18 NEWS

Talking points

9/11,:Ten yearslater,how Americahaschanged

"Sept. 11 is the day that neverends," said adrninistration'santi-terrorism tactics, includRichard Cohen in The Washingon Post. Ten ing the interception of suspected terrorists' years have come and gone sincehijacked phone calls and e-mails,and the "tough plarlescrashedinto the twin towers and the interrogation of a few high-ranking al Qaida Pentagon,and yet our wounds remain fiesh, leaders." The intelligencewe extracted and our country is still at war. I was in Lower allowed the U.S. to disrupt numerous plots, Manhattan when the \7orld Trade Center fell, including plans to bomb offices,apartment and went home that night with shoescovered blocks, and airliners. And it's helped the r,vithdust and "a l.rate that was entirely new military kill or capture "most of al Qaida's rage to me." In our grief and understandable first and most capable leaders," ir.rcludir-rg over the murder of 2,977 innocent people, we bin Laden. Despite thesesuccesses, Qaida "al marched off to war, first in Afghanistan and and its imitators are still dangerous," said then, at the behestof the Bush administraThe Economist Radical Islamistsin Yemen, 'Western tion, in Iraq, "even though it was not Saddam Pakistan,and nations are constantly Hussein who attacked us." Today, American looking for vulnerabilitiesto exploit. "Tl.rere troops continue to die in Afghanistan-partly can be no return to the innocenceof Seot. 10. because tl.rehorrifically bloody and expenof 200 l-and, sadly.no end to the vigilance." sive diversion of lrao. And what do we have But how long must we maintain our "singleto show for this decadeof conflict? "Our minded focus on Islan.ric far.raticism"? asked enemy Iran" now has more influence than Anne Applebaum tn The Washington Post. ever in the region, while Afghanistan remains During the past decade,while we spent a failed state. Our nation, meanwhile, bears $3 trillion on wars and the creation of a vast "little or no resemblance the heroic America to securiry bureaucracyof 1,200 agencies, our we glimpsed on 9111ar.rd the days that folA day of brrror: Did we ouerreact? country's infrastructure crumbled, millions lowed," said Frank Rich in New York. Yes, of jobswent abroad,and our dependence on is Osama bin Lader.r now dead, and al Qaida is largely defeated. foreign oil grew. Meanwhile, China emergedas both a mighty But "our economyand our politicsare broken," and national commercial hub and a true global power. In the Arab world, we unity has given way to bitternessand pessin-rism. aligned ourselveswith tyrants we thought would help us defeat That's because"9/11 worked," said Andrew Sullivan ir.r NezsIslar-r-ric terrorism. No wonder we're now viewed with susoicion in ueek. It may have failed spectacularlyto advtrncebin Lader.r's Egypt and Tunisia. "Ten years on, could it be that the planes that ultimate goal of promoting a radical Islanric calipl.rate the Midin l.ritNerv York and Washington did lessdar.nage than the cascade east, but when Arnericanssaw the \ilorld Trade Center'siconic of bad decisionsthat followed?" towers tumbling to the ground, and the "mighty Pentagon" in As scarredas America rnight be, our nation's ideals remair-r largely flames,we becameunhinged by fear. So we took bin Laden's bait. intact, said Kathy Kiely inNationalJourna.l.Yes, there have been Dick Cheney ar.rd the Bush administrtrtion convinced panicked pockets of xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry, but since 9/11 Arnericansthat al Qaida was a "greater threat tl.ranthe Nazis and we've electedrwo Muslirns to the House of Reoresentatives-"the the Soviets," thus justifying ar.ry and irll responses. we tortured So first of their faith to servein Congress." We alsr-r electeda man to not only al Qaida leadersbut legions of yor,rngMuslin.rs,tore Irtrq the \fhite House with the middle name Hussein, who promised to apart at an "incalculable" cost in lives and money, ar-rd"destroyed get us out of Iraq, and has largely succeeded. Dissent-briefly conAmerican moral standing ir.rthe world." sideredunpatriotic in the months following the attacks-is alive What utter nonsense, said former Bush administration lzrwyer and well. "It was a ror-rgh decade,but we survived as a democracy that embracespluralism and debate and one ther questions John Yoo in Tbe Wall StreetJournaL Those clain.ring America overreactedto 9/11,are igr-roring simple fact: We've gone 10 a authority." And that, on an otherwise sad anniversary,"offers us years without anothel attack. For that, we urust credit the Bush solrething to celebrate."

