Читать книгу Decade of Fear - Michelle Shephard - Страница 8
Оглавление“Some of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 story are the outstanding efforts of so many individual officials straining, often without success, against the boundaries of the possible.”
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
IT WAS MIDNIGHT on September 14, 2001, and Times Square was eerily quiet. The few people milling about had their chins dipped, eyes downcast, and if the knock-off Gucci handbag vendors had been out earlier, there was no sign of them now. Broadway was dark. No inebriated late-night diners. No tourists. Times Square was like a wrinkly and weary prostitute, resigned to her fate, and longing for a client just to escape the tedium. Only the Lipton Cup-a-Soup high above, spewing its curly stream of smoke into the warm night, seemed oblivious to what had happened three days earlier.
Standing alone at Broadway and 46th, I was trying to decide if a doughy pretzel passed for dinner and wishing there was somewhere I could buy a new T-shirt that didn’t say I Love New York—even if I did. I had worn the same pants and shirt since the morning of September 11, washing the Ground Zero dust off them at night, using the hair dryer on them in the morning. High above me was a gargantuan billboard for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s next action Hollywood blockbuster, Collateral Damage.
The news of the day had been U.S. President George W. Bush’s trip to Ground Zero. Finally. Bush had been in Sarasota, Florida, at Emma E. Booker Elementary School the morning of 9/11. Five minutes before he walked into a classroom, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called him from the White House to say a commercial aircraft had struck the World Trade Center, adding, “That’s all we know right now, Mr. President.” Ten minutes later Bush was reading “The Pet Goat” to the class of eager youngsters when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered in Bush’s ear, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”
Bush later wrote in his memoir that his instinct was to stay calm, so he remained in the classroom reading for another seven minutes. “The nation would be in shock; the president could not be,” he wrote. “If I stormed out hastily, it would scare the children and send ripples of panic throughout the country.” But in a video clip that aired endlessly, Bush looked less like the sanguine commander-in-chief he imagined himself to be and more like a deer in headlights. Osama bin Laden recalled this moment before Bush’s 2004 re-election. “Because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations. All praise is due to Allah,” al Qaeda’s leader said in a video.
While Bush was criticized for maintaining that stunned demeanour in the days that followed, he was reborn amid the debris of the towers on that Friday as exhausted firefighters and cops started cheering “U-S-A, U-S-A!” The image of Bush with raised bullhorn, standing among New York’s finest, was beamed around the world. The swaggering Texan told the crowd that the world was listening. “And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” he thundered.
I didn’t see Bush that day, but instead was writing a profile on the man emerging as New York’s real hero, Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani was at the World Trade Center ten minutes before the first building collapsed and remained at the epicentre of the tragedy during the week that followed. He became New York’s trauma counsellor, public information minister and cheerleader. “He seems both concerned and calm, and appears to be in control of an uncontrollable situation. Usually I cringe when I hear politicians speaking. But this hasn’t been the case with the mayor,” New Yorker Molly Hammerberg told me as we walked along Canal Street in the pounding rain.
Just a week earlier, New Yorkers had not particularly liked Giuliani, lamenting the scandals in the city’s police department and the mayor’s well-publicized affair, but 9/11 had transformed the thin-skinned Giuliani into the fifty-seven-year-old big-hearted Teflon Rudy. He had even spontaneously hugged the largely unhuggable New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at a press conference. Friday, September 14, may have been Bush’s day to shine, but New Yorkers were praising Giuliani. He would later become Time magazine’s Person of the Year and Queen Elizabeth ii herself would knight him.
As I searched for dinner after writing about Saint Rudy, my cell-phone rang. “Hi, doll.” It was Lorrie Logan.
AT THE TORONTO STAR there was once a secret we called “switchboard.” All Star journalists who worked in the pre-Internet, pre-cellphone, pre-BlackBerry, -Twitter, -Facebook and -24-hour-news-coverage days, have a switchboard story or favourite operator who saved their career. I loved Lorrie because aside from being a workaholic she had this way of talking that made you feel like a cherished niece. Whenever I was somewhere feeling homesick, my eyes would well up when I heard her say, “Oh, dolly, what can I do for you?”
