The heart of the devastation is at the Jenin refugee camp, where the number of dead buried beneath tons of rubble is unknown and a bitter and momentous controversy about what happened there is raging. Palestinians charge that a massacre took place, with hundreds killed; the Israelis deny their army did anything wrong and put the number of Palestinian dead in the dozens. Human rights groups and British and European officials, fearing that atrocities took place in Jenin (from which journalists were banned until a few days ago), have called for an international investigation. Chris Patten, external relations commissioner for the European Union, warned that if Israel did not accept a U.N. investigation, its reputation would suffer “colossal damage.”

Blasted Jenin is quiet now, but the Israeli army and Palestinian gunmen are still engaged in two tense standoffs, one in Bethlehem around the Church of the Nativity, the other in Ramallah at Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s West Bank headquarters, where Israelis charge that those responsible for the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister are holed up. And Israeli soldiers are still arresting and processing hundreds of fighting-age Palestinian men — including on Monday afternoon Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank head of the Fatah political party affiliated with Arafat, a big fish Israel says is responsible for ordering terrorist attacks on Israelis. The fighting in the occupied territories has largely subsided, though shooting flared up again Wednesday at the Church of the Nativity.

The intensifying crisis led the Bush administration to belatedly get involved, sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region. But as many predicted, Powell departed the region Wednesday with almost nothing to show for his trip. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continues to bluntly rebuff vacillating U.S. calls for an end to the invasion, while Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has been confined to his devastated headquarters in Ramallah for weeks, refused to call for a cease-fire until Israeli forces withdraw from the occupied territories. A final meeting between Powell and Arafat on Wednesday produced no breakthrough; indeed, after Powell left, angry Palestinians asserted that his intervention had achieved nothing. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saab Erekat said, “The situation on the ground is that Secretary Powell leaves the situation much worse than he came.”

As the world waits for the next development — which painful experience indicates will probably be a dreadful one — a question arises. How did the Israeli-Palestinian situation deteriorate so far so fast? How did the so-called Al-Aqsa Intifada, which began after Ariel Sharon, accompanied by hundreds of policemen, made a controversial visit to set foot on the esplanade of the most contested holy real estate in the world in September 2000, move from riotous stone-throwing to full-fledged war?

The violence had an escalatory dynamic from the start: Israeli police brutality and the rage following the first Palestinian funerals produced increasingly violent riots. Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers traded bullets. Israel’s policy of knocking off wanted Palestinian militants (and innocent bystanders) angered Palestinians who vowed revenge. And Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians whetted Israel’s appetite for drastic military action. These are the “cycles of violence” that diplomats have urged, over and over again, both parties to break.

But for left-wing Israelis who campaigned against Sharon’s election as prime minister in February 2001, the terrible events of the last year have come as no surprise. In fact, they predicted them with uncanny accuracy — and lay responsibility for them directly at the feet of Ariel Sharon.

The left-leaning Ha’aretz, Israel’s most prestigious newspaper, reminded its readers last week of the advertisement run by Labor on television 15 months ago. The clip, which predicted in graphic detail what would happen if Sharon were elected, forecast the reinvasion of Palestinian territories, hundreds of deaths, the deterioration of Israel’s relations with Jordan and Egypt and a massive call-up of reservists. In a publicity gimmick that was much criticized at the time, mock call-up cards were also sent to reservists to stress the danger inherent in choosing Sharon, a man known for his ruthlessness and checkered military past, as leader of the Jewish nation. The admen “should be congratulated on their prescience,” wrote Aviv Lavie in Ha’aretz.

“From day one, Sharon’s main decision was to ruin the Oslo peace process and destroy the Palestinian Authority,” says Ron Pundak, one of the early architects of the Oslo accords, now director of the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv. “It was just a question of timing and a matter of how tactfully and skillfully to create an environment most conducive to reducing U.S. pressure and domestic opposition to his plan. It took him a year until he reached this moment and unfortunately Arafat played into his hands.”

