More WTC News

Current WTC happenings: The FBI is searching ISPs with FISA warrants. Architects and civil engineers are starting to speculate on why the towers collapsed. Pictures: NASA, a powerful photoessay, newspaper headlines. Current investigation news: LA Times, NY Times, CNN. They're finally starting to mention casualty figures. Finally, bjb writes: "It isn't the hollywood blockbuster of a story, but I'm a daily reader of Slashdot, and I was on the 38th floor of the WTC 1 building when the first plane hit. Oh, and I was reading Slashdot at the time. You can read about my experience here. It was originally an email that I sent out to friends and family, but I was asked by NPR's Talk of the Nation to make it a web page."

Comments

And here comes Carnivore...

[rkischuk]

Apparently ISP's are allowing the installation of Carnivore. They say it's only for a few days, but we'll see how long that claim holds up...

Re:And here comes Carnivore...

[Sir_Real]

If we lose our civil liberties, then the terrorists have won.

Re:And here comes Carnivore...

[Omnifarious]

No amount of inconveniencing will give you the safety you crave.

Repeat after me...

No amount of 'inconveniencing' will give me the safety I crave.

Repeat it over and over as a mantra until you achieve enlightenment.

I could learn martial arts well, with a bunch of buddy's, get onto the plane, kill a few people with some well placed jabs, and take control. Would you be willing to be manacled to prevent this? You can make knives quickly out of many things. Take a stiff plastic or metal box for example. Are you going to make people strip before they get on the plane? I'm sure someone more imaginative than I can come up with scenarios in which even being stripped and manacled would not be enough.

There is no security in the direction you wish to go. As Benjamin Franklin said "Those who would trade liberty for security will get and deserve neither.".

The only way to prevent these attacks is to decrease the motivation to perform them. This is done by being a nicer country, and by being implacably and harshly punitive in our response to such attacks.

I will be traveling by air soon, and I intend to make up some leaflets to distribute at the airport about this. It's either that, or get upset at being patted down and create a scene. I think the leaflet approach to venting my frustrations is much more constructive.

Re:And here comes Carnivore...

[GungaDan]

"We gave up HUGE civil liberties during the war, because it was necessary to win the war."

I'm sure alot of the Japanese Americans who were "inconvenienced" (internment/inconvencience, what's the difference, right RM?) during WWII would see things differently. This is a balancing act for the govt., to be sure, but hyper-reactivity by hawkish proclaimers does not lend itself well to balancing. By seeing and responding to only one angle of this multifaceted issue, those who would bomb now and forget about asking questions later reveal the true nature of their response - anger is always a secondary emotion to fear. Fear is understandable. We all feel it right now. But while it's comforting for some to cover up that primary emotion with tough talk, it's also dangerous to those who might listen, and to the nation as a whole.

Re:And here comes Carnivore...

[jedinite]

Do you really think that if it was "illegal" for the terrorists to carry any knife on board the airplane, that FAA rule would have stopped this tragedy?

Get real...

Take your logic a step further - Congress needs to immediately pass legislation banning the hijacking of airplanes, and further banning the crashing of airplanes into buildings. Because if those specific laws were in existance, this tragedy could have been prevented. Yeah, that's the ticket...

Ban anything remotely resembling a weapon from going on an airplane. You still have two large problems:

1) the almost complete inability to detect these "banned" weapons given today's lax airport security and low-skilled minimum-wage "security" guards

2) the ability to kill without a "banned" weapon - a pen can easily be used to kill someone, bare hands, fingernails, whatever extreme you wish to take the example. The "prison" examples as frequently sited - prison bans all weapons, prisoners still manage to kill each other despite the bans.

The basic message of Omnifarious' posting is correct. Your statement is similar to another former slashdot arguement, that Columbine supposedly could have been prevented by tougher laws on carrying guns into a school. Right...

The people who put this attack into motion did not care about airline regulations, or laws of any kind. This was an act of terror, an act of war. Tougher rules at airports without increased levels of inforcement and inspection will accomplish NOTHING. The only response the people who committed this act were/are possibly considering is military response.

We have two options: respond militarily, or respond socially (change our public and political policies). I personally favor both - a swift (and devastating) military response (once a proper target is identified) and an attempt to shift our public and political policies in regards to terrorism, terrorist states, and etc.

