For Palestinians and Israelis alike, Hamas’ victory has been likened to an earthquake. Some Palestinians are apprehensive about the rise of the hard-line group, but many more applaud the fact that they will now be represented by negotiators who are as tough as the Israelis. For Israelis, the Hamas victory has created fear and uncertainty. Most Israelis see Hamas as a murderous group of religious zealots who refuse to recognize the Israeli state, want to see it destroyed and are willing to be very patient in seeking its doom. For them, the triumph of Hamas confirms their worst fears about Palestinian attitudes and intentions. And nothing that any of the Hamas leaders can say — short of immediately recognizing Israel and unconditionally renouncing violence — would reassure them.

The U.S. pressed for the elections that brought Hamas to power, but now it largely shares the Israeli position. The Bush administration has worked furiously hard to try to isolate the Palestinian Authority’s emerging Hamas-led government — even before that government has been formed. (The U.S. apparently differs with Israel on whether it is still worth working with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or not.) But though Washington has had some success with the Europeans in its campaign to isolate Hamas, it has had far less success to date with its Arab allies.

Some have proposed — and I am among them — that the advent of Hamas need not necessarily be viewed as a threat, but that the organization’s long reputation for internal discipline and its solid nationalist credentials could potentially be viewed as an asset in the crafting of a stable peace in the region. An interview I conducted on Feb. 25 with a senior Hamas official provided further evidence for this assessment. Mahmoud Ramahi, the chief whip of the new 74-seat Hamas bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, strongly indicated that Hamas was prepared to cease hostilities with Israel if it returned to its 1967 borders. Ramahi, an Italian-trained anesthesiologist, also said that Hamas is pursuing a plan to allow the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization to conduct the Palestinians’ foreign affairs, including its ever-sensitive negotiations with Israel, while the new Hamas “government” of the Palestinian Authority would concentrate on internal economic and social affairs. Such a position would avoid an immediate collision between Israel and Hamas, by using Abbas, who is president of both the PLO and the P.A., as a crucial intermediary.

For Israelis like Dore Gold, who was Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1990s, Ramahi’s moderate-sounding words are meaningless. Speaking to me in the lovely stone mansion on West Jerusalem’s Tel Hai Street that houses the think tank he now heads, Gold scoffed at the idea that Hamas might be persuaded to undergo any meaningful political transformation. “The Brits love to lecture on this point. They talk to us endlessly about how they transformed the IRA through the Good Friday Agreement. But even that didn’t work!” he said. “Hamas’ goal is to replace the whole of Israel with an Islamic state.”

The Qalandiya crossing point between Israeli-controlled East Jerusalem and the Ramallah District, which is administered by the P.A., is just six miles north of downtown Jerusalem , but it feels like a completely different universe. At Qalandiya, Israeli soldiers perched atop ugly enclosed watchtowers peer down over a bizarre, lunar landscape where two looping segments of the shockingly high, still-under-construction concrete wall come close together without touching — and Palestinians wishing to cross between Jerusalem and Ramallah have to shuffle through a series of Israeli-controlled cattle pens, one-way gates, and waiting sheds in the desolate, dust-clogged space between them. The anger of people forced to bear this treatment for, now, 10 years is pervasive, deep and often only barely suppressed. The Israeli army units stationed here and in the other heavily defended forts that ring Ramallah continue to undertake some missions inside that city, but their main job is to exercise tight control over all movements of Palestinian people and goods between Ramallah and Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.

The 220,000 Palestinians who live in and around Ramallah are deeply concerned about how Hamas’ victory will affect the relationship with Israel that dominates their every daily transaction. I heard a few expressions of fear that relations with Israel might worsen, but more expressions of satisfaction that at last a Palestinian political force had emerged that had shown it was ready to stand up straightforwardly for the Palestinians’ basic demands. This is in strong contrast to P.A. President Abbas, whom many Palestinians view as far too compliant with Israel’s ever-escalating demands and also quite unsuccessful in winning any Israeli reward for his continuing flexibility.