Ha’aretz commentator Doron Rosenblum predicted the current crisis two and a half months ago. In a savage column titled “The State Rejoices, the Nation Bleeds,” Rosenblum wrote, “[T]he inevitable and the obvious happened quite quickly: The mask of the restrained grandfather dropped. Sharon is Sharon is Sharon — escalation, provocation, complication and all. Even as prime minister, he has turned out to be a ‘one-trick pony,’ obsessively repeating the exercise of encircling, tightening and siege remembered from the days of the Second Army in Sinai, through Beirut and on to Ramallah … The suspicion arises that even the Lebanon War will turn into an aperitif to the dish Sharon is now boiling up in the territories in a huge pressure-cooker. By closing off all the openings for negotiations, sealing the lid on his personal foe and raising the temperature of the motives of hatred and revenge, it seems that he is consciously cooking up some big explosion.”

During the election campaign Sharon himself was candid about his tough intentions. He promised “peace through security,” not the other way around. And ever since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Sharon had harshly criticized, in opinion pieces and Knesset speeches, the land-for-peace negotiation process. This was not surprising, since Sharon’s entire career has been defined by battling the Palestinians and other Arabs militarily, on the one hand, and masterminding the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza to create “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible for Israel ever to give back the territories it occupied after the 1967 war, on the other.

Like other Israeli politicians, he toned down the virulence of his criticism after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the accords’ signatory, was assassinated by a rabidly pro-settlement and religious Israeli who believed that Rabin had betrayed the Jewish people. But in a well-publicized interview with Kfar Chabad, a religious weekly, last January, Sharon declared: “The Oslo agreement no longer exists. Full stop.” He said he would never give up a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza nor divide Jerusalem. When pressed by other journalists to define his vision of a Palestinian state, he described an entity with no control over its borders, cut up by security roads, ruling over at most 45 percent of the occupied territories — in short, the status quo, preserved indefinitely through “long-term interim agreements” and elusive promises.

The Palestinian response to Sharon’s hard-line positions was equally clear at the time of his election. “What [Sharon] has proposed means that it is impossible to reach an agreement,” Saeb Erakat told the New York Times. “The result is a description of war.”

So when Sharon was elected in a landslide last February, did Israelis expect war? “Many did,” says Yaron Ezrahi, a political analyst at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. “There was a mood after the collapse of [talks at] Camp David, that if the diplomatic general [Ehud] Barak [then Israel's prime minister] had come home empty-handed and Arafat had sent us his armed people, we needed to send them the neighborhood gangster [Sharon] and use force against force.”

There were other signs that the conflict would escalate under Sharon. Operation “Defensive Shield,” as the current campaign is known, was triggered by the deadly suicide bombing in Netanya on the first night of Passover. But the option of reinvading the West Bank and/or Gaza had been discussed as a contingency plan by politicians, pundits and generals months before. Similar operations, on a smaller scale, had been launched repeatedly over the past year: Tanks moved into Palestinian cities after the murder of the Israeli Tourism Minister Rechavam Zeevi last October, for example, and soldiers practiced urban warfare against the Balata refugee camp at the beginning of March. Those were clearly dress rehearsals for the big operation Sharon had been planning all along, says Pundak.

That Sharon’s true intention was not simply to put an end to the suicide bombings that have been crippling Israeli life but to smash everything that might make up a Palestinian state is shown by the type of people and buildings the army has targeted in the current campaign, says Pundak. “At the same time as the army is fighting the so-called terrorist infrastructure, it is ruining the Palestinian Authority, breaking in offices, destroying records and dismantling police forces.” The population registry, for example, no longer exists. While Israel pounds what remains of a crippled, ineffectual Palestinian administration, Sharon has allowed “the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad [who oppose all peace agreements with Israel] to go on living happily in Gaza,” says Pundak. Ironically Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, the organization behind the most lethal terrorist attacks, hasn’t been disturbed, he says — “not even his afternoon nap.”

Other Israeli analysts, however, caution against charging Sharon with “premeditated war.” Nahum Barnea, a political columnist for Israel’s highest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, says Sharon has “master instincts,” not a “master plan.” “Saying it looks like a plan is a way of relieving the burden of responsibility on Arafat, but it’s not right,” says Barnea. “From day one foreign journalists have portrayed Sharon as a very strong person. He is not. When he became prime minister, he was torn between contradictory agendas, caught in the political and military situation. It’s not easy being prime minister of Israel and go to sleep only to be woken up four times at night by news of bombs or soldiers being killed.”

