Tolling the terror.

• Position: Letters to the Editor

"The cycle of violence must be broken. The time to break it is now" (Comment, October issue). No truer words can be spoken.

As to how to break that cycle, consider that one or more terrorist networks have targeted, now target, and will continue to target innocent people. We must embrace justice, renounce vengeance, and be sad about the course that justice must take.

If we nuke bin Laden while he's sitting in his lawn chair in the city square of Kabul, we will ourselves be terrorists. But if America or anybody else whacks bin Laden, the Taliban, and every other terrorist on Earth without innocents lost, I'll sleep just fine.

Roger Curry Fairmont, West Virginia Now it is easy to think that the other guy is at fault and we are fine, but as your poignant article "The Toll of Terror" argues, the United States is not lily-white in all of this. We are not immune from the same kind of fanaticism, fundamentalism, and prejudice that we impale terrorism on. In all of American history have we ever fought a war that was not considered just or holy?

What we do have, however, which I felt your article neglected, is a system of government that attempts to foster tolerance and dialogue, that attempts to treat all people with respect, and that attempts to assess and correct itself when we fail to achieve the above. It is not a perfect system, but as Winston Churchill noted many years ago, "it is the best of a bad lot."

Paul Muscari Queensbury, New York I live in New York City and was watching the morning news on September 11, 2001. The big story of the day was the mayoral primary--then, like so many others, I saw the news report that a plane had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Like so many others, I watched in horror on live TV as the second plane crashed.

My brother is a Port Authority cop, and since the phone lines were down, we couldn't find him all day. Days later, he was assigned to the Ground Zero command center. My friend's son, an NYPD narcotics officer, has been assigned to corpse...