By all accounts, the work of federal investigators has been pretty effective in the wake of the discovery of the explosives-laden Nissan Pathfinder in New York’s Times Square on Saturday night, tracking and arresting suspect Faisal Shahzad within 53 hours of his having allegedly parked the truck. ABC also reports that the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, is involved in the interrogation of Shahzad, and Attorney General Eric Holder said earlier that Shahzad has admitted his role in the failed plot.

But the fact still remains that we got lucky. As with the Christmas underwear bomber, the thing that averted a major terrorist atrocity was the incompetence of the terrorist himself. And Philip Shenon reports that the last-minute arrest of Shahzad — he was taken off a Dubai-bound plane that had already begun to pull away from the airport gate — “was carried out in large part in response to information from the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, which became suspicious after Shahzad’s contacts with the airline in the hours before he boarded the flight.”

A federal law-enforcement official in New York said he “took heart” at the fact that the car bombing was so badly bungled, leaving police in Manhattan with easy-to-follow clues to the identity of the bomber, including the intact Nissan Pathfinder abandoned in Times Square.

“If he got terrorist training, it was apparently pretty lousy training,” the official said.

Obviously, counting on the stupidity of terrorists is not a sufficient anti-terrorism policy, but of course there are a whole host of other tactics being used by the Obama administration to track and put pressure terrorist organizations, and I think it’s fair to assume that these tactics and policies bear some measure of credit for the poorer players that extremists have been able to field lately. By tightening border controls and working more closely with allied intelligence agencies to track extremists, the U.S. shrinks the pool of potential infiltrators, resulting in far slimmer pickings for terrorist commanders, forcing them to settle for some of the drawer’s duller knives. It also makes training those infiltrators far more complicated and costly, resulting in cut corners that in turn result in botched attacks.

Shrinking the pool of potential terrorists — both in terms of pressure applied via greater international intelligence cooperation and in avoiding needlessly belligerent approaches that alienate allies and radicalize enemies — has long been a key element in progressive anti-terrorism policy. I don’t think we know enough yet about Shahzad and those he worked with to start claiming any sort of policy victory, but it’s very much worth considering whether the more law enforcement-focused, less acting-like-a-jerk-to-the-world approach that Obama has brought to anti-terrorism is resulting in dumber, less effective terrorists.

It’s also important to understand — as many of our professional bedwetting hysterics refuse to — the difference between intent and capability. Whatever these self-styled holy warriors may say about their intentions against the United States, actually committing acts of terrorism is difficult. That’s not a reason for complacency, but it is one factor in the evolving terrorism landscape that receives relatively little attention.

The Obama administration yesterday at the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference announced for the first time the number of bombs in the US nuclear arsenal. As of September last year, the US possesses 5,113 nuclear weapons. This is a 75 percent reduction since the Berlin Wall fell. But why disclose? Frankly, because there was no downside.

Some conservatives are predictably going to complain that this further eliminates “nuclear ambiguity” and no longer keeps our adversaries from guessing. This is absurd. An NGO, the Federation of American Scientists, estimated that the US had 5,200 nuclear weapons – they were off by 87! The fact is that there was both little reason to keep this number classified and that any intelligence agency worth its salt basically knew the size our nuclear number.

So why disclose? Because (as the chart shows) the United States has been dramatically reducing its nuclear stockpile — and thereby living up to its nuclear disarmament commitments under the NPT — without getting any credit for doing so. Furthermore, the announcement by Secretary Clinton effectively knee-capped one of the main arguments that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made in his speech yesterday that the US was not living up to its disarmament commitments. Well, that is simply not true.

Not only is the United States under the Obama administration taking steps to make nuclear reductions — as seen by the New START agreement, the reduction in the role of nuclear weapons in US defense strategy, as well as its desire to enter an even more far reaching discussions with Russia — but this disclosure confirms that President Bush, despite initial efforts to build more usable nukes, was a significant nuclear arms cutter. The US nuclear arsenal was cut in more than half from 10,526 in 2001 to 5,273 in 2008. The problem, however, was that the Bush administration did not get any credit internationally for making these cuts. In fact, the last NPT review conference was effectively torpedoed by the neglect and disdain of the Bush administration.

