The report concludes that there is no consistent profile that could be used to help identify who might be vulnerable to such radicalization, and yet the biographies do show in some detail how the making of an Al Qaeda-inspired suicide bomber is an idiosyncratic narrative of push and pull. Alienation from citizenship or family and a loss of faith in secular opportunity create a pool of potential volunteers; preachers, recruiters, and Al Qaeda leaders take it from there. The British parliament’s main intelligence-oversight committee, in a separate report, admits that Britain has failed to consider adequately how it might reduce the number of potential recruits: "We remain concerned that across the whole of the counter-terrorism community the development of the home-grown threat and the radicalisation of British citizens were not fully understood or applied to strategic thinking."

It seems obvious that citizenship, assimilation, religious tolerance—-the basic ideals of an open, plural society—-should play a prominent part in counterterrorism strategy, to at least complement the funds that governments pour so eagerly into concrete barriers, listening devices, and retina scanners. When President Bush promotes the spread of democracy abroad, he argues that the distractions of civic life offer a partial cure for terrorism. Yet he offers no comparable rhetoric, never mind a strategy, at home. The scant outreach to American Muslims that the Bush Administration undertakes, aside from occasional religious conferences and White House iftars, is left mainly to the F.B.I.

The results are predictably depressing: a startling number of America’s several million Muslim residents think that the United States is not safe for them. A poll conducted by Zogby International just before the last Presidential election, for example, showed that more than a third of American Muslims believe that the Administration is waging a war on Islam; a similar number believe that “American society overall is disrespectful and intolerant toward Muslims”; and more than half said that they knew someone who had suffered discrimination. It is fair to assume that these numbers understate the problem. If you were a media-literate Muslim immigrant, would you express your frustration to a pollster on the telephone?

British and European Muslims are more often poor, unemployed, and trapped in segregated housing than their American counterparts, but this hardly seems grounds for self-congratulation or complacency, particularly in this country’s current phase of fence-building and nationalism. The Bush Administration has failed to manage the connection between immigration policy and counterterrorism strategy; instead, the President is succumbing to immigrant-bashers. The nativists are ascendant in the Republican Party as final negotiations begin in Congress on a major immigration-reform bill that is rooted in a demagogic movement to strengthen border security (a worthy objective, but not one likely to be achieved by such craven symbolic gestures as the deployment of National Guard troops). It is not clear whether a new law will be passed this summer, or just how bad a bill it will be. Even if a compromise is reached that offers a reasonable path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have long lived here, the price will almost certainly include an expansion of police powers and the re-categorizing of many immigration violations as felonies—a prescription for error and abuse. . .