The CIA really should have employed Star operators. Switchboard could track anyone. For years, they worked manically, hidden in a third-floor room that looked as if it belonged to an autistic mathematician. Every inch of wall space was carefully covered in numbers. Shelves were lined with phone books from around the world or obscure tomes on cooking, or wildlife, or Tajikistan. These incredible women—because except for the rare male interloper the staff were predominantly women—had found hostages and gunmen, presidents and criminals and more than one Star reporter who didn’t want to be found. They weren’t just operators even though they also connected calls. They were relentless and charming investigators, bloodhounds, who could go toe-to-toe with the most dogged investigative journalist.
One famous story goes back to November 23, 1963, when the Star’s managing editor desperately needed our Washington correspondent, Martin Goodman. It was less than twenty-four hours after U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson inaugurated. Goodman had covered Johnson’s swearing in, but still hadn’t filed his story and editors were panicking. Switchboard was dispatched to track the wayward scribe. Within minutes, they had a map of Johnson’s post-inauguration parade route and the names of all the shops along the motorcade’s path. They called a drugstore and persuaded a pharmacist to go outside and shout Goodman’s name from the sidewalk as the press cars passed. Goodman heard, was told by the helpful druggist to call his Star boss, and he did.
Linda Diebel, our former Latin America correspondent, recalls one time when in a panic she dialled switchboard on a Thursday night, trying to track a Canadian government official for a weekend story. The man was on vacation. Somehow, within the next twelve hours, switchboard not only discovered that the official was in London, England, but had uncovered what he was going to do, where he was travelling, how he would get there and what he looked like. When the bureaucrat got off the Tube at a south end station that Friday morning, some guy held out a pay phone asking if he was from Ottawa, Canada, because he had a call. True story. There were hundreds.
Journalists were fiercely protective of our switchboard and mourned their “downsizing” in 2010. But in the weeks after 9/11 they were working overtime, and on this night switchboard had found Cindy Barkway.
THERE WERE 2,982 9/11 victims. Twenty-four were Canadian. David Michael Barkway was one. As the managing director for Toronto’s office of BMO Nesbitt Burns, he had been on a three-day business trip to Manhattan. He was meeting with the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the north tower when American Airlines Flight 11 hit. David was a family man who loved his cottage, golfing, practical jokes, fine cigars, action films, his university sweetheart Cindy, and Jamie, their two-year-old son. Friends called him “Barky.” He would sit with his giggling toddler on his lap as they listened over and over, and then over again to the Baha Men singing “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Somehow the song’s woof woof woof woof just got funnier every time. David was one of those guys who possessed a kinetic energy that allowed him to suck out of life all he could, and his energy was contagious.
His wife, Cindy, was five months pregnant with their second son when she accompanied him to New York that week. They had flown together the day after David’s 34th birthday, on September 9. At 7:40 the morning of the 11th, they said goodbye as David left for meetings and Cindy prepared for a day of shopping. She was in SoHo when the first plane hit.
But none of this story had been told yet and all I knew was that one of David’s friends had called our newsroom to say David was among the missing and his wife Cindy was somewhere in New York. Before I had started trailing Giuliani that afternoon I called switchboard. “Can you find Cindy?” Of course they did, and this time it was quite simple, albeit time-consuming. Lorrie just called every New York hotel until she found a Barkway reservation.
“She’s at the Times Square Hilton,” Lorrie told me. Cindy was three blocks from where I stood, so I passed on the pretzel and went directly to the hotel, only remembering when I got there that it was after midnight.
Like Times Square, the Hilton’s second-floor lobby was nearly empty and depressing. Sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs, I started scribbling a letter, explaining to Cindy who I was, that I was staying at a nearby hotel and that I wanted to tell her husband’s story, but understood if she didn’t want to talk and hoped the letter didn’t compound her grief.
