Word: uselessness
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...giving "Marriott in New York City" as their destination. On Aug. 23, the CIA passed their names to the FBI and the INS for inclusion on the U.S. watch list, and FBI agents searched the country for the two. But they had left addresses that turned out to be useless, and the FBI never found them until they crashed into the Pentagon. Only afterward did the FBI turn up the address for Al-Midhar in the Claremont area of San Diego...
Morrow misconstrues a vital point. Healing is a very real and necessary thing because it prevents the useless cycle of hatred that he invokes. The anger that he wishes to whip up is the same anger that propelled those planes through the World Trade Center. A society that turns away from hatred does not become self-indulgent and weak. Rather that society provides itself with the ability to bring along all its members without squandering its resources on military battles that cannot solve fundamental problems. Do we need a military response? Yes. Do we need to invoke a jihad...
...makes me sort of uncomfortable. Normally, I think journalists bow too often at the false shrine of objectivity; our on-the-one-hand, on-the-other reporting keeps us from getting at the truth. We tap out stories that are so balanced that they're largely useless in helping people see the world. ("While some say the deficit is worrisome, other argue that it's not a problem.") There's no reason journalists should idiotically feign utter neutrality in the wake of the 9/11 attack; that would be ridiculous. When network anchors use words like evil to describe what happened...
...Laden's wristwatch and listen in on his every cell phone conversation. That is, of course, if they know where he is. (And the Saudi terrorist-financier long ago figured out that his cell phone wasn't secure.) The point is that the most sophisticated intelligence technology is useless unless some of the simplest information is available...
...research, while promising, still lies on the fringes of science. I imagine the Bush Administration is glad for any debate that turns attention away from its dismantling of environmental legislation for its friends in the power industry, its scrapping of the ABM Treaty, its support of the expensive and useless missile-defense shield, its lack of a Middle East policy and so on. I hope that in the future the news media will use better judgment about what needs to be in the national spotlight. BRIAN STEBLEN Rochester...