Bulletin Board Topic:
World Trade Center

Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998. Sadly, the Bush administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden. The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the Taliban, who has subjected the female half of the Afghan population to a continual reign of terror in a country once considered enlightened in its treatment of women? At no point in modern history have women and girls been more systematically abused than in Afghanistan where, in the name of madness masquerading as Islam, the government in Kabul obliterates their fundamental human rights.

Women may not appear in public without being covered from head to toe with the oppressive shroud called the burkha , and they may not leave the house without being accompanied by a male family member. They've not been permitted to attend school or be treated by male doctors, yet women have been banned from practicing medicine or any profession for that matter. The lot of males is better if they blindly accept the laws of an extreme religious theocracy that prescribes strict rules governing all behavior, from a ban on shaving to what crops may be grown. It is this last power that has captured the enthusiasm of the Bush White House. The Taliban fanatics, economically and diplomatically isolated, are at the breaking point, and so, in return for a pittance of legitimacy and cash from the Bush administration, they have been willing to appear to reverse themselves on the growing of opium.

That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising. But it is grotesque for a U.S. official, James P. Callahan, director of the State Department's Asian anti-drug program, to describe the Taliban's special methods in the language of representative democracy: "The Taliban used a system of consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the Taliban, adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very religious terms." Of course, Callahan also reported, those who didn't obey the theocratic edict would be sent to prison. In a country where those who break minor rules are simply beaten on the spot by religious police and others are stoned to death, it's understandable that the government's "religious" argument might be compelling. Even if it means, as Callahan concedes, that most of the farmers who grew the poppies will now confront starvation. That's because the Afghan economy has been ruined by the religious extremism of the Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously tolerated quick cash crop overwhelming. For that reason, the opium ban will not last unless the U.S. is willingto pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the Afghan economy. As the Drug Enforcement Administration's Steven Casteel admitted, "The bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country--or certain regions of their country--to economic ruin." Nor did he hold out much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat, which require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no longer exists in that devastated country. There's little doubt that the Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of opium in order to stay in power.

Diala's was one of a million mind games Lebanese played in order to survive in a city where suicide bombings and exploding cars became part of the background noise of daily life. My favorite quote from those days was from the Beirut hostess who turned to us at a dinner party one evening and asked casually: "Would you like to eat now, or wait for the cease-fire?"

I never expected that I or my neighbors would ever have to play such mind games in America. I certainly understand why Americans are scared. I understand why at a parent-teacher meeting at my daughter's junior high school last week, there was unanimous support for postponing the eighth-grade class's trip to New York, scheduled in two weeks. I understand that this particular act of terrorism we just experienced is something so much more frightening than what Beirutis had to deal with.

How so? It is hard to trust anything after such an attack, because trust is based on a certain presumptive morality, asense that certain actions are simply outside the bounds of human behavior or imagination. That 19 people would takeover four civilian airliners and then steer three of theminto buildings loaded with thousands of innocent peoplewas, I confess, outside the boundary of my imagination. The World Trade Center is not the place where our intelligence agencies failed. It is the place where our imaginations failed.

What we know of these terrorists is that they were evil,educated and suicidal. That is a combination I have never seen before in a large group of people. People who are evil and educated don't tend to be suicidal (they get other people to kill themselves). People who are evil and suicidal don't tend to be educated.

Naturally, when our imaginations fail us in such a shocking way, there is a tendency to push out the boundaries so farthat we see threats everywhere and become paralyzed. We must not. I took my family to the Baltimore Orioles baseball game last Friday night, and as we drove into the parking lot we were handed a slip of paper with "security precautions" - new restrictions about things you could not take into the ballpark anymore. When I get on a plane at the airport, frankly, you can X-ray me until I glow in the dark, but I hope we are not headed for a day where wepermanently do the same at ballgames and concerts.

Believe me, I'm not naïve about these threats. But I'm still hoping that what we're dealing with here is a relatively small number of terrorists, and possibly a crazy state or two - which, over time, can be combated andcontained without totally shackling ourselves.

Beirutis had it right: There is no such thing as perfect security in today's world. All rational precautions need to be taken. But once you take them, then you basically have to decide: Am I going to sit home and hide in the basement forever, or am I, like my friend Diala, going to play whatever mind game it takes, or none at all, and just go on with my life?

My mentor in such things is my late departed friend George Beaver, a crazy Englishman who played golf - as a man in his 80's - almost every day of the Lebanese civil war at the Beirut Golf and Country Club. (I confess that I joined

him on some days.) When I would say to him, "You know, George, it's crazy to play golf under such conditions," he always had the best answer: "I know I am crazy to do it, but I would be even crazier if I didn't."

Unable to actually imprison us, these terrorists want us to imprison ourselves. Sorry, but no way. It breaks my heart to think about the people who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, but I will not let it break my spirit.

I went to the ballgame Friday night, took in Dvorak's "New World" Symphony at the Kennedy Center Saturday, took my girls out to breakfast in Washington Sunday morning, and then flew to the University of Michigan. Heck, I even wentout yesterday and bought some stock. What a great country.

