Contrary to the apocalyptic worries of some commentators, hirabi (aka jihadi) terrorists are employing a polarization and recruitment strategy that does not benefit from WMD attacks -- and, bluffs aside, they are nowhere near capable of developing or acquiring such weapons.

Instead, they will continue their attempts to inspire a violent movement striving for an (increasingly) unpopular theocracy. Furthermore, they will persist with their longstanding repertoire of weapons and attack styles -- gravitating around Planes, Trains, and Car Bombs -- because it is so adequate for the goals of creating spectacle, shocking the senses, and intimidating governments.

Read more, here.

The Carrico story provides some helpful cover to an Obama administration that has been walking confidently into enemy political fire lately. It just recently submitted an extraconstitutional signing statement against silly/counterproductive/demagogic NDAA provisions. And today, the President and his national security team announced their plan to build a leaner, smarter, more versatile military.

GOPers are already against it . It will be interesting to see how this debate flares up during Presidential debates. Maybe Ron Paul, promoter of a less interventionist foreign policy, will give Obama even more cover as Islamophobic Santorum pulls Romney closer to the cliffs of Armageddon.

The Senate is pushing forward legislation to allow the US military to detain US citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants. But the Department of Defense does not want that power. Neither does the CIA. Nor the Department of Justice. Strange.

Spencer Ackerman reports:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists. President Obama has promised to veto the bill.

When the security state declines to accept rights-infringing powers offered by the people's Senate, the centuries-old understanding of an adversarial relationship between the power hungry state and the defiant governed is turned on its head.

I am reminded of Frederick Doglass's quote -- one that often inspired me:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both."

I wonder if old Frederick is smiling in his grave right now.

Somehow I missed Jack Goldsmith's Times piece explaining that Cheney's War on Terror policies were ultimately counterproductive even for the purposes of bolstering executive power. In it he cites both Bush and Rumsfeld expressing regrets for taking Cheney's advice to secretly and unilaterally create CT policy.

Cheney, of course, is "'not inclined to make any mea culpas."

As Goldsmith writes:

He has instead deflected the failures of his philosophy by maintaining that Barack Obama embraced his policies. Obama did continue many of the Bush administration counterterrorism policies as they stood in January 2009. But the 2009 policies Obama inherited were not Cheney policies. They were the products of a four-year pushback against those policies...

After the killing of al-Awlaki, Cheney and his daughter stepped up to the mic to demand an apology from Obama. Their logic: Obama had criticized some of their policies, but was also using some of their other policies (sort of). And that's not fair.

John McCain responds with readily apparent exasperation to a question about whether Obama owes Cheney or Bush an apology: "About what?" He also notes that the so-called 'enhanced' interrogation program netted no valuable information.

BBC News reports that Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the head of Egypt's National Transition Council (NTC) has announced the NTC goal to create a modern democratic government influenced by the teachings and example of Islam's founding religious and political leader, Mohammed:

In his first speech since moving to the capital from the NTC stronghold of Benghazi, Mr Jalil told some 10,000 supporters to avoid retribution attacks, adding that Libya's new leaders would not accept any extremist ideology.

"We are a Muslim nation, with a moderate Islam, and we will maintain that. You are with us and support us - you are our weapon against whoever tries to hijack the revolution," he said.

Mr Jalil, who served as Col Gaddafi's justice minister before joining the rebels when the uprising started, said women would play an active role in the new Libya, and thanked a number of nations - including France and Britain - for supporting the NTC.

But he also warned against secularism, envisaging a state "where sharia [Islamic law] is the main source for legislation".

His words, broadcast live on television, were met with rapturous applause, as fireworks illuminated the Tripoli waterfront.

Americans need to support and respect such movements toward democracy as long as they allow moderate and modern interpretations of sharia to compete for public support. Because Islam's founding father was a political and religious figure -- and he formalized many principles of governance and religion in the same moments -- it is unrealistic to think that endogenous self-determination movements in overwhelmingly Muslim countries will not be suffused with Islamic values and narratives.

