In front of Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters on Thursday, Palestinian teenagers climbed atop a bus shelter to attach a red, black, white and green Palestinian flag in the sight of the Israelis. It was eerily reminiscent of scenes during the first intifada in the late ’80s, when the Palestinian Authority (PA) was not yet around and the then-banned flags were one of the few ways to express Palestinians’ aspiration to statehood. Now, with Arafat surrounded, and important symbols such as the radio studios and the Gaza airport in rubble, it looks as if the Palestinian dreams of sovereignty have literally been set back by decades.

Just how much the PA’s hold has crumbled became clear earlier this week, on Monday, when Israeli tanks and bulldozers blocked off the entrance to the house of Mahmoud Jallad, mayor of the West Bank city of Tulkarm. “The soldiers knocked on the door at 4 in the morning,” Jallad was able to tell reporters over the telephone. His house was occupied and he and his family were placed under house arrest. “They made me, my wife and my two children stand outside in the cold for three hours while they searched our house,” he said. It was the first time the Israeli army had reoccupied an entire Palestinian city. Mayor Jallad had an explanation for why they took over his house: “To show all of Tulkarm, all Palestinians and especially President Arafat that they can do what they want.” The army withdrew the following morning, but the message had been sent.

The Israelis move at will through areas that were supposedly handed over to the PA under the Oslo peace agreements. There they arrest or kill people on their wanted list, as they did in Nablus on Wednesday when four members of the militant Islamic group Hamas died when troops attacked a presumed bomb-making facility. Late in the evening on Thursday, Israeli forces undertook another targeted assassination. Helicopter gunships fired two missiles into the car of Bakar Hamdan, a senior Hamas official in the Southern Gaza strip, killing him and wounding two others. A Hamas response to both incidents is inevitable, which means the fundamentalist movement’s cease-fire agreement with the PA is now definitively scrapped. Israel’s army and its political decision-makers could not have made it any clearer that in their view the PA has indeed become irrelevant.

What is perhaps most surprising about the unprecedented Israeli assault on the Palestinian Authority is how completely the United States has gone along with it. While the international community, including the United States, issued howls of protest over the first Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory last year, now whole cities can be reoccupied for more than a day with full American support. On Thursday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush “understands the reason that Israel has taken the action that it takes, and it is up to Chairman Arafat to demonstrate the leadership to combat terrorism.”

But the Israeli assaults have brought the PA to the brink of extinction, destroying any hope that it would be able to control militants. In fact, with the PA pushed to the side, support for the militants is growing among an increasingly enraged and desperate population. After the Israeli action in Nablus, thousands of furious residents stormed the local prison and the governor’s compound. They broke through the metal fence and attempted to free anti-Israeli militants who had been detained by the PA in the past weeks. “Prisons are not for Hamas,” the demonstrators chanted. One of them was killed in the confrontation with the Palestinian police.

In the wake of the Israeli raid that killed four of its members, Hamas immediately pledged a resumption of the devastating attacks inside Israel that had presumably been suspended since mid-December. The movement promised a “fierce war” against “Zionist gangs,” using all the means at its disposal.

Just hours later, in the already hard-hit center of Jerusalem, a Palestinian gunman sprayed Israeli passersby with bullets, killing two and wounding dozens. Israelis have almost become accustomed to these scenes, with 10 fatalities from shootings the week before. As usual, the Israeli government held the PA and Arafat directly responsible. A spokesman called the attack “a continuation of the terrorist campaign against Israeli civilians, women and children, committed by terrorist organizations with the passive or active encouragement of the Palestinian Authority.” Many speculated that the shooting would set the stage for further Israeli action against the PA, which would then trigger more attacks against Israel.

Both Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat seem to have chosen to engage in permanent, low-level confrontation rather than to make painful political concessions. Right now, Sharon and his right-wing followers have the upper hand in their attempt to beat down the Palestinians’ national aspirations. Despite Palestinians’ criticism of Arafat, they still regard him as Mr. Palestine, the living symbol of their struggle. By showing he is impotent in the face of Israel’s might, Sharon hopes to dash the Palestinians’ hopes of statehood.

The immediate effect, however, is that many Palestinians are turning away from Arafat’s tactics and are embracing those of his more militant opponents. Many Palestinians linked the Jerusalem attack with the events earlier that day in Nablus, even though Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, not Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack. “I don’t like this,” a Jerusalem Palestinian who himself frequently moves through the city center said after the attack, “but the Israelis have to understand that if they do what they did in Nablus, they can expect to be killed themselves. That is the only way that we are going to get them to stop. Arafat does not offer an alternative.”