I wonder what Osama bin Laden did in his cave in Afghanistan yesterday?

Standing physically close to strangers in silence feels bizarre, but then again, so does any kind of gratuitous pleasantry. There is no right way to do it.

Yet as so often occurs in New York, the very peculiarity ofthe situation creates its own opportunities. At times, relationships emerge from these strained encounters. Like those tiny, hardy flowers one finds in parts of the world with the most extreme and inclement weather, small tendrils of social life tenaciously survive and grow.

In the elevator of my apartment building I have, quite literally, a nodding acquaintance with any number of people. One of these was an attractive professional woman whom I would often see on the elevator in the morning. She had a pleasant, open face and a chic but slightly old-world style of dress. Sometimes she would even wear fashionable hats, a touch that I found nervy and original. We would smile at each other as we headed out into the sunny or wet or autumnal days.

Two weeks ago, a few blocks from our building, she hailed me and fell into step as I walked. Clarin, as my neighboris called, had seen a piece of mine in this column about one of my psychiatric patients who had died of cancer.

She had been particularly moved by the article because she had recently experienced the death from cancer of her male companion. Walking down the street, we chatted about the uses of psychiatry in such situations. We parted feeling much more like neighbors than we ever had before.

Two days later, when I finally arrived home on that terrible Tuesday, Sept. 11, I heard that Clarin had not returned from work. A neighbor took in her mail. Clarin's phone kept ringing. A close friend later told me there were 90 phone calls on Clarin's answering machine that day -people who knew she worked at the World Trade Center checking in to make sure she was O.K.

Over the week, her bills, letters, and junk mail kept arriving. Sunlight streamed into her apartment. Clothes were delivered from the dry cleaner. She was away and yet still here in some disturbing invisible way; Clarin seemed neither alive nor dead.

Thinking back to our conversation, I remembered her description of her friend Jack's death, surrounded by people who cared about him. His death suddenly seemed like a luxury; a death that had some humanity and context, woven into the fabric of his own life and those around him.

Clarin had, quite literally, vanished into thin air. We kept seeing the image of the World Trade Center building stumbling down in a hurricane of debris, concrete, steel and asbestos - but no people. Tiny mementos of lives floated down from the sky as papers settled onto the street with scraps of information or scribbled notes or lists. All other signs of the buildings' inhabitants had been reduced to a thick, dusty layer of ash. The days were clear and blue-skied, but the air smelled strange. Life both continued and yet stood still; nothing got done.

Slowly signs of life - and death - began to appear. In ourbuilding, candles were placed on the lobby mantel with a picture of Clarin. Then flowers appeared and more flowers. Six days after the disaster, the building held a vigil forher. People streamed down the stairs and packed into the elevators. The lobby was filled as we read a psalm together.

Friends and family described Clarin as a woman of unusual generosity, adored by a large circle of friends. We heard about her reading group, her organization of cooking marathons with her friends, her role as a one-woman support system for her fellow lawyers. I wished I had had more than my brief elevator friendship with her, cut off at its very beginning.

Watching the television on September 11, my primary reaction was amazement.

The attacks were amazing in their diabolicalness and audacity: to hijack fuel-laden commercial airliners and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of innocent civilians. We'll probably never know if the attackers realized that the heat from the jet fuel would melt the steel supports and collapse the World Trade Center. It seems probable that they placed advantageous trades on the world's stock markets just before the attack. No one planned for an attack like this. We like to think that human beings don't make plans like this.

I was impressed when al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed two American embassies in Africa. I was more impressed when they blew a 40-foot hole in an American warship. This attack makes those look like minor operations.

The attacks were amazing in their complexity. Estimates are that the plan required about 50 people, at least 19 of them willing to die. It required training. It required logistical support. It required coordination. The sheer scope of the attack seems beyond the capability of a terrorist organization.

The attacks rewrote the hijacking rule book. Responses to hijackings are built around this premise: get the plane on the ground so negotiations can begin. That's obsolete now.

They rewrote the terrorism book, too. Al-Qaeda invented a new type of attacker. Historically, suicide bombers are young, single, fanatical, and have nothing to lose. These people were older and more experienced. They had marketable job skills. They lived in the U.S.: watched television, ate fast food, drank in bars. One left a wife and four children.

It was also a new type of attack. One of the most difficult things about a terrorist operation is getting away. This attack neatly solved that problem. It also solved the technological problem. The United States spends billions of dollars on remote-controlled precision-guided munitions; al-Qaeda just finds morons willing to fly planes into skyscrapers.

Finally, the attacks were amazing in their success. They weren't perfect. We know that 100% of the attempted hijackings were successful, and 75% of the hijacked planes successfully hit their targets. We don't know how many planned hijackings were aborted for one reason or another. What's most amazing is that the plan wasn't leaked. No one successfully defected. No one slipped up and gave the plan away. Al-Qaeda had assets in the U.S. for months, and managed to keep the plan secret. Often law enforcement has been lucky here; in this case we weren't.

