The Transportation Security Administration, a universally loathed government agency, is facing a shortfall, despite its more than $8 billion budget. Instead of having a debate over what effective airport security might actually look like and how much should reasonably be spent on the honestly rare threat of commercial-air-travel-based terrorism, there was a debate over how best to come up with the money needed for all the radioactive naked picture machines and bomb-sniffing dogs. The Democrats suggested passing on the cost of ineffective, cumbersome and intrusive security theater to citizens, via higher fees on airfares. The Republicans, even more predictably, suggested cutting spending that directly helps poor people to ensure there is enough to spend on stopping imaginary future 9/11s.

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Takeshi Miyakawa, a visual artist and furniture designer, was arrested Saturday after placing the installation in two separate areas of the same New York City neighborhood. His lawyer and employer both called the arrest a misunderstanding.

The first apparatus was found Friday morning after a caller reported a suspicious package to police. It consisted of a plastic bag that contained a battery and was suspended from a metal rod attached to a tree. The bag, which had the classic "I Love New York" logo printed on it, was connected by a wire to a plastic box that contained more wires.

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.

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In my mind, the key to keeping airplanes safe is, and always has been, stopping acts of sabotage while they are still in the planning stages. Here in the age of the TSA checkpoint, with its toothpaste confiscations and obsession with pointy objects, we tend not to think this way, preoccupied instead with a kind of airport Kabuki -- the tedious, fanatical screening of passengers and their carry-ons. Real airport security takes place offstage, as it were. It is the job of the folks at the CIA and the FBI, working together with foreign authorities. And while TSA has an important role here too, we can do without the spectacle of airport guards rifling through innocent people's bags in a pathological hunt for what are effectively harmless items.

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For many Americans, the secret raid provided a measure of revenge and catharsis for the strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. But it didn’t provide the kind of justice and official reckoning that the country needs to gain real closure. Now the government has a chance to achieve that through a full, fair and open trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants, so the world can finally see the evidence against him as the true architect of the attacks on New York and Washington. The trial kickoff -- an arraignment for the men — is scheduled for this Saturday at the U.S.-run detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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.

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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.

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An FBI agent from Dallas, Danny Coulson, knew better. As Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles relate in their impressive new book, "Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed -- and Why It Still Matters," Coulson jumped in his car and headed to Oklahoma City as soon as he heard about the bombing, fielding a call from a CBS correspondent along the way. She told him "everybody in Washington" said the perpetrators were Middle Eastern, but he said no way. "It's a Bubba job," he told her. "It's Bubbas."

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In a major story the newspaper reveals that Forts shares the views of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. "I represent a nationalist alternative, just like Breivik," he says. Forts writes letters to the assassin and exchanges ideas with him. As proof he shows off one letter the mass murderer wrote him from his prison cell.

Breivik praises the somewhat haggard-looking American. VG quotes from the letter Breivik reportedly sent to Forts, in which he writes: "I have received letters from supporters in 20 countries, but you appear to be someone who can write well. Yes, I am absolutely interested in discussing ideological issues with you and am thinking about how we can work together."

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A five-day bombing campaign mid-March, for instance, killed at least 60 militants across central and southern parts of the country. Most of the strikes — launched from warships, jets and drones — occurred in Yemen’s Abyan Province, a region on the Gulf of Aden that has become the latest and perhaps most important front in the war against al-Qaida.

Here, al-Qaida’s ranks have swelled in the last year, and at least five ciites are now controlled by the terrorist group.

Despite the hefty death toll, some think the military assault might be aiding the terror group more than hurting it, sewing sympathy for the militants and anger toward the Americans.

Yemenis who live in these poverty-stricken areas, long neglected by the central government, said that with al-Qaida now governing large parts of the region, some stability has finally arrived.

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The package was received at the station’s offices in the Montparnasse neighborhood and contained a memory card and a letter and has been given to Judicial Police who have authenticated the video, according to the newspaper.

Merah, who was shot dead on Thursday at the end of a 32-hour police siege in Toulouse, was believed to be responsible for a killing spree in the city and in nearby Montauban that left seven people dead, including three children.

Authorities had reported early on that Merah was believed to have worn a video camera as he carried out the killings.

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Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.

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“The President and his underlings,” writes one fiery critic, “are your accuser, your judge, your jury and your executioner all wrapped up in one, acting in total secrecy and without your even knowing that he’s accused you and sentenced you to death, and you have no opportunity even to know about, let alone confront and address, his accusations.”

