In September of 2009 the FBI arrested three men as part of a terrorism investigation that included New York, Pakistan, and Denver. Najibullah Zazi has admitted receiving weapons training from Al Qaida, and authorities have stated that details are emerging on how he played a direct role in an alleged terrorism plot. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are doing their job to keep us safe, and they’re doing it well.

I served as the FBI spokesperson in Northern California from 2002-2006, and during those years I spent considerable time working with agents assigned to terrorism cases. In the days after 9/11, fear filled the hallways of the White House, the nation’s capital, and our homes as we struggled to understand an enemy who wanted to destroy us. We elect presidents to tell us what to do in these situations. We give him a big office and an even bigger staff with the power to form national security policy in a post-Cold War world of complexity and change. Our government’s response to 9/11 was to pass the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in 2004 and create a Director of National Intelligence. America had been attacked and the Bush administration “declared war on terrorists.”

Those are fighting words and Americans have never been shy about standing up for their own. We kept our eyes open for suspicious activity. We endured long security lines at airport. FBI Director Robert Mueller issued a policy that still stands to this day: no terrorism lead is left uncovered, no matter how minute or obscure. As a result, FBI agents burn up energy—and morale—chasing accusations and suspicions that are without credibility and, ultimately, considered a waste of time. And yet, they keep at it. We all keep at it because the alternative is too terrible to think about. No one wants to be the one responsible for allowing another senseless terrorist attack.

Before 9/11, most of us believed that suicide bombers belonged to a primitive culture. Terrible things happened, but they happened to other people, with different politics, and in other countries. We read the news over coffee, lamented about the violence, and then went on with our lives. It’s not that we were indifferent to the plight of others; it’s that we were complacent with our own position in the pack—at the top.

In a few short minutes on September 11^th, 2001, the pendulum swung from complacency to fear. Extreme messages—the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists, the launch of Sputnik by the Russians, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese—can cause a sharp and sudden shift in our attitudes and behavior. Each of these events provided a good dose of fear, which influenced our viewpoint and response to the war against terror, the hostility of the Cold War, and our involvement in WWII.

As an FBI counterintelligence agent, I often injected a dose of panic into interviews with targets of my investigations. I call this the “inoculation” technique because an extreme message always gets people’s attention. The key principle to remember with using the inoculation approach, however, is that it can’t sustain itself forever. A shock is a shock only when fresh and full of possibilities. Eight years after 9/11, the national conscience is no longer as sensitive to the idea of terror. Our attitudes have changed. We can never go back to the naïve mentality that kept us in darkness before the pre-dawn hours of 9/11. It took us a while to feel our way through the murkiness, but the mantle of terrorism is now resting solidly upon the squared shoulders of determined Americans.

And it seems that our new Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, understands this. In a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 16, 2009, he discussed aspects of the new National Intelligence Strategy, which lists its top mission as “combating violent extremism.” The harsher rhetoric used by the Bush administration in phrases like “war on terror” and “defeating terrorists” no longer carries the same emotional impact because the pendulum of attitude has begun to find its natural resting point.

This does not mean that law enforcement is going soft on terrorists, or that Americans should let down their guard. The FBI continues to pursue every terrorism lead that comes to its attention. But government no longer has to herd citizens with fear. We’ve moved beyond revenge and rhetoric. Our attitude adjustment has come to rest somewhere between awareness and resolve.

Blair appears to have gotten this message.

• Denver man indicted in alleged al-Qaida plot (msnbc.msn.com)