On a trip to Pakistan a few years ago I was talking to an ex-General about the militant Islamist groups in the region. I asked him why these people, who had happily accepted funds and weapons from the United States throughout the Cold War, had become violently anti-American overnight. He explained that they were not alone. Many Pakistan officers who had served the US loyally from 1951 onwards felt humiliated by Washington’s indifference.
 
 

‘Pakistan was the condom the Americans needed to enter Afghanistan’, he said. ‘We’ve served our purpose and they think we can be just flushed down the toilet.’
 
 

The old condom is being fished out for use once again, but will it work? The new ‘coalition against terrorism’ needs the services of the Pakistan Army, but General Musharraf will have to be extremely cautious. An over-commitment to Washington could lead to a civil war in Pakistan and split the Armed Forces. A great deal has changed over the last two decades, but the ironies of history continue to multiply.
 
 

In Pakistan itself, Islamism derived its strength from state patronage rather than popular support. The ascendancy of religious fundamentalism is the legacy of a previous military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq who received solid backing from Washington and London throughout his 11 years as dictator.
 
 

It was during his rule (1977-89) that a network of madrassahs (religious boarding schools), funded by the Saudi regime, were created.
 
 

The children, who were later sent to fight as Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, were taught to banish all doubt. The only truth was divine truth. Anyone who rebelled against the imam rebelled against Allah. The madrassahs had only one aim: the production of deracinated fanatics in the name of a bleak Islamic cosmpolitanism. The primers taught that the Urdu letter jeem stood for ‘jihad’; tay for ‘tope’(cannon) , kaaf for Kalashnikov and khay for khoon (blood).
 
 

2500 madrassahs produced a crop of 225,000 fanatics ready to kill and die for their faith when asked to do so by their religious leadersDespatched across the border by the Pakistan Army, they were hurled into battle against other Muslims they were told were not true Muslims. The Taliban creed is an ultra-sectarian strain, inspired by the Wahhabi sect that rules Saudi Arabia. The severity of the Afghan mullahs has been denounced by Sunni clerics at al-Azhar in Cairo and Shi-ite theologians in Qom as a disgrace to the Prophet.
 
 

The Taliban could not, however, have captured Kabul on their own via an excess of religious zeal. They were armed and commanded by ‘volunteers’ from the Pakistan Army. If Islamabad decided to pull the plug, the Taliban could be dislodged, but not without serious problems. The victory in Kabul counts as the Pakistani Army’s only triumph. . To this day,the former US Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brezinski remains recalcitrant: ‘What was more important in the world view of history?’ he asks with more than a touch of irritation, ‘the Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?’
 
 

If Holywood rules necessitate a short, sharp war against the new enemy, the American Caesar would be best-advised not to insist on Pakistani legions. The consequences could be dire: a brutal and vicious civil war creating more bitterness and encouraging more acts of individual terrorism. Islamabad will do everything to prevent a military expedition to Afghanistan. For one thing there are Pakistani soldiers, pilots and officers present in Kabul, Bagram and other bases. What will be their orders this time and will they obey them? Much more likely is that Ossama Bin Laden will be sacrificed in the interests of the greater cause and his body dead or alive will be handed over to his former employers in Washington. But will that be enough?
 
 

The only real solution is a political one. It requires removing the causes that create the discontent. It is despair that feeds fanaticism and it is a result of Washington’s policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. The orthodox casuistry among loyal factotums, columnists and courtiers of the Washington regime is symbolised by Tony Blair's Personal Assistant for Foreign Affairs, ex-diplomat Robert Cooper, who writes quite openly: 'We need to get used to the idea of double standards'. The underlying maxim of this cynicism is: we will punish the crimes of our enemies and reward the crimes of our friends. Isn't that at least preferable to universal impunity? To this the answer is simple: 'punishment' along these lines does not reduce but breeds criminality, by those who wield it. The Gulf and Balkan Wars were copy-book examples of the moral blank cheque of a selective vigilantism. Israel can defy UN resolutions with impunity, India can tyrannise Kashmir, Russia can destroy Groszny, but it is Iraq which has to be punished and it is the Palestinians who continue to suffer.
 
