I can’t find a linkable transcript, but PM Netanyahu’s remarks last night at the White House to inaugurate the renewed peace process were really commendable.

President Abbas, you are my partner in peace. And it is up to us, with the help of our friends, to conclude the agonizing conflict between our peoples and to afford them a new beginning. The Jewish people are not strangers in our ancestral homeland, the land of our forefathers. But we recognize that another people shares this land with us.

I came here today to find an historic compromise that will enable both our peoples to live in peace and security and in dignity. I’ve been making the case for Israel all of my life. But I didn’t come here today to make an argument. I came here today to make peace. I didn’t come here today to play a blame game where even the winners lose. Everybody loses if there’s no peace. I came here to achieve a peace that will bring a lasting benefit to us all.

Obviously negotiation awaits, and then implementation. He doesn’t commit himself to anything. But this is precisely the kind of framework that’s conducive to both. It’s a preamble, not an endpoint communique. Don’t make me a fool for hoping, man.

Via the good transparency people at Public Intelligence, here’s a presentation from the Justice Department about paths to domestic radicalization. There’s only so much one can tell from briefing slides. But the slides provide an important context: the conspiratorial nature of those who enlist. Notice the “Cosmic Crisis” framework, something that should gladden the heart of any Jack Kirby-obsessed counterterrorist. The world is imperiled; the purpose of Creation has been subverted by a powerful and unjust force; only a privileged few recognize the depths of the crisis.

It should be clear that someone who accepts those premises will find any intellectual force to shove inside of it: religion, politics, war. That’s why the most salient fact about al-Qaeda isn’t its self-proclaimed religious agenda. It’s that they buy into this Final Crisis conspiracy theorism. Religion is the gasoline, not the engine.

I include the Paul Kantner track here because it’s one of the purest musical expressions of a paranoid conspiracy theory that I know. The world is doomed by the corruption of Amerikkka and so the only hope is for the hippies to steal a spaceship and leave earth. (Some of us would consider that win-win.) Obviously there’s no comparison between the Jefferson Starship and al-Qaeda, and that’s why I post it here. Not all conspiracy theorists are violent and dangerous. To its credit, the DOJ briefing points to observable indicators of growing militancy (“each path involves exposure to violence”). However vague that is — it’s a framework, after all — it’s a reminder that you can only avoid false positives by looking at how people act on their beliefs, not the crazy-as-hell beliefs themselves.

The actual military commission of Omar Khadr — who, at 15 years old in 2002, allegedly threw a grenade that killed an Army Special Forces sergeant during the storming of a Khost Province terrorist compound in which he stayed — will begin on October 18 at Guantanamo. While I was in Afghanistan, the military judge in Khadr’s case, Colonel Patrick Parrish, ruled that much of the evidence against Khadr taken from his interrogations can be used against him at trial. Those statements came after one of his interrogators, Joshua Claus, told Khadr a grotesque parable about an uncooperative young detainee being raped to death. How any of this squares with the Military Commissions Act of 2009’s stated protections against the admissibility of statements delivered under coercive environments is beyond me.