Right-wing pundits and politicians are loudly declaring that diplomatic efforts to stop Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program have failed and the time has come for Obama to either participate in a military attack against Iran or stand back while Israel launches airstrikes. The argument increasingly hinges on a “closing window of opportunity” which, according to various reports, limit the Israelis to striking this spring or living with a nuclear weapons armed Iran.

While neither the IAEA nor U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, the IAEA has expressed concern about military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program. But right-wing hawks — from GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney to Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens — are repeating talking points that the Israelis are on the verge of unilaterally attacking in the face of an “existential threat” from Tehran.

Today, former Israeli intelligence chief Meir Dagan slammed Netanyahu’s government for representing fringe political positions, adding that Israel does not face an existential threat. The AP reports:

Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad spy agency said he does not believe Israel faces an existential threat from Iran, a view that contrasts with Israel’s prime minister and other leaders. [...]

At the launch of an electoral reform movement he chairs, he observed, “I don’t think there is an existential threat.” He did not specifically mention Iran, but the use of the phrase “existential threat” in Israel generally refers to Iran.

Dagan is joined by the current Israeli intelligence chief Tamir Pardo who reportedly told a gathering of Israeli ambassadors in December that Iran doesn’t pose an “existential threat” and “the term existential threat is used too freely.”

Last week, retired Israeli Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak told The Independent that the Israeli military’s leadership does not support a strike on Iran and the Associated Press reported that Israel’s new air force chief, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, is “less enthusiastic about a possible attack on Iran” than his predecessor.

There is no doubt that Iran’s nuclear program, if weaponized, is incredibly worrying and constitutes a threat to nuclear non-proliferation efforts as well as Israel’s security. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said recently that Iran can be dissuaded from nuclear weapons through diplomacy and economic sanctions.

Nearly a year ago in Iran, former prime minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, his wife and adviser Zahra Rahnavard, and reformist parliamentarian Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest, where they’ve languished since, incommunicado with the outside world. Now, as the anniversary of their detention nears, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) is calling on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to release the three opposition leaders.

Moussavi and Karroubi were both presidential candidates in the June 2009 election — where critics allege the government committed widespread fraud to keep incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power — and subsequently became public faces of the Green opposition movement that faced a brutal regime crackdown.

In addition to an interactive timeline of the house arrests and a letter-writing campaign aimed at freeing the opposition leaders, ICHRI released this short video about the affair:

In the ICHRI release, the group’s spokesman Hadi Ghaemi said:

Khamenei bears the ultimate responsibility for these house arrests, which indeed are nothing short of a kidnapping. Khamenei is operating above the law of the land, and the intelligence and judicial apparatus are tools of repression in his hands, operating with impunity and without any regard for the law or the constitution.

According the ICHRI, the “house arrests are illegal under both Iranian and international law,” and no Iranian agency or official has taken responsibility.

A top Pentagon official admitted that the U.S. government may have misjudged the actual threat posed by Al Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. More than a decade later, Michael A. Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict, told an audience Tuesday, “Quite frankly, we, the American people, were asleep at the switch, the U.S. government, prior to 9/11. So an organization that wasn’t that good looked really great on 9/11.”

Sheehan, speaking at a Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict Planning conference, questioned Al Qaeda’s capabilities:

Everyone looked to the skies every day after 9/11 and said, ‘When is the next attack?’ And it didn’t come, partly because al-Qaida wasn’t that capable. They didn’t have other units here in the U.S. … Really, they didn’t have the capability to conduct a second attack.

Sheehan credited the American military’s “brilliant operation” in October 2001 that ousted the Taliban from power but also emphasized that Al Qaeda’s limited capabilities were one of the key reasons the U.S. hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack since 2001.

Unrealistic estimates of Al Qaeda’s reach and strength weren’t the only overblown fears after the 9/11 attacks. A new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and RTI International study [PDF] finds that counterterrorism officials’ warning about a potential wave of homegrown terrorism have not materialized. Moreover, numbers of U.S. Muslims with any suspected links to terrorism have been declining since 9/11. The study found that 20 Muslim-Americans committed or were arrested for terrorist crimes in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and 49 in 2009. A chart from the report illustrates the data:

“Those who predicted an inevitable, rapid increase of homegrown violent extremism among Muslim-Americans were wrong,” said David Schanzer [DOC], director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and professor of public policy at Duke. UNC professor Charles Kurzman, author of the report, called terrorism by Muslim Americans “a minuscule threat to public safety.”

In September, Kurzman’s new book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists found that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have “failed so dismally” because they have been unable to recruit American Muslims. Putting the homegrown terrorist threat in context, Kurzman pointed out that in the ten years since 9/11, Muslim American terrorist plots have killed 33 people in the U.S. but there have been more than 150,000 murders.