A poll released by the Washington Post and ABC News provided another opportunity to discuss how important civil liberties and national security issues are to liberals. The poll results showed majority support among liberals for President Barack Obama’s handling of “counterterrorism,” including his use of drone strikes and failure to close Guantanamo Bay prison.

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.

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

Everything changed on September 11, 2001. It’s become an American truism. And for many, it’s also absolutely true. It certainly was the case for Tom Engelhardt. He was roughly seven miles north of the World Trade Center that morning and that’s about the furthest he’s been from it since.

So in essence, what I’d just read was yet another exercise in punching hippies (particularly straw hippies) in order to try and somehow equate progressives (i.e., the people who so far have been right about pretty much everything) with Tea Party members, and with a nice steaming chunk of juicy “you hate Obama ‘cuz you’re white!” race-baiting tossed in, which is ironic as hell because some of the most biting critics of Obama are in fact African-Americans.

In July 2010, as Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin were getting ready to publish the first article in their Top Secret America series, they got an unusual request from the office of the United States’ intelligence director: Please don’t publish a key part of your research.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted last week to implement recommendations from the Near-Term Task Force Review of Insights from the Fukushima Daiichi Accident (PDF), and to do so “without delay.” Coming over seven months after the earthquake and tsunami that started the crisis in Japan, and over four months after the Near-Term Task Force (NTTF) issued its report, the move highlights what might be accomplished when attention is paid, but also illustrates systemic flaws in the US nuclear regulatory regime.

Soufan, a long-time special agent working with the FBI, worked on some of the more notorious terrorist cases post-9/11, including the interrogation of Mohamed Al-Qahtani and Abu Zubaydah. According to Soufan, he was pulled off these interrogations when the CIA or military officials wanted to use torture on the detainees. In these cases, and it turns out others, Soufan and his colleagues were pulled out of interrogations at the behest of the Bush administration or the CIA.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), is holding a major hearing on whether the United States is safer ten years after the September 11th attacks. Homeland Security Department Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen will be testifying before the committee.

Behind us, then, this last and greatest anniversary: perhaps? Without forgetting the victims or disrespecting their loved ones — might it be? Can we now move on?