The fantasy comes in many forms. There's the notion that 9/11 was planned by Saddam Hussein, that popular non-fact suggested as true by the Bush Administration and held as gospel by many Americans even today.

There's the fantasy that terrorism is best fought by bombing civilian neighborhoods rather than international police work.

There's the fantasy that terrorist without industry, without nations, without centralized control are "fascists" while nations that suspend civil liberties and quash dissent and torture prisoners and kill civilians in bloody occupations somehow could never be "fascist."

There's the fantasy that patriotism can be measured by winning a political argument, like, say, sticking it out in Iraq, rather than winning this war on terror, whose goal is in conflict with the Iraq occupation.

There's the fantasy that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to America.

There's the fantasy that being "strong" can make up for being stupid.

And there's even the fantasy that, while thousands are dying in a bloody, smoky, burning hell, nobody uses four-letter words.

"This is example No. 1," said Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS Corp., of the decision by two dozen CBS affiliates to replace or delay "9/11" — which has already aired twice without controversy — over concerns about some of the language used by the firefighters in it.

"We don't think it's appropriate to sanitize the reality of the hell of Sept. 11th," Franks said. "It shows the incredible stress that these heroes were under. To sanitize it in some way robs it of the horror they faced."

The stations, including Fox Television Stations Inc. and Sinclair, cite the FCC's large and arbitrarily enforced censorship laws. However, the political views of Fox and Sinclair are not exactly secret.

Still it's hard to argue with a bunch of FCC boobs who got all upset over Janet Jackson's boob -- or the boobs in Congress who facilitated such overreaction.

Congress recently boosted the maximum fines the FCC can impose for indecency from $32,500 to $325,000.

So far, about a dozen CBS affiliates have indicated they won't show the documentary, another dozen say they will delay it until later at night and two dozen others are considering what to do.

So on this upcoming 5-year anniversary of 9/11, we can reflect on how tough the US government has gotten on the terror of four-letter words uttered by true American heroes.

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