The media played me for a fool, and I bit. I got pissed off by the images of "the Palestinians" celebrating in the streets, just as I was supposed to. Did I notice that it was mostly teenagers? Nope. I just saw people cheering at the senseless deaths of Americans. And I did what I was supposed to do. I hated them.

And now I see other avenues of media manipulation. All the pictures of Osama bin Laden that I can recall seeing in the past two days have shown him holding a gun, or wearing a camouflage jacket. The message: This is the bad guy. Hate him. He killed Americans. Never mind that the government still hasn't conclusively identified him as the ultimate source of the attack.

Or the sanitized coverage of the mainstream media. Last night, my band was supposed to rehearse, but none of us felt much like making music. So, of course, we talked about the attack. I expressed my surprise that the increasingly sensationalist media hadn't been showing clips of the jumpers, but ony mentioning them. The wife of our bass player replied that she had been watching the Spanish-language channels, which didn't restrict the video to the plane crashes, the fires and the collapses: they showed the victims, they showed the jumpers, they showed the body parts. They displayed the horrible consequences of warlike acts in all their grisly splendor.

When you see something like that, retribution is no longer just an abstraction, an expression of righteous indignation; you can't avoid knowing that, no matter how justified it is, any retaliation will have the same horrible, physically repulsive results. You might still believe it's the best course, but now you do so with the full knowledge of the consequences of your actions.

Why did CNN show endless repeats of "the Palestinians" celebrating, but avoid showing us the actual consequences of an act of war? Because they think Americans' sensibilities are too fragile? Or to manipulate us?