First - People: My sister Anna spoke to Isabel’s boyfriend Bilal, and they are both fine, as is Isabel’s daughter Amalie. Isabel is stuck somewhere out in the suburbs, where she was to have been in court this morning. But Bilal and the nanny are both at Isabel’s house with Amalie.

So are Walter White, Sonia Rein & their son Sacha, although Walter missed the blasts at Kings Cross by only a few minutes. Characteristically, Sacha is already out-and-about, but nowhere near central London.

Second - Feelings: I’m feeling shaken up, much like I felt September 11, but not quite to the same level of intensity. It is different when it isn’t your city. Back in September 2001, I was desperate to get home and just see everyone and everything.

Now, I’m feeling blue and saddened by the state of the world, and my usual "we can make a difference" worldview has taken another hard hit. But it isn’t personal to me the same way September 11 was. And I don’t have the same strange aversion to thinking about the political situation that allowed this to ferment, or the political consequences likely to follow.

Third - Politics: Of course, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem with the question of anti-American/anti-Western terrorism and American foreign policy in the middle east. But I don’t think there’s any question that our decision to invade Iraq, and the wanton social destruction & abuse that followed, has galvanized anti-American feelings and motivated a whole new community of terrorists and people who sympathize with them.

I don’t think a large scale crackdown is the answer. When people lose the right to complain, debate, protest, and organize themselves to try to be heard, they get resentful and sneaky, and some of them turn to violence. It isn’t a matter of ideology, it’s human nature. Think about the ANC and their military wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe, under the apartheid government of South Africa, and of Soviet dissidents creating subtle anti-authoritarian art under the old Iron Curtain governments.

But banning the ANC and sending dissidents to Siberia was no more effective at combating dissent and keeping oppressive governments in power in the long run, than secret seizures of library records will be under the USA Patriot Act will be in combating terrorism. (That’s my favorite of the USA Patriot Act dumbass provisions.)

I think there are things we can do that would help fight terrorism. For example, a good provision of the USA Patriot Act changed wiretapping law to allow the taps to attach to a person, rather than a phone number, so it’s easier to deal with people getting new or multiple cell phones. If you have a real suspect, being able to fully investigate them without antiquated regulations getting in the way is a good idea.

But even more than that, I think the US government has to quit lying to people. We lose credibility when we say there are WMDs, and then there aren’t. Or that Saddam Hussein was tied to the Taliban and al Qaeda, when their brand of religious extremism was antithetical to his secular totalitarianism.

In the same way, I think we lose credibility when George Bush says that terrorists "hate freedom." I don’t think that’s what the al Qaeda terrorists hate. They might hate our relationship to Israel, or the way our culture spends so much time and money focused on nearly naked women, or our general ignorance of Islamic traditions and rules. But freedom? What would hating freedom even look like? Maybe hating the choices we are free to make, but again, that seems more substantive than the abstract "hating freedom" that the President so strangely claims.

And we lose credibility when our soldiers engage in torture and humiliation of the people they’ve detained. The Abu Gharib photos of naked and humiliated prisoners gave anyone with the slightest inclination towards anti-Americanism horrifying evidence that we aren’t the paragons of virtue we claim. Reports that we desecrated the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay prison, even if the reports turn out to be exaggerated, hit the Muslim world the same way that most Americans are hit when we read about protesters burning or otherwise desecrating the American flag. It isn’t about logic, we react emotionally, and so do they. That further damages our credibility and our reputation throughout the world.

I don’t know how or when we should withdraw our troops from Iraq. It seems like we’ve either destroyed, or stood by while looters destroyed, most of the previous government’s infrastructure and cultural resources. Is it better to withdraw and let the local people fight out how to move forward? That seems like the definition of democracy to me, but I can see where right now, that might result in more of a "might makes right" outcome favorable to the communities and interest groups that are best organized and armed. On the other hand, it’s hard to tell how effective our police presence has been. Maybe people would calm down and be less resentful and violent if we weren’t there as an obvious target for their anger and frustration.

But I do know we need to start telling the truth. We need to be responsible for our mistakes, and in a public and speedy manner. We should try to do some humanitarian good, like getting hospitals and schools up and running, preferably with credible aid partners — if we can find a way to do it where we aren’t setting them up to be new terrorists targets. And we should find some way to restore the cultural treasures that we failed to protect during the initial invasion — museums and libraries that housed some of the oldest books, art, and artifacts in the "western" world. They can never really be restored, having been damaged and looted, but we could certainly make a difference by supporting academic experts and sponsoring acquisition of available artifacts.

And we should find and punish the people who planned and set those bombs in London. They should be tried in a democratic judicial system and punished to the full extent of the law.

</rant>