(2001 Thread) Plane just crashed into the world trade center

[mr. cat]

New York Times

Government Clamps Down on Agency Web Sites

October 28, 2001

By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, government officials have been removing information from their agencies' Web sites on the Internet: the location and operating status of nuclear power plants, maps of the nation's transportation infrastructure and an array of other data suddenly deemed too sensitive for general consumption.

Their actions have touched off a difficult and growing debate about the balance between the public's right to know and the nation's heightened security needs in an era of terrorism.

Critics say the government is overreacting, restricting information needlessly and even removing information that would improve, not jeopardize, the public's safety, like details on environmental hazards that might be useful to local citizens.

"It's a balancing act," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a watchdog group that tries to increase the accessibility of government information, particularly on the environment. "I don't want to pretend that there's some bright line you can draw and say, `ah-ha, this is something that needs to be taken down, or kept up.' But in a democracy, you always need to err on the side of public information and the right to know."

Yet government officials say they are reacting to a different and more dangerous world. "Agencies are trying to do the right thing," said Rosetta Virgilio, a spokeswoman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The commission closed its Web site on Oct. 12 and has since returned a bare-bones version of it to the Internet. Like other agencies, the commission has formed an internal working group to review its public information for "anything that might be sensitive or might be helpful to adversaries," Ms. Virgilio said.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics restricted access to its "National Transportation Atlas Data Base" as a "precaution" shortly after Sept. 11, said a spokesman, David Smallen. Mr. Smallen said of the map gallery, "We've not totally refused access to it, but we're judging requests on a case-by-case basis."

The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has removed from its Web site a database with information on chemicals used at 15,000 industrial sites around the country, reflecting the "risk management plans" the industry must file with the federal government under the Clean Air Act. Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the agency, noted that these databases reflected the fears of an earlier era, "when Bhopal hit India, and people said, `Do I have a chemical plant near me that stores something dangerous I should know about?'"

This information is still available in government-run "reading rooms" around the country, officials said. But withdrawing it from the Internet has its critics. Mr. Bass argued that "the benefits outweigh the risks" in maintaining easy access to such data, saying that families have a right to know if their school or day care center is adjacent to a potentially dangerous chemical site. Moreover, he added, such information can be pieced together from many other sources, including the telephone book.

His group, OMB Watch, has continued to post "executive summaries" of those risk management plans on its Web site, part of what it calls RTK-Net, for "right to know."

"This is not an easy decision," Mr. Bass said. "We get hate mail. We get hate phone calls. It's amazing to say that, because for 12 years we've gotten accolades from presidents of both parties saying RTK-Net is wonderful."

Indeed, many people say they feel conflicted on this issue, regardless of their position. The Federation of American Scientists, whose Project on Government Secrecy was created 10 years ago to force more government information into the open, decided after Sept. 11 to remove data from its Web site on United States intelligence sites, nuclear weapon facilities and similar matters.

The decision was made to err on the side of caution, said Steve Aftergood, who founded the Project on Government Secrecy. "I have had to come to terms with the fact that government secrecy is not the worst thing in the world," Mr. Aftergood said. "There are worse things."

Still, many advocates of openness in government argue that officials are removing information indiscriminately from the Internet.

"The dismantling of these Web sites seems to have been done without much deliberation, and in more of a panic than a considered judgment as to whether or not the American public should be deprived of this information," said Paul K. McMasters, the First Amendment ombudsman at the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation that promotes freedom of the press.

"It is precisely at such times that citizens have not just a right to know but a need to know," he added.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a longtime advocate of the Freedom of Information Act, said through a spokesman, "As agencies use the discretion they have on what information they put on line for the public, there also needs to be Congressional oversight to make sure that discretion is not abused."

