A few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Rev. Nathan Baxter, then Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, cautioned Americans against "becom[ing] the evil that we deplore." I think of that as I ponder Vice President Dick Cheney's blithe acknowledgement that he helped obtain approval for interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects that have been widely condemned as torture. This includes Waterboarding.

News reports say that federal authorities are confident that a top research scientist charged with creating new defenses against biological agents is responsible for the 2001 mailings of letters containing anthrax spores that kiled 5 people and wounded 17 more. However, in the wake of that scientist's apparent July 29 suicide, friends, colleagues and independent observers are skeptical.

Since Bruce Schneier published his June 5 Guardian essay asking the question, "Are photographers really a threat?", this weary topic is being revisited. Amidst the paranoia-fest that has moved in since 9/11, taking a photograph has become suspect activity. Many shutterbugs I know have been questioned and harassed by police officers and over-zealous security guards who believe they are protecting the country from some elaborate evil plan that evidently cannot engage without some glossy 8x10s.

September 11. I can think of nothing that's affected travelers for the worse since the last World War. We now travel with fear, paranoia, and bureaucracy. Taking a flight abroad isn't quite the act of resistance it was six years ago, but we still question our neighbors who are off to the Arab nations about their sanity, we still eye our fellow travelers with suspicion, we feel the weight or our recent history every time we step through a security gate at an airport. Here are a few reads that acknowledge the recent anniversary of the day that everything changed. How Travelers Have Changed Remember after 9/11 when people were so worried about being harmed in a terrorist attack overseas that they were choosing trips that, in fact, increased their risk . . . of a lousy vacation? They were, for instance, choosing cruises that sailed out of Florida instead of sightseeing trips to Europe...

It was a gray Tuesday today in central New Jersey,with intermittent rains falling steadily as fresh tears. There was little overt acknowledgment of the 9/11 anniversary, just over an hour away from Manhattan. No need -- the shadows of memory are palpable. That day in 2001, sitting in a computer lab that my students and I used to launch our local coverage, I wrote: "On the morning of September 11, 2001, individual Americans and people around the world siezed upon the Internet, as well as television, radio and telephones as a way of making sense of madness. What we saw and heard seemed scripted by some B-grade Hollywood hack: first the news that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, then live images of a second plane, and the towers imploding, and then the word about the Pentagon and the rumors of elsewhere, and there were no words to be said, and no sense to be made, but we kept searching...." Six years later, we are still searching: for a way out of the morass in Iraq, for clues to the enigma of Osama bin Laden and his confederates, for clues about how we to make our differences a source of strength, instead of fear.