Certainly, we can and should increase airport security. My base argument here is that flying (like driving) is a privledge and not a right. If I understand that I have to be knocked unconscious in order to fly on a public commercial airline, then I either choose to fly (and be drugged) or not. Likewise, more reasonable talks of banning all sorts of weapons on airplanes does not infringe upon my rights, only upon a privledge. Whether or not I feel it is intelligent to start taking weapons out of the hands of innocent people over this is a whole different matter (argument: ~20 civilians with large knifes on each plane would have almost certainly been able to prevent this sort of hijacking, had they tried to do so).

Don't Ask Why They Fell.

[Ardvaark]

Ask why they stood! The fact that any building was capable of taking a direct impact from a jetliner with a full load of fuel and then stand for over an hour (and allow lots of people to get out) is remarkable! We need to make sure we keep building them like that.

Trying to build skyscrapers aircraft-proof isn't feasible, I don't think. But building them capable of resisting that kind of trauma for at least a little while is.

What you must NOT do!

[absurd_spork]

We have failed by appeasing Islamic fanatics for 50 years, beginning
with the acceptance of the expropriation of oil wells which were made possible
by American science, technology, and engineering.

This is only partly correct. Most of the Middle Eastern oil wells were actually initially exploited by the British, which is also evident from the fact that most of the area was either British protectorate or heavily influenced by the British.

What we must do now is to destroy the leaders of the organizations which seek to
destroy us, and to render incapicitated the governmental and military
institutions of the states which bring them aid and comfort. We can begin with
Afghanistan, then proceed with Iran, Sudan, and Yemen, assuming those regimes are
not toppled by their own people when they witness the destruction we inflict upon
the Taliban. Iraq, Syria, and Libya would be next.

The problem is that it has not and never been proved that they are actually guilty of this.

If you want to save the principles of Western civilization, how about adhering to them in the first place? Like, not bombing someone out of existence because he said he didn't like you and someone else killed a couple of thousand people in your country?

With reactions like this, you can bet that:

• Whoever hates the USA already will not start loving them.
  
• Terrorism is hard to overcome. Remember, it's not Iran, Sudan and Yemen (do you even know where Yemen is, or do you just blindly involve them?), nor Iraq, Syria and Libya that are your enemies. It's a group of terrorists whose names you don't even know.
  

BTW As far as Syria is concerned, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has recently offered support to the US in combatting international terrorism. Now what, nuke 'em?

The problem is that America doesn't know what to do now. Throwing bombs around is probably not the best thing to do just because nobody can think of an alternative.

What we must NOT do

[frknfrk]

is to once again terrorize our own citizens. from anti-communist witch-hunts to asian-american ww2 camps to the generally accepted anti-Arab anti-Islamic trends of America for more than a decade, we still have a lot to learn, it seems.

Re:It's been said before...

[baptiste]

I respectfully submit that spouting 200 year old quotes about liberty is not helpful or applicable in the least.

Sure it is. Events like this open up the potential for society to give up liberties for perceived safety which probably isn't all that real. I for one worry about the future of our liberties in teh name of 'preventing another WTC'

I submit that these bastards could STILL get the weapons on board even with all the changes. No curb side checkin? LIke thats gonna make a DIFFERENCE? Its SO simple to make a weapon - just as a prisoner. Consider this:

Shaving kit - inside, one normal razor that uses a double edged blade. Blade installed, no spares. Elsewhere in your bag, a plastic or wooden handle of some kind with slot for blade, by itself or with other stuff that looks innocent. Maybe a little super glue. GO to a stall in a terminal bathroom. Take blade, insert in handle, glue in place. Slit someones throat when necessary and take over whatever vessel you're on. Think about it - you can probably come up with plenty on your own. Thats just one way and there are plenty others. These guys planned this for MONTHs as the reports of flight training indicate. You wouldn't even NEED to bring weapons with you - maybe one of your pals works IN THE TERMINAL past the checkpoints and cna give you a weapon of some kind. Banning plastic knives? OK - thats gonna help!

Face it folks - no matter WHAT happens, the only thing that could prevent something like this is sky marshals on EVERY flight in civilian clothes. And even then, they may not be able to overpower 5 guys with weapons (since shooting guns in the air is er, not a great idea)

So in short, I think our forefathers wisdom IS applicable and helpful to remind folks that we may be fooled into giving up liberties for supposed security that doesn't really exist

Re:The Buildings

[Exedore]

Agreed. That the buildings lasted as long as they did is a testament to the engineers who designed and built them. Can we do better the next time around? Absolutely... we have so much more materials and design research under our belts.

