There's been essentially the same analysis over and over again and very little allowance made for different views and interpretations and reflections.

The just response to this terrible event [9/11] should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the United States has never done that; it's always gone it alone.

Speaking as a New Yorker, I found [September 11] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it.

The other view is of the official United States, the United States of armies and interventions. The United States that in 1953 overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought back the shah.

There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this. And out of this sense of desperation and pathological religion, there develops an all-encompassing drive to harm and hurt, without regard for the innocent and the uninvolved, which was the case in New York.

[9/11] was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.