I have been to Hawaii twice, and visited Pearl Harbor both times.  I find the USS Arizona Memorial to be dignified and touching, and quite provocative.  I highly recommend you see it some time...  The Arizona still weeps for her crew - thousands of gallons of fuel oil were in it's tanks when it was sunk, and small black droplets meander their way to the surface regularly, spreading into little rainbows when they break the surface.  One of the turrets that once supported her massive guns still rises slightly above the surface of the harbor, and now services as a repository for leas of fresh flowers that visitors toss in from the windows of the memorial, which straddles the Arizona as she rests on the ocean floor.  Of all the warships damaged in the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor, the Arizona was the only one that could not be restored to service, and she became a symbol for our efforts in the war against the Japanese.

The World Trade Center, on the other hand, was a completely different matter.  Instead of a military target, the WTC was a purely civilian site that was a symbol of the greatness of America.  There was no strategic, or even tactical, advantage for any attacking force to take out the WTC - rather, it was the target because of it's understood appeal as a testament to the strength and pride of the USA.  The attackers are also not a nation, not a visible force that you can point to on a map and see and feel.  They hide in the shadows, and do not accept the consequences of their actions.  They hide among us, deceiving and scheming and plotting while they teach our children at school, or prepare our lunches at a restaurant.  How do you bring war upon rats that hide within your own house?  These rats have no honor at all, if you can say that honor even exists in war - they didn't have the balls to attack people who might be able to defend themselves, rather, they can only attack those they know will be helpless and not able to respond in kind.  Current estimates of the casualties of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, including the four hijacked airplanes, are in the neighborhood of 6,300 people.  Whatever the final tally turns out to be, it pales the number lost with the Arizona.

Next, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) is crawling all over NYC performing all kinds of tests, which I'm confident they were.  Giuliani has already ordered all of the roads and trains in and out of the city shut down, effectively providing some level of quarantine.  An hour later, a CDC scientist determines that a "bug" he found to be prevalent in the city's air to be a highly virulent germ of unknown origin.  The CDC contacts the mayor's office and directs him to not re-open the roads and trains until further notified.  Two hours later people begin showing up at the city's hospitals and clinics with acute symptoms of the flu, "or something."  The CDC notices and quickly verifies that they have contracted a disease from the unidentified bug.  Their labs are already feverishly working on an antigen to the germ...  The CDC orders a more widespread quarantine to include most of the eastern seaboard - anywhere the prevailing winds might have carried the airborne virus in the past few hours.  Cities in the wind's path are advised to evacuate.  A few hours later, people are dying from the incredibly brutal germ...and thousands upon thousands are waiting outside hospitals to be seen.  Soon, someone will have to make an unthinkable decision - with such an incredibly vicious bug in the air, and so far no antidote, inoculation, or even effective treatment apparently forthcoming, just exactly how do you protect the rest of the country?

...?

Ever see the movie "Outbreak?"  Overall, not a bad movie, save the usual butchering of science that Hollywood is (in)famous for.  The general concept was that this really, really bad virus had been unleashed in some town in America, and the CDC was not quickly coming up with a way to combat it.  So, the military was going to napalm the town to "sanitize" the area and prevent the bug from spreading.  Sound far-fetched?  Maybe.  But, faced with that same decision in the real world, just exactly what do you do?  Hope that the scientists do manage to come up with an antigen sometime soon, or cut your losses and "sanitize" the area to protect the rest of the country?

Was there an Air Force bomber or two loaded and ready to cauterize NYC in the event that order came down?  I can't say.  But I also can't say that I'd be surprised if there was.

OK, so the whole "designer virus" thing is a little too far-out for you?  Fine...how about a nuke?  Let's presume that the leader of whoever performed this attack had, say, $300 million to their name.  Enough to buy a nuclear device from some unscrupulous Russian military insider?  Or, maybe to secure one from your buddies who do have that technology?  The USA and the former USSR are hardly the only countries capable of building a nuclear warhead.  India and Pakistan both demonstrated nuclear bomb technology just a few years ago.  Other countries have really smart physicists who can figure this stuff out too.  You could probably find just about all the information you'd need on the internet by now.  A Newsweek article I read recently indicated that Osama bin Laden attempted to purchase black market uranium for the princely sum of about $1.5 million - and evidently failed.  At least, as far as we know.

