Justa Picker - Which one of your buttons did I push? You do me a disservice to compare me to Nero. Nero was an emperor with absolute power, in command of the greatest military and civil forces of his day...a position somewhat analagous to that of George W. Bush at this moment, loosely speaking.

I am in command of: a very small one-man company, an automobile and a guitar, all located in a small town in Ontario, Canada.

What would you like me to do while New York burns?

I have recommended that the airlines put Sky Marshalls back on airplanes and provide sealed, armoured cockpit doors to protect flight personnel. Those are real, substantive things that could be done to help prevent such disastrous events being repeated.

Like you, I too "am frankly surprised that something on this scale did not happen sooner in the U.S. The country has never been any good at looking at the long range picture. They tend to plan things within the range of the next 5 - 10 years, instead of taking this, and adding another 20 or 30 years, onto the scenarios.

All the doomsday planners in the Pentagon, CIA, National Security, and Military were either in denial about the plausability of this type of an occurance, or it was sheer arrogance on their parts to not have had any elaborate security precautions in place." (direct quote of your own words) So we agree on that, don't we?

We probably agree on a few other things too.

So what's the point of dropping insults about Nero? It's just a nasty cheap shot, and has nothing to do with anything helpful whatsoever. You and I are doing the same thing about it at this point...we're talking to other people on the Net, and explaining ourselves as best we can, which requires a modicum of respect, right?

And as McGrath said: "There seems to be a sort of instinct in the part of politicians to say that kind of stuff: "This is an attack on freedom carried out by cowards".

As if the people who did this had any interest at all in whether or not the USA was "free" or not. Why should they care one way or the other?

And as if it made sense to describe a suicide bomber as "cowardly", as if that was the ultimate insult that has to be dragged in, however absurd. There are things far worse than being cowardly.

It's a way of filling in the space and saying something that sounds appropriate, but which doesn't make any kind of sense at all. The trouble is, that space could be filled by saying things that did make sense.

I agree with that assessment. The Islamic militants (and other people) who are angry at the USA have no concern whatsoever about the relative freedom or lack of freedom of American society...what concerns them is the military, financial and political power of America and how it affects their people in Palestine and elsewhere.

They were not attacking "freedom", they were attacking the financial and military symbols of a great power.

Bush is just saying the same tired cliches that politicians always say in order to sound tough, righteous, decisive, and in command. It's so predictable...my God, how many times have we heard this stuff before? A hundred? A thousand?

Just because you've heard a cliche, a piece of meaningless posturing repeated 85,000 times in your life does not mean it's true or even relevant to the circumstance. In this case it is totally irrelevant.

I'm not making comparisons here between freedom in America and freedom somewhere else...I am simply saying that "freedom" is not what was under attack here. To think so is to completely ignore the actual realities of the international situation. When people are willing to volunteer for suicide missions, it is a damned serious situation, and it did not happen overnight for no reason at all. It goes back for generations.

And no, I am not saying that that in ANY WAY justifies terrorist attacks on New York or anywhere else! Got that?

- LH