Let me suggest the following -- build timeout rooms at all major domestic airports.
The rooms can be used by officials to send every pampered, selfish traveler who chooses to complain about showing IDs or enduring medal detectors at gate areas.
Minimum punishment would be 20 minutes. Hopefully many such morons will miss their flights.
-- Kenneth Farragh
Yesterday was our generation's Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center is our USS Arizona. The fact that so many are entombed in the rubble and so few can have survived, once the chance of finding any more alive ends, the wreckage should not be removed nor the buildings replaced.
The site of America's worst single event should be left as it is as a most solemn monument to all those who died that fateful day even if it means the terrorists bodies also lay buried within.
The process of the digging and recovery of what little remains can be identified will be much too painful to the survivors and the families of the dead.
What a horrible day and even more horrific event. It can not ever be forgotten. The sorrow I feel is immense at the least.
God bless the good people of this nation and all those good people who have died or suffered in this most numbing and senseless trauma.
-- Michael Dunatov
"Whoever the culprit is, you don't lower yourself to their level by bombing a city with innocent civilians." So writes Robert C. Gray.
I count myself among the many Americans horrified and saddened by the tragic events in New York and the District of Columbia. However, I am equally appalled by the sort of morally superior rhetoric that I see in quotes like Mr. Gray's. And he's not the only one. Chattering commentators (on television and in my office) clamor to condemn attacks on civilian targets as the province of fanatics without consciences. This is true, I believe. But. More civilians have been killed by patriots and soldiers with surnames like mine than have died at the hands of Strawman bin Laden.
-- Mark Phillips
My family lives about 50 miles east of the city and I have a brother-in-law who is unaccounted for. Our hope is that he worked quite a bit away from the WTC and that he is just unable to contact my sister. Words can not express my feelings of anger and sadness. The extent of the evil perpetrated against innocent civilians defies belief. I am worried that the enemy here is a vicious ideology filled with hate and jealousy and not some bastard cowering in a smelly hole in the desert. This act of evil has affected all of us ... American, Kiwi, Aussie or French. The USA was chosen because it is the most visible and shining example of the strength of the culture we share. It was an attack against our civilization's conviction that a person has worth ... even if we disagree.
My biggest concern? How do we defend ourselves against an enemy who has no concern for the lives of the innocent? How do we defend ourselves against those who have no concern for their own lives and are taught that for killing innocents and themselves, they will go to heaven and be served forever by 72 beautiful virgins? How do we defend ourselves against an enemy that has no capitol? Do we retaliate against an entire religion? Or region? Or stinking hole in the desert? No assassination of the leader of this act will replace the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters or friends of those no longer in this world. God bless our friends around the world who see what this really is. Big country or small, those of us who believe in freedom and liberty need to stand up to the plate (American term, sorry) and strike down and strike back at this cult of death and destruction. All of my countrymen appreciate your prayers and concerns.
-- Laurence Percz
Tuesday's terrorist attacks are the direct result of George Bush senior's failed Iraqi policy. He heeded bad advice from Colin Powell -- advice that it was unnecessary to depose Saddam Hussein, the worst danger to world peace since Hitler.
The lesson taken from this failure by terrorists and rogue despots is that America will bow to "multilateralism" and fail to pursue unconditional surrender and war crimes trials. Osama bin Laden and his like were emboldened to continue (for the past 10 years) ever escalating acts of terror, secure in the knowledge that they, personally, would not seriously be held to account for the slaughter of innocent civilians.
Now comes Bush junior, who assures that we will take action, but it will be targeted and precise and only after a complete investigation where guilt is unambiguous. These constraints didn't work for the past 10 years of terror, and they are inappropriate now.
The correct response is a unilateral declaration of war against "terrorists" en masse. Osama bin Laden, his Taliban co-conspirators, the Iraqis who provide technical and logistical support, the countries who supplied fraudulent passports and other documentation. If you take out just one of the terrorist cells, even if it's the "right one" this time, the others will simply expand to take it's place.
The time for half measures is past.
-- Rich Black
While no one can say whether it would have prevented the WTC attack, it must be noted that Bush's unwillingness to take an active role in forcing Israel's right-wing government to go back to the peace process of handing over occupied lands to the Palestinians and ending the provocative settlements on Arab lands surely allowed the current belligerent mood in the Middle East to worsen. Only the U.S. has the power to compel Israel to move towards peace and reconciliation with its own Palestinian citizens and those whose families have been forced into decades-long exile from their ancestral homes. As long as that Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, America, as Israel's prime ally, will be a target, and no amount of anti-terrorism warfare will change that.-- David Lindorff
Next page: An eyewitness to the Pentagon attack