Still, there will be pressure from Congress in the other direction, too - to ensure that agencies are exercising enough caution in what they make available on the Internet

All this is based on an assumption that may be faulty, many engaged in this struggle say: that information once available can later be restricted, that the toothpaste, in other words, can be put back in the tube, in the age of the Internet. "The answer is how in the world could we?" Mr. McMasters said. "And if we could, would we want to?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/na...244f7b55ba5c58

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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[bren.1]

Catherine, although you probably won't get to read this soon, I hope you heal quickly. Perhaps you should look into feng shui for your bedroom. Improper positioning the bed in relation to the door can cause your chi to drain out, or be less effective. Or so they say. I'm not sure I completely believe it myself.

To everyone else, I think this forum should stay the way it is. I am learning a lot, and it is a great way for us to air our feelings and opinions. Kittyfoot pointed out that it is the only way some of us would exchange opinions. At least in cyberspace we don't let our prejudices and misconceptions get in the way of clear communication. Not as much as in the real world anyway.

 

[mr. cat]

[We had a "sick" building here in Portland, Oregon (U.S.A.). It took a huge effort by many people to get the building's owners to fix the problem. Obviously, none of the owners worked in the building.]

New York Times

Design of Newer Buildings Reduces Bioterrorism Risk

October 29, 2001

By JAMES GLANZ

The idea of protecting people in public and commercial buildings against a bioterror attack may conjure up 1950's-era pictures of students crouching under desks. But engineers and terrorism experts say advances in building design over the last 5 to 10 years have left the nation surprisingly well prepared to reduce the danger from insidious threats like airborne anthrax spores.

Those advances, many involving indoor air quality and energy efficiency, have grown out of mundane needs like filtering small particles from the air to prevent "sick-building syndrome" or reducing the amount of outdoor air that leaks inside and raises utility costs. Much more powerful technology is just beginning to reach the marketplace from military research programs that have focused on countering biological and chemical attacks.

"The way we design our buildings now, they're well built; they're tight," said Barney Burroughs, chairman of the committee that sets standards for ventilation filters at the American Society for Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, or Ashrae. "Commercial buildings have fine protection devices in them, because we are tempering the air."

Mr. Burroughs and others said, however, that the terror attacks could push building owners who have lagged behind those trends to meet or exceed recommended standards that do not generally have the force of law.

Though none of these changes can eliminate the threat entirely, more advanced and expensive technologies can push the level of protection much higher.

"We have a lot of information available that can assist any firms that would like to do this," said William Blewett, a mechanical engineer working on protection against chemical and biological agents at the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

Discussing the close connection between controlling indoor air quality and defending against bioterror "is something of a moral Catch-22 for us," said Jon Shaw, a spokesman in the Syracuse office of Carrier, the heating and cooling systems manufacturer.

"While there are ways that you can filter and catch small particles, to discuss how to do so publicly also creates an environment where you teach people how they can get around it," Mr. Shaw said.

But he said Carrier already marketed ventilation systems that maintained "positive pressure," or a slightly higher air pressure inside buildings than outside. Positive pressure can keep polluted air, or a cloud of a biological agent released outside, from entering a building without passing through its intake filters.

The company also markets things like high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters, that are continually irradiated by ultraviolet light. HEPA filters capture more than 99.97 percent of particles larger than half a micron, and ultraviolet light kills common bacteria, molds and fungi, as well as anthrax spores. A human hair is about 100 microns across.

Mr. Burroughs, who is also president of Building Wellness Consultancy Inc., said that even less expensive filters that met the latest Ashrae standards captured up to 95 percent of particles of five microns. He said many buildings still had older systems that captured less than 20 percent of those particles, adding that in the last decade "there has been a general upgrade across the board."

Efficient filters cannot prevent all exposure to a biological attack from within a building, as when people opened envelopes filled with fine powder contaminated with anthrax. But filters can stop the powder from spreading through the rest of the building through the ventilation system.

Measures that focus on thwarting biological and chemical attacks range from common-sensical and cheap to advanced and astronomically expensive, said Mr. Blewett of the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center.

He said, for example, that merely placing air intakes in new buildings high above the ground, in a protected area, went a long way toward protecting against one of the most feared types of attack, in which an agent is poured directly into the ventilation system.

