To Catch a Terrorist The lead article in the New York Times on June 22nd, Inside the Interrorgation of a 9/11 Mastermind, is a great piece of journalism. In the frightening days and months after 9/11 the CIA worked desperately to capture the terrorists responsible for it and to prevent another such attack on the US. They were very successful, capturing both 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, logistics manager for Al Qaeda. This article reveals the operations of the CIA and ordinary people trying to do their work under extraordinary circumstances. Both these men were interrogated at a secret black site where they were subjected to harsh treatment and waterboarding before being moved to Guantanamo.                                                                                                                   Good Cop/Bad Cop The fascination of this article is in the interrogation details.

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As we watch the war in the Middle East unfold on our television screens, each day bringing new scenes of devastation and horror, more and more I am hearing people say, “This is crazy, there has to be a better way.” These comments are not just coming from my peace and justice friends, the already converted dovish ones I can count on to espouse such things. No, this time I’m hearing this from unexpected quarters, from people I would never have expected it from. Yesterday’s news of 37 children killed in the village of Qana seemed so over the top, so outrageous, that I thought, “that’s it, they have to stop now,” and yet they are not stopping. The rockets continue to rain on Israel and the Israelis will not stop until they feel they have knocked out Hezbollah completely, until they feel safe. And I don’t know when, Hezbollah will ever stop. So we’re probably in this one for a very,very long time.

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Americans today are divided, polarized by political and cultural schisms that are wide, painful and deep. The nature of the issues that divide us are social, cultural, political and religious. In some ways it feels as if we are living in two different countries, depending on where you live and how you describe these schisms and how you vote. The simplest description of this division is to separate the country into the so-called red states and blue states, that is that people in those states vote overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic depending on how they feel about certain cultural or social issues. We can pretty much predict that most people who are pro-choice vote Democratic and most people who are against same sex marriage vote Republican. No surprise there.

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For a few days last September Americans had to face a dirty secret about our society and we didn’t want to look. We have found elegant and artful ways to call this ugly thing something else.But for a while we had to look at it directly and we didn’t like what we saw. And what we saw is that poverty and inequality in this country has a black face. Despair, death, and squalor all were black last September. That’s what came bubbling to the surface in the fetid flood waters of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina after the levees broke, after the infrastructure collapsed and after all the rhetoric and bombast and pomposity broke down. American shame was on display for the whole world to see.

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If we really wanted to create a more peaceful world, what could we do? What if it was up to you and me? What would you do? If you think President Bush is doing it wrong, what would you do differently? If you don’t like those terrorists exploding themselves in car bombs in Iraq or in the subways in London or God forbid, slamming more airplanes into buildings in our own country, how would YOU get them to stop? We tend to think creating peace is something that the experts are supposed to do, the politicians, the diplomats, the top elected officials, and then the rest of us go to war when they tell us to or we complain loudly when we think it was a mistake, but aside from that, most of us have delegated the job of peace-making to someone else, to those people whose job it is or to those saintly creatures who choose to work in war-torn lands trying to get people to love each other.

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