9/11 + 12

September 2001
Smoked Out "I have seen smoke like what was covering downtown only two other times, writes The New Yorker's Michael Specter, "once in 1980, when I flew over Mount St. Helens shortly after it erupted, and once in Grozny after a particularly vicious round of Russian Air Force bombings."

At 2:40 p.m. on September 11, a New Jersey man filed an application to trademark the words "World Trade Center" for a future TV or movie production.

Former CIA agent Reuel Gerecht cautions that "An officer who tries to go native, pretending to be a true-believing radical Muslim searching for brothers in the cause, will make a fool of himself quickly."

Reports of looting send C.J. Chivers into a tomblike mall beneath the World Trade Center, an "eerie Pompeii" that survived the collapse of the twin towers and the fires that raged overhead.

Jimmy Breslin's dissenting opinion of President Bush's much-acclaimed speech to Congress: "It was more about money than dead Americans. At times, it sounded as if the nation had its wallet stolen instead of being bombed."

Imagining an instant message exchange between Bush (XprezbushX) and bin Laden (BinLaden9151).

October
Jonathan Schell writes that "There is no technical solution to the vulnerability of modern populations to weapons of mass destruction ... Man, however, is not merely a technical animal. Aristotle pointed out that we are also a political animal, and it is to politics that we must return for the solutions that hold promise."

Contaminating the News Anthrax scare spooks tabloid readers.

An enterprising curator establishes a museum like no other, featuring the logos used by TV stations, magazines and newspapers to brand terrorist attack coverage.

Good Guy, Bad Cop A Pakistani who studied in the U.S. asks: "How does this 'good guy' at home become the 'ugly American' overseas?"

CNN chairman Walter Isaacson orders his staff not to coddle the enemy by overplaying images of civilian devastation, saying it "seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan."

November
U.S. authorities continue hunting for the religious extremist and terrorist who lives in mountainous terrain, hides in caves and moves regularly from place to place. This is him without a beard.

Cross-dressing French reporter recounts his 25 days in a Taliban jail, where "ignorance is the rule and suspicion triumphs over analysis."

Military jargon launches an assault on the language.

How the media functions as a wire service for government spokespeople.

A phrase that turns routine acts into acts of war.

December
"It's creepy," says a man whose name erroneously made it onto a WTC 'victims' list, "because I've been alive since, well, I've always been alive."

Miles of Misery The Telegraph's Christina Lamb is the first journalist to visit a "forgotten" refugee camp in western Afghanistan, where up to 800,000 people are starving: "I have been to most of the big Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan as well as many in Africa but I have never seen people in such harrowing conditions."

"Geraldo, is that a gun in your pocket, or, are you just happy to be on the good vs. evil network?" Plus: How to know if you're watching a war on TV.

The "winners" of the 2001 P.U.-litzer Prizes -- for the stinkiest media performances of the year -- are announced.

An average day in Afghanistan.

Prophets of Doom Who saw 9/11 coming?

Allah Scam An interview with a former Taliban reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of the movement: "Where the west saw fanatical warriors willing to kill and die for an Islamic utopia, he saw frauds and hypocrites hungry for dollars."

January 2002
In "Where's Ernie Pyle?", John Bloom, a.k.a. Joe Bob Briggs, writes: "Call me old-fashioned, but I'm the type who believes the press, righteous war or not, ought to always be second-guessing the government. Where's the war correspondent who's constantly telling the Pentagon, 'That's not exactly what I witnessed?'"

Crony Capitalism, U.S.A. While political reporters have been busy waving the flag, business reporters have taken the lead in telling us what's really going on. And they seem disgusted by what they see.

A Russian military astrologer predicts that if the U.S. doesn't get bin Laden in February, March or May of this year, "it will be possible to kill him only in 2006-2008."

Kandahar comes out of the closet.

Flippin' Media! In the war on terrorism, the media and the military have flipped roles, according to a Stratfor analysis: "The media have become cheerleaders, creating expectations of replicable victories, while the military has been objective and restrained, saying the war will be long and hard."

Westerners have to get used to living in two kinds of societies at once -- great wealth and great risk -- writes John Lloyd: "Most of that risk lies in those weapons we have created to defend ourselves -- nuclear, chemical and biological."

February
Tim Cavanaugh takes aim at the blogs of war.

In documenting how "The Sheik" got away, Philip Smucker writes that in retrospect, Tora Bora "looks more like a grand charade, a deliberate ploy to cover bin Laden's quiet escape." Smucker's day-by-day account.

Afghan refugees go on the block at a Pakistani slave auction.

Bowen Smith notes that since 9/11, there have been no military enlistments "from the ranks of our political, industrial, media, or entertainment elites."

"Enron may be as much a cultural scandal as it is a business and political scandal," writes Frank Rich. "What we see is a world in which insiders get to play by one set of rules while the unconnected and uninitiated pick up the bill."

March
Let's Roll! In praise of famous widows.

Where's the Man? How crime fell following 9/11 -- for about one week.

Osama Yo Mama Vocabulary of 9/11 is comic relief for teens.

Son of Blowback Since the 1980s, the core curriculum of Afghanistan's school system has been textbooks filled with violent images, militant Islamic teachings and talk of jihad -- paid for by the U.S. as part of a covert plan to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

In "The Strange Battle of Shah-i-Kot," Brendan O'Neill masterfully dissects the U.S. military's spinning of Operation Anaconda.