Rarely do you see an attack that changes the world's conception of attack, as these terrorist attacks changed the world's conception of what a terrorist attack can do. Nothing they did was novel, yet the attack was completely new. And our conception of defense must change as well.

Airline Security Regulations

Computer security experts have a lot of expertise that can be applied to the real world. First and foremost, we have well-developed senses of what security looks like. We can tell the difference between real security and snake oil. And the new airport security rules, put in place after September 11, look and smell a whole lot like snake oil.

All the warning signs are there: new and unproven security measures, no real threat analysis, unsubstantiated security claims. The ban on cutting instruments is a perfect example. It's a knee-jerk reaction: the terrorists used small knives and box cutters, so we must ban them. And nail clippers, nail files, cigarette lighters, scissors (even small ones), tweezers, etc. But why isn't anyone asking

the real questions: what is the threat, and how does turning an airplane into a kindergarten classroom reduce the threat? If the threat is hijacking, then the countermeasure doesn't protect against all the myriad of ways people can subdue the pilot and crew. Hasn't anyone heard of karate? Or broken bottles? Think about hiding small blades inside luggage. Or composite knives that don't show up on metal detectors.

Parked cars now must be 300 feet from airport gates. Why? What security problem does this solve? Why doesn't the same problem imply that passenger drop-off and pick-up should also be that far away? Curbside check-in has been eliminated. What's the threat that this security measure has solved? Why, if the new threat is hijacking, are we suddenly worried about bombs?

The rule limiting concourse access to ticketed passengers is another one that confuses me. What exactly is the threat here? Hijackers have to be on the planes they're trying to hijack to carry out their attack, so they have to have tickets. And anyone can call Priceline.com and "name their own price" for concourse access.

Increased inspections -- of luggage, airplanes, airports -- seem like a good idea, although it's far from perfect. The biggest problem here is that the inspectors are poorly paid and, for the most part, poorly educated and trained. Other problems include the myriad ways to bypass the checkpoints -- numerous studies have found all sorts of violations -- and the impossibility of effectively inspecting everybody while maintaining the required throughput. Unidentified armed guards on select flights is another mildly effective idea: it's a small deterrent, because you never know if one is on the flight you want to hijack.

Positive bag matching -- ensuring that a piece of luggage does not get loaded on the plane unless its owner boards the plane -- is actually a good security measure, but assumes that bombers have self-preservation as a guiding force. It is completely useless against suicide bombers.

The worst security measure of them all is the photo ID requirement. This solves no security problem I can think of. It doesn't even identify people; any high school student can tell you how to get a fake ID. The requirement for this invasive and ineffective security measure is secret; the FAA won't send you the written regulations if you ask. Airlines are actually more stringent about this than the FAA requires, because the "security" measure solves a business problem for them.

The real point of photo ID requirements is to prevent people from reselling tickets. Nonrefundable tickets used to be regularly advertised in the newspaper classifieds. Ads would read something like "Round trip, Boston to Chicago, 11/22 - 11/30, female, $50." Since the airlines didn't check ID but could notice gender, any female could buy the ticket and fly the route. Now this doesn't work. The airlines love this; they solved a problem of theirs, and got to blame the solution on FAA security requirements.

Airline security measures are primarily designed to give the appearance of good security rather than the actuality. This makes sense, once you realize that the airlines' goal isn't so much to make the planes hard to hijack, as to make the passengers willing to fly. Of course airlines would prefer it if all their flights were perfectly safe, but actual hijackings and bombings are rare events and they know it.

This is not to say that all airport security is useless, and that we'd be better off doing nothing. All security measures have benefits, and all have costs: money, inconvenience, etc. I would like to see some rational analysis of the costs and benefits, so we can get the most security for the resources we have.

One basic snake-oil warning sign is the use of self-invented security measures, instead of expert-analyzed and time-tested ones. The closest the airlines have to experienced and expert analysis is El Al. Since 1948 they have been operating in and out of the most heavily terroristic areas of the planet, with phenomenal success. They implement some pretty heavy security measures. One thing they do is have reinforced, locked doors between their airplanes' cockpit and the passenger section. (Notice that this security measure is 1) expensive, and 2) not immediately perceptible to the passenger.) Another thing they do is place all cargo in decompression chambers before takeoff, to trigger bombs set to sense altitude. (Again, this is 1) expensive, and 2) imperceptible, so unattractive to American airlines.) Some of the things El Al does are so intrusive as to be unconstitutional in the U.S., but they let you take your pocketknife on board with you.

After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They Placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a minister or the president was passing. On every occasion they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!". Silent as a rock, I watched the charity concert broadcast on Saturday once, twice, three times, on different TV channels. There were Clint Eastwood, Willie Nelson, Robert de Niro, Julia Roberts, Cassius Clay, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Silvester Stalone, James Wood, and many others whom no film or producers could ever bring together. The American's solidarity spirit turned them into a choir. Actually, choir is not the word. What you could hear was the heavy artillery of the American soul. What neither George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton, nor Colin Powell could say without facing the risk of stumbling over words and sounds, was being heard in a great and unmistakable way in this charity concert.