But Palestinians in Ramallah and elsewhere are also very concerned with how the transition of their own administration from one dominated by Abbas’ Fatah movement to one dominated by Hamas will proceed. After all, the peaceful hand-over of power from one party to another is a key test for any emerging democracy. Most Palestinians are keenly aware, in addition, that their very vulnerable society cannot afford to be wracked by more internal fighting. Most such fighting to date has been between the different factions of Fatah, or has involved splinter groups of Fatah taking various lawless actions against foreigners, especially in Gaza. Very, very little of it has involved Hamas. But there has been some fear of how the ill-organized Fatah factions might respond to the imminent displacement of their ill-organized party from power. A few incidents right after Jan. 25 further stoked that fear.

When I went to the PLC’s seat in Ramallah on Feb. 25 I found it much more peaceful than I had expected. At the suggestion of an old friend who knows the Hamas luminaries well, I simply walked into the nicely appointed, stone-faced office building where the parliamentarians have their offices and asked to see the new PLC speaker, Aziz Dweik, and the Hamas chief whip, Mahmoud Ramahi.

(Hamas’ designee for the premiership, Ismail Haniyeh, lives in Gaza. Like all other Gazans, he is forbidden to travel to Ramallah. Indeed, nowadays “Palestine” is oddly bicephalous, with one head in Ramallah and one in Gaza. When the new PLC held its first session on Feb. 18, roughly half of the parliamentarians convened in Ramallah, and the other half took part via a video link from a public hall in Gaza. And then, there were the dozen-plus elected members who are still held in Israeli jails; they could not participate at all.)

Security in the PLC office building was almost nonexistent, and parliamentarians from Fatah and Hamas were visiting each other’s offices in apparent amity. Dweik’s people said he was busy, but Ramahi agreed to see me. He was polite and welcoming. As a female I was ready — after many experiences with Islamists in Lebanon, Iran, etc., over the years — not to shake a male hand but to do the old hand-over-the-heart thing on greeting Ramahi. But he walked out from behind his desk with his hand extended for a handshake. (And for what it’s worth, he has no beard.) But he, too, turned out to be busy, so we made an appointment to meet later in the afternoon.

When we finally did sit down together, we spoke for about half an hour. He answered all my questions in nearly impeccable English.

My first question was whether Hamas had been surprised by the extent of its victory. Ramahi said that Hamas had expected its “Change and Reform” list to get around 50 percent of the new PLC’s seats, but “getting 60 percent was a surprise!”

I asked how Hamas now planned to proceed with its mandate to run the Palestinians’ affairs. He told me Hamas had started a dialogue with all other factions represented in the PLC with a view to establishing a government of national unity. He said that Islamic Jihad was the only faction that had refused point-blank to join such a government, “though they said they wouldn’t be an obstacle to our forming it. All the others are still in dialogue with us.” He said that in Hamas’ view, the first thing to establish was the common program on which the national unity government would be based — and only after that would come discussion of division of the various portfolios.

In fact, under the Palestinian Basic Law that was adopted in 2002, Hamas has no need whatsoever for a coalition government, since the confirmation of a prime minister and government and the passage of most daily legislation can be achieved with a simple majority. Only amendments to the Basic Law require a two-thirds majority — and by attracting just 15 allies from non-Hamas parties, which is quite possible, Hamas could even do this. But evidently Hamas prefers to bring allies from other parties, especially Fatah, into the government — whether to share the political risk, or to split the badly wounded Fatah down the middle, is not clear. Ramahi told me the coalition talks were “going positively. We’re hopeful that reaching a compromise is possible.”

I had earlier heard an intriguing report that Hamas might be prepared to let President Abbas handle the P.A.’s foreign affairs, and I asked Ramahi if that was correct. He clarified for me that it was not Mahmoud Abbas in his capacity as president of the P.A. to whom the Hamas leaders were considering handing the foreign affairs portfolio, but rather Mahmoud Abbas as president of the PLO.

He explained, “When the Oslo Accords were concluded, it was originally agreed there that the Palestinian Authority would not handle foreign affairs. Remember that the Oslo Accords were concluded between Israel and the PLO. So the arrangement at that point was that the PLO would continue to handle negotiation affairs and the P.A. would handle only domestic affairs. But then Fatah reversed that. We’re suggesting a return to the original idea. And that fits in with an initiative from [the PLO's foreign-affairs chief] Farouq Qaddoumi.”