 

Cooper continues: 'Advice to post-modern states: accept that intervention in the pre-modern is going to be a fact of life. Such interventions may not solve problems, but they may salve the conscience. And they are not necessarily the worse for that' Try explaining that to the survivors in New York and Washington.
 
 

The United States is whipping itself into a frenzy. Its ideologues talk of this as an attack on 'civilization', but what kind of civilization is it that thinks in terms of blood-revenge. For the last sixty years and more the United States has toppled democrat leaders, bombed countries in three continents, used nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians, but never knew what it felt like to have your own cities under attack. Now they know. To the victims of the attack and their relatives one can offer our deep sympathy as one does to people who the US government has victimised. But to accept that somehow an American life is worth more than that of a Rwandan, a Yugoslav, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Japanese, a Palestinian...that is unacceptable.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Filed 10:35 p.m. EST Wed.

Mortality 101

I spoke with some outsiders just now: a couple who live on the Upper West Side (usually it's 15 subway minutes away.) They came south to Canal St., they said, because "everything's so normal uptown." They wanted to see what it was like here, they said. They wanted to take the reality in.

There's a lot to take in down here on Canal St., half a mile at most from the World Trade Tower blast. Most spectacular, this afternoon -- when the wind shifted towards the northeast -- was the environmentally dubious dust and smoke. At two pm, the sky smoldered, yellow-brown-orange, and an acrid smell of burning plastic worked its way into our lungs. It's the smoke that hit Brooklyn yesterday. Manhattanites got the brunt of it today.

New Yorkers have been learning a lot these past two days. Emergency workers have taken a tip from the Seattle protestors. They're writing their names and phone numbers -- "JOSH 201 555-3232" -- in red marker on their arms, in case something happens to them that they can't control.

We're getting a tiny taste of checkpoints and armed soldiers on the street, and some of us are seeing just how empty grocery shelves can be. In SoHo, affluent New Yorkers searched for bread and milk this evening with the same dogged optimism and good cheer that grandmothers mustered in Belgrade. Some of us have learnt what Rwandan refugees know -- how it feels to pin your last hope to a paper-scrap. "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON?" Greenwich Village is dotted with makeshift "missing" posters pasted to light posts. As the Rwandans did, Villagers bring their faces up really close to look.

There's just been another bomb scare. Will we hear that crash again? Just what is that stuff in the air, and is that how depleted uranium smells? (Some commercial airliners use DU for ballast in the wing-tips.) For us it's been 24 hours of wondering. For Iraqi families, of course, it's been a decade.

We're learning a lot around here. Pretty useful stuff, I reckon. Unfortunately, we're learning none of it from TV. The nation's leaders seem to be less focussed on learning and more focussed on war-waging. What aren't we learning? Stay tuned, tomorrow, for more.

Filed 1:05 p.m. EST Wed.

The headlines roar war.

``This battle will take time and resolve, but make no mistake about it we will win,'' said George W. Bush a few hours ago. By that time, Senator Joseph Lieberman, loyal opposition Democrat, had already chimed in: ``An act of war was committed against us. It's more than a crime. It's certainly at least a war crime. And I think Congress has to effectively declare war against terrorism.'' On ABC's Good Morning America, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell said, ''The American people have a clear understanding that this is a war. That's the way they see it." Does he see it that way? He was asked. "I do."

I beg to differ. In Manhattan, we aren't in a state of war, we're in a state of mourning. And for the whole country to join us right now would be a really good idea.

They're calling it “The Pit" where the World Trade Towers were. "You don't want to get too close," Pvt. Maldonado of the National Guard told downtown-dwellers as we maneuvered through the multiple checkpoints in our neighborhood. "1,400 National Guardsmen are down there," said Maldonado.

On Lafayette Street, at the neighborhood firehouse, the Stars and Stripes flies at half mast. The local crew, among the first to go to The Towers, is missing six members. A rack of dusty coats and rubber knee-highs hangs by the station door.