I don't know how it happened that all this obsessive singing of America didn't sound croaky, nationalist, or ostentatious! It made you green with envy because you weren't able to sing for your country without running the risk of being considered chauvinist, ridiculous, or suspected of who-knows-what mean interests. I watched the live broadcast and the rerun of its rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who fought with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that would have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth were they able to bow before a fellow human? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit which nothing can buy.

Another very troubling provision has to do with the effort to combat computer crime. The bill allows law enforcement to monitor a computer with the permission of its owner or operator, without the need to get a warrant or show probable cause. The provision might subject someone who uses a computer at a library or at school and happens to go to a gambling or pornography site to government surveillance – without probable cause and without any time limit. With this one provision, fourth amendment protections are potentially eliminated for a broad spectrum of electronic communications.

I am also very troubled by the broad expansion of government power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. Under this bill, the government can compel the disclosure of the personal records of anyone – perhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to, or went to school with, or sat on an airplane with, or has been seen in the company of, or whose phone number was called by -- the target of the investigation. And under this new provisions all business records can be compelled, including those containing sensitive personal information like medical records from hospitals or doctors, or educational records, or records of what books someone has taken out of the library. This is an enormous expansion of authority, under a law that provides only minimal judicial supervision.

Under this provision, the government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone. All it has to allege in order to get an order for these records from the court is that the information is sought for an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence gathering. That’s it. On that minimal showing in an ex parte application to a secret court, with no showing even that the information is relevant to the investigation, the government can lawfully compel a doctor or hospital to release medical records, or a library to release circulation records. This is a truly breathtaking expansion of police power.

Another provision in the bill that deeply troubles me allows the detention and deportation of people engaging in innocent associational activity. It would allow for the detention and deportation of individuals who provide lawful assistance to groups that are not even designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist organizations, but instead have engaged in vaguely defined "terrorist activity" sometime in the past. To avoid deportation, the immigrant is required to prove a negative: that he or she did not know, and should not have known, that the assistance would further terrorist activity.

When concerns of this kind have been raised with the Administration and supporters of this bill they have told us, "don’t worry, the FBI would never do that." I call on the Attorney General and the Justice Department to ensure that my fears are not borne out.

The anti-terrorism bill that we consider in the Senate today highlights the march of technology, and how that march cuts both for and against personal liberty. Justice Brandeis foresaw some of the future in a 1928 dissent, when he wrote:

"The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. . . . Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?"

We must grant law enforcement the tools that it needs to stop this terrible threat. But we must give them only those extraordinary tools that they need and that relate specifically to the task at hand.

In the play, "A Man for All Seasons," Sir Thomas More questions the bounder Roper whether he would level the forest of English laws to punish the Devil. "What would you do?" More asks, "Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?" Roper affirms, "I’d cut down every law in England to do that." To which More replies:

"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake. "

Two thousand one, nine eleven
Four thousand-plus enter heaven.
A bearded man with stovepipe hat
Steps forward saying, "Let's sit and chat."

They settle down in seats of clouds
And a man named Martin shouts out proud,
"I have a dream!" And once he did,
The Newcomers said, "Your dream still lives."

Groups of soldiers in blue and gray
Others in khaki, and green then say
"We're from Bull Run, Yorktown, the Maine."
And the Newcomers said, "You died not in vain."

>From a man on sticks one could hear
"The only thing we have to fear--"
And a Newcomer said, "We know the rest,
Trust us, sir, we've passed that test."

"Courage doesn't hide in caves
You can't bury freedom in a grave."
The Newcomers had heard this voice before
A Yankee twang from Hyannis shore.

A silence fell within the midst
And somehow a Newcomer knew that this
Meant time had come for her to say
What was in the hearts of the four thousand that day.

"Back on Earth, we wrote reports,
Watched our children play in sports
Worked our gardens, sang our songs,
Went to church, walked along.
We smiled and laughed, knew love and hate,
But unlike you, we were not great."

The tall man in the stovepipe hat
Stood and said, "Don't talk like that.
Look at your country, look and see--
You died for freedom, just like me."

Then before them appeared a scene
Of rubbled streets and twisted beams
Death, destruction, smoke, and dust
And people working because they must.
Hauling ash, lifting stones,
Knee-deep in hell, but not alone.

"Black man, White man, Brown man, Yellow man,
Side by side helping their fellow man!"
So said Martin, as he watched the scene.
Then: "Even from nightmares, can be born a dream."

And down below three firemen raised
The colors high in the ashen haze.
The soldiers above had seen it before--
On Iwo Jima in '44.

The man on sticks studied everything closely
Then shared his perceptions on what he saw mostly
"I see pain, I see tears,
I see sorrow--but I don't see fear.
"You left behind husbands and wives
Daughters and sons, and so many lives
are suffering now because of this wrong.
But look very closely: You're not really gone.

All of those people, even those who've never met you
All of their lives, they'll never forget you
Don't you see what has happened?
Don't you see what you've done?
You've brought them together, together as one."

With that the man in the stovepipe hat said,
"Take my hand," and from there he led
Four thousand Newcomers on into heaven
On this day, two thousand one, nine eleven.

