by JAMES TARANTO
Sunday, September 16, 2001 2:16 P.M. EDT

Osama Plays the Market
NBC reports that American and European investigators are looking into whether associates of Osama bin Laden may have profited financially from last week's atrocity by short-selling the stock of reinsurance companies, which insure insurance companies. Explains NBC:

Short-selling can produce huge profits when a stock plummets because of unanticipated bad news--unanticipated, that is, by all except those involved in a conspiracy to cause that bad news. In a short sale, an investor would borrow a certain number of shares from a broker, immediately sell them, and then once the stock price had fallen, buy shares to return to the broker.

NBC notes that the stock of three major reinsurance companies--Swiss Re, Munich Re and France's AXA--dropped 13% to 15% in the week before the attack. At the time analysts said the drops were anomalous, "since the reinsurance business was healthy and premium payments were on the way up."

Plane Manuals Found in Florida Motel
A day after two Arab men checked out of his Deerfield Beach, Fla., motel, Richard Surma found a duffel bag in the dumpster, the Miami Herald reports. "Inside: Boeing 757 manuals, FAA flight path maps for the East Coast, a flight map protractor, three Ju-Jitsu martial arts books, an English-German dictionary and a three-ring binder full of handwritten notes." The room was rented in the name of Marwan Al-Shehhi, now identified as one of the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center.

Bin Laden's Boston Ties
Investigators in Boston are "interviewing drivers from Boston Cab Co., where two known associates of bin Laden once worked, to see if they had ties to baggage handlers, who in turn may have supplied weapons to the hijackers," the Associated Press reports. It also turns out that Osama's brother Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden made a large donation to Harvard Law School in 1994 to fund visiting scholars to do research in Islamic legal studies. A Harvard professor, Stephen Walt, "likened the relationship of the bin Laden brothers to that of University of Massachusetts President William Bulger and his brother, reputed mobster James 'Whitey' Bulger, who is among the FBI's 10 Most Wanted."

Intelligence Failure
An editorial in the Asia Times quotes retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, former head of both the National Security Agency and U.S. Army intelligence: "Anyone who says this is not an intelligence failure is blowing smoke. This is an intelligence failure and a security failure. The security guys will blame it on the intelligence guys and the intelligence guys will tell us the great successes they had in the past."

In the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht, himself a former U.S. intelligence officer, quotes a former senior Near East Division operative: "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing."

'Americans Have Little to Fear'
On July 10 the New York Times published an op-ed by Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism specialist, titled "The Declining Terrorist Threat." Johnson wrote:

Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.

None of these beliefs are based in fact. . . .

The greatest risk is clear: if you are drilling for oil in Colombia--or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia--you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear.

Although high-profile incidents have fostered the perception that terrorism is becoming more lethal, the numbers say otherwise, and early signs suggest that the decade beginning in 2000 will continue the downward trend. A major reason for the decline is the current reluctance of countries like Iraq, Syria and Libya, which once eagerly backed terrorist groups, to provide safe havens, funding and training. . . .

I hope for a world where facts, not fiction, determine our policy. While terrorism is not vanquished, in a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are still aimed across the continents, terrorism is not the biggest security challenge confronting the United States, and it should not be portrayed that way.

If this is the attitude that prevailed in the foreign-policy establishment before Sept. 11, we begin to get an inkling of how America might have been caught unawares.

Muslim Rage
In the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Bernard Lewis puts the Islamic terrorists in sweeping historical perspective:

Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.

The reason the Muslims target the West, Lewis writes, is that the West is a genuine threat: "More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people."

In today's Washington Post, Lewis assesses the purpose that underlay the action on Tuesday: "to expel the Americans, their economic tentacles, their corrupting culture and their local accomplices from all the world of Islam, wherever the frontiers of that world may ultimately lie."

