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Yet this type of accountability just brought to Pakistan’s intelligence service is simply inconceivable in the United States. It is virtually impossible to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the CIA to disclose documents about its treatment of detainees or, even more unrealistically, to permit the victims of CIA abuse to have their grievances heard in court. Anyone who doubts that can simply review the past decade of full-scale immunity bestowed by the Justice Department and subservient American federal courts on all executive agencies in the War on Terror. We should think about that the next time some American pundit, politician, or media figure righteously holds forth on how undemocratic and oppressive is Pakistan as opposed to the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar yesterday patiently explained that drone strikes — which Americans widely support, including American liberals — are “completely illegal and unlawful” and “counterproductive” because they “fuel terrorism,” since people tend to become quite angry at the foreign power which slaughters their children…

So let me get this straight. A few years after some terrorists used our airliners as bombs in attacks on otherwise unreachable American targets—and that plot was unrepeatable thanks to subsequent passenger awareness—we become pioneers in the business of cheap, remote controlled flying bombers that can go anywhere. We create a thriving market for their components and accelerate the development of these objectively evil machines by many years. And just in case anybody had qualms about using drones against American civilians, we accidentally kill hundreds of civilians with drones over several years, in countries where we are not at war.

If you craved a near-term future of asymmetrical drone warfare encircling the globe and inevitably reaching within our borders, you would do exactly what the old men in charge of our war machine are doing.

All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” These senior officials also admitted that “the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign” but claims it “has no direct involvement.”

WTF.

Lindsey Graham: “Homegrown terrorism is a real threat. There are a lot of people being radicalized on the Internet”

Graham wraps all his paranoid anxieties, whether genuine or for the benefit of his owners, into such a tidy package.

Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism, said Mr. Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

Just consider what the constant hyping of this “miniscule threat” has enabled. The once-controversial Patriot Act was extended for another four years with no reforms whatsoever based on these fears…

It is really way too depressing to consider all that Bush and Obama’s easy manipulation of fear and ignorance hath wrought these past ten years. The less we are evidently at risk, the more government stokes our collective anxiety disorder with its Department of Homeland Security televisions in Penn Station, its stationing of armed soldiers at the PA bus terminal, and perhaps most weirdly with its affection for police dogs everywhere.

With so few actual bombs for those cuddly beasts to sniff (did any dog ever find a damn bomb—has the “success case” for the “K-9” obsession occurred even once in history?) they might end up on domestic Abu Ghraib duty before we know it.

The Bureau’s journalists and researchers spent months engaged in the painstaking and difficult task of gathering documentation on the effects of the top secret U.S. drone program in Waziristan — producing extraordinary findings — only to find themselves and their sources, many of whom are local villagers whose children have been killed, depicted as Al Qaeda’s witting or unwitting allies the very next day in The New York Times, by some senior government official too frightened to put his name on his accusations and aided (as always) by a newspaper that has repeatedly vowed to stop these practices.