Ramahi said that as far as he knew there were differences inside Fatah, which dominates the PLO, over how to respond. He said his information was that Qaddoumi, Abbas, and Fatah’s chief whip in the PLC, Azzam Ahmed, were all inclined to accept the Hamas proposal, while previous P.A. chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and security bosses Mohamed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub all favored rejecting it.

(Shortly after I talked with Ramahi, Abbas left Ramallah on a trip to Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. This trip would allow him to confer further with Qaddoumi and other figures in the PLO’s exile wing — many of whom have been strongly opposed to his negotiating stance with Israel in the past.)

I asked Ramahi about the very important portfolio of security affairs. How would these be handled under the new government?

“The Palestinian law says there are two parts of our security apparatus,” he replied. “Some bodies report to the president, like the intelligence agency and the Presidential Security. Others, like the police and the Preventive Security (amn wiqa’i), should be under the Ministry of the Interior.

“For our internal security problems, we certainly need to reach a strong agreement. Right now there are so many separate little bodies, some of which I’m sorry to say seem to act more like mafias.”

How about the proposal to fold Hamas’ own militia, the Izzeddine Qassam Brigades, into the government’s security forces?

Here, he was adamant. “No. The Qassam Brigades should not be part of the authority’s police forces, because the Qassam Brigades need to continue fighting the occupation. The demand to dismantle the Qassam Brigades is not acceptable. International law gives us the right to fight occupation.”

I asked about the tahdi’eh (truce) with Israel that Hamas has stuck to — with one exception — since March of last year. The tahdi’eh was the result of an agreement that all the major Palestinian organizations, though notably not some of the smaller component factions of Fatah, had agreed to among themselves during intensive meetings in Cairo. Israel never reciprocated the initiative, in either word or deed.

Ramahi said, “Until now, we have respected the tahdi’eh. Abu Mazen has asked for internal dialogue on continuing it. So we expect there would be a joint decision on this after we have formed the government.”

As we spoke, the Palestinian areas were coming to the end of a five-day period in which the Israeli forces had killed some eight to 10 Palestinians, some of them armed, some not armed. Ramahi warned, “If the Israelis continue their present aggressions we’ll find it hard to restrain some of our youngsters. We are certainly worried that the Israelis might launch a further escalation as their election campaign progresses.”

I asked how he would characterize Hamas’ vision of the long-term relationship between Israel and Palestine. He replied, “We have said clearly that Israel is a state that exists and is recognized by many countries in the world. But the side that needs recognition is Palestine! And the Israelis should recognize our right to have our state in all the land occupied in 1967. After that it should be easy to reach agreement.

“They ask us to recognize Israel without telling us what borders they’re talking about! First, let us discuss borders, and then we will discuss recognition.”

What did Hamas plan to do about the fact that it is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the E.U.?

He almost shrugged. “The U.S. and E.U. need to resolve their own problem there. It’s not our problem. We have said we’re against terrorism. The Israelis didn’t accept to stop killing civilians. For one year we haven’t done any suicide bombings — but the Israelis have continued to kill our civilians.

“You remember when they assassinated Saleh Shehadeh? They said afterwards that they had known there were 40 civilians in that house — but they went ahead with dropping that big bomb, anyway.

“Yes, we’d like to have a reciprocal agreement to save the lives of all civilians.

“You know that of the 3,500 Palestinians killed in the last intifada, more than 2,000 were civilians? Yet the Israelis lost only 1,000 people in all — between soldiers and civilians.

“Right now, regarding our relations with the U.S. and Europe, Hamas and the other Islamic groups here say they are ready to sit down with them to agree on the future. But they refuse to sit with us. But they should know: If they make us fail, they won’t find anyone else at all to talk with. We are the moderates in the Islamic movement. We condemned the al-Qaida actions in the U.S. and London and Madrid. We could have acted outside the area of Palestine, but we never did. We’re the only group here that never did kidnappings or other undisciplined attacks like that.”

(In a piece in the Feb. 27 New Yorker, David Remnick quotes Aziz Dweik, the new PLC speaker who was too busy to see me, as saying, “Bin Laden is a fighter for the cause of Islam, and this man has his way of serving his God. He has offered the West a truce many times, saying that he will put down his arms if the West stops interfering in our affairs. We have no right to hate bin Laden. We respect him. Hiding this fact does not serve the truth.”)