Two thousand one, nine eleven
Four thousand-plus enter heaven.
A bearded man with stovepipe hat
Steps forward saying, "Let's sit and chat."

They settle down in seats of clouds
And a man named Martin shouts out proud,
"I have a dream!" And once he did,
The Newcomers said, "Your dream still lives."

Groups of soldiers in blue and gray
Others in khaki, and green then say
"We're from Bull Run, Yorktown, the Maine."
And the Newcomers said, "You died not in vain."

>From a man on sticks one could hear
"The only thing we have to fear--"
And a Newcomer said, "We know the rest,
Trust us, sir, we've passed that test."

"Courage doesn't hide in caves
You can't bury freedom in a grave."
The Newcomers had heard this voice before
A Yankee twang from Hyannis shore.

A silence fell within the midst
And somehow a Newcomer knew that this
Meant time had come for her to say
What was in the hearts of the four thousand that day.

"Back on Earth, we wrote reports,
Watched our children play in sports
Worked our gardens, sang our songs,
Went to church, walked along.
We smiled and laughed, knew love and hate,
But unlike you, we were not great."

The tall man in the stovepipe hat
Stood and said, "Don't talk like that.
Look at your country, look and see--
You died for freedom, just like me."

Then before them appeared a scene
Of rubbled streets and twisted beams
Death, destruction, smoke, and dust
And people working because they must.
Hauling ash, lifting stones,
Knee-deep in hell, but not alone.

"Black man, White man, Brown man, Yellow man,
Side by side helping their fellow man!"
So said Martin, as he watched the scene.
Then: "Even from nightmares, can be born a dream."

And down below three firemen raised
The colors high in the ashen haze.
The soldiers above had seen it before--
On Iwo Jima in '44.

The man on sticks studied everything closely
Then shared his perceptions on what he saw mostly
"I see pain, I see tears,
I see sorrow--but I don't see fear.
"You left behind husbands and wives
Daughters and sons, and so many lives
are suffering now because of this wrong.
But look very closely: You're not really gone.

All of those people, even those who've never met you
All of their lives, they'll never forget you
Don't you see what has happened?
Don't you see what you've done?
You've brought them together, together as one."

With that the man in the stovepipe hat said,
"Take my hand," and from there he led
Four thousand Newcomers on into heaven
On this day, two thousand one, nine eleven.

Another very troubling provision has to do with the effort to combat computer crime. The bill allows law enforcement to monitor a computer with the permission of its owner or operator, without the need to get a warrant or show probable cause. The provision might subject someone who uses a computer at a library or at school and happens to go to a gambling or pornography site to government surveillance – without probable cause and without any time limit. With this one provision, fourth amendment protections are potentially eliminated for a broad spectrum of electronic communications.

I am also very troubled by the broad expansion of government power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. Under this bill, the government can compel the disclosure of the personal records of anyone – perhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to, or went to school with, or sat on an airplane with, or has been seen in the company of, or whose phone number was called by -- the target of the investigation. And under this new provisions all business records can be compelled, including those containing sensitive personal information like medical records from hospitals or doctors, or educational records, or records of what books someone has taken out of the library. This is an enormous expansion of authority, under a law that provides only minimal judicial supervision.

Under this provision, the government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone. All it has to allege in order to get an order for these records from the court is that the information is sought for an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence gathering. That’s it. On that minimal showing in an ex parte application to a secret court, with no showing even that the information is relevant to the investigation, the government can lawfully compel a doctor or hospital to release medical records, or a library to release circulation records. This is a truly breathtaking expansion of police power.

Another provision in the bill that deeply troubles me allows the detention and deportation of people engaging in innocent associational activity. It would allow for the detention and deportation of individuals who provide lawful assistance to groups that are not even designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist organizations, but instead have engaged in vaguely defined "terrorist activity" sometime in the past. To avoid deportation, the immigrant is required to prove a negative: that he or she did not know, and should not have known, that the assistance would further terrorist activity.

When concerns of this kind have been raised with the Administration and supporters of this bill they have told us, "don’t worry, the FBI would never do that." I call on the Attorney General and the Justice Department to ensure that my fears are not borne out.

The anti-terrorism bill that we consider in the Senate today highlights the march of technology, and how that march cuts both for and against personal liberty. Justice Brandeis foresaw some of the future in a 1928 dissent, when he wrote:

"The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. . . . Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?"

We must grant law enforcement the tools that it needs to stop this terrible threat. But we must give them only those extraordinary tools that they need and that relate specifically to the task at hand.

In the play, "A Man for All Seasons," Sir Thomas More questions the bounder Roper whether he would level the forest of English laws to punish the Devil. "What would you do?" More asks, "Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?" Roper affirms, "I’d cut down every law in England to do that." To which More replies:

"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake. "

After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They Placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a minister or the president was passing. On every occasion they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!". Silent as a rock, I watched the charity concert broadcast on Saturday once, twice, three times, on different TV channels. There were Clint Eastwood, Willie Nelson, Robert de Niro, Julia Roberts, Cassius Clay, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Silvester Stalone, James Wood, and many others whom no film or producers could ever bring together. The American's solidarity spirit turned them into a choir. Actually, choir is not the word. What you could hear was the heavy artillery of the American soul. What neither George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton, nor Colin Powell could say without facing the risk of stumbling over words and sounds, was being heard in a great and unmistakable way in this charity concert.

