Nice catch by Best of the Web.

The reliably obnoxious Eric Alterman attacks ABC News head David Westin, who apologized for suggesting that the Pentagon may have been a "legitimate target" for terrorists. "Of course the Pentagon is a legitimate target for an attack for those at war against us," Alterman opines. "Hello? War is the Pentagon's entire reason for being. It's where we plan our wars and figure out how to carry them out. By what conceivable definition of war could the Pentagon be excluded as a potential target?"

And, Eric, this is OK, because the terrorists had issued a formal declaration of war against us.

Right?

Right?

Alterman? Alterman? Bueller? Anyone?

Whether or not the Pentagon was a "legitimate military target" is utterly beside the point, which both Dave Westin and Eric Alterman seem to have missed. As on December 7, 1941, on September 11, 2001, the United States was not, as far as it knew, at war.

With anyone.

Had we been, we might have had defenses up against what happened, especially at the Pentagon.

But such issues, being favorable to the position of the US, are not worthy of note to "journalists" such as Eric Alterman and Dave Westin...

The Pentagon was most certainly a legitimate target for a group that had indeed declared war on the United States, if anyone had cared to pay attention to Osama bin Laden's frequent public statements to that effect for two years prior to September 11th. Unlike the WTC, anyone working at the Pentagon can reasonably be called an integral part of the US military establishment. What was NOT legitimate was the method by which it was attacked... a civilian airliner full of non-combatants. Grotesque.

True, but the problem was that no one took bin Laden seriously (in that we never considered ourselves to be at war with him--we continued to deal with it as a criminal matter, rather than a military one).

The non-response to the Cole attack convinced him that we would continue to roll over, unless he did something dramatic to get our attention...