But many of Mohammed's principles -- like political leaders' responsibilities to their constituents and the insistence on respect for minorities -- align easily with the democracy of the European Enlightenment. Others are less compatible, but open to interpretation and contestation and likely to modernize with the economies of the region. Now is a time for the West to wish the best to Libyans, show friendship, and support movements toward democracy and increased individual freedoms.

In a CNN interview with John King, Joe Biden "denied former Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that controversial interrogation techniques such as waterboarding... would help generate useful intelligence in the war against al Qaeda and other organizations."

""I've seen zero evidence that it works, and I think there's abundant evidence that it hurts us internationally. It hurts our security," Biden said."

Ali Soufan's book chronicling his insider account of the hunt for al Qaeda, The Black Banners, is now available.

Robert Baer, former CIA agent, describes it as "Superb. An education. And best book on al Qaeda out there, bar none."

Soufan discusses some of its contents on last nights's episode of 60 minutes.

And here's more from the New York Times review:

As we ramp up to a weekend that will flood our televisions and radiowaves with retrospective specials on the 9/11 attacks, America's opinion-makers are vying to define the meaning of those horrors and the decade since.

But instead of using this moment to reconstruct narratives affirming our successes and clarifying the many lessons we only learned through error, many among the opinion-making class have dug in their heels, cherry-picking from ten years of evidence to support whatever position on counterterrorism they staked out on September 12, 2001.

Commentators from the right continue to harp on the very simplistic logical fallacy that because there has not been a devastating attack since 9/11, EVERY aspect of the government's response was a success. They are nearly as eager to point out, too, that because the Obama administration has yet to renounce all of its predecessor's policies, it must have judged them all to be effective:
Charles Krauthammer propagates the fallacy with gusto:

10 years, no second attack (which everyone assumed would come within months). That testifies to the other great achievement of the decade: the defensive anti-terror apparatus hastily constructed from scratch after 9/11 by President Bush, and then continued by President Obama. Continued why? Because it worked.

In the last decade, our nation has certainly paid a price in the lives of the brave men and women who have defended us. But who would say, after 10 years, that it wasn't worth it to keep our nation safe?"

"reality and political opposition forced the [Obama] administration to return to many of its predecessor's core terrorism policies."

"A near absence of terrorist incidents in the United States since 9/11 points to the successes of the Bush Administration's counterterrorism measures that once stirred controversy but now have bipartisan acceptance."

"A decade beyond Sept. 11, the Bush Doctrine has been adopted by the Obama administration and vindicated by events."

Commentators from the left, meanwhile, have their own reasons for closely comparing the policies of Bush and Obama. (To avoid charges of drawing false equivalencies, I should note that the rhetorical flourishes of these commentators pale in comparison to the flights from logic coming from folks like Krauthammer and Yoo.)
Having spent the early part of the decade vigilantly defending civil liberties against real and counterproductive encroachments by an overzealous Bush administration, they show little hesitation in skewering Democrats for failing to enact the entire agenda they campaigned on.

Robert Wright, for example, writes of the whole counterproductive War on Terror :

"Certainly President Obama seems bent on sustaining it. In addition to authorizing the assassination of al-Awlaki (an American citizen, by the way, in theory guaranteed due process by our Constitution), the President has massively expanded drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he recently extended them to Somalia, even as they continue in Yemen."

"Quit doing the kinds of things that have made so many in the Muslim world hate the United States. Get our troops out of Muslim lands, stop firing drones into their countries."

"He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He failed to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, move terrorism trials out of military commissions to civilian courts, end extraordinary rendition, or prosecute Bush Administration officials who ordered torture. … In targeting Muslim cleric and accused Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki for assassination, he has affirmed Bush’s claim that the president can order the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, even outside any battlefield context. Overall, Obama’s record on executive power and civil liberties diverges little from that of his predecessor. In certain respects it is even worse…"

A few outlets have at least acknowledged that there is not total continuity between Bush's and Obama's counterterrorism policies -- The Economist, for one:

"…the Bush Administration rode roughshod over cherished civil liberties. Congress, the courts, and a new president eventually pushed back, but not all the way."