Environmental Fundamentalists
On Thursday, two days after the worst atrocity in American history, an outfit called Earth Island Journal published an appalling article by its editor, Gar Smith, titled "U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks With Self-Righteous Arrogance." The article has disappeared from EIJ's Web site. But reader Myron Ebell sent us a copy before EIJ--whose homepage boasts that it is a "winner of the Project Censored awards"--decided to censor it. Smith's argument is that America should respond to this attack on civilization by surrendering--that is, by dismantling our civilization:

If you were to draw a flow chart tracing every terrorist attack against the United States back through every foreign alliance, military mutual aid pact, joint military exercise, bloody political coup, intrigue and tacit alliance, the lines would generally flow back to one common factor. Oil.

Our foreign policy is captive to oil. Our position as a superpower is dependent on oil. (The Pentagon runs on oil. That's why US motorists--unlike European drivers who pay much higher prices for petrol--enjoy a unique hidden "subsidy" on the price of gas.)

If we were able to transform our economy into one that operates on clean, renewable energy, we would not only be taking the right measures to mitigate climate change, we would also be taking an important step toward a new foreign policy that is not predicated on the need to control world oil supplies by propping up foreign dictatorships, unpopular dynasties and repressive regimes. . . .

If we were to redirect our economy to operate on clean renewable energy--energy that is available everywhere on Earth and not just beneath the subsoil of despotic Third World governments--we would not only be on the path to mitigating climate change, we would also be on the path to eliminating one of the major causes of terrorism.

The solution is available but the U.S. government (as presently constituted) will never act on it because, to do so, would require the United States to give up its position as the world's reigning Superpower.

Without oil, we have no army. If armies and economies run on oil, whoever controls the oil controls the planet.

If towns, factories and homes could be powered by solar and geothermal energy, no one country could dominate the world's energy-based economies.

It is time to move to a world beyond oil, beyond repression and beyond superpowers.

While there's a case to be made for reducing America's dependence on foreign oil, the notion that we should answer this act of war by dismantling our ability to make war is insane. We're not surprised to see environmental fundamentalists finding common cause with religious fundamentalists, for the two groups have a great deal in common. Both begin with a worthy ideal--respect for nature, faith in God--and pursue it with a monomaniacal self-righteousness. The result, in each case, is a monstrous, antihuman ideology that espouses hatred of the real world and indifference to human life in favor of some heaven--a pristine state of nature in the case of environmental fundamentalists, and literal heaven in the case of religious ones.

Environmental fanatics, like Muslim ones, have been known to resort to terrorism, albeit so far on a much smaller scale than we saw on Tuesday. So, for that matter, have Christian fanatics, a handful of whom have pursued the "pro-life" cause by bombing clinics and assassinating physicians. These of course are the exceptions; most Muslims, Christians and environmentalists are not fundamentalist fanatics. But Sept. 11, 2001, should be a lesson to everyone about the fruits of fanaticism.

We hope Gar Smith pulled his piece because he realized it was grievously wrong and not just because he feared embarrassment. But in any case, Americans who care about freedom should be vigilant about terrorist fanatics of all stripes--domestic as well as foreign, Christian and secular as well as Muslim.

Joseph Farah, Purveyor of Obscenity
Speaking of fundamentalist fanatics, Virginia Postrel calls our attention to another stunning piece of work, by someone called Anthony LoBaido, which appeared Thursday on the right-wing site WorldNetDaily:

In the West, we most often see Islamic people as crazed and irrational. But have we considered that the Muslims might not be irrational when they consider America to be akin to Satan? Let's look at the Satanic Bible. What are the values of Satan? Lust, greed, gluttony, revenge. Hmm. Sounds like American society.

Is New York the head of the "Great Satan"? All that is evil in the world can be found in New York: MTV, the United Nations, the U.N. abortion programs, the Council on Foreign Relations, New Age Church of St. John the Divine, Wall Street greed, Madison Avenue manipulation and of course more confirmed AIDS cases than the rest of America combined. Let's remember the filthy sodomite gay parade last summer in New York. Let's remember all the New York politicians falling all over themselves to praise this sick spectacle.

And let's not forget that New Yorkers elected--by a landslide--the openly Marxist, treasonous and abortion-mongering, occultic Hillary to a Senate seat. All while fully knowing what she was all about. . . .

