"The terrorism threat facing the United States may be vastly understated, as well as inaccurately characterized..."

"... because so many 'failed' terror plots are excluded from the nation’s terror attack databases, new terrorism research suggests."

“One finding from my research is that the terror threat within the US is higher than most Americans realize,” says Erik Dahl, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, whose research has identified 227 failed domestic and international terror plots of all kinds (Islamic jihadist, right-wing extremist and others) against the US dating back to 1987 – the vast majority excluded from national “attack” tallies.

In his post-9/11 analysis, Dr. Dahl found that of the 109 failed attacks, 76 were inspired by radical Islamist beliefs. But the fact that the rest of the terror flops – 30 percent – were not inspired by radical Islam “might surprise some people and shows the importance of the domestic extremist threat, including right-wing militias, anti-government groups,” Dahl says.

There's so much room for cooking the numbers here. When we're talking about things that didn't happen and how to characterize those things, we're talking about the stuff of propaganda. Did Professor Dahl go looking for right-wing plots to up the percentage on non-Islamic terrorism? And what's with the phrase "including right-wing militias, anti-government groups"? It makes me suspicious that when something seems right-wing, it's called right-wing, but when it seems left-wing, it's called anti-government.