Complaining that the buildings "only" stood for about an hour or so seems silly to me. Some are asking, "Why did the buildings collapse?" Well, I'm no civil engineer, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's because THEY WERE RAMMED WITH BIG HONKING PASSENGER JETS CHOCK-FULL-O-FUEL. Sounds like a plausible explanation to me.

There will never again be a good day....

[dfenstrate]

to hijack a plane. The passengers and crew undoubtably cooperated to the extent they did because they thought it was some ransom bullshit.

Now that planes have been used themselves as weapons, and the passengers with them, I doubt there will be a high-jacking where they're aren't people like Glick and Barret, who are among the few passangers who apparently made sure that flight 93 crashed in PA woods, and not a national landmark.

The sentiment has been repeated over and over these past two days: "If I fall, the guy behind me will get him."

I hope that if such a day ever comes for me, I can get over my imminent death fast enough to do some good.

Nothing is more dangerous than someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.

Re:What we must do

[Isofarro]

We can begin with Afghanistan, then proceed with Iran, Sudan, and Yemen, assuming those regimes are not toppled by their own people when they witness the destruction we inflict upon the Taliban.

Logically this would make sense, but religious fanaticism is not based on logic but something more like brainwashing and indoctrination.

Remember these terrorists committed their acts in the belief they were doing the right thing. Even though there is no religion that I know of that could possibly condone such barbarism - this is not about religion, religion is a victim, along with countless innocent people. In that regard, there would be no "toppled by their own people" since these fundamentalists would rather die for their beliefs/brainwash.

A conventional war in Afganistan would be very costly. Remember the invincible Russian army was decimated. The problem is that there isn't a visible standing army, but a guerilla army that hides in the towns and cities. To push for victory in this theatre would involve levelling every village and town and leave nothing standing, which would involve thousands more innocent victims.

There isn't an easy answer, but a decision must be made. Why is US/Nato nuking/destruction all of Afganistan better that Tuesday's actions? To me it is still genocide.

Concentrate on eliminating all sources of indoctrination, remove the tools for brainwashing and intolerance - remember that the freedom of choice ends when the actions are criminal, fundamentalists behind this attack have abrogated their rights. Root out the organisations responsible. There is no quick solution, only a path that needs to be travelled. Once everyone on the planet has the freedom to choose their destiny can the barricades these terrorists have created be broken down.

Making the World Safe For

[Alien54]

Received in an email from a friend:

Maybe today my sign-off poem ("they were all good people") will make more sense. I've been sending you only very short poems, but today it's something a bit longer (about a page), a poem written at least 20 years ago that seemed to come back to life today:

Making The World Safe For

Yankee, you say, thinking
you understand me, thinking
the 24-point-headline ideas
by which WE fail to understand YOU
will suffice for understanding US.
We are your problem as you are ours;
Let us understand one another.
It won't be easy. While your children starve,
Most of us are trying to loose weight.
We speak from a different part
of the palate, look with a different
openness -- some say veiledness; we have
an innocence -- or is it barbaric daze;
idealism -- some say bullying self-righteousness;
squeamishness about death and torture
if we have to see it...
I am a fat, squeamish Yankee, taught
to understand you by your T-shirt-like labels:
"Kill Me", "Pity Me", "Exploit Me", "Bribe Me",
"Enjoy Me", "Fear Me". I AM not,
CANnot be the thing you think you see,
for I am what you are: the understanding,
not what is misunderstood, which is
where I am absent from myself, and so
become what is easiest to be,
because it fits the headline script:
The Fat Greedy Satan whose crime is
to have failed to make everyone like me;
whose crime is to have dreamed well,
but not well enough; to have created a game
so good, it became the only game in town,
but not good enough to let everyone play;
so now the new game is: Destroy my game.
If all can't have it, let no one have it.
Understand us: We do not need your help
to destroy America. We need your help
to create it. It has not yet been.
Understand us, for we do not. You,
who hate us or condescend to us or toady to us,
you trap us in your sticky visions,
which, hardening, preserve us, your nightmare,
like flies in amber. We cannot be that.
Please understand us. We don't want to destroy you.
But how else can we free ourselves
from your vision?