So are we all innocent here in New York? Are we innocent with our porno, drugs, filthy Jay Leno monologues, our idolatry, materialism and consumerism?

Postrel writes that "there are some people . . . whom civilized people should not let into our houses. Not only LoBaido but the editors who published him should be shunned." We wholeheartedly agree. WND's honcho, Joseph Farah, ought to hang his head in shame for publishing this obscene anti-American screed.

A Libertarian Against Liberty
Even a belief in freedom is no protection from the dangers of fanaticism--or so it would seem, to judge by this article by Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in both 1996 and 2000. Browne sets up a moral equivalence between Tuesday's atrocity and U.S. foreign policy:

When will we learn that we can't allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?

President Bush has authorized continued bombing of innocent people in Iraq. President Clinton bombed innocent people in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia. President Bush Senior invaded Iraq and Panama. President Reagan bombed innocent people in Libya and invaded Grenada. And on and on it goes.

Did we think the people who lost their families and friends and property in all that destruction would love America for what happened?

When will we learn that violence always begets violence?

Journalism Profs Against America
Bill Israel, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts' Amherst campus, weighs in the day after the attack with an article in the campus newspaper, the Daily Collegian. Calling the attack "the predictable result of American policy," Israel blames the atrocity, which investigators believe the terrorists have been planning for as long as five years, on Bush administration policies:

Since the contested election in November and his coronation by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush, first, ignored the suffering of the Palestinians in the Middle East, then urged Israelis and Palestinians to settle their differences by leaving Ariel Sharon to pursue a policy of non-negotiation and state assassinations. When the world, at the U.N. conference in Durban, focused the bankruptcy of our policy, the delegations of both Israel and the United States walked out, rather than deal. The result is predictable.

Another J-prof, Robert Jensen of the University of Texas, somehow persuades the Houston Chronicle to publish a scurrilous article arguing that America is "just as guilty" as the perpetrators of Tuesday's atrocity:

This act was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism--the deliberate killing of civilians for political purposes--that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime. For more than five decades throughout the Third World, the United States has deliberately targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism. And it has supported similar acts of terrorism by client states.

If that statement seems outrageous, ask the people of Vietnam. Or Cambodia and Laos. Or Indonesia and East Timor. Or Chile. Or Central America. Or Iraq. Or Palestine. The list of countries and peoples who have felt the violence of this country is long. Vietnamese civilians bombed by the United States. Timorese civilians killed by a U.S. ally with U.S.-supplied weapons. Nicaraguan civilians killed by a U.S. proxy army of terrorists. Iraqi civilians killed by the deliberate bombing of an entire country's infrastructure.

All these matters are, in normal times, the subject of legitimate dispute. But we are at war. This is not the time to fight old foreign-policy battles.

Banner Banners
We read about this one on the Web site of radio talk-show host Neal Boortz. On Tuesday Lehigh University of Bethlehem, Pa., briefly banned the American flag. The Allentown Morning Call reports that Bill Guglielmo, an engineering junior from Davidson, Md., was riding on a campus bus when, in his words, "I hear a call over the radio for them to remove all American flags."

It turns out that one John Smeaton, vice provost for student affairs, "ordered flags removed so non-American students would not feel uncomfortable," according to the Morning Call, which quotes an executive of the school as saying: "We have such a diverse student body and emotions are so high right now. The idea was to keep from offending some of our students, and maybe the result was much to the contrary. The student and the bus driver were understandably angry. A mistake was made." Within an hour, the school rescinded Smeaton's order.

What does it tell us about the state of American higher education that an administrator's first reflex when America is under attack is to protect foreign students from displays of American patriotism, which he only imagines would offend them?

Something similar happened in Pasadena, Texas, where, Houston's KPRC-TV reports, the principal of McMasters Elementary School told seven-year-old Ashley Meyer "to change her shirt because it wasn't part of the school's dress code." The school district later said the the principal had made a mistake and children would be allowed to wear flag shirts.

