Topic: Terrorism

Shameful. Just shameful.

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Topic: Terrorism

Today, bowing to pressure from the victims' families and a lawsuit from the New York Times, New York City released thousands of pages of oral histories from the weeks after September 11, 2001, as well as dispatch tapes and phone logs recorded as the events were unfolding (NY Times article here). The Times put up an interactive feature with excerpts from the dispatch tapes (complete tapes here), which are recordings of calls back and forth between emergency personnel and the Manhattan command center, as well as one harrowing sequence in which a civilian calls in from inside the cab of a fire engine after the second tower has collapsed.

Because of how I found out about the attacks — from a radio report in the snack bar at Glacier Point in Yosemite, after both towers were already down — I have to imagine what it would have been like to experience the events in sequence as they unfolded. These tapes give at least some sense of that, as the situation steadily worsens and the confusion increases, culminating in the nightmare cloud of dust as the second tower collapses.

I don't have much to add. These tapes are painful listening. Thinking about September 11 still makes me tear up, and I wasn't even there. To all who bore the weight of that morning as it unfolded, my deepest sympathies. That's about it.

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Topic: Terrorism

According to a Washington Post article, the United States plans to transfer 70 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the governments of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. As Talking Points Memo points out, there is no way we'd be turning over anyone we were seriously worried about to governments as sketchy as these, particularly the Afghan government, which may not even remain in existence a few years down the road. So again, the US government is admitting without admitting that a key part of its strategy in the Global War on Terror has failed.

This is, of course, welcome news. It comes a few days after the New Yorker commented on the name change from Global War on Terror, or GWOT, to Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, or G-SAVE, reporting that "In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: 'This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines,' he said. 'The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world.'"

This thinking is painfully long overdue, but that doesn't make it less correct. It seems that our government is at last coming to terms with the reality of who and what it is that we should be fighting — of who and what, in other words, is fighting us. At last the US is recognizing that "Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people," as the New Yorker reported General Gregson said.

The most dangerous thing about the first Bush administration, I thought, was its utter inability to admit mistakes. The second time around, though, after blundering badly on domestic issues (Social Security, Terri Schiavo, the filibuster battle, the Karl Rove scandal), the administration has shown itself remarkably lithe, able to shift course without drawing harsh criticism for the failures that required the shifts in the first place. To some extent, this is because those who have opposed this White House are so pleased to see it adopting saner policies and showing some spirit of compromise at last. The nomination of John Roberts is a case in point: the hard right may grumble, but Bush doesn't need them anymore — he's never running for office again — and the left, after revving itself up for a big fight, has been largely deflated.

I'm not sure what's driving all this change. Much of this course correction seems to have been in the works for a while. Rumsfeld's famous memo asking, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" dates from October 2003. Rove's reelection strategy for Bush seems to have been to admit no mistakes at all, but that doesn't mean that everyone in the administration was genuinely convinced that all was well. Perhaps we are seeing a strategic shift to greater compromise and subtlety because those in charge genuinely believe that more compromise and subtlety are needed if we are to keep America safe and strong.

One can only hope.

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Topic: Terrorism

I posted yesterday about my fear that the wrong man would end up "full of bullets on the subway floor." It turns out that it had already happened: the London police killed the wrong man, a Brazilian unconnected to any terrorism at all.

One hopes that the NYPD is taking note. And at least this shooting is big news and an international incident, with the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim, is on his way to London demand an explanation from his counterpart, Jack Straw. Still, how different is this kind of shooting at the wrong man from the overzealous roundups that filled our prisons in Guantanamo, Bagram, Baghdad and elsewhere? The American people have mostly turned a blind eye to these human rights violations abroad, but one wonders whether, by accommodating ourselves to the reality of Guantanamo, we have made it easier to accommodate ourselves to something similar at home. When the first wrong man is cut down in America, will we shrug it off as the price of liberty?

It occurs to me that our response to 9/11 has not been all that different from our response to Pearl Harbor, if you leave out the part where we participated successfully in the major wars that were already underway across Eurasia and North Africa. The glory and cameraderie of that endevor have perhaps helped us to see the internment of the Japanese as a minor incident in a larger drama. And the immediacy of the war delayed the seizure of paranoia that arrived after the victory, when Red purges racked our country and our social politics devolved into a panicked loyalty to a clenched-teeth domesticity.

The analogy is of course limited. You can't just write off World War II and its impact on America that easily. But there is a pattern in American history of shocks followed by hyperreactive violence: Harper's Ferry exploding into the Civil War, the explosion of the Maine leading to the conquest of Cuba and the Philippines, the sinking of the Lusitania throwing us into the bloodiest war in history. And too often, these violent periods have been eras of repression at home.

Although, as a friend pointed out recently, this is an unusual convulsion of militarism, in that the young are not, in fact, joining up.

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Topic: Terrorism

Last night, an London police chased an Asian man (which in the UK usually means South Asian) onto a tube train and shot him dead. They had been following him for some time as a terrorist suspect, and when they confronted him, he ran. The worry, expressed by the British Muslim Council, is that the British police will now shoot to kill whenever an Asian, or an Asian terrorist suspect, refuses to halt for a police search, for whatever reason. One witness did describe the victim as wearing a "bomb belt with wires coming out," and after the second set of blasts in two weeks, the police have very little choice but to react as if they are under attack. But it's still frightening.

Meanwhile, my subway conductor this morning announced that beginning today, bags will be subject to search, and never mind about that pesky Fourth Amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"). I suppose the question is what constitutes "unreasonable." But what I fear is that people carrying things they shouldn't be — a bag of pot or coke, say, or large sums of cash — will panic and run and wind up full of bullets on the subway floor.

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