The center's biological and chemical defense program has also outfitted about 200 buildings in the United States and overseas with elaborate ventilation and filtering systems to give nearly absolute protection against accidents or attacks.

Some of those buildings are schools, hospitals and jails near chemical depots, where accidental releases are a concern, and many are military installations that could be the target of attacks, Mr. Blewett said. Even so, he added, the users of those sophisticated systems faced some familiar problems. In some overseas military installations, he said, "they don't even do the routine maintenance, changing the dust filters."

Though many of those systems are very expensive, they are beginning to drop in cost and make their way into the commercial world, said Arthur Soma, product manager at Barnebey Sutcliffe, a company in Columbus, Ohio, that builds equipment for the program.

But Mr. Soma said the specialized nature of many of his projects, like a system at a county jail next to a chemical depot in Newport, Ind., made it hard to estimate costs in the marketplace.

The jail project, he said, not only required special filters but also bars over the ventilation ducts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/29/na...1a0c46704b434e

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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[kittyfoot]

I had a strange thought today...I wonder how the terrorist idiots felt when they awoke in hell with Satan laughing his ass off???

 

[mr. cat]

I think they looked at one another, shrugged and said, "Well, at least it's dry heat."

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[kittyfoot]

I thought you might all enjoy seeing the following web-page...http://www.ishaah.com/Flag2.htm

 

[adymarie]

I work in a federal gov't building in Canada. As America's closest allies there are times I fear retribution at my location as we are the regional headquarter building. They have enhanced security where anyone coming into the building has to go thru a security check point. This is a time of uncertainty. The only thing I am sure of is that freedom is worth any price. Men & women should have equal opportunities of education and work. To me freedom is equality.

 

[catspride]

That's the spirit AdyMarie, Just keep your eyes open and take all the good advice about opening letters. Not that that is the only way to spread anthrax spores... But I am in unreconstructed optimist in spite of all I have seen and experiences on the way to my gray hairs. And we do have to fight this strange war against the shadow play of terrorists. If we don't, they will gain and swell in numbers until they blot out our freedoms and the future of our children.

To my dear friends on this thread -- I see yet another specialist tomorrow about my eye, and I am, as usual, keeping my thoughts positive. By the way, not to endorse everything he says, I would like to send you a NYTimes article by Salman Rushie, if you haven't seen it. I will do it tomorrow, depending on how my eye interacts with my monitor.

Keep safe and responsible in these troubled times.

Peace,

 

[mr. cat]

New York Times

When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital

November 6, 2001

By GINA KOLATA

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 1 - The nation's capital was struck by a plague so terrible that 10 percent of the population died in a matter of months. People panicked. Everyone who could fled the city. Politicians seized the moment to try to gain advantages over their opponents.

An instant book appeared and became an international best seller, snapped up by some who wanted to read the gruesome details of the disease and its accompanying social disruption, and by others who wanted to pore over its list of the dead.

The city was Philadelphia in 1793, and the disease was yellow fever.

No one knew where the illness came from or how it was spreading. No one knew the best treatment or how to clean up the city. It was a hemorrhagic fever, Ebola-like in many symptoms. And it was, in a way, a natural form of bioterrorism.

Now, researchers at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia have found a cache of letters and documents from that terrible time, written by historic figures like Alexander Hamilton and Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a professor at what is now the University of Pennsylvania.

While the letters do not change the general picture of the epidemic, they offer new details and give the events immediacy.

Reading the letters, said Charles Greifenstein, the college's curator of archives, he felt "the vicarious archival thrill," adding "you can really feel like you're there, like you are part of the community."

In an odd twist, one of the letters - from June 1790 - describes a case of anthrax in a farmer, Nathaniel Browner. His doctor, Benjamin Say, writes that Mr. Browner had '`severe Chills" that were "followed by a violent pain in his head." He had a blister on his back, apparently caused by an anthrax infection of his skin, that was as big as a "garden sized pea" but grew until it was "about the size of a large hen's egg."