With exquisitely bad timing, the Amherst, Mass. board of selectmen voted Monday night to pass an ordinance that "restricted the waving of Old Glory on Main Street utility poles to six days a year. The vote was 4-1. The lone dissenter wanted to allow the flag to be flown only one day a year," reports Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr. In Florida, meanwhile, the Associated Press reports Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida is calling on homeowners associations across the state to allow residents to fly the American flag. The governor had received e-mail complaints from Floridians saying about their homeowners associations' restrictions.

Lies From Brazil
Yesterday we noted that one Marcio A.V. Carvalho, a student at a Brazilian university, has been making the claim, supposedly at the urging of a professor, that CNN has shown footage of festive Palestinians that, in Carvalho's words, "WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991!!! Those are images of Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait!"

Reader John Freitag Isham points out something so obvious, we're red-faced for not noticing it ourselves: Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

As Seen From Space
Space.com has satellite photos of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, taken both before and after Tuesday's atrocity.

You Don't Say
"Bush Presidency Seems to Gain Legitimacy" -- headline, New York Times, Sept. 16 (link requires registration)

The World That Was
One way to get your mind around just how much the world has changed in the past five days is to go back and look at what people were talking and writing about in the weeks before. Suddenly Gary Condit, the Social Security lockbox and the retirement of Jesse Helms are distant memories. Look at our own featured article for Tuesday, in which Rich Lowry examines the foreign-policy views of congressional Democrats and concludes: "Politics doesn't end at the water's edge. It only gets started there." Rep. Barbara Lee notwithstanding, this is no longer true.

The cover blurb on the Sept. 17 Weekly Standard, which went to press the weekend before the atrocity, reads "Farewell to American Greatness." The photo is of Bob Denver and Alan Hale in a scene from "Gilligan's Island." The article, by David Brooks, is a review of "Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization" by Paul Kantor, a book that takes four TV shows as a symbol of America's decaying political culture. Brooks's opening now seems weirdly prescient:

I'd never really considered the way George W. Bush resembles Gilligan. . . . As Cantor points out, Gilligan is not the smartest one on the island. He doesn't have the obvious leadership résumé. Yet the audience instinctively sympathizes with him, and the show's creators were right to put him in the center. In episode after episode, the fate of the islanders usually rests in his hands and he usually serves them well.

That's because Gilligan possesses a subtle but important set of virtues: the democratic virtues. He is agreeable. He is decent. He never looks down on people; instead he gives others the benefit of the doubt. As Bush would say, he has a good heart. . . .

Though Cantor doesn't make the connection, Bush is a lot like that. He's not the smartest one in his administration. He doesn't possess the aristocratic spirit we associate with, say Churchill, or the intellectual or military virtues of Lincoln or Washington. But he does possess the democratic virtues; he's decent and grounded and in tune with the aspirations and values of middle-class Americans today, who have democratic souls, after all.

Brooks's conclusion, though, now seems quaint: If Cantor is right, "then we will spend the next few decades grappling with a fundamentally new political world--and probably looking back fondly on the greatness that was Gilligan."

Even more weirdly prescient is the subheadline on an article by Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly about defense spending: "While the Bush administration and Congress fiddle, the Pentagon burns."

Reality--What a Concept
Here's the sickest thing we've heard yet. Remember "reality television"? You'd think it would now have been pre-empted by reality, but apparently not. The Associated Press reports that producers on the "Big Brother" shows in Belgium, Denmark and South Africa "have decided to stick to their rule forbidding participants from learning about anything outside the house."

"It's one of the basic themes in 'Big Brother' that they have no contact with what is happening outside of the house," says Kristina Vanhaute, of Belgium's Kanaal 2. "If you show them these images, you immediately create a panic situation because they won't know how things will evolve."

Producers in America and the Netherlands did tell contestants about the atrocity. A cousin of U.S. contestant Monica Bailey was working on the 90th floor of the World Trade Center's south tower and hasn't been heard from since Tuesday.

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to John Lott, Michael Paranzino, Jonathan Adler, Gregory Taylor, Juan Vallhonrat, Kyle Flanagin, Dave Sharpe, Rosslyn Smith, John Archer and Dawson Bell. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)