The following is my letter (unpublished) to the New York Times submitted May 8, 2007.

To the Editor:

            Clark Kent Ervin's "Answering al-Qaeda" is another chicken-little warning of America's vulnerability to terrorist attack.  The hype justifies his laundry list of surveillance and border control measures along with his new sinecure, having moved from the Department of Homeland Security to become director of the "Homeland Security Initiative." 

            Despite the absence of evidence of any serious terrorist threat in the U.S. since 2001, we can assume that Americans will be killed in the future by murderers with Muslim last names. (Thank God the killer at Virginia Tech didn't have one.) But the spiral of hyping the terrorist threat, increasing spending, and reinforcing inclinations to hype the threat to protect that spending, has got to stop. There are reasonable things to do to make our country more resilient.  But the "War on Terror" weakens us. The waste, worry, and silliness it generates plays into the hands of our enemies, trapping all of us, including politicians from both parties, in an infinite and doomed commitment to treat any bad thing that could happen as a national security imperative.

 Ian S. Lustick