The Washington politicians' talk about war is helping some people to vent, to rage, to rally to kill more innocent civilians -- is that what we're going to do -- kill them back? And the revenge talk is reaping a harvest of hate.

An Iranian-American friend received an email yesterday, from a volunteer at a Moslem Mosque in Los Angeles, with disclaimer that "these are the letters of hate my dad’s mosque in LA got just in the past few hrs...” Excerpted:
"Go back to the middle east before you get burned at the Stake, who the fuck do you think you guys are coming to our communities and bringing your dirt with you? Muslims and their hate are not wanted in LA"

"Fuck you all for bringing your mud dirt people to our country and after that bringing your evil uncivilized ways here to harm and hurt our people. Watch out because we know who you are and we know where you live and we will make sure that you pay for all those American lives lost"

"Fuck Muslims and fuck you, you will die for doing this"

"You middle eastern mud people need to die and pay for what you did."
 

This is a time to think about death and rage. To think about it for once, and to pause. Will we too be burned at the stake or something similar if we say that "terrorists" are people made by their circumstances, not born hankering to kill or to kill themselves. And most of them believe they have a cause -- political or religious. Will we too, the immigrants among us, be banished for saying that the source of that belief is worth thinking about? Do we risk becoming "harborers" of terrorists -- or terrorist thoughts -- if we murmur anything about the U.S. bombing of major cities: Hiroshima, Hanoi, Tripoli, Beirut, Panama City, Baghdad, Khartoum, Belgrade?

I wonder. Meanwhile, in New York, we the people inhale the dust, gather at blockaded streets and watch, and I've heard no hate. Not yet.

Filed 10:35 p.m. EST Tues.
President or Priest?

Some New Yorkers gathered around a television two hours ago, to hear words from the only president we've got. Around the set were three people who make movies who had a friend on the hijacked Boston-Los Angeles flight; a painter and a poet whose home, a few blocks from ground zero, has no electricity and no gas. Rumors of underground gas explosions swirl like the dust-clouds.

A civil rights attorney was on her morning bicycle ride when she saw the first plane hit the first Trade Tower. People have started calling them "our towers" now. "It was so huge, so low." Many of us saw "our towers" drop out of our sky before our eyes. A writer believes she saw a city school bus pass her, filled ceiling-to-floor with body bags.

So when the only president we have talked to us about "terrible sadness" New Yorkers weren't impressed. When he gave us cliches about the day's events many of us were furious. "We know what happened, we weren't in a bunker," one shouted at the set. As for the government functioning and the economy continuing... "Who's he kidding? Wall Street is under dust." He asked us to pray: "What is he," we said. "A president or a priest?"

In lower Manhattan at least, it's clear that this president has no idea what happened today. "That's the scariest part of all," some people said. There was no leadership coming from politicians tonight. Nor pundits, try as they might. And no light of freedom shining 'round here except the headlights of a thousand emergency vehicles and the reflective vests on several thousand workers, heading back into the smoke-filled streets.

Filed 5:30 p.m. EST
Where do we turn in a crisis? To public workers, the ones we have left. I just spoke to two dozen of them at an emergency staging area on Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas. Bused in from as far away as Far Rockaway, Queens they are massed here: the men and women of the New York City Housing Authority with their blue suits, hard hats, city-issue respirators and their 52 flatbed trucks lined up, awaiting the call to head downtown to start the ghastly clean up.
Usually these people -- almost exclusively Black and Latino, mostly men with a couple of women -- manage Manhattan's housing projects. Today, they're coming to the World Financial Center's aid. Where are the sanitation workers? Standard garbage crushers are poorly suited to the delicate clean-up operation downtown. That's part of the story. Besides, as one NYCHA worker put it, "The city's been getting out of the trash business." It's true. More and more city garbage is picked up these days by private contractors. These city workers, members of the Teamsters local 127, have been without a contract for a year.

"It's always police and hospital workers who get the credit, but we're here when you need us," said union member Ray Garcia. It's true. Dark skinned, blue collared, hot and waiting, these are emergency workers. Workers we depend on in an emergency. Cut public spending on social services? Think about it. Right now, chances are, I'd be looking at an empty street.

