One thing I noticed this weekend is that I haven’t really linked to any stories about the amazing human interest stories that have come out of the attacks last Tuesday. The main reason I haven’t done so is that they’re already being incredibly well covered. Just let me say that amidst all of this tragedy, we’ve seen the best that human character has to offer more times than can realistically be counted. Every time I see the number of casualties among firefighters and police officers on the screen, I choke up.

The Washington Post has an article on the Jerry Falwell’s hateful statements on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club television program. Given the opportunity to backtrack, Falwell pressed ahead with even more stupidity. What a guy.

Guess who Jerry Falwell blames for the attacks on Tuesday: people he considers to have pissed off God.

I was glad to read today that there’s some wrangling in Congress over the legislation requested by the White House to give it lots of power to fight terrorism and a blank check for billions of dollars, because it demonstrates that our system of government is working as it should, even in the immediate aftermath of a great crisis.

Ann Coulter’s latest column is the perfect example of the bigoted, moronic, hateful rhetoric that we’re going to see a lot of in the aftermath of the terrorist attack. She even manages to sideswipe the Clintons for no good reason in the process of calling for us to indiscriminately avenge ourselves upon anyone who we suspect might have been involved in the attack. I’m going to spoil the ending of the column on behalf of those who don’t feel like reading it:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

Max Garrone interviews Stephen Cohen (a fellow at the Brookings Institution) about Osama bin Laden and the history of the Taliban. A somewhat different and perhaps more nuanced view of our level of complicity in the creation of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization.

From the Guardian: They can’t see why they are hated. (Upon further reflection, and learning some new things that I’ll write about when I have time, I think that this article is useful only as something to debunk. This author is completely wrong about why we’re hated overseas. So many people are talking about this article, though, that it’s useful to know about even if it is wrong.)

The LA Times has an incredibly detailed article on the current state of the investigation into the identities of the terrorists.

I heard on the news last night that the names of the terrorists who attended flight school in the United States were all on an FBI list of known terrorists (I’m still looking for a cite on this). That, to me, is an amazing communications failure. All day yesterday, I thought about Customer Relationship Management software, which is used by many firms to provide access to all of the relevant information about a customer whenever someone at a business has contact with that customer. This type of software is becoming pervasive in business because without some sort of information aid, it’s impossible for any person to keep track of all of the data that might prove useful when communicating with a specific customer. Doesn’t it seem logical that we would have similar software systems available when security is off the essence? How could we provide a pilot’s license to someone without first checking to make sure that they’re not going to most likely use that license to break the law? How do we let people board airplanes without checking against these sorts of lists? I find it shocking and depressing that these attacks could possibly have been prevented with nothing more than better information technology. We had the information we needed, we just didn’t provide that information to the people who needed it. I had assumed that these pilots would have been people who had perfectly clean records in order to avoid being caught in the system. It’s much more jarring to discover that there just isn’t any system.

Here’s a link to an old Guardian article on Islamic extremists who received terrorist training on America’s dime during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.