According to what I read, Congress is about to reach a compromise on a bill that will set the parameters that American service and intelligence personnel can use when interrogating enemy combatants.

Now, we're not talking about enemy soldiers. Enemy soldiers -- the armed forces of a sovereign nation -- are covered by the Geneva Convention, and most of the time they are treated with respect. This is more than I can say for the way Saddam Hussein's armed forces treated the Americans they captured during the first Gulf War some years back.

No, we're talking about enemy combatants here: Al-Qa'ida -- terrorists. Those like the Iraqi terrorists who took video of themselves dragging two American Soldiers (Pfc Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker) behind trucks, then mutilating and beheading the youngsters. Or the Chechen al-Qa'ida who took their time killing a Navy SEAL who had fallen into their hands. Or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qa'ida in Iraq assassins who gleefully beheaded their civilian prisoners.

And yet, many in Congress, as well as the obstructionist lawyers running our armed services' JAG Corps, are pushing to treat al-Qa'ida's murderers as if they were shoplifters, embezzlers, or Martha Stewart. No rough stuff. No threats. No demeaning tactics. No tricks. White hat treatment all the way. Oh, and by all means, supply their defense attorneys with any of the sources and methods that led to their capture.

Now, according to an al-Qa'ida manual that the Brits were kind enough to let us see, these are the same terrorists who have been instructed that, when captured and asked by anyone in authority how they were treated, must immediately claim they have been tortured.

Now I might be tempted to say let's make their claims come true. But we are, after all, a nation of laws. And we should follow the law. Like the Arizona sheriff who puts his inmates in tents without air conditioning because that's how our Soldiers and Marines are living in forward bases overseas. And he doesn't let his jailbirds watch TV, or lift weights, because…they're prisoners , not residents of some government-run health spa. And he makes them work. Do road gang work, because they should pay their own way.

Maybe Congress should mandate something similar for al-Qa'ida detainees: All the treatment we mete out to al-Qa'ida combatants should be equal to the sort of treatment our intelligence operatives, armed forces, and the armed forces of our allies receive during training.

Like, for example, there is a secret place not so far from one of our best ally's capitals, where male prisoners are stripped naked and chained to splintery wood pallets. They are kept for days in stress positions, hosed down with freezing water, deprived of sleep and warmth, and regularly interrogated by female guards who mock the size of their genitals and impugn their manhood. What secret place is this? It's where the best of the SAS and what used to be called the 14 Intelligence Company go for their capture survival training.

In one secret location right here in the United States, there is a prison camp run by federal authorities where the inmates are regularly waterboarded, stripped and hosed down with cold water, kept in stress positions, deprived of sleep, and denied food and water. Where is it? It is in Virginia, at a location where CIA undercover operatives are trained in how to withstand coercive interrogation methods.

There is another U.S. facility where humiliation, mortification, shame, and embarrassment are the least of the nasty things that can happen. Denizens at this facility get so hypothermic they actually urinate on one another to keep warm. Where? At the Naval installation in Coronado where SEALs go through their BUD/S training ordeal.

The SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training that special forces of all the uniformed services go through can include every one of the nasty techniques that such Senators as Kennedy, Levin, Boxer, Schumer, Clinton, and other high-minded Democrats want to forbid our interrogators to use on Al-Qa'ida. And yet we use these tactics on our own people -- volunteers, every one.

As one Ranger non-com puts it, “The worst of the abuses at Abu Ghraib were like one-tenth of what I went through during SERE training.”

But using such tactics on al-Qa'ida combatants, the Capitol Hill solons argue on the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages, is inhumane. Worse, it loses us America's high moral ground. We become no better than Al-Qa'ida.

What a steaming load of unadulterated horse puckey. We'd lose the high moral ground if we reverted to the kind of behavior the Viet Cong used on John McCain, or that Fidel Castro uses in his prisons as this column is being written, or the tactics the Chinese government practices on its Falun Gong dissidents, or the stoning, beheading, and amputation practices common to our Saudi allies. When we'd target innocent civilians the way al-Qa'ida in Iraq targets Iraqi civilians, that's when we'd lose the moral ground.

But prohibiting using the same tactics that we have been using as training for our own people for years? It's time for the Congress to get real, and for our interrogators to be able to use every arrow in their quiver when it comes to squeezing every bit of useful intelligence out of an al-Qa'ida prisoner. And make no mistake: If any such defeatist bill is sent to the President's desk, he has the moral obligation as CINC, to veto it on the spot.

How do you feel about this issue? Let your public officials know how you feel!