9/25/01 - Well, 4 days after I wrote this initially, CNN.com posted this story about the threat of germ/chemical warfare, which included coverage of the USA's flight ban on crop-dusters, which could theoretically be used to spread a bio-active agent.

9/26/01  -...and then this story on Time's website.

"Yeah," you say, "but that was all a long time ago - we were stupid then, and didn't know any better.  We don't do those things now."  Hmmm...been to Ireland lately?  Ireland, if you haven't noticed, doesn't have any trouble with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zen-Taoists, Moonies, or anybody else...it's Catholics and Protestants.  You know, just like we have here in the States.  They're JUST LIKE US.  They're white, they speak English, and they drink Coke.  And they fire-bomb each other's malls.

Although I can't claim to have any idea why the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland have gotten so pissed at each other, I think I do have some flimsy insight into why Osama bin Laden and his bands of merry men (one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter) hate America so much.  But first of all, I want to make one thing clear...

This "war" is not against Islam.  It is not against Arabs.  From what I have gleaned from newspapers, magazines and the internet, these people are ultra-hard-line fundamentalists, literalists even, of Islam - not like your Muslim neighbor across the street.  These guys find in the Q'uran all kinds of statements and reasons to hate the Western World's debauchery, and they take them literally.  You can find the same kind of stuff in the Bible, and I suspect other holy books too.  It's just that, even though there is a passage in the Bible that tells us to kill gay men, we don't (evidently, lesbians are OK - see Leviticus 20:13 and surrounding passages).  There's all kinds of directives in the Bible to keep women subjugated to men, but we don't really dig that way of thinking anymore.  We also don't sacrifice animals to God anymore (that is soooo Old Testament).  By those same tokens, these terrorists have found all of the extremist ideals they wanted in the Q'uran, and that's what they're enforcing.  Muslims don't do the things these people do, any more than Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and atheists do.  I am confident that, if he exists, Allah would spit these guys from his mouth.  BTW, as an interesting side-note, my Microsoft Office 2000 doesn't recognize the word "Q'uran."  I wonder who wrote this office suite...

Anyway, back to my rant: America, and indeed the rest of the Western World, engages in all kinds of disgusting activities that these guys' twisted version of Islam won't tolerate.  Things like educating our women.  Letting them wear shorts (not to mention bikinis).  How about drinking alchohol?  Owning televisions?  Playing Diablo II on our home computers?  Evangelizing Christianity (or the Church of Mormon, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or pretty much anything but Islam)?  Evidently, just existing as a non-Muslim country might be good enough to get their panties in a bundle.  They want a totalitarian theocracy, in Islam of course, to rule countries - not this new-fangled democracy (OK, republic) thing we've got going on here.  Outside of pure religious reasons to hate us, we tend to live fat, hedonistic lives with our condos on the beach and our bitchin' Trans Ams, in blissful riches and comfort beyond anything anyone in their area of the world can even imagine.  People say "we should bomb them back to the stone age."  Have you seen Afghanistan?  They ARE in the stone age.  They have nothing of value - they have nothing to lose.  Bomb them?  Bomb what?  We can make their big stones smaller, but that's about it.  On the other hand, they know for a fact that they have everything to gain by engaging in a suicide mission to destroy America.  I guarantee you that each and every one of those terrorists expected to wake up in paradise to see the beaming face of Allah thanking them for their good work against the American infidels.  It is the greatest of honors to be asked to die for the glory of Allah, not unlike the kamikazes of WWII.  It is said that bin Laden even pays a pension to the families of the suicide attackers.

These guys are smart, they are patient, and they are just begging for a chance to die for the glory of Allah.  They are dug into the barren hills of Afghanistan...they are college students in Germany...they are doctors in Texas.  We can't just decide to nuke Afghanistan and expect the problem to be solved...we probably wouldn't even get bin Laden in the process - we'd just kill all of the innocent people who had no place to hide.  They are also in the process of re-writing their history to suit them - Afghanistan has a rich Buddhist history as well as Islamic.  The Taliban has been destroying all signs of "idolatry" (read: statues of the Buddha) all over the country, and pretty much any other sign of non-Islamic religions.  Earlier this year they destroyed two massive statues of the Buddha that had been carved into the side of a mountain - the value to humanity as a whole of those centuries-old monuments was, well, monumental.  Many organizations offered to somehow come and remove the enormous standing Buddhas (rare enough that they were standing Buddhas, let alone the size of a mountain), but the Taliban would have none of that.  Even Pakistan, also rife with extremely conservative Muslims, shunned the childish act.  This is close to being on the order of someone like Napoleon deciding not just to shoot the Sphinx' nose off, but to just demolish it and the pyramids too, since they had nothing to do with his particular view of what the history of the area should be.  Napoleon just declared that the pyramids had been waiting eons for him to show up and conquer the country, and was satisfied with that.  Note that history is generally re-written by the victor...evidently, the Taliban believes it has already won.

