Saturday, 22 September 2001

Friday, 21 September 2001

Thursday, 20 September 2001

That particular quatrain was offered by the page's author, Neil Marshall, as a fabricated example to illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted through the use of abstract imagery. He pointed out how the terms he used were so deliberately vague they could be interpreted to fit any number of cataclysmic events.

Wednesday, 19 September 2001

"Yes, we have heard something about Sept. 22, but nothing specific," one source close to the investigation said. "We have information that leads us to believe that there could be more attacks very soon. The same murky sources that indicated something might be coming in the weeks before the attacks have indicated something may be happening this weekend. It is our hope that we can stop it."

Another official familiar with the investigation said preventing further attacks has become their first priority.

In the wake of the attacks, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has proposed making it mandatory that software developers give government security agents the "keys" to encryption programs when they are created, a position strongly opposed by many in the technology community who worry it could be used to invade the privacy of law-abiding computer users.

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of a popular encryption technology, said he believes the answer to catching the terrorists lies in human footwork rather than more surveillance technologies: "It's not practical to frisk everyone on the planet to find the one person with a box cutter."

...now suburban Maryland has become a major focus of the investigation. Teams of agents are visiting and revisiting hotels, gyms, stores and apartment complexes along the Route 1 corridor.

At least six of the hijackers ... were seen in Laurel, Bowie, Greenbelt and Beltsville [MD]. ... [I]n 1999, Waleed M. Alshehri, who was aboard the same flight as Atta, lived for a short time in a Vienna [VA] boarding house and took computer classes with his father in Tysons Corner [VA].

A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion -- but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania.

...reactor containment buildings were not built with the idea of resisting an intentional assault by a modern-day jet... The literature is actually strangely silent on this point -- so much so that experts interviewed all named the same study, published in 1974 ... about probabilities of a plane accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor. That study concluded that some reactor containment structures had zero chance of sustaining a hit by a "large" plane, defined as more than 6.25 tons. The 767s that hit the trade center weighed 150 tons...

Terrorism also has implications for the Great Waste Debate. Our reactors have for fifty years been piling up vast quantities of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. The question of what to do with it all takes on a new urgency... There is no easy answer -- which may explain such a sluggish and bleary-eyed response to potential terrorism against nuclear targets: the NRC and others are in denial. Not so long ago, they were arguing that terrorism was not a very scientific probability, and that terrorists had a moral impediment against taking life on a mass scale. So much for that. But if terrorism is real, then a clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is done for.

... [A]s Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, no one this week is calling his colleagues in the alternative energy sectors to ask about terrorist threats to windmills.

In the past decade, nearly half the nation's 103 power plants have failed mock terrorist attacks against them.

Starting next week, the Waterford 3 plant, which had boosted security to pass the NRC's terrorist exercise, will begin to reduce its training programs and its guard force. "As soon as the NRC leaves," says one guard, "they downgrade security."

Tuesday, 18 September 2001

Monday, 17 September 2001

Sunday, 16 September 2001

As real-life tragedy continues to unfold in New York and Washington, Hollywood is struggling with how -- or whether -- to release certain movies that once aimed to titillate audiences but now strike too close to home in a shellshocked nation.

At least two major movies have been put off: the action thriller "Collateral Damage," ... and "Big Trouble," a dark comedy ... Other films are undergoing last-minute revisions to suit a dramatically different social climate.

I think about movies now only because that is my job, and because New York's mayor, displaying unprecedented stature, has counseled us all to go back to work...

Network television screenings of The X-Files movie (in which an office tower explodes) and Independence Day (in which the White House explodes) have been canceled. It wouldn't feel right to be entertained by annihilation. But should it ever have felt right? Pauline Kael, who passed away a week before this happened, in that other era, wrote about the obscenity of the 1974 schlock epic The Towering Inferno, in which "each scene of a person horribly in flames is presented as a feat for our delectation..." It will be a while, after footage of people fleeing clouds of lethal debris, before we surrender to disaster-porn like that again -- although it should be said that, 10 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Japanese studio transformed the national trauma into a moneymaking machine named Gojira.

Tuesday's terrorist attacks had people in Washington dusting off their copies of a prescient -- if little read -- report in February by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, co-chaired by former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.).

The commission said, among other things, that "the United States finds itself on the brink of an unprecedented crisis of competence in government" and must "improve recruitment, retention, and effectiveness at all levels."

A significant problem, the study found, is that talented people don't want to work for the government anymore. One reason is that the private sector pays vastly higher salaries. Another reason "is that there is no single overarching motivation to entice patriotic Americans to public service as there was during the Cold War," a situation that may have changed this week.

"The anti-Washington bias may play well at home," Rudman said, "but it is self-defeating. I think we've got to recognize that the best way to have a lousy government is to have [government workers] think that no one cares and thinks highly of them. If people in high positions are demeaning" government, "you won't get competent people," he said.