IMO, one thing we can not do is to spend 10 years to compile forensic evidence that may hold up in some international court, a la Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Someone has declared war on us. First we find out who. This shouldn't be hard. It was a big operation. Many people know who did what---by a combination of bribes, forceful armtwisting and Intelligence, we find out who.

If it was individuals, then we apply the Mossad/KGB tactic (ie, our agents assassinate the guilty persons, immediately). The US then denies any complicity in the assassinations but the terrorists know what happened. If another state was involved, then a legal war should be declared and that state must be conquered. Yes, that will cost more US lives but if there is no retribution then we are just sitting ducks for more terrorism.

Does anyone seriously think this will be resolved by international law? Does anyone seriously think the UN will (or even wants to) do anything? This was a drive-by shooting. It demands street justice. Now!

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), September 11, 2001

Answers

I am an American. I am a Muslim. I am heartsick.

-- (Ahmed@Detroit.MI), September 11, 2001.

Ahmed, my heart goes out to you.

-- helen (turning@against.the.innocent), September 11, 2001.

Ahmed, I'm concerned about your safety, with so much anger looking for an outlet. Do you and your family have someone who is watching your back locally?

I've just written to our superintendent of schools, to make sure there watching for any bullying and retaliation against any Muslim students we have in the district.

-- Firemouse (sorrow@broken.hearts), September 11, 2001.

Calm down Lars, you're gonna pee yourself.

-- Osama (Binl@din.org), September 11, 2001.

Lars,

First we should bomb the shit on Afghanistan, just on general principle. Start at the south and literally blow the shit out of every city, village, hamlet, tent and camel watering hole.

Next stop Baghdad. Just because we should have gotten Saddam the last time. Final move end the Israeli/Palestinian question once and for all. Not in Arafat's favor either.

Might seem a little extreme but in order to discourage this type of shit from ever happening again very, very forceful action is required in my opinion.

-- Jack Booted Thug (governmentconspiracy@NWO.com), September 11, 2001.

by a combination of bribes, forceful armtwisting and Intelligence, we find out who.

"Intelligence"? What Intelligence?

-- (Roland@hatemail.com), September 11, 2001.

JBT--

I don't buy that. Just because they deliberately killed civilians doesn't mean that we should do the same thing. We can find out exactly who did this. They die, no one else. And no court procedings that serve only to martyrize them.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), September 11, 2001.

A number of years ago, the Israelis had Arafat bottled up, and they, in the interest of humanitarianism, let him go. Ten years ago, kinda, we had Sadam Hussein defeated, and stopped short of removing him from power.

We have now received their thanks. Let us pray that our leaders will not make the same mistake again.

-- Garryowen (anon@spamproblems.gag), September 11, 2001.

OK Lars, you don't like that method (even though i think it has the kind of message that some of these terrorist types could understand) how about this.

Bounty, one billion dollars reward for bin Laden, dead. you have to provide the head and both hands to collect. Produce them and the cash is your. As a side incentive, one hundred million dollars for any close relative of his, dead. Same proof required to collect.

When bin Laden's head has been presented we stuff it and put in the Smithsonian so terrorist tourists see what happens to those that fuck around with us. Better?

-- Jack Booted Thug (governmentconspiracy@NWO.com), September 11, 2001.

Well JBT, that assumes Usama did it (with support) and that does seems to be the popular consensus at this time. Sure, if he did it, administer radical Islamic justice, whatever that is---decapitation, stoning, flaying, buried alive in camel shit, whatever.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), September 11, 2001.

If he didn't do it does it matter. I mean his record isn't too upstanding.

-- Jack Booted Thug (governmentconspiracy@NWO.com), September 11, 2001.

What JBT said both times. We've had these sonsabitches before and let them go, for whatever reason. HOPEFULLY, it's different this time and we REALLY do something about it.

We lost a lot of US today and THEY are having a fucking party. I've never felt so much rage in my life.

Did I mention my wife is still in the UK? Will she get home this week? Who knows......she is scheduled to arrive here Thursday evening. I finally got thru to her late this afternoon (We're sorry sir, these circuts are busy......). She tells me the Brits are pretty pissed too.

Deano

-- Deano (deano@luvthebeach.com), September 11, 2001.

OK, we all agree. Hang "them" by their balls. Then what? This country is wide open to more terrorism of all types. Planes, bombs, bio, you name it.

