Spinnaker [Distributed: Wednesday, September 13, 2006]

In the months and weeks leading up to the fifth year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation has been inundated with movies, shows, documentaries, TV specials, advertisements, picture galleries, essays and articles meant to help us remember those who lost their lives.

Or at least that should be the point of them, right?

It would seem that the media went to great lengths to remember every detail of that fateful day and make the nation remember as well. We were even given the opportunity to view live-streaming video from Sept. 11, 2001. All the confusion, all the terror and all those images that have been forever seared into many of our souls were made available once again. Some say that showing the news footage again will help remind us of what was lost and allow those who lived on the West Coast a chance to experience what is was like in the early morning hours of Sept. 11.

But who could've forgotten? Who could have already forgotten exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with and how they felt when they saw those towers go down? The families and friends who lost loved ones have surely not forgotten. And they certainly don't need to see the loss of their fathers, daughters, mothers, brothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, fiances, friends or children replayed again and again for someone's morbid thrill. They will never forget what happened.

There is no need and no call for movies and TV miniseries that fictionalize and Hollywood-ize the events of Sept. 11, and what our nation's heroes endured, to supposedly help us remember or to better tell their stories.

If those were the real motivations behind these projects, then well-known actors and actresses wouldn't have been chosen to portray those amazing people and the suffering they have endured, just to ensure a big box office success.

Some of the 9/11 projects have stayed true to the real story and the right motivations, while others have stooped to fictionalizing events and situations to make it more entertaining.

The rights of individuals to tell a story is not to be forbidden, but along with that right to "entertain" the masses and tell that story comes the responsibility and accountability to tell it right.

Hollywood, the entertainment industry and the media have been making entertainment and money out of tragedy and loss for decades, but maybe the time has come for them to get some perspective and think about the people they are "entertaining."

There are those who claim that as a nation, we will not know the truth of what events transpired leading up to the event and during that sad day, for years to come, if ever. But we know right now that thousands of innocent people lost their lives that day and they have left a hole in our lives and society.

We do know that their heroic deeds and tragic deaths do not need to be capitalized upon for monetary gain, political grandstanding or box office and Neilson ratings. We know that those who have fallen are not remembered just on Sept. 11 each year, or because of an article in a paper or a movie on a big screen.

They are remembered every day by those who loved them.

Harvard ends early admissions process

Editorial

Roughly one-third of the incoming freshman class last year at Harvard University was admitted early.

But as of fall 2007, Harvard has eliminated its early admissions process, and with good reason. The university recognized the bias early admission has toward wealthier students and ones who have the time and resources to devote to applying to colleges in the first months of their senior year.

Harvard has set an important example that other Ivy League schools should follow. Its early admissions were non-binding, but schools like Princeton and Georgetown are. This means if students apply in September and October and are admitted, they are committed to attendance.

Students who depend on financial aid can't make a commitment like that because they have no way of knowing if they can afford their university of choice. Moreover, many less privileged students may not be privy to understanding how the early admissions process works, because they cannot afford the college preparatory training that wealthier students can.

Other proponents of the measure also point out that by encouraging early admission, high school students must begin clamoring to decide what college to attend by the beginning of their junior year. The college application process is stressful enough without adding an extra year to it.

Some speculate that the reason Harvard can make such a bold move is because it can afford to. As the most prestigious facility of higher learning in the nation, removal of this perk will not curb students' desire to attend.

But universities afraid of losing their edge needn't worry. Every year, more and more high school graduates set their sights on college. Competition to fill the few slots available, especially to exclusive colleges, has only grown more heated.

Students from middle, working and underprivileged classes still face plenty of disadvantages when applying to prominent colleges. They don't have the comfort of knowing their parents donated thousands of dollars to a particular university, or that members of their family have attended a school for multiple generations.

By creating a more equal footing for all students, Harvard is guaranteeing a more diverse, and possibly more deserving, freshman class.

Students must learn to deal with parking issues

Student Opinion

"The same old song and dance." That's what was splashed across the front page of last week's Spinnaker. And boy does that ring true.

It's the same thing day after day, week after week. Students complain that they have to drive around for 30 minutes to find a parking spot, and that parking in lots 14 & 18 is just too inconvenient.

They demand to know what the school is doing to fix the problem. Blah, blah, blah.

Everyone knows that parking at the University of North Florida is a nightmare. So I, for one, think it is time that everyone stops complaining about it.

Let's be realistic about this. What exactly do we want the school to do? Stop selling so many parking permits? Then people would complain because they really are up a creek, in this case without a parking pass, instead of a paddle.

