The enemy is in this country right now. And any terrorists who are not already here are free to immigrate. The government has been doing an excellent job rounding up suspects from the last two attacks. But what about the next attack? We thought there was only one murderous Islamic cell in America the last time, too.

Congress has authority to pass a law tomorrow requiring aliens from suspect countries to leave. As far as the Constitution is concerned, aliens, which is to say non-citizens, are here at this country's pleasure. They have no constitutional right to be here.

Congress has it within its power to prevent the next attack, but it won't. When the Sears Tower is attacked, the president is assassinated, St. Patrick's Cathedral is vaporized, anthrax is released in the subway systems or Disneyland is nuked, remember: Congress could have stopped it, but didn't.

Pious invocations of the Japanese internment are absurd. For one thing, those were U.S. citizens. Citizens can't be deported. So far -- thank God -- almost all the mass murderers of Americans have been aliens.

But even more blindingly obvious: There was no evidence that the attack on Pearl Harbor was staged by Japanese saboteurs living in California. The Japanese internment was a pure land grab implemented by liberal politicians -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt and California Gov. Earl Warren (later the namesake of the infamous Warren Court). The internment was vigorously opposed by J. Edgar Hoover.

This time, the very nature of the enemy is that they have infiltrated this country and pass themselves off as law-abiding, quiet immigrants. The entire modus operandi of this enemy is to smuggle mass murderers to our shores.

But the country refuses to respond rationally. Rather, Congress is busily contemplating a series of "anti-terrorism" measures most notable for their utter irrelevance to the threat. What precisely would a national ID card accomplish? The hijackers were in this country legally! A few may have overstayed their visas by a few days -- a minor bureaucratic oversight that they surely would have remedied had they not been about to commit suicide in a monstrous attack.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., has bravely proposed that we take the aggressive step of asking aliens in the country to register periodically with the government so we know where they are. That's already the law in Germany. Several of the hijackers in this attack lived in Hamburg; they obediently complied. The mastermind of the most vicious terrorist attack in the history of the world, Mohammed Atta, was in Florida on a "vocational status" visa (in order to attend flight school). Let's say Atta had registered. Now what, Joe?

As the entire country has been repeatedly lectured, most Muslims are amazingly peaceful, deeply religious, wouldn't hurt a fly. Indeed, endless invocations of the pacific nature of most Muslims is the only free speech it is safe to engage in these days.

This is a preposterous irrelevancy. Fine, we get it. The New York Times can rest assured that every last American has now heard the news that not all Muslims are terrorists. That's not the point. Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims -- at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours. Continued...