Filed 1:56 p.m. EST

911.

It's the date. It is also the situation. At St. Vincent's hospital, where there are some 180 casualties and two at last count dead, about 500 people are waiting to give blood. Civilian cars are driving casualties to the door. New Yorkers are turning out to help. That's the good news.

The bad news: on televison, reporters are fanning flames with irresponsible reports. Just an hour ago, CBS Channel 2 in New York interview with a transit employee who, with no evidence and no data, was broadcast live, telling the already terrified public that biological agents might be entering people's lungs.

Tom Brokaw on NBC can't get enough of State Department officials. For hours this morning, NBC "reported" that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine had "claimed responsibility" for the attack on the World Financial Center. Brokaw's source, it turns out, was an anonymous caller to Abu Dhabi television. By 9.58 EST, the Reuters newswire was reporting that a senior official from the Democratic Front had denied any connection to the attack:

``I emphasize that the story released on Abu Dhabi TV by an anonymous person is totally incorrect,'' Tayseer Khaled, a senior official from the DFLP politburo in the Palestinian territories, told Reuters.

``The DFLP is against hijacking planes and against endangering the lives of civilians who are not connected with the struggle of this region,'' he said.

Filed 12:27 p.m. EST
It looks like nuclear winter out there. Police are trying their best to close off all streets from my block south (Canal St.) I think of Baghdad, Belgrade. Speculation on tv runs rampant. I am going now to St. Vincent's hospital in Greenwich Village to give blood.

Filed 10:33 a.m. EST
The smoke is heading my way in lower Manhattan. I can see it. And I can no longer see either of the World Trade Towers that were clearly visible from my block as I walked home last night.

That's about all I can tell you about this morning's attack in New York. In CNN's News Center in Atlanta, they know even less, but that isn't stopping their talk.

Two hours after attacks on two U.S. cities, it's not clear how the coverage will develop. There's no question, however, that TV speakers will be filling the rest of the day with talk about an event that none of them can explain. As the hours progress, "experts" will no doubt be interviewed. Greta Van Sustern was already asked for her analysis. CNN's legal expert talked from her vantage point at Washington's National Airport.

We can't predict the coverage, but we can recall the past. Here, thanks to our friends at FAIR, from 1995:

"Seldom have so many been so wrong -- so quickly. In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed -- almost en masse -- to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. "The betting here is on Middle East terrorists," declared CBS News' Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). "The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East," ABC's John McQuethy proclaimed the same day.

"`It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,' wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). "Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working," declared the New York Times' A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen."

There's been a tragedy. May all of us in the media not add to it today.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

[interview comes in mid-point]

Bennis: . . . crisis when we escalate the patterns of more and more and more violence.

Ward: At this point in time most Americans would say how could they escalate it, I mean, if you didn't respond militarily, wouldn't that be worse than in fact responding?

Bennis: Well, I think the very worst thing would be responding militarily to the wrong country, as the U.S. has been known to do, not too long ago, in fact, when it knocked out a vaccine company in the Sudan claiming that it was tied to Bin Laden and only six months later saying, whoops, I guess we got the wrong place. And in fact, settled with the owner of that factory for having destroyed it, not to mention destroyed the one factory in central Africa that was producing crucial vaccines for children in that impoverished part of the world. So we have to be very careful. And yes, I think it would be worse to respond militarily than to be cautious and to say let's use this to do what is so difficult at a moment like this, when we're horrified by the human toll, the human tragedy, to say let's stop for a moment and think about why is it that people around the world, so many people, are starting to hate symbols of the U.S. as symbols of oppression.

Ward: Well, now you know that you are in a huge minority tonight when you suggest that one of the things we ought to take from this is to ask the question of why committed terrorism against the United States to begin with, and most Americans are simply going to say, "Who cares?" most Americans are going to say, "It was whoever it was and we're going to go get them," and most Americans at least in the polls already that have been released, say that our support for Israel is very crucial and that, you know, this is just going to solidify . . . you, you are in a huge minority when you suggest that part of what happened today might be connected to foreign policy decisions that we have made in other parts of the world.

