9-11: FACTS, PERCEPTIONS, CAUSES, EFFECTS, SECRECY

From 1972 to 2011, the World Trade Center stood at the southwest tip of Manhattan as a gigantic prophecy of its destruction on Tuesday morning, 11 September 2001. The day after the terrorist attack that reduced North America’s tallest office buildings steaming, smoking rubble, I sat looking at old photos of the buildings and concluded that whoever planned the act was some sort of evil genius – for any picture of the two buildings will only remind us of the day of their destruction.

Almost ten years later, I listened with grim bemusement at politicians make speeches at the Pennsylvania site where United Flight 93 crashed. 9-11 is now so encrusted with legend and sentiment that it is hard to find the facts of the case. Some today like to call Flight 93 the first battle of the War on Terror. If that is the case, it was a lost battle in the sense that all the civilians caught in the middle of the battle died when the hijackers should have been captured alive. Of course, the politicians like to spin the incident to say we won the battle in the sense that the hijackers did not get a chance to ditch the plane into the U S Capitol. We tend to forget that if the passengers had failed, U S Air Force fighter pilots would have shot down the flight before it reached Washington.

We also tend to forget that Flight 93 could have turned out quite differently had the hijackers had not delayed in taking over the plane. If they had taken it over while flying over eastern Pennsylvania instead of eastern Ohio, they might have been over Maryland or even the District of Columbia itself before anyone in authority could focus on them.


WTC: LEGEND VS FACTS

The terrorist destruction of WTC-1 and WTC-2 transformed that real estate development into hallowed territory, just as the Battle of Gettysburg hallowed both a sleepy Pennsylvania crossroads and a flawed battle strategy. People today tend to forget that from 1966 to 2001 many found the center controversial and ugly.

The World Trade Center was a monument to the edifice complex of international financier Laurence Rockefeller and his brother New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who oversaw its financing and constructing. From the start, the center was not exactly necessary. It was also a monument to the impersonal ugly business architecture of the 1960s – the buildings were basically two enormous glass, steel, concrete and cast stone rectangles completely lacking in the architectural and decorative sophistication of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building -- the two great art deco skyscrapers ever to grace a skyline. One had to really love the Internationale style to love the World Trade Center, sometimes described as the boxes the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building arrived in.

An incident from my life illustrates the center’s lack of personality. After the buildings caved in, my mind went back to May 1997 when I saw the New York skyline from an airliner preparing to land in Newark International Airport. I remembered gazing over the George Washington Bridge, the Chrysler Building, that east-side bank with the ski-slope roof, the Empire State Building, the Bayonne Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge Bridge. I did not remember seeing the World Trade Center. At all. Obviously it was there; however, it did not register with me.

In the year before the attack I remember that the center appeared in the news a few times, and the news was not necessarily complementary. The center struggled for profitability, and it was profitable only after a bunch of New York state and federal bureaucracies rented offices in it. Its owners wanted to divest themselves of it. As it turned out, the terrorists divested it for them.


THINKING CLEARLY WHEN SCARED

Let me tell a story from my family history that illustrates something about the way we felt after the attack.

My grandfather wrote in his history that when the Japanese military attacked US military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941, he was all alone in his house when he heard the first radio bulletin at or around 12:30 p.m. mountain time and the subsequent radio news reports throughout the afternoon. His family left him at home in Orem, Utah, to visit relatives in Magna, Utah.

He wrote that he got so nervous that he went around his property locking doors. Obviously, if the Japanese military planned to bomb Orem, locking doors would provide no protection. However, why would the Japanese air force want to bomb rural Orem Utah – even if it could? And it could not. If Japan had spies in the USA, it is hard to believe they would waste them in Utah let alone Orem.

Grandpa action resulted because he was angry and scared. That combination always undercuts clear thinking. We saw examples of that over and over from 11 September 2001 onward.

The news reports about the first plane flying into the first World Trade Center building started up around 6:52 a.m. Mountain Time. As I wrote that morning in my home office, I did not know what was happening until my Mother, who even as an old lady liked to arise at 6:30 a.m MT to watch NBC Today, told me what was going on a little before 7:00 a.m.

Within an hour I found her crying in the hallway asking why anyone wanted to do this sort of thing to us. Her words certainly speak volumes about what happened that day and how most of us felt about it. Television has many advantages. However, its major disadvantage is that it can make it feel as if major disasters have happened in our living room. We learned we can now get post traumatic stress reactions to events that we actually do not experience first hand.


PERCEPTION OF REALITY

I continued taking my morning walks in the days after the attack. I found it strange, eerie even, that no airplanes flew in the sky for about four days. I found it even more eerie that practically every home owner displayed American flags. I remember thinking as I looked carefully around at Grandview and Provo scenery during my morning walks that the world really was just the same. Our perceptions had changed.

