TIMES
EAGLE
NORTH
COAST
AUGTEMBER 2002
50CENTS
In a daHc time the
VOL24NO2
MA TT WUERKER
THE YEAR AFTER 9/11
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
“/ play with my dolls and I think of Bin Laden My dolls save the
world sometimes, and sometimes they save the people in the
towers and the airplanes."
-Young daughter of a U.S. airline pilot
“The human heart is the start of all matters pertaining to war."
-MARECHALde SAXE
(‘Reveries of the Art of War', 1732)
The mental images of the captive passenger filled
suicide airliners crashing into both towers of the World Trade
Center on September 11,2001 are indelible a year later in
the American psyche — as familiar and cryptic as the smoking
ribbons of the Challenger space shuttle 16 years ago. Although
Pearl Harbor has been remembered all over again since 9/11,
the images of the first ‘Day of Infamy' seem ancient history.
Other images recall 9/11. Thousands of hands reaching
up as if to stop the collapsing south tower of the WTC. Falling
bodies of people who jumped to their deaths to escape the fires
started by the jets, in particular a couple holding hands as they
fell. Doomed firemen going up into the towers passing fleeing
survivors going down. The wreckage of a fourth skyjacked
airliner forced to crash in Pennsylvania woods short of its
probable target in Washington, D C. by passengers who seemed
aware everyone aboard were about to die regardless of their
resistance.
A few obscure images seldom recalled or even noticed
are yet revealing and prophetic: Two crowds confronted each
other in Chicago on the night of 9/11, one group white and right,
the other mostly brown and Muslim, shouting at each other
“USA! USA! USA!” A young man on a bicycle in D C 9/11
morning just after the third plane kamikazed the Pentagon
shouted the attacks on it and the WTC were appropriate
punishment for the USA’s oppressive foreign policy and was
pelted with food and rocks by a shocked and angry crowd.
(Police searched his clothes and knapsack for explosives then
allowed him to ride away exchanging shouts with people on
the sidewalks.) A woman in Chicago the same day cryptically
said 9/11 was "phase one.”
A woman on 9/11 morning in NYC described a “surreal
atmosphere" of people standing on street corners staring up at
the flaming towers and after they collapsed seemed to numbly
look at the subsequent pile of rubble that was vast and several
stories high Another woman said she saw crowds of people
walking away from ‘Ground Zero" stunned after the towers
collapsed. “Where are you going?" she asked. “Away," they
said (A woman who used to live in Astoria and lives now across
the East River from the WTC saw the towers burst into smoke
and flame from a picture window in her apartment high above
the street, and regretted she couldn't shut off the view like a TV;
yet she did not close the curtains.)
Pearl Harbor was analogy of the day for 9/11: complete
surprise, a direct hit on the USA’s symbols of wealth and power,
epic destruction. The anger and instant desire for revenge were
about the same as Pearl Harbor; also the heart wrenching sense
of tragedy, and the immediate fingerpointing at why 9/11 was
allowed to happen Suspicion of government foreknowledge of
9/11 has also been a Pearl Harbor legacy
There are questions about 9/11 : the most extreme claim
is that it was planned and set in motion at the highest echelons
of the U.S. government — or at least these upper cadres knew
about the terrorists’ intentions and did nothing to prevent the
attack. Nixon’s smoking gun redux: What did the President
know, and when did he know it — with a conundrum: What has
he gained from it?
After World War 2 self-proclaimed isolationists charged
that President Franklin Roosevelt “trapped" the Japanese into
attacking Pearl Harbor in order to get around the Constitutional
requirement for a declaration of war, which became the basis for
an incessant quarrel that persists into this new millennium and
quantumly affects controversy over 9/11. There certainly was
gross low-level negligence in the intelligence community in both
the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks, as well as high level laxity in
the White House, short of downright conspiracy. And like FDR
in his personal war with Adolf Hitler even before Pearl Harbor,
President George W Bush, demanding wartime prerogatives of
a President (without the aforementioned declaration of war), is
already playing with the old don't change horses in midstream’
gambit that successfully gave Roosevelt his third and fourth
terms.
HISTORY LESSON
Class,
I must apologize
for the film we are about to see.
If you would like to be excused,
I will give you a pass to the library.
If you have a weak stomach,
you may wish to be excused.
(I cannot be held responsible for any
sudden loss of innocence.)
I cannot be held responsible
after the rain, or when the skin slips
off like a glove, or when you see
the person without a mouth
You will be responsible for anything I write
on the blackboard
50,000 dead instantly,
within 10 miles of center
100,000 died later,
within 50 miles of center
Today’s bombs: 200,000 X Hiroshima,
Nagasaki
(And you will be held responsible
for the knowledge)
•
A significant difference from Pearl Harbor, despite the
instant nationwide flowering of flags (including flag patterned
clothing and accessories of the sort that got Abbie Hoffman
arrested a generation ago, and a profusion of stars & stripes
collectibles), is that the nation has not been as immediately or
undividedly united as the historic claim after Pearl Harbor and
as the country's new war leaders have intended us to believe
since 9/11. The nation's real unity was its shock and revulsion
at 9/11, but from there a growing split has intensified the past
year as to the real motives of the attack (as well as who was
involved beside the suiciders) and the nature of reaction to it.
The 9/11 attack on the USA was most definitely a crime
against humanity and a violation of international law because it
specifically targeted civilians — which is essentially why U.S.
apologists are hasty (after initially denying) to ensure that every
civilian casualty from U.S. bombing or other military action since
9/11 is purely accidental and quite simply a consequence of war
rather than premeditated murder.
But just as surely as innocents are killed in war, the
devastating and unprecedented attack on 9/11 was not directed
at the WTC and Pentagon (and perhaps the White House) as
mere symbols of American power but instead as the true center
of the USA's political, economic and militarily global supremacy
That was clearly the perspective of those who elaborately plan
ned and executed the attacks. They regarded those employed
in those two centers (and surely the White House) as directly
responsible for American actions around the world as are U.S
soldiers, diplomats and multinational corporations based in the
USA. Total war is not only the prerogative of military institutions
but also of those who struggle against them by any means at
hand however horrible and catastrophic the results. In a total war
everybody is a soldier, which was the ultimate rationale of the
mass bombings of cities in World War 2, and certainly the use
of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities which ushered in the
nuclear age and its iconic mushroom cloud that has billowed
over nearly everything since
Those who committed the atrocity of 9/11 did not do it
because they are ‘evil’ but because they perceive evil has been
done to them and they reciprocated as they were capable A
major reaction of the USA to 9/11 has been that it is irrelevant
what we have done to others, all that matters is what has been
done to us, which is dealt with as if it occurred in a vacuum
A distinction between just wars and unjust wars (a
distinction made in medieval times by the Christian church to
justify its religious wars) is equally or more important in regard
to a war’s conduct as it is its reason. The main distinction is
the prohibition of intentionally targeting citizens in a war to
be considered a ‘just’ war, nor should disproportionate force
be used But as the wholesale bombings by both sides in World
War 2 indicate, the differences are too often degrees of propa
ganda rather than reality
Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 is a rallying cry for revenge and
war "You're either with us or against us," Bush declared unilater
ally to the rest of the world From the beginning his stance has
been that “cowardly terrorists" jealous of our democratic way of
life are fanatically determined to destroy the USA and that we
must preempt their evil ways by hunting terrorists everywhere in
the world forever
It was not our values but the abandonment of them the
terrorists attacked on 9/11 Especially in the past decade our
-GERRY FOOTE
CONTINUED ON BACK PAGE
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