Editor's Notes, Fall 2001

BY NOW, HE MAY BE DEAD, DISAPPEARED or done for. Yet whatever his fate, you have to hand it to Osama bin-Laden. Mission accomplished.

Who can compare? For sheer amoral audacity wrapped in a smooth package you'd have to look to pop culture and the skin-flaying, human being-consuming Hannibal Lecter, the erudite madman of "Silence of the Lambs." Yet who can ever again watch a movie depiction of a brilliant mass murderer with a stone-cold heart and not say, 'No, sorry but no fictional madman could be as cooly ruthless as Osama bin-Laden in real life. Why, he convinced 19 of his best men to commit suicide in front of the whole world so he could kill 5,000 more people—5,000!—in hellish style. Now THAT's evil.'

Yes, it is. So is a hatred and bile so extreme that one day of mass murder is not enough, that a second wave, a la the successive Biblical plagues against Egypt, must follow. Except instead of frogs it's anthrax, spewed indiscriminately across the American landscape, a poisonous mind trying to spray poison on whomever it can reach, however many happen to be in the line of fire. (Even if it turns out the anthrax attacks were launched by unrelated domestic wackos, they were given cover—permission, really—by the jaw-dropping horror of Sept. 11.)

A lot of fast and loose talk has been poured out across the land by many observers—myself included— who have suggested, pondered, argued or teased out the thought that the attacks of Sept. 11 were terrible in the extreme, but that there were grievances behind them that need study.

Certainly, the populist support for bin-Laden and the rage against America in large swaths of the Muslim world requires long-term attention, ongoing introspection, careful politics, and some serious housecleaning. Where did I read that America's Central Intelligence Agency did not have a single seasoned speaker of Pashtun—the main tongue of Afghanistan—on its payroll?

Yet's let's also sum up clearly the mission statement of Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaida organization: 'Die, You Bastards, Die!'

So what's a Buddhist-oriented publication like Hundred Mountain got to say about all this? What should a right-thinking person do, in the spirit of Right Thought from the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path?