r The CIA'sCounterterrorism Center. which had 300 employeeson the day of the Sept. 11 attacks.now has more than 2,000 peopleon staff-more than al Oaida's core membershioaround the world. TheWashingtonPost r Suicidebombers killed m o r e t h a n 1 2 , 0 0 0 r a q i sa n d l wounded more than 30.000

from 2003to 2010,a new study found. Suicidebombers also killed about 200 coalitionsoldiers. TheLancet I August was the first month since the U.S. i n v a s i o no f l r a q ,i n M a r c h 2 0 0 3 ,t h a t n o t a s i n g l eU . S . s o l d i e rw a s k i l l e dt h e r e . The NewYorkTimes r T h e U . S .h a s w a s t e du p t o $ 6 0 b i l l i o ni n p a y m e n t s to contractorswho aided

war effortsin lraq and Afghanistan, a n i n d e p e n d e nc o m m i s s i o n o u n d . t f That'sone of every four dollars spent on war-zonecontractorsin the Dast decade. TheWallStreetJournal r Documentsfound in Triooli indicate that the CIA sent eight terrorism suspects to Libya to be interrogatedby its intelligenceservice,despite its long history of torture.A CIA sookeswomansaid the agency "works with foreign governments to help protect our country." The NewYorkTimes

THEITEEK September 1.6,2011.

The ruin of
an English delight
\
Philip Johnston The Telegraph

F M

The government is on a mission to make British food bland, said Philip Johnston. The "health police" have decreedthat Britons should ingest much lesssalt, and they have bullied food companies into signing pledgesto changetheir recipes. One of the first casualtiesis the nation's most beloved condiment, Heinz's HP sauce-a'Worcestershire-likemix of tamarind and secretspices."No roadside caff worthy of rhe name wouid be without its HP alongsidethe tomato ketchup." Former Prime Minister Harold'Wilsor.r,in fact, slopped it onto every meal, and to some it's still known 'Were as "Wilson's gravy." he alive today, he Lithuanians are "mad for basketball,"said Willy Le Devin. Most consider the game part of their national identiry.The "love affair" began in1.937, when the tiny Baltic country won the Europear-r basketballchampionship.On its way home, the team stoppedthe train in "every small village" to greet cheeringcrowds waving Lithuanian flags. But just three yearslater,Stalin'stroops marched in, and Lithuania was forced to become a Soviet republic. Lithuanian basketballplayers,known for their nationalistviews, were blacklistedfrom the Sovietnational team. "As a result, Lithuania's clubs took on the role of Sovieteiant killers."

wouldn't recognize the new flavor. Even though the bottle still says "original and genuine," HP is now brewed with so much less salt that the sour notes overpower everything else,making your food taste as if it's gone rancid. Isn't this overkill? Who eats so much brown saucethat its salt content could affect your health? In fact, "given that it is usually being splatteredonto a full English breakfastor soueezed onto a bacon sandwich. the sauceis probably the healthiestpart of the meal." FortunatelS there rnay be a way to recover the tangy flavor we grew up with: Just reach for that saltshaker. 'Whenever local Lithuanian teams beat Moscow teams or---ven bener-the Red Army team, Lithuanians swelled with patriotism. Fans love to recount one game in Moscow in the 1980s.The Soviet army had bought up all the tickets for soldiers so the stadium wouldn't fill up with chanting Lithuanians.But the day of the game, the Lithuanian fans descendedon the army barracks, "where thel traded liters of vodka for the precious tickets." By tip-off time, the arena was a seaof Lithuanians. Basketballhad become"an essential component of Lithuanian identiry forged by bold acts of resistance that defied the Sovietogre."

A nation
cfazv lor

baslietball
Willy Le Devin Libdration (France)

