In a nutshell, former governor John Engler is suggesting that Michigan offer the Upper Peninsula as a new home for a prison for the suspected terrorists who have been kept in the facility at Guantanamo that President Barack Obama intends to shut down.

Yup.  You gotta love an economy that leads people to beg the Feds for prisons.

The commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Tuesday for a deadly assault on a Pakistani police academy and said the group was planning a terrorist attack on Washington that would “amaze” the world.

Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million bounty on his head from the U.S., said Monday’s attack outside the eastern city of Lahore was in retaliation for U.S. missile strikes against militants along the Afghan border.

“Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world,” Mehsud told The Associated Press by phone. He provided no details.

In al-Qaida’s first response to Obama’s victory, al-Zawahri .,.. called the president-elect—along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—”house negroes.”

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term “abeed al-beit,” which literally translates as “house slaves.” But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as “house negroes.”

Proving that they’ve learned nothing about how NOT to destroy social capital from their adversary George W. Bush during the last seven years of struggle, Al-Qaida manages to alienate just about everything but the rocks with this one. 

And yet again it’s interesting to note how closely the rhetoric of the American right mirrors that of religious radicals everywhere.  Much like Americans who think Bush and Palin would be a dream ticket, al-Zawahri either doesn’t grasp the historical significance of Obama’s election, or feels completely threatened by it.

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

. . .

Ivins, the son of a Princeton-educated pharmacist, was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio, and received undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a doctorate in microbiology, from the University of Cincinnati.

The eldest of his two brothers, Thomas Ivins, said he was not surprised by the events that have unfolded.

“He buckled under the pressure from the federal government,” Thomas Ivins said, adding that FBI agents came to Ohio last year to question him about his brother.

“I was questioned by the feds, and I sung like a canary” about Bruce Ivins’ personality and tendencies, Thomas Ivins said.

“He had in his mind that he was omnipotent.”

Ivins’ widow declined to be interviewed when reached Thursday at her home in Frederick. The couple raised twins, now 24.

The family’s home is 198 miles — about a 3 1/2 -hour drive — from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where anthrax spores were found by investigators.

All of the recovered anthrax letters were postmarked in that vicinity.

In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.

“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.’”

Unfortunately, the program’s in turmoil, perhaps due to a culture clash between the lefty, egghead anthropology PhD’s and the army colonels they’re serving with, among other things.

The real money quote comes from an army recruitment email, which we’ll file under things we should have asked before the war:

“The key is we need smart people who get the Middle East to whatever extent such a thing is possible.”

Indeed.

Seriously, when a state army can be defined as a terrorist group, does the phrase still have any meaning?

The president will ask the nation to pay for the next 11 months in Iraq with billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. We think this sacrifice will be in vain, because only Iraqis can heal their national wounds. And so we ask instead: What else could the United States do with a guesstimated $100 billion to reduce the strength and the appeal of Islamist terrorist groups worldwide?

That’s $100B just for the next 11 months. We’re going to be in Iraq for at least another 5 years. Probably 10. So after we spend the first $100B reducing the appeal of terrorism, we could spend the next trillion or so: ending global poverty ($60B), providing clean drinking water to the entire African subcontinent ($16B/yr), and maybe even have enough left over to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure ($120B/yr?) or, y’know, educate its children so they grow up smart enough not to elect people like our current President.

Instead, though, we’re going to spend it building bridges by day that Charlie insurgents will blow up by night, and designing state-of-the-art, armor-plated vehicles that are so strong that it will take insurgents 6 whole months to figure out how to blow them up with a steel pipe and a piece of chewing gum.

(via)

Once you’ve accepted this basic truth, it’s time to get a grip on your expectations. Bush and his cronies persist in the fallacy that it’s possible always and everywhere to create a perfect outcome (i.e., no future terror incidents in the U.S.). But this outcome is not possible. As I’ve argued previously, terrorism, like the plague, can be analyzed from a statistical perspective. Even if you can stop 99.99% of terrorists, you’ve still got to worry about terrorist 10,000. If, indeed, there are the thousands of evil doers monkey man would have you see lurking behind every brown-skinned face, then even a 1 in 10,000 chance of an incident means that it’s highly likely an incident of some kind will happen.

So let’s identify (yet another) failure of the Bush administration: failure to properly set expectations regarding the statistical likelihood of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Now, maybe it’s a bit odd that I can simultaneously decry Bush’s “Intelligence” Estimate on the grounds that it overstates the threat coming from one direction, while also pointing out that the threat is probably much greater than Bush himself is letting on. The reason I can get away with that is that Bush is trying to overstate the likelihood of a terrorist incident originating from a certain situation (Iraq) in order to continue justifying The Worst Decision in American History — the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It’s highly concerning to me that Bush is more interested in justifying the crap he took on our collective lawn than he is in providing real security, an effort which, as Michael Rose pointed out in the New York Times, would be greatly aided by a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

Instead of doing his best CYA (“cover your ass” … a skill he undoubtedly learned from his time at Harvard Business School) on Iraq, Bush SHOULD be providing leadership by correctly setting the expectations of the American people.

A friend of mine who works in the Seattle policy community (it’s small, but there is one here) introduced me yesterday to the concept of “resilience.” Resilience accepts the inevitability of a future terrorist incident (or natural disaster) and — instead of setting the impossible goal of 100% protection — seeks to mitigate the damage from any such incident. Thus we have a focus on overcoming and preparedness, rather than a false sense of security and invisible boogeymen.

