Los Alamos Country police, on what they thought was a routine domestic disturbance call at a local trailer park, found a rudimentary crystal-meth lab and three flash drives containing more than 400 pages of classified documents from Los Alamos National Labs. Four hundred pages.

"Potentially the greatest breach of national security" in decades, is how one official described it. That would probably be true if the U.S. government wasn't already publishing documents that explain how to build nuclear weapons on the Internet.

Honestly, given that the current administration is so cagey about security that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has threatened to prosecute journalists for revealing classified information, top secret nuclear documents are appearing in a lot of strange places. 

Yesterday, the Bush administration announced dramatically that it fears a coup in Lebanon. What was behind the announcement? Is Lebanon again approaching the brink of civil conflict? And how quickly is Hezbollah rearming? FP spoke with regional expert David Schenker to get some answers.

FP: Has UNIFIL had any impact on Hezbollah's ability to rearm?

David Schenker: No. In fact, UNIFIL has made it very clear that they will not do anything in this regard. [UNIFIL commander Alain] Pellegrini was asked recently what he would do if Hezbollah were about to launch a rocket. He said he would beg them to stop.

Be sure to check out the rest of the interview. 

For those who are interested, the complete (2 hours, 50 minutes and 13 seconds!) event FP co-hosted with the Woodrow Wilson School and the National Press Club is now online via Google Video. The event is divided into two roundtables, and the final speaker is Ambassador Christopher Hill. Enjoy.

The CIA is still recruiting and they're running a new commercial. We pointed to their first effort back in August.

The narrator asks "Are you ready for a world...of ambiguity and adventure?" I'm not sure I know what that means.

One of the most interesting and overlooked developments to emerge from last week's military coup in Thailand concerns the general now in charge of the country and the Muslim insurgency in the southern part of the country. Nearly 1,700 Thais have died over the past two and a half years as a result of fighting in the south, but there may be hope that, despite cracking down on the press and banning political activities, Thailand's current military leaders may be more amenable to negotiations with insurgents than former Prime Minister Thaksin was. FP spoke recently with John Brandon of the Asia Foundation about the political future of Thailand and he had this to say:

Everyone except Thaksin and his cronies thought the [response to the insurgency] has been handled badly. A Muslim separatist said the other day that he thought the coup was a good thing, and I think that's because Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratkalin, the head of the military council who led the coup, is a Thai Muslim from the south. [The insurgents] feel that he will be able to work with Muslim insurgents in the south and create a strategy that promotes peace and security.

In fact, after Gen. Sondhi was appointed head of the armed forces last year, his first major spat with PM Thaksin came when Sondhi's proposal for talks with insurgents was rejected. So, will we see a move to negotiations soon? Greater autonomy for the south?

Be sure to check out the rest of this week's Seven Questions with John Brandon. He gives his predictions for the next interim prime minister of Thailand and explains why this coup probably made no one happier than the oppressive leaders in neighboring Burma.

John Robb over at Global Guerillas has an interesting theory: The power outage across much of Pakistan over the weekend is an obvious sign that Musharraf's grasp on power is slipping. Why? Because these kind of infrastructure attacks are tactics straight out of the global guerilla playbook - strike at basic needs and work up. According to Robb, Musharraf is in "survival mode" and no doubt believes that his life is in danger (there have been a number of assassination attempts in recent years), but he has far more to fear from these infrastructure attacks - the ones that "fragment Pakistan's society and economy" - because it's these that will drive him from power. They're the same tactics that insurgents have used in Iraq. If this wasn't worrisome enough, here are a few of Musharraf's recent decisions that are putting U.S. strategy in the region at risk:

• Autonomy to rebels. After the loss of a reported 3,000 troops, Pakistan has ceded the tribal areas of Waziristan (population: 800,000) to pro-Taliban local rule. Weapons will be returned, outposts will be abandoned, and compensation will be paid.
• Safe haven for the Taliban. Pakistan has cut a ceasefire with the Taliban's Mullah Omar. Pakistani troops will no longer hunt down the Taliban (and likely al Qaeda) in Pakistan. This ceasefire also prevents US/NATO troops from crossing the border to pursue Taliban forces.
• Exporting guerrillas to gain good-will. 2,500 Taliban and al Qaeda militants have been released from Pakistani jails (under the stipulation that they will leave Pakistan).

Reading the emails from the Pentagon's media listserv is usually pretty repetitive; mostly depressing updates about Iraq, Rumsfeld's seemingly non-existent media event schedule, or something really newsworthy (sarcasm alert), like country music star Chely Wright singing to the troops "Shut up and Drive." But yesterday they sent out a winner: Pentagon Hot Dog Stand, Cold War Legend, to be Torn Down.

The Soviet Union is a thing of the past, but the hot dog lives on in America."

The Pentagon eatery, which has not been open for a few years but served the top brass a steady diet of hot dogs throughout the Cold War, is rumored to have been a source of concern for the Soviet Union. All they saw on satellite was a group of officers entering and leaving the building at about the same time every day, so they concluded it led to a top secret bunker.

