It seems certain that two Americans have now died in a terrorist biological attack in Florida. The first case of anthrax inhalation never struck me as a fluke. The second renders such a benign possibility extinct. Just as chilling as the attack itself is the fact that it was directed at a tabloid paper which has recently run the usual tabloid fare on Osama bin Laden. Who did this? I hope the current somewhat complacent attitude of the authorities begins to shift as we contemplate the next round of terrorist warfare on Americans. In some ways, a repeat of the massive toll in New York City is unnecessary. Random mini-attacks everywhere in the country could actually be more effective in creating the widespread panic and fear that al Qaeda obviously wants to foster. The FBI needs to throw as much effort into tracking down these suspects as into bombarding military targets in Afghanistan. And the perpetrators should not be treated as regular criminals with the usual rights. They are military forces, conducted by a military enemy. If captured, they need to be put in military detention centers, not regular prisons. We have to resist at all costs the trap of terrorists, which is that they can be treated as mere criminals while conducting a war.
LARKIN ON BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM:
“Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.”
– Myxomatosis, by Philip Larkin.
DID OSAMA CONFESS?: Bin Laden’s nauseating propaganda video seemed to me to come extremely close to acknowledging that he was indeed behind the massacre of September 11. Would he hail a “vanguard” of Muslim warriors if he were not directing it? If he were still trying to play the victim, would he not add to his condemnation of our initial attacks on “innocent” countries another assertion of his own innocence? I would think so. I was also struck by the intensely religious nature of his address. As I argued in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, we ignore the religious dimension of this war at our peril. The enemy is not Islam as such, but fundamentalism. And Islamic fundamentalism is of a particularly brutal kind.
LETTERS: Riffing on Caligula and Claudius; is Heidegger at fault?; leaving the far far left alone.
COLUMBUS DAY: The lite dish today is because of the holiday. I’m traveling back to DC from Chicago. Wish me luck.
SALON ON CLINTON’S FAILURES: Interesting interview with a special forces expert, Mark Bowden, in Clinton-supporting Salon magazine. Here’s the relevant passage:
“Q: Were they targeting Osama bin Laden under the Clinton administration’s executive order to track him down and, if possible, capture him?
A: The Clinton administration’s executive order authorized drawing up plans to go after bin Laden, meaning that his administration allowed the planning of an operation, training for it and putting special forces into position in that part of the world waiting for the green light, but it didn’t authorize the action to capture him. Someone’s conscience must weigh heavily that they didn’t authorize that mission. I expect that after the initial shock of our reactions to the Sept. 11 bombing wears off there will be a serious evaluation of who made the decision not to go ahead with this. It doesn’t take a genius to know that something bad would come of this. There were people preaching exactly this sort of attack. People will be asking a lot about policy failures. It’s not like we didn’t know that Osama bin Laden was planning to do something awful; he told us that he would do it and started doing it. He bombed our embassies, bombed the USS Cole and our forces in Saudi Arabia. Looking back we’re going to have to ask why we allowed this to happen: Was it that they thought they couldn’t have pulled it off or were inept?”
So when I raise this troubling idea, it’s a function of my pathological hatred of Clinton. What excuse do the Clintonites have for someone with expertise in this area in a left-leaning magazine?
The Dish 