Our perceptions certainly did not change for the better. In September 2011, I taught three English courses at what was then called Utah Valley State College. My Tuesday-Thursday afternoon class contained one of the most troubled male personalities I ever encountered as a teacher. He did bodybuilding; he showed off his body in tight t-shirts and shorty shorts; he drank water compulsively; he had anger control issues and thus he was divorce and a Mormon returned missionary evolved into an anti-Mormon. On either the Thursday or the Tuesday after the attack, he got into a long ramble rant in which he predicted that if terrorists ever attacked the USA mainland again, the government would simply panic and put the whole culture into military marshall law more or less permanently.

That student turned out to be somewhat prophetic.

Technically the terrorists attacked the New York and New Jersey Port Authority and the professional U.S. Military headquarters. If the plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside had actually achieved its mission, if the terrorists had ditched the airliner into the United States Capitol while Congress was in session and working in it, then that could be defined as an attack against civilian Americans generally. The military and the command in chief wasted no time in persuading Americans that the dead terrorists had attacked all Americans. That started with the President’s speech to the nation on the evening of 11 September 2001.


GRAB POWER

The terrorist attack of 9-11 posed a problem to those who wanted revenge: the actual perpetrators were all dead the moment of the attacks. The attack had planners, organizers, and financiers, but who were they? and where did they live?

The new book Top Secret America details some interesting facts about what happened in the days after the 9-11 attack. For starters, the Central Intelligence Agency had plans ready within days, if not hours, which makes me wonder what they were doing making these sorts of plans before the attack. The military apparently did not have a plan of attack ready. Many in government saw the attack as an opportunity to get more funding for militarism, to gather more power unto themselves, to decrease the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and to personally dominate the public. Homeland Security, the NSA, the CIA, the TSA, and the JSOC, all profited handsomely both in monetary and in power gains. Congress thoroughly avoided any sort of oversight; the secret Fourth Branch of Government has evolved into a separate power unto itself – a power inside America, not outside.

One should be careful about generalizing in the wake of an attack that produced a lot of hasty, unfounded generalization. However --

The 9-11 aftereffects has taught us that mankind’s modern systems and institutions do not self correct. They made our problems worse; our leadership became more barbaric, paranoid, and suspicious – not less. We will see how soon Top Secret America becomes obsessed with American enemies within.


TRIBUTE TO THE DIPLOMATS

I pay tribute to leaders and staff in the U.S. State Department who had the good sense to try and stop the War in Iraq and to try and bring some sense into the Afghanistan campaign. They did not succeed, but they tried when everyone else around them had cold-blooded revenge on their minds.


TRIBUTE TO SOLDIERS

On this anniversary, I think about all those military and private contracting volunteers who found themselves in Afghanistan, one of the truly terrible places to fight a war. The Afghans have always found the terrain – rugged terrain -- just right for picking off their enemies one by one.

Since 2001, I have known a number of America’s soldiers studying at Utah Valley University and working in the United States Census. I think today of those young men and women who fought The Second Persian Gulf War in Iraq, a War that truly never should have happened, for all of its premises were either wrong, false, or faked. Its despot, Saddam Hussein is gone, but Iraq’s problems linger on -- and on. Iraq really constitutes three nations held together by despots and arbitrary boundaries set up by the British Empire for its own purposes. This is to say for purposes that no longer exist. No one in Bush administration or even in the Obama administration seems willing to deal with those sets of facts.

The troops took the brunt of the last ten years’s worth of horrors. 10 years is too long to fight a war, especially a war as shape-shifting as the War on Terror, so-called.

Our troops’s political leaders and generals hurt them in both wars. They held vague, contradictory, or conflicted attitudes and goals. They wanted to obtain an American victory from plans that had misguided or unclear goals. That proved to be a recipe for disaster in the past – and the present.

The opposition military leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan did bad to and for their soldiers as well. It is a war with few political victors.


SUMMARY

The real villains of 9-11 all died the moment the War on Terror started. .

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld all somehow escaped international trials for crimes against humanity. Secretary of State Powell wound up looking like a prophet without honor in his own country.

The new government of Iraq, a branch office of The Coalition of the Willing, did put Saddam Hussein on some sort of trial, and executed him. In reference to 9-11, he had little if anything to do with the attacks. Iraq’s troubles, meanwhile, live on without him.

Osama bin Ladin, the man who came up with 9-11 abstraction, planning, and financing, somehow alluded capture and trial in an international court for nearly a decade. His enemies martyred him, which is hardly ever a good idea for despots who do wars for Pleasure and Glory.

However, we should never assume that God does not notice our deeds on Earth.