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Professor Peter Adriaenssens, chairman of the commission, said the abuse in Belgium may have been even more rampant than the 200-page report suggests, because his panel’s work was interrupted and all its files seized in a June 24 raid by Belgian judicial authorities who are conducting their own probe.

Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist who has worked with trauma victims for 23 years, said nothing had prepared him for the stories of abuse that blighted the lives of victims. He called the report’s findings “a body blow” to the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium.

Belgian church authorities said they would react on Monday to the report. The Vatican had no immediate comment.

The report’s findings are the latest embarrassment for Belgium’s Catholic Church, which is still reeling after the April resignation of Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who admitted to having sexually abused a nephew for years when he was a priest and bishop.

Terrorism today is more likely to come as small-scale attacks, such as last November’s shootings at Fort Hood military base in Texas, where a gunman killed 13 people, or the failed attempt May 1 to set off explosives in Times Square.

“Today, America faces a dynamic threat that has diversified to a broad array of attacks, from shootings to car bombs to simultaneous suicide attacks to attempted in-flight bombings of passenger aircraft,” says a 42-page report from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, a Washington research group.

Lee Hamilton, a vice chairman of the 9-11 Commission, which urged the government six years ago to be vigilant and nimble, warned Friday that the new report shows that, “The American people just have to get a more realistic sense of what they’re confronted with.”

So does the government. “There are a lot of things that still need to be done to make our country safer,” said Hamilton, a former Indiana Democratic congressman who co-chairs the group that produced Friday’s report.

Last year proved to be a “watershed” in domestic terrorist attacks and plots, the report says.

“In the past year alone,” it says, “the United States has seen affluent suburban Americans and the progeny of hardworking immigrants gravitate to terrorism. Persons of color and Caucasians have done so. Women along with men. Good students and well-educated individuals and high school dropouts and jailbirds. ”

The only common denominator, it said, “appears to be a newfound hatred for their native or adopted country, a degree of dangerous malleability and a religious fervor” that they think justifies their violence.

Britain endures its fair share of elemental hardships: floods, storms, and even the occasional tornado. It is not, however, known for its high risk of catastrophic earthquakes.

But that did not stop police officers undertaking a three-day course training them to deal with a devastating tremor.

Officers from four British forces participated in the £826,000 exercise that simulated the consequences from a tremor measuring eight on the Richter scale hitting the country – something that has never happened and probably never will.

The teams were called in to work with European and Middle Eastern officials for the “extremely unlikely” crisis.

Hundreds of actors were also employed to recreate the mock disaster scenes across the country.

Critics suggested the three day exercise, one of the largest ever undertaken, was a waste of valuable resources as it would almost never occur in Britain.

Senior officials, however, felt it “necessary” to be prepared for such an “unthinkable” event despite just 11 people dying from earthquakes in Britain over the past 1000 years.

This week’s EU-funded project, code-named Exercise Orion, simulated emergency services rescuing people caught up in the disaster. In one “real life event”, up to 600 casualties were rescued from the town of “Widley”, Hants.

That disaster, recreated near Portsmouth, caused motorways and apartment blocks to collapse, oil storage plants to be damaged and cars to start burning.

Under the scenario, British emergency services were soon overwhelmed and the Cabinet Office issued an appeal for European Union assistance.

The men, two from Russia and one from Kazakhstan, were found near Georgia Power’s Plant McIntosh on Old Augusta Road about 1 a.m. Sunday after a ranger with the Department of Natural Resources reported a suspicious vehicle, Effingham County sheriff’s spokesman David Ehsanipoor said.

Deputies reported the men, who were inside a 1995 Nissan Pathfinder, had a machete, shovel, wire cutters and ski masks. One man also had black silk stockings in his front left pocket.

Arrested were Evgeniy Luzhetskiy, of Kazakhastan Nail Idiatullin and Rustem Ibragimov of Russia. All three reported they lived in Charleston, S.C., deputies reported.

The men were all charged with possession of tools during the commission of a crime.

The three were released after being interviewed by task force members, Ehsanipoor said.

Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer’s memoir “Operation Dark Heart” had become a headache for the Defense Department which determined after it had gone to print that it contained classified information. The book recounts the Army Reserve officer’s experiences in Afghanistan in 2003 while working for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

An option being explored with the book’s publisher was for the Pentagon to purchase the 9,500 copies of the book’s first run so they could be destroyed.

Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham confirms that is what happened earlier this week.

“DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security,” she said.

According to Cunningham, “the approximately 9,500 copies of the book were “disposed on Sept. 20. DoD observed the destruction of the copies.”

“DoD is in the process of reimbursing Macmillan Publishers for costs associated with the production of approximately 9,500 copies of the first printing of ‘Operation Dark Heart,'” she said.

There is no information as to the costs associated with this effort.

“Operation Dark Heart,” which was scheduled to be published this month by St. Martin’s Press, recounts the adventures and frustrations of an Army reservist, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who served in Afghanistan in 2003, a moment when the attention of Washington and the military had shifted to Iraq.

Shaffer, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, describes a number of planned covert operations, including an aborted cross-border surveillance operation using sophisticated eavesdropping technology that targeted high-level al-Qaeda operatives based in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The operation was shut down by military officials concerned about offending Pakistan, according to Shaffer’s account.

Shaffer’s book was reviewed and cleared in writing by the Army Reserve earlier this year, but this summer the Defense Intelligence Agency objected to the use of the names of American intelligence officers, among other issues.

A senior Pentagon official said that the DIA obtained a copy of the manuscript in mid-July, adding that the agency “did a quick review” and found “some issues we were very concerned with.” The agency then referred the matter to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which distributed the manuscript to other agencies, presumably including the CIA, “all of whom had major objections to things in the book,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official said the Defense Department “sent up a team to talk with the publisher some time ago,” and has been negotiating an agreement that might allow the Pentagon to purchase already printed copies of the book and permit a subsequent version to go forward as long as it complies with U.S. government requests.

Both sides now appear to have agreed on the contents of the second printing, but negotiations are focused on what to with the 10,000 copies already published.

The Pentagon is now negotiating with Shaffer’s publisher to buy the entire first print run, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The Pentagon’s plan to destroy all 10,000 copies of the initial printing was first reported Thursday night by the New York Times.

A new print run, without the disputed passages, is being prepared by the publisher. Meanwhile, the first printing is sitting in a warehouse in Virginia. Several dozen review copies of the first edition have already been circulated to media outlets, including The Washington Post.

Overall, the number of prescriptions filled for psychiatric medications rose 42 percent from 2005 to 2009 among Tricare beneficiaries in that age group, according to data provided by Tricare Management Activity in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

That compares to an increase of 24 percent among Tricare beneficiaries ages 45 to 64, mostly retirees. For children 17 and younger, the increase was 18 percent.

All the increases outpace overall growth in the Tricare population over the same period.

Anti-depressants like Zoloft, Wellbutrin and Celexa account for slightly more than half of the prescriptions in this age group. But increasingly, young adults in the military and their spouses are turning to other types of psych meds to treat their mental health problems.

Prescriptions for stimulants, including amphetamines and drugs to treat attention-deficit disorders, more than doubled. And claims for anti-psychotics like Seroquel and Abilify nearly doubled from 2005 to 2009 among beneficiaries ages 18 to 34, the Tricare data show. Seroquel is often used to treat nightmares and sleeping problems related to post-traumatic stress disorder.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, monitors the Einstein intrusion-detection sensors on nonmilitary government networks, and helps other civil agencies respond to hack attacks. It also issues alerts on the latest software security holes, so that everyone from the White House to the FAA can react quickly to install workarounds and patches.

But in a case of “physician, heal thyself,” the agency — which forms the operational arm of DHS’s National Cyber Security Division, or NCSD — failed to keep its own systems up to date with the latest software patches. Auditors working for the DHS inspector general ran a sweep of US-CERT using the vulnerability scanner Nessus and turned up 1,085 instances of 202 high-risk security holes.