I always dreaded trying to talk to relatives of someone who had just died—something I had done far too often in my years as a crime reporter. It never got easier. My first journalism assignment after just three days of “orientation” at the paper—which back then consisted roughly of “and here’s the women’s washroom, and the cafeteria. Human resources need you to fill out this form and pee in a cup”—had been to interview a woman whose baby had died after the doctor had dropped him on the delivery room floor. She lived in Hamilton, about a ninety-minute drive from our downtown newsroom, and by the time I got to her door I was so filled with dread that I was delighted no one was home. An editor told me to stay put, so I sat in one of the company cars staring at her front door. When she arrived home an hour later, I reluctantly went again, and knocked gently, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t hear. When she did, the sight of her reduced me to tears. After I choked out an introduction and apologies for being there, the poor woman took such pity on my snotty face that she brought me inside for tea and told me about her baby Michael. In the end, the Star was the only paper to get an interview but despite the editors’ praise, I still felt sick. The only saving grace was that eventually the publicity surrounding the case helped push for an investigation into hospital policies regarding newborns and recommendations were implemented, including the mandatory swaddling of babies in a towel before moving them.
Sometimes telling crime stories did make a difference, and I really did believe that as journalists we shared the motto posted in the hall of Toronto’s coroner’s office: “We Speak for the Dead to Protect the Living.” Of my dozens of “pick ups,” as they’re known because essentially we go and “pick up” a picture of the deceased, only a handful of relatives ever closed the door without talking. But the times that they did, that noble mission of making the world a better place by violating someone’s private grief just sounded hollow and I felt ghoulish. Besides, these days, as news gets delivered faster, most stories, no matter how tragic, have a shelf life of only a few days before the next tragedy makes them expire.
Of course, 9/11 was different because the grief was so widespread and public. But for Cindy, like the other relatives, it was a personal loss. I promised in my letter not to bother her if she didn’t call back and included my hotel and cell numbers at the bottom, before convincing a kind hotel clerk to take the note to her room and slide it quietly under the door.
I HAD JUST fallen asleep at the Algonquin Hotel as the sun came up, when the phone rang. In a steady and clear voice, Cindy Barkway told me she had my note and she would be happy to talk. But she was leaving New York. Could I come now? After a quick phone call to Star photographer Vinnie Talotta, who had been in New York shooting Fashion Week on the 11th, we ran to the hotel in time to greet Cindy as she came off the elevator. Cindy’s blond hair was smooth and styled. She wore a twin sweater set that looked cashmere and was accentuated by a string of small pearls. I felt embarrassed at what a mess the two of us were beside this beautiful widow. Cindy’s whole world had collapsed in those towers, but what I would better understand later is that grief affects everyone uniquely, at different times, and Cindy had somehow grasped something so many other relatives couldn’t yet believe. She realized her husband was gone. She knew David wasn’t in a hospital, or trapped alive under the rubble. She said she could feel it and needed to get home to her son Jamie to tell him. But first, she would tell us. We had only about twenty minutes before she had to join her parents in the idling Lincoln Town Car that had been sent by David’s company to drive her to Toronto.
She was remarkably composed. She said she was thankful for the two days she had had with David in New York, roaming the city, dining at the Gramercy Tavern and a steak house on Avenue of the Americas, thinking it would have been so much harder had she been forced to watch it all from Toronto. “He loved his son more than anything in the world,” she said, touching her stomach, which held the baby her husband would not meet. “My children are going to grow up without a father. But I’m going to make sure they know what a wonderful dad they had.”
Cindy had been playing the cruel “what if” game in her head since the towers were hit. What if the planes had struck twenty minutes later, when David was due in another meeting and would have left the building, or what if they had crashed into another skyscraper, far away from the World Trade Center? At first, Cindy believed David had escaped since he was in the north tower, which collapsed second, and perhaps he had time to climb down the 105 flights. He had sent an email to a colleague in Toronto that said, “We need help. This is not a joke,” so it was clear he had not been killed upon impact.
But by the morning of September 12, when David had not returned to the hotel, Cindy went to the missing persons bureau. She was given number 180. She wanted instead to go south and claw through the pile herself, but no one would let her near Ground Zero, and they cautioned her about being outside at all with the questionable air quality. The day before I met her, she had taken David’s toothbrush to the centre for DNA testing.
“I haven’t wanted to leave because that’s admitting David is gone,” Cindy said as she clutched a picture of her husband and walked toward the car. “But it is time to go home.”