9/28/01 - Here's a MSN article about a "last-day" guide full of religious zealotry and helpful reminders that underscores the mindset these people have.

9/28/01 - Still not sure about the connection between religion and intolerance (and war)?  Take a gander through this CNN article.  Here's a couple excerpts - quoting bin Laden:

"We hope that these brothers will be the first martyrs in the battle of Islam in this era against the new Jewish and Christian crusader campaign that is led by the Chief Crusader Bush under the banner of the cross" bin Laden said, referring to 3 Muslims who died in an anti-US demonstration in Pakistan.

"We ask God to make us defeat the infidels and the oppressors and to crush the new Jewish-Christian crusader campaign on the land of Pakistan and Afghanistan."

The reason he's tying Judaism into this is because of our ties with Israel.  These guys have been spoiling for a holy war, and now they've got one.

No, really - the USA developed a gun that fired nuclear bullets (they were mighty big bullets).  Problem was, it couldn't shoot them far enough to be out of the blast range when it hit, so you had to dig a hole before you fired, shoot the gun, then jump in the hole and wet yourself as the shockwave hurtled livestock over your head.  For reasons unknown, our military actually decided not to put the gun into service.

...how do you kill these people?  As I noted above, dropping bombs isn't going to do much good - it will just annoy the debris already sitting there.  We could nuke the whole friggin' country, but aside from the fact that such a tactic still wouldn't guarantee that we'd get who we want, it pretty much would guarantee staggering amounts of innocent civilian casualties.  We could send in some covert ops, like Navy SEALs, assuming we could get good intelligence on where the dirtbags were...but even assuming that we inserted them successfully, there's pretty much no way we'd get them back out alive.  No...I think what's likely to happen is a massive air offensive to make sure everybody is sufficiently peeved at us, and then a huge ground assault full of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of soldiers and artillery to scour the hills and valleys looking for the terrorist groups one cave at a time.  It could take years to find them...and that's just the ones in Afghanistan.  This is supposed to be a war against terrorism everywhere, which could likely include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, not to mention the ones already resident in the US, the UK, and elsewhere.

While this is a grave risk within Pakistan, having different Islamic groups facing off against each other, and even greater danger is the possibility that a large consensus among Islamic peoples is reached that there is indeed a crusade under way by the Christians and Jews to wipe out Islam - which his the rhetoric being spouted now by bin Laden and the Taliban.  Should Muslims in many countries begin to feel that way, the entire world will be in dire straits indeed (my apologies to Mark Knopfler).  If the Islamic extremists groups become successful in activating a large-scale holy war of Islam vs. Christianity/Judaism, we will discover how accurate our fiction writers have been over the past few decades in wondering about what World War III would be like.  Keep in mind that at least a few Muslim countries have nuclear technology, such as Pakistan and India (well, India I think is primarily Buddhist - but I think they also have a large population of Muslims.  I'm not an authority on it...feel free to correct me)., and they have other very powerful military forces as well - not to mention the ability to potentially mobilize millions of Islamic men who would gladly die in the effort to protect their religion and the honor of Allah.  <10/22/01 - I correct myself - India is primarily Hindu, not Buddhist.>

In a war to protect the very existence of your religion, there are absolutely no rules - it would be the most desperate of times for the Islamic countries involved.  You can be assured that the full extent of their ability to make war would be utilized, including any nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.

Due to the distance between the USA and the middle east, it is less likely that they would be able to deliver such weapons over here in a time of war...outside of more terrorist activity.  To the best of our knowledge, these countries do not own any stealth technology that would allow them to deliver a nuclear warhead in a conventional manner - i.e. flown in on a plane and dropped as a bomb.  We would see them coming far too soon for them to really have any chance of making the delivery.  But, that doesn't help the countries relatively close to them...clearly, Israel would be a prime target - and would be in range of one of their bombers or probably a missle.  As would many other countries, including all of the former USSR and I suspect many European countries.

