Three American groups that oppose torture — the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Amnesty International USA, and the Center For Constitutional Rights — delivered a petition with 60,000 signatures to the White House this week demanding an apology.

In 2007, the Canadian government admitted Arar had been mistakenly pinpointed as an Al Qaeda ally, apologized, and compensated him.

President Obama ended the “extraordinary rendition” program in 2009 and Politifact noted that the Obama administration “has announced new procedural safeguards concerning individuals who are sent to foreign countries” but some rights groups claim those safeguards aren’t adequate.

Citing the requirement for “remedy and redress” in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment — which prohibits knowingly transferring detainees to countries, like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, that engage in torture — the letter campaign (PDF) asked signees to themselves apologize and then demand the U.S. do the same. An Amnesty press release said:

“It was so painful,” Maher Arar said of the beatings he endured, “that I forgot every enjoyable moment in my life.”

Released without charge and allowed to return home to Canada, Maher Arar received an apology and compensation from the Canadian government for its role in his treatment. But the U.S. government has failed to apologize or offer Maher Arar any form of remedy – despite its obligation to do so under the UN Convention Against Torture and other human rights treaties.

The letter campaign emphasized that additional steps need to be taken for accountability in the Arar case, including more explicit prohibitions on transfer, not relying only on diplomatic assurances about the treatment of detainees before transfers, ending discrimination in “no fly lists” and investigating and prosecuting those who broke the law.

Amnesty also released an infographic — using a mock-up of Arar’s 3-foot-wide, 7-foot-high and 6-foot-deep Syrian cell — highlighting the numbers around his detention: 12 days of incommunicado detention in the U.S., 351 in Syria while enduring torture, and 0 charges filed against Arar. However, there is no figure for the “number of people like Maher Arar subjected to the U.S. government’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ program.” That number? The Amnesty infographic boldly states, “UNKNOWN.”

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who led the Pentagon at the time of the raid, and Vice President Biden said they advised Obama against the raid. And during a portion of an interview with Charlie Rose that aired on CBS This Morning yesterday, Gates said that “people don’t realize” how tough the decision was. PBS aired the full interview last night and Gates expounded on the consequences, saying a failed raid could have been “catastrophic” militarily and might have cost Obama re-election.

Rose then wondered if “any thinking American,” as Romney put it, would have made the same decision as Obama:

ROSE: Nobody can say “I would have made the same decision.” You don’t really know until you’re in the room and you listen to what the best people you know say to you and then you have to go as president and decide.

GATES: Right, absolutely.

Watch the clip:

Later in the interview, Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, also disagreed with Romney’s contention that Russia is American’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

“Do you agree with Governor Romney that Russia is our principal adversary or how he’s characterized the national security issue?,” Rose asked. “No, I don`t think so,” Gates replied.

Protesters in Salt Lake City

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest found that a section of the NDAA which gives the government powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists could be used against journalists, scholars and activists to curtail their first amendment rights. The judge’s opinion [PDF] found:

The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.

Opponents of the law, which include Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Christopher Hedges, contend that the law permits the detention of U.S. citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. who are suspected of providing “substantial support” to people or organizations engaged in violence against the U.S., such as al Qaeda. Journalists testified that they feared their associations with certain individuals overseas, as part of reporting assignments, could result in their arrest or even indefinite detention.

“An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so,” the judge said. She also said the law gave the government the ability to detain individuals who engage in political speech that “may be extreme and unpopular” but “That, however, is precisely what the First Amendment protects.”

Hedges testified that while, in the past, he had interviewed al Qaeda members, spoken with members of the Taliban and reported on 17 groups named on the State Department’s list of known terrorist organizations, the law has forced him to consider altering speeches where a member of al Qaeda and the Taliban might attend.

Hedges celebrated the ruling, telling ABC News, “Ever since the law has come out, and because the law is so amorphous, the problem is you’re not sure what you can say, what you can do and what context you can have,” and called Forrest’s ruling “a tremendous step forward for the restoration of due process and the rule of law.”