There's even rumor that the Soviets always had at least two missiles aimed at the stand, which was thus nicknamed Café Ground Zero. It gives a whole new meaning to nuking a hot dog.

What happens if you organize and arm janjaweed militias who rape, kill, and pillage for years, displacing millions from their homes and leaving at least 200,000 dead? And what happens if you recently imprisoned an American journalist, his translator, and driver, kept the U.S. president's envoy waiting for three days - despite her offer of a one-on-one meeting with Bush - because you are "too busy" to meet, and then rejected all international calls for U.N. troops to be deployed in your country, despite demonstrations around the world over the weekend demanding just that? Well, if you're Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, you get a nice package of economic incentives offered to you - think debt relief, increased trade, and more aid. Is this how the international community hopes to address the worsening violence in Darfur? By so richly rewarding one of the men responsible?

President Bush has called on Congress in recent weeks to expand his authority for authorizing warrantless wiretaps. Already, Congress has put up a bit of a fight and it seems unlikely any legislation will be passed before the midterms. But the United States would do well to heed the lessons of Germany, which has been eavesdropping on tens of thousands of its citizens for years. In a new piece at ForeignPolicy.com, Niels Sorrells argues Germany's vast system of surveillance hasn't helped it convict terrorists or detect plots. So, why does the United States think it can do better?

Be sure to head over to ForeignPolicy.com today. We've devoted the homepage to some of FP's best analysis on the attacks of September 11 and the war on terror. Several of the articles come from our current issue, led by our cover story, "The Day Nothing Much Changed" by FP's managing editor, Will Dobson. Kim Cragin and Andrew Curiel of RAND chart the shocking rise in terror attacks around the world in our most recent Prime Numbers, and Juan Cole debunks myths about 9/11. We also have Anne Applebaum searching for America's admirers, Benjamin Friedman on why everything you know about homeland security is probably false, Kenneth Rogoff on whether the global economy can survive the costs of security, and Christine Fair and Hussain Haqqani on the popular misconceptions of what inspires Islamist terrorism. As we remember that day five years ago - where we were, what we saw, who we lost - it's crucial to challenge the easy conclusions about what it all meant and where we go from here. I think these pieces do just that. See for yourself.

An intriguing study by Syracuse University researchers reveals that, amazingly, terror prosecutions in the U.S. have fallen off steeply to pre-9/11 levels. The Justice department now declines 9 out of every 10 terrorism cases that it receives from other government agencies like the FBI. 

There are two possible interpretations of the study: 1) The Department of Justice is being overburdened with cases and isn't doing its job. 2) The sharp rise in terrorism prosecutions just after 9/11 was mostly paranoia - and the prosecution rate is simply returning to normal.

Considering all the hype and scrutiny that terror prosecutions are subjected to these day, I seriously doubt the former explanation. A look at this graphic showing the massive drop-off in average sentence length for those charged with terrorist offences suggests that, since 9/11, a lot of people have been tried without much evidence or for very minor crimes. 

Some say that sentence lengths have fallen because the Department of Justice is trying to preemptively prosecute terrorist plots:

There are many flaws in the report," said Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra. "It is irresponsible to attempt to measure success in the war on terror without the necessary details about the government's strategy and tactics."

For instance, Sierra said, prison sentences are "not the proper measure of the success of the department's overall counterterrorism efforts. The primary goal ... is to detect, disrupt and deter terrorist activities."

Others say it reflects a post-9/11 world of paranoid prosecutions and racial profiling - and the recent-drop off in prosecutions shows that the DoJ is finally returning to its senses. You decide.

Just yesterday, I mentioned that the White House has been trying to recast the War on Terror as the Third World War, in an effort to regain public support in the run-up to November elections. There's further evidence of that today in Bush's speech at the American Legion convention:

As veterans you have seen this kind of enemy before. They are successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century. And history shows what the outcome will be.

Over at TPMCafe, Bruce Jentleson explains why the rhetorical strategy of discrediting critics by comparing them to appeaser Neville Chamberlain is the oldest (and most misleading) trick in the hawk's book. Here's Lyndon Johnson talking about the Vietnam War: 

Everything I know about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in WWII. I’d be giving a big fat reward for aggression.

Some nations are just doomed from the start, often because their borders are not squiggly enough. That's the conclusion of a recent NBER study by Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Janina Matuszeski and NYU's Bill Easterly. 

The researchers developed an equation for measuring the "squiggliness" of national  borders using grids, coming up with (ln (box count) = a + b * ln (box size)), which they argue roughly corellates with how "artificial" or "natural" a state is - that is, how well a country's borders reflect existing regional, ethnic, historical, geographical, and linguistic fault lines. They also developed another measure to determine to what extent borders "partition" ethnic groups.

The researchers then set out to find whether artificial states with straight, partitioning borders do any worse than natural states with squiggly borders. The findings? The names of the “most artificial” states according to both the "squiggly" and "partition" measures - Chad, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guatemala, Jordan, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Pakistan, Sudan, and Zimbabwe - should give you a clue (hint: a lot of them show up on FP's Failed State Index). Yup, less squiggly countries turned out to do worse all around: they are poorer, more prone to unrest, governed poorly, and have higher infant mortality rates.