None of David’s remains would ever be recovered.
THE FIRST CALL from the newsroom came shortly after we filed the story and photos. I vividly recall Vinnie’s face as he talked. The conversation went something like this:
“Are there any other pictures?”
“I sent what I have,” replied Vinnie, defensive.
“It’s just, well, she doesn’t look, sad.”
“She was. That’s how she looked.”
“But aren’t there any, where she’s, you know, crying?”
Vinnie grew up in Toronto, the eldest son of a first generation Italian household where his mother did not speak English and his father loved to sit in the backyard under a canopy of grape vines, wearing a white undershirt and straw hat as he drank coffee or grappa and embarrassing the hell out of the teenaged Vinnie. Perhaps it is more accurate to say Vinnie grew up on the street. And even though Toronto is heralded for its low crime rate, Vinnie always drove around, and likely still does today, with a small pocket knife tucked somewhere under his seat.
Vinnie joined the Star in 1988 as a “copy boy.” It was a position that has retained its name today even though the duties now entail general office administration. Since computers replaced typewriters, copy boys were no longer needed to run stories from the reporters’ hands to editors, then cram the stories into oblong containers that would be suctioned along tubes to the engravers and eventually to the printing presses.
Over the years, Vinnie got to know everyone at the Star, and everyone knew Vinnie. But it was the photographers he studied and wanted most to befriend. Vinnie learned about journalism in the newsroom, not the classroom, and in 1997 the paper rewarded him with a job as staff photographer. I loved working with Vinnie as a crime reporter because he had a gift for putting anyone at ease. I watched him charm politicians, dignitaries, housewives, ceos, drag queens (and I bet the Queen herself should he meet her), drug dealers and chiefs of police. In Compton, California, where we once did a series on gangs, I interviewed a six-foot-five Crip serving two life sentences for murder, and it was Vinnie whom the gang leader felt more comfortable talking with. Ditto the cops. Yes, Vinnie had charisma and treated everyone as equals, but if pushed too far, he also had a short Italian fuse, and on the phone that day I watched it ignite.
The editors wanted to know if he could go back to photograph Cindy again. I had to wonder what that would involve. Would we keep probing and prodding, and if that didn’t bring her to tears perhaps I would pinch her?
“No,” Vinnie said. “She’s on her way back to Toronto.”
“Could we get her here?”
The call was over.
In the end, David Barkway’s story ran on the Sunday front, the pictures inside.
A DAY AFTER interviewing Cindy, I wandered into an empty Afghan Kebab House at 9th Avenue and 51st Street and met Mohammad Nasir. Taped to the window outside the restaurant were yellow ribbons and an American flag, just like those that hung at almost every other Manhattan restaurant. But there was also a handwritten note on yellow lined paper. “To our neighbors, fellow New Yorkers and everyone affected by the terrible tragedy at the World Trade Center. Please accept our sincere and heartfelt condolences. We also feel such shock and horror.” The also was not underlined but that was the point.
Mohammad was a twenty-three-year-old waiter serving tables to help pay for tuition at New York’s City College. He told me in a soft voice that employees at the restaurant had been receiving death threats and that people would come in to stare at the flag of Afghanistan teary-eyed and shake their heads. Two of Mohammad’s friends sold coffee from carts on the top floors of the twin towers and were missing, presumed dead. But unlike other New Yorkers who shared that intense kinship in grief, Mohammad felt alone and like an outsider for the first time since he left Pakistan.
Which was ironic, because Mohammad had always felt more at home in New York than he had growing up in Islamabad.
