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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.

So here we have the nauseating spectacle of the Obama administration secretly targeting its own citizens for assassination, boasting in public about it in order to show how Tough and Strong the President is, but then hiding behind broad secrecy claims to shield their conduct from meaningful transparency, public debate, and legal review, all while pretending that they are motivated by lofty National Security Concerns when wielding these secrecy weapons.

So militarized is U.S. foreign policy — and so reviled is the U.S. in Iraq — that even when it “withdraws” from that country, it maintains a presence that is so large and menacing as to be unimaginable in most other countries around the world: basically the equivalent of a small army.