Conspiracy Shows Signs of Following Classic Bin Ladin Doctrine:

“…(T)he entire operation seems to have followed classic al-Qaida rules. Advance teams may have arrived in the U.S. several years before the attacks to lay the ground work, build up a small local support network, collect information, rent houses, etc. These teams would be followed by the actual operational teams, who would learn their jobs as they waited to be activated.

The suicide squads seem not to have relied on cover identities at all, but used their own names, or at least consistent work names. Under these names they enrolled in flight schools, rented apartments, bought and rented cars. Some of the men seemed to have used the same Visa card, on which they rang up substantial charges, and gave the same postal addresses. This was also the same card that was used to buy plane tickets from the East Coast to California on September 11. As attack day drew near, the men may not have been as careful as they might have been about leaving a paper trail; they may have known that it wouldn’t matter.

As was the case in the East Africa embassy bombings, the teams appear to have operated almost completely on their own, meeting with their commanders only at key moments as the plot unfolded. The commanders alone would have known the full picture and how all the pieces were meant to fit together. They’re the ones Washington desperately wants to find, because they might provide the definitive link to bin Ladin, and–of more immediate urgency–could be the key to stopping any other attacks that may be in the making.

Sources: Time magazine, Associated Press, Reuters.” The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Herzliya, Israel

An architecture critic reflects on the Twin Towers: “Now that the Trade Center has become a martyr to terrorism, I suspect that architectural criticism of it will cease altogether. It has become a noble monument of a lost past. It is no more possible to know what will replace it as a symbol than it is to know what, if anything, will be built someday where the towers stood. But when the biggest thing in a city that prizes bigness becomes the most fragile thing, and the void has more weight than the solid, the rules of city-building change.” The New Yorker

“Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack, we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.” — Wendy Kaminer in The American Prospect

“Authorities have grown increasingly certain — from intelligence intercepts, witness interviews and evidence gathered in hijackers’ cars and homes — that a second wave of violence was planned by collaborators. They said Sept. 22 has emerged as an important date in the evidence, but declined to be more specific.” New York Times

Unusual Trading In Chicago Might Have Been Terrorists “There are now widespread efforts by investigators and regulators to determine whether terrorists tried to profit from stock and option trading ahead of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” German and Japanese regulators, SEC regualtors and the Chicago stock exchange are investigating apparently suspicious trading just before the attacks, which might have indicated advance knowledge. The Boston Channel

Dan Hartung’s ongoing series “Understanding Islam” at lake effect is worth your while. Thanks, Dan. And Chuck Taggart at Looka! suggests fostering better understanding by eating at your local Middle Eastern restaurant.

Israel pulls back forces: “The Israeli military is to withdraw from all

areas under exclusive Palestinian military

and civil control.

The BBC correspondent in Jerusalem says

this amounts to a pullback of a few hundred

metres, but the move is a hugely symbolic

step designed to show Israeli goodwill.

The United States has been trying for

several days to bring calm to the Middle

East as part of efforts to build a worldwide

coalition against terrorism including the Arab

States.” BBC

News: Lethal worm spells double trouble — ‘A computer worm that spreads to both servers and PCs running Microsoft software

flooded the Internet with data Tuesday, but the FBI said that, as of yet, it sees no

link to last week’s terrorist attack.

Known as “Nimda” or “readme.exe,” the worm spreads by sending infected e-mail messages,

copying itself to computers on the same network, and compromising Web servers using Microsoft’s

Internet Information Server (IIS) software.

“It is extraordinary how much traffic this thing has created in a couple of hours,” said Graham Cluley,

senior security consultant for antivirus company Sophos. “As far as we can see, it doesn’t seem to

be using any psychological tricks because it’s all automated.” ‘ I thought things have been running abit slowly today, but I figured it was the increased traffic in the wake of the events of last week… ZDNet News

Nuclear Safety — “What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo jet into one of America’s 103 nuclear power reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor complex–or, worse, through the enormous and barely-protected containment pools of spent nuclear fuel found at every such plant?