Dr. Say gave Mr. Browner poultices, complained that he was not called in early enough and asked two other doctors to consult. Then, said Mr. Greifenstein, the letter "just sort of ends." Dr. Say never tells whether Mr. Browner recovered.

The cache of letters had lain unnoticed in a locked drawer of a battered wooden box that looks like the slanted top of a lectern. It had been tucked into a corner of a vault on the second floor of the old brick building that houses the college. In June, needing storage space, Mr. Greifenstein decided it was time to throw the box away. He asked Leroy Green, the facilities foreman, to remove it.

"I was about to put it in the Dumpster, but I heard items moving around inside," Mr. Green said. He decided to break the lock on the drawer and investigate. To his astonishment, he saw a packet of yellowed papers tied with a string.

The 85 documents, dated from 1787 to 1889, included medical case studies, articles, meteorological data and letters. They are originals, Mr. Greifenstein concluded, after examining them and consulting other experts in the months since they were found. And the ones discussing the yellow fever epidemic seem eerily timely now, when the nation is reeling from anthrax attacks.

"The message to really consider when you look at the yellow fever in 1793 and anthrax today is that panic results from a lack of knowledge," said Dr. Allen R. Myers, president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and professor of medicine at Temple University.

"In the 1790's, we had useless treatment and we certainly had no understanding of the epidemiology of the disease," Dr. Myers said. "In the case of anthrax, we know a great deal about the organism but we're really trying to understand more about the transmission."

Of course, the anthrax attacks, while terrifying, have had nothing like the death toll of that yellow fever epidemic, which killed about 55,000 people in Philadelphia.

To put it in perspective, said Dr. Marc Micozzi, the executive director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, it would be as if a disease were to sweep through Washington and its suburbs today killing about 400,000 people between late August and November.

In a paper for a 1996 symposium on the Philadelphia epidemic, Dr. J. Worth Estes, an emeritus professor of pharmacology at the Boston University medical school, described the symptoms of yellow fever. Patients would complain of headaches and abdominal pain, but the disease, he wrote, was easy to spot by its colors: "yellow eyes and skin, purple hemorrhages into the skin, red blood pouring from the nose and mouth, black vomit."

A Philadelphia printer and bookseller, Mathew Carey, chronicled the epidemic in a self-published book. The first edition, which sold out in days, was dated Nov. 14, 1793, and by Jan. 26, 1794, it was in its fourth "improved" edition.

Mr. Carey wrote that patients would get sicker and sicker for four or five days. "If these symptoms were not soon relieved, a vomiting of matter, resembling coffee grounds in color and consistency, commonly called the black vomit, sometimes accompanied with or succeeded by hemorrhages from the nose, fauces [the oral pharyngeal passage], gums, and other parts of the body - a yellowish purple color and putrescent appearance of the whole body, hiccup, agitations, deep and distressed sighing, comatose, delerium, and finally death."

Doctors bitterly debated how to treat patients. One group, explained Gretchen Worden, director of the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, argued that if a treatment did not cure a patient or prolong life, it was worthless.

Dr. Rush was of this school, she said. He advocated treating yellow fever with bleedings and violent purges, including large doses of mercury and jalap, the root of a plant that grows in Mexico and is related to the morning glory. He himself got yellow fever during the epidemic but took his own treatment and recovered.

In one of the newly discovered letters, dated Oct. 2, 1793, Dr. Rush told Dr. Samuel Powel Griffitts, a founder of the College of Physicians: "I continue to use mercury in large doses, with great success. I have found 40 grains necessary in the course of the day to open the bowels. I rely upon no evacuations until they are large & bilious." He added, "I have only lost one patient who took mercury on the first day in the manner I have mentioned, & I think I have saved two in a very advanced stage of the disorder by it."

Other doctors believed in a gentler approach, reasoning that the body should be allowed to heal itself. They treated patients with rest and a mild diet, a bit of quinine and a cold bath every morning.

