The news in my morning newspa per was not good. Indeed, it was frightful and depressive. But why should it be otherwise when agendas seeded and fertilized by politicians and statesmen run amok. No matter what ensign they wave from No. 10 Downing Street, the White House, the Houses of Parliament, Capitol Hill, the Kremlin or from a palace in Baghdad, their acts spell disaster with a capital D. Think death, depression, dismemberment for warrior and civilian alike.

“Pakistani fundamentalists claim 35 of their fighters killed in U.S. air strikes on Kabul,” trumpeted a 48-point headline. The story cited a pro-Taliban militia group who claimed that “dozens of their fighters were killed by bombs dropped on Kabul, a development which will broaden fundamentalist rage against the U.S.-British coalition.”

Then came the “anthrax spores” morsel. International investigators reported that “Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida network is discovering ever more connections to Egypt, where a growing population of well-educated but unemployed young men has proved a fertile recruiting ground for terrorism.”

This linkage ties al-Qa’ida “to the anthrax attacks in the U.S.” Ahmad Ibrahim al-Najjar, a Bin Laden disciple, was jailed in Egypt last year for attempting to overthrow the government. Now an informer, al-Najjar, told authorities that “the network bought anthrax spores and other biological agents from laboratories in eastern Europe and Asia.”

On the FBI’s most-wanted list of terrorists “in connection with the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington, at least a third were of Egyptian descent.”

On the same page an Iraqi intelligence agent who may have had “two meetings with Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the World Trade Center attack, was expelled from the Czech Republic earlier this year.”

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My reading of the paper’s Campaign Against Terrorism section was interrupted by the chimes of Big Ben, the prelude to the BBC News at Ten program. Here correspondents report the day’s events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other smouldering tinderboxes where the presence of U.S. troops is not always welcomed with acclaim.

Thus, from my hotel room overlooking London’s Kensington Palace and Gardens, I put aside my copy of The Independent newspaper for Thursday, 25 October 2001.

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Some things never change. Like death and taxes, the deposing of iron-fisted tyrants occurred eons before Shakespeare’s regal corpses soiled the boards of London’s Globe Theatre. We in the U.S. have a mixed history of success and failure in such endeavors. Justified or no, by undertaking this ancient removal process, every such act invites, indeed provokes, reprisals upon the perpetrators — a rich legacy of hatred fueled by a healthy taste for revenge. Has it ever been otherwise?

Richard Kepler Brunner is a longtime seasonal visitor to Chilmark. A retired editorial page editor of a Times-Mirror newspaper, he lives in Emmaus, Pa., and contributes occasional commentary pieces to the Gazette.