Bennis: But, you know what Bernie, you may be right that I am in a minority, but I think these words have to be said. We've had too many years of experience of answering these kinds of attacks with more violence. And you know what? It hasn't worked. If we're serious about ending attacks like this, we have to go to the root causes.

Ward: And what are the root causes?

Bennis: To me it's a question of the arrogance of the U.S., the policies around the world, not only in the Middle East, although that's obviously a big component, but our policies of abandoning international law, dissing the United Nations, refusing to sign conventions and international treaties that we demand everybody else in the world sign on to, whether it's the prohibition against anti-personnel land mines, support for the international criminal court, the convention on the rights of the child, for God sakes that should be a no-brainer, only the U.S. and Somalia have refused that one, you know, when countries around the world and people around the world look at this, not to mention the most recent stuff about abandoning the Kyoto treaty, threatening to throw out the ABM Treaty, that's been the cornerstone of arms control for, you know, twenty-five years, they say, "Who is this country? Why do they think they're so much better than everybody else in the world just because they have a bigger army?"

Ward: So do we deserve what happened to us today?

Bennis: No, no one deserves what happened. There's no justification. . .

Ward: Did we ask for it?

Bennis: The question is: How do we stop it? The question is how do we stop it. And military strikes are not going to stop it.

Ward: All right. So the example of terrorism certainly is if we look at Israel, the example is that when you respond with violence for violence it does not stop the terrorism.

Bennis: Absolutely right.

Ward: And in fact we saw for the first time yesterday or the day before an Arab Israeli citizen who committed a suicide bombing, meaning obviously that even buffers between them and the West Bank aren't going to make any difference one way or the other.

Bennis: Right. Ending occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem might make some difference. But certainly what isn't working is responding with more violence.

Ward: But aren't the extremists, Osama Bin Laden has declared war on this country, , there's an interesting article in Salon.com about how this is a very different kind of terrorism than the terrorism of the P.L.O. and Black September and others in the sixties and the seventies and the eighties, that they see this as a war of attrition, that if they can wear down the American people, if they can get them so worried about this that they'll be willing to make compromises. Is it a war? Is that an accurate term today?

Bennis: I don't know if it's a very useful term. Again, we don't know that this was Osama Bin Laden having anything to do with the events of today. I think that we have to be a little bit cautious when we hear U.S. officials and former U.S. officials, as we've been hearing all day tonight, talking as if, number one, they knew it was Osama Bin Laden, number two, that this is what Henry Kissinger and so many others today have said is just like Pearl Harbor and the U.S. should respond . . .

Ward: Yeah. I don't like that analogy and I can't tell you why I don't like it, but I don't like it.

Bennis: I'll tell you one reason why maybe you don't like it, and it's one of the reasons I don't like it either. It's that one of the first things the U.S. did after Pearl Harbor was to round up all the Japanese-American citizens and put them in concentration camps - in this country. Now I hope that that's not what anyone in the U.S. is thinking about when they talk about responding the way we did to Pearl Harbor. But it's a very dangerous precedent. We've already heard about death threats against Arab Americans and Muslim organizations in the U.S. That kind of hysteria is already on the rise. And we have to be very cautious and conscious about the dangers of that. We have to be very cautious when we hear someone like James Baker, the former Secretary of State, claiming that he thinks there would be ninety-nine to one hundred percent support across the U.S., that's what he said today, for "taking out" a person who heads an organization like Bin Laden's and getting rid of the legal prohibitions against that.

Ward: Well, I think that's going to go, to be quite honest with you, I think there's going to be legislation maybe even as early as tomorrow to eliminate that or get rid of that prohibition against assassinations.

Bennis: You may be right. But I think that we can guarantee it's not going to work. It's not going to stop events like this.

Ward: Let me put you into a bigger minority.

Bennis: O.K.

Ward: Make the case for why the U.S. would be so hated in the Middle East.

