'I Have Trouble With a War That Has No Endgame'

And now the most telling two minutes in television, the latest from the wartime grapevine.

Former Attorney General Janet Reno, who's running for governor of Florida, says she's bothered by the war on terrorism. "I have trouble," she said, "with a war that has no endgame. And I have trouble with a war that generates so many concerns about individual liberties." Reno, who has been campaigning across the state of Florida in a red pickup truck, took time out to make a speech in Norfolk, Va., yesterday, where she expressed her doubts about the war. The Richmond Times Dispatch says Reno also said that no matter how much security is tightened, terrorists are likely to find new ways to strike.

Some U.S. military analysts suspect those eight Americans killed at the start of Operation Anaconda were set up by supposedly friendly Afghan fighters. And some of those Afghans are now saying that U.S. troops withdrawn from the area were ineffective fighters. The Times of London quotes an Afghan commander named Allah Mohammed as saying the Americans "were not trained for the kind of fighting we do in the mountains and, in these conditions, their kind of fighting is useless. They were weakening our morale. It was better for them to go."

The man who failed to save Russian communism through restructuring – what he called perestroika, now says his defense of the system was "pure propaganda." Former Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev told an audience at Columbia University in New York on Monday that, "We – including I – were saying capitalism is moving toward catastrophe whereas we are developing well. Of course that was pure propaganda. In fact our country was lagging behind." Gorbachev said that when he came to power, "We were discussing the problem of toothpaste, the problem of detergent, and they had to create a commission of the politburo to make sure that women have pantyhose."

And a judge in Houston has ruled that a 25-year-old man accused of molesting a four-year-old girl can appear at his trial dressed as a woman. Judge Denise Collins said she is worried that the defendant Marcus Alexander's clothes might influence the jury and said she would “have something to say to the jury about it.” The man's lawyer said, "He's just being who he is."