How they see 9/I1 triggered us: tI.S. decline

'What a toll this decadehas taken on the meltdown facing the U.S. can be directly U.S., said Gregor Peter Schmitz in the Hamtraced to this insaneoverspendingon deburgDer Spiegel.Just before the attacks of fenseagainst a small band of terrorists. Sept. 11, America "was in full bloom." The economy was booning. George\7. Bush had There is also "another, lesstangible, cost," "inherited a fat budget surplus." The U.S. said Neil Tweedie in the London Telegraph. nation" in global afwas "the indispensable America has abandoned its claim to the fairs-Europeans couldn't even solve the moral high ground-and not just by killproblem of Kosovo, in our own backyard, ing some 140,000 civilians in Iraq and Afwithout U.S. help. On the day after the atghanistan.First it violated the sovereignty tacks, the world rallied to the American of allies by kidnapping suspected terrorcause,"and for a brief moment, the superists-many of them entirely innocent. Then power seemedeven more powerful than came the practice of "extraordinary rendiNo claim to the moral high ground ever." Palestinianleader YasserArafat oertion," whereby those suspects were shipped sonally donated blood for rhe 911,1 victims. "Even the French off to other countries for torture. Then torture was embraced all suddenly wanted to be Americans." And 10 years later? The as an American tactic, when CIA agentswaterboarded suspects U.S. is unrecognizable. Binerly divided against itself, the country at "black sites." And finally we have outright assassinations, in has become "distrustful, fearful, and defensive-against Musthe form of drone attacks. All theseBush administration oolicies lims, against foreigners,againstanyone who is different." "have sullied the country's reputation" beyond repair. The terrorists won, said Bernd Pickert in the Berlin Die Tageszeitung.If al Qaida's goal was to goad the superpower into self-destruction,"the Bush administration succeeded admirably in complying." By launching rwo wars, at a cost of trillions of dollars and rising, the U.S. carried out "a massivetransfer of money and resources from the national treasury into the pockets of the military-industrial complex." Military budgetshave ballooned to the point that the U.S. now spendsmore than all other countries in the world put together. And that's not even counting the massivecosts of the new Homeland SecuriryDepartment and Transportation Security Agency. The financial Don't blame Bush alone, said Tariq Ali in the London Guardian.The imperialist adventurehe began continues apace. "Apart from Obama's windy rhetoric, little now divides this administration from its predecessor." Obama has deported more immigrants and prosecutedmore whistle-blowersthan Bush. He has failed to ciose Guantdnamo, and he renewed the Patriot Act. He increasedthe use of drones, killing untold numbers of Pakistani families. He even started a third war in a Muslim land, Libya. And it won't be the last. In the words of Gen. David Petraeus, whom Obama named head of the CIA, "This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and orobablv our kids' lives."

T H E W E E KS e p t e m b e r , 2 0 1 1 23

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pa. location and altitude' At 9:55' the A tuntporttrlt tentporary trtemorial tnemorial neartlte craslt near tbe crash sitc in Shanksuille, site Shanksuille,Pa. JerenryGlick, a salesmanfor an i'-'t..n.tservicescompany,alsoman--.-..-)|''.'''. relat-ing the plane'sdirection' He was to must have-irgreed,-they-were to die sure aged to phone. In, lir-rg'.o,ru.rsationwith heading, it indicated, for rwashington,D.C. anyway when dre hijackerscrashedthe hi"swife, Lyz, Glick saiithe hijackers had plarre.They-resolvedto fight for their lives. "prt on-th... red headbands.they said wife, JeremyGlick, still on the phorreto l.ris "A group of us"' Burnett told his wife,,, they had a bornb...theylooked lranian." "f kno* I could rake the guy witir LvillU, "are getting ready to do something." "l'rn The "bornb" was in a red box, he said. Then, joking-he had ,i,,e,,,#il;;b." The couple told each other how much rhey goilg to take a vote," Glick said on his knives-,.I still ;i;,;';il;, the hiiackers"had call. "There's three other guys as,big as me iru". -, Lu".r knife from breakfast." loved each other. Glick said, "l don't -ani " a1{ w9'r9 tl.rinkingof attacking the guy to die," and his wife assuredhim that he - . . -' Todd Beamer,continuir.rg his,conversawirh the bornb." *o.,li ,.,ot.She urged t,i- t,, k..p n f,.*,. '-:,19_ of her and their 11"-week-olddaughter in So began the minutes of brave resisrance, I]:""-f]:h"9:trt:?:::t::"t*f:Y

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ILANEwASflying erratically again. OperatorJefferson f,ea.dthe sounds I ofan"awful commotion":raised voices,morescreams.Then."Areyouguys voicesrying. ready?"and Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!"-a phrasethat, in family life, he liked to use to get his children moving.

