Your continuous reference to a remark I made in a very different context is a demonstration of exactly the kind of mindless, pea-brained, moronic illogic about which I continuously upbraid you, Sawz. That part of things aside, I am sure you're a nice guy, patriotic and well-intended and trying to do right.

Context and relevance seem to be your weak points.

A week after 9-11, when the entire nation was still numb from the shock of the attacks, I made this remark:

"This is a war -- if you can even call it that -- that involves identifying people who are hidden, in groups that are not a nation, have no capitals, move in shadows, who can ruin the morale of a giant nation with a boxcutter, for Christ's sake, and who communicate by word of mouth.

"To even identify them, let alone act effectively against them, requires an extent of intelligence we haven't begun to master. Intelligence comes from over-fly photos and sensors (ELECINT), or it comes from human beings (HUMINT). And there is no way we will ever penetrate this distributed networks of well- but loosely-organized criminals with sat recces and electronic sensors.

"We need, therefore to make a LOT of friends in the world of Islam, very fast, and we need to deploy them in every corner of the Middle East gathering opinions, bits and pieces, learning who is friends with whom, who buys what where, whose son has just been tapped to join the Network, who suddenly seems to be spending oney like a drunken sailor, whether in the market places of Kabul or those of Tel Aviv.

"This kind of networking has not been deployed by Western operatives since the heyday of Wild Bill Donovan, or the French Resistance. But this is the only way to permeate a network of people who are not identifiable by their big capitols or their five-star command HQs or their tanks and battalions moving across the plains for any bird to see.

"Once their trails are found we can take action against them -- cutting off funds, spiking their cellphones or even sending small squads in to bring a few of them at a time off for summary justice somewhere. ..."

For you to remove this statement from the time and place to which it belonged and try to pretend that it was aimed at "all terrorists", or even was a statement of policy instead one aspect of a compound strategy, is disingenuous (a word you should look up).

A