The following article was developed by Green Comma as a discussion resource for use in grades 9–12 classrooms as well as in freshmen college classrooms. The principal writer is Douglas Houston, a lawyer living in Cambridge, MA, who frequently collaborates with Green Comma’s managing director, Amit Shah. The 9/11/2001 recollections are his.
All opinions are the writers’ own.
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This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
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“The Birds Are on Fire”
We’ve heard the introduction countless times, an established scriptꟷ “It was a beautiful clear fall morning, crisp, bright, cool. Everything seemed alive….” I was working in an office in Chelsea; we looked south and the Twin Towers inexplicably had a faint trail of smoke coming from them. It was so out of place; skyscrapers don’t have chimneys.
Despite what had occurred eight years before, in 1993, when some terrorists drove a 1,336- pound fertilizer bomb loaded on a truck into the North Tower basement garage and blew it up, we couldn’t imagine what was obviously happening. This time both 110-story towers came down, as we watched. The towers became a 47-foot smoldering rubble.
I called my wife who worked near the Empire State building in midtown Manhattan. Someone wondered out loud whether that building was next. Millions of people had taken to the streets to walk home. There was no public transportation. We stopped at our local hospital in Brooklyn to see about giving blood; they told us they had enough donors, there wasn’t a big demand for blood. The message was clear, there weren’t going to be many survivors.
We lived across the street from a container port, about half a mile south of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of our windows faced the Wall Street skyline, where now there was billowing smoke. The wind was coming from the northwest that day, and brought not just the smell to our doorstep. Charred scraps of paper began littering our doorstep. And the smell, which filled our living room just slightly, wouldn’t leave for several weeks.
Even if you never turned on a radio, TV, or computer you were reminded. The smell lingered downtown for weeks. A community of eight and half million in New York City grieved. It was not unusual to know someone who died. All the subway stops had become shrines and bulletin boards, flowers, pictures, notes asking if anyone had seen or heard anything about a loved one. Our neighborhood fire station remained closed; they had lost almost all of their firemen. 343 NYFD firefighters (including paramedics and emergency medical technicians working with the FDNY’s Emergency Medical Services Command, lost their lives that day. 23 NYPD officers, 37 Port Authority police officers and New Jersey police officers.
9/11 was certainly an unprecedented New York tragedy. We tend to forget that planes also crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and United Flight 93 with 44 passengers and crew and the hijackers crashed in a Pennsylvania farmland near Shanksville.
Faces of the dead defined the day. Even today, the missing faces are not all accounted for.
Fifteen years ago, 9/11 was a Tuesday. We went back to work later that week necessitating a subway ride. Were the subways always so unpredictable, or were the sudden stops between stations in darkened fetid tunnels something new? And when the lights went out, you could feel the anxiety level rise. You’d hear a rustle, a sigh; someone might give out a nervous laugh.
Time passed, months passed. The air turned cold and the smell dissipated, but people still talked about it. Sometimes they cried. It was local news. A strange disconnect became apparent, I began to notice the national news started to look elsewhere for its stories; everyone was “moving on.”
How did Oklahoma City residents feel months, years after the bombing on April 19, 1995? It had been such important, tragic news when it happened, and then, as it always does, the news, like the smell of burned rubble, starts to dissipate.
Many Americans felt rage and a desire for revenge. On the other hand, there were communities of every religion getting together. Rudy Giuliani, a now conservative and controversial politician, was then mayor of New York City, and he echoed the fundamental principles of the country when he addressed the United Nations a few weeks after 9/11. “Like the victims of the World Trade Center attack, we’re of every race, we’re of every religion, we’re of every ethnicity, and our diversity has been our greatest source of strength. It’s the thing that renews us in every generation ꟷ our openness to new people from all over the world.”
International Response
On September 16th from the front lawn of the White House President George Bush said, “Tomorrow the good people of America go back to their shops, their fields, American factories and go back to work.” He said we were “horrified” but we weren’t going to be “terrorized,” because we’re “great.” He said that if the rest of the nation had seen what he had seen in New York City, they’d “have great faith, too.” He had “faith in our military….We will rid the world of evil-doers. We will call together freedom loving people to fight terrorism….We’ve been warned. We’ve been warned there are evil people in this world…people have declared war on America….”
In answer to some reporters’ questions he said people would be “amazed at how quickly we rebuild New York; how quickly people come together to really wipe away the rubble and show the world that we’re still the strongest nation in the world.” The President was asked about “enhanced law enforcement authority to surveil and disrupt terrorism that might be planned here in the United States. What will that mean for the rights of Americans?” The president referred the reporter to the Attorney General.
