In the wake of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many media pundits focused on one theme: retaliation. For some, it did not matter who bears the brunt of an American attack:


"There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this thing."
--former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger (CNN, 9/11/01)

"The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift-- kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts."
--Steve Dunleavy (New York Post, 9/12/01)

"America roused to a righteous anger has always been a force for good. States that have been supporting if not Osama bin Laden, people like him need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution."
--Rich Lowry, National Review editor, to Howard Kurtz (Washington Post, 9/13/01)

"TIME TO TAKE NAMES AND NUKE AFGHANISTAN."
--Caption to cartoon by Gary Brookins (Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9/13/01)

"At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilites should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration."
--Former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Thomas Woodrow, "Time to Use the Nuclear Option" (Washington Times, 9/14/01)

Bill O'Reilly: "If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because..."

Sam Husseini, Institute for Public Accuracy: "Who will you kill in the process?"

O'Reilly: "Doesn't make any difference."
--(The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel, 9/13/01)

"This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack.... We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
--Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter (National Review Online, 9/13/01)

But the Pentagon's war against media coverage in Afghanistan is not limited to reporters and news crews on the ground. In October, as the brass busily prepared for war, they used public money, at the none too shabby tune of $2 million per month, to secure exclusive rights to all new high-quality commercial spy satellite images of Afghanistan. During a policy debate on the release of satellite imagery, the idea was floated that the Pentagon might shoot down the commercial satellites if they were not allowed to control the images.