Strength, fortitude, and determination in the face of gathering darkness, or smoke, mirrors, and invisible terror with collective self-delusion? I ask you — which set of values represents the America of your aspirations? How do you want to live?

First, this description of the six guys’ alleged activities strikes me as remarkably similar to the kind of 1990s Timothy McVeigh-style domestic terrorism:

Dritan Duka, Eljvir Duka and Shain Duka collected weapons including handguns, shotguns and semi-automatic assault weapons, and trained on firearms in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania. The three men and Mr. Shnewer reviewed terrorist training videos. In addition, he and Dritan Duka ordered AK-47 machine guns.Another witness recorded a conversation in which Mr. Tatar was said to have wanted to join the Army so he could kill American soldiers from the “inside,” the statement said.

In other words, it wouldn’t at all surprise me if these guys were local militia types. It’s funny how our lens changes, though. Related to Matt Yglesias’ discussion of whether the War on Terror exists or not, it’s useful to think about terrorism as a means versus an ends.

Secondly, it looks like they were definitely fans of the 9/11 hijackers, but it’s unclear if they had any connections to them (they downloaded training videos, as the Contrarian posted earlier). In other words, this is the Al Qaeda gone viral: no top-down commands needed.

Third, I have to wonder what role, if any, Patriot Act-enabled surveillance played in this. I’d expect he FBI to come out strong saying that the Patriot Act thwarted this, but so far I haven’t seen that.

And finally, this whole thing dovetails eerily well with the current Sopranos plot line. I won’t spoil it for people who are catching up on DVD, but for those of you who are watching… weird, right?

Six men from New Jersey have been arrested in an alleged terror plot against soldiers at Fort Dix, according to law enforcement sources.

Investigators said the men planned to use automatic rifles to enter Fort Dix and kill as many soldiers as they could at the New Jersey military base. Fort Dix was just one of several military and security locations allegedly scouted by this group, authorities said.

. . .

Sources have told NewsChannel 4′s Brian Thompson that the suspects tried to have a training videotape converted to DVD at a store in Cherry Hill, N.J., but the store owner alerted authorities.

Authorities then inserted a cooperating witness into the alleged terror cell to be a go-between in their attempt to purchase M16 and AK-47 rifles. Arrests were made Monday night after the informant delivered dummy weapons paid for by the alleged terror cell suspects, authorities said.

A previously undisclosed meeting last year of President Bush’s most senior national security advisers was the highest level discussion about how to rewrite the cold war rules. The existing approach to deterrence dates from the time when the nuclear attacks Washington worried about would be launched by missiles and bombers, which can be tracked back to a source by radar, and not carried in backpacks or hidden in cargo containers.

Among the subjects of the meeting last year was whether to issue a warning to all countries around the world that if a nuclear weapon was detonated on American soil and was traced back to any nation’s stockpiles, through nuclear forensics, the United States would hold that country “fully responsible” for the consequences of the explosion. The term “fully responsible” was left deliberately vague so that it would be unclear whether the United States would respond with a retaliatory nuclear attack, or, far more likely, a nonnuclear retaliation, whether military or diplomatic.

. . .

The weekly meeting of the interagency group dealing with nuclear attribution is just one part of a governmentwide effort to prepare for what might happen after a small nuclear device was detonated in an American city, just as Washington once gamed out a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

But it is a subject Mr. Bush and his aides have rarely referred to in public. In private, officials say, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to plan for more than a dozen scenarios — including one in which a bomb goes off, and terrorist groups then claim to have planted others in cities around the country.

While most of that planning takes place behind locked doors, officials responsible for it appeared at a workshop last month sponsored by the Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration sponsored by Harvard and Stanford Universities.

The daylong discussion revealed major gaps in the planning. But it also demonstrated that while the first instinct of government officials after an explosion would be to figure out retaliation, “that would probably give way to an effort to seek the cooperation of a Pakistan or Russia to figure out where the stuff came from, what else was lost, and to hunt down the remaining bombs rather than punish the government that lost them,” said one of the conference’s organizers, Ashton B. Carter of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped

Rudy Giuliani benefitted from a great deal of post-9/11 haigiography (America’s Mayor, TIME Man of the Year, etc.), so I guess he thinks he gets to say things like that with impunity.

But let’s leave aside for a minute that the last 9/11 happened when we had a Republican president and a Republican Mayor of NY.

Just remember that the biggest pre-9/11 terrorism responsibility that Giuliani had was where to locate the city’s emergency management center. His choice? On the 27th Floor of the World Trade Center. And that was six years after the 1993 WTC bombing.

Sigh. I guess this sort of ignorant pandering plays to the Republican base.

Mr. Hicks’s conviction with a guilty plea provides something for each side. He admitted training with Al Qaeda, guarding a Taliban tank and scouting a closed American embassy building. But there is no evidence he was considering a terrorist attack or capable of carrying one out. Yet he was held five years and four months before he got his day in court. And at the end of a very long day at the tribunal Friday, his actual sentence was only nine months.

Nine months. Hicks is a relatively easy case, being a white guy who was clearly out of his league with the Taliban. He also had to agree to some particulars:

Not only did Mr. Hicks plead guilty, but he also signed a plea bargain in which he recanted his accusations about being abused in detention and promised not to speak to reporters for a year.

Hmm… won’t speak to reporters for a year? I assume that’s after his release in 9 months. So let’s do some math: one year + nine months brings us to… January 2009. Funny, that’s just about when Bush leaves office. Coincidence?

After over a decade in the “fringe” theater trenches, I’m increasingly wary about art’s ability to influence politics. But a production like this, now, in Washington D.C., is probably about as close as you’re likely to get.