Bennis: I think it's hated in the Middle East because, number one, it's uncritical support to the tune of between three and five billion dollars a year in unconditional support to Israeli occupation, including providing the helicopter gunships, the F-16s, the missiles that are fired from the gunships, that are used to enforce that occupation. It's hated, number two, because it has armed these, these, repressive Arab regimes throughout the region, in Saudi Arabia, In Egypt, in Jordan, throughout the region, that have suppressed their own people, that have taken either oil money or arms to build absolute monarchies in which citizens have no rights and where the U.S. claims to support democratization of every government in the world, don't seem to apply when the U.S. seems to think it's fine when one absolute monarch dies and passes on the baton to his son, you see every U.S. official and all of their European and other Western allies flocking to the funeral to say "The King is dead, long live the new King." We see it in Saudi Arabia, we see it in Morocco, in Jordan, throughout the region. And there's enormous resentment of that kind of support. So those two sectors alone, support for the Israeli occupation and the arming of these repressive Arab regimes is enough. Now that doesn't even get to the question of the impact of U.S. imposed sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq, the bombing of Iraq, that's been going on for ten years now, all of these are things that have dropped off the radar screen of the media coverage in the U.S. but are very much front and center in Arab consciousness in the region.

Ward: Would you be surprised if I told you a poll has come out in which a very large majority of Americans say they're willing to give up civil liberties in order to "fight terrorism," and that there may be legislation introduced in Congress tomorrow to in some cases suspend habeas corpus and other things in the cause of fighting terrorism?

Bennis: Would I be surprised? No. Because I think too many people in this country have been misled by politicians and by the media to think that somehow that's going to work. That if you have more profiling based on race and ethnicity, if you identify Arabs and don't let them on planes, if you do what the multi-agency task force in 1987 and 1988 tried to do, which was to actually round up citizens of seven Arab countries plus Iran on a preventive basis and put them in a concentration camp in Oakdale, Louisiana. It would not be surprising that that's something very much on the minds of policy-makers. It would be, I hope you're wrong to say that it would be supported by most people in this country, but unfortunately I could understand why it might be because of that misleading, what I would call propaganda, that has led people to think that somehow that would work, that that would make people safer, that if you didn't allow Arabs on the airplanes, somehow it would be safe to fly. You know, this is the kind of illusion that is bred by racism. And it's a very dangerous tendency in this country. And I do hope that we don't have our political leadership in Washington tomorrow or next week moving towards this kind of an approach ostensibly as a way of providing safety for American citizens.

Ward: Phyllis Bennis, I really appreciate this. I hope we can keep in touch and maybe invite you back on again.

Bennis: I look forward to it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies.

They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their motivations senseless. They are “madmen” and their states are “rogue.”  Now is not the time for more understanding – just better intelligence.

These are the rules of the war game.

Feeling people will no doubt object to this characterization: war is not a game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers, each with a dignified story. Tuesday's act of terror was reality of the harshest kind, an act that makes all other acts seem suddenly frivolous, game-like.

It's true: war is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps after Tuesday, it will never again be treated as one. Perhaps September 11, 2001 will mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war.

Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with what we have seen this week. Back then, instead of real buildings exploding over and over again, we saw only sterile bomb’s-eye-views of concrete targets – there and then gone. Who was in these abstract polygons? We never found out.

Since the Gulf War, American foreign policy has been based on a single brutal fiction: that the U.S. military can intervene in conflicts around the world – in Iraq, Kosovo, Israel – without suffering any U.S. casualties. This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war.

The safe war logic is, of course, based on the technological ability to wage a war exclusively from the air. But it also relies on the deep conviction that no one would dare mess with the U.S. – the one remaining superpower -- on its own soil.

This conviction has, until Tuesday, allowed Americans to remain blithely unaffected by – even uninterested in -- international conflicts in which they are key protagonists. Americans don't get daily coverage on CNN of the ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to human-interest stories on the devastating effects of economic sanctions on that country's children. After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (mistaken for a chemical weapons facility), there weren't too many follow up reports about what the loss of vaccine manufacturing did to disease prevention in the region.