Romney has assumed that Obama was assured of bin Laden’s presence at the compound and all he had to do was give the order to get him. But as Gates (and others) has noted, “There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.” The former defense secretary expounded on the difficulty surrounding Obama’s decision this morning during an interview on CBS This Morning, particularly regarding the lack of information on bin Laden’s presence at the compound, and the ramifications if the raid failed or bin Laden wasn’t there:

ROSE: What were your concerns?

GATES: I had no doubts that the SEALs could perform the mission. My concern was whether or not he was there. People don’t realize that what made the decision tough for the president was we didn’t have once single piece of hard data that he was actually in that compound. Not one. The whole thing was a circumstantial case built by analysts at CIA.

ROSE: There was no single person who could tell you he was in that building. No single person had seen him in that building.

GATES: Right. The crux of the decision revolved less about the efficacy of the military piece of it than the consequences for us if he wasn’t there in terms of the relationship with Pakistan, in terms of the war in Afghanistan. … But I’ve always thought that it was a very courageous call. If this mission had failed, it could have put the war in Afghanistan at risk and that was one of my principle concerns.

Watch the clip:

Romney doesn’t really know much about the raid that killed bin Laden, at least that’s the sentiment he displays in public. But perhaps that’s because, as one of his foreign policy advisers has said, Romney “doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office.”

Photo: Getty Images

Moreover, seeming to concede President Obama’s dominance of national security issues this campaign season, a Romney adviser told the Times that Romney isn’t interested in talking about foreign policy. “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office,” the adviser said.

And there’s good reason. Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy and national security issues has dogged his campaign with confusion, ignorance and private and public disagreements among Romney’s campaign advisers and surrogates:

AFGHANISTAN

Romney has been “all over the map” on Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported late last year, Romney “has not explained what he thinks the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is at this point and what would constitute success.” And keeping with his adviser’s above statement, Romney said in a major foreign policy speech that he’d wait until becomes president to “order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military.”

Romney also says that the U.S. should not be negotiating with the Taliban, a position that puts him at odds with his top national security campaign surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), his own advisers and even former top Bush administration officials. “Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement,” the Times noted.

IRAN

Romney said that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon. “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. That line “caused some of his advisers to cringe” the Times reported this weekend. But overall, again, Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. Romney has proposed much of what Obama is already doing. The Times noted that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”

But Romney does occasionally ramp up bellicose rhetoric on Iran which prompted a former Israeli Mossad director to say the former Massachusetts governor “is making the situation worse” with Iran. Romney has ignored what the IAEA, U.S. and Israeli intelligence think about Iran’s nuclear program and his campaign advisers even attacked the Obama administration for public discussion of the consequences of attacking Iran.

RUSSIA

Russia “is without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney said in March. The Washington Post called the remark “a bit puzzling,” given Russia’s post-Cold War global standing and less adversarial relationship with the United States. Even McCain seemed a bit wary of endorsing that point of view.

And the co-chairman of the Romney campaign’s working group Russia, Leon Aron, disagrees with Romney’s contention that, as the Times put it, “natural resources could vault Russia to a position of global influence rivaling any nation by midcentury.” Aron wrote last month that “Russia’s most serious risk stems from a near-fatal dependence on the price of oil.”

CHINA

Romney’s regularly hypes the Chinese military threat and ignores the need for engaging China diplomatically and economically. In fact, former GOP presidential candidate and U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, who declared himself a Romney supporter, said that Romney’s China policy is “wrongheaded.” Even one of Romney’s top foreign policy advisers praised President Obama on China. “I think he has a good policy in Asia, particularly in dealing with China,” said Robert Kagan.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE/MIDDLE EAST

While Romney often throws out the baseless attack line that Obama has thrown Israel “under the bus,” the presumptive GOP nominee has offered no real plan to achieve peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In fact, Romney has said that the U.S. “should not play the role of leader” in the Middle East peace process. “My inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel,” he said last October.

Romney criticized Newt Gingrich for saying Palestinians aren’t people, but again, he said he’d ask the Israelis what his position would be. “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’” Former U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration Martin Indyk said that statement implied that he would “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.”