I don't know how it happened that all this obsessive singing of America didn't sound croaky, nationalist, or ostentatious! It made you green with envy because you weren't able to sing for your country without running the risk of being considered chauvinist, ridiculous, or suspected of who-knows-what mean interests. I watched the live broadcast and the rerun of its rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who fought with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that would have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth were they able to bow before a fellow human? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit which nothing can buy.

Watching the television on September 11, my primary reaction was amazement.

The attacks were amazing in their diabolicalness and audacity: to hijack fuel-laden commercial airliners and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of innocent civilians. We'll probably never know if the attackers realized that the heat from the jet fuel would melt the steel supports and collapse the World Trade Center. It seems probable that they placed advantageous trades on the world's stock markets just before the attack. No one planned for an attack like this. We like to think that human beings don't make plans like this.

I was impressed when al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed two American embassies in Africa. I was more impressed when they blew a 40-foot hole in an American warship. This attack makes those look like minor operations.

The attacks were amazing in their complexity. Estimates are that the plan required about 50 people, at least 19 of them willing to die. It required training. It required logistical support. It required coordination. The sheer scope of the attack seems beyond the capability of a terrorist organization.

The attacks rewrote the hijacking rule book. Responses to hijackings are built around this premise: get the plane on the ground so negotiations can begin. That's obsolete now.

They rewrote the terrorism book, too. Al-Qaeda invented a new type of attacker. Historically, suicide bombers are young, single, fanatical, and have nothing to lose. These people were older and more experienced. They had marketable job skills. They lived in the U.S.: watched television, ate fast food, drank in bars. One left a wife and four children.

It was also a new type of attack. One of the most difficult things about a terrorist operation is getting away. This attack neatly solved that problem. It also solved the technological problem. The United States spends billions of dollars on remote-controlled precision-guided munitions; al-Qaeda just finds morons willing to fly planes into skyscrapers.

Finally, the attacks were amazing in their success. They weren't perfect. We know that 100% of the attempted hijackings were successful, and 75% of the hijacked planes successfully hit their targets. We don't know how many planned hijackings were aborted for one reason or another. What's most amazing is that the plan wasn't leaked. No one successfully defected. No one slipped up and gave the plan away. Al-Qaeda had assets in the U.S. for months, and managed to keep the plan secret. Often law enforcement has been lucky here; in this case we weren't.

Rarely do you see an attack that changes the world's conception of attack, as these terrorist attacks changed the world's conception of what a terrorist attack can do. Nothing they did was novel, yet the attack was completely new. And our conception of defense must change as well.

Airline Security Regulations

Computer security experts have a lot of expertise that can be applied to the real world. First and foremost, we have well-developed senses of what security looks like. We can tell the difference between real security and snake oil. And the new airport security rules, put in place after September 11, look and smell a whole lot like snake oil.

All the warning signs are there: new and unproven security measures, no real threat analysis, unsubstantiated security claims. The ban on cutting instruments is a perfect example. It's a knee-jerk reaction: the terrorists used small knives and box cutters, so we must ban them. And nail clippers, nail files, cigarette lighters, scissors (even small ones), tweezers, etc. But why isn't anyone asking

the real questions: what is the threat, and how does turning an airplane into a kindergarten classroom reduce the threat? If the threat is hijacking, then the countermeasure doesn't protect against all the myriad of ways people can subdue the pilot and crew. Hasn't anyone heard of karate? Or broken bottles? Think about hiding small blades inside luggage. Or composite knives that don't show up on metal detectors.

Parked cars now must be 300 feet from airport gates. Why? What security problem does this solve? Why doesn't the same problem imply that passenger drop-off and pick-up should also be that far away? Curbside check-in has been eliminated. What's the threat that this security measure has solved? Why, if the new threat is hijacking, are we suddenly worried about bombs?

The rule limiting concourse access to ticketed passengers is another one that confuses me. What exactly is the threat here? Hijackers have to be on the planes they're trying to hijack to carry out their attack, so they have to have tickets. And anyone can call Priceline.com and "name their own price" for concourse access.

Increased inspections -- of luggage, airplanes, airports -- seem like a good idea, although it's far from perfect. The biggest problem here is that the inspectors are poorly paid and, for the most part, poorly educated and trained. Other problems include the myriad ways to bypass the checkpoints -- numerous studies have found all sorts of violations -- and the impossibility of effectively inspecting everybody while maintaining the required throughput. Unidentified armed guards on select flights is another mildly effective idea: it's a small deterrent, because you never know if one is on the flight you want to hijack.

Positive bag matching -- ensuring that a piece of luggage does not get loaded on the plane unless its owner boards the plane -- is actually a good security measure, but assumes that bombers have self-preservation as a guiding force. It is completely useless against suicide bombers.