There are people out there who hate us. Unlike the Soviets, they are not deterred by our potential retaliation. There will be terrorists. How do we protect ourselves in the future without becoming a police state? How did these jerks simultaneously hijack 4 planes with such ease? Why did our intelligence services not pick up on this in advance?

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), September 11, 2001.

Lars

I honestly believe we got too relaxed and basically, "fucked up" on a huge scale. You can bet the mortgage things will change. Police state? Probably not, but if you're entering the country from abroad, it may seem like one. I'll let you know when I pick Wendy up from the airport when they allow it.

I may have a couple of extra tickets to the Tennessee at Florida game this weekend (if it happens this weekend).

Deano

-- Deano (deano@luvthebeach.com), September 11, 2001.

who sets things up--for political reasons??? WHO gains from this???

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), September 11, 2001.

We've got to grab those sons'a bitches by the throats, kick 'em in the ass, and bomb 'em back to the stone age. Do it soon and do it with every fucking weapon in the arsenal.

as you were

-- George S Patton (JustKickin@ss.org), September 11, 2001.

[I posted this on Socrates' "Get ready for a new way of living" thread]

Some random thoughts on the events of the day.

Many people have used the "Pearl Harbour" analogy. I think that analogy fits only so far in that this was a surprise attack. In 1941 America knew who attacked it and knew how and where to fight back. In 2001 that is not the case.

Socrates said get ready for a "new way of living". I second that. I grew up in Northern Ireland, emigrating to Canada in 1977 with my family. Standard operating procedures at Belfast Int'l Airport in the 70s and 80s was that you got searched THREE times before you got on a plane. Once, to get into the terminal building. A second time after you check in and a third time at the gate. It is noteworthy that Belfast never had a hijacking.

There will be calls for vengeance, for America to retaliate quickly and harshly. But whom and what do you bomb? How do you fight people who are willing to sacrifice themselves as the means of furthering their cause. US attacks that kill Arab women and children will just fuel more resentment and fill the ranks of potential suicide bombers.

I'm not sure a military response will solve this problem. Again, I draw an analogy to Northern Ireland. The logistical sophistication and weaponry of the British Army was unable to defeat the IRA over 25 years (1969-1994). We may be at the end game in Northern Ireland, but we've got there over the past 5 years because a majority of the "combatants" realized that negotiation was going to be the only way to a solution. Militarily, both sides were stalemated.

Perhaps I will be excoriated for saying this, but the US must address the grievances that fuel the conflict in the Middle East. Bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran etc will not solve anything in the longer term, even if it slakes - in the short term - the thirst for vengeance.

Finally, what we saw today is, in my opinion, the type of attack that the proposed Missile Defence Shield would have been completely useless against. Once the initial shock of the day has passed, and all those who perished have been buried, is it time for a national debate in your country about allocation of defence resources? Is it time to re-direct some of the high-tech dollars into old fashioned "Human Intelligence" - i.e. developing spies, double agents, turncoats? Do you put more money into airport security (with the concomitant costs passed on in higher fares?

As I sign off for the night, my thoughts are with all those who lost loved ones in this terribe day.

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), September 12, 2001.

"There will be calls for vengeance, for America to retaliate quickly and harshly. But whom and what do you bomb? How do you fight people who are willing to sacrifice themselves as the means of furthering their cause. US attacks that kill Arab women and children will just fuel more resentment and fill the ranks of potential suicide bombers. "

Again, there will only be resentment in survivors, if all the arabs were killed at once a la dresden or hiroshima, no resentment. Enough is enough.

-- Time (to@finish.the.game), September 12, 2001.

Johnny I understand what you're saying but we're not dealing with any rational people. You say, "US attacks that kill Arab women and children will just fuel more resentment". I disagree. They treat their women like dogs. They don't care about their women the way you and the rest of the civilized world does. They kill their women with only a suspicion of wrong doing. These are not normal thinking people.

You also write, "How do you fight people who are willing to sacrifice themselves as the means of furthering their cause." We destroy their training camps and supplies, kill them, and send a strong message to any who support them with whatever sanctions. I just hope the congress in fact declares war so that we can go after them.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), September 12, 2001.

Outta today's Wall Street Journal, from, IMHO, one of the great essayists of our time...

We Beat Hitler. We Can Vanquish This Foe Too.

