But “safer” doesn’t mean we are safe. The problem with homeland security is that we have thousands of vulnerabilities, which means that after the next attack someone can say, correctly, that we didn’t do enough.

Do we live in a less free society than we did on 9/10?

That depends, as a recent president would say, on your definition of “free.” We’re more free of danger from smallpox because we have a stockpile of vaccines. We’re more free of danger from dirty bombs because we have radiation detectors all over the ports. But are we more free from being stopped on the street by police and asked who we are and what’s in our cars? Not at all. I got stopped last night at our friendly new neighborhood checkpoint at 96th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

We live in a new time, which I call the Sept. 12th era, and it’s a period when we’re going to have to recalibrate the balance between the traditional liberty of the government leaving us alone and our new security concerns.

Do you think the war with Iraq will lead to a further erosion of civil liberties and freedom of speech? Are you concerned, for instance, about the way the GOP leadership recently questioned Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle’s patriotism after he criticized President Bush’s failed diplomacy?

I don’t think the war can or should or will lead to any erosion of free speech, and I don’t think the administration’s criticism of Daschle’s hypocritical comments erodes free speech. (Daschle had no problem with the Clinton administration’s failure to forge a U.N. alliance in the Balkans, nor did he vote against the resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq.) After all, reaction to free speech [Daschle's] is part of free speech.

On the other hand, as the book recounts, if war means Code Orange, then we’re going to be left alone a lot less by the government, because Code Orange means a variety of law-enforcement intrusions on our daily lives.

Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU, comes across in your book as a fairly heroic figure in his efforts to counter some of the government’s more repressive security measures. At the same time, there’s a sense that if not Romero himself, his organization has been slow to recognize what a different security climate that Americans now live in. What’s your general sense of the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations’ performance after 9/11?

First, I love the fact that the ACLU is there, as the book makes clear. They do important work and they’re courageous people. But I also think that Anthony’s position against recalibrating the balance between freedom and security is just plain wrong. I’m glad he takes the position, because he provides a great, effective counterbalance against those who want to recalibrate too much in the direction of taking away our freedom. But in the real world we do have to have metal detectors at airports. There’s a scene in the book in which, on the day that Congress is passing the USA PATRIOT Act, the ACLU leaders actually debate the 30-year-old policy requiring metal detectors at airports; they had been against it for those 30 years and only now did they move, again with great debate, to retract it for fear of looking completely idiotic!

So yes, we do have to be able to decide who is most at risk and give them more attention (more searches at airports, for example) than others. Deciding who those people are on the basis of race, religion or nationality is stupid, because the terrorists will simply recruit people whom we won’t suspect. But we do have to know where they’ve traveled, or if they have criminal records, or if they are legal immigrants, or even if they’ve shared apartments with known terrorists. It’s crazy not to want to know that.

Your reporting on the John Walker Lindh case shows that the Justice Department and the FBI took liberties with the law after his arrest — incarcerating him under brutal conditions, preventing his family and counsel from contacting him, and relying on a rogue FBI agent’s questionable interrogation to build their case against him. In the end, do you think Lindh was handled fairly and justly?

Yes, under a law passed during the Clinton administration prohibiting aiding known terrorist organizations including the Taliban, Lindh was rightly convicted. But he wasn’t convicted of the crimes that Ashcroft took to the national airwaves to say he was guilty of — such as conspiring to kill Americans. That’s in large part because the system ended up working.

The real problem I had with the Lindh case was not so much that he was questioned in battlefield conditions differently than he would have or should have been questioned by police if under arrest for a crime, but, rather, that all the information from that harsh, un-Miranda-like questioning was then used against him to charge him for a crime. Plus, they relied on a single FBI agent’s account of the interrogation, which is highly unusual. The book recounts all of this in great detail, because it is so chilling and bespeaks exactly the kind of prosecution tactics the legal system was meant to protect against. And guess what? In the end the legal system, thanks to Lindh’s legal team, as well as the military interrogators who had the integrity to tell Lindh’s lawyers the truth, did protect against it.

As your book makes clear, 9/11 brought out the best and worst in America. Let’s name the book’s villains and heroes.

The book tries hard not to make those black-white judgments, but, rather, to weave a compelling narrative about a lot of diverse people who cross paths in a series of surprising confrontations and alliances. But as long as you’re asking, my nominees for the Sept. 12th era’s greatest generation would include Jim Brosnahan, Lindh’s lawyer; Gail Rossides, the career civil servant who supervises the recruiting and training of all the new airport passenger screeners; Detroit border patrol agent Robert Lindemann, who has the guts to blow the whistle about his unprotected border; the two lawyers who work pro bono for the shoemaker whose small shop near ground zero was pulverized; Romero of the ACLU; Eileen Simon, the New Jersey widow who holds her family together so well; the CEO of Chubb Insurance, who quickly makes payments on claims that he might have legally avoided; and Tom Ridge, who decides in the space of 21 hours to leave his Pennsylvania governorship and his family to take on an ill-defined job that pits him against Washington’s toughest bureaucracies.

As far as villains, although the book depicts real-estate mogul Larry Silverstein in an unflattering light as he tries to litigate his way to a double — $7.1 billion instead of $3.55 billion — payment on his Trade Center insurance policies — I don’t think there are any true villains, except the terrorists. Life is not that simple, nor should journalism be that simple.

Is John Ashcroft a danger to the Constitution? What is his vision for the country — and for his own political future?

The truth is that any hard-nosed attorney general — and that he is — is a danger to the Constitution if left unchecked. But we still do have checks. Thus, a federal judge has ordered that Jose Padilla — the American citizen seized at O’Hare airport and then held as an “enemy combatant” — must be allowed a lawyer to help him present arguments contesting his status. Of course, the fact that I have to say that as if it’s something to celebrate rather than something to expect is chilling. But the history of dangerous times in America is replete with law enforcement officers who pushed beyond what those who don’t have their jobs (or their responsibilities, as they would say) think is consistent with American values.

Ashcroft’s vision is exactly what the president asked of him: to protect us from future attacks. No other attorney general has had prevention rather than prosecution as his job, and Ashcroft sure took it seriously. Indeed, he sees himself as a general in a home-front war, who has all the powers that a commander in chief delegates to a battlefield general. To him, a judge questioning his tactics is like a judge questioning Tommy Franks in Iraq. It’s clear from what he told me and has told Congress that, in many important respects, he thinks he should not be accountable to the courts or legislature. Fortunately, many in those other branches, including Republican legislators and Republican-appointed judges, haven’t agreed.

As for his vision of his own political future, the book tells stories that actually happened. It does not speculate. But again, since you’re asking, I’d be surprised if he didn’t run for higher office.

America received an international wave of support after 9/11, but today most of that goodwill has been lost. Do you think we’re dangerously isolated in the world community? Will that make it more difficult for the U.S. to pursue and capture terror suspects?

As I think about that question in the first days of war, I think the answer is clear. If we win fast, most of our alleged sins will be forgiven, especially by insincere critics like the French. If we don’t win fast, that’s another story. But I don’t think it will affect the pursuit of terror suspects either way, because it’s in everyone’s interest that they be rounded up.

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.)