Mohammad’s father was an officer with Pakistan’s navy who told his two boys from a very young age that he didn’t want his sons to live with the corruption of Pakistan’s ruling elite. When they were old enough, he would find a way to send them abroad to study and work. Mohammad’s chance came in 1995 when he travelled to Switzerland, where he studied hotel management, while his older brother left for Ireland. Even though he was only a teenager, Mohammad had been planning all his life (“I’m addicted to work,” he liked to exclaim, throwing up his hands as if he had an undiagnosed medical condition that he had learned to live with). He hit his stride as soon as he arrived in Switzerland, quickly securing a hotel internship, freelancing with bartending and DJ gigs at night, and learning English and German to add to his list of languages that already included Punjabi, Farsi and passable Arabic. But while his living costs were taken care of through the internship, his jobs earned little, which meant he was unable to save for the career he sought. He wanted to be a doctor. He believed there was only one place where he could do that. “To me, it was always the land of opportunities,” he said of New York. In 1998, he applied for a U.S. student visa and was delighted when he was accepted. He arrived in Manhattan soon after and found himself at the doorstep of the Afghan Kebab House, where he met Shafi Rouzy.
Shafi, the founder of the Afghan Kebab House chain, had also come to the United States in search of a new life, after fleeing his home in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, in 1979 during the Soviet invasion. He received political asylum in the United States and became an American citizen. Shafi’s first job was selling kebabs from a pushcart on the streets of Midtown during the 1980s. One night as he wearily parked his cart in the rundown garage on 9th Avenue, he imagined what could be. By the time he was able to sponsor his wife and children to get them out of Pakistan, to which they had fled, the wily businessman had established the Afghan Kebab House and already had a faithful clientele.
When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Shafi was in the Middle East trying to start a chain of restaurants and had left his 9th Avenue restaurant in the care of his son Yusuf. Yusuf had slept in the restaurant for a week following the 9/11 attacks, because travelling in and out of the city was too difficult with all the road restrictions, but Mohammad thought it was also to keep his family business safe. Mosques, stores, and Arab and South Asian homes were being vandalized. Within a week of the attacks, a Sikh owner of a gas station was shot dead in Arizona (reportedly because he “looked Middle Eastern”); a Pakistani store clerk was killed in Dallas; and Hassan Awdah of Gary, Indiana, a U.S. citizen born in Yemen, survived an attack at his gas station by a masked man wielding a high-powered rifle. Mourning was giving way to vengeance.
Shafi told employees in a conference call from Kuwait that he was considering dropping “Afghan” from the restaurant’s name. He even mused that he wanted to close his restaurants and open a fried chicken chain instead.
Business was certainly bad for a long time after that, but in the end, Shafi wasn’t forced to close his chain, and the Afghan Kebab House survived.
On an unusually warm spring night in 2010, I went back in search of Mohammad. Ready to use my best investigative skills to track him down, I went first to the restaurant hoping he had a friend still working there. Instead, I found Mohammad right where I had left him almost a decade earlier, waiting tables at 9th and 51st. Yusuf was there too, in the kitchen, slicing massive white pieces of cod into cubes.
The restaurant diners that night were the usual mix of the pre-theatre crowd, tourists with aching feet and bulging shopping bags, and women in pencil skirts, looking all business above the table, but underneath they had traded their spiky office heels for flip flops or running shoes. The restaurant didn’t serve alcohol, but diners were allowed to bring their own. “Some people don’t think it’s right to have hard liquor every night. What’s with that?” a twenty-something suit at the table beside me loudly exclaimed to his workmates as they clinked their corner store beer.
I had secured the only free table and spent a few minutes watching Mohammad before saying hello. He had lost a little hair and his black vest and dress pants seemed looser, I thought. He was busy, banging back and forth through the swinging kitchen doors, returning with fragrant trays of lamb, rice and fish, filling water glasses from wine decanters and returning with empty plates. There was no fried chicken on the menu.
“You’re still here?” I said to Mohammad as I explained that we had met days after 9/11, handing him my business card.
“You came back!” he exclaimed. “I remember.”
For Mohammad, a university degree was still the Holy Grail but his quest had ended a number of years ago when he could no longer afford rent for his 46th Avenue apartment near the restaurant and was forced to move to New Jersey. Trying to balance the commute, school and classes, with cost of tuition . . . “I’ll go back,” he said brightly.
A white-haired man came into the restaurant with a pack of smokes and handed them to Mohammad. “See? I didn’t forget you,” the man said before walking out with a smile. Mohammad later explained that he didn’t know the man’s name but knew his story. The eighty-six-year-old was a World War ii veteran whose wife had died about five years earlier and who was down on his luck. He wandered in often, usually without money, and Mohammad took it upon himself to bring him a steaming bowl of lamb stew. Sometimes the man would come back with a pack of cigarettes to thank him, and Mohammad didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t really a smoker.