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"Okay," Jeremy Glick told Lyz, "I'm going to do it." His wife told him he was strong and brave, that she loved him. "Okag" he said again. "I'm going to put the phone down. I'm going to leave it here and I'm going to come right back to it." Lyz handed the phone to her father, ran to the bathroom, and gagged. Flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw was in the galley, boiling water for the passengers to throw on the hijackers.On the phone to her husband, she signed off quickly. "Everyone'srunning up to first class.I've got to go. Bye..." The cockpit voice recorder registered the moment the hiiackers realized what was happening.At just before 9:58, a hijacker asks, "Is there something?...Afight?" There is a knock on the door, followed by sounds of fighting. Then, in Arabic, "Let's go, guys! Allah is greatest.Allah is greatest. O guys! Allah is greatest...OAllah! O Allah! O the most gracious!" Then, loudly, "Stay back!" A male voice, a native-English-speaking voice that Tom Burneft's wife has recognized as that of her husband, is heard saying, "In the cockpit. In the cockpit." Followed by a voice exclaiming, in Arabic, "They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside...Hold." From a distance, perhaps from Todd Beamer,"Roll it!" Crashing sounds,then, in Arabic, "Allah is that the greatest!Allah is the greatest!...Is it? I mean, shall we pull it down?" "Yes, put it in it, and pull it down." Two seconds later, in Arabic, in a whisper now, "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!" Jeremy Glick's father-in-law, still listening on the ground, heard high-pitched screams coming over the line Glick had left open when he left to join the rush to the cockpit. Then "wind sounds" followed by banging noises,as though the phone aboard the plane was repeatedly banging on a hard surface. After that, silence on the phone. Silence on the cockpit voice recorder. Then, in less than a second, the recording ended. 'rEAR THE LrrrLE rown of L strantsville,,Pa., man.working in a \ I \ a scrap yard saw an airliner, flying low but seemingly trying to climb, just clear a nearby ridge. Half a mile away, another man saw the final plunge. It was "barely 50 feet above me," he said, "rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and was this big fireball it just crashed...There and then a huge cloud of smoke." It was 10:03. Thirry-five minutes had passedsincethe hijackers struck, four mincounterattacked. utes since the passengers

The grave of Flight 93 and the men and women it had carried was an open field bounded by woods on the site of a former strip mine. The voice recorder, recovered days later,would be found buried 12 feet Then, from severalEnglish speakersin under the ground. There were no bodies, unison. "Hold the door..." And from The day after: lnuestigators searchthe wreckage. it appeared,only shredsof clothing hanga single English speaker,"Stop him," ing from the trees. For a while, a white followed repeatedlyby "Sit down! Sit "Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! cloud of "sparkly, shiny stuff like confetti" down!" Then, again from an English Cut off the oxygen!...Up,down. Up, down... floated in the sky. speaker,"Let's get them..," Up, down." More violent noises,for as long Three hundred miles away, in the town of as a minute, and then-apparently from a Flight 93, now down to 5,000 feet, had Cranbury, N.J., Todd Beamer's wife, Lisa, begun rolling left and right. Jeremy Glick's native English speaker-"Shut them off!... saw the first oictures of the crash site on Go!...Go!...Move!...Move!...Turn " it up. father-in-law, listening intently on the televisionand knew her husband was dead. phone his daughter had handed him, now In Arabic, "Down, down...Pull it down! heard screamsin the background. On the In lfindham, N.Y., someone told Jeremy Pull it down! DOWN!" cockpit voice recorder,there is the sound Glick's wife, Lyz,thar there might be surApparently from an English speaker, of combat conrinuing. Then, in Arabic, vivors. Then her father returned from the "Down. Push,push, push, push, push... "There is nothing...Shallwe finish it off?" garden, where-at the request of the FBIpush." "No. Not vet." "When they all come, we he had kept open the line on which Jeremy finish it off." Then, from Tom Burneft, In Arabic, "Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give had called. He had waited. waited. for an "I am injured." The flight data recorder it to me...Giveit to me...Give it to me... hour and a half. Now, as he came back in, indicatesthat the plane pitched up and Lyz saw thar her father was weeping. Give it to me...Giveit to me...Give it to down, climbed to 10,000 feet, turned. me...Give it to me." Hundreds of miles apart, the rwo wives, Glick's father-in-larv, phone clapped to his Intermittent loud "air noise" on the cocknow widows, sank to their knees in grief. ear, heard more shrieks,muffled now, like pit recorder. grief was invading Sudden,unforeseeable those of people "riding on a roller coaster." homes across the country, across the world. Moments later, in Arabic, "Allah is the In Arabic, on the voice recorder,"O Allah! greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the O Allah! O gracious!" greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the Excerpted from the bookThe Eleventh " greatest! Day. @2011 AnthonySummers by and In English, "In the cockpit. If we don't, g we'll die!" In Arabic, "Up, down. Up, RobbynSwan.Reprinteduith permission Sounds of further struggle, and a loud of BallantineBooks. E down...Up, down!" shout from a native English speaker, "No!"
THE WEEKSentember 1.6.20-11