Today, I bought a copy of Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens' memoir, and opened
it to a random page.  This is what I found, on the damage done to the
Pentagon on 911:

"Should I now also feel protective of that other behemoth, the Pentagon?
Well, into its outer walls had been flown a nice acquaintance of mine, a
feisty Republican lady named Barbara Olson.  She had managed to get her
husband on her cellphone to say she had been hijacked, and to him had fallen
the task of telling her that she was mistaken about that.  She was not a
hostage.  There were not going to be any 'demands.'  She was to be murdered
in order that others, too, might die.  As I tried to picture her reaction, I
hit a barrier that my imagination was unable to cross."

A few pages later - on the jumpers, who haunt me to this day.

"'Look, teacher,' The New York Times reported a child shrilling as the Twin
Towers were becomming pyres: 'the birds are on fire.' Here was a sweet,
infantile rationalization of an uncommon sight; human beings who had
hesitated too long between the alternatives of jumping to their deaths or
being burned alive, and who were thus jumping *and* burning, an from much
more than 300 feet.  Nothing I have witnessed since, including Abu Ghrain
and Guanatanamo and various scenes in Afghanistan and Iraq, has erased those
initial images of the deep and sick relationship between murder and suicide,
or of the wolfish faces of those who gloated over the horror."

What a nice departure from the dregs here to have a man of the left with
compassion for those who died that day - even the reviled Barbara Olson gets
a kind notice.

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