In one of the newly discovered letters, Alexander Hamilton, who also contracted yellow fever in the epidemic, credits the treatment with saving his life. But while the College of Physicians letter is the original, its text was well known because Hamilton sent it to Philadelphia's only newspaper at the time, The Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Advertiser, to attack Dr. Rush, who was a close friend of Hamilton's rival Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Greifenstein said.

While there is still no treatment for yellow fever, it is now known that the disease is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which picks up the virus while feeding on an infected person and transmits it to healthy people. There is a yellow fever vaccine, but the disease was eliminated in this country by wiping out the mosquito that carries it.

In 1793, however, doctors were baffled by the illness. Dr. Rush argued that it was infectious and arose when people lived in poor sanitary conditions. In his book on the epidemic, published in 1794, he wrote: "This discovery of the malignity - extent - and origin of a fever which I knew to be highly contagious as well as mortal gave me great pain. I did not hesitate to name it, the Bilious remitting Yellow Fever."

Others who thought the disease contagious said it came to the city with 2,000 French colonists who were fleeing from Haiti, noting that they had arrived just when the outbreak began. In his book, Mr. Carey advanced the refugee hypothesis:

"In July arrived the unfortunate fugitives from Cape Franconia. And on this occasion, the liberality of Philadelphia was displayed in a most respectable point of light. Nearly 12,000 dollars were in a few days collected for their relief. Little, alas! Did many of the contributors, then in early circumstances, imagine that a few weeks would leave their wives and children dependent on public charity, as has since unfortunately happened."

But, as the newly discovered letters illustrate, there was an active epidemiological investigation. A letter dated Nov. 9, 1793, from a Maj. Samuel Hodgson to the College of Physicians, explores evidence for a hypothesis that the disease came from a load of rotting coffee:

"The Sloop Amelia came to the Wharf the 23rd July and immediately began to discharge her Cargo - this Vessel was wholly loaded with Coffee in Bags the lower tier of which from the leaky condition of the Vessel were under water & found to be wholly rotten, and when thrown on the Wharf occasioned a most intolerable stench for several days. Two of her passengers or Crew I am informed died on board her while she lay at the Wharf."

Major Hodgson also considered the refugee hypothesis, telling of a ship that arrived on Aug. 7, "loaded with Passengers from the Cape all of which with their baggage were landed on the Wharf - from this Vessel I saw a woman taken, who appear'd to be extremely ill & with her child put on a Dray provided for her."

Without knowing how the disease was spreading, doctors were at a loss to prevent it, and as many as 20,000 people fled the city. Some found their way barred.

Hamilton left Philadelphia and traveled to Albany, attempting to visit his father-in-law. But, Mr. Greifenstein said, Hamilton was not allowed into the city for fear he would bring yellow fever with him.

In the meantime, social and business life in Philadelphia was fast disintegrating. In one of the newly discovered letters, dated Sept. 12, 1793, Hamilton told of the "undue panic which is fast depopulating the city and suspending business, public and private."

"Dismay and affright were visible in almost every person's countenance," Mr. Carey wrote in a chapter that he titled: "General despondency. Deplorable scenes. Frightful views of human nature. A noble and exhilarating contrast."

Afraid of contagion, people shunned their friends and acquaintances, Mr. Carey wrote. "The old custom of shaking hands fell into such general disuse, that many shrank back with affright at even the offer of a hand." And, he added, "many valued themselves highly on the skill and address with which they got to windward of every person whom they met."

Dr. Rush, believing that blacks were immune to yellow fever, asked two prominent black men, Absolom Jones and Richard Allen, to help.

The two persuaded the mayor to release black prisoners to help in the relief effort, which consisted of bleeding and purging patients and carrying away the bodies of the dead. Blacks turned out to be just as susceptible as whites, however, and many died of the fever.

The epidemic ended abruptly in November, with the first frost that killed the mosquitoes. On Nov. 14, the city's mayor announced that those who had fled could safely return.

