WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- Salim Hamdan was convicted Wednesday by a military commission at Guantanamo Bay; Bruce Ivins committed suicide last week as the FBI closed in on him as its prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax-by-mail attacks in and around Washington, D.C.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone, where the war on terror and the complexities of the American legal system interact.

Nothing is ever simple and straightforward in this Twilight Zone of a twilight war, because the war is like no other the United States has ever fought. The threat the American people face is all too real. Almost 3,000 Americans died in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in no small part because the 19 al-Qaida terrorists who flew, or tried to fly, their hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- a fourth hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania -- had been able to take advantage of American legal safeguards to organize their carnage operating freely within the United States itself.

Since that dark day, not a single al-Qaida terror attack has claimed any fatalities on the U.S. mainland. The massive tightening of national security organized by the Bush administration and pushed through with rapid and bipartisan fervor by the Republican-controlled 107th Congress has to be given at least a significant amount of credit for this usually overlooked but very real achievement.

Military policy and national security dictate ruthlessness, relentlessness and constant alertness in a war against a faceless, un-uniformed enemy that boasts of trying to gain access to nuclear, chemical and even biological weapons of mass destruction capable of killing millions of Americans.