What’s Wrong with Missile Defense? MIT Professor Ted Postol, former defense consultant and now leading critic of the NMD plan, was interviewed on Sept. 5th. An afterword includes his post-Sept. 11th reflections. Boston Review

The co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project describes The Search for New Voting Technology — “Changing the way we vote is more urgent — and less complicated — than you think.” Boston Review:

Presented without comment: “how to eliminate hunger from the entire world”

In the more prosaic terrorism category: Two girls held for allegedly pouring acid in teacher’s coffee. Chicago Tribune Probably nothing about this twist on coffee consumption at the Coffee Science Information Centre, but just about anything else you want to know about coffee and health. Caveat: the site appears to be a mouthpiece for the coffee industry.

Rob Morse: Staying sane in time of terror: “…the all-news networks seem designed to drive people crazy. Sensory overload leads to emotional overload as talking heads are intercut with nightscope and bombing footage, with a constant buzz of scary headlines running underneath.

CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are boob-tube cocaine, addictive and paranoia inducing, but with no highs. Definitely limit your exposure to the stuff.

You can read the paper, though, because you can always flip to the comics and find amusing jokes in columns, maybe even toward the bottom of this one.” SF Chronicle

Kofi Annan, U.N. Win Nobel Peace Prize: ‘The United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan won the centenary Nobel Peace Prize today for working for “a more peaceful world” in the 21st century by tackling challenges from poverty to terrorism.

The choice brought a flood of praise from around the globe, except from survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda who accused Annan of responsibility in failing to stop the slaughter. He was head of U.N. peacekeeping at the time.’ LA Times

Screenshots of Online News Sites, September 11/12, 2001: “The web has no memory – unless it is created.”

Edward Said gives a good thumbnail of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, then takes grave exception to the much-touted notion that Sept. 11th confirms Huntington’s conception. The Clash of Ignorance:

The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington’s thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is–the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes–international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam’s troubles, and in the latter’s case have used Huntington’s ideas to rant on about the West’s superiority, how “we” have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don’t. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to “Islam.”) The Nation [via AlterNet]

Hintington’s Clash of Civilizations essay is reprinted here.

Prolific ‘public intellectual,’ perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the U.S., secular Protestant born in Jerusalem and educated there and in Cairo, ‘doggedly optomistic’ University Professor at Columbia, and all the while struggling against chronic leukemia. Edward Said is interviewed in late September in The Progressive. I think the Moby Dick metaphor he describes here is very much to the point:

Q: In a recent article in the London Observer, you say the U.S. drive for war uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick. Tell me what you have in mind there.

Said: Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him–which had torn his leg out–to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality. Now, all the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis–“wanted, dead or alive,” “a crusade,” etc.–suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences. And it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden–who has been turned into Moby Dick, he’s been made a symbol of all that’s evil in the world–a kind of mythological proportion is really playing his game. I think we need to secularize the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality. Treat him as a criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who has unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people. Punish him accordingly, and don’t bring down the world around him and ourselves.

“The U.S. government was incredibly shortsighted,” says Raymond Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “This kind of research is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention if it’s carried out in the open and reported as part of the confidence-building measures — neither of which was done. Here we are doing activities that, if we found out they were being done in Iraq or Iran or North Korea, we would probably immediately bomb the hell out of them.”

U.S. Undermining International Bioweapons Controls: “Just a week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, American news media reported that the U.S. government had conducted clandestine research on biowarfare preparedness. The Pentagon had secretly drawn up plans to reproduce a Russian genetically-engineered strain of the anthrax bacterium in order to test the U.S. military’s anthrax vaccine. It had also built a germ factory in Nevada out of commercially available materials, in which the government apparently planned to manufacture not actual bioweapons agents but germ simulants, to gauge how easily others could do the real thing. Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency had constructed a copy of a Soviet germ bomblet that the agency feared was being sold on the international market.

Many experts believe these sub rosa experiments violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).” The American Prospect

David Corn: Calling for a Wider, but Smarter War

The Bush Administration can offer BDAs (for non-cable-news addicts, that’s bomb damage assessments) showing destroyed terrorist camps, pulverized Taliban infrastructure. It can note the number of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders “neutralized.” But, most probably, the true effectiveness of this assault will not be readily determinable, since the target is a murderous band that only mounts attacks every few years. (So far, that is.) All may appear well with President Bush’s war on terrorism — assuming it doesn’t spark unrest in the region and the outbreak of other wars — until the Sears Tower is leveled in 2003 or a human-bomb takes an orchestra seat at the 1000th performance of “The Producers” or New Orleans is nuked during the next presidential campaign.