And the newly discovered letters were stored away at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The mystery, however, is, How did they end up in that wooden box, which apparently dates from around 1900?

Ms. Worden, the museum director, said the papers probably were put there in 1901 by someone who was packing up the college's papers during its move to its present building. And, she added, it is possible that the box with its valuable papers had simply been kept in the locked closet ever since. It was found now, she added, because the college was renovating.

Dr. Micozzi agreed. "It was in the context of this huge renovation project," he said. "Things get turned over and brought to the surface. It's a little like plowing a field."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/06/he...1314f322db7ce5

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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[kittyfoot]

While I was driving along today listening to the news coverage of the NYC crash I was struck by the tone of those being interviewed. not the pros,the "common folks". No big panic,no emotional collapse.

It got me thinking...

For the past 40+ years we have been living with a threat that makes bin Laden and his bunch look like kids with firecrackers. The threat of Global Nuclear War. The 2 superpowers could have wiped mankind from the face of the earth many times over. That thought would have destroyed the will to survive of a weak people. But we all stood up to that. We built our lives in spite of it. We looked death in the eye and laughed. We are NOT a weak people!!

Bin Laden and his freaks think they're going to scare us into submission?? HA!! I DON'T THINK SO!!!

 

[catspride]

Hi, well-recovered now, and my eye hardly hurts anymore. It was not a good eye to begin with, and now is a little less than that, but the cat claw marks are fading fast into thin white lines and life is looking better until the next time -- a thought I share with New Yorkers.

By now it is ALMOST clear that this latest plane crash is just that. Like the one in the Black Sea -- the Russian airplane coming from Israel and accidently shot down during an Ukranian military exercise --

Just ordinary, run-of-the-mill disasters, and we've learned to cope with those.

Thought -- why does it seem so very much more terrible to have a plane brought down by terrorists -- I am thinking, in particular, about the Locherby plane -- than it does when a plane sort of naturally has an acciident? Often similar numbers of people are killed, and it is not at all unknown for a number of people on the ground to be hit by the crash or by falling debris from a plane that is breaking up. Earthquakes in Turkey recently killed numbers approaching the WTC atrocity. Yet we have in us to accept these things as deaths that are somehow more "natural" than terrorist deaths.

All unexpected and apparently untimely deaths are an atrocity. All victims should be wept over. The one we call "Acts of God," as if God were just standing around somewhere thinking up who and how he intends to kill that week. Do we see terrorists as something we can take vengence for -- not really feeling comfortable about declaring our own jihads against our God??

All unecessary deaths or killing should have our tears and and compassion, whether the people involved are associated with the "good guys" or the "baddies." I was deeply moved to saddness at the sight of Taliban and Pakistani volunteers to their cause shot or hung or beaten to death out of hand last night, as I was very sad about the three foreign journalists who were summarily killed yesterday by the Taliban in an ambush.

I cannot support the war against terrorism and terrorists any less than with my whole heart and intellect, but neither can I hold tears back when anyone meets these kinds of deaths. I pray for all of us to die the truly organically natural death when it is time for this great step past our present horizons -- to die quietly in our beds in our sleep, or in the comforting arms of those we love, in the certain knowledge that we have grown and matured more than we were at our births, and that we have learned to find harmony within ourselves and with our miraculous universe.

I pray that there will come a time when we shall be relatively free of gratuitous violence and the stupidities of wars.

We are perhaps the only organic species that seems wholly intent upon destroying its own young and its own future.

Peace and love,

Catherine

 

[mr. cat]

Amen!

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[lotsocats]

I'm so glad that your eye is improving and that the scars are fading!


I was remarking to my husband just this morning that isn't it amazing that we would be relieved to find out that the plane crash was an accident...in times past, we would be horrified and frightened by the thought of an airliner crashing just because...but now we're relieved that this is why it happened.

 

[ghostuser]

Has anyone else seen this statement by the BBC? I found this on CNN but could not find anymore about it.