How about creating more parking lots that are closer to the center of school? Where exactly should these lots be built? In the middle of the green?

The University of North Florida just doesn't have the space to accommodate lots any closer to school.

There are plenty of parking spaces in lots 14 and 18, but rather than walking 10-15 minutes, people would rather drive around for 15 minutes or more and then complain about parking pandemonium.

Let's just be thankful that when we incur a parking violation all we get is a meager parking ticket, not a tow truck and a hefty bill. At least our cars are still in their illegally parked spots when we get out of class.

North Florida is expanding. And, as with any school that grows, parking will become an issue. Unfortunately, since UNF is located on a nature preserve there isn't much space available close to school to expand parking.

A shuttle system is a viable option but is expensive and could take a while to implement. And even if it is put into affect, I wonder if people will actually use it, or if they will just continue to complain about the lack of parking spaces.

The moral of the story: give parking services and the school a break. It's really not their fault.

World loses a true nature lover

I've been unexpectedly sad all week over the death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin. I say unexpectedly, because I wasn't exactly a regular viewer of his show on Discovery's Animal Planet channel. In fact, I'm not even sure I ever sat through an entire episode.

But even if you weren't an avid fan, you couldn't help being delighted by the exuberant Aussie, dressed in his trademark khaki shirt and shorts, cradling and cooing over creatures most of us wouldn't exactly call "beautiful," much less cozy up to.

Most Americans couldn't tell you the name of Australia's prime minister, but we knew who Irwin was: an ordinary bloke with blue-collar roots who loved to wrestle crocodiles. He made it easy to forget that he wasn't invincible.

"If I'm going to die," the 44-year-old naturalist joked in a 2002 interview, "at least I want it filmed."

Tragically, he got his wish. On Sept. 4, while shooting a documentary called ``Ocean's Deadliest'' in the Great Barrier Reef, a stingray's barb pierced his heart as he swam above it.

Moments after he yanked it out, he was dead. Stingrays' strikes are rarely fatal, so it was an especially cruel twist of fate.

In the first public comments by Irwin's family since the tragedy, his father, Bob Irwin, who started the wildlife park that his son turned into a major tourist attraction, said they were aware of the inherent dangers of their work.

"Both of us over the years have had some very close shaves, and we both approached it the same way - we made jokes about it," he said. "That's not to say we were careless. But we treated it as part of the job. Nothing to worry about really."

More natural celebrity than trained biologist, Irwin successfully built his career around a passion that stirred in childhood, when his father, a plumber at the time, taught him to catch crocodiles in the rivers of North Queensland.

"That's what my hand and my brains are designed to do," he once said. "That's what I have to give to the world."

We all know people who lovingly and skillfully connect with animals, but generally not the type with giant jaws, claws and venom. In Irwin's risky exploits, we saw the rarest of gifts - the ability to understand and communicate with all varieties of creatures, especially the panic-inducing kind.

"If you love the snake, and if you sincerely love it, it will ooze out through your hands," he once said. "If you can avoid being hit in the first 30 seconds, pretty soon the snake will understand that you're not trying to kill it."

Irwin's fearlessness and willingness to go anywhere were what won him so many fans. While more staid scientists and conservationists were solemnly lecturing about habitats and ecosystems and endangered species, he was off giving us a front-row look at wildlife.

Two years ago, he was criticized for being a little too wild - when he dangled a piece of meat for a crocodile in one hand while holding his 1-month-old baby boy with the other. He didn't think he did anything wrong. If his kids were going to live around crocodiles, he told ``Today's'' Matt Lauer, they needed to get used to it.

Maybe what was so alarming to us about the baby incident was just how perfectly at home Irwin was with the wildness.

Our own lives, for the most part, are predictably tame. Our boxed-in society has a way of moving us away from the natural world, making it too easy to lose our respect for the planet - and, even worse, to lose our awe.

But here was Steve Irwin, wrapping himself in an anaconda or cuddling a croc, putting us in touch with where the wild things are. We relied on him to move us beyond our fears and into the marvelous, complicated world around us.

Now that he's gone, we've not only lost this larger-than-life character, we've also lost that connection. And perhaps that's what we're going to miss most of all.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services -- PERMALINK -- TOP OF PAGE

Take the preventitive war option off the table

The Sept. 11 attacks five years ago had many terrible consequences, most of them seared into our minds by that day's unforgettable images of destruction. But the attacks also had a long-term consequence for national policy, arguably even more destructive they lit a fuse in Washington that led to the Bush administration's incendiary doctrine of preventive warfare.