Sounds grave, doesn’t it? No less penetrating a critic than Esquire’s Charles Pierce characterized Holder’s March 5 speech at Northwestern University’s School of Law, as “a monumental pile of crap that should embarrass every Democrat who ever said an unkind word about John Yoo.”

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The propriety and legality of the NYPD's activities is under dispute. Mayor Michael Bloomberg – who claimed last year that the NYPD does not focus on religion and only follows threats or leads – is now arguing that, as he said last week, "Everything the NYPD has done is legal, it is appropriate, it is constitutional." Others disagree. In fact, Bloomberg himself signed a law in 2004 prohibiting profiling by law enforcement based on religion.

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As former peace officer and Iraq veteran Arthur Rizer and co-author Joseph Hartman write, the police arms race has very clearly spread well beyond the urban borders of the only cities to actually be targeted by foreign terrorists.

Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. When one of us, Arthur Rizer, returned from active duty in Iraq, he saw a police officer at the Minneapolis airport armed with a M4 carbine assault rifle -- the very same rifle Arthur carried during his combat tour in Fallujah.

The extent of this weapon "inflation" does not stop with high-powered rifles, either. In recent years, police departments both large and small have acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even armored vehicles (mini-tanks) for use in domestic police work.

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I don’t know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or what it means. So I’ve got no point -- only a lot of anxiety. I usually write about the problems of the world, but now I’ve got one of my own. They evidently think I’m a terrorist.

That is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a faceless, acronymic government agency.

It all started with a series of messages from my bank: Citibank. Yeah, I know, I should have moved my money long ago, but in the distant past before Citibank became Citigroup, it was my friendly little neighborhood bank, and I guess I’m in a rut. Besides, I learned when I made plans to move to Norway that if your money is in a small bank, it has to be sent to a big bank like Citibank or Chase to wire it to you when you need it, which meant I was trapped anyway.

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Four aged right-wingers apparently plotted to carry out a mass murder based on the plot of a thriller written by frequent Fox guest Mike Vanderboegh. They planned to "save this country" by attacking Washington, D.C., and Atlanta with ricin and botulinium toxin. And they were targeting the government:

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This is a big leap for Richard Cohen, a writer who hates democracy and defended Dick Cheney's torture regime as recently as 2009. (2009!)

So he begins by pointing out that he cheered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki:

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During the NSA eavesdropping controversy, Bush defenders insisted there was no harm from bypassing the FISA court because they were only eavesdropping on Bad Terrorists (who could possibly object to that?), which prompted this obvious, unanswerable question (one I asked here, among other places): if you really have so much evidence proving that the targets of your eavesdropping are Terrorists, then why not go show it to the court and get a warrant?  After all, the more incriminating evidence you claim exists, the more (not less) reason there is to show it to a court.  Similarly, during the controversy over Bush's (and now Obama's) detentions without due process, administration defenders insisted there was no need to charge the detainees or try them in a court because they were only imprisoning the-worst-of-the-worst, too-dangerous-to-release Terrorists (who could possibly object to that?), which prompted the same question: if there's so much evidence proving they're Terrorists, isn't that even more of a reason to prove that in court?

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Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a strike on his convoy carried out by a joint operation of the CIA and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, according to counterterrorism officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence. The CIA provided the intelligence and the military provided the firepower.

Al-Awlaki had been under observation for three weeks while they waited for the right opportunity to strike, one of the U.S. officials said.

The cleric known for fiery anti-American rhetoric spread on the Internet was suspected of inspiring the mass shooting at Fort Hood Army base in Texas in 2009 and of taking a more direct role in planning the attempted Christmas bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner and other terror attempts against Americans.

He is the most prominent al-Qaida figure to be killed since bin Laden's death in May.

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But there are a few rules of thumb. In their self-proclaimed "holy war" to carve out the world's newest Muslim state on the Thai-Malaysia border, jihadis consider soldiers, cops, Buddhist monks, government teachers and their Muslim collaborators as fair game. Backpackers partying just a short distance up the coast are left alone.

But less mercy is offered to a different sort of tourist: Malaysian men, many fellow Muslims, border-hopping into insurgents' turf for paid sex. Now, after a bloody Sunday night bombing spree in their favored brothel town, Malaysia's government is warning its men to stay away.

Shortly after sunset on Sept. 18, in the gritty Thai border town of Su-Ngai Golok, a series of explosions erupted on a busy lane lined with hotels, food stalls and karaoke joints.

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