Other analysts argue that Sharon did not necessarily set out to roll back the concessions made since Oslo. “There’s no question in my mind that when Sharon went to the Temple Mount he intended to derail Oslo,” says Hirsch Goodman, senior research associate at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. “Sharon saw a prime minister of Israel [Barak] ready to give back 97 percent [the actual percentage of land offered by Barak is in dispute] of the West Bank and Gaza and to divide Jerusalem and he thought he had to stop it.” But Goodman adds: “His intention was to stop Oslo where it was but not to destroy it. He was ready to have a Palestinian state declared without borders and to negotiate long-term interim agreements.”

Pundak disputes that, painting the picture of a man who would never accept a peaceful compromise on the basis of Oslo. “[Sharon] thinks Palestinians don’t deserve more than limited self-rule. He doesn’t trust Palestinians and thinks we’re engaged in a conflict that will last another hundred years. His thinking, shaped by his experience as a general and the climate of the 1960s, is that a Palestinian state would be a bridge to other outside Arab forces [like Iraq] who would use it to destroy Israel. He thinks it’s a lousy arrangement to help them with a peace process.”

In any event, “Oslo as a process was already dead after Camp David,” notes Barnea. After putting major issues like the status of Jerusalem holy places, the fate of refugees and the shape of final borders on the negotiating table, there was no going back to the incremental land-for-peace process begun at Oslo. And then there was the second intifada, in which Arafat has embraced violence. “Sharon didn’t have to send soldiers in Jenin to shoot it,” says Barnea of the Oslo diplomatic process. “He only had to bury it.”

That doesn’t mean the yearlong slide toward war was entirely involuntary. “Nothing is involuntary,” says Barnea. “Arafat and Sharon have both accomplished their basic agendas.”

According to him, “Arafat wanted to have a grand finale and not to finalize the diplomatic process. He wanted a final act involving lots of violence and he got it. It was a question of historical legacy but also because he believes he has no chance to get what he wants with a signed agreement. He sees a signed agreement as only one way of achieving his goal. When he committed himself not to use violence at Oslo, he did not mean it. That is what has offended Israel most — the notion that he resorted so easily to violence after the failure of Camp David.”

“In Sharon’s case, his agenda goes back much earlier than Oslo. Every Israeli leader has a certain amount of suspicion for signed agreements with Arabs, but Sharon takes that suspicion to the extreme,” says Barnea, who’s been observing Israeli politics up close for years. “He has a problem with having an agreement with Arafat.”

“I remember a trip in Washington in the spring of 2001,” says Barnea. “It was late at night and I asked him, to distract him, what he thought about bin Laden. This was before Sept. 11. He looked at me with surprise, as if wondering why I wasn’t asking him about Bush and Arafat, and said, ‘Arafat is bin Laden.’ I got a quote but I think it also reflects his way of thinking. His idea of Arafat was crystallized in 1982 in Beirut and he’s never changed it.” (In 1982 Sharon, using the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat by a dissident Palestinian faction as a pretext, launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon with the intention of smashing the PLO and setting up Lebanon as an Israeli client. Arafat and his troops, trapped in Beirut, were forced to flee Lebanon for Tunis. Sharon recently said he regretted not giving an Israeli sniper an order to kill Arafat as he boarded the ship.) To this date, Sharon has always refused to shake the Palestinian leader’s hand — even at the Wye River Plantation where he joined then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Arafat for intensive talks in a secluded setting.

Then there is the question of settlements. The Jewish implantations in the West Bank and Gaza are Sharon’s brainchild and legacy, a project he has overseen in every ministerial role he has held over the decades. “When he was elected people said that now that Sharon is old, he will put the safety of his children and grandchildren before the settlement enterprise, but they’re wrong,” says Barnea. “His real grandchildren are the settlements, the ones built in the middle of Palestinian population. It would be very difficult for him to evacuate them. For him Israel has to be in Paradise, living in a state of utopia, in order to give up one settlement.”

