Ways to donate to the Red Cross disaster relief fund:

• Amazon Honor System (they’re not taking their usual cut of the contribution)
• PayPal (again, PayPal isn’t going to take a cut of the money)
• Red Cross (this page seems to be overloaded right now, so you might try one of the others)

Here’s an eerie post from the Yahoo Finance message boards, posted Monday evening.

CNN’s chronology of yesterday’s events.

Here’s an AP digest of editorials from newspapers around the country today.

RAND’s Michele Zanini on the new breed of terrorism:

It’s one in which people think they’re fighting a war, and it’s a war between the strong and the weak. The weaker side is rebelling and it understands that there’s no way to defeat the stronger side head on. So it exploits the weaknesses of the stronger side. They do it through terror. They don’t want to play on the standard military playing field because they know they’ll get their butts kicked. So they resort to terrorism and guerrilla tactics. And they see what they do as strategic. Osama bin Laden sees himself as engaged in a long war with the U.S. that’s a sequence of battles and campaigns. The strategic goal is to inflict as much damage as possible.

Bigotry, in its most basic form, is the belief that you can know one’s thoughts and beliefs based simply on their appearance, religion, or nationality. I mention this only because I’ve witnessed this sort of bigotry first hand more than once since the terrorist attack yesterday, and it shames us all.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1996 piece from The Atlantic, entitled Blowback. It describes how the U.S. intelligence community created a network of terrorists in the 1980s through our support for fundalmist Islamic resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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p> The CIA … had been obsessed with driving out the Soviets. As a result the CIA helped to train and fund what eventually became an international network of highly disciplined and effective Islamic militants

Estimates of the fatalities are coming in. 800 people are missing at the Pentagon. Over 250 New York firefighters are assumed dead, including both the fire chief and deputy fire chief. Thousands of others are missing as well. There are reports on all the news channels of people calling out from under the rubble on cell phones, still alive and hoping to be rescued.

A friend sent an email chiding me for blaming this on the intelligence community, and he’s right, I have no way of knowing if or how the intelligence community failed in this instance. Certainly they have no way of knowing everything. I think that we’ll need to assess our intelligence gathering apperatus along with lots of other things, like airport security, and on-flight security in the aftermath of this awful incident.

Donald Rumsfeld just said in a press conference that the U.S. was not involved in the attacks on Kabul.