Preventive warfare is the doctrine that affirmed and encouraged the United States to strike first in Iraq, before any move by Iraq to strike us. It allowed our leaders to act on their imagination of what Iraq might be planning for us. And we know now how that imagination was fanciful.

After the obvious misfire in Iraq, one might have expected the White House to go back to the drawing board and revisit its commitment to first-strike force as a key weapon in its war on terror. No such luck.

The 2006 National Security Strategy explicitly reaffirms the U.S. approach of "acting pre-emptively" against emergent security threats.

The fuse is still live. Another major terrorist attack on American soil could ignite it and trigger a sequel to the ill-fated Operation Iraqi Freedom, perhaps in the form of a preventive U.S. assault against Iran or North Korea.

Before this is allowed to happen, we should review the track record of preventive warfare and think carefully about whether first-strike force is a sound security strategy for addressing the dangers posed by the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Most of the preventive attacks of this type on record since World War II have been ineffective or worse. Limited strikes (by Israel, Iran, Iraq, Norway, Britain and the United States) have largely failed to eliminate targeted weapons stocks. Full-scale regime-change operations (by the United States and its allies) have enjoyed more success in rooting out unconventional arsenals, but led to unanticipated post-war costs.

Framed as snapshots, preventive strikes often appear effective at first, but blemishes come to light later when the dust settles. For example, the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor is often cited as a success story. But the mission's apparent operational success was cosmetic; destruction of the Tammuz I reactor only drove Saddam Hussein's nuclear program underground and accelerated Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, so that by 1991 Iraq was within 18 months of building an atomic bomb. A 1998 U.S. strike against the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan did nothing to counter al-Qaeda's biological weapons program. And the full-scale preventive invasion of Iraq in 2003, intended to stem the production of unconventional weapons and topple an adversarial government, failed to uncover the weapons, while post-war civil strife continues to tie down U.S. forces, complicating and undermining the initial military victory.

Two key factors accounting for this poor track record are faulty intelligence and misuse of intelligence analysis by political leaders.

To predict an attack by an enemy before such an attack is evident requires intelligence bordering on clairvoyance. No intelligence is that reliable, even in a system exquisitely organized and not corrupted by politicians. Yet ironically, a preventive war doctrine itself further degrades the quality of intelligence, steering analysts and their political masters to introduce false positives into the threat matrix by distorting the warning function of intelligence tradecraft.

Despite these shortcomings, some argue that the preventive force option is still useful as a threat that can leverage coercive diplomacy. But raising the stakes with a weak hand is risky business. If adversaries decline to fold under pressure, Washington faces a Hobson's choice of either admitting that the threat of force was a bluff, thus severely damaging U.S. credibility, or alternately exercising a flawed military option that was never intended for actual use.

Unfortunately, the need for broad public discussion of these issues is obscured by the Bush administration's catch phrase "all options are on the table." This statement works as an ideological code that appeals to common sense but packs heavy baggage. Through repetition of the code, Washington obliquely re-asserts its commitment to preventive warfare.

But since the commitment is not explicit, it can be advanced without explanation or justification. The resulting vacuum of public discussion enables a thoroughly discredited military option preventive war to remain on the books as a key pillar of U.S. national security strategy.

On those infrequent occasions when they are pressed to justify preventive warfare, advocates of the Bush national security strategy give ground, pointing out that first-strike force is just one tool in their shed, along with nonviolent options such as rigorous inspections, treaties, law enforcement and economic leverage.

Unfortunately, insistence on keeping the preventive war option on the table degrades intelligence, diverts resources and diminishes allied support necessary for effective implementation of these nonviolent prevention strategies that offer more promise in countering nascent security dangers.

As a country and as individuals, we have learned much about ourselves since Sept. 11. One lesson that has clearly not yet been learned is that preventive warfare - striking first militarily - simply does not work as a tool to counter proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Like spoiled food, the preventive war option should not be kept on the table. Its removal would clear space for the more palatable and effective foreign policy instruments that are better suited for dealing with this new century's security challenges.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services -- PERMALINK -- TOP OF PAGE

Print Edition

DISCOURSE

Remember 9/11, don't exploit it

Editorial

Harvard ends early admissions process

Editorial

Students must learn to deal with parking issues

Student Opinion

World loses a true nature lover

Take the preventitive war option off the table

This Week

News

Expressions

Sports

Print Edition