One by a witness, the second on the consequences
These are updated versions of articles that originally ran on the 20th anniversary of 9/11
What I saw
By Will Collette
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| What Donald Trump has forgotten about 9/11 |
We lived just out the DC Beltway in Kensington, a modest Maryland suburb.
I was alone on my drive to downtown DC. Cathy was in Los
Angeles at her union convention, due to fly back later that day.
I headed out, past the Mormon Temple and down Rock Creek Park, our favorite commuting route, a largely unknown way to bypass the bumper-to-bumper traffic on 16th Street and Connecticut Ave. Emerging in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, I continued on to park in Cathy’s designated space in a garage next to AFSCME's building and walked three blocks to the AFL-CIO building where I worked in the Building Trades Department as a senior strategic researcher.
Just after 9:30 AM, Building Trades Chief of Staff Bob
Ozinga ran into my office yelling “get off that fucking phone….we’re under
attack!” and told me we all had to evacuate. I asked WTF and he said, “Look out the window.” From the south windows
on the upper floors of the AFL building, Lafayette Park, the White House,
Washington Monument and the Pentagon line up in a row. I saw a roiling column
of smoke and flame rising from the Pentagon.
Like everyone else, I evacuated into the sheer pandemonium
on the downtown streets. Rumors were that bombs had gone off in the Metro.
People couldn’t figure out how to get home, or at least get out of range of the
inbound plane likely headed for the White House (Flight 93, the one taken down
by brave passengers over Shanksville, PA). My office was only a block away from the White House across Lafayette Park.
I tried to work out in my head when Cathy was due to board
her flight for home from LA. I figured she wouldn’t board until around noon our
time, given her nighttime ETA at Dulles.
In all that chaos, I ran into three of Cathy’s colleagues
who were distraught about how to get out. I told them to come with me so I
could drive them out to suburban Maryland. The radio was not providing much
useful (or as we learned later, even factual) information.
I took back routes to reach Rock Creek Park. We made it up
to Maryland and I dropped each of Cathy’s staff at home. When I got home, I
started calling to find out if Cathy was OK. Phone service was overloaded.
Cathy finally got through to me a couple hours later to tell me she was stopped
at the check-out desk and told she wouldn’t be flying anywhere since all
flights were grounded indefinitely. It took her almost a week to get back.
Like most Americans, I spent the next few days watching
endless replays of the plane strikes and the Towers falling. The Bush
Administration started giving their version of events and vowed revenge for
this vicious and totally unforeseen event.
I remember thinking “vicious, yes” and “revenge, sure.” But
“unforeseen? Bullshit.” I like to read for pleasure and often indulge in
thrillers. Two best-selling thrillers I had read EXACTLY foretold 9/11.
One was Tom Clancy’s 1994 bestseller “Debt of Honor”
that featured a high-jacked 747 hitting the Capitol during the State of the
Union speech. Also in 1994, Dale Brown’s best-seller “Storming
Heaven” featured high-jacked airliners used as weapons against US
infrastructure and political targets.
We later learned that George W. Bush had been explicitly
warned on June 29th and August 6th about likely
attacks on the homeland by Osama Bin Laden and had done nothing. Further, we
learned that the FBI was already on to the hijackers while they were still
taking lessons at flight schools.
A month after 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan at first to
destroy al-Qaeda and
punish the Taliban for allowing al-Qaeda to
operate. Our NATO allies joined in, though the “mission” had morphed into
changing Afghanistan from top to toe into a client state that served our
interests.
I remember thinking that this is what happens when the country is run by people who don’t read books. This problem is far worse today.
Clancy and Brown had predicted
the use of airliners as missiles and dozens of histories told of the Afghan
people’s refusal to be conquered. Since Alexander the Great through the Soviet Union and now the US occupation, Afghanistan has been the “graveyard of empires.”
While waiting for the announcement that we would be
permitted to go back into DC and to our jobs, I stewed in anger at the
terrorists who murdered so many people as well as our lapse in intelligence and
judgement that allowed us to be taken by surprise.
When we were finally allowed to come back to work later in
the week, there were Humvees at every major intersection with nervous looking
kids from the DC National Guard manning 50 cal. machine guns. It’s a truly
weird commute when you are targeted and tracked by a kid with a 50 cal.
Much of downtown was barricaded to traffic. You could walk
to most places under the watchful eyes and tactical machineguns of troops
stationed everywhere.
This was surreal, but it got worse. You needed an ID and a
pass to go from building to building and in some instances (at the AFL-CIO for
example), floor to floor.
We were told in the harshest terms to stay away from
south–facing windows (like the one in my office) and absolutely forbidden to go
on any south facing balcony under penalty of being shot without warning by
sharpshooters.
A week after 9/11, letters filled with anthrax started
arriving across DC. Five people died and 17 more were infected. We all looked
at every piece of mail suspiciously.
Cathy and I had left Rhode Island in 1979 for new jobs in DC
but always felt like Rhode Islanders and believed in our eventual return. We
loved our jobs. We loved the travel that came with those jobs. But after George
W. Bush got “elected” by the Supreme Court, we felt the time to go home was
getting near. We bought our current home in Charlestown in November 2000 and rented it
out.
After 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, life in DC stopped being
fun. Travel was a nightmare. Security was so tight as to be unbearable. George
Bush was taking us into the “war on terror.”
The last straw was the DC snipers, John Muhammed and Lee
Malvo, who terrorized the metro area for three weeks in October 2002. One of
their first victims was a woman shot while gassing up at the gas station I
regularly used. That was it for us.
Cathy took her retirement. We sold our house in Kensington
MD and moved into the house we had already bought here. I was hired by the
Laborers Union regional office in Providence. Goodbye DC, Hello Charlestown.
And no regrets.
Please read on. My colleague Mitchell Zimmerman, whose work
appears nationwide and frequently in Progressive Charlestown, reminds us that
we were hardly the only victims of 9/11. I share just about all his thoughts on
the subject, but he expresses them much more eloquently than I can.
The victims of our post-9/11 wars deserve remembrance,
too
Countless innocents died in the 20 years of war our
country launched in the name of our 9/11 dead.
Like our memorial, the German monument consists
of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows.
But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly
different.
We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to
honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their
name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted
on other innocent nations.
In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a forty-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.
Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the
fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the
memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a
mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the
history of this place as a wound and an open question.”
It’s part of the way Germans have accepted responsibility
for the crimes of the Nazi era. The small monument conjures the sadness of
loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.
The mass murder of Americans, the crime of September 11,
2001, spawned a larger tragedy for others. Treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism”
as license for war on Afghanistan as well as on Iraq, our government invaded
both countries, overthrew their governments, and occupied them.
Far-seeing people like Rep. Barbara Lee warned that war on
Afghanistan was the wrong response to the 9/11 attacks, and they were right.
But using the attacks as a pretext to attack Iraq was arguably even more absurd
and criminal.
“In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Bush White House
anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke
confirmed, the president told “the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of
Iraq… Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA,
that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”
As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to
their government before the invasion, “the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy” of going to war.
Even by relatively conservative estimates, America’s post-9/11 wars have
caused nearly a million deaths. They’ve also made millions of refugees and
inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on
generations of children in Iraq and other war zones.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents
murdered in America, 20 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize
the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in other countries. To our 9/11
memorial, America should add a wall on which we engrave the names of the
million innocent men, women and children slain in those futile wars.
I don’t think that’s likely anytime soon, but the proposal
may be useful. As Hoheisel says, “That’s how a counter-monument works. People
get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the
history begins to come out.”
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org. It was also sent to me by Mitchell along with photos of the Aschrott counter-monument.