But at this review conference (they happen once every five years), the Obama administration is actually trying to strengthen the NPT. So by declassifying the number, the US has just demonstrated that both Republican and Democratic administrations have lessened America’s reliance on nuclear weapons and have largely lived up to its NPT commitments. Marc Ambinder points out that:

It is more than a symbolic gesture because the U.S.’s refusal to acknowledge the number of weapons it has has been regularly given as an excuse for why other countries aren’t fulfilling their international obligations. The reality is that the U.S. stockpile now is smaller than its been since the Eisenhower administration. … Problem is, the U.S. has claimed to be reducing its stockpile since the end of the Cold War, but it hasn’t been able to back up its claims because the intelligence community refused to declassify details about the stockpile.

By demonstrating our commitment to the treaty, we are now better placed to push for stronger verification and enforcement measures – such as giving the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear inspectors greater authority and access when conducting inspections and increased penalties for countries that pull out of the treaty, which would be useful against Iran and other potential proliferators.

Yet conservatives, like the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens live in some sort of incoherent fantasy world, in which the US should just dismiss multilateral institutions, tear up the NPT, and idly accept the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the formation of a new “nuclear age.” The fact is that conservatives have no idea how to stop the nuclear proliferation dam from breaking, because this can’t be done unilaterally.

Instead, it requires fortifying the existing multilateral non-proliferation regime. Now the NPT has its problems – as all institutions do. But it is widely credited with reducing the incentives for countries to go nuclear and has helped stave off the flood of nuclear proliferation. As the Arms Control Association notes:

Rather than the dozens of nuclear-armed states that were forecast before the NPT entered into force in 1970, only four additional countries (India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea) have nuclear weapons today, and taboo against the use of nuclear weapons has grown stronger.

The existence of the NPT has also enabled the world to almost fully isolate North Korea. Contrary to much of the chatter on the right, almost no country wants to be like North Korea – nuclear armed and starving. Instead of insanely letting the nuclear dam break, we should do everything possible to reinforce it.

As soon as the Obama administration announced that it had Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab in custody and was questioning him about his failed Christmas Day bombing, conservatives began complaining about the fact that authorities had read him his Miranda rights. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL), for example, inaccurately complained that as soon as Abdulmutallab “was read his Miranda he did in fact stop cooperating with our intelligence.” In reality, officials did not mirandize Abdulmutallab until after he had already made clear that he wasn’t going to talk. Even afterward, Abdulmutallab gave authorities valuable information after the FBI gained the valuable assistance of his family members, who persuaded him to cooperate.

Nevertheless, Republicans are rushing out their same playbook in the case of Times Square bombing plot suspect Faisal Shahzad:

– “I think obviously that [mirandizing Shahzad] would be a serious mistake until we’ve — at least until we find out as much information as we have, and there are ways — legal ways — of delaying that.” — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

– “I hope that [Attorney General Eric] Holder did discuss this with the intelligence community. If they believe they got enough from him, how much more should they get? Did they Mirandize him? I know he’s an American citizen but still.” — Rep. Peter King (R-NY)

This morning on Fox News, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) suggested that Congress should perhaps create a process to strip “American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorists” of their citizenship and, therefore, their Miranda rights. It’s unclear how this would be accomplished, however, since such a process would also presumably involve some sort of due process:

Some of us have started to talk about it here, which is that there is an existing law — which hasn’t been much used — that says if an American citizen is shown to be fighting in a military force that is an enemy of the United States, then that person loses their citizenship and they no longer have the rights of citizenship. That’s an old law that was adopted during a very different time of conflict.

I think it’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship, and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act.

Watch it:

Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan. In February, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich justified the Bush administration’s mirandizing of terrorist suspects by saying that they were citizens. (Gingrich has thus far been silent on Shahzad.)

The Justice Department has not yet said whether it has mirandized Shahzad. But whether or not it does, Shahzad has the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney under U.S. law, regardless of whether officials read him those rights. As Matt Yglesias notes, mirandizing someone just means that what someone says will be admissible in court:

Now McCain thinks he may be eligible for the death penalty, which I think may be correct. But to give him the death penalty, or indeed any penalty, you need to put him on trial. Which is to say you need to prove that the guy in custody is actually responsible for the crime. And the whole reason cops mirandize suspects is that if you don’t, you risk having your evidence thrown out of court. If you gather all the information before mirandizing, you could be throwing the whole thing into doubt. Which is why professionals give out the warning.

Believe it or not, Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano and host Glenn Beck are condemning the type of fearmongering that King and McCain are doing. This morning on Fox and Friends, Napolitano said that Shahzad needed to be mirandized, and Beck added, “He’s a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens.” When Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade interjected, “But he’s a threat to the country. That’s different,” Beck responded, “So are a lot of citizens of the country. … We don’t shred the Constitution when it’s popular.”

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