The ambiguity and contradictions rife in this short piece mirror the overall message we're getting from media and the government these days. I want to point them out because I'd be surprised if anyone thinks they're defensible.


Notice he begins by appearing to address those that conducted the attacks: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard," "your coward's attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us." Certainly everyone hates the scumbag terrorists. But since he's not purporting to speak to body parts, he must mean other people, co-conspirators perhaps.


If co-conspirators remain at large, a fact not yet in evidence (although likely), no one to my knowledge has speculated about more than a few dozen or hundred of them. Nor is it clear that military force will be necessary to bring them to justice.


But even if the writer believes that several thousand people are guilty for the 9/11 attacks, the rest of the piece makes it clear that he's advocating more severe means against a much larger target that he prefers not to mention.


If he were talking about a thousand criminals, he wouldn't refer to a future that, based on what he knows about Americans, makes him "tremble with dread." Nor would he warn of a response so unspeakable that not even terrorists can imagine it ("You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of.") This isn't what you write when you're threatening murderers with justice, or even killing them after torture. He's talking about something massive and even apocalyptic, as in the chilling reference to "the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow," the otherwise inexplicable reference to God, and the weird reassurance he receives from what he predicts will be a terrifying future. This is what you write when you're preparing people for world war, and not the prosecution of murderers.


Advocating responses so terrible that they can't be imagined, much less stated, against victims one cannot yet identify, is a virtual endorsement of Col. Kurtz's dictum: "And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends." In short, what begins with a condemnation of terrorism ends up sounding like something written by a terrorist.


In the larger media, we're being bombarded by two contradictory messages: that particular people responsible for this specific attack remain at large, that the mastermind is Osama bin Laden, and that they're capture in foreign lands might require the use of military force. This might all be true. At the same time, however, we're told that we must prepare for a long, difficult war of inestimable duration against many groups in several if not many countries, none of which we can presently identify, with the goal of eradicating all terrorism and, in more extreme rhetoric, of evil in the world. (Of course, no one thinks for a second that our targets will be Irish, Basque, Tamil, Moro or Chechyn or any of the hundreds of violent groups that generally don't interfere with concrete U.S. interests).


Our justifiable hatred at those responsible for a particular crime is therefore being channeled toward a larger response against larger targets, and this piece is a good example of how it's being attempted.