Dean Blehert
dean@blehert.com
poems and paintings at
www.blehert.com
"It's even sadder than you think:
They were ALL good people."

and as a final note:

Yes, of course -- you can post or forward any poem I send you. Just leave my name with it and, preferably, email and/or url. But at least the name.

Dean

The views of a Muslim in NY

[michael.creasy]

I didn't write this, I was sent it in an email, I don't know the original author. I am a muslim and I live in the US. I was born and raised in Canada with Indian background. I feel I need to help clear up what is true and what is not true with regards to Islam. Islam is a religion and a person practicing Islam is a muslim. There are five basics pillars of islam that any muslim should follow. All the guidance of what muslims should do is in the holy book called the Qu'ran or "Koran". Unfortunately, it seems that Bin Laden and others have taken religion as a vehicle to project their political hatred and motives. What he is doing, has nothing to do with Islam at all. Islam teaches people to be loving, peace giving, god fearing people. It teaches us to live with diversity, other religions, and humility. All the things that bin laden has said in the interviews and has done in the past are not words from the qu'ran but his words. And unfortunately the media and lack of real knowledge has blurred what is true and what is not. The statement by binladen that non-muslims cannot live in a muslim country is false - 100% false. India was ruled by muslims for 900 years, christians, muslims and hindus lived happily together. Same in palestine, before the partition, arab jews and arab muslims lived together for hundreds of years in peace. The main reasons for hatred and fighting the past 50 years was due more to political landscape than religion. Unfortunately, religion is a powerful tool that gets people motivated and people in power have used it as the lauch pad for fighting. Another item that binladen keeps talking about is Jihad or holy war. There is discussion of Jihad in the Qu'ran and when and why it is appropriate. It is never an offensive tactic. Jihad is only permitted when a muslim is being opppressed to practice their religion. Only real examples where Jihad may have been appropriate in recent years would be the Bosnian war where Bosnian muslims were being executed strictly based on their religion. But by no means, can a muslim country attack another country (muslim or not) as an act of Jihad. That is incorrect. the basics of islam are similar to christianity. Believe in one god. In arabic the word god is Allah. The god is the same between all three religions. jews, muslims and christians pray to the same god. That is very important to understand. But a true muslim is humble, not greedy, not arrogant and never shows jealousy. Tolerance, helping neighbours of any race, creed, or religion is the first thing. One of the five pillars of islam is to give to the poor. It's required, not a choice. As any religion or race, there are a small group of radicals that take any religion and bend it for their convenience. This seems to be the case with bin laden, saddam hussein, and others who have killed humans for their gain. None of these people will go to heaven as they believe they will. Jihad is not valid here nor does is it say to kill innocent children, parents, and siblings. Jihad only allows fighting among soliders, not civilians. Unfortunately these people are misled and doing very evil things that they will be punished for it. I'll stop rambling here..I hope this helps you guys get a better understand of what is going on. Just remember, Arab is a race..there are Arab Christians, Arab Jews and Arab muslims. At the moment radical arab muslims are causing trouble and doing things that are absolutely not tolerated in Islam at all. I hope these groups are stopped and removed. I was in NYC yesterday and I was there when it happened. I saw the second plane slam into the WTC 2. It was an experience I wish I had not witnessed. But we need to grow strong and not stereotype. best regards, a muslim in america.

Re:The views of a Muslim in NY

[aussersterne]

Thank god someone has said this.

Too many Americans have no idea what "Islam" is or what "Muslim" means -- they only see sensational media images of machine-gun-toting four-year-olds that are designed to get ratings.

What this person says is true: Jews, Christians and Muslims all pray to the same God. I do not mean this in some literary, allusory sense; I mean it literally. Most Christians know enough history to understand the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Most Christians in the western world do not realize, however, that a similar historical closeness exists between these two and Islam. The three religions are as family, and they do share the same God, no matter how they pronounce that God's name in their own language.

Furthermore, the basic tenets of all three religions include a respect for human life. Don't be fooled by people who use Islam as an excuse for violence; they are just as misguided as the Catholic inquisitors were hundreds of years ago.

