Remembering 9/11
I will never forget the appalling shock of 9/11. I was at work, and a colleague who was late getting in said he heard on the radio that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. It might be deliberate. He turned on a radio at his desk, and of course the news followed. At noon I went to a diner across the street to see CNN. Lots of repeat footage, including Giuliani, as cool as a cucumber.
The war-bloggers seem to judge people as to whether they primarily felt grief, or anger; a sense of tragedy or an awareness of a criminal attack requiring retribution. One of my first remarks was "if the Palestinians think they're going to gain statehood--or anything else--from this, they're probably mistaken." Later that same colleague, possibly repeating CBC Radio, pointed out that Bin Laden had been involved in the attack on World Trade in 1993--perhaps he had never given up on destroying these buildings.
Eventually my son complained that my wife and I were obsessed with details of the attack--the exact sequence of events, what people inside did, and so on.
Of course there are people who literally refuse to believe that these huge buildings collapsed so suddenly because of these attacks. There must have been some kind of detonation--hence a conspiracy. How could they have collapsed so quickly--almost as fast as free fall, with no obstruction at all? How could so much concrete and other solid stuff be reduced to huge clouds of dust--in tiny particles--even before the buildings collapsed?
Engineers can apparently explain--although one thing that interests me is that very few engineers, watching on TV, expected the towers to collapse as fast as they did.
I still have a somewhat gruesome interest in what exactly was in that dust. Graydon Carter has an "Editor's Letter" in the September Vanity Fair on this (not on line). Some details: asbestos, PCBs from generator fuel and fluid from electrical transformers, glass particles, mercury from computers and fluorescent lights, concrete particles, dioxin.
In many ways the lack of preparation was amazing. In one tower, it was possible for people above the point of attack to walk all the way to the ground by stairs--but no one apparently knew that. Many people had the idea they could evacuate by going to the roof, where they would be picked up by helicopters. That had actually happened in 1993, but it had not been part of the official evacuation plan for years--and helicopters couldn't have landed that day. People who went up found a locked door leading to the roof. Some people walked all the way to the ground once, then went all the way back up to the office again. At one point a voice on the intercom actually urged people to stay in their offices. Many firefighters and other first responders died very bravely; but one account raised the question: if the firefighters made it up to a high floor with their back packs, what were they going to do? If the evacuation had been more rushed, those heavily laden firefighters might have prevented people from climbing down double-file.
In the film by the French brothers, it looks like there had never been an incident that attracted so many fire units before--and there was no protocol to establish who got priority on the radios.
The 9/11 Commission:
Despite weaknesses in preparations for disas-ter, failure to achieve unified incident command, and inadequate communi-cations among responding agencies, all but approximately one hundred of the thousands of civilians who worked below the impact zone escaped, often with help from the emergency responders.
Of course the bigger question is whether authorities were prepared for such an attack in general.
Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U. S. govern-ment from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al Qaeda plot. Across the government, there were failures of imagination, pol-icy, capabilities, and management.
Imagination The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe lead-ers understood the gravity of the threat. The terrorist danger from Bin Ladin and al Qaeda was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress. Indeed, it barely came up during the 2000 pres-idential campaign.
Al Qaeda's new brand of terrorism presented challenges to U. S. governmen-tal institutions that they were not well-designed to meet. Though top officials all told us that they understood the danger, we believe there was uncertainty among them as to whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat the United States had lived with for decades, or it was indeed radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced. As late as September 4, 2001, Richard Clarke, the White House staffer long responsible for counterterrorism policy coordination, asserted that the govern-ment had not yet made up its mind how to answer the question: "Is al Qida a big deal?"
|
