"The less any thing is, the less we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing then, is this Nothing! We say in the School, Deus cognoscibilior Angelis, We have better means to know the nature of God, than of Angels, because God hath appeared and manifested himself more in actions, than Angels have done: we know what they are, by knowing what they have done; and it is very little that is related to us what Angels have done: what then is there that can bring this Nothing to our understanding? what hath that done? A Leviathan, a Whale, from a grain of Spawn; an Oke from a buried Akehorn, is a great; but a great world from nothing, is a strange improvement. We wonder to see a man rise from nothing to a great Estate; but that Nothing is but nothing in comparison; but absolutely nothing, meerly nothing, is more incomprehensible than any thing, than all things together. It is a state (if a man may call it a state) that the Devil himself in the midst of his torments, cannot wish." - John Donne

That puzzle of Nothing, today, is the puzzle of the hijackers. So far what we know is that, from an incredible effect, the reduction to powder of the World Trade Center Towers, we go backwards towards a few pitiful clues - cell phone calls from airplanes in the midst of being turned into missiles, a possible black box in a field in Pennsylvania, the statement of Barbara Olsen, before she was slammed into the Pentagon along with all her other fellow passengers, that the hijackers used knives. And we, like Donne's Devil, are in the midst of contending with a disproportion so great that the mind keeps blinking.

In Salon today, among a group of pundits and airport security experts interviewed for their responses, one of the common statements was that this was a terribly sophisticated operation. A Sam Skinner, an investigator of the Lockerbie attack, was quoted as saying:

"...the fact that four domestic flights were hijacked is entirely shocking. I don't know of any scenario that allowed for this. This is not an amateur performance. It must have had support from strong organizations or governments."

This was echoed by a Charlie Leblanc, billed as the manager for an Airline Security company, who said:

"I can't tell you how this happened. We don't know exactly what was done, or in the order it was done to accomplish what they did accomplish. But what we know is that this was a well-planned attack. This took months if not years to figure out. We can also guarantee that at least 30 to 50 people were involved."

If this is true, it is hard not to endorse Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, who was quoted by the Washington Post labeling this as an intelligence failure of "catastrophic proportions."

"How nothing could have been picked up is beyond me � way beyond me," Katzman told The Post. "There's a major, major intelligence failure, specially since the [previous] Trade Center bombing produced such an investigation of the networks and so much monitoring."

So on the one hand, we have four coordinated hijackings, we have a devastatingly well synchronized attack schedule, and we have the assurance that the backup for these terrorists had to be extensive and deep. And, on the other hand, we have the startling lack of guns, and the confusing testimony of a few voices who are dead and gone now. It is as if we had received cell phone calls from the cattle cars rolling to Auschwitz.

When you beat your head against a Blank this huge and black, against a will to the void this determined, it is easy to fall for any hint. Orrin Hatch callously demagoged on ABC last night (and is quoted in the Times this morning) with the assertion that the FBI (or the CIA or some "High Intelligence Official", whatever that means) had certain knowledge linking the hijacking to bin Ladin.
"They have an intercept of some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit," Hatch said in an interview with The Associated Press. He declined to be more specific."


So we are to conclude that while the conspiracy was building, the intercept people just let it go - but now they have certain information that "the target was hit", whatever that means? This sounds more than suspicious - it sounds like serious tail covering and disinformation of the worst kind.

This isn't surprising, since men like Orrin Hatch are always the willing dupes of Nothing - they gamble with wild inferences, playing their own ideological games, and we suffer the consequences longterm if we let them get away with it.

I'm not getting to the obvious point that we don't know if bin Ladin did it. Because if there is a man with a motive and a habit of shouting that he wants to knock down American skyscrapers and kill Americans en masse, it is Ladin. An obvious point by the way: the U.S. has been terribly lax not only in letting Ladin receive aid and comfort from the Taliban and from Pakistan, but in refusing to support anti-Taliban forces. There's a strong Iran-o-phobia keeping us from exercizing a rational policy in this part of the Middle East. It is the same fear of Iran that prevented the US from destroying Saddam Hussein when that was a real option. The Kuwait war was a huge oddity: it shouldn't have been waged in the first place, and it shouldn't have been stopped once it was waged before Hussein was taken down. It was, on both ends, a complete botch.

Yet we don't have to backtrack over American policy to make a simple point about a criminal investigation. That point is: we can't start with suspects that we want to be suspects. We have to start with what we know.

I think we are in for some surprises as we find out more about the men who planned and carried out this crime.