Critics have accused Sharon of deliberately scuttling chances for a cease-fire in the past year by approving provocative military actions — in particular the so-called targeted assassinations — at times when Palestinian guns were quiet. Sharon’s ultimate goal, they charge, is to buy time and avoid reaching the phase of painful political concessions that would require freezing construction of new housing in the territories and, eventually, dismantling his life’s work by giving Palestinians control over most of the West Bank and Gaza.

Political analyst Ezrahi argues that Sharon planted the seeds of the current war simply by promoting settlement-building on conquered land. “It was terribly short-sighted and unsophisticated. Anyone who knew anything about national liberation movements knew that [settling territories conquered in 1967] would be untenable and could only end in bloodshed. Sharon was driven by narrow conceptions of history and Darwinian perceptions of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.”

But if the settlement enterprise was “the worst act taken by Jews against themselves since 1948,” Ezrahi stresses that Palestinians have also made a fatal historical mistake by resorting to terror: “Terrorism has profoundly infected the Palestinian movement,” he says. “It wakes up terrible memories of the Holocaust. It was the worst possible way of forcing us [Israelis] to compromise.”

The general consensus among analysts, however, is that Sharon is following his instincts and doesn’t have a long-term plan for what Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians should be. “I don’t know what his vision is. He’s a brilliant tactician but not a very good strategist,” says Goodman — who makes clear that he also believes Arafat planned all along to use Oslo as a Trojan horse that would lead to the destruction of Israel. Moreover, Sharon is not an ideologue about the settlements, he says — distinguishing him from the ultranationalist and religious parties and individuals that believe that “Judea and Samaria” were given by God to Israel. “He’s primarily concerned with security-oriented issues and he thinks settlements are key to Israel’s security.”

“It would be an error to take the positions he voiced as a member of the opposition and to project them to understand Sharon’s present behavior,” says Ezrahi. “These positions were meant to galvanize his constituency. Of course, what he does now is not entirely apolitical. He does it with the intention to crush Netanyahu who has been calling for more action [against Palestinian militants]. Netanyahu is the silent partner, the Iago in this play, inciting Sharon’s Othello to go further.”

Explaining Sharon’s “master instincts” and his failure to have a coherent endgame strategy, Barnea says, “Sharon has principles that are the product of his childhood, of his time in the army and the issues he faces on the political scene. At the same time he has to think about the survival of Israel, his coalition … All master plans melt in the Israeli sun. Israeli politics are so intensive and constantly changing, that it’s very difficult to implement a plan.”

“If there are no results to the military offensive, the [Israeli] public can easily turn left and not right,” says Barnea. “The Israeli center is zigzagging. You see it in the polls. There is overwhelming support for both military action and wide political concessions. There is no contradiction here. Israelis hate to be impotent and solutionless.”

The question, then, is whether after a year and a half of escalating violence there will be a reasonable Palestinian partner to talk to. “Without a different Palestinian voice and a different Palestinian vocabulary [from the current rhetoric of hatred and intransigence], it will be very difficult to convince Israelis who see that Sharon’s way has failed to vote for an alternative,” says Pundak, who spent many hours with members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (then an illegal terrorist entity) secretly plotting the Oslo breakthrough. “The track record of Palestinians is bad. They have a history of doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment,” he says. “But there are still pragmatists among them and we can still make a deal.”

Pundak mentions Marwan Barghouti as an example of a Palestinian pragmatist who would embrace a deal along clear political guidelines. An hour later, Israeli television killed that hope, reporting that the Israeli army had just seized Barghouti, once an outspokenly pro-peace politician who had many meetings with Israeli doves. Israeli officials charged that Barghouti was responsible for turning the Tanzim civil guard, part of Arafat’s mainstream Fatah movement, into a militia that carried out suicide bombings against Israelis. Israeli security officials and politicians were divided about the wisdom of arresting the highly popular West Bank leader. Politicians on the right called for a public trial and Barghouti’s execution, those on the left called for his release. Centrists defended his arrest, but warned that it would lead to bloody reprisals or kidnappings.

Ezrahi joins an increasing number of observers who believe that Sharon and Arafat, two old warriors who cannot change their ways, stand in the way of peace. “It’s a tragic conflict fed by unforgivable misconceptions on both sides. Sharon and Arafat are like Siamese twins. There can be no victory of one against the other because of our territorial and demographic proximity. But the real big losers in this war are the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

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.)