It was declared a “war” on September 20th, 2001, when Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. The hijackers were identified almost immediately and two weeks after the attack the FBI identified al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as the “prime suspects.”
The reaction outside the United States was overwhelmingly supportive and sympathetic. All the European and Asian countries expressed their solidarity. In many European countries spontaneous gatherings of citizens lit candles and held vigils; public transportation was momentarily halted in remembrance; the German destroyer Lutjens, as it approached the American destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill, manned the rails, flew the American flag at half-mast, and displayed a banner “We Stand By You.” In Poland and Czechoslovakia firefighters sounded their sirens. Ireland declared a national day of mourning.
Declarations of support came from most Islamic countries, including Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Jordan. The President of Iran, Khatami, and the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, condemned the attacks, and 60,000 Iranian citizens at a soccer match in Tehran observed a moment of silence. There were reports of celebrations, most notably in Palestinian refugee camps, but the Palestinian National Authority condemned the attacks. Everyone supported the United States immediately after 9/11.
THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS
During this early period of heightened anxiety about foreign terrorism, one week after 9/11, several letters containing anthrax spores were sent to news media offices and to the offices of two US senators. The letters ended up killing five people and infecting 17. No was ever charged with this crime, but eventually the FBI stated that all the anthrax used came from the same flask in the possession of a US government laboratory in Maryland. It was a reminder that not all threats come from abroad.
U.S. GOVERNMENT RESPONSE
On October 26 Congress passed the US Patriot Act with far reaching consequences. The abbreviation stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.” The Act is comprised of ten sections: enhancing domestic security, surveillance procedures, anti-money-laundering, border security, removing obstacles to investigating, victim relief, increased intelligence sharing, expansion of criminal code, improved intelligence, and miscellaneous. The Act reached into financial transactions, record-keeping, electronic surveillance, the timing of warrants for investigations, and almost every part of our lives. Some of the regulations had “sunset provisions” (to be dismantled after a fixed period of time), but many of those have been extended. Some of the provisions have been challenged in court and declared unconstitutional.
While much of the attention, understandably, was directed at trying to improve security within the country, or as it was now known, the “Homeland,” the administration was looking outward for a response. The next month the United States demanded that Afghanistan, under the Taliban, extradite bin Laden, and they refused. The UN and the United States had demanded the Taliban extradite him three years earlier after he had been indicted for the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and they had refused then. This time, on October 7th, with British military assistance, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. For many, this pivot from pursuing an individual to invading a country seemed forced.
IRAQ BECOMES PART OF THE PLAN
In the middle of a December 9, 2001, in a Meet the Press interview, Vice President Cheney made the first Bush administration connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Cheney would be accused of leaking stories about these connections to well-established news outlets and then repeating these claims in interviews, using the media stories he had instigated to support his claims. The CIA was skeptical of an Iraq connection to 9/11. Perhaps as a result, Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld created the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit in the Pentagon that existed from September 2002 to June 2003, which produced intelligence concerning an Iraq connection and Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. In President Bush’s January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, he introduced the phrase “Axis of Evil” that drew Iraq under the target umbrella.
The administration’s efforts to confirm allegations of Iraq’s complicity culminated in Secretary of State Powell’s February 5, 2003 speech to the UN. He laid out the administration’s case, based on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, which itself did not speak to Iraq’s intentions, or more significantly its connection with terrorism aimed at the United States. On March 20, 2003 the US invaded Iraq. Unfortunately it was not until after we had invaded Iraq that we discovered there were neither weapons of mass destruction nor any reliable evidence of Iraq’s complicity in 9/11.
WE WERE “CONCERNED” WITH BIN LADEN; BUT NOW WE’RE NOT
A year before we invaded Iraq, Bush stated at a March 13, 2002 press conference that “I am deeply concerned about Iraq. And so should the American people be concerned about Iraq. And so should people who love freedom be concerned about Iraq…I truly am not that concerned about (bin Laden). I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country.”
While the initial part of the war was over fairly quickly, with few US casualties, the consequences have dragged on for years since and may be the most significant factor in the current environment of the Middle East. The casualties of this war is still being accounted for.
The war in Afghanistan is the longest war in US history.