Mohammad had other fans and a bunch of them were at a table at the front of the restaurant, wearing crisp suits and sitting with their backs to the wall in a defensive, erect posture that screamed police officers. “You write good things about him,” one told me, winking at Mohammad as he paid the bill.
“You working with NYPD on 9/11?” I asked the baby-faced officer.
“Negative,” he replied.
“They’re good guys,” Mohammad said once they were out of earshot. “Work for intelligence.”
Then he added seemingly more to himself than to me, “You know, New York is a good place for good people and it’s a bad place for bad people.
“I don’t have anybody here but I don’t feel lonely. This is my home. This is my place. This is my country.”
A FEW BLOCKS from the Afghan Kebab House was the Pride of Midtown, the nickname for New York’s busiest fire hall. Built more than one hundred years ago, it sits on the corner of 8th Avenue and 48th Street, close to Broadway and the theatres. The firefighters working in the red-brick building answer more than fourteen thousand emergency calls a year.
Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 lost fifteen men on duty on 9/11: the three Mikes—Haub (the Hobbinator), Lynch and Brennan; the house “probie” and youngest at 24, Chris Santora; the “artist” Paul Gill; the athlete Sam Oitice. Chief Ed Geraghty, Joe Angelini, Len Ragaglia, Carl Asaro, Captain Dave Wooley, Jose Guadalupe, Lieutenant Danny O’Callaghan, John Tipping, Alan Feinberg. They answered the call at 9:04 AM fourteen minutes after the first plane hit.
Just before the first anniversary of 9/11, I went back to the fire hall and spent a week doing a “ride along” with the men. This involved a lot of grocery store visits. The Pride of Midtown may be the busiest station in the city, but there always seemed time to get ingredients and create elaborate meals. It was almost inevitable, however, that the bell would ring just as the plates were served and the men would run cursing toward the trucks as mouthwatering scents wafting like fingers from the kitchen tried to pull them back to their seats.
The anniversary was hard on the New York City firefighters. They lost 343 members. Stories of some of their dead had reached near-mythical status. The commander, the rookie, the father and son under the rubble; sixty-eight-year-old Fire Chaplain Reverend Mychal F. Judge, who was killed by falling debris in the lobby of the north tower after giving the last rites to firefighter Daniel Suhr. The Reuters photo of Father Judge as he was carried out by firefighters on a tipped chair, his head slumped sideways, became one of the most enduring images of 9/11.
But at the Pride of Midtown in particular, the anniversary was excruciating. Firefighter Richard Kane came off a twenty-four-hour shift one day in early September 2002 and walked out bleary-eyed smack into a busload of earnest children, all gripping hand-drawn pictures and lined up shyly behind their teacher. They wanted to deliver the drawings and could they maybe hug the firefighters, the teacher asked? A few nights earlier, a group of inebriated women had come to buy commemorative 9/11 T-shirts that most of the stations sold for charity, and then just stared at the firefighters with drunken tears and slurred their admiration. On this morning, Kane looked down at the children and wanted to tell them to go away. He needed a shower and a bed.
In the first months after 9/11, the focus on the firefighters made it okay for the normally macho men to break down. It was expected that you would cry and more of an issue if you didn’t. The Pride of Midtown became a shrine of candle wax and flowers that stretched from the driveway into the road, blocking two lanes of traffic. Whenever you passed that corner, all noise ceased. Even the cabbies wouldn’t honk.
But then fall turned to winter, the missing became the dead, and the steady stream of well-meaning visitors and mourners turned into a daily sucker punch in the gut. You’re the ones who survived, those well-meaning hugs and tears said. Your buddies are all dead. And if the firefighters didn’t already think about that almost every minute at that fire hall, then all they had to do was look up at the Ladder 4 sign that had been brought back after it was discovered in the rubble of Ground Zero in the spring of 2002, twenty metres below ground. Or they would see O’Callaghan’s spare coat, which remained where it was on the morning of 9/11. “All gave some, some gave all,” screamed a sign read by only those who gave some. The firefighters were working, cursing, sweating, guilt-ridden, pissed-off actors in a living memorial.