Keep in mind that that's just thinking about conventional weapons delivery techniques - as noted, the threat of clandestine terrorist activity to smuggle such devices into the USA is still very real, although hopefully much harder to pull off with our heightened security measures in place.  Difficult, yes - impossible, no.

The idea of coded messages in public broadcasts is certainly nothing new.  If we go back to the attack on Pearl Harbor, you may or may not recall that the Japanese military was using public weather reports to encode and deliver messages.  On a pre-determined day, the weather report would indicate whether to attack Russia, Hawaii, or other targets.  The code-phrase "east wind rain" uttered by the weatherperson during the broadcast informed the Japanese Imperial Navy to attack Pearl Harbor.  There is no reason to believe that the Taliban/al-Qaida couldn't have devised similar coded messages as well.

It is still highly disturbing that these attacks are taking place, regardless of their intensity or effectiveness.  Be glad, actually, that it's just anthrax - it could be worse.  It could be anything from a genetically modified strain of anthrax to genetically modified strains of the plague.  The plague (yes, the one that wiped out a third of the population of Europe a while back - and killed 10 million Indians not honestly that long ago) is still alive and well in it's biological sink; namely, rattus rattus ("rats" to you and me).  I recently read a fascinating article about the plague somewhere (unfortunately, I don't remember where, but it was probablly CNN.com or MSN.com).  As biologists and pharmaceutical researchers know, these kinds of bugs can evolve rather quickly - a new strain can appear suddenly and spread with traits that were not there before.  Case in point, it is not altogether easy to spread the most dominant form of the plague from one human to another - any case that you hear about today is probably in relation to some isolated individual who came into contact with a carrier rat or prairie dog or something.  It isn't overly likely that that human will pass the affliction on to another human - the bug isn't built for that.  However, as noted in a small number of enormous plague events, such as the aforementioned one in medieval Europe, there is every chance that in successive moves of the bug from one host to another (such as via fleas) will eventually "strain" out the most effective strain for the current conditions, regardless of whether or not that strain was dominant before.  You always have the random mutations that occur between generations of any organism as well, from bacterium on up to deal with - benign, neutral, or helpful mutations stick around, whereas derogatory mutations get quickly winnowed out.  Essentially, the foundation of evolution (indeed, the foundation of essentially all biological sciences as we know them).  Hence, a strain that was just kind of sitting around doing nothing, or one that randomly mutated into existence, can suddenly run wild in it's newly accommodating environment and have drastically different results than the original, dominant strain.  Many scientists believe this is what occurs when truly massive outbreaks happen - at the point at which the outbreak is contained (or has run through everyone it can find), the new strain finds itself without suitable hosts, and it simply blinks out of existence - but the original dominant strain remains in the biological sink that has always hosted it, waiting and ready to do a repeat performance.

An article from CNN.com regarding supposedly hundreds of people currently held in the US without formal charges.

On the other hand, I think it's very possible, if not likely, that al-Qaida has secured chemical and biological weapons.  The current anthrax attacks in the US I honestly think are the work of some demented US national who's just taking advantage of current events.  Time will tell.  However, that's not to say that al-Qaida and the Taliban don't have anthrax or some other bio-active agents to play with.  With any luck, though, Osama is bright enough to realize the danger to his own people of mis-handling such weapons - he could just as easily kill all of his own soldiers along with all of their immediate opposition forces.  What I fear the most from Osama is not a direct attack at the US, the Northern Alliance, or even Israel with such a weapon...I find it quite possible that while retreating from a given city in the face of a US/Northern Alliance advance, the Taliban could unleash a biological or chemical weapon in that town to cause thousands of civilian deaths and then accuse the US of having perpetrated the attack.  It would be the kind of atrocity that could incite more Muslims to take up his cause, if they believed the story that the US carried out the attack.  As I see it, Osama's word still carries a lot of weight in his part of the world...if he says the US dropped Agent Orange bombs in a major Afghani town, then people will believe him.  He does need to have some kind of "proof" to his stories about how the US is leading a crusade against Islam itself, and not just his terrorist organization...

A while ago we were shocked about the young man in Florida who stole a small private aircraft and flew it into a FL bank building, leaving behind a note supporting bin Laden.  Truly amazing and disturbing that a middle-class white kid (a fact I point out only to showcase his difference from the terrorists) with evidently no ties at all to bin Laden or other organizations can be pulled into their way of thinking, even if it is just to be a copycat.