We must indeed, LEJ, although I cannot, deep down, really say why. I think there is an imperative code in the group organism, that calls for it.

To my mind the only right retaliation will be in the careful scrutiny and correct identification of those individuals and organizations who acted to bring this about. Finding those threads and the names and faces to whom they lead is going to be hard, sweaty, painful work, with none of the exhileration and adrenalin of a smoke-and-bang battle, none of the adrenalin. But only if we do this will we have the right to retaliate with directed force. The fanatics who pulled this coup killed blindly from insane hatred. If we kill in return, it must be with eyes open and known rationale. And the only rationale that works, in my mind, is to dissove the groups that have banded together through their secret webs to make this occur.

Only when these groups are completely brokenb up through reform or through force can we consider the goal accomplished.

I wish I had the data and intelligence to say how to know this, but the intell is not available -- not to me, and I am afraid not to anyone just yet. That is hwy the boggest piece of work ahead of us in response is one of finding out who was actually involved.

One of the saddest things about the madness of acts like this is that the bright images of glory that seem to motivate the perpetrators are such shabby lies.

Every single one of those assholes who died for union with Paradise was just as completely betrayed as their victims. If they have regained any awareness after the shock, they are bitter with disappointment that it just does not work that way. They were had just as surely as we were.

One of the real ethical quandaries underlying this situation is the benevolent and necessary tolerance of freedom of worship. You have already seen the jingoistic retributions that have started cropping up against anyone who even looks like they might want to worship Islam When religous experience and belief is so viciously distorted as to make murderers out of people in the name of UIslam, or any other religion, we are dealing with a deeply criminal impulse, worse than bilking old ladies out of their retirement by uisiung their faith in human beings; in pother words a con job of awful proportion. Bin Laden and his fellow mullahs have created a monster by using religion to accomplish the most unreligous of all purposes, the gathering of personal power and wealth through the deployment of violence against men and women. This is sheer treachery on every level, awful to contemplate. The hatred of those who felt hurt in the US being directed against a religous category, blindly, is another distortion caused by it.

Those who lead and teach hatred and disguise it as a spiritual exercise are the core of the enemy. They have no nation, capital or race to aim at. ut they are the criminals at the core of this great confusion.

Of treachery, the worst kind -- to take the highest spiritual hopes of an individual and use them to lead him into degradation and insanity. What a crime!

A