The news anchors, analysts, and politicians all point their fingers in the same direction, toward the Middle East. We must remember, however, that in America, all suspects are innocent until proven Muslim.

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.

When and where people are not allowed the freedom to run their own lives, where government is thrust upon them instead of being "of the people, by the people, for the people"; where peaceful political solutions are not allowed, people will become angry. And angry people 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 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, let us not forget that the attacks of September 11 didn't come out of nowhere. They were retaliatory attacks. Even without knowing the Top Secret specifics of recent years, anyone whose eyes are open should understand that this was retaliation.

And now, some Americans are calling for retaliation for yesterday's retaliation. To me, that sounds like an invitation to another round of ... terrorism, retaliation, or call it what you will. It's asking for yesterday's events to be repeated.

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.

When America's actions in 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, perhaps the U.S. government won't be quite so casual about its actions 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.

Of course, I'm smoking a pipe dream here, offering a strategy straight from LaLaLand. America will "retaliate," Americans will feel pretty darn good about it, and the president's approval ratings will shoot up higher than 110 storeys. It all goes without saying, just like the