Please, do not hate your Islamic or Arabic neighbors in the US, and please do not hate those in other countries based solely on religious or ethnic origin either. Do not hate, period. Desire instead to compassionately and methodically stamp out violence wherever it exists in the world and through whatever means it occurs (these means to not always consist of physical force).

I guess that's my rant. It's been smouldering for two days...

Re:The views of a Muslim in NY

[G-Man]

How the fuck did this idiocy get modded up to +5?

Totally atheist ideoligies have killed at least as many people in the last century as any religious fanatic.

Soviet Pogroms: 20 million
Khmer Rouge: 2 million
Chinese Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution: ?? million

Moron. Read the First Amendment. People can worship or not worship whatever deity, life-force, or shrub they want to. We have laws in this country to to govern what people can do *to* each other. You want to "rehabilitate" those who have a religious bent? Go fuck yourself.

Re:It's been said before...

[jd]

The RUC use rubber bullets. Well, sometimes. When they feel generous.

Could an airliner's skin be sufficiently toughened for Air Marshals to be able to use rubber bullets?

If not, tasers, those new infra-red stun devices the military are playing with - even a harpoon gun could be very effective against skyjackers.

A third option, that nobody seems to have mentioned - the pilots already have a "panic button" in the event of a skyjacking. This could easily also put the plane irreversibly on automatic pilot, or remote piloting, to ensure that the vehicle -could- not be used in this way, and WOULD land safely at the nearest suitable emergency runway.

There is a term, used in connection with hostile acts, and the response given. That term is "Dane Gold". It is said that in the times of King Ethelred the Unready, whenever the Danes landed a raiding fleet, King Ethelred would rather just pay them to go away. After a while, the Danes cottoned on to the fact that simply landing on a beach was an easy way to make money. And they made a lot of it.

Thus, today, when someone provides a means for a hostile force to repeatedly profit off exactly the same strategy, they are said to be paying "Dane Gold".

Provided it is even remotely possible for any terrorist organisation to use civilian aircraft as weapons against America, then America is vulnerable to paying that Dane Gold.

Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan adopted the philosophy of "the only ones paying are the other side". Often, this involved storming aircraft, with guns blazing. I, personally, have intense dislike for their hard-line attitudes. However, I'm not even going to question the fact that the legacy of their strategy was a massive reduction in such actions, in the air and at sea.

The only alternative I can see to their hardline tactics would be Air Marshals on every flight with enough disabling force to cripple any attempt, and some kind of "panic button" the pilot can use as a "last resort" to disable the controls beyond any person's ability to restore, in-flight.

Re:Architectural stuff

[unitron]

Agreed, they stood the impact of the jets admirably, and when they fell, they "failed safe" as much as possible under the circumstances, but, as bjb wrote, "The stairs are only wide enough for two people abreast...".

Sounds like some bean counter had the influence on the design that an engineer should have. Could be the basis of a huge class action wrongful death suit.

Sympathy matters

[ErfC]

I don't know if this is the right place to say this, but I don't know of a better one...

I'm a Canadian, but I've been as shaken up by all this as if I were American. The horror of what happened is independent of nation -- everybody (or almost everybody) on the entire planet was hurt by this. I can't imagine what the people in New York and Washington are going through, but I know it's a horrifying thing without anything resembling rational explantion.

Here in Edmonton, all flags are flying at half mast -- not just on government buildings, but anybody who has a flag is doing the same. In the Provincial Legislature Building, there are books that people are signing to express their condolences to America and tell you that you're not alone. A moment of silence has been recommended for 10am today.

Similar things are happening around the world.

And it matters. I was talking to an Arizonan friend of mine last night. We got to talking about all the ways the world is reaching out, about how people are trying to express their shock and horror and outrage all over the world, and she cried. She told me to tell everyone I could that it matters -- the books are not being signed in vain, the half-mast flags are being seen, the sympathy is felt.

It's as important as donating to the Red Cross.

Inconvenience vs. safety

[Omnifarious]

To those who are willing to be 'inconvenienced' at the aiport in order to be safe... No amount of inconveniencing will give you the safety you crave.

Repeat after me...

No amount of 'inconveniencing' will give me the safety I crave.

Repeat it over and over as a mantra until you achieve enlightenment.