…if terrorism is real, then a clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is done for… A country that has nuclear power plants, it turns out, has handed over to ‘the enemy’ a quasi-nuclear military capability.” The Nation

Rumsfeld: Terrorism Isn’t Bin Laden Alone. Reassuring insight from our country’s leaders.

Source: Taliban Discussed Extraditing Bin Laden To Third Party; their condition was apparently international recognition of their regime. However, they also threatened to declare a ‘holy war’, or jihad, against the United States if Afghanistan is attacked by the U.S. [I’ve edited my original post, which said the Taliban had declared a jihad, which was how the article to which I linked had originally been headlined in early editions, subsequently amended. Rebecca Blood corrected me, saying, quite correctly, in part, “It’s important to read and report this accurately, … I feel that more and more reasonable voices are being lost.”]

A Reality Show for Your Desktop, but There’s a Catch:

Most people consider a person’s desk to be private space, but

“DeskSwap” makes the on-screen desktop public, laying bare its secrets.

The program is essentially a screensaver. But instead of the typical

screensaver fare — slide shows of cute critters and sun-drenched beaches

— the images displayed by “DeskSwap” are desktops.

Including yours. So when “Desk Swap” kicks in, the first thing it does is take

a snapshot of whatever is on your desktop and sends it to Mr. Daggett’s

computer, where it joins a queue of similar images that are then fed back

to your screen. A new one appears every 30 seconds or so.

There is an undeniable voyeuristic allure to viewing other desktops, akin to

rummaging through a co- worker’s papers and finding a pay stub,

medical bill or an incriminating memo.

After taking “DeskSwap” for a spin, Gene Kan, a developer of the

Gnutella file-sharing technology, said: “It appeals to the inner Jerry

Springer watcher in everyone. It was like `Survivor’ or `Cops.’ It’s a new

form of entertainment: reality computing.” New York Times

Stress From Attacks Will Chase Some Into the Depths of Their Minds, and Stay. The media have begun to speculate in articles like this from the New York Times (rife with commentary from psychiatric pundits like myself) about the extent of psychological trauma that will ensue from the attacks. This is the first event of any such scope so informed by familiarity with post-traumatic stress disorder, and as far as I’m concerned this is both a blessing and a curse. The problem is that this diagnostic concept remains a murky one and a moving target, and that what is in effect a PTSD-treatment industry, invested in its self-perpetuation, has grown up within the profession, with a treatment approach that places us all at risk of self-fulfilling prophecy.

With every iteration of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the profession’s official ‘bible’ of diagnoses and their criteria (we’re up to the second revision of DSM-IV now), the PTSD concept changes in scope. The previous notion, in DSM-III, that the traumatic stressor to which the sufferer had been exposed must have been “outside the range of normal human experience” was removed as unreliable and inaccurate. Instead, DSM-IV requires only that the person’s response to the stressor must involve “intense fear, helplessness, or horror.” How diagnoses are defined is informed not only by empiricism but by the balance between ‘lumping’ and ‘splitting’ tendencies in the zeitgeist of the moment, competing political interests, and the commodification of emotional distress to ensure psychiatry’s continuing “market share”), among other influences. Broadening the range of people ‘eligible’ for the diagnosis of PTSD makes a fundamental difference in our conception of what is a normal, expectable response to adversity, what we need assistance dealing with, whether adversity or stress are expectable and tolerable, how empowered and resilient we are as individuals or a culture, etc.

