Graphics: Highlights of Initial U.S. Efforts in Afghanistan

Links to graphics detailing the initial efforts to provide humanitarian aid and to attack terrorist support and infrastructure targets in Afghanistan:

• Meals From the Air "C-17 cargo planes dropped 37,500 food packages to Afghans in non-Taliban areas yesterday."

• Ships/Aircraft/Naval Weapons Used Yesterday "B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers from the U.S., B-1 Lancer & B-52 Stratofortress bombers from Diego Garcia, F-14s & F-15s from the USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise aircraft carriers, 500 pound MK-82 Dumb Bombs, 2,000 pound Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) Smart Bombs, 1 U.S. and 1 British submarine, USS Philippine Sea Guided-Missile Cruiser, USS McFaul Guided-Missile Destroyer, USS John Paul Jones Guided-Missile Destroyer, USS O'Brien Destroyer, Tomahawk Cruise Missiles, 1,000 pound Joint Standoff Weapon Missiles, 1,400 pound Standoff Land Attack Missiles."

• Start of a Measured, Broad, and Sustained Attack "The initial phase of a U.S.-British air attack yesterday and today targeted Kabul, the Afghan capital, Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban regime, and several other Afghan areas and suspected terrorist training camps."

• Terrorist Training Camps "A late 1999 photo of a training camp complex near Jalalabad."

FBI Probing Second Anthrax Occurrence in Florida

Anthrax has been detected in the nasal passages an individual who works at the same business that a coworker who died from anthrax worked at. Both men worked at a building housing supermarket tabloid publications, the Sun and the Globe.

The gentleman who died of anthrax last week was the first person in 25 years to die of anthrax that had been inhaled.

The over 300 people who worked at and visited the business are being tested for the bacteria and are being treated with antibiotics as a preventative measure just in case they've been exposed to anthrax.

The gentleman who died last week lived a mile from an air strip where one of the terrorist hijackers, Mohamed Atta, rented planes.

Late-breaking update just reported on MSNBC TV: Tonight, Howard Fineman, a reporter with Newsweek, has reported that it is suspected that a letter received prior to September 11th, in the mailroom of the Sun / the Globe, may have contained the anthrax spores in a powder form.

Sources:

• World Scientist / AP [inactive]
• Washington Post

Complete article titled "...But Any Religion's Extremists Have Their Roots in It" , by Mark Lilla, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago ...

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If there is any consensus among spokesmen and students of religion after the events of Sept. 11, it is that those behind them do not in any way represent the Islamic faith. The desire to exculpate Islam is understandable. Yet the question looms: To what degree does any religion bear responsibility for those who speak in its name?

The Roman Catholic Church has been forced to confront its past in relation to European Jewry. The deep issue that this confrontation has raised is not whether individual church authorities abused their powers or distorted church teaching but whether there is something in traditional church doctrine, said or unsaid, that made official anti-Semitism possible.

It is all very well for Catholics today to insist that their faith, properly interpreted, does not condone anti-Semitism. That does not get us closer to understanding how millions of Catholics during a millennium could have thought that it did. Any Catholic who is serious about his faith must pose this question to himself.

Muslims, like Jews and unlike Catholics, recognize no central doctrinal authority. This renders it more difficult to distinguish orthodoxy from heterodoxy and heresy. Yet if any religion is to cope with these deviations it must recognize that they do not arise from nowhere but have roots, however twisted, in the faith itself.

Christians who bomb abortion clinics appeal to the Christian Bible and persuade others to join them on biblical grounds. That Islamic fundamentalism and its militant offshoots appeal to the Koran is therefore not an incidental matter. It means that they have found a way to breed in the religious space opened up by the revelation that Islam presupposes.

Muslims the world over bristled when George W. Bush spoke of the campaign against terrorism as a "crusade," a word they associate with the slaughters during medieval Christian incursions. And they are not wrong to do so.

There is a plausible "crusading" interpretation of Christianity that appears periodically in Christian history, and which the Christian churches need to protect themselves against.

The same temptation exists in Judaism today, as one sees in the more radical branches of the Israeli settlers movement, which is fired by the eschatological belief that reclaiming the land will hasten the coming of the Messiah.

All the great monotheistic faiths have had, and continue to have, trouble reconciling their understanding of revelation with the reasonable demands of political life. Yet reconcile it they must.

Those concerned with Islam's place in the world today are obliged to study seriously the theological sources of Islamic fundamentalism and the apparent absence of theological defenses against the spread of political extremism.

Recent public discussions of Islam have been informed by a humane spirit of toleration, but they mark an abdication of intellectual responsibility among Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

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Source:

• International Herald Tribune [link inactive]