But the Economists' view of the retreat from Bush-era policies is only partially correct. The courts did push back on the Bush Administration's designs for Military Commissions, forcing the tribunals to approximate more closely the traditional criminal courts of the American Constitution. And President Obama did issue an Executive Order banning the use of 'enhanced' interrogation tactics that were already abandoned. But, Congress, for its part, has done precious little on any of these fronts. It has provided episodic and toothless oversight of executive counterterrorism programs, greenlighted ineffective security policies agencies have not even asked for, and even prevented DoD and DoJ prosecutors -- against their preferences -- from transferring terror defendants to Article III Courts (citing their responsibility to protect their constituents from "movie-plot" attacks on the trial venues).

Who Really Ended the War on Terror?

What is missed in all this coverage -- as my colleagues and I have argued in The ATLANTIC -- is that most of the retreat from Bush's rights-abusing policies was initiated by the security establishment itself, because the policies did not work.

The FBI, TSA, and ICE walked back from ethnic profiling policies because they caught no terrorists and alienated potentially useful collaborators. The CIA ended the 'enhanced' interrogation program in favor of better-performing methods. And, for every military prosecutor fighting for increased prerogatives and decreased due process for terror suspects, a military defense attorney has been fighting to defend Article III Constitutional rights on the grounds that they make our legal system more effective and legitimate.

Though Anderson is right that the NSA's domestic surveillance programs are ongoing, plenty of people are waking up to the fact that they don't actually work. The FBI has complained for some time that the programs inundate them with useless leads. The National Academies of Science released a thorough review concluding that the programs' success relied on data unlikely to exist, and probably only drove terrorists further underground. And a joint report from Inspectors General for the DOD, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and DNI cited interviews with users of the program who could turn up no example in which the program led to the foiling of a terrorist plot. Officials in charge of the programs, dazzled by the illusion of future potential for the programs have so far failed to appreciate their fundamental limits. (Given Americans' faith in technology, a full repudiation of the programs is not likely to come until politicians' constituencies understand that they are useless, too.)

As for the second counterterrorism policy used to draw equivalence between Bush and Obama -- drone strikes -- they are far less disruptive to civilian populations than ground invasions and occupations, and far different from and preferable to the conventional war both hawks and doves have dismally attempted to conflate them with. The question is no longer over whether to use drones as opposed to war to combat terrorists, but whether to use drones instead of daring capture and arrest missions. Given the status quo policy allowing the President, with National Security Council approval, to target American citizens abroad for killing, civil libertarian advocates might be wisest attempting to tame and legitimize the practice.

To be clear, all things being equal, the dynamics of the struggle between states and terrorists play out in such a way that it is praobably always better to deny terrorists' their preferred status as warriors by treating them as common criminals. Doing so highlights the legitimacy of the state and 'Rule of Law' while diminishing aspiring world historical figures to petty losers. And putting terror suspects through traditional due processes, despite baseless assertions to the contrary, actually engenders more cooperation than treating them in harsh adversarial fashion.

When American law enforcement cannot safely get their hands on a terror suspect, there should probably be some formal process for confirming to the world that they are bent on mass-murder before summarily executing them. Whether that process includes an arraignment and/or trial by satellite, a publication of evidence and invitation for response, or something else is a question that civil libertarians should engage.

Ten years on, our current approach to counterterrorism is not perfect. But the approach we used immediately after 9/11 was far worse and that should not be forgotten. Policies targeting Muslims with suspicion (and (sometimes accidental) abuse and death) alienated Muslims allies inside and outside our borders, bolstering al Qaeda's recruitment call. Surveillance powers expanded to allow spying on innocent Americans flooded our intelligence community with yet more dots they were ill-equipped to connect, sending them on thousands of goose-chases tracking false leads. So-called 'enhanced' interrogation only enhanced the speed with which America's reputation declined. To date, there has been no credible evidence showing that those coercive tactics generated useful intelligence. And the overbroad use of military detentions and military trials has weakened our 'Rule of Law' while failing to successfully determine the guilt or innocence of hundreds of men. These policies were abject failures. And most of them have long since been abandoned or significantly curtailed.

