Sept. 11, 2001: The Prequel

“Everything has changed. Nothing will be the same,” or some version of that sentiment was repeated over and over in the days after the airliners were used as guided missiles.

I didn’t feel that way then, and I don’t now.

The world – as beautiful and full of light as it is – is a fundamentally dangerous place. No one is guaranteed the next second.

Fundamentally, the only thing that had changed was that a terrorist attack against the United States shattered all previous records of success (from the terrorist point of view).

There was a magazine called Scanlan’s, published in 1970 and 1971, that survived at least eight issues doing controversial journalism. What I believe was their final issue had to be printed in Canada because it exposed how much guerrilla warfare (call it terrorism depending on your point of view) was going on in the United States. Assembling reports from across country spanning Feb. 12, 1965 to Sept. 7, 1970, the editors compiled 23 pages of about 56 instances per page (some pages had fewer some had more) of sabotage and terrorism in the United States. That’s just about 1,300 incidents, and while some seem to be more readily validated as terror and some seem like they might just be “regular” crime, the last two pages alone contained reports of 39 bombings across the United States from June 12 to Sept. 7, 1970.

You may never have heard about it. According to the editors of the magazine, they had to print that issue in Canada because unionized lithographers threatened the printing companies where they worked with sabotage if they went ahead with printing the magazine. Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one, but only if that person doesn’t piss off a group of employees it would appear.

OK. So that was a long time ago in a time that was crazier perhaps than even today. So let’s skip ahead to the 1990s.

•      Feb. 26, 1993. The World Trade Center was attacked. A van rented by Mohammad Salameh exploded in the center’s underground garage, blasting out a 100-foot crater in the structure, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand others with everything from minor wounds to crushed limbs. The FBI says a SWAT team captured Salameh on March 4, 1993 “as he tried in vain to get his $400 deposit back.” An Islamic fundamentalist, he had worked with others ­ among them, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Ahmed Ajaj – according to the FBI. All four were tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. There is more to this story because the mastermind of the plot was on the run. “We’d learned his name—Ramzi Yousef—within weeks after the attack and discovered he was planning more attacks, including the simultaneous bombing of a dozen U.S. international flights. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in February 1995, returned to America, and convicted along with the van driver, Eyad Ismoil. A seventh plotter, Abdul Yasin, remains at large.” You read that right. He’s still on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrrorists list. They had wanted to topple one tower into the other, causing both to fall.
•      April 19, 1995. The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City. A rental van blew up in front of the building and the destruction was awful, with 168 people killed – including 19 children – and about a third of the building destroyed, forcing its demolition months after the recovery effort ended. What you may not know is that the Murrah building, like the World Trade Center, was also a target twice. In October 1993, a Christian militia group (which should be an oxymoron) planned to fire rockets at the building from a vehicle parked in front of it. They called off the action when in the process of building the rocket launcher the ordnance blew up in a member’s hands. According to the reports, the group took this as a divine intervention and called off their plan to attack the building. However, Richard Snell, one of the leaders of that group, was executed on April 19, 1995, after being convicted of an unrelated murder. Was it a coincidence