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While many of my colleagues are doing important look backs at the 9/11 attack tonight, "The Factor" is going to concentrate on who's winning the war that the attacks started.

As far as the legacy of 9/11 for me, it is one overriding issue: Five years ago, thousands of American children woke up, kissed a parent good-bye and the kids never saw mom or dad again. They were murdered by a group of Islamic fanatics targeting civilians for death.

Those children will never fully recover from that day and serve as a reminder to all of us that we have enemies who want to kill as many Americans as possible for the glory of their god.

Now over the weekend, I read in the left-wing press that the Bush administration is now over estimating the terror danger, trying to frighten Americans into voting Republican.

Well, you can decide whether that's a valid point, but I do believe that both the Bush and the Clinton administrations underestimated the danger from Al Qaeda and the 3,000 dead, as well as their children and relatives paid for it.

Talking Points believes the federal government has an obligation to bring the Al Qaeda killers to justice and destroy terror cells worldwide. The feds also have an obligation confront nations that openly support terror killers, as well as nations like Russia, China and France who are soft on terrorism.

Negotiating with these nations is fine, but there also must be a Plan B. No longer can we sit back and allow terrorists to openly operate anywhere on this earth.

But we must fight smart. Huge mistakes were made in Iraq. And they may be understandable, but mistakes get people killed.

In the future, we must elect people who have specific plans and who are courageous enough to fight this brutal terror war.

Finally, political correctness is strangling American in the terror war. This weekend in The New York Times, a front page article discussed alleged torture used against an Al Qaeda big shot. Those torture methods included blaring loud music by a group called the Red Hot Chili Peppers and keeping a captured terrorist in a frigid room.

We'll have more on this tomorrow night, but believe me when I tell you that Vladimir Putin, a former honcho at the KGB, must have laughed his head off when reading that article.

Five years after 9/11, we are divided country. Some of us live in the theoretical world, where name, rank and jihad number is all a terror suspect should be required to give.

Some of us want to bomb the terrorists into dust. And some, perhaps most Americans, are sitting the terror war out, believing it is not their problem.

Well, it is. And tonight, we're going to prove it.

And that's The Memo.

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