I could learn martial arts well, with a bunch of buddy's, get onto the plane, kill a few people with some well placed jabs, and take control. Would you be willing to be manacled to prevent this? You can make knives quickly out of many things. Take a stiff plastic or metal box for example. Are you going to make people strip before they get on the plane? I'm sure someone more imaginative than I can come up with scenarios in which even being stripped and manacled would not be enough.

There is no security in the direction you wish to go. As Benjamin Franklin said "Those who would trade liberty for security will get and deserve neither.".

The only way to prevent these attacks is to decrease the motivation to perform them. This is done by being a nice country, and by being implacably and harshly punitive in our response to such attacks.

I will be traveling by air soon, and I intend to make up some leaflets to distribute at the airport about this. It's either that, or get upset at being patted down and create a scene. I think the leaflet approach to venting my frustrations is much more constructive.

Hatred against muslims

[hey!]

Islamic fundamentalism is just as dangerous to the world as National Socialism (Nazi) ever was.

Be careful -- there may be truth in what you say, but it can be misinterpreted.

This is a good place to point out that Islamic leaders around the world have condemned the attack as inhuman and un-islamic. American Islamic leaders in particular have directed their followers to donate blood, money, to volunteer in the emergency response and to assist law enforcement in any way they can. It is also very likely that some of the victims of this crime were muslims themselves.

The US press has not picked up on this yet, but the foreign press (e.g. The London times) is starting to to report the beginning of a wave of hate crimes in America against Muslims. I even heard one congressinal pinhead libelling Islam as a totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion. These developments are disgraceful and unworthy.

The real division is not between religions, but between people who believe there can be civilized coexistence between people who have different viewpoints, and those who believe that one side can only enjoy freedom at the expense of the other. Osama bin Laden is one of the latter, and he deivides into two camps: the Christian/Jewish side and the Muslim side. People spreading religious or ethnic hatred are, in effect agreeing with him and doing his work; their personal feelings towards him are simply petty tribalism.

Make no mistake: America was targeted because we are a free, open and pluralistic society where muslims can coexist peacefully with christians, jews and even atheists. This marks us out for special hatred,and with good reason: our success and preeminence in the world shows that all ideologies of intolerance preaching freedom for one viewpoint through the oppression of others are lies.

Concerns and Analysis

[rsborg]

When this happened, I had a lot of thoughts going through my head... but found it difficult to clearly say what I felt...

So I will leave that to someone esle (who is much more qualified to do so):

>Subject: It Doesn't Have to Be Like This
>Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 13:14:00 -0400

Death, Downtown
Dear friends,
I was supposed to fly today on the 4:30 PM American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK. But tonight I find myself stuck in L.A. with an incredible range of emotions over what has happened on the island where I work and live in New York City.

My wife and I spent the first hours of the day -- after being awakened by phone calls from our parents at 6:40am PT -- trying to contact our daughter at school in New York and our friend JoAnn who works near the World Trade Center.

I called JoAnn at her office. As someone picked up, the first tower imploded, and the person answering the phone screamed and ran out, leaving me no clue as to whether or not she or JoAnn would live.

It was a sick, horrible, frightening day.

On December 27, 1985 I found myself caught in the middle of a terrorist incident at the Vienna airport -- which left 30 people dead, both there and at the Rome airport. (The machine-gunning of passengers in each city was timed to occur at the same moment.)

I do not feel like discussing that event tonight because it still brings up too much despair and confusion as to how and why I got to live... a fluke, a mistake, a few feet on the tarmac, and I am still here, there but for the grace of...
Safe. Secure. I'm an American, living in America. I like my illusions. I walk through a metal detector, I put my carry-ons through an x-ray machine, and I know all will be well.

Here's a short list of my experiences lately with airport security:

* At the Newark Airport, the plane is late at boarding everyone. The counter can't find my seat. So I am told to just "go ahead and get on" -- without a ticket!

* At Detroit Metro Airport, I don't want to put the lunch I just bought at the deli through the x-ray machine so, as I pass through the metal detector, I hand the sack to the guard through the space between the detector and the x-ray machine. I tell him "It's just a sandwich." He believes me and doesn't bother to check. The sack has gone through neither security device.

* At LaGuardia in New York, I check a piece of luggage, but decide to catch a later plane. The first plane leaves without me, but with my bag -- no one knowing what is in it.

