Something extremely important to our country’s national security occurred last week: Congress passed a new bill giving the military total authority to deal with captured terror suspects.

The new act gives the armed forces unbridled control to try suspected terrorists in military courts and evaluate classified information against them without consent. And while the bill forbids treatment of detainees that would constitute war crimes – such as torture, rape and biological experiments – it gives the president the power to decide which other techniques interrogators can use.

The passing of this new law is in stark opposition to the Supreme Court decision handed down over the summer, which asserted that under the Geneva Convention terrorists are entitled to the same rights as regular Americans, and therefore could not be tried in military courts, nor could they be subjected to torture or other humiliating and degrading treatment.

At the time, this absurd ruling by the court put us in greater danger of attack and all but doomed the future of the U.S. bases at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of terrorists have been locked away since Sept. 11.

But now, thanks to the unflappable resolve of Congress to sidestep the Court’s lunacy, the world will again be a more dangerous place for those who wish to murder us.

The fact is foreign terrorists should absolutely not be afforded the same rights as American citizens because, last I checked, they are not Americans. The Geneva Convention is foreign law, and therefore should not apply. And as far as I’m concerned, the military should have the power to take any and all measures to extract information from these murderers, even if that means using every torture method in the book.

After all, I’m sure the terrorists didn’t think about the sensitivity of our basic rights when they cut off the heads of our soldiers, and I’m positive they did not care if they were violating the Geneva Convention when they ruthlessly murdered thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children.

This is a different kind of war, and extreme measures must be taken. There is no grey area, no middle ground we should tread lightly. If we want to prevent ourselves from being attacked again, we must do everything we can to ensure our safety.

Furthermore, the court’s notion that suspected terrorists should be afforded the opportunity to be tried in civilian courts, aside from being dangerous, is just plain dumb.

We all saw how that played out in the Zacharias Moussaoui case where it took four long years and tens of millions of dollars to convict the 9/11 accomplice.

You do the math: take hundreds of terrorists out of Guantanamo Bay and let them lawyer up, creating years of anarchy within the judicial system while we sit around and miss important opportunities to acquire information vital to our national security.

No thanks.

However, in light of Congress’s new ruling, that thankfully will not happen.

Yet despite this recent victory in the War on Terror, some things just don’t change.

Minutes after Congress’s decision, the usual liberal suspects in Washington like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry vehemently expressed discontent and pledged to pass what I like to call The Al-Qaeda Bill of Rights, which would essentially revert everything back to the Supreme Court’s prior ruling, allowing terrorists the same rights to which we are entitled, slime ball attorney and all.

We can only hope these liberal ideologues will eventually come to their senses and cease this type of extremist thought in the future, for we are safer without it.

What these liberals simply do not understand is a majority of Americans overwhelmingly support President Bush and Congress on this decision, and according to just about every poll in existence, they want a more aggressive War on Terror. Our citizens believe we are in danger and want the military to protect us from these killers.

Well, now they can.

Congress did the right thing in passing this new, tougher terror bill, and history will prove that.

So let’s celebrate this victory in the War on Terror and hope that Congress will show this type of moral fortitude in the future so our country can continue to be safe.

Send comments to Dan Lipian at [email protected].