The worst security measure of them all is the photo ID requirement. This solves no security problem I can think of. It doesn't even identify people; any high school student can tell you how to get a fake ID. The requirement for this invasive and ineffective security measure is secret; the FAA won't send you the written regulations if you ask. Airlines are actually more stringent about this than the FAA requires, because the "security" measure solves a business problem for them.

The real point of photo ID requirements is to prevent people from reselling tickets. Nonrefundable tickets used to be regularly advertised in the newspaper classifieds. Ads would read something like "Round trip, Boston to Chicago, 11/22 - 11/30, female, $50." Since the airlines didn't check ID but could notice gender, any female could buy the ticket and fly the route. Now this doesn't work. The airlines love this; they solved a problem of theirs, and got to blame the solution on FAA security requirements.

Airline security measures are primarily designed to give the appearance of good security rather than the actuality. This makes sense, once you realize that the airlines' goal isn't so much to make the planes hard to hijack, as to make the passengers willing to fly. Of course airlines would prefer it if all their flights were perfectly safe, but actual hijackings and bombings are rare events and they know it.

This is not to say that all airport security is useless, and that we'd be better off doing nothing. All security measures have benefits, and all have costs: money, inconvenience, etc. I would like to see some rational analysis of the costs and benefits, so we can get the most security for the resources we have.

One basic snake-oil warning sign is the use of self-invented security measures, instead of expert-analyzed and time-tested ones. The closest the airlines have to experienced and expert analysis is El Al. Since 1948 they have been operating in and out of the most heavily terroristic areas of the planet, with phenomenal success. They implement some pretty heavy security measures. One thing they do is have reinforced, locked doors between their airplanes' cockpit and the passenger section. (Notice that this security measure is 1) expensive, and 2) not immediately perceptible to the passenger.) Another thing they do is place all cargo in decompression chambers before takeoff, to trigger bombs set to sense altitude. (Again, this is 1) expensive, and 2) imperceptible, so unattractive to American airlines.) Some of the things El Al does are so intrusive as to be unconstitutional in the U.S., but they let you take your pocketknife on board with you.

Standing physically close to strangers in silence feels bizarre, but then again, so does any kind of gratuitous pleasantry. There is no right way to do it.

Yet as so often occurs in New York, the very peculiarity ofthe situation creates its own opportunities. At times, relationships emerge from these strained encounters. Like those tiny, hardy flowers one finds in parts of the world with the most extreme and inclement weather, small tendrils of social life tenaciously survive and grow.

In the elevator of my apartment building I have, quite literally, a nodding acquaintance with any number of people. One of these was an attractive professional woman whom I would often see on the elevator in the morning. She had a pleasant, open face and a chic but slightly old-world style of dress. Sometimes she would even wear fashionable hats, a touch that I found nervy and original. We would smile at each other as we headed out into the sunny or wet or autumnal days.

Two weeks ago, a few blocks from our building, she hailed me and fell into step as I walked. Clarin, as my neighboris called, had seen a piece of mine in this column about one of my psychiatric patients who had died of cancer.

She had been particularly moved by the article because she had recently experienced the death from cancer of her male companion. Walking down the street, we chatted about the uses of psychiatry in such situations. We parted feeling much more like neighbors than we ever had before.

Two days later, when I finally arrived home on that terrible Tuesday, Sept. 11, I heard that Clarin had not returned from work. A neighbor took in her mail. Clarin's phone kept ringing. A close friend later told me there were 90 phone calls on Clarin's answering machine that day -people who knew she worked at the World Trade Center checking in to make sure she was O.K.

Over the week, her bills, letters, and junk mail kept arriving. Sunlight streamed into her apartment. Clothes were delivered from the dry cleaner. She was away and yet still here in some disturbing invisible way; Clarin seemed neither alive nor dead.

Thinking back to our conversation, I remembered her description of her friend Jack's death, surrounded by people who cared about him. His death suddenly seemed like a luxury; a death that had some humanity and context, woven into the fabric of his own life and those around him.

Clarin had, quite literally, vanished into thin air. We kept seeing the image of the World Trade Center building stumbling down in a hurricane of debris, concrete, steel and asbestos - but no people. Tiny mementos of lives floated down from the sky as papers settled onto the street with scraps of information or scribbled notes or lists. All other signs of the buildings' inhabitants had been reduced to a thick, dusty layer of ash. The days were clear and blue-skied, but the air smelled strange. Life both continued and yet stood still; nothing got done.

Slowly signs of life - and death - began to appear. In ourbuilding, candles were placed on the lobby mantel with a picture of Clarin. Then flowers appeared and more flowers. Six days after the disaster, the building held a vigil forher. People streamed down the stairs and packed into the elevators. The lobby was filled as we read a psalm together.

Friends and family described Clarin as a woman of unusual generosity, adored by a large circle of friends. We heard about her reading group, her organization of cooking marathons with her friends, her role as a one-woman support system for her fellow lawyers. I wished I had had more than my brief elevator friendship with her, cut off at its very beginning.

