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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. 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 ...

Terrorists have attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon by deliberately crashing planes into them. One of the planes that crashed into the WTC was a hijacked American Airlines 767 out of Boston, I don’t know about the others. Latest news: all flights in the U.S. are grounded, and all planes were ordered to land at the nearest airport. One of the two towers of the WTC has collapsed (at least partially). According to the news, there can be up to 100,000 people in the WTC at any given time. ...

The Privacy Foundation has a report on the privacy practices of Monster.com written by Carol Dixon. I have not yet read it, but here’s the operative quote from the executive summary: This report does not allege illegalities regarding the privacy practices of TMP/Monster. However, the findings in totality raise critical questions about the company This story I found at Slashdot was too good to pass up: Bobby Fischer may or may not be playing grandmaster level chess matches anonymously via the Internet. I don’t know what’s more interesting, that Bobby Fischer might be beating up on top level competition anonymously, or that some other person might be knowledgeable enough and good enough to pass for Bobby Fischer in online chess matches. ...

Declan McCullagh: Microsoft Still Faces Feds’ Regs. The proposed remedies listed in the article seem really stupid to me. I’m not in favor of breaking up Microsoft, but I feel that some structural remedy is required in this situation, the conduct-based remedies are just bizarre. I’m much more in favor of doing something harsh to them and then walking away and seeing what happens. The Economist has a good pro-immigration editorial this week. ...

It shouldn’t surprise you that Department of Justice is no longer seeking to break up Microsoft. All those corporate contributions to Republican candidates have to count for something, right? I installed Mozilla .93 on my computer at work, and it doesn’t work at all. It launches, but I can’t get it to open any Web pages, whether I type them into the address box or try to select one of the preset bookmarks. Oh, well. I’ll try .94. ...

Daniel Gross discusses Little Magazines and the future prospects for TheStreet.com and Salon in a Tom Paine article. It includes this nice turn of phrase: So you won’t get rich. So what. The game has changed. It’s no longer “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” It’s “Survivor.” The Bush administration seems to be working on some sort of quid pro quo with China where we publicly approve of their expanding their nuclear arsenal and they accept the fact that we build a missile defense system. In other words, we tell them it’s OK to build enough weapons to overwhelm any defense system we might build in exchange for them agreeing to our building of such a system. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Have we thought at all about what the effect on other countries will be if two of the most powerful countries in the world agree that a return to expansion of nuclear arsenals is a good thing? Oh, and in the meantime, we’re talking about OKing a resumption of underground nuclear testing by China and potentially the United States. ...

Huge IT news today: HP is buying Compaq for $25 billion. My prediction is that this merger is going to work out about as well as Daimler-Benz’s takeover of Chrysler – in other words, it’s going to be a disaster. Compaq didn’t help themselves out by buying out Tandem and Digital a few years ago, and I don’t see how HP is going to get better by buying out Compaq. The company expects to save $2.5 billion by the middle of fiscal 2004 despite the fact that the costs of merging these two monsters are going to be huge. ...

Verant teams with the Make A Wish foundation to make a child’s dream come true … Lots of DMCA news this week. First, Salon has the reactions of various parties to the release of the U.S. Copyright Offi ce’s release of a report to Congress on the DMCA. Disappointingly, they hewed to the industry line on this bought and paid for legislation. NPR ran a story yesterday on the demise of radio stations streaming over the Internet. Part of the report focused on some pernicious provisions of the DMCA, such as a ban on telling what songs you’ll play in advance, and playing songs from the same artist back-to-back. Since many radio stations can legally do both of these things over the airwaves, it makes them difficult to webcast. ...

I’m kind of obsessive about food safety, and that obsessiveness was only magnified after I read Fast Food Nation. One of the most disturbing current agricultural practices is the use of antibiotics in animal feed. This isn’t one of those things that you can ignore if you’re a vegetarian, either (I’m not a vegetarian anyway), since it’s creating resistant strains of all sorts of nasty bacteria. Anyway, the latest group to denouce this use of antibiotics is the American Medical Association, which joins such other radical leftist groups as the World Health Organization and the American Public Health Association. ...

Last night I finished reading Robert Reich’s memoir of his four years spent as Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Locked in the Cabinet. The book covers Clinton’s first term, which included Clinton’s failed effort to launch a universal health care system, the Republican takeover of Congress in ‘94, and the subsequent hiring of Dick Morris. Even if you disagree with Reich’s politics (they seemed benign to liberal me), you’ll probably find the book fascinating from the standpoint of reading how a truly principled non-politician deals with the constant compromises and sellouts involved in national politics. This book offers a sharp perspective of all of the major personalities that defined Clinton’s first term, and insightful commentary on the state of the U.S. economy at the time the book was written. Reich isn’t shy about admitting and dissecting his own mistakes, either. It’s really a great book, I recommend it highly. ...