The coverage goes on and on, hour after hour, repeating the same irrelevant details of the deaths, attempting and failing to find words to describe the tragedy, instead simply showing us the same footage again and again. I've seen the second jet strike the second tower a hundred times, from several angles, sometimes in slow motion, sometimes in blurry and obviously amateur video, sometimes in images so crystalline and artificial they might be computer-generated. I've seen the buildings collapse dozens of times, followed by footage of people running, screaming, crying, and helping each other.

One thing I haven't seen, despite plenty of switching from network to network, is anyone taking five seconds to ask why.

Why are people willing to kill and even die to express their anger at America? What has America done to provoke such a suicidal rage, one might wonder? The answer, like the question, is nowhere to be found in America's media coverage.

I have a theory, just a hunch, that people do not decide to hijack and crash planes, obliterate skyscrapers, attack the Pentagon, and kill themselves in the process on a whim. My guess is that they do it because they're angry -- angry as hell, and because peaceful protest is not allowed, or is allowed but accomplishes nothing.

Terrorism does not arise in a vacuum. "Violence is the language of the unheard," Rev. Martin Luther King once said. Is there something unheard in all this rubble?

Indeed. When and where people have the freedom to run their own lives and run their own government, political problems are dealt with politically -- by public debate of the issues, and by free elections. If freedom is repressed, we hope the people will rise up, like Americans did in 1776. When repression comes from a foreign government, however, especially when it comes from the most powerful foreign government in the world, then peaceful protest accomplishes almost nothing.

Where peaceful political solutions are not allowed, lives are lived in fear, and people will become angry.

Some of them will turn to violence. They always have. They always will.

Tuesday's terrorists did not choose their targets at random, by throwing darts at a map of the world. Their carefully chosen targets were all American. The jets were American, the icons obliterated were American, and of course most of the victims were American, because America is the nation that has made these people so very angry.

None of this is written to take the terrorists' side. Killing innocent people is, of course, not the right way to advance any cause worth advancing. I'm simply trying to understand the why of it all, because without a why, we'll never understand anything about what's happened.

So I ask, why ... and in answer I remember reading about American agents, directed by the American government and funded by American taxpayers, interfering in the elections of foreign countries, American bombs and bullets toppling foreign governments, American attacks and American support for attacks on foreign countries, American-sponsored assassinations of foreign kings, czars, and presidents, and American-installed new leaders in those countries, who were little more than puppets of the American government.

If you pay very close attention to the newspapers, you'll see bits and pieces of long-held American secrets leaking out, usually twenty-plus years after the fact, in curt, three- to four-paragraph articles in the back pages of the papers, near the classified ads. In recent months, American atrocities against Vietnam and Cambodia during the '70s, long suspected but never quite known, have finally been revealed. In recent days, Associated Press finally confirmed that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was deeply involved in planning assassinations in Chile in 1970.

And no, the 1970s were not the lowest point in America's shameful record of international crime. The '70s, like the 1960s and 1950s, were business as usual for American espionage -- and we still don't know what the American government was doing to foreign countries in the 1980s and 1990s. America's state secrets and covert actions routinely take decades to work their way into the light of day, waiting for some senior official -- American or overseas -- to write his memoirs and clear his conscience, or for someone who literally knows where the bodies are buried to offer a confession before dying. Many of America's covert actions, one suspects, are never known at all by anyone but the participants and victims.

If you think you know all of America's dirty secrets of recent foreign policy, you're either deluded or a former Secretary of State. The truth takes so long to come out, we won't know a fraction of what America's covert agents were up to in the 1980s and '90s, unless we're paying close attention to the news in the 2010's and beyond.

For all the fine talk by American statesmen and women, repeating over and over that American freedom and the very American way of life has been attacked, today's attacks didn't come out of nowhere. They were retaliatory attacks. Against innocent people, certainly, and certainly wrong. Yet even without knowing the Top Secret specifics of recent years, anyone whose eyes are open should understand that this was retaliation -- for heinous acts planned and ordered by some of these very same American statesmen.

Perhaps when America's international affairs are out in the open, instead of stamped "Top Secret," when the American people and the people of the world are allowed to know what the U.S. government is up to while it's happening instead of years and years later, the U.S. government won't be quite so casual about killing people all around the globe. When America can be proud of its foreign policy, instead of ashamed to the point of keeping it classified, our fear of terrorist attacks will evaporate.

On the other hand, to continue and escalate the bloodshed on all sides, America needs only to continue its ongoing role as meddler in myriad countries' internal affairs. Pick a country and retaliate. Assassinate another leader, bomb another town or city, and as it has in the past, American strategy will generate a great deal of anger.

That anger will manifest itself in new and terrifying ways in the future, and we will all understand why.

Trying to understand why people do what they do is not the same as saying they're right to do it. From this dark day, however, there might arise a smidgen of understanding, if we try very, very hard to understand: This tragedy didn't just happen. It has context.

America's foreign policies and actions have killed thousands of people, people who were just as innocent -- and now are just as dead -- as the victims in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. That doesn't justify this terrorist act -- nothing can -- and that doesn't make the Americans who died any less innocent, their deaths any less an outrage.

