KStone, Golden Boy, you guys are getting me positively HOT for you both with your back-and-forth. I'll chime in now, because I think that you've both made some good points in between your headbutting.

So, I used to be a Muslim. Conservative, I guess. I consider myself more or less an atheist now, but as a cultural thing, I have had trouble letting go of the Muslim title. Kind of like trying to recover from Catholicism. You can take the girl out of the mosque, but you can't make her stop wondering if she shouldn't zip that burqa back up and take her place in some basement prayer room with the other devoted women, as the saying goes.

Now, I can totally appreciate what you are saying about other acts of terrorism committed by non-Muslims. Yes, they occur. There are the eco-terrorists who burn down large developments of McMansions, and Timothy McVeigh did, in fact, kill hundreds of people. But there just aren't that many of them. The nutjobs like Tim McVeigh are lone wolves. Sure, there are cults of white supremacists in the woods of Idaho, but they have neither the resources nor the desire to perform the kinds of acts that Al Qaeda has wrought upon the U.S. and will continue to fund and execute. McVeigh had some help, yes, but he was nothing like the 9/11 bombers. He did not have the backing of the Muslim world (although he probably had quite a few fans in Tehran).

Please don't underestimate the kind of hatred that boils throughout the Islamic world for United States. I've had a fair amount of experience with this, and I was perpetually shocked by how Muslims could be so kind on a personal level, but openly and outwardly wish for the death of all Americans. Some Uyghur friends explained to me how they had celebrated upon seeing the towers collapse on 9/11. These are NORMAL sentiments throughout the Muslim world, even among the educated. This is not to say that EVERY Muslim believes this way (and I'd argue that American Muslims are, by and large, very patriotic, although still a bunch of sexist bastards) but I would say that you'd have to look pretty hard in Islamabad to find someone who didn't enjoy the idea of America's complete and utter destruction.

And although it sounds nutty, especially coming from Golden Boy, but there are Muslims who troll sites for anti-Islamic commentary and send death threats to the poster (although I can't see how that would happen HERE). I made the mistake of suggesting in an online chatroom 10 years ago that homosexuals maybe shouldn't be stoned to death - the next day, my inbox was filled with hate mail from a fellow Muslim, discussing the exact manner in which I should be raped and murdered for being an unbeliever. And these guys knew who I was. So anonymity is a blessed thing.

I don't think hiring people who have significant grievances against their ethnic "homeland" is a good way to start. Seriously, if you were a CIA officer, and you had to select a field operative for a mission in Somalia, would you choose the woman who lost her labia there as a child? CIA employees, be they analysts or field ops specialists, need to be objective and unemotional on the job.

But as far as the gay lefty thing goes, I happen to know that the CIA doesn't discriminate based on your political views, so long as they don't think you might eventually switch sides and help out Castro or anything.

As a graduate of Mount Holyoke, I can attest to three things:

1. Women's colleges do foster a more supportive academic atmosphere than mixed-gender academic settings.

2. That supportive atmosphere will not exist outside of women's colleges, so it doesn't really do you that much good.

3. Yeah, almost everybody is a lesbian.

I took classes at the other five colleges (Smith, UMass, Amherst, Hampshire) and with the exception of Hampshire, found the atmosphere in the co-ed classes to be positively caustic towards women. And I've found the same thing since in other academic situations - when taking classes at the University of Washington a few years ago, I was shocked to see how many men felt that my opinions and research could be quickly discounted simply because I was female. How do I know that I was being dismissed based on gender? Because the dismissers used their feeble foreign language skills to discuss how stupid women are, right in front of me. In a foreign language that I speak.

And the professors let it slide. They certainly weren't going to get caught up in the drama surrounded a bunch of cocky grad students and a non-matriculated woman with too much time on her hands. That would not have gone over at Mount Holyoke; on the contrary, I always felt comfortable jumping into academic discussions at my alma mater. But that kind of irrational, sexist, and obnoxious behavior goes over in the workplace on a daily basis, and it's one of those things that you have to become adept at fighting. I don't feel like my time at a women's college helped me at all in that regard.

Oh, and the whole womens-colleges-are-just-finishing-schools critique? Dude, nothing of the sort. They may be overly nurturing and hold on to some strange traditions, but academically, these are sound institutions. And the lesbian thing - fun!