“Why haven’t we been attacked?”

It’s as good a question as any, coming on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 hijackers’ graduations from flight school.

And it sliced through the room of gloom at the National Press Club last week, where former national security officials, scholars and journalists dined on baked salmon and heard yet another blue-ribbon panel issue yet another blue report on the lame state of homeland security.

The question, posed to a panel starring two radically disenchanted former Bush White House terrorism advisers, Richard A. Clarke and Rand Beers, broke the mood of somber doom like a cough during a funeral oration.

Clarke said “the list of vulnerabilities is pretty much the same as it was five years ago. There are isolated cases where that’s not true, but we’re essentially as insecure as we were five years ago.”

“We hoped that things would be getting better, but here we are five years later . . .” with huge gaps in homeland defenses, said Beers, who resigned from the White House in 2003 with charges that the Bush administration had caved into the chemical industry’s opposition to mandated security upgrades.

The views of Beers and Clarke, career bureaucrats who led a task force of 21 other national security experts in writing “The Forgotten Homeland”, are hardly out of line with the prevailing views of security experts from left to right.

Books and studies with similar titles — “Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable to Attack,” by former DHS Inspector Clark Kent Ervin, comes to mind — cram my mailbox weekly. Then there are the Inspector General reports, GAO audits, congressional testimony and investigative reporting by the media that regularly explode like illumination rounds over the gaping holes in U.S. homeland defenses.

So it’s pretty relevant — and interesting, in a morbid sort of way — to ask why we haven’t been hit again in a big way.

The administration claims that stiffened homeland defenses have been warding off the terrorists.

“We look differently as a country now to the terrorists,” former homeland security chief Tom Ridge said last year, in a representative comment. “We have created security measures unlike the terrorists have seen before, and we continue to upgrade them.”

DHS spokesman Russ Knocke was outraged by the claims of Clarke and Beers, telling CQ/Homeland Security reporter Eileen Sullivan that “. . . It’s unjustifiable for someone to make the claim that we’ve just not made security advances. That’s just simply not true.”

But others say “advances” aren’t much to crow about nearly five years after the Sept. 11 attacks — and 13 years after the first assault on the World Trade Center. That’s like claiming credit for locking half the windows in your house to keep burglars out. The kind of committed, sophisticated terrorists who pulled off the multiple Sept. 11 hijackings can easily navigate the kind of homeland security hurdles the United States has erected.

Take cockpit doors, a vulnerability that was at the top of the security agenda, along with the inability of emergency crews to communicate by radio, in 2001.

The doors have been hardened, but pilots still have to exit the cockpit for trips to the lavatory, leaving the planes nearly as vulnerable as ever to a terrorist with a six-inch screwdriver (now permitted on board).

Requiring the airlines to install “man-lock” systems — double-door barriers —would solve the problem, frustrated TSA security officials privately say. But the administration has no plans to force the issue. Meanwhile, manufacturers of ultra-expensive missile defense systems for passenger jets have succeeded in getting their widget to the top of the agenda.

All too typical, the critics say.

So why hasn’t al Qaeda taken advantage?

“The major reason,” said Clarke, reflecting a view that has been emerging among experts over the past several months, “has been the transformation of al Qaeda” by the war in Iraq.

In the 1990s Osama bin Laden’s strategy was to attack “the far enemy,” the United States, to loosen its grip on the “near enemy,” in particular the Saudi royal family, which had introduced U.S. troops into the land of Mecca for the first Gulf War in 1991, as well as such corrupt nations as Egypt and Jordan that, in the eyes of al Qaeda, pay only lip service to Islamic values.

But with the invasion of Iraq, “the hierarchy collapsed,” Clarke said, with fundamentalist brigands such as the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi taking advantage of the chaos to make a name for themselves.

The Bush administration’s inveiglement of other, mostly Western governments to send troops to Iraq provided other terrorist entrepreneurs a new, rich plate of targets — last July 7th’s London train and bus bombings, for example, and before that, Madrid.

The most unsettling development in the new terror battlefield has been “the spontaneous creation of terrorist cells,” Clarke said, of the kind most recently discovered in Toronto and Miami, where al Qaeda wannabees have been caught up in the global jihad.

Intelligence sources say American jails are also humming with fervor for bin Laden, stirred up by Black Muslim prisoner gangs.

All this, ironically, conjures up the peace-and-love Sixties, when college kids were tacking posters of Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara on their dorm room walls.

The counterculture slogan back then was, “Think globally, act locally.”

Heaven help us if Osama bin Laden is turning into a pop phenomenon here for wayward kids and criminals here.

Then we won’t be asking where the next hit is coming from.

They’ll be inside the fence.

MAD AS HELL: James Grady, author of the iconic “Six Days of the Condor” (shaved into three days for the 1974 Robert Redford flick), has a hilariously intriguing premise in his latest thriller, “Mad Dogs”: The CIA has a secret insane asylum in Maine, where it stows away its head cases, driven crazy by counterterrorism missions. Naturally, they escape when the agency tries to frame them for the murder of a psychiatrist, but “forget to evac with a supply of their meds,” Grady said last week.

“A central premise of the novel is also its slogan or motto or theme: ‘It takes guts to be nuts,’” Grady added.

How true is it? Rumors abound, but only that, said Grady (as did a veteran spook I asked). “This is a thriller that’s a comic novel that’s satire that’s literary,” Grady said. “I poured every ounce of blood I have and then some into this book — and yeah, I reported it with both thanked and confidential sources.”

PRISON FARE: Jailhouse memoirs have a proud literary pedigree—think Nelson Mandela and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn —and now the war on terror has its own notable entry, “Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment in Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar” (The New Press), by British citizen Moazzam Begg. You’ve seen the pictures, read the newspaper stories, now walk in the shoes of someone who was caught up in the vortex of the war on terror, kidnapped by CIA and British operatives and dispatched to terrifying places where he despaired he would spend the rest of his life. If you want to know what it’s like on the other side of the interrogations, this is the place to start.

(Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com)