“It’s really the toughest place in the city to work. No one wants to say that because we’re just so grateful for the public support we’ve received, but it has to end soon. Everybody just wants it to stop,” Richard Kane said after smiling and accepting the drawings from the children. Seeing a penny on the ground, he kicked it absentmindedly. I wrote in my notebook that Kane did not put that penny in his pocket. Probably just an act of frustration but it felt significant. See a penny pick it up all day long you’ll have good luck. None of the firefighters wanted to talk about luck as the reason they survived.
So call it timing. Five trucks responded to the 9:04 call. Only one made it back—Kane’s. His lieutenant turned around after realizing he had left his helmet behind. “Leave it, we’ve got to go, leave it,” Kane remembered yelling. But they went back to get it and then their truck was stopped en route. They were two blocks away when the second tower fell.
FEW WOULD PREDICT how a terrorist attack on U.S. soil could usher in a such a dark, divisive period in history, one that not only failed to quash the threat of global terrorism, but instead created a whole new generation raised on war and rhetoric and bent on revenge.
In the early days, those few voices who called for a measured response and urged the United States to look inward and take a deep, collective breath were branded traitors and told they did not appreciate just how profoundly the world had changed. The world was indeed a different place. “Patriotic” and “anti-American” became buzzwords. A rabid new breed of so-called security experts hit the airwaves, talking in concise 15-second clips about the near and the far enemy that now, looking back, does not seem that different from the rhetoric Osama bin Laden spewed. I was part of the media machine that churned out these stories, which were heavy on drama and outrage, and light on analysis.
Hindsight makes it easy to judge how things went so disastrously wrong, how the goodwill for the United States turned to international condemnation. What is harder to recall and for many of us to admit now was how we felt then. People were scared. We wanted strong leaders. Many wanted revenge. The sepia-toned Western posters demanding Osama bin Laden be captured Dead or Alive were flying off the racks. I bought a roll of toilet paper with the al Qaeda’s leader’s face on every square above the words Wipe Out Terrorism.
Subways and tunnels turned ominous, as did tall buildings. No one wanted to fly and the airline industry, already hit by a recession, spiralled downward. On October 5, less than a month after the attacks, Robert Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor of the Boca Raton, Florida, tabloid, the Sun, inhaled anthrax spores after opening his mail. Targeting a newspaper, of course, also had the chilling effect of putting all journalists on alert and making them personally invested in the story. By mid-November, five people were dead or dying of anthrax, dozens injured. Senators and Supreme Court justices were also targeted. Everyone was on edge. The FBI began tracking leads from Washington to Florida and the fear grew that if al Qaeda had anthrax maybe they had smallpox too, or plans to poison the water supply. Maybe nuclear weapons? It would take a multi-million-dollar investigation and nearly seven years for the FBI to dismiss an al Qaeda connection to the anthrax and conclude that the likely perpetrator was an army scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins, a troubled doctor who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine and had even been advising the FBI in its investigation. Dr. Ivins had been tormented by alcohol and mental illness and took his own life in 2008 when the FBI turned its focus on him.
Fear is a powerful motivator that our brains process in strange ways. We know that obesity and smoking are killers, but it’s the idea that a murderer is lurking in the basement or under our bed that scares us. How often are nervous flyers told that they are more likely to die in an accident driving to the airport than flying? But knowing the statistics doesn’t stop their palms from sweating during takeoff. Even after 9/11, the risk of being struck by lightning was greater than dying in a terrorist attack in North America. But we had heard f-16s soar across Manhattan, and that was the thunder that made us shudder.
If you didn’t feel afraid instinctively, then you were told you should. In fact we were bombarded with fear, warned to be in a constant state of readiness and to heed the colour-coded threat level. It was usually red (severe risk), sometimes on good days maybe orange (high risk). If you see a red flag on Hawaii’s North Shore you probably don’t go swimming. A black weather flag at a military base means it’s not the smartest idea to run a marathon at noon. But how do you live with severe risk when you don’t know what the risk is?
