I find it very disconcerting that thirty-six hours (as of this writing) after the Boston terrorist bombing, law enforcement and counterterrorism officials are running hotlines and calls for "anyone seen with an unusually heavy, dark bag" in the Boston area.  A $50,000 reward has been offered for clues leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator.  Officials are saying that this case is "wide open."

Wide open?  Really?

This is where the status of the investigation is.  In Europe, and in Israel, whenever there is a terrorist attack, they have someone or some group in their sights or in custody every time.  Take 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, the Glasgow jihad plot -- every jihad attack and jihad plot in Europe, European authorities are right on it, identifying and apprehending the perpetrators.  They know exactly who the bad guys are.  They know exactly where to go.  This is a historical first: that America is not dramatically ahead of the curve, but dramatically behind the curve.  So American citizens are now considered expendable, just the way our soldiers are in Afghanistan.

It should bother every American that Europe and Israel are so far ahead of us in intel that we're begging CNN and Fox for clues -- and apparently detaining people who have nothing to do with the bombing, raiding their homes, taking bagfuls of evidence out, and then saying, "Never mind."

Really?  The billions that Americans spend for the CIA, FBI, DHS, NSA, JTTF, and all the other various counterterrorism agencies, and they don't have a clue?  All they have for us is 1-800-CALL-FBI?  This is unconscionable.  If that's where we are, disband these incompetent, inane agencies that call jihad "workplace violence" and name Atlas Shrugs as a "domestic hate group," when in fact Atlas Shrugs is battling violence and mass murder across the world.  How did this happen eleven years after 9/11?

We know that the bomb mimics the IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We know that it is the same kind of bomb that Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square jihad car bomber, used to try to murder hundreds, if not thousands, on a crowded Saturday night in Times Square.  News reports from Boston hospitals said that "patients had completely mangled and destroyed extremities."  We know that the recipe for this bomb was published in the al-Qaeda four-color glossy, Inspire magazine.  These bombs were designed to cut through bone and flesh and mutilate as many humans as possible.  And we have nothing almost two days into the bombing?  As an American, I'm ashamed.

It's unconscionable that they would allude to jihad with the taking into custody of the Saudi national, who was a devout Muslim from Medina -- and this was run not only in the New York Post, but on CBS and in mainstream media websites -- and then say, "Never mind."  Of course counter-jihad websites would run these stories.  It's what we do.  But the last thing we want to do is smear anyone, because we have experienced the very same smear.  If Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi was completely innocent of any involvement in the attacks, law enforcement officials bear a tremendous responsibility for the besmirching of his name.

Who's running the investigation?  The Keystone Kops?  The question is: was this attack a jihadi operation, or are we facing some brand new threat that we have never seen before in the United States?  We have seldom seen bombs going off in the name of any ideology other than jihad.  Timothy McVeigh was a one-off.  He didn't represent any major movement.  And to this day, there are questions about the third man who was involved.

In the past twenty years, all bomb attacks have been jihad-related.  The shootings of Newtown, Columbine, Aurora, and the rest were all the result of madness -- mental illness.  Lone shooters looking for infamy.

Americans should be deeply concerned about the fact that instead of leading the world in intel fast response, we're not just leading from behind -- we ain't leading at all.  We're pathetic.

American homeland security is an abject failure.  They torture us at the airports.  We've lost so many of our freedoms to be "more secure."  How are we more secure?

Pamela Geller is the president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of the new book Freedom or Submission: On the Dangers of Islamic Extremism & American Complacency, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.