The American government, however, is not utterly innocent. The C.I.A. taught Osama bin Laden everything he knows about terrorism, when it suited America's purposes and the targets weren't Americans. In the sixty years since America was last attacked, the U.S. military has attacked Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Panama, Grenada, Korea, Sudan, and Yugoslavia -- among other nations -- leaving innocent dead everywhere. Let's stop pretending surprise and bewilderment that someone, somewhere hates the United States.

I'll say this in bold type, so there's no mistaking my meaning: The author and essay are not endorsing or excusing terrorism, killing the innocent, or the philosophy of "an eye for an eye." Like any other American, I look at Tuesday's carnage and want to scream. It's absolutely wrong to kill innocent people. And 'absolutely' means there's no excuse, no justification.

It is wrong for foreigners to kill innocent Americans. It is just as wrong for the American government to kill innocent foreigners. Both wrongs have happened, and both wrongs will be repeated, when America's response to the murder of innocent Americans is to murder innocent people somewhere else. When that happens -- and it will, soon -- don't pretend we're talking about justice; only revenge. But revenge, it seems to me, is what today's attacks were all about. Revenge is an endless cycle, drawing all who seek it toward the darkest, most primitive and hateful aspects of humanity.

And what will be the next step, after America has its vengeance? Will another round of senseless violence show America's enemies the error of their anger? Will they learn to love America, after America kills more and more of them -- or will they become angrier still? What can we expect in the future, after U.S. missiles, troops, and policies have again killed thousands of innocent people?

More vengeance, of course, to avenge for American vengeance. And after that, more vengeance, more and more innocent dead, until everyone involved runs out of weapons, or victims.

There is another path. Here's what I propose, instead:

First and foremost, the U.S. government -- or preferably, the United Nations -- should thoroughly investigate the clues leading to whomever's responsible for what happened today, hold up the evidence for all the world to see, and make its case publicly against the suspected culprit.

Saying "we have evidence but we can't reveal it" is, in a word, bullshit. Bombing a foreign country, or perhaps several foreign countries, is senseless and counterproductive. "Surgical strikes" are a myth. American missiles will kill innocent people, while the terrorists will simply hide. Children's corpses will make wonderful propaganda, motivating more and more people to be more and more enraged, and leading unavoidably to more and more terrorist strikes against America. More and more innocent dead is not a good idea. That's not what I want. Is that what you want? Is that what President Bush wants?

If there's evidence pointing toward a suspect or suspects, and the evidence has been publicly revealed, and a fair trial in an unbiased nation has been promised, almost any nation would turn over the suspects.

If a nation doesn't or won't turn over the suspects, despite public airing of the evidence and promise of a fair trial, then I would support cold, hard sanctions. I would support sending armed and shielded tanks carrying U.N. troops into such countries, with whatever weapons are necessary to defend themselves and capture the suspects.

Concurrently with all this, I would have the United States list in explicit detail what international incidents, armed uprisings, military coups, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, overturned elections, and unknown et ceteras it has sponsored since the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency.

I would reveal this information to the public without exception, without crossing out names, and without hesitation, as soon as the reports can be compiled. And since I see no distinction worth making between such CIA-sponsored crimes and the crimes we more commonly call terrorism, the U.S. should promptly fire and arrest anyone suspected of such acts, and turn them over to the same international court of law which will judge the suspected terrorists.

The U.S. should offer generous compensation to the victims of its crimes, or their survivors, and their nations.

And most importantly, the U.S. should very loudly, in a manner very sincere and very well-publicized, apologize for such acts, and promise under further penalty of law that it will never again engage in such crimes.

Toward this goal, 99.9+% of the material currently "classified" by America's secret government would be revealed to the American public, and to the world. This would leave 99.9+% of all Americans utterly and tremendously embarrassed at what's been done in their nation's name; it would also leave an open and honest American government for the future, a government which we the people could respect and be proud of instead of wonder and worry about.

Once the above plan of integrity has been carried out, 'terrorism' would be nothing but a bad memory, something our children might look up in history books, when they're curious about the stupidity of a bygone era.

Of course, I'm smoking a pipe dream here, daydreaming that the U.S. government might offer evidence and pursue charges against terrorists, without bombing the life out of whatever country they happen to be holed up in. Dreaming that America might acknowledge that the era of terror didn't begin out of the blue this morning. Peace, I'm well aware, is a strategy straight from LaLaLand.

War is much easier, and lets American secrets remain secrets, so the U.S. will "retaliate." The people responsible for what happened today will never face any real consequences, but innocent people will die, probably by the thousands, and Americans will feel pretty darn good about it. The president's approval ratings will shoot up higher than 110 stories. Most Americans will wave flags, wear flag t-shirts and lapel pins, affix flag bumper stickers to their cars, and proudly sing the national anthem, while people in some poor Middle Eastern nation mourn their dead, bury their children, and swear vengeance upon the United States.

All this goes without saying, just like the reasons for terrorism go without saying -- meaning literally that the reasons can never be revealed to the American public.

The agony thousands of American families are going through this week will be repeated -- in an Arab nation, soon, and then in America, a little later. What goes around comes around. Again and again and again.