CNN

Item in the New York Times: As U.N. Meets, bin Laden Tape Sets Off Alarms. This is a good note. Lots of news out there, but this one should raise some alarm bells. The take-home message for me is:

Osama Bin Laden has read his Sun Tzu
He is cultivating his friends and his enemies with great care. He seeks to eliminate any means to rally global sentiment against him. He seeks to end the UN because it has the capability to act against him. The UN was to be the successor – the successful successor to the original League of Nations, which failed to prevent the Second World War.

Osama Bin Laden and his group effectively read and use the media
From the way he manages to get his message out, to his awareness of the news on CNN, Al Jazeera, and how he uses that to craft his message he is a madman who uses the media with as much savvy as any Hollywood PR man. We must understand what he’s doing, and as I have said before, we must play that game as well.

It is not enough to have justice and right on your side, you must also be able to communicate that fact. Can we do it?

Related posts on this theme: msnbc in arabic, us leaflets need better design

CNN has the news that Allied Forces are attacking Afghanistan. Dystopia indeed.

The Fresh Air radio show from Tuesday, April 10, 2001: a remarkable interview with the author of a new biography of Timothy McVeigh.Their book is significant to history, given Mr. McVeigh’s shyness with the press, and yet the authors, both journalists, come across as mild-mannered to a fault. Until I had heard an exerpt on the radio, I had not realized that McVeigh had confessed to the crime.Their book is called American Terrorist and looks to be worth a read.

William Gibson, in the new film No Maps For These Territories, describes seeing footage of the Murrah Building on CNN as a pivotal moment. The bar for science fiction had been raised, as the modern world made another leap of incomprehensibility.