VETERANS

The Romney campaign has attacked President Obama for not doing enough for the nation’s veterans, yet Romney has no plan to address various issues affecting the U.S. military — for example, veterans’ health care and unemployment or servicemembers’ education.

TERRORISM

In 2007 and 2008, Romney based his national security policy during his failed presidential bid on the need to fight “radical jihad” and the threat from those wanting to unite the world “under a single Islamic caliphate.” During that campaign, Romney also said he does “not concur” with then Sen. Obama’s plan to go after “high-value intelligence targets” in Pakistan with or without permission. And referring to Osama bin Laden, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

But now, Romney barely mentions terrorism, jihadists or an Islamic caliphate and claims that “of course” he would have done what Obama did and ordered the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader last year. “Any thinking American” would have ordered the raid, Romney said. Apparently “any thinking American” does not include Vice President Biden and Robert Gates, who was Defense Secretary at the time of the raid.

The Times also reported this weekend that Romney’s foreign policy advisers — many of whom helped push for the Iraq war and are now doing the same with Iran — are themselves divided. “There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” on adviser said. Some of the more mainstream views within the campaign have resulted from “the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power.” But there also remains the more hawkish “Bolton faction,” referring to former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

So it’s clear why Romney doesn’t want to engage on foreign policy and national security issues in this year’s presidential campaign: his advisers don’t agree with him or each other. And Romney either doesn’t have any national security policies, they aren’t different from President Obama’s, or as recent polling has suggested, they aren’t very popular.

The Avengers is hardly the first post-9/11 movie to have superheroes rampage through New York, causing property damage and loss of life along the way. But I was struck, in the moment when Thor, doing battle with his brother Loki atop Stark Tower, forces him to look out at the city Loki’s forces were laying waste to, trying to force him to recognize the stupid, destructive futility of his attack. The crash of alien invaders into skyscrapers was one of the most striking visual allusions to the September 11 attacks I’ve seen in an action movie, flowers of fire blooming from pillars of steel in an eruption of violence hugely more widespread than the terror accomplished by 19 angry men in three hijacked planes.

The buildings didn’t fall. We didn’t have to go to war, because we could shut the border between our world and the one from which our enemies came. We didn’t even have to conduct a mop-up operation or interrogate detainees because when that portal closed, the invaders collapsed like toys (interestingly, while in Avengers captivity, Loki assumes he’ll be tortured and Nick Fury certainly seems prepared to do so, but it’s Black Widow who talks information out of the mad god without touching him). This isn’t just a fantasy of an easy dynamic, of revenge on the bad guys as Adam Serwer has written at Mother Jones. It’s a dream of resilience and clean war, where we can suffer greater losses and survive; where we can solve our problem without putting as many men and women at risk of death, deformity, or traumatic brain injury; where we can end the war in a day; where we can avoid doing grievous harm to ourselves and our values in the process.

The Dictator doesn’t perform alchemy on our post-9/11 fears, it mocks them. Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming comedy about a Middle Eastern dictator adrift in New York City takes on issues ranging from anti-Arab sentiment. But it also features an extended joke, which appears at the end of this red band trailer, that derives its humor from the idea that a pair of tourists in a helicopter are stupid to think that they might be the victims of a 9/11 style attack again:

It’s a poor choice of target. Publications like The Onion and Modern Humorist dived in immediately after 9/11 to start making fun of the hijackers themselves, and the Taliban and al Qaeda more broadly, turning them into small, delusional, murderous, isolated men rather than giving them the deference of treating them like an existential threat to the United States. It’s that kind of thinking that leads to raids to take out Osama bin Laden directly, rather than grinding wars that have accomplished little more than giving the sense that the country responding with force equal to the trauma we felt on September 11 itself. If you want to make fun of that trauma, it makes more sense to mock the things that it’s made us do to ourselves, be it the threat level system, invasive TSA searches, or watch lists. For all the movie’s other fantasies, Bruce Banner’s indignant request to know why “Captain America’s on a threat list?” in The Avengers says a lot more about the idiocies of post-9/11 vigilance than mocking the terror of two middle-aged tourists who think they’re about to die.

