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UT professor who outraged readers says antiwar activists like him were right about 9/11 We all remember where we were and what we felt on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. I also have a clear recollection of the morning of Sept. 14, 2001.I got to my office early, and the red message light on my phone was already blinking. My voice-mailbox was full of angry condemnations of an essay that had run in the Houston Chronicle that morning ("U.S. just as guilty of committing own violent acts," Outlook), in which I sharply criticized past U.S. policy and warned that...

Yesterday, Slate posted this piece criticizing Frank Rich's New York Times column about the 9/11 photo shown here. The picture was taken by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker on the afternoon of 9/11. Calling the image "shocking," Rich suggested that the five New Yorkers were "relaxing" and were already "mov[ing] on" from the attacks. Slate's David Plotz disputed that characterization of the picture, arguing that the subjects had almost certainly gathered to discuss the attacks and to find solace in others' company. Rather than showing callousness, as Rich suggested, it depicted civic engagement. But since neither Rich nor Plotz knew exactly...

September 13, 2006, 4:54 a.m. StagnationThe deadly cocktail of poppy and incompetence. By Michael Yon Slightly more context in Tarin Kot: This government sign threatens poppy eradication, but the area around it was heavily sowed with poppy. In some areas the flowers undulate for as far as the eye can see. I took this photo at a traffic circle where the local government often dumps the bodies of its enemies. Half a decade ago, Steve Shaulis gave me a copy of the excellent book written by his Pakistani friend Ahmed Rashid , Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush, on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, planned to say Monday the war against terror "is a struggle for civilization" that will require a determined effort by a unified country. "We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations," Bush was to say in remarks prepared for a prime-time address from the Oval Office. The speech was coming at the end of a day in which he honored the memory of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks that rocked his presidency and thrust the United States into...

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Never mind where I was standing or what I was doing this time five years ago. (Because really, what could be less pertinent?) Except that I do remember wondering, with apparent irrelevance, how soon I would be hearing one familiar cliché. And that I do remember hearing, with annoyance, one other observation that I believe started the whole post-9/11 epoch on the wrong foot. The cliché, from which we have been generally but not completely spared, was the one about American "loss of innocence." Nobody, or nobody serious, thought that this store-bought phrase would quite rise to the occasion of...

WASHINGTON, June 28 — Ever since President Bush vowed days after the Sept. 11 attacks to "follow the money as a trail to the terrorists," the government has made no secret of its efforts to hunt down the bank accounts of Al Qaeda and its allies. But that fact has not muted the fury of Mr. Bush, his top aides and many members of Congress at the decision last week by The New York Times and other newspapers to disclose a centerpiece of that hunt: the Treasury Department's search for clues in a vast database of financial transactions maintained by...

WEST CHESTER, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years ago, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer, according to his father. Michael Berg said the FBI investigated the matter more than a year ago. He stressed that his son was in no way connected to the terrorists who captured and killed him. Government sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the...

PARIS - Zacarias Moussaoui's mother said Thursday a life sentence for her son was more cruel than putting him to death because now he will "live like a rat in a hole." Aicha El Wafi, who returned to France earlier this week, said the trial was a masquerade that did not prove her son's guilt, and she accused the French government of not fighting hard enough for him, saying it did not want to oppose the United States. El Wafi, dressed in black, was emotional and nervous as she spoke with reporters a day after the jury in Alexandria, Va.,...

Just flashed on Fox, jury has a verdict, to be read at 4:30PM EST!

It is not too soon for "United 93," because it is not a film that knows any time has passed since 9/11. The entire story, every detail, is told in the present tense. We know what they know when they know it, and nothing else. Nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about Osama bin Laden, nothing about Afghanistan or Iraq, only events as they unfold. This is a masterful and heartbreaking film, and it does honor to the memory of the victims. The director, Paul Greengrass, makes a deliberate effort to stay away from recognizable actors, and there is no attempt...

Artists Speak Out Against the War Michael Stipe, Bright Eyes, Steve Earle, Moby and more play New York anti-war event R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, Bright Eyes, Steve Earle, Rufus Wainwright, Fischerspooner, Moby, Peaches and Devendra Banhart all performed at Monday night's Bring 'Em Home Now! concert at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom. The event, to benefit a number of anti-war groups, could be seen as an anti-war rally at the third anniversary of the United States' invasion of Iraq, bringing together an array of musical styles -- hip-hop, country, rock, pop, indie and electronica -- with one shared view: It's time...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Reading from radiophone transmissions, a federal prosecutor transfixed the courtroom at Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing trial Tuesday with a minute-by-minute account of al-Qaeda's hijacking of American Airlines' Flight 11 and the plane's journey into the north tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. “We are flying low. We are flying very very low. We are flying way too low,” flight attendant Amy Sweeney told ground controllers who had asked at 8:44 a.m. where the plane was. Then a few seconds' pause, and finally: “Oh my God, we are way too low!” The phone went dead...

Muslims all over the world are outraged over a series of cartoons that have appeared in European newspapers in recent months that feature the prophet Mohammed in ways that suggest he condones terrorism. Al Jazeera reports, for instance: "Up to 300 Indonesian Muslims went on a rampage in the lobby of a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta on Friday. Shouting 'Allahu Akbar' [God is Greatest], they smashed lamps with bamboo sticks, threw chairs, lobbed rotten eggs and tomatoes and tore up a Danish flag."

Frank Lindh, the gay father of John Walker Lindh, dubbed the "American Taliban" after being found in Afghanistan in late 2001, lashed out at the mainstream media and politicians on both sides of the aisle in Washington during a fiery, and at times, emotional speech before the Commonwealth Club last week. Breaking a self-imposed silence about his son's case, Lindh gave the speech in order to reach out to the American public, which he said has been brainwashed by lawmakers, government officials, and sensational news coverage into thinking his son is a traitor to his country and an ally of...

Nothing To See Here - Move Along By Michelle Malkin October 12, 2005 Oct. 12 marks the fifth anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole. Seventeen American sailors were murdered in the attack. They were casualties of a war with radical Islamic terror that America hadn't yet declared and which the mainstream media still refuses to acknowledge today. Too many of us were blind in 2000 -- unable or unwilling or simply too uninterested to connect such blood-stained dots as al Qaeda's 1993 World Trade Center bombing attack, the 1996 Khobar Tower bombings, the 1998 African embassy bombings, and...

There's a growing outcry that one element of the newly chosen Flight 93 National Memorial represents Islam and is a slap in the face to the passengers and crew members who died on the hijacked plane four years ago. The winning design, announced Wednesday in Washington, D.C., includes what is called the "Crescent of Embrace."

A Pennsylvania pastor is fighting the newly approved design of the Flight 93 National Memorial, contending its crescent pattern is a symbol of Islam. Rev. Ron McRae, head of the Bible Anabaptist Church near Jerome, Pa., about 55 miles from Pittsburgh, said a private group he formed might go to court to block the "Crescent of Embrace" memorial designed by Paul Murdoch Associates of Los Angeles. "This is a memorial to the terrorists who killed those people, not a memorial to the folks who died there innocently," McRae told the Tribune-Democrat newspaper in Johnstown, Pa. McRae of Conemaugh Township, Pa.,...

August 21, 2005 The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan By FRANK RICH CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning...