Terrorists strike India
– Terrorists attack India’s parliament. They had been warned of bin Laden attacks. MSNBC report. Times of India report. Photo: Violence in the shadow of Ghandi’s statue at Parliament.
Hitler’s home video
– The government just released the bin Laden party tape. He’s sitting, eating, grinning about the Sept. 11 attacks. He says he knows about the time between the attacks and he gloats that our government thought a coup was underway. He calculates the death. The smoking jet:
UBL: (…Inaudible…) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (…Inaudible…) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.
Shaykh: Allah be praised.
For a complete transcript of the tape, click here (it’s a PDF file).
HTML version of the tape transcript here.
Widows
– I’ve not cried once since Sept. 11 but I’ve come close a thousand times — especially, every day, when I read the profiles of the victims and heroes of our tragedy in the New York Times, an endless, I’m afraid, collection of heart-wrenching stories of the lives lost. Here the numbing numbers of 9/11 become individuals again with stories to tell and with widows and children who are left with memories. Then, yesterday, I had on Fox News at work and ended up watching the internment of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of the jet that was crashed into the Pentagon. There have been so many funerals in New York that they’ve become one stream of tears and bagpipes. But because of the news surrounding this funeral — the fact that rules were waived so he could be buried with honors in Arlington National Cemetery — there was coverage on TV and, again, this became the story of an individual. You can’t see his widow and hear Taps without feeling the sorrow in your soul. Now, this morning, I pick up the Times and read the story of Patricia Flounders, a widow of 9/11 who could not bear the loss of her husband. She committed suicide.
Here is the story from her hometown, New Orleans.
Get me rewrite
– Matt Welch has an in-depth (we journalists just love that phrase) look at the state of journalism and columnizing in the post-weblog world, with lots of smart (of course) things to say about old and truly new media:
What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not? Iíd say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s, unchecked joy at discovering clever people, a readiness to admit error, tendency to write with passion and emotion, a radar attuned to personal responsibility, a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review Ö
I think he left out one thing. I was talking on IM one night with my blog mentor, Nick Denton, marveling at how great (albeit economically impoverished) weblogging is and and why that’s so and Nick summed it all up in two words:
No editors.
And I is one. But he’s right. So much of the appeal of blogdom is its immediacy, honesty, and unsanded, unvarnished, rough-edged but personal and passionate individuality. That can’t work in many print publications; the genius of People is that it has a voice as a magazine and creates a tremendous economy of words and pictures (I learned more about tight writing there than I did at a tabloit). That’s right for People. Blogs are right for the Web, the medium we the audience own. Anyway, speaking like the old war horse that I am, this reminds me of the day a dozen years ago when I was trying hard to hire (I presume he won’t mind me telling the story) Stephen Hunter, now the Washington Post movie critic and a thriller writer, a straight-shooter if I’ve ever met one. We asked him what he thought about editing and at first he started to kiss our rears about how enriching the editing process is. But then he stopped himself, shook his head and said: No, I don’t believe that. You know, I shoot guns. I like guns. I think a bullet is a beautiful thing. Too beautiful to waste on an editor….
– And here a good Glenn Reynolds Fox News column that inspired Welch.
If the web had a laughtrack
– Great line from Little Green Footballs on a Chronicle article about John Walker, the rat traitor superdoofus: ìNever mentioned in this article is the psychological impact of naming your child after a famous brand of Scotch…”