BY MARK HELPRIN

The Wall Street Journal

Wednesday, September 12, 2001 12:00 a.m. EDT

America, it is said, is slow to awaken, and indeed it is, but once America stirs, its resolution can be matchless and its ferocity a stunning surprise.

The enemy we face today, though barbaric and ingenious, is hardly comparable to the masters of the Third Reich, whose doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Berlin that we had reduced to rubble. Nor is he comparable to the commanders of the Japanese Empire, whose doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Tokyo we had reduced to rubble. Nor to the Soviet Empire that we faced down patiently over half a century, nor to the great British Empire from which we broke free in a long and taxing struggle that affords a better picture of our kith and kin than any the world may have today of who we are and of what we are capable.

And today's enemy, though he is not morally developed enough to comprehend the difference between civilians and combatants, is neither faceless nor without a place in which we can address him. If he is Osama bin Laden, he lives in Afghanistan, and his hosts, the Taliban, bear responsibility for sheltering him; if he is Saddam Hussein, he lives in Baghdad; if he is Yasser Arafat, he lives in Gaza; and so on. Our problem is not his anonymity but that we have refused the precise warnings, delivered over more than a decade, of those who understood the nature of what was coming--and of what is yet to come, which will undoubtedly be worse.

The first salvos of any war are seldom the most destructive. Consider that in this recent outrage the damage was done by the combined explosive power of three crashed civilian airliners. As the initial shock wears off it will be obvious that this was a demonstration shot intended to extract political concessions and surrender, a call to fix our attention on the prospect of a nuclear detonation or a chemical or biological attack, both of which would exceed what happened yesterday by several orders of magnitude.

It will get worse, but appeasement will make it no better. That we have promised retaliation for decades and then always drawn back, hoping that we could get through if we simply did not provoke the enemy, is appeasement, and it must be quite clear by now even to those who perpetually appease that appeasement simply does not work. Therefore, what must be done? Above all, we must make no promise of retaliation that is not honored; in this we have erred too many times. It is a bipartisan failing and it should never be repeated.

Let this spectacular act of terrorism be the decisive repudiation of the mistaken assumptions that conventional warfare is a thing of the past, that there is a safe window in which we can cut force structure while investing in the revolution in military affairs, that bases and infrastructure abroad have become unnecessary, that the day of the infantryman is dead, and, most importantly, that slighting military expenditure and preparedness is anything but an invitation to death and defeat.

Short of a major rebuilding, we cannot now inflict upon Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden the great and instantaneous shock with which they should be afflicted. That requires not surgical strikes by aircraft based in the United States, but expeditionary forces with extravagant basing and equipment. It requires not 10 aircraft carrier battle groups but, to do it right and when and where needed, 20. It requires not only all the infantry divisions, transport, and air wings that we have needlessly given up in the last decade, but many more. It requires special operations forces not of 35,000, but of 100,000.

For the challenge is asymmetrical. Terrorist camps must be raided and destroyed, and their reconstitution continually repressed. Intelligence gathering of all types must be greatly augmented, for by its nature it can never be sufficient to the task, so we must build it and spend upon it until it hurts. The nuclear weapons programs, depots, and infrastructure of what Madeleine Albright so delicately used to call "states of concern" must, in a most un-Albrightian phrase, be destroyed. As they are scattered around the globe, it cannot be easy. Security and civil defense at home and at American facilities overseas must be strengthened to the point where we are able to fight with due diligence in this war that has been brought to us now so vividly by an alien civilization that seeks our destruction.

The course of such a war will bring us greater suffering than it has brought to date, and if we are to fight it as we must we will have less in material things. But if, as we have so many times before, we rise to the occasion, we will not enjoy merely the illusions of safety, victory, and honor, but those things themselves. In our history it is clear that never have they come cheap and often they have come late, but always, in the end, they come in flood, and always in the end, the decision is ours.

Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

-- Eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), September 12, 2001.

An insightful essay from today's Wall Street Journal...

Mistakes Made The Catastrophe Possible

What went wrong with U.S. antiterrorism policy.

BY DANIEL PIPES

Wednesday, September 12, 2001 12:00 a.m. EDT

It is likely that more Americans died yesterday due to acts of violence than on any other single day in American history.

Two parties are responsible for this sequence of atrocities. The moral blame falls exclusively on the perpetrators, who as of this writing remain unknown.