Osama Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan

Since the ad appeared, Romney, his surrogates, and so-called independent groups like the nouvelle swift-boaters have all rehashed the same dubious line in Romney’s defense: That any American president (or “any thinking American“) would have ordered the bin Laden raid. Just last night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show, Romney yet again issued this defense:

ROMNEY: But if the president wants to remind people of his decision, well, that’s entirely appropriate. But I think it was a big mistake for the president to try to make in this a political event by suggesting that I would not have done the same thing. I mean, frankly, Sean, almost any American in the position of presidency hearing that Osama bin Laden could have been taken out would have certainly pressed the button and said: get rid of the guy.

HANNITY: Oh, absolutely.

ROMNEY: And of course I would have.

Watch the video:

However, Romney and his allies’ repeated responses to the ad that “any thinking American” would have ordered the raid don’t account for the actual events surrounding Obama’s call.

In an analogous choice in 2005, George W. Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to strike at senior Al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan because of the potential risk to relations with the notoriously sensitive country. When Obama said in his first presidential campaign that he would strike in Pakistan to get bin Laden, McCain criticized him as irresponsible. Romney echoed this concern when he said in August 2007, “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours.”

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

ROMNEY: And the idea to try to politicize this, and to say, “oh, I, President Obama would have done it one way and Mitt Romney would have done it another,” is really disappointing. Let’s not make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden a politically divisive event. There are plenty of differences between President Obama and myself. But let’s not make up ones based on, “Well he might not have done this.” It’s disappointing and it’s unfortunate and it’s taking an event that really brought America together.

Back in 2004, President Bush ran a smear campaign against challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) which undermined his service in Vietnam and questioned Kerry’s ability and determination to protect the United States — just three years removed from the 9/11 attacks — from another terror strike. “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” then Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

And while Romney complains about Obama’s alleged “politicization” now, he willfully participated in the Bush-Cheney smear campaign on Kerry in 2004. During an August 9, 2004 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis) interview on Fox News, Romney suggested that Kerry would “twiddle his thumbs” when dealing with terrorism and in September 2004, also on Fox News, Romney said Kerry is too much of a flip-flopper to protect the country:

ROMNEY: [M]ost has already been said about John Kerry. I think people know pretty well that he’s a guy who has a hard time finding which side of a position to come down on. But I’m going to focus on the fact that our nation needs strong leadership. We’re under attack, militarily, economically. Our very way of life is under attack. And we need to have the kind of steady, strong leadership, which is represented by Dick Cheney, and by of course, President George W. Bush.

In his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, Romney said “America is under attack from almost every direction,” later adding, “On the just war our brave soldiers are fighting to protect free people everywhere, there is no question: George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First’ crowd is wrong.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also notes that during his speech at the 2008 RNC, Romney “blasted Obama as untrustworthy when it comes to combating ‘the threat from radical, violent jihad,’ which he contrasted with John McCain, who, apparently unlike Obama, understands that ‘radical, violent Islam is evil,’ and will do everything he can to defeat it.”

“Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is ‘politicizing’ an important national event,” Jon Meacham writes today, noting that Obama’s alleged “politicizing” might be a bit different from what the GOP knows. “In this sense,” Meacham writes, “‘politicizing’ might be best translated as ‘beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.’”

The Daily Show's puppet version of Sen. John McCain

Romney’s push back is that anyone would have made the same decision that Obama made in ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound last year. “Any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing,” Romney said today. One problem with that argument is that Vice President Biden and then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates advised Obama against taking the course he chose on the bin Laden raid.

Top Romney surrogate John McCain (R-AZ) used a similar line last night on Fox News. “I say any president, Jimmy Carter, anybody, any president would have obviously under those circumstances done the same thing,” McCain said. When host Bill O’Reilly pointed out that Biden would not have, McCain’s response was basically, “eh, anybody but Biden”:

MCCAIN: Biden is the same one that said we should divide Iraq into three countries. Biden is the same one that said Desert Storm would be another Vietnam. Biden has — has been consistently wrong on every national security issue that I’ve been involved in in the last 20 years or so. So, I wouldn’t use Biden as a bellwether.

