Instead, a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, can anyone say with confidence whether Ashcroft was speaking of a serious new threat, or exploiting the anniversary to restore his credibility? There is every reason to think that al-Qaida's adherents would take this anniversary as seriously as the group's victims in New York, Washington and elsewhere. But when Ashcroft is the messenger, we just can't tell any more. Any honest accounting on this day -- when the memory of shock mingles with fear for the future -- includes facing the failure of Ashcroft's security policies, which are unraveling so fast that you need a scorecard to keep up.

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Yet Thursday's pretrial hearing in the Moussaoui case -- in which Moussaoui tried to plead guilty to certain parts of the case, then abruptly withdrew his plea -- ought to alarm anyone who cares about credible justice in the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui's weeks of erratic self-defense, his alternation between a reasonable interpretation of the government's determination to execute him and elaborately paranoid accusations against the judge and his own former defense attorneys, all call into serious question his competence to represent himself as Judge Leonie Brinkema has so far permitted. They also raise serious doubt about the attempt of the government to portray him as the "20th hijacker" and a death-row stand-in for the Sept. 11 conspirators.

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Recently I found myself contemplating this photo, taken shortly after the Watergate scandal forced President Nixon from office. The two would-be hipsters -- Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- were aides to the new president, Gerald Ford. At that time Rumsfeld and Cheney were persuading Ford to veto one of the most important Watergate-inspired reforms, an enhanced Freedom of Information Act, designed to guarantee public and media scrutiny of the FBI and other agencies. FOIA, the two aides warned, would take too much power from the executive branch. Ford indeed vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto and the FOIA became the law of the land -- at least until last October, when Attorney General John Ashcroft fulfilled Cheney and Rumsfeld's three-decade-old wish by pledging to fight any FOIA request that comes over the transom.

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The Daniel Pearl murder video is more grotesque, sickening and disturbing than can possibly be appreciated without a viewing. It's not only the brutality, more than adequately described elsewhere; and not only the spectacle of Pearl's degrading and futile participation in his captors' anti-Semitic script. There's also the video production itself. I expected a crude equivalent of one of those old ransom notes made from pasted-up newspaper headlines. Instead it is relatively slick and professional, a paranoid montage of tangentially related images putting the dead reporter at the center of global Jewish conspiracy and Islamic revenge fantasy. The logic is that of a cult like Lyndon LaRouche, the images those of a snuff film.

Over the last few days, debate has raged over whether the Boston Phoenix and its publisher, Steven Mindich, were justified in posting a prominent link to the Pearl murder video -- the first direct access provided by a U.S. news organization, in direct defiance of the wishes of Pearl's family.

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ABC reported that Paul Marcoux, now 54 years old, charged that around 1980, "he was sexually assaulted by the archbishop when he went to him seeking advice on entering the priesthood." Marcoux himself was even more explicit: "He was sitting next to me and then started to try to kiss me and continued to force himself on me and pulled down my trousers, attempted to fondle me. Think of it in terms of date rape." The story was incendiary. Within hours, Archbishop Weakland -- the leading voice within the American Catholic hierarchy for democratization, acceptance of gays and other social-justice reforms -- had accelerated his planned retirement. It seemed the logical next chapter in a season of church scandal.

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On one level, you've got to feel for those Bush administration officials suddenly squeezed between victims' families, Congress and the press. After all, the Sept. 11 hijackings represented as shrewdly organized a criminal conspiracy as any on record. Mohammed Atta and his low-tech co-conspirators quite literally flew beneath the radar of a national security bureaucracy obsessed with high-tech gizmos and satellite missile defenses. The specifics of the martyrdom operation were closely held by an intimate circle tight and tiny enough to defy penetration by the most determined intelligence service.

And yet the questions escalate. Partly, perhaps, it's just emotional: Something in us recoils at the thought that a handful of individuals could so radically upend our safe and prosperous society, turn history on its ear. Just as it is oddly reassuring to believe that weaselly Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed President Kennedy alone, so we yearn for proof that Bush, the FBI, the CIA -- some national parent-surrogate -- must have known, had to have known about the Sept. 11 attacks, even if they failed to do anything about it.