Despite all of this, we have enjoyed a decade without a single American civilian killed by Hirabi (AKA Jihadi) terrorists on US soil. The reasons we haven't been attacked are fairly simple:

1) There aren't that many terrorists. (And there will be even fewer if we allow al Qaeda's popularity to continue to plummet.)
2) We have gotten lucky in a few cases that terrorists were incompetent.
3) Our counterterrorism operations -- based on old-fashioned police work, community tips (many from Muslims), traditional targeted surveillance, and foreign intelligence -- have netted almost every possible terror plotter in our country.
4) Our offensive counterterrorism operations abroad including primarily drone-strikes and special operations missions -- which neither require all-out wars of choice nor a war footing more generally -- have significantly dismantled al Qaeda's existing leadership network.
5) Our security establishment has steadily learned how to more effectively counter terrorism.

Now is a time to celebrate these successes but also ponder how we can carry them into the future. To build on a decade of trial and error, it is essential that we reimagine national security as an object of scientific inquiry. Over the last four centuries, virtually every other aspect of statecraft -- from the economy to social policy to even domestic law enforcement -- has been opened up to engagement with and evaluation by civil society. The practice of national security is long overdue for a similar transformation.

Maintaining the nation's security will, of course, continue to require some degree of secrecy. But there is little reason to think that appropriate secrecy is inconsistent with a fact-based culture of robust and multiplicative inquiry. Indeed, to whatever partial extent that culture already exists within the national security establishment, it has led the move away from many of the counterproductive security measures established after 9/11.

In a world in which efforts to attack Americans are ongoing, developing a formal capacity for critical evaluation of security policy is as urgent as ever. Such capacity will not guarantee that we will avoid all future security failures, or the cruder and less effective responses they tend to provoke. But it will give the security establishment the tools it needs to improve its practices and resist impractical, unproven, and downright dangerous policies. Lacking those tools, the next high profile attack could well inspire another War on Terror, and another danger-filled decade spent relearning lessons about how to keep our people safe.

John Yoo signs off his self-congratulatory 9/11 retrospective in the Wall Street Journal with this chestnut:

"In the last decade, our nation has certainly paid a price in the lives of the brave men and women who have defended us. But who would say, after 10 years, that it wasn't worth it to keep our nation safe?"

I don't know if it is better or worse that Yoo posed this conclusion as a rhetorical question. I guess -- given my understanding of what actually keeps our nation safe and what endangers it -- it would strike me as incredibly cavalier and tone-deaf either way.

But, to take Yoo's challenge, I will say, unequivocally, that the war-footing that sent us on a misadventure in Iraq, distracted special operations from the obliteration of al Qaeda in Tora Bora at a moment when their allies were convinced 9/11 (and the "far enemy" approach it aimed to advance) was a strategic blunder, precipitated the metastasization of al Qaeda into Iraq and beyond, killed at least tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, shamed the U.S. around the world, destabilized the region to the benefit of Iran, and placed us anywhere from 1-3 trillion dollars deeper in debt was not worth a single American life. And it certainly wasn't worth thousands of American lives, nor the physical and psychological maiming of tens of thousands more of our soldiers and their families.

Did we need to root out al Qaeda? Yes. But that's not what Yoo and friends did. They fertilized al Qaeda and spread its seeds throughout the Middle East and North Africa by "choosing war" (in Yoo's words). They chose the only way of dealing with al Qaeda - expansive war in the Middle East - that could have made them more relevant and popular after 9/11.

Without that chosen war, the decade would have looked quite different. A small special operations unit would have dispatched bin Laden and much of the rest of al Qaeda in Tora Bora. The CIA and JSOC would have increased their surgical and limited counterterrorism operations, containing any Hirabi groups seeking to emulate al Qaeda's approach. The internal debate in Muslim lands about how to incorporate Islamic traditions into their political systems would have stayed an internal debate, and eventually the Arab Spring would have swept Hussein out of power along with the other authoritarians in the region. We would be basically where we are now, without having squandered unnecessary blood, treasure, and good will.