Watch the clip:

So Biden should not be brought into this debate because he may have gotten some things wrong. If that’s the measure, than McCain has been irrelevant for many, many years.

Romney now says that “of course” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account. “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is, the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were.

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported.

(HT: Josh Shahryar)

A reporter asked Obama about the criticism and Romney’s newest statement today during a White House press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. While Obama said it’s “entirely appropriate” to “remember what we as a country accomplished” in getting bin Laden, the President advised that people look at what Romney said in 2007 and ask him why he now says something different:

OBAMA: As far as my personal role and what other folks would do, I just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden. I assumed that people meant what they said when they said it, that’s been at least my practice. I said that we’d go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggested they’d do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.

Watch it:

Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates — a Republican and a holdover from the Bush administration — said last year Obama’s decision to get bin Laden was a “gutsy call,” adding, “This is one of the most courageous calls — decisions — that I think I’ve ever seen a president make.”

In April 2007, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” Last May, President Obama ordered the raid that killed bin Laden and last week, the Obama campaign produced a video highlighting the president’s decision, while noting Romney’s 2007 comments.

The Romney campaign attacked the ad, claiming it was trying to “divide” the country.” And this morning on CBS’s The Early Show, the Romney campaign got an unexpected supporter, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington:

HUFFINGTON: I agree completely — I agree with the Romney campaign. I think that using the Osama bin Laden assassination, killing the great news that we had a year ago in order to say basically that Obama did it and Romney might not have done it, which is the message. … I don’t think there should be an ad about that. … [T]o turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do. It’s the same thing that Hillary Clinton did with the 3 a.m. call. You know, you are not ready to be commander-in-chief. [...]

HOST: In a campaign aren’t you supposed to tout the accomplishments of what you’ve done?

HUFFINGTON: But this is not just what this ad did, does. What the ad does is questions, if we’re talking about the same ad. … It quotes a snippet from Romney in ’07 and uses that to imply that Romney would not have been decisive. There’s no way to know whether Romney would have been as decisive. And to actually speculate that he wouldn’t be is to me not the way to run campaigns on either side.

Watch the clip:

Huffington doesn’t seem to think it’s fair to speculate what Romney would have done as president based on what Romney said he would (or in this case wouldn’t) do. But the ad is stating two basic facts. One, that Obama ordered the raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader and two, that Romney said in 2007 that he wouldn’t have done the same. So is it really “despicable” to wonder whether a President Romney would have ordered the raid on bin Laden given that he said he wouldn’t do it while campaigning for president?

Adis Medunjanin

But a high-profile terrorism trial is currently taking place in Brooklyn without much fanfare. Authorities arrested three men in 2009 and 2010 accused of plotting to blow up targets on the New York City subway system. While two of the suspects have already pleaded guilty, the trial of the third, Adis Medunjanin, who was arrested in January 2010, began last week. This time though, the right-wing isn’t saying much, NPR reports:

“It’s rather ironic that this case has attracted so little attention,” says Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who used to work on detainee affairs for the Bush administration. “This trial has been an occasion for a convention of terrorism suspects.” [...]

What makes the Brooklyn trial of Medunjanin particularly unusual, Waxman of Columbia University says, is the sheer number of convicted terrorists who have shown up in court. He says the testimony, and the way the trial is unfolding, is proof that the criminal justice system can handle terrorism cases — and tough cases with classified material don’t need to be sent to military commissions at Guantanamo.

“In the past, the idea of prosecuting terrorists here in New York has generated huge outcry,” he says. “But this high-profile trial is going on right here.”

Listen to the full NPR report here:

Indeed, the New York Times reported last week that federal officials said the plot was “one of the most serious threats to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

British citizen Saajid Badat, who was convicted in the U.K. in 2005 of plotting to blow up an airplane, and another admitted terrorist, American Bryant Neal Vinas, who fought alongside al-Qaeda against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, testified in Medunjanin’s trial yesterday about al-Qaeda’s operational details. Badat, who was supposed to be the second airline shoe-bomber after Richard Reid but backed out, said that Osama bin Laden told him “that the American economy is like a chain. If you break one link of the chain, the whole economy will be brought down.”