Diala's was one of a million mind games Lebanese played in order to survive in a city where suicide bombings and exploding cars became part of the background noise of daily life. My favorite quote from those days was from the Beirut hostess who turned to us at a dinner party one evening and asked casually: "Would you like to eat now, or wait for the cease-fire?"

I never expected that I or my neighbors would ever have to play such mind games in America. I certainly understand why Americans are scared. I understand why at a parent-teacher meeting at my daughter's junior high school last week, there was unanimous support for postponing the eighth-grade class's trip to New York, scheduled in two weeks. I understand that this particular act of terrorism we just experienced is something so much more frightening than what Beirutis had to deal with.

How so? It is hard to trust anything after such an attack, because trust is based on a certain presumptive morality, asense that certain actions are simply outside the bounds of human behavior or imagination. That 19 people would takeover four civilian airliners and then steer three of theminto buildings loaded with thousands of innocent peoplewas, I confess, outside the boundary of my imagination. The World Trade Center is not the place where our intelligence agencies failed. It is the place where our imaginations failed.

What we know of these terrorists is that they were evil,educated and suicidal. That is a combination I have never seen before in a large group of people. People who are evil and educated don't tend to be suicidal (they get other people to kill themselves). People who are evil and suicidal don't tend to be educated.

Naturally, when our imaginations fail us in such a shocking way, there is a tendency to push out the boundaries so farthat we see threats everywhere and become paralyzed. We must not. I took my family to the Baltimore Orioles baseball game last Friday night, and as we drove into the parking lot we were handed a slip of paper with "security precautions" - new restrictions about things you could not take into the ballpark anymore. When I get on a plane at the airport, frankly, you can X-ray me until I glow in the dark, but I hope we are not headed for a day where wepermanently do the same at ballgames and concerts.

Believe me, I'm not naïve about these threats. But I'm still hoping that what we're dealing with here is a relatively small number of terrorists, and possibly a crazy state or two - which, over time, can be combated andcontained without totally shackling ourselves.

Beirutis had it right: There is no such thing as perfect security in today's world. All rational precautions need to be taken. But once you take them, then you basically have to decide: Am I going to sit home and hide in the basement forever, or am I, like my friend Diala, going to play whatever mind game it takes, or none at all, and just go on with my life?

My mentor in such things is my late departed friend George Beaver, a crazy Englishman who played golf - as a man in his 80's - almost every day of the Lebanese civil war at the Beirut Golf and Country Club. (I confess that I joined

him on some days.) When I would say to him, "You know, George, it's crazy to play golf under such conditions," he always had the best answer: "I know I am crazy to do it, but I would be even crazier if I didn't."

Unable to actually imprison us, these terrorists want us to imprison ourselves. Sorry, but no way. It breaks my heart to think about the people who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, but I will not let it break my spirit.

I went to the ballgame Friday night, took in Dvorak's "New World" Symphony at the Kennedy Center Saturday, took my girls out to breakfast in Washington Sunday morning, and then flew to the University of Michigan. Heck, I even wentout yesterday and bought some stock. What a great country.

I wonder what Osama bin Laden did in his cave in Afghanistan yesterday?

Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998. Sadly, the Bush administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden. The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the Taliban, who has subjected the female half of the Afghan population to a continual reign of terror in a country once considered enlightened in its treatment of women? At no point in modern history have women and girls been more systematically abused than in Afghanistan where, in the name of madness masquerading as Islam, the government in Kabul obliterates their fundamental human rights.

Women may not appear in public without being covered from head to toe with the oppressive shroud called the burkha , and they may not leave the house without being accompanied by a male family member. They've not been permitted to attend school or be treated by male doctors, yet women have been banned from practicing medicine or any profession for that matter. The lot of males is better if they blindly accept the laws of an extreme religious theocracy that prescribes strict rules governing all behavior, from a ban on shaving to what crops may be grown. It is this last power that has captured the enthusiasm of the Bush White House. The Taliban fanatics, economically and diplomatically isolated, are at the breaking point, and so, in return for a pittance of legitimacy and cash from the Bush administration, they have been willing to appear to reverse themselves on the growing of opium.

That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising. But it is grotesque for a U.S. official, James P. Callahan, director of the State Department's Asian anti-drug program, to describe the Taliban's special methods in the language of representative democracy: "The Taliban used a system of consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the Taliban, adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very religious terms." Of course, Callahan also reported, those who didn't obey the theocratic edict would be sent to prison. In a country where those who break minor rules are simply beaten on the spot by religious police and others are stoned to death, it's understandable that the government's "religious" argument might be compelling. Even if it means, as Callahan concedes, that most of the farmers who grew the poppies will now confront starvation. That's because the Afghan economy has been ruined by the religious extremism of the Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously tolerated quick cash crop overwhelming. For that reason, the opium ban will not last unless the U.S. is willingto pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the Afghan economy. As the Drug Enforcement Administration's Steven Casteel admitted, "The bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country--or certain regions of their country--to economic ruin." Nor did he hold out much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat, which require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no longer exists in that devastated country. There's little doubt that the Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of opium in order to stay in power.