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Barbara Olson and the three thousand others were not killed. They were murdered. The PC media can not even bring itself to use the correct and accurate verb. Scum.

I understand your feelings, but I have to say that IMHO, they were not murdered, but killed. Just as soldiers who die in battle aren't murdered. Plain and simple, our country was attacked by a pseudo-government using a covert military force. The word murder indicates a criminal act. IMHO, it was an act of war. When a murder is committed, you send in the police. When war is waged against you, you send in the military.

Mark

IMHO, they were not murdered, but killed. Just as soldiers who die in battle aren't murdered. Plain and simple, our country was attacked by a pseudo-government using a covert military force.

Well, you are wrong on about every count one can be wrong. There is no just theory of war under which you hijack a civlian airliner and deliberately murder all the civlians on board to achieve a military objective. Second, if you will recall, after we used the military to establish civil jurisdiction in Germany and Japan, we then brought the murderous bastards in the SS and some of the same kinds of senior Japanese military and civilian folks to the bar of justice.

This was not unavoidable collateral damage. It is was directly and simply murder.

What kind of an inhuman soul are you not to see the difference?

I understand your feelings, but I have to say that IMHO, they were not murdered, but killed. Just as soldiers who die in battle aren't murdered.

It seems to me that the problem with that analogy is this: Soldiers (including kamikaze bombers, as in WWII) should be targeting other soldiers and military equipment. The civilians on the hijacked airliners were never a part of the hostilities, prior to the barbarous acts of 9/11.

Even so, I agree with you that Al Qaeda intended this as an act of war; Osama bin Laden had declared war on the US as far back as the mid-1990s, and this was not the first manifestation of it. But at least the attack on the USS Cole was an attack on a military target. And the Khobar Towers bombing was an attack on military personnel. As dreadful as they were, at least they did not strike at the heart of civilized society the way the 9/11 assault did.

What we seem to have here is a gruesome hybrid: an assault that Al Qaeda clearly regarded as military in nature, but only because it has so expanded the definition of combatants as to include every "infidel" in the world. And that is an unacceptable definition of "combatants."

Since Al Qaeda has chosen to treat this as war, however, I agree that we must respond accordingly. Those on the far left--who wish to treat this as a mere law-enforcement issue--are either willfully blind or hopelessly dogmatic, or both.