We’re back from Amsterdam. It was a quick trip but was still incredibly refreshing. I hope to have photos online by the end of the week.

We went for the opening of this show, The Photograph and the American Dream at the Van Gogh Museum. It’s quite a collection and will most likely travel around the US in the after it’s run in Amsterdam.

The exhibition also reminded me of one of my favorite photo books, the catalog to Crossing the Frontier, Photographs of the Developing West. I don’t go to The Strand bookstore nearly often enough, but many of my favorite books have been found while browsing the tables there.

Our neighborhood smelled like smoke again yesterday.

My favorite part of this story about the stealing of the Enigma encoding machine is that the suspect lived on a street called No Man’s Lane.

I think Thomas Friedman is my favorite New York Times columnist. Today’s column, Terrorism Game Theory should be read by everyone thinking about fleeing American cities or canceling travel plans.

I highly recommend reading his past columns as well. Having won two Pulitzer prizes for Middle East journalism and having headed the New York Times offices in Beirut and Jerusalem, he possesses a unique understanding of the region and it’s effect on the world.

He even looks like a good old-fashioned newspaper reporter, or at least what they used to look like in seventies movies.

Another excellent editorial is Bush vs. Powell in today’s Washington Post.

Joe’s Filters are back at the top of the page. I need to get back to work, and some sense of normalcy. We were on a plane back to New York 9 hours before the WTC attack, since that was still completely normal, I got a bunch of work done on the flight. The FXScript Reference is getting some updates and I’m also getting back to work on the first expansion filters. Several new tools are already working, and a half-dozen more are sketched out on paper.

These postings have been incredibly therapeutic, and are helping me to sort out my feelings and figure out what I’m thinking in the aftermath of the attack less than two miles from my house. I’m not planning on stopping, but I need to spend less time reading the news and more time making stuff. I also need to get back on 2-pop…

September 12, the day after the attacks, I found this article on WorldTribune.com Israeli intelligence: Iraq financed attacks. I’d never heard of WorldTribune.com before and since the site looked kind of sketchy I spent the next three hours trying unsuccessfully to find a second source for the story or anything to validate it.

Last night I saw a much more detailed account in the British military journal Janes. Salon lead with a story titled A Saddam connection? Yesterday night, Stratfor published U.S. May Be Refocusing on Iraq. (On the 13th Stratfor published the only article I know of pointing out that the clues found in rental cars might have been decoys, Hijacking Clues May Be Red Herrings) WorldTribune also published another story reaffirming their initial report about the Iraq conneciton, CIA now focusing on Iraq connection. To me, the Iraq connection makes sense. Both of Saddam’s sons are now in power in Iraq and it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to imagine a bloodfued between the Bush and Hussein families.

It has been my fear that too quick a focus on Bin Laden could overshadow another threat which could be much more dangerous. The Janes article describes Bin Laden as a “schoolboy in comparison with Mughiyeh”, so why is this the first we’ve heard of him?

Keeping track of what is going on is difficult enough, but spelling seems to be a regional decision as well. The New York Times uses Mujahadeen and Taliban, the Times of London and the BBC use Taleban and Mujahedin. The AP combined those into Mujahedeen while Reuters came up with Mujahadin, both use the spelling Taliban. I’m not sure what I’ve been using, but I’ll try to follow the NY Times spellings from now on.

The mainstream American press isn’t painting a very complete picture Afghanistan. I imagine this is partly because of information overload, and dealing with the events of last week is difficult enough without the convoluted mess that is Afghanistan.

Still, we need to know what we’re getting into. Stratfor’s country profile starts with the line “Afghanistan is a tragic mess.” The Sydney Morning Herald published this map of active factions which illustrates how many groups are active and where their support is coming from. This Times of London article, Where war is a way of life, was written by a journalist who has traveled through the country and interviewed the mountain fighters. The article I linked to yesterday was also published by Salon, Welcome to the death zone. MSNBC posted the last interrview with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who lead the strongest resistance to the Taliban and was assassinated two days before the US attacks.