But Yoo does not get any of that. As he argues:

Choosing war - especially the war in Iraq - played directly into al Qaeda's hands not only by pulling special operations forces from the mission to capture or kill bin Laden in Tora Bora, but also by demonstrating to Muslims that we valued their lives far less than our own perceived or misperceived interests in the region. As Yoo himself acknowledges, bringing al Qaeda to the brink of destruction has been achieved thanks to tenacious and painstaking intelligence work, not because we sent tens of thousands of soldiers to snuff out Saddam Hussein and quell the civil war created by the subsequent power-vacuum. And when we did finally take out the leader of al Qaeda it was not through an act of war. We did not invade Pakistan with thousands of troops. We used a small team that intended to avoid battle not wage war.

"A nation at war need not wait for a suicide bombing to arrest the "suspects" who remain. Instead, it can fire missiles or send in covert teams to pre-emptively capture or kill the enemy."

As can a nation not at war. A state does not have to be on a war-footing to detain people reasonably suspected of plotting a terrorists attack. And no one suggests that the Clinton administration was at war when it attempted to take out Osama bin Laden with targeted missile strikes.

"Our government doesn't need a judge's permission before tapping an al Qaeda operative's phones, intercepting his emails, or arresting him."

Setting aside Yoo's visceral contempt for judicial oversight, there is no evidence that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge has ever - in the history of FISA - held up a wiretap warrant in a way that was detrimental to an investigation of a foreign terrorist organization or one of its agents in the United States. In the entire history of FISA (since 1978) only a handful of thousands of warrant requests have been denied, a FISA judge is on call 24 hours a day to approve warrants, and emergency wiretaps can be put in place immediately by FBI officials as long as they seek retro-active approval within a number of days.

"We need not provide terrorists with Miranda warnings, lawyers and jury trials. A nation at war can detain the enemy without lawyers or civilian trials and interrogate them for information to prevent future attacks."

Again, setting aside Yoo's contempt for modern due process and constitutional rights, there is no evidence whatsoever that putting suspects of terrorism through the effective processes our courts have honed over centuries results in worse outcomes. To the contrary, when terror suspects are very likely guilty, defense attorneys counsel them to cooperate in order to receive a shorter sentence. Adversarial, domineering procedures reinforce terror suspects' oppositional stance to the state, prolonging their obstinence. In case after case of effective interrogation, the story is the same: a charming interrogator worked his or her way into the confidence of a detainee and won troves of information.

If Yoo knew anything about the human psychology of interrogation, he would understand that while his approach might be emotionally satisfying to those who deploy it - allowing them to feel powerful and dominant in relation to people (terror suspects) whose actions they generally fear - that approach results in lower quality intelligence that often leads investigators astray. Furthermore, Yoo's approach squanders the legitimacy of American jurisprudence for a sum total benefit amounting to the emotional satisfaction of limited revenge. Wiser men in our history - John Adams who defended British soldiers responsible for the 'Boston Massacre' and Harry Truman who insisted on open trials not summary executions for Nazi officials - recognized the poverty of such Faustian bargains.

Yoo then tries to claim that the war-footing allowed the intelligence community to operate more effectively:

"Before 9/11 our national security bureaucracies, prodded by the civil liberties worries of the courts and Congress, had deliberately handicapped their ability to pull all intelligence into a single mosaic. Passage of the Patriot Act, the expanded interception of international terrorist emails and phone calls, and the tough interrogation of a few high-ranking al Qaeda leaders broadened and deepened the pool of information on our enemy."

It is nice to see Yoo admit that no law handicapped the ability of national security bureaucracies from integrating their intelligence. But, since that is the case, it follows that the PATRIOT Act was not needed to fix the problem of intelligence integration. Those bureaucracies merely needed to change their internal protocols. While the quantity of international terrorist emails and phone calls may have expanded, that, again, would have had nothing to do with legal changes or a war-footing. Such interception - done primarily by the NSA - was completely legal well before 9/11 and it was occurring all the time. What PATRIOT Act provisions did give us after 9/11 was a surge in domestic spying and wiretapping of innocent Americans that flooded intelligence agencies with information that was totally useless but that they had to sift through. It was just such informational noise that likely distracted investigators from tuning in the signal of Abdulmutallab's plot to bomb an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

The 'tough' interrogations of high-ranking al Qaeda leaders Yoo refers to were actually counterproductive if we believe the interrogators who were in the booth. They - Ali Soufan in the case of detainee Zubaydah, and Deuce Martinez in the case of detainee KSM - extracted truthful and useful intelligence from the detainees by befriending and skillfully manipulating them. Or, one could believe John Yoo -- who was not there and whose defense in any future war crimes prosecution depends, in part, on justifying his actions by proving that the tactics saved lives -- and his account which is supported by no documentation and no witness not facing the same potential legal jeopardy.