Despite Bush’s optimistic pronouncement “Mission Accomplished” on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, the US did not leave Iraq until December 2011. At its peak in November 2007, the United States had 170,300 troops in Iraq. Beginning in September 2015, the US started sending troops back in limited numbers so that as of July 11, 2016, when Secretary of Defense Carter sent 500 additional troops to Iraq; the United States has about 5,000 troops there.
THE CONSEQUENCES
In January 2002, the Bush administration created a holding prison outside of its borders at its naval station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for captured al Qaeda terrorists. This was thought to resolve the problem of holding these people who were neither criminals, nor enemy combatants in the traditional sense. At the time the administration argued that since the prisoners were not on US soil, they would not be afforded protections under the Geneva Convention. The United States Supreme Court later ruled that was not true.
The U.S. government has acknowledged that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and at various “black sites” (secret prisons) around the world have been tortured in a designed and authorized program to extract intelligence, this despite a significant portion of the intelligence and law enforcement community believing torture does not result in reliable intelligence, as well as the damage to United States’ reputation.
As revelations about Guantanamo Bay, black sites, the torture and prisoner abuse at a prison in Iraq under the command and control of the United States, Abu Ghraib, became public knowledge, world opinion of and sympathy for the United States suffered.
AS THE WAR DRAGGED ON
In March 2003, 23% of those polled felt we “made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq”, 75% felt we did not make a mistake. Those numbers immediately started reversing until April 2005 when they reversed and 49% felt we made a mistake, 48% felt we had not made a mistake. That gap kept increasing, although slowly, until June 2015, when 51% felt we made a mistake and 46% felt we had not. The lowest favorable rating was 36% in July 2007; at that time 62% felt we had made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.
THE PROBLEM WITH TERRORISM
Without getting into a scholarly analysis of al Qaeda or a textual analysis of all its proclamations, it seems clear it did not want to take over the United States in the beginning. Its early proclamations were about the U.S. leaving the Middle East.
On the other hand, the current leader in terror attacks, ISIS, does seem to be an organization bent on territorial control, and seems more like a “state.” In fact, translations of its name include the word “state.” the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL) and the ‘‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS). So that its attack in November 2015 in Paris, was not a statement, but appears more like a tactical military action, and was proclaimed as retaliation for French air strikes.
Another element of the fear that seems to accompany current terrorism is that it has become so decentralized. It becomes difficult to distinguish actual “cells” from an unbalanced person who attacks, and almost as an afterthought, pledges allegiance to a terrorist organization. The June 2016 shooting in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub is an example of a horrific attack; 50 people were killed and 53 injured, and although the gunman used some references to a terror organization, it is unlikely he was ever part of such an organization, or that his actions were motivated by ideology or politics.
The November 2015 Paris attacks that claimed 130 lives, on the other hand was a planned terrorist attack that is targeted to instill fear. As well as the Brussels and Nice attacks in July 2016.
THE LEGACY
What else have we in the US inherited from 9/11 and the subsequent decisions? The US still has quasi-legal holding prison in Guantanamo Bay that endures despite President Obama’s early promise to close it and his recent efforts to push a plan through Congress. There have been improvements; where in 2001 there were 779 prisoners, now there are 61. But as the US brings the prison into conformity with US and international laws, as these prisoners come up for review, we are reminded of the excesses committed in the zeal to prosecute the war on terror. Abu Zubaydah was a minor official in al Qaeda, who was mistaken for a top official. Subjected to “enhanced interrogation” more than 85 times, he is now up for review after 14 years of captivity and no trial.
While in the United States the Constitution provides some separation between church and state, and therefore some protection for religious freedom, that separation is not so well established in Europe. So the war on terrorism and its conflation with religious and cultural differences have had ominous manifestations. The fear of terrorism, which is real and understandable, becomes a desire to preserve some kind of religious or cultural purity, in some countries in Europe. The French, who have long sought to preserve some ideal of “Frenchness,” with its “Ministry of Culture” and efforts at preservation dating back to the 16th century, find themselves in the middle of the”burkini” war. The fear of differences among its citizenry, the highlight of American diversity, is facing many challenges.
Why Discuss 9/11 and Its Aftermath?
We wrote this loose chronology of the aftermath of 9/11 for children in schools. Middle schoolers in the US weren’t even born and the high schoolers were so young that the event is only constructed through other people’s interpretations, not from their own memory. Yet, 9/11 frames the vast majority of US foreign policy today and in this election year. It is a significant event in US history and its aftermath will be encountered for generations.
We, in the US, are also are debating what diversity, inclusion, and immigration means to the United States, the bastion of inclusion in the modern world.
“What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.” (Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan)