And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo – including markets, hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station – NBC didn't do “streeter” interviews with survivors about how shocked they were by the indiscriminate destruction.

The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely out-sourced to experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes: though the engine of globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward looking, less worldly.

No wonder Tuesday's attack, in addition to being horrifying beyond description, has the added horror of seeming, to many Americans, to have arrived entirely out of the blue. Wars rarely come as a complete shock to the country under attack but it's fair to say that this one did. On CNN, USA Today reported Mike Walter was asked to sum up the reaction on the street. What he said was: “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I just can't believe it.”

The idea that one could ever be prepared for such inhuman terror is absurd. However, viewed through the U.S. television networks, Tuesday's attack seemed to come less from another country than another planet. The events were reported not so much by journalists as by the new breed of brand-name celebrity anchors who have made countless cameos in TimeWarner movies about apocalyptic terrorist attacks on the United States – now, incongruously reporting on the real thing. And for a bizarre split second on Tuesday night, CNN’s graphic “America Under Attack” disappeared and in its place flashed another one that said “Fighting Fat” – an eerie ghost graphic that yesterday passed as news.

The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace but war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to most Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the U.S. has woken up in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on for years.

Did the United States deserve to be attacked? Of course not. That argument is ugly and dangerous. But here’s a different question that must be asked: did U.S. foreign policy create the conditions in which such twisted logic could flourish, a war not so much on U.S. imperialism but on perceived U.S. imperviousness?

The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share their pain.

Since the attack, U.S. politicians and commentators have repeated the mantra that the country will go on with business as usual. The American way of life, they insist, will not be interrupted. It seems an odd claim to make when all evidence points to the contrary. War, to butcher a phrase from the old Gulf War days, is the mother of all interruptions. As well it should be. The illusion of war without casualties has been forever shattered.

A blinking message is up on our collective video game console: Game Over.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Like every U.S. citizen, I was shocked and revolted beyond comprehension by the attack on our nation last week. We need to do everything within our power to find the responsible persons and parties, bring them to justice and end the blight of terrorism.
 
 

At the same time, we must all remember that just as this horrendous act can destroy us from without, it can also destroy us from within. Historically, it has been at times of inflamed passions and national anger that our civil liberties proved to be at greatest risk, and the unpopular group of the moment was subject to prejudice and deprivation of liberty. In 1798, Congress enacted the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, making it a federal crime to criticize the government. In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, citing the need to repress "an insurrection against the laws of the United States." Ulysses S. Grant sought to expel Jews from southern states. World War II brought about the shameful internment of Japanese Americans, which even the Supreme Court failed to overturn.
 
 

Unfortunately, our response in 1996 to the Oklahoma City bombing and to the first bombing of the World Trade Center does not portend well for today's discussions. Legislation that began in good faith as an effort to fine-tune our anti-terrorism laws turned into a legislative race to the bottom. It contained sweeping new limitations on habeas corpus for death- row and other inmates. The legislation also severely narrowed the ability of persons fleeing for their lives from dangerous regimes to seek asylum. I sat through the hearings on this legislation and did not hear a single shred of evidence that proved that a single terrorist act could be prevented by limiting the ability of persons convicted in state court to obtain relief from unconstitutional convictions or by denying immigrants their due process rights.
 
 

Meanwhile, many laudable provisions were dropped from the 1996 legislation at the behest of the gun lobby. We tried to include a provision allowing for broader roving wiretaps, as has been recommended by Attorney General John Ashcroft, but the conservatives could not stomach this expansion of government power. An exasperated Henry Hyde, who as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee had worked to keep some of the better provisions, was quoted as saying that many in his party "trust Hamas more than their own government." We also failed in our efforts to ban dangerous "cop-killer" bullets and to require that "taggants" (tracer elements) be attached to explosive materials and that unregulated explosive material (such as the fertilizer bomb used in Oklahoma City) be rendered inert. Instead, we were forced to settle for an ineffective study of these issues.
 