Finally, Yoo wishes to soothe his libertarian critics by arguing that we are freer than ever thanks to the War on Terror:

"Individual freedom emerged from the decade stronger than before. No dictatorship arose. ... Meanwhile, new technologies and social networking have created an expanding space for political activity and organization unlike anything in our history."

:) lol ;)

__________
The War on Terror did not make us safer in the least. That we have not suffered a major attack on US soil owes to four things:

1) There aren't that many terrorists.
2) Our counterterrorism operations -- based on old-fashioned police work, community tips, targeted surveillance, and foreign intelligence -- have netted almost every possible terror plotter in our country.
3) We have gotten lucky in a few cases that terrorists were incompetent.
4) Our offensive counterterrorism operations abroad -- which neither require all-out wars of choice nor put us on a war footing more generally -- have been quite successful at dismantling al Qaeda's network.

But, to date, there is no credible evidence that War on Terror policies like enhanced interrogation, ethnic profiling, expanded domestic surveillance powers, or the suspension of due process for terror suspects have led to the capturing of a single terrorist or the foiling of a single plot. And while we may have killed some terrorists as part of the war in Iraq, there is little doubt that we inspired as many or more than we killed. Sadly for men like John Yoo and his friends, who would like to believe that their deeds were not entirely counterproductive, the Arab Spring has just put the lie to the final surviving justification for that war -- that it was needed to bring democracy to the region.

In a fairly sedate apologia for George W. Bush's post 9/11 foreign policy appearing in Foreign Affairs, Melvyn Leffler writes:

"To extract actionable intelligence, it [the Bush Administration] resorted to detention, rendition, and, in a few cases, torture."

This formulation suggests both that 'actionable intelligence' was won using such tactics and that the administration 'resorted' to their use only after other tactics were tried and found wanting. But leaked and declassified accounts of interrogations featuring the 'torture' Leffler refers to suggest that neither of these propositions are true. Coercive techniques did not produce actionable intelligence, and they were used despite the superior efficacy of rapport-based techniques that generated far more intelligence with those very detainees.

For a thorough debunking of the meme Leffler casually propagates, see this.

In their 9/11 piece "Ten Years On," the Economist writes:

"…the Bush Administration rode roughshod over cherished civil liberties. Congress, the courts, and a new president eventually pushed back, but not all the way."

This is only partially correct, and misses the point.

The courts did push back on the Bush Administration's designs for Military Commissions, forcing the tribunals to approximate more closely the traditional criminal courts of the American Constitution. And President Obama did issue an Executive Order banning the use of 'enhanced' interrogation tactics often described as torture. But most of the retreat from Bush's rights-abusing policies was initiated by the security establishment itself because the policies did not work.

The FBI, TSA, and ICE walked back from ethnic profiling policies because they caught no terrorists and alienated potentially useful collaborators. The CIA ended the 'enhanced' interrogation program in favor of better-performing methods. And, for every military prosecutor arguing for increased prerogatives for themselves and decreased due process for terror suspects, a military defense attorney has been fighting to defend Article III Constitutional rights on the grounds that they make our legal system more effective and more legitimate.

The Congress, for its part, has done precious little on any of these fronts. It has provided episodic and toothless oversight of executive counterterrorism programs, has greenlighted ineffective security policies agencies have not even asked for, and has even prevented DoD and DoJ prosecutors -- against their preferences -- from transferring terror defendants to Article III Courts, waxing heroic about their responsibility to protect their constituencies from movie-plot attacks on the trial venues.

Washington lawyers and politicians did not end Bush's war on terror. Security officials did. And they ended it, because it didn't make Americans any safer.

Image from The Economist.com

Ross Douthat argues in the New York Times that "It's Still the 9/11 Era."