With that in mind, it is best to wish for and to urge a limited military action. Not a war, but a modest use of force that does not spread by design (as the let’s-get-Iraq hawks in the Pentagon crave) or by accident.

In fact, it was a mistake for Bush to label this endeavor a “war on terrorism” and pitch it as a battle for freedom. “Terrorism” has long been a loaded word; used in this manner it creates an overly broad target. “War” raises expectations here, and in other lands fuels suspicions among those wary of U.S. intentions. And who believes that Bush is fighting for freedom, as he cuts deals with autocratic and repressive regimes to entice them into joining his anti-terrorism coalition? AlterNet

Declan McCullagh: Terror Bill Limits Gambling, Too: ‘Osama bin Laden is not, according to news reports, a terribly big fan of Western vices.

Nor has there been any reliable confirmation that last month’s suicide-hijackers, who completed the bloodiest terrorist attack in American history, were habitual gamblers.

But that didn’t stop the House Financial Services committee from voting 62-1 on Thursday for an “anti-terrorism” bill that limits Internet gambling.’ Wired

I would appreciate any links readers could send me regarding the reactions of the rightwing militia movement to the events of Sept. 11th and its aftermath.

Anthrax Found In New York. Authorities are quick to announce it is a “different type” than, and “apparently unrelated” to, the Florida cases. Boston Channel Certainly the route of infection was different — cutaneous rather than pulmonary — but that does not establish that it was a different strain of the bacterium. As I understand it, they have not completed its genetic analysis. This, not the route of entry, will tell us if it had a common origin with the Florida strain. If they want to reassure us, they should restrict themselves to reminding the public that there is no risk of person-to-person contagion. Take-home lesson? “Don’t inhale.”

Other interesting aspects of this case; it appears to have been destined for Tom Brokaw but was instead opened by one of his staffers, who became infected. She’s had the infection for almost two weeks, but it is only being revealed now. The contents of a suspicious letter received at Microsoft’s offices in Nevada have been confirmed to test positive for anthrax spores as well. Both the New York and the Nevada letters were reportedly postmarked in St. Petersburg, Florida. [What do you think the odds are that all these anthrax isolates are of the same strain?]

Satire in Surreal Time: “I’m worried about the Weekly World News. It is published by the same company that puts out such supermarket tabloids as the Sun, the Globe and the National Enquirer. Anthrax has been found in the company’s Florida headquarters, and one Sun editor recently died of the disease. It sounds like a WWN headline — Anthrax Attacks America’s Tabloids! — but it’s all too grimly true.

Weekly World News is sometimes mistaken for a supermarket tabloid, but nothing could be further from the truth. Tabloids such as the Sun and the National Enquirer cover celebrity scandals and other tawdry trash. WWN is completely different. It prints detailed news dispatches from a parallel universe, a weirdly familiar dreamworld where popular culture mixes with urban legends, paranoid delusions and bizarre fantasies.

Consider just a few of the treasures found in WWN in the last month alone… Washington Post

Happy birthday, Winnie.

Steve Perry: What Is To Be Done? “There are lots of Americans who would like an alternative to prolonged war. Is there one?”

• Counter the two big lies that undergird Desert Storm II:
  
  • That the enemy is religious zealotry, and the zealots hate the U.S. because it is a free society.
    

  • That with sufficient military resolve, the United States can smother terrorism in its cradle.

• First bin Laden. Directly guilty or not, his elimination is a foregone conclusion. So genuflect to his pursuit by a clumsy spy satellite game of Where’s Waldo? and cheer his eventual demise. Grunt a lot in public about the evils of terrorism, but meanwhile take steps in the background to retool U.S. Mideast policy:
  
  • Take a step back from sponsorship of Israeli aggressions against the Palestinians.
    

  • Likewise, back away from the unconditional support of Arab client regimes that repress their own people in the name of continuing U.S. control of the region’s oil supply. CounterPunch

Dan Bricklin, reading historian Bernard Bailyn, finds analogies between the pre-Revolutionary pamphleteers and modern personal websites.