In Tulkarm earlier in the week, politicians and ordinary people who could not understand why the PA had not resisted the Israeli incursion more forcefully expressed similar sentiments. While machine-gun fire echoed through the narrow streets of the Tulkarm refugee camp at the edge of the city, a group of Palestinian militants shouted their defiance at Israeli tanks at the camp’s perimeter. “If you are a man you will come down from your tank and we’ll teach you a lesson,” one Palestinian, who would only give his name as Khaled, shouted derisively at the Israelis. Most of the militants on Israel’s wanted list had escaped to the camp, a warren of narrow streets and jerry-built houses, in the early hours of the incursion. “We will fight the tanks, if necessary with our bare hands,” said Khaled, “not like the Authority people, who don’t do anything.” The black smoke of burning tires and more machine-gun fire attested to the determination of the resistance. In the end, the Israelis vindicated the militants’ stance. The army left the camp alone, saying that it would have absorbed casualties had the troops gone in. The failure of the army to enter the camp and arrest the wanted militants also proved that the reoccupation was largely an exercise in symbolism.

Not far from the camp, the villa of Hassan Khreisheh, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council for Tulkarm, afforded a view of the surrounding hills, dotted with Israeli tanks. “Of course the PA cannot fight tanks with machine guns. We are powerless,” he said. Khreisheh, though belonging to Arafat’s Fatah movement, blames the Palestinian leader for his people’s troubles. “We did not build any institutions; the PA is a one-man show,” he said. The lawmaker signed a petition in 1999, condemning undemocratic practices and corruption in the PA. He said Arafat’s men threatened him because of it. “Many people are against Arafat, against all his concessions to the Israelis, against the way he runs the PA. But if we are going to change our leaders it should be through democratic means, not because of Israeli pressure.”

On Monday, the only oasis of power for the PA in Tulkarm was the governor’s residence. Ezzedin Sharif, clearly a Fatah man to the bone, put a brave face on the fact that the Israelis had left him alone. “I am the direct representative of President Arafat. If they move against me, it is like moving against him.” He seemed completely bewildered by the developments in his city. “The Israelis say this is a center of terrorism, but in the six years since I became governor, I didn’t see any terrorists,” he maintained. “Tulkarm was even the favorite town for Israeli weekend shoppers before the intifada. Would they have come if there were terrorists here?” Outside, one of his armed guards looked about nervously. “An Israeli jeep comes by every 30 minutes with a megaphone announcing a curfew. We’d rather not run into them.”

The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)

I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.

The area was evacuated for two hours until a bomb squad determined that the device was not dangerous.

At about 2 a.m. Saturday, a police officer discovered Miyakawa on a ladder not far from where the first contraption was found. Police said he was tying a similar “I Love New York” bag to a public lamp post.

Miyakawa was charged with two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the first degree, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the second degree, two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of second-degree criminal nuisance.

A judge ordered him held pending a psychiatric evaluation. His lawyer, Deborah J. Blum, said Monday that she is filing for emergency relief to have Miyakawa released. A court date was set for June 21 to review the results of the evaluation.

“He’s still being held,” Blum said Monday. “I believe that it was a gross misunderstanding and other than that I don’t have any other comment.”

Miyakawa, who was born in Tokyo and is about 50 years old, has worked for a New York-based architect Rafael Vinoly for the last 20 years and also has an independent design practice.

Vinoly’s firm released a statement Monday praising Miyakawa for his “extraordinary brand of professionalism” and said he has been a mentor to generations of young architects.

“Takeshi is a fabulous human being and a person of extraordinary talent,” Vinoly said. “We hope this misunderstanding is cleared up as quickly as possible.”

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement that the charges sounded “like a wild overreaction.”

“It’s hard to understand why a light-up bag in a tree would be treated as an attempted terrorist act unless there’s more to the story than has been reported in the press thus far,” she said.

In 2007, an artist touched off a terror scare in Boston by placing electronic devices around the city as part of a marketing stunt for Cartoon Network. The city closed bridges, roads and public transit before authorities realized the signs were not bombs.

On an average day, the NYPD receives nearly 100 reports of a suspicious package. Last year, there were more than 4,000 such reports. The number generally rises following any word of terror threats in New York and around the world.

The concourse checkpoint needs to be there.  Just the same, chances are good that once an adversary has made it to the airport, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system.  And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system.  ”Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of the latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.”

That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.

Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In prior years, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could have used almost anything — a deadly sharp can be fashioned from a broken first-class dinner plate or a ballpoint pen — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security — a breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA level.

To put it succinctly: The success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.

Not that frontline guards don’t play a deterrent role.  And, in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at U.S. domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?

And although the scanners are effective, where does the arms race end?  Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next?  The stubborn truth is, we can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.

That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality.  And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.

Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists.  The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA Flight 847.  And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme masterminded by Ramzi Yousef (nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.

While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that have been useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to 2 million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me) serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that could make us safer.  Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.

And lastly, if only as an aside, let’s behold for a moment the term “underwear bomb.”  That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker.  What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?

Strange times indeed.

This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.

The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.

“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’

Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.

Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.

Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.

“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’

Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.

And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.

It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.

The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.

A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.

Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.

The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.

To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.

Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.

By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.

We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)