In an op-ed that almost reads as a glancing rebuttal to our Atlantic essay describing how the War on Terror ended, Douthat argues that we have not yet emerged from a 9/11 era defined by a martial approach to terrorism and a foreign policy promoting democracy in the Muslim world.

This formulation of the '9/11 era' is suspect on both accounts. First, a purely criminal justice approach to terrorism cannot be an essential criterion for judging the end of the 9/11 era. There are strong arguments suggesting we should use such an approach. But the United States has never been shy about using military force against dangerous threats. The Clinton Administration's missile strikes targeting Osama bin Laden -- to say nothing of its aggression against potentially dangerous domestic groups or America's long history of covert warfare against non-state actors -- suggests that extrajudicial killing of enemies is not a marker of the '9/11 era.'

As for his second criterion, democracy promotion in the Middle East: the United States invaded Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts. We invaded Iraq over ginned up fears that Saddam Hussein would transfer WMDs (he did not have) to terrorists (he was not connected to). In both cases, democracy promotion merely became necessary once vacuums of authority threatened to leave the territories lawless safe-havens for terrorists. That Obama uses the rhetoric of democracy promotion should not mark him as a '9/11 era' president any more than it would mark Kennedy, Roosevelt, Jefferson, Washington, or indeed every single American president in our history.

In any case, the substance and timbre of US counterterrorism policy have changed dramatically since the first two years of Bush's War on Terror. Ethnic profiling, 'enhanced' interrogation, preventative detention, and the aggressive stance of our military occupations have all been dialed back significantly as US security officials have recognized the wisdom in fostering cooperative relationships with the communities they contact while reserving their uses of force for selected surgical strikes.

Douthat could not have known this at the time he wrote, but his fear of a "possibly permanent military footprint in Iraq" also appears to be unfounded. As Fox News reported today, Obama and his Iraqi partners have tentatively agreed that only 3,000 US troops will stay on in Iraq as advisers after December 31st. Even if the number is jiggered up a bit by the end of the year, there is no arguing that our military operations in both countries have significantly shifted first from invasion to counterinsurgency, and now counterinsurgency to counterterrorism and institution building.

I might charitably agree with Douthat (a writer I often enjoy) that we are not entirely out of the woods yet. But, the forest is thinning significantly. We are well past the War on Terror and you can even make out the horizon enough to see the sun setting on his "9/11 era."

The War on Terror lives on today only as political theater. Policymakers, from President Obama to Members of Congress, continue to fear the accusation of being "soft on terror," and hence continue to describe contemporary counterterrorism efforts in martial terms. Congress continues to legislate War on Terror approaches that the security establishment, for the most part, hasn't asked for and, in some cases, has even explicitly rejected.

But while the political class remains stuck in the past, the security establishment has moved on. Virtually all of the progress that U.S. authorities have made in dismantling al Qaeda and countering terrorism has been accomplished in spite of, not because of the War on Terror. As we consider the future of U.S. counterterrorism after Bin Laden, we would do well to consider what we have learned from the evolving security response to the 9/11 attacks, and how those lessons might keep us safer in a world where the War on Terror may be over but the threat of terrorism still remains.

Read our whole piece at The Atlantic.

An excerpt:

Trust also matters in covert networks if communication is to be effective. And Atiyah had that trust with many of al-Qaeda's key actors and affiliates; that is why he will be hard to replace -- perhaps even more so than current al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri is a critical leader of the organization, but he operates within a structure that increasingly emphasizes the ability to move information rather than generate authoritative commands. In other words: in al-Qaeda, connectedness is more important than authority and Atiyah was connected.

When we first put out CT Since 9/11 in the Spring, we anticipated that it might be read by a few advocates and experts in the national security and human rights communities, but we had no illusions about it being a popularly-read piece.

We have just recently learned, however, that some of the main findings of the report have been cited** in Reader's Digest, which according to Wikipedia has the largest paid circulation in the world and reaches more readers with household incomes of $100,000+ than Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and Inc. combined.

Cool.

** Reader's Digest actually (forgive-ably) mischaracterized our analysis slightly. Our review found not only that expanded surveillance powers were used in only two plot interdictions since 9/11 (as they wrote), but also that the expanded powers were unnecessary to foil those plots.