The tactical blame falls on the U.S. government, which has grievously failed in its topmost duty, to protect American citizens from harm. Specialists on terrorism have been aware for years of this dereliction of duty; now the whole world knows it. Despite a steady beat of major, organized terrorist incidents over 18 years (since the car bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983), Washington has not taken the issue seriously.

Here are some of its mistakes:

• Seeing terrorism as a crime. American officials have consistently taken the view that terrorism is a form of criminal activity. Consequently, they have made their goal the arrest and trial of perpetrators who carry out violent acts. That's fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. This legalistic mindset allows the funders, planners, organizers and commanders of terrorism to continue their work untouched, ready to carry out more attacks. The better approach is to see terrorism as a form of warfare and to target not just those foot soldiers who actually carry out the violence but the organizations and governments that stand behind them.

• Relying too much on electronic intelligence. It's a lot easier to place an oversized ear in the sky than to place agents in the inner circle of a terrorist group, and so the Central Intelligence Agency and other information-gathering agencies have put on their headphones and listened. Clearly, this is not enough. The planning for the events that took place yesterday requires vast preparation involving many people over a long period of time. That the U.S. government did not have a clue points to nearly criminal ignorance. As critics like Reuel Marc Gerecht keep hammering home, American intelligence services must learn foreign languages, become culturally knowledgeable and befriend the right people.

• Not understanding the hate-America mentality. Buildings like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon loom very large as symbols of America's commercial and military presence around the world. The trade center has already been attacked once before, in a bombing in February 1993. It should have been clear that these buildings would be the priority targets, and the authorities should have provided them with special protection.

• Ignoring the terrorist infrastructure in this country. Many indications point to the development of a large Islamist terror network within the United States, one visible to anyone who cared to see it. Already in early 1997, Steven Emerson told the Middle East Quarterly that the threat of terrorism "is greater now than before the World Trade Center bombing as the numbers of these groups and their members expand. In fact, I would say that the infrastructure now exists to carry off 20 simultaneous World Trade Center-type bombings across the United States."

The information was out there but law enforcement and politicians did not want to see it. The time has come to crack down, and hard, on those connected to this terror infrastructure.

If any good is to come out of yesterday's deaths and trauma, it will be the prompting of an urgent and dramatic change of course in U.S. policy, one that looks at the threat to the United States as a military one, that relies on human intelligence, that comprehends the terrorist mentality, and that closes down the domestic network of terror.

An easy assumption pervaded the airwaves yesterday that the morning's horrors will have the effect of waking Americans to the threat in their midst. I am less optimistic, remembering similar assumptions eight years ago in the aftermath of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. That turned out not to be the wake-up call expected at the time. Perhaps because only six people died then, perhaps because the bombing was not accompanied or followed by other incidents, that episode disappeared down the memory hole. We owe it to yesterday's many victims not to go back to sleep again.

We also owe it to ourselves, for I suspect that yesterday's events are just a foretaste of what the future holds in store. Assuming that the attacks in New York and in the Washington area were only what they seemed to be, they killed and injured only those who were in the buildings under attack or in their immediate vicinity. Future attacks are likely to be biological, spreading germs that potentially could threaten the whole country. When that day comes, this country will truly know what devastation terrorism can cause. Now is the time to prepare for that danger and make sure it never happens.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.

-- Eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), September 12, 2001.

• Ignoring the terrorist infrastructure in this country. Many indications point to the development of a large Islamist terror network within the United States, one visible to anyone who cared to see it. Already in early 1997, Steven Emerson told the Middle East Quarterly that the threat of terrorism "is greater now than before the World Trade Center bombing as the numbers of these groups and their members expand.

Unfortunately this is true and the majority of American Muslims who are patriotic Americans will suffer.

BTW, Canada is the entry point to America of many Arab terrorists. Johnny and Tricia Canuck, please copy. infrastructure now exists to carry off 20 simultaneous World Trade Center-type bombings across the United States."

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), September 12, 2001.

I have friends who are from the middle east whom are good, kind, God- fearing-and-loving people. I worry for their safety and how they are treated amidst all of this hatred. I have already heard words of poison directed toward anyone who remotely resembles one from that region. And I heard stories of NYC cabbies being beaten like Reginald Denny, though I have no details. They, and the people who died in those buildings. all victims of this hatred. Makes me sick to my stomach.

-- (cin@cin.cin), September 12, 2001.