• The BBC reported that Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar is speaking of a plan in the works to destroy the United States. "The current situation in Afghanistan is related to a bigger cause -- that is the destruction of America," Omar said. "If God's help is with us this will happen within a short period of time."

Meme

 

[lotsocats]

I heard this on NPR this morning. It sounds like a threat of despiration. And...it sounds to me just like the bully who gets his butt kicked by all the kids on the playground who storms off yelling "I'm gonna get you guys!" The Taliban have been kicked off the playground by all of the people who have come together to fight and so they have to show the little bit of bravado they have left as they run off to lick their wounds.

 

[catspride]

I hate to disagree, or inject any more nervous-inducing stuff, but the Taliban never were very good at pitched battles -- you will note that the really serious fighting is being done in areas where there are large numbers of Usbek and Pakistani volunteers. The Taliban themselves have no military, strategic sense beyond their historial mythologies that teach them that their country is the graveyard for all invaders, and their firm belief in their ability to win over all odds if the simply conduct raids from hiding places in the mountains. These tactics have worked for them in the past, and they believe that it will do so now.

Historically, Afghanis have never fought prolonged battles. They just fade away to fight another day. Which is why the US sent in the special forces. They are equipped and trained to fight through even the Afghani winter, and now they have been joined by British units of special forces who are highly experienced in these kinds of fracases. There will be no final resolution of terrorism ever, and it is a war that may eventually define this new century because we will be involved in it for a very long time. Afhanistan is only the opening round.

As for the "Taliban" statement reported on CNN, BBC, and elsewhere -- I don't doubt some kind of hit will come. Because the Taliban have not spoken in their own voice since the early days of the preparation for this war. I don't know if you noticed the very sudden sophisticated propaganda-type statements that began to broadcast or used in interviews. After several weeks of the Taliban trying to cope with the international press themselves, all of a sudden they were saying things that were direct or almost direct quote from bin Ladfen's tirades. Since that time, everything they say for public consumption has that nice polish of a speech writer tied to al-Queda interests. Bin Laden enjoys warning his vicitims of coming events in terms that are as vague as possible. But we ignore his threats at our peril, and I am sure the FBI and the CIA and others have focussed a lot of interest on those statements of coming destruction.

On the other hand, there is no reason at all to be nervous before the fact. It doesn't do any good and it clouds judgement and destroys pleasure in life before anything has actually blown up. Each lifetime is too short to waste on things that might or might not happen.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter.

Keep praying for peace,

Catherine

 

[Anne]

This has been a long and painful thread. As there were no new posts in the last 10 days or so, I think it may be time to unstick it.


Thank you everyone for contributing to this special thread!

 

[hissy]

For letting this be a sounding board and keeping it at the top. I learned a lot about myself since Sept. 11 and this thread helped me to know others as well. Thanks again for sticking it up there so we didn't have to go looking for it.

 

[catspride]

Yes, thank you Anne. We have finally accepted, I think, events of the 11th, and begun to turn ourselves back to normalcy tempered by the understanding that the world has taken another quantum leap into newness and change and uncertainties. Not that these things are anything new, but only that we are now fully and globally aware of them.

For those who would like to read much deeper into the background of the news, there is an interesting website that involves a lot of things that might not be published by more conventional news services. It is apparently operated by some journalist, with a lot of help from security and political established people who perhaps want to say more than is generally permissible.

Check of www.debka.com.

I hope that I will find a few partners in an occasional exchange of articles or new information on the changes we are going through in dealing with international terrorism, now that many countries in the world have decided to prioritize it. The coming struggles about the definition of terrorism should be very interesting and revealing.

But meanwhile, I am also rather glad to get back to my cats, and aim to retire to the Behaviior, Health, and other like CAT-egories.

I wish you all much love and peace,

 

[mr. cat]

This thread, begun by Buttercup 429 seemingly ages ago, has been a wonderful meeting-place. Thank you, Anne, for keeping it on top of this forum for so long! Hopefully, a similar thread will not need to be created any time soon.

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