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And that was only the beginning of what has become the most intense debate anywhere in the nation about academic freedom in the wake of Sept. 11. Al-Arian's "O'Reilly" appearance triggered hundreds of phone calls and e-mails (as well as death threats) from critics outraged that USF would employ the supposed "terrorist." Three days after his Fox appearance, university president Judy Genshaft suspended the Palestinian-born Al-Arian with pay, ostensibly for his safety and that of the university community; just before Christmas, she fired him.

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Bush's order authorizes military trials, imprisonment and death sentences not only for present or former members of al-Qaida, but for any noncitizen accused of aiding or abetting acts aimed "to cause injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy or economy." Such trials could take place not only on the Afghanistan battlefield but in the United States. The order is being sold as an expedient means of settling the nettlesome question of what to do with Osama bin Laden, but Bush's order explicitly applies as well to those already detained at home in the post-Sept. 11 dragnet.

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Good news for passengers and the public, right? Not according to House Republicans. While Congress has demonstrated remarkable unity in voting for the bombing of Afghanistan and for Attorney General John Ashcroft's wiretap wish list, an overhaul of the nation's notoriously lax and haphazard airline security system -- the single intervention most likely to impede future hijackings -- still seems a long way off. That's because Republicans in the House have their own, radically different idea: Let the private contractors who have delivered us the current system keep the job.

Republican Whip Tom DeLay has vowed to block any airline security bill that puts federal officers instead of private contractors at the departure gate. And on Friday afternoon, he and other GOP leaders in the House went so far as to urge President Bush to short-circuit the unamimous vote of the Senate with an executive order keeping airport security in private hands. The request came even as Ashcroft announced the criminal indictment of one leading airport passenger-screening contractor, Securicor, for hiring security guards with extensive criminal records in defiance of a previous federal order.

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From his first shaken television appearance hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks a week ago, Bush has seemed to promise a swift and definitive and violent reply. Standing atop the rubble in New York, he shouted into a bullhorn that the perpetrators of the attack would feel America's sting; earlier this week he declared presumed mastermind Osama Bin-Laden "wanted dead or alive"; in Congress he offered a high-oratorical version of the same John Wayne promise: either "we bring our enemies to justice, or we will bring justice to our enemies."

But the remarkable reality of Bush's speech Thursday night was just how far he backpedaled from that promise of easy vindication of the dead. He devoted much of the speech to explaining what his new world policy is not: "not one battle but a lengthy campaign," not a war for territory like Iraq, not a sanitized air war like Kosovo, not even a war with a pre-defined enemy but against any mafia or state "sponsoring, sheltering or supplying terrorists."

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With President Bush talking of war and "a monumental struggle between good and evil," motivation may seem beside the point. But David's anguished query is the right one, and one we ignore at our peril: What do we make of a rage so deep that it could prompt a few individuals to convert box-cutters, pilots' licenses and airline schedules into weapons of mass destruction?

For now, with the attackers still officially unidentified, the only thing that can be responsibly said is that terrorist killers are made, not born. Call it blowback, call it payback -- but whichever part of the world these sadistic attacks emanated from, it is someplace where people have long acquaintance with body counts and death raining down from the sky.

Handschuch's question is even more relevant because, as the bodies and survivors are finally recovered, the mute bewilderment and confusion will turn into anger of our own. That is natural. But what contours will that rage take as it emerges in Washington and around the country?

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Sure, those events were both controversial enough in the European Union, which prohibits membership to countries with the death penalty. But then Bush appeared to get into an argument with himself about one of the most controversial aspects of capital punishment: execution of the retarded.

"We should never execute anyone who is mentally retarded," the president told a group of European reporters who had asked him about growing concern from prominent American diplomats that execution of the retarded was impeding U.S. relations abroad. "And our court system protects people who don't understand the nature of the crime they've committed nor the punishment they are about to receive."

What made Bush's comments particularly remarkable: As governor of Texas, Bush himself presided over several executions of mentally retarded inmates.

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The inability of the White House and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to keep Jeffords from going independent and switching his support to the Democratic leadership -- giving the Democrats an effective 51-49 edge -- is only the latest evidence that zealotry rather than pragmatism is guiding Bush's Republican team. The White House and Lott could have accommodated Jeffords' none-too-extreme insistence that the tax-and-budget plan make room for adequate special education funding. Instead they locked Jeffords out of a crucial conference committee, and kept him off the invitation list to a White House dinner honoring a teacher from his own state.