Finally, I asked Ramahi about Hamas’ social agenda. He tried to dispel any fears that Hamas was about to impose strict Islamic norms on Palestinian society: “We aren’t planning to make an Islamic state. We aren’t planning to impose anything like that on our people. We’ll make our state first, and then see what people want. We want to convince people of the Islamic way, not impose it.”

Ramallah is a historically Christian city and has numerous restaurants and stores that sell alcoholic beverages. There, as well as in its Muslim “parent-city,” al-Bireh, around half of the women seen in public don’t wear head coverings. Some of my friends there had made rueful jokes about the imminent arrival of new Islamic norms. (One veteran Palestinian politician told me that Hamas had suffered at the most recent polls in the northern town of Qalqiliya, where they had been running the municipality for some months but had raised some ire by canceling a much-loved cultural festival. “The Hamas vote there went down from 10,000 in the municipal elections to less than 8,000 in January,” he said.)

Some people had expressed particular concern about what Hamas might do with the education system that the P.A. has set up, quite successfully, over the past decade. I asked Ramahi if Hamas had any particular plans for that.

“We don’t want to change it, basically, but we do need to have more in it about Palestinian history. Under the Oslo Accords, they cut that part of the education system rather short. We need to have a full history that also includes the history of the Palestinians inside Israel.”

Ramahi, like all the dozen or so Hamas people whom I’ve interviewed in the past, seemed like a serious, sober and determined individual. I noted that he used the terms “Israel” and “suicide bombings” quite openly and easily. (As opposed to, for example, “Zionist entity” and “martyrdom operations,” respectively.) And he left open the distinct possibility that once Israel has withdrawn to the pre-1967 borders Hamas might consider the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be finished. He notably did not refer to the post-withdrawal phase as being merely one of prolonged hudna, or cease-fire, as many other Hamas leaders do.

For his part, Dore Gold remained adamant that it would be useless to hope for any moderation either of Hamas’ actions or of its views. According to him, Hamas in 2006 is in a stronger strategic position than the PLO was in 1993, when it accepted the Oslo Accords. “Hamas has two external patrons: the Sunni extremist networks in Egypt and elsewhere, and Iran operating as a minority Shii power. This external environment is not supportive of political transformation.” He argued that, by comparison, the PLO of 1993 was very weak. “Back then, the PLO had lost its superpower patron [the USSR] and it had lost Iraq as a useful regional support. So it was very vulnerable to pressure for political transformation from the West. Not Hamas.”

Gold bases his distrust of Hamas on its belief system. “I take Hamas’ ideology very seriously, even if most Israelis view it as not so different from Fatah. They are an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has produced so many different kinds of offshoots including Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, Ayman al-Zuwahiri and the worst one of all, Abdullah al-Azzam, who was Osama bin Laden’s mentor. There’s a supermarket of Islamism out there, but I’m most concerned with the extremist ones.” He told me that in 2003, the Israel Defense Forces raided a Hamas training school in Gaza and found training materials that included texts from Wahhabist clerics. For Gold, Hamas’ electoral victory means it could become a bridgehead for al-Qaida right on Israel’s borders.

He did not even seem to see any value in securing a prolongation of the tahdi’eh, or truce, that Hamas and most other Palestinian factions have stuck to since March 2005. Such a seeming period of calm, in his view, would simply allow Hamas to rearm and bide its time while waiting for Iran to acquire nuclear arms. “All these groups that have their origins in the Muslim Brotherhood have a strategy that includes two phases: first daawa [long-term education and preparation] and then jihad. You know that prior to 1987 Israel actually helped the Muslim Brotherhood people because we saw them as not politically active. But they were doing daawa, and then in 1987 they transformed themselves into Hamas. Those transformations can happen at any time. So perhaps you’d have a tahdi’eh for five years — but then they would bring in weapons and be acting under an Iranian nuclear umbrella. Yes, a Hamas with a long-term cease-fire could certainly continue with daawa and with bringing in weapons.”

As for the effect on Israeli’s political scene, with crucial elections looming on March 28, Gold said, “The Hamas victory has thrown everything off-kilter.” He said that both the parties of the Israeli left and the new centrist bloc, Kadima, had had their plans thrown completely off-kilter by Hamas’ victory. “The idea of a negotiated solution becomes just a pretty theory. The idea of further unilateral disengagements, as espoused by Kadima, has become complicated. Before, disengagement was conceivable because you would have an ineffectual P.A. left in charge on the other side. But now, we would have an active enemy there, and one which moreover would be further empowered by any further disengagement. So it’s very complicated! So only the Likud position stays more or less the same: simply to emphasize the things that we need to retain in terms of land and topography, and to maximize Israel’s strength.”