 

Certainly, we must update our counter-terrorism laws so that they reflect 21st century reality. But new expansion of government authority should be limited to properly defined terrorist activity or threats of terrorism. And with increased federal power, we must ensure accountability and oversight. We also need to drastically improve airport security by increasing the training and wages of airport personnel. That will mean increasing the role of the federal government and allocating more federal dollars to these needs.
 
 

I urge the attorney general to take a fresh look at expanding the federal law to cover hate crimes. Recent days have seen a spate of hate crimes against Muslims, Arab Americans and South Asian Americans. Two persons believed to be of "Middle Eastern" descent were killed in likely hate crimes over the weekend. If we are going to expand law enforcement's ability to pursue terrorists, we must not neglect the government's role in protecting Americans from vigilante violence. We are a nation of immigrants, and we are all in this together.
 
 

The keys to success in developing anti-terrorism legislation will be balance and prudence. History has taught us that we should not use the threat of violence as an excuse to suppress legitimate constitutional rights and liberties. As Benjamin Franklin stated, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." We must ensure that these acts of terror do not accomplish in a "slow burn" what the fires of the World Trade Center and Pentagon could not -- subversively destroying the foundation of our democracy.
 
 

The writer, a Democrat from Michigan, is ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.
 
 
 
 
 
 

On Sept. 14, the Senate voted 98-0 for a war resolution. It says: "The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

This resolution, written as a blank check, is payable with vast quantities of human corpses.

* * * * *

The black-and-white TV footage is grainy and faded, but it still jumps off the screen -- a portentous clash between a prominent reporter and a maverick politician. On the CBS program "Face the Nation," journalist Peter Lisagor argued with a senator who stood almost alone on Capitol Hill, strongly opposing the war in Vietnam from the outset.

"Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy," Lisagor said.

"Couldn't be more wrong," Wayne Morse broke in. "You couldn't make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That's nonsense."

Lisagor: "To whom does it belong then, senator?"

Morse: "It belongs to the American people.... And I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy."

Lisagor: "You know, senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy."

Morse: "Why do you say that? ... I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them. And my charge against my government is -- we're not giving the American people the facts."

In early August 1964, Morse was one of only two senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which served as a green light for the Vietnam War. While reviled by much of the press in his home state of Oregon as well as nationwide, he persisted with fierce oratory for peace. It would have been much easier to acquiesce to the media's war fever. But Morse was not the silent type, especially in matters of conscience.

On Feb. 27, 1968, I sat in a small room at the Capitol to watch a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Six members of the panel were seated around a long table. Most of all, I remember Morse's voice, raspy and urgent.

"My views are no longer lonely," he noted at one point, adding: "You have millions of people who are not going to support this tyranny that American boys are being killed in South Vietnam to maintain in power."

Morse summed up his position on negotiations between the U.S. government and its Vietnamese adversaries: "Who are we to say there have to be two Vietnams? They are not going to do it and they shouldn't do it. There isn't any reason in the world why the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong should ever come to a negotiating table on the basis that there must be two Vietnams."

Moments before the hearing adjourned, Morse said that he did not "intend to put the blood of this war on my hands."

At the time, Oregon's senior senator was remarkable because he challenged the morality -- not just the "winability" -- of the war. He passionately asserted that the United States had no right to impose its will on the world. In the process, he made enemies of many fellow Democrats, including President Lyndon Johnson.

Like most heretics, Morse suffered consequences. After 24 years in the Senate, he lost a race for re-election in November 1968. The winner was a slick politician named Robert Packwood, who denounced Morse's antiwar fervor.

In his lifetime, Morse became a media pariah. In the quarter-century since his death, political reporters have rarely mentioned his name.

"I don't know why we think, just because we're mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right," Morse said on national television in 1964. "And that's the American policy in Southeast Asia -- just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it."

Three years later, he declared: "We're going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that's going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia."

Such heresy infuriated many powerful politicians -- and journalists -- while Wayne Morse did all he could to block a war train speeding to catastrophe.

* * * * *

Now, in the autumn of 2001, there's no one stepping forward from the Senate to help block the war train. We'll need to do it ourselves.