* Back in Detroit, I take my time getting off the commuter plane. By the time I have come down its stairs, the bus that takes the passengers to the terminal has left -- without me. I am alone on the tarmac, free to wander wherever I want. So I do. Eventually, I flag down a pick-up truck and an airplane mechanic gives me a ride the rest of the way to the terminal.

* I have brought knives, razors; and once, my traveling companion brought a hammer and chisel. No one stopped us. Of course,
I have gotten away with all of this because the airlines consider my safety SO important, they pay rent-a-cops $5.75 an hour to make sure the bad guys don't get on my plane. That is what my life is worth -- less than the cost of an oil change.

Too harsh, you say? Well, chew on this: a first-year pilot on American Eagle (the commuter arm of American Airlines) receives around $15,000 a year in annual pay.

That's right -- $15,000 for the person who has your life in his hands. Until recently, Continental Express paid a little over $13,000 a year. There was one guy, an American Eagle pilot, who had four kids so he went down to the welfare office and applied for food stamps -- and he was eligible!

Someone on welfare is flying my plane? Is this for real? Yes, it is. So spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the FAA is taking. They, like all businesses, are concerned about one thing -- the bottom line and the profit margin.

Four teams of 3-5 people were all able to penetrate airport security on the same morning at 3 different airports and pull off this heinous act? My only response is -- that's all?

Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the "terrorist threat" and today's scariest dude on planet earth -- Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows, maybe he did it. But, something just doesn't add up.

Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?

Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today?

Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause -- but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I don't know. What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except this one fact -- WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden!

Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!

Don't take my word for it -- I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it all out. When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

We abhor terrorism -- unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing.

We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!

We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.

We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.

Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted by a guy from the desert but rather by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the federal government.

From the first minutes of today's events, I never heard that possibility suggested. Why is that?

Maybe it's because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It's much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn't look like us.

Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn't want to hear any more talk about more money for education or health care -- we should have only one priority: our self-defense.

Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race -- you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all.
The Senators and Congressmen tonight broke out in a spontaneous version of "God Bless America." They're not a bad group of singers!

Yes, God, please do bless us.

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!
Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity...

Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.
It doesn't have to be like this...
Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com

Is this a "war"?

[ajs]

This is a touchy topic, so stop reading here if speculation about the legal implications will bother you.

Time and again, I hear politicians from the mayor of NY to congress to the president refering to this as an act of war (see the president's most recent remarks).

There's a problem with this. If this was an act of war, it cannot, by definition be a federal crime, no?

What's more, if this was an act of war, anyone we "capture" is a prisoner of war, and we must obey the terms of the Geneva Convention and other international treaties. They will have to be re-patriated after the conflict, or brought before an international court for war crimes, NOT tried for federal crimes in the U.S.

Now, I can see the attack on the WTC being called out as a war crime, but if we treat this as an act of war, the Pentagon was a valid military target, and the attack on that building was legal (the point could even be made that Bin Laden had made it quite clear that he had declared war on the U.S. before the attack, unlike the Japanese who had tried but failed to do so before Pearl Harbor). The use of a commercial airline to do it is obviously not acceptable, but I'm not sure how much weight that will carry in a war crimes tribunal.

What I'm trying to say is that we've painted ourselves a very restrictive map here. There's no such thing as "murder" in the criminal sense in an act of war. There's only international treaty on the rules of war.

Now, I'm not a lawyer (I hate the acronym), and I could be wildly off-base here, but is this just short-sightedness or have we decided that the support that we get from the international community as a result of an act of war outweighs our desire to bring these criminals (soldiers?) to trial? Or, are we just planning to ignore international law, and bring anyone we capture to trial anyway?

Loss of privacy is not necessarily loss of liberty

[cryptochrome]

Call it my contrarian nature, but amidst all the usual self-centered-libertarian-police-state-paranoia, I feel compelled to point out that loss of privacy is not necessarily loss of liberty. Nowhere is it guaranteed even in the US constitution; never has it been established that privacy actually produces a freer society; and in practice the idea that you can actually have privacy is a total myth. David Brin makes a good case in his for all of this and more in his controversial The Transparent Society (chapter one available here). His core arguement is for complete transparency - that all citizens should be allowed to observe the activities of individuals, government, and business - rather than the alternative of those having the power to do so using surveillance to their private advantage. While you'll almost certainly have objections, it's well worth consideration, and it's always worth it to look at things from an alternative perspective.