Afghan temp worker tells of al-Qaeda gig at Shah-i-Kot: "They gave us food and goat meat, and we were laughing every day. We were having a very good time -- it was like a picnic."

An Afghan satellite TV installer claims to have been kidnapped and held prisoner near Shah-i-Kot, by Taliban fighters who wanted his help in setting up a dish to receive Al-Jazeera.

Pentagon downsizes bin Laden bounty, claiming big bucks concept lost on Afghans.

April
The New Republic's Peter Beinart writes that "wars on terrorism" being conducted in Chechyna, Kashmir and Palestine are different from America's and that the difference is not moral, but strategic: You can't crush a war of national liberation in the same way you can crush al-Qaeda.

The New York Times profiles "Get Your War On" creator David Rees. Read an interview with Rees and get your war on here.

Robert Young Pelton, an adventure writer with an affinity for war zones and rebel causes, tells Salon how he outmaneuvered traditional journalists in Afghanistan to come back with an unsanitized version of the war on terrorism story.

U.S. Special Forces promised the moon to Afghan villagers in exchange for their cooperation in defeating the Taliban, with no apparent intention of delivering.

May
Printer's Row During the five years that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance retained control of the country's money, printing trillions of afghani notes -- including $8 million worth last December -- and rendering the currency virtually worthless.

Writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali, -- inspiration for the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" -- offers his provocative post-9/11 world view and discusses the death of Daniel Pearl, who he believes was killed because he got too close to the story of al-Qaeda's links to the Pakistani secret service.

Read a profile of the Coup's Raymond "Boots" Riley -- rapper, communist and, for a few days after 9/11, one of the most reviled men in America.

A retired Filipina policewoman details her involvement in the 1995 foiling of Operation Bojinka, a plan hatched by al-Qaeda operatives that included crashing planes into U.S. buildings and that today looks like an early blueprint for the 9/11 attacks

How would U.S. martial law look and how it might find its way to a neighborhood near you.

Ideological Imposter In a scathing critique of the difference between the rhetoric of candidate Bush and the reality of President Bush, Robert Kuttner charges that "One simply cannot conjure up a systematic presidential deception of comparable cynicism and scale."

June
John Prados connects the dots to show how the Bush administration uses terrorist threats to its advantage. Plus: How all the president's men buried Coleen Rowley.

Christopher Hitchens writes that the true pre-9/11 failure is and was a political one, "involving an American 'national security' class that looked (and looks) upon the Pakistani secret police and the Saudi Arabian royal family as friends and allies."

Ben Cohen asks "Why does the Defense Department need $400 billion a year to fight enemies armed with $5 box cutters?" He notes that the 'axis-of-evil' nations (Iran, Iraq and North Korea) spend $12 billion annually on their militaries combined.

The Wall Street Journal profiles Raymond Cromley, who at 91 is the oldest of the more than 500 reporters covering the Pentagon and the sole representative of the Cromley News Agency. He hasn't written a column since 1996 when the last of his news service clients moved on, but he dutifully attends the daily press briefings.

A State Department analyst accuses the U.S. media of treason for publishing information that identifies the country's vulnerabilities for terrorist groups.

July
Dinesh D'Souza and Gore Vidal square off over why the U.S. is hated.

With al-Qaeda in hiding and scattered across the globe, the real action in radical Muslim politics is now in a jungle of Web sites, bulletin boards, e-mail lists and chatrooms on the Internet.

Philip Smucker travels to Kashmir and finds that al-Qaeda is thriving. Estimates of the number of soldiers who have entered the country range from hundreds to thousands and many militant groups "banned" by the Pakistani government are operating in the open, with the tacit approval of Pakistani intelligence.

Read how FoxNews.com reported as news a fantastical UPI commentary that claimed al-Qaeda operatives had infiltrated scandal-ridden companies in a conspiracy to undermine the U.S. economy. (Item # 4)

The Los Angeles Times profiles U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan and reveals some of the methods they use to pry secrets from captured al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

August
Retired General Wesley Clark writes that "We've got a problem here: Because the Bush administration has thus far refused to engage our allies through NATO, we are fighting the war on terrorism with one hand tied behind our back."

Speaking about the coverage of the war in Afghanistan, a CNN senior executive said that "Anyone who claims the U.S. media didn’t censor itself is kidding you. It wasn't a matter of government pressure but a reluctance to criticize anything in a war that was obviously supported by the vast majority of the people."

Marc Cooper reports from Spain on the vogue for 9/11 conspiracy theories: "Nowadays in Europe it seems that the further you move up on the informational food chain, the more humidly fetid the imagination turns when it comes to Things American."

"In many Arab states there is a steady trend toward historical revisionism that promotes al-Qaeda leaders as the 'good guys' and U.S. officials as the 'bad guys,'" reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Bernard Lewis on why bin Laden is still popular in the Arab world.

Whosama? As Saddam takes center stage, bin Laden goes from "evil one" to unmentionable one. A historian tells Reuters that "To keep dwelling on Osama and on Afghanistan would be to dwell on futility. The President, like a great white shark, has always got to be moving forward."

A 9/11 widow tells Phil Donahue that "at this time of year, everyone is asking us, you know, what can we do to memorialize, what can we do to memorialize. And you know what? An independent investigation."