Saturday, 15 September 2001

Forced displacement ... ban on women's right to education, employment and freedom of movement ... detention and torture ... unfair trials, cruel punishments and the death penalty

On Jan. 22,1996 a lady was hit by Taliban vehicle. People went to governor of Herat for investigation. The governor said that "we keep telling you that women don't have the right to go outside their houses. If she was a man we could investigate the case. It is a good lesson to other women not to go outside of their houses. WOMEN IN THEIR HOUSES OR IN THE GRAVE."

...[Thursday] morning Flag War broke out among the cable news networks. CNN declared itself the victor, having put its animated American flag near the bottom of the screen at midnight Wednesday; MSNBC and Fox News Channel followed suit yesterday morning.

"I'm thrilled we were the first network to put up the American flag," said Garth Ancier, vice president of programming at Turner Broadcasting Systems, which includes CNN.

"We all started hearing about friends and neighbors who were buying flags. Walter Isaacson said he didn't want anyone getting an American flag on before us; he ordered the animated American flag [Wednesday] night."

Will the networks please -- please -- stop showing the planes crashing into the World Trade Center as scene-setters for their opening credits? As "bumpers" before commercial breaks? As video wallpaper while talking heads are being interviewed? As a split-screen diversion while Ari Fleischer is briefing reporters?

The sheer repetition trivializes and dehumanizes the tragedy as we watch the fireball again and again, the towers collapsing again and again, the people dying again and again. It's as if the networks kept showing JFK getting shot in 1963 every five minutes. The story is compelling. People are watching. The network bosses don't have to use cheap tricks to convince us that something momentous has happened. We know. We've seen it. We get it.

...CNN indulged in the stunt of interviewing novelist Tom Clancy simply because he'd written a thriller about a similar attack. I was braced for the worst -- Clancy is, after all, a wannabe Rambo -- but he launched into a monologue about how Islam is a religion of love, like Christianity and Judaism, and we shouldn't believe that the actions of a few madmen actually represent such a religion. "My God," I told my wife. "Tom Clancy has become the voice of reason."

Why did so many of them remain in their seats or in the backs of the planes while the hijackers took aim at buildings containing thousands of people? Because it never seriously occurred to those passengers that the hijackers would use the planes for that purpose.

This is one of the most important lessons of Tuesday's catastrophe. Our ability to prevent crimes is constrained not only by technical limits--money, intelligence assets, airport security administration--but also by conceptual limits. We can't prepare for what we don't anticipate. Furthermore, the range of scenarios we anticipate isn't limited merely by what we think others can do. It's also limited by what we think they will do.

After a terrorist attack, everything looks different. You realize that every plane is a potential guided missile and that every hijacker might be a kamikaze pilot. Yet nothing has changed except the range of your imagination.

Where will terrorists strike next? If you've got an answer off the top of your head, it's the wrong answer. To thwart a terrorist, you have to think like one.

Pakistan has agreed to the full list of U.S. demands for a possible attack on neighboring Afghanistan, including a multinational force to be based within its borders, Pakistani military and diplomatic sources said Saturday.

Pakistan's agreement was conveyed by President Pervez Musharraf in a meeting Friday with U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Besides the ground force, Pakistan also agreed to close its border with Afghanistan, allow its airspace to be used for possible strikes and cooperate in intelligence gathering.

Friday, 14 September 2001

He has looked tired, has on occasion grown emotional, but he has not allowed more than a few hours to pass without reminding the city that someone was at the helm.

President Bush will visit New York on Friday, a gesture many have suggested is overdue. New York knows this because he called the mayor and the governor, live on TV ... "You've been a terrific leader and we're taking our example from you," the mayor responded with startling generosity.

The very qualities that have caused so many flaps and feuds -- Giuliani's chin-out pugnaciousness, his reluctance to compromise, his tendency to take things very personally -- have proved to be exactly what a stricken city needs in its worst crisis. If term limits weren't forcing him from office in January, even with so many of the city's ordinary problems from housing to education still enduring, he could probably be elected mayor for life.

Thursday, 13 September 2001

Senators were especially angry when White House communications aide Karen Hughes emerged in Washington to assure the nation that the president was safe. "We didn't need her to tell us he was all right," said another senator. "We needed him to tell us that we are all right. They missed the point."

...my thoughts keep turning to the longer term effects that these attacks are going to have on our society, on the shape of our daily lives. I'm going to be laying awake at night worrying about the tradeoffs that we're going to be forced to make, or bullied into choosing, or duped into believing in; tradeoffs that will reduce our personal freedoms for an illusionary and facile sense of security ... that as long as we carry our luggage inside the terminal instead of dropping it off at the curb, everything will be okay, and the boogeymen won't be able to get us.

At the moment, my stance is reluctantly hawkish. Reason seems very unlikely to work with the perpetrators of yesterday's attacks, so I fear that we will have to fall back on force; we will have to forcefully make the point that while it may be technically possible to do this sort of thing to Americans, on American soil, the final result is a terrible and awful retaliation.

This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover, but it won't be able to run for cover forever.

This is an enemy that tries to hide, but it won't be able to hide forever.