PTSD was originally codified to inform the psychiatric profession’s response to ‘shellshock’ or ‘combat trauma’ in GIs returning from the American foreign military involvements of the ’40’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s. Thereafter, it fused with attention driven by the women’s movement to domestic abuse and incest. At this juncture, in my opinion, the concept lost much of its specificity and utility to describe a specific range of psychological and physiological responses, to explain symptoms and inform treatment. Naive clinicians with politically correct sensibilities find it politically incorrect not to diagnose any psychiatrically distressed patient who has ever been touched inappropriately, or imagines and reports that they have been, with PTSD, and to attribute all the patient’s psychopathology to that abuse! (You’re all familiar, I’m sure, with the ‘false memory’ controversy, but this is only the tip of the iceberg with the profession’s confusion around and abuse of the PTSD concept.) Empirical evidence has begun to suggest that the responses of sufferers in the major categories subsumed under PTSD — combat veterans, victims of torture, sufferers of serious physical abuse, victims of natural or manmade disasters, survivors of incest and other prolonged sexual violation — are different, and that lumping them together within this ‘wastebasket diagnosis’ may be useless. Just as not every experience of sadness or fear should be subsumed under diagnoses of depressive or anxiety-disorder conditions and subjected to treatment, not all severe stress is a condition requiring medical or psychological treatment.

In fact, I’ve noticed, the articles you’ll be reading about our trauma response to the WTC disaster are starting to acknowledge one central, important distinction along these lines. The immediate stress response (so-called “acute PTSD”) may be normal and expectable. Empirical data provides no answer yet about whether the crucial factor in whether this progresses to the true psychiatric syndrome, “chronic PTSD”, is early intervention. Studies and commentaries within the profession have begun to question this central tenet, suggesting that early intervention may be harmful or at best neutral for the victims, although of course self-serving for the clinicians.

“One large survey of Americans’ mental health found that of those who

said they had been exposed to trauma, about 25 percent developed the

hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Experts said that figure might

provide a rough estimate for those traumatized by the New York and

Pentagon attacks.

Other researchers, including Dr. Edna Foa of the University of

Pennsylvania, have come up with higher numbers for the victims of rape

and other forms of physical assault, at least in the first few months after a

trauma. In such studies, which begin following victims immediately after

the event, up to 50 percent of the subjects showed acute symptoms of

post-traumatic stress a month later, when a diagnosis of post-traumatic

stress disorder can first be made. Three months afterward, the numbers

had dropped to about 35 percent. After a year, up to 25 percent

continued to experience difficulties.

But researchers say the people who develop lasting symptoms are not

always the same as those who show immediate signs of extreme distress.

And because of the tragedy’s size, its resemblance both to natural

disasters and to war, and its human toll, researchers say it is impossible to

generalize past findings to what lies ahead.”

Just as this curmudgeon has been railing in these pages about the peril we’re in if we give over control of our national emotional response to the politicians, we may be in parallel peril if we give it over to the ‘PTSD industry’. Just as the authorities in New York have had to stem the tide of volunteers streaming toward Ground Zero (whose motivation to help has alot to do with combatting their own felt helplessness in this way), we may have to stem the tide of mental health professionals streaming toward emotional Ground Zero in our psyches.

I’m sometimes accused of being peevish without proposing alternatives. I’m by no means saying there’s no role for well-informed mental health clinicians in helping shepherd us through both individual and national suffering at a time like this. Indeed, trauma response has dominated my psychiatric work since 9-11’s events. But let’s be careful not to pathologize the outrage, despair and helplessness, not to disempower the normal range of coping responses, and not to create rather than forestall a national epidemic of dependent patients with an abused diagnosis.

Whatever the perils discussed above, they are nevertheless a fate far better than turning our distressed over to the S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s.

Television viewers who turned to Fox News on Friday for coverage of the terrorist attack also saw a message scrolling across the bottom of their screens — National Mental Health Assistance: 800-FOR-TRUTH.

Unknown to the cable news channel, the phone number connects to a Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y center in Los Angeles, where S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s were manning the phones.

While representatives of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y claimed theirs was a good-faith effort to provide counselling and support, it is well-known that the cult wages war on the mental health profession and its ministrations. St Petersburg Times [Curious about my markup of the name of the cult? Especially with Google placing weblogs’ content at the top of search results, I don’t want a search for its name to readily reveal my critical comments. It is pretty clear that the group retaliates for unfavorable press. — FmH]