Badat made the decision in prison to cooperate with authorities against al-Qaeda and “his help has been invaluable in breaking up plots and understanding al-Qaida as an organization.” The former terrorist said on Monday that he wants to testify in the military commission trial set to begin next month and specifically against KSM because he came to believe that he “was manipulating Muslims into doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”

The families of 9/11 victims and even a number of Bush administration Justice Department officials supported trying terrorists in civilian courts. And as CAP’s Ken Gude has previously noted, “presidents of both parties have relied on criminal courts for decades because they are extremely effective at convicting suspected terrorists and have an excellent record of producing reliable and actionable intelligence information.”

Oklahoma City National Memorial

McVeigh said that he attacked the Murrah building, which held the local offices of the DEA, ATF, Social Security, and the Army and Marine recruiting offices, because of his hatred of the federal government, opposition to gun control laws and anger at the FBI for its actions during the Waco Siege of 1993. McVeigh was found guilty on eleven counts of murder and conspiracy in 1997 and was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

Though the terrorist attack on Oklahoma City happened nearly two decades ago, right-wing extremist terrorism remains a significant domestic threat to American security. The Department of Homeland Security released a report in 2009 stating that the economic and political climate bears important similarities to the conditions of the early 1990s when right-wing extremism experienced a dramatic resurgence. These conditions, including the public debate around hot-button issues such as immigration, gun control, and abortion, along with the election of the first African-American president, present “unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment,” the report said.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano eventually ordered the report withdrawn because of significant political backlash from mainstream conservatives. But the report, which was originally commissioned by the Bush administration, also found that “lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”

A look at terrorist incidents since the Oklahoma City bombing, including both successful and disrupted ideologically-motivated attacks, backs up the conclusions of the DHS report:

Fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists, as compared to 30 percent by ecoterrorists and 12 percent by Islamic extremists. Right-wing extremism has been responsible for the greatest number of terrorist incidents in the U.S. in 13 of the 17 years since the Oklahoma City bombing.

After DHS withdrew the report, the department cut the number of analysts studying non-Islamic domestic terrorism. Daryl Johnson, the primary author of the report and a self-described Republican, soon left his post at DHS and said in July, 2011 that DHS has “just one person” dealing with domestic terrorism. The Department has largely been silent on domestic terrorist threats ever since.

Although current statistics show that right-wing extremism is on the rise through groups like the Sovereign Citizen and Patriot movements, domestic counterterrorism continues to receive few resources and little public attention. Though Islamic extremism remains a significant domestic security threat, current statistics and incidents such as Oklahoma City show that it is far from the only threat. In order to protect American citizens, we need to match our resources to the reality of our threats, not just the politically expedient narratives we have formed.

The Nation Rifle Association has opposed regulatory measures that require gun training before residents obtain a concealed carry permit. Late last year, the NRA objected to a proposal in Wisconsin that would require state residents there to undergo four hours of training before getting the permit. “It’s clear that the will is to allow people to gauge what their own needs are,” an NRA spokesperson said of the measure. “There are some people who need additional time and others who do not.”

ThinkProgress spoke with NRA members in St. Louis last weekend at the organization’s annual meeting and exhibition. Many supported a gun safety training requirement before obtaining a concealed carry permit:

– “I don’t have a problem with doing the gun safety training or even live fire as part of the requirements.”

– “They should [require training]. They don’t give you a driver’s license if you don’t know how to drive.”

– “Yeah it’s really a good thing to go through, learn all the safety. Oh sure.”

– “I could still get my concealed carry so that, in Washington at least, Washington state, seemed a little lackadaisical. … So I think it is very helpful and should be required.”

Watch the interview clips:

The NRA is also pushing a concealed carry reciprocity bill that would force all other states to accept permits of states with lax standards.

Patricia Maisch, who grabbed a bullet-filled magazine from Jared Loughner before he could reload his semi-automatic handgun during his shooting rampage that ended up wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), criticized the NRA for opposing common sense regulatory measures. “I don’t think they care. I think that the NRA has gone from gun safety and gun training to being about selling guns and making money,” she said.