Gold is on the right side of the political spectrum in Israel. Like Hamas, Gold and his former boss, Netanyahu, have nearly always been vociferously opposed to Oslo. When Netanyahu was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999, he cooperated with Israel ‘s obligations under Oslo only very reluctantly and minimally. Then, after he was voted out of office in 1999, he reverted to a strident opposition to the Accords — a position that he retains as head of the Likud Party today.

Gold’s dark views of Hamas are shared by many Israelis, even some on the left. But not all of them. Moshe Ma’oz, a retired Hebrew University professor and specialist on regional affairs, told me that if, after an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the Palestinian side wanted to call the resulting arrangement a hudna, and the Israelis wanted to call it a “peace,” that would be fine by him.

So which is the “real” Hamas? Is it a party of apparent pragmatists like Ramahi, who seem prepared to accept Israel’s de facto presence and perhaps also its de jure legitimacy — provided that Israel gives up the territories it occupied in 1967? Or is it a party of true believers, still dedicated to the furtherance of regionwide Islamist goals and concealing a dedication to Israel’s destruction behind media-savvy spin?

For now, it is far too early to answer this question. Hamas has always had a strong “civilian” agenda and a strong internal discipline. But it only set aside its 17-year recourse to suicide bombings in March 2003, and the fact that the size of its victory at the polls came as such a surprise means that even some weeks after the January election its exile-based leadership is still scrambling to figure out how to use the mandate that it won.

But the “real” intentions of Hamas can most certainly be tested — and I agree with former President Jimmy Carter that this testing should occur by looking at the Hamas leaders’ deeds rather than, in the first instance, at the content of some of their worrying earlier public declarations. Remember that from 1990 on, the De Klerk government in South Africa conducted peace negotiations not only with the cuddly Nelson Mandela but also with another party — the Pan-Africanist Congress — whose slogan was still, “One settler, one bullet!” Decolonizing governments throughout the modern era have acted similarly — to the benefit of the whole of humankind. The basic lesson there is that for parties that are weaker in the elements of hard power, words and declarations are often the only form of power they feel they can cling to, so they become the very last “weapons” to be laid down.

But at the level of deeds, the fact that for nearly all of the past year the Hamas leaders have stuck to their sometimes unpopular commitments under the tahdi’eh should be recognized, and the contribution they thereby made to the general peaceableness of Israel over the past year should be publicly acknowledged. The fact that these leaders seem prepared (for now) to give up responsibility for the conduct of Palestinian foreign affairs and many aspects of Palestinian security affairs should likewise be recognized and welcomed. Beyond that, outsiders sincerely committed to the establishment of a sustainable final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine should surely seek to open sincere channels of communication with this significant force in the Palestinian body politic, rather than engaging in a doomed attempt to try to isolate and marginalize it. At the end of the day the Israelis, like all other peoples (including the Palestinians), need to understand that peace needs to be made with your enemies.

So far, though, a U.S. government that is attuned to the needs of only one party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken the darker view of Hamas. There is no domestic opposition to Bush’s policies in this regard (indeed, Congress and the Democrats have shamefully staked out positions to Bush’s right on Israel and Palestine), but the international balance has turned significantly against the neoconservative hard-liners — and nowhere more so than within the extremely volatile Middle East. The downward spiral in Iraq and the rise of Iran have weakened the Bush administration’s strategic position, and made Washington more dependent than ever on the goodwill of Jordan, Egypt and other Arab states. With the Israelis mired in their election campaign, these broader regional realities probably give the Palestinians a small breathing space in which they can, at least, hope to effect a smooth transition from the Fatah-dominated P.A. government to the Hamas-led body that will follow it. If the Palestinians can achieve that, that will be no small victory for the democratic process. And it will allow the P.A. and the PLO and whatever other Palestinian bodies are involved to plan for whatever follows Israel’s elections.

More on the post-Sharon political upheavals in Israel in my next piece.

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.)