This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe, but they won't be safe forever.

Wednesday, 12 September 2001

When the Hijackers took control of flight 93, Jeremy called my niece who in-turn conferenced him to 911. Jeremy relayed to the police what was happening as the hijacking unfolded. As our niece Liz listened, Jeremy told the police there were three Arab terrorists with knives and a large red box that they claimed contained a bomb. Jeremy tracked the second by second details and relayed them to the police by phone. After several minutes of describing the scene, Jeremy and several other passengers decided there was nothing to lose by rushing the hijackers. Although United Flight 93 crashed outside of Pittsburgh, with the loss of all souls, Jeremy and the other patriotic heroes saved the lives of many people on the ground that would have died...

Tuesday, 11 September 2001

Before the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland, terrorists usually proudly claimed "credit" for themselves and their causes. They established proof of their responsibility and explained why it was necessary to shock the world with extreme actions.

Now the terrorist style is to remain silent, count on the United States to treat the attack not as an act of war but as a legal matter for world tribunals to resolve (as it did with Pan Am 103) or to launch poorly conceived pinprick responses by cruise missiles (as it did for the 1998 embassy bombings). The hidden hand and those who manipulate it now remain in the shadows to escape direct retaliation.

...in contemplating who might be responsible for the most terrifying attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor, it's worth remembering that Arabs were blamed initially for the Oklahoma City bombing as well.

Just at the moment when American political debate had reached a nadir of frivolousness, with wrangling about nonexistent "lockboxes" and the like, the nation's decade-long holiday from history came to a shattering end. After about a half-century of war and Cold War, Americans came to feel, understandably, that the world was too much with them, and they turned away from it. What happened Tuesday morning, and can happen again, underscored the abnormality of the decade.

At times like this, confused thought breeds confused action...

Terrorism acquires its power from the special horror of its randomness, and from the magnification of it by modern media, which make the perpetrators seem the one thing they are not -- powerful. Terrorism is the tactic of the weak.

• NYC bridges/tunnels/outbound lanes are reopening.
• American has accounted for all their planes
• DC inbound/outbound bridges now open
• DC streets open except those near White House
• World Trade Center Building 7 has also collapsed (though it wasn't hit).

All this talk of America vs. the world by our politicians is making me sick and uneasy. This is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue. Someone attacked us all, all of us on the Good Earth.

We have lived a very safe and coddled life in this country. And now we are like the rest of the world.

I called my friend Daniel Benjamin, who was director for transnational threats at the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. ... he said this day's events had all the markings of an assault by the forces of Osama bin Laden ... "They have been seeking to create a sort of Tet offensive phenomenon of lots of attacks at one time to show they can coordinate attacks better than any other terrorist operation before ... They've done that today. This is a very impressive performance."

It seemed this morning that our government, our country were totally clueless, but Benjamin said that's precisely the impression that terrorists want to make, and it's not entirely the case.

"Terrorism is a bizarre game in which when the bad guys score one, it looks like they're winning the game," he said. "Attacks have been foiled in recent years. And there have been arrests that stopped incipient attacks."

People shared phones, radios, cars, stories. We didn't know what to do except to keep on doing. We just didn't know anything but to be afraid, and that's the purpose and the mission of terrorism.

...extend our deepest sympathies and condolences to the individuals, employees and families who had friends or loved ones onboard United Flight 93 or United Flight 175. We are dispatching a team of United employees to assist the families involved and have established a toll-free number that families and friends can call for assistance and information...

The toll-free phone number for families in the US to call is 1-800-932-8555.

All United flights worldwide are suspended until further notice.

Monday, 10 September 2001

• Let There Be Michael by David Segal [Washington Post]
  ...the evening felt more like a meandering dress rehearsal than a finished product, more like a rough draft than an extravaganza that could justify the $2,500 fetched for top tickets. There are consumer hot lines for lesser fleecings.
  
  ...the Jacksons didn't take the stage until 10:45, more than three hours after the scheduled start of the show...
  
  Jackson's strategy for the night was fittingly strange. ... he surrounded himself with as many famous people as possible, as if to say, "If I'm so bad, how come these people love me?" ... A saner man would have low-balled expectations, kept ticket prices low and ditched the innocence-by-association concept altogether. For one thing, that might have assured a sellout -- there turned out to be plenty of unfilled seats and a bustling buyer's market outside the venue.
  
  ...much of the night felt more targeted to a television audience than the in-house crowd, perhaps because it was filmed for a CBS special to be broadcast in November. That might explain all the downtime, though how anyone could charge a few grand for a seat and then pepper a show with TV timeouts is beyond imagination.
  
  There was a superb 90-minute concert buried somewhere in this heap, under all the aggrandizing testimonials and semi-pointless musical excursions. If Jackson really wants to reconnect with fans, he ought to stick with what won them over in the first place: his singing and spectacularly fleet dancing.

Sunday, 9 September 2001

"You're the television? Or someone in the television?"
"The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to."
"What do they sacrifice?" asked Shadow.
"Their time, mostly," said Lucy. "Sometimes each other."
--American Gods, Neil Gaiman