Fear explained the billions spent on airport security even though there is no way to plug all the holes. The box cutters used on 9/11 caused airlines to give us plastic cutlery on flights. Shoe bomber Richard Reid caused us to take off our footwear. In 2006, after British police thwarted a liquid bomb plot, water bottles were deemed dangerous. After the so-called underwear bomber failed to bring down a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, Canadian passengers flying to the United States had to put their hands in their pockets, rub them around and extend their palms for an explosives test. Minutes before undergoing this routine at Toronto’s Pearson Airport in February 2010, I had stood in a customs line that snaked out the door to the check-in counters. No one had passed through security yet or checked their luggage. A bomb detonated there could have killed hundreds.
Fear helps explain why there was little debate over Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act or the sweeping October 2001 U.S. Patriot Act that undermined decades of civil rights protections. It had passed 96 to 1. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold was the one. “This was not, in my view, the finest hour for the United States Senate,” he told Congress. “The debate on a bill that may have the most far-reaching consequences on civil liberties of the American people in a generation was a non-debate. The merits took a back seat to the deal.” He was branded a traitor, which didn’t deter him from later trying to censure Bush for wiretapping American citizens without court approval, from voting against the Iraq war or from becoming the first senator to call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
“The tragic events of September 11, 2001, changed more than Manhattan’s skyline; it profoundly altered our political and legal landscape as well,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his bestseller Kingdom of Fear. “Anyone who witnessed the desecration of those buildings and the heart-wrenching loss of life, who didn’t want to run out and rip someone a new asshole, doesn’t deserve the freedoms we still enjoy. However, anybody who thinks for one moment that giving up our freedoms is any way to preserve or protect those freedoms, is even more foolhardy.”
And that’s the thing. Everyone knows that fear can be irrational but many just resorted to the mantra “better safe than sorry.”
But are we safer?
In April 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate said the United States wasn’t. According to declassified portions of the report, the terrorist threat was in fact greater than it had been on September 10, 2001. This wasn’t the bleeding-heart-socialist-civil-rights-activists-American-Civil-Liberties-Union-leftist-media talking. This was an NIE, a federal government document written by the National Intelligence Council, approved by the Director of National Intelligence and based on raw, uncensored information collected by the sixteen American intelligence agencies. Of course, as the name states, the reports are “estimates.” But they are considered authoritative assessments and while typically bureaucratic or measured in tone, this one was blunt. Radical Islamic movements that aligned themselves with al Qaeda had not been quashed, but had metastasized and spread around the world. The report laid out the factors that were fuelling the movement: fear of Western domination leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness when coupled with entrenched grievances such as corruption and injustice; the faulty intelligence that led to the Iraq war; the slow pace of economic, social and political reform in Muslim nations; and the pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among Muslims and exploited by jihadists.
Two of the authors of a report issued by the 9/11 Commission (an independent, bipartisan committee created by congressional legislation to investigate the attacks) asked in a Washington Post editorial in 2007 how it was possible that the threat could remain so dire when billions had been spent, new laws enacted, wars fought.
“We face a rising tide of radicalization and rage in the Muslim world—a trend to which our own actions have contributed. The enduring threat is not Osama bin Laden but young Muslims with no jobs and no hope, who are angry with their own governments and increasingly see the United States as an enemy of Islam,” wrote the former commission chair Thomas H. Kean, and vice chair Lee H. Hamilton.
Kean and Hamilton wrote that the West had lost the struggle of ideas.
“We have not been persuasive in enlisting the energy and sympathy of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims against the extremist threat. That is not because of who we are: Polling data consistently show strong support in the Muslim world for American values, including our political system and respect for human rights, liberty and equality. Rather, U.S. policy choices have undermined support.” Military is essential, they wrote. “But if the only tool is a hammer, pretty soon every problem looks like a nail.”
Fear drove so much of what happened after 9/11, and many political leaders were the masters of stoking it. The world was suddenly viewed only through the terrorism prism. There was no middle ground. As Bush famously said on September 20, 2001, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