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I was startled because that student's question seemed so distant and remote, as open and objective as if he were inquiring about Antietam or Bull Run. I thought of that student again this week: how it may be impossible for him, or anyone born after the last American helicopters left Saigon in 1975, to fully grasp the unexpectedly raw emotions unleashed -- visible on op-ed pages and talk shows -- by the revelation that recently retired Sen. Bob Kerrey, as a young Navy SEAL lieutenant, participated in a massacre of 13 unarmed Vietnamese women and children in February of 1969.

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Thanks to assiduous efforts by credit card companies and banks, the House rushed through a bill on March 1, with scant media attention, that would make it radically more difficult for middle-class consumers to escape overwhelming consumer debt and make it a lot more likely that families will lose their homes and cars. The Senate is preparing for a rapid vote on the same measure.

Consider the assessment of these reforms by former federal bankruptcy judge Francis Conrad, an internationally regarded authority who has counseled the World Bank and helped the Czech Republic, Romania and the Philippines establish modern bankruptcy systems. Conrad is no sentimentalist. In 10 years on the federal bench, this hard-nosed jurist and financial analyst supervised the liquidation of the scandal-ridden junk-bond firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, and brought the New York Post back from the brink of extinction. What does Conrad think will happen if the brand of "bankruptcy reform" currently being peddled in Congress passes?

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Bush is right. After five years, it does honor to the victims of Oklahoma City to dedicate a museum to their lives and stories.

Yet in a macabre dance, federal prosecutors and Timothy McVeigh are together ensuring that the man who drove that truckload of fertilizer to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building remains center stage.

Two days before Bush traveled to Oklahoma City, McVeigh announced that he is ready to be executed on May 16. The only difference between McVeigh's own death wish and prosecutors' plans to execute him is that McVeigh wants his death broadcast nationally and prosecutors want a closed-circuit telecast to an invitation-only audience of his victims' family members, some 250 of whom have signed up for the privilege.

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The tidal wave of superpredators never arrived. Instead, juvenile crime plummeted. But seizing upon DiIulio's incendiary predictions and prescriptions, politicians in both political parties created their own tidal wave -- a tidal wave of unforgiving punishment. Harsh juvenile prison sentences, the incarceration of teenagers, massive expansion of juvenile prisons: All were propelled forward by DiIulio's superpredator theory.

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Forget the Linda Chavez imbroglio: By lying to Bush and the FBI, Chavez Borked herself out of the labor secretary job in a way that gained the Democrats little and cost Bush less. Ashcroft is the game that counts.

And there is far more involved than Beltway bragging rights. For some sense of the stakes in this fight, turn to Janet Reno's farewell speech to the Department of Justice on Thursday. As Reno expressed her thanks to each of her agency's divisions in turn, it provided a vivid portrait of the sweep of agencies Ashcroft would now command. Not just those high profile outfits like the FBI and the Civil Rights Division, but offices dedicated to taxes, to consumer protection, to victims of crime, to the environment, on and on. Ashcroft, serving a new president who seems to rely more heavily upon his Cabinet and advisors than any chief executive in memory, would assume office vested with unprecedented power, touching a broad panorama of daily life.

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On Wednesday night Bush did his level best to convince the public otherwise, intoning some variation on the theme of "bipartisanship" more than a dozen times in his brief remarks. But as Specter understood, the very terms of Bush's victory cloud his presidency before he begins it, and no return to his pre-November "uniter, not divider" language is likely to expunge the Bush campaign's vote-suppression tactics of the past few weeks from the public's memory.

As for Al Gore, nothing became his campaign like his ending it. Gore's speech Wednesday night -- conceding the election but not the justice of an Electoral College defeat secured by Supreme Court intervention -- underscored a remarkable shift. Gore as post-election cheerleader for voting rights -- the kind of Great Society civil rights politics that Gore had always disdained -- roused far more passion and loyalty than Gore as hawker of centrist policy-wonking in the election proper.

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"After today, I don't really see this case going anywhere as a practical matter," says election-law scholar Pamela Karlan of Stanford University Law School. "Even if the Florida Supreme Court decides to rule for him and allow a Miami-Dade recount, it's hard to see how [the justices] can rule in a way that will stand up on appeal."

The two Monday rulings might not in isolation from each other have had much effect. But in combination they were like a hammer and anvil, leaving Gore's prospects battered and drastically constrained.

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