Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber” who attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Eve 2009, will receive a life sentence in Detroit, the conclusion of a trial that ended abruptly with a guilty plea.

Is the national focus on terrorism justified? Kevin Drum has this chart showing that indictments for homegrown support for terrorist attacks have declined significantly. In addition, violent attacks carried out by Muslim-Americans in 2011 were almost non-existent. And a Department of Defense official now suggests we over-estimated the al Qaeda threat.

The US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is set to rehear a civil suit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today. The suit, brought by Donald Vance, a US navy veteran and former defense contractor, and Nathan Ertel, also a former defense contractor, alleges Rumsfeld is responsible for “intentional mistreatment” that occurred when they were tortured in an American-run prison in Iraq for nearly one hundred days. It’s one of several cases brought against Rumsfeld, all of which have been dismissed to avoid courts interfering with the “war on terror.”

The ACLU filed suit in federal court yesterday seeking to force the White House to turn over records related to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen assassinated in a drone attack in Yemen last year.

At least so far, the attempts from inside the military to warn against an early withdrawal in Afghanistan are not working. In fact, the US appeared to move in the other direction today, aligning themselves more with France than with the military moles.

It’s a sad commentary on our media that the President had to answer questions yesterday about drones for the first time, and the questions didn’t come at a White House press briefing or major print interview, but in a virtual YouTube town hall with members of the public. FDL’s Kevin Gosztola covered this at The Dissenter last night, but there’s more to say about the disconnect between the concerns of the media and the concerns of ordinary Americans in that.

At one level, Prouty’s life story—before the FBI targeted a woman who had done so much for the Agency—reads like a classic, exceptional, immigrant success story. But so much of what the government used against her has been used on Muslims and other Arab-Americans without the means to fight back:

Secret evidence
National Security Letters
Threats of deportation (which in her case would have been lethal) and to family members
Border exception searches
Badly managed informants (in this case, Prouty’s own brother)
Trial in the public sphere

The Pentagon today announced its “lighter” budget, which should more accurately be referred to as its reorganization of the military. It’s hard to call this a smaller budget when you look at this fact sheet. The only reason the budget gets “smaller” is the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sad chapter of the Haditha massacre may have been put to bed in a legal sense when Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich received an incomparably light sentence, walking away with no jail time, for ordering the troops under his command to “shoot first, ask questions later” in an incident that killed 24 innocent Iraqis. But this issue isn’t close to being over for the Iraqis in the village of Haditha.

This is a war. Which is why you don’t start them in the first place. Which is why you don’t start them unless you absolutely have to. Unless you know you have no other choice. Unless you know how to end them as quickly as possible. Unless you’re ready not only for what will be done to your enemies, but what doing that will do to you. Unless you think you can carry that, because you sure as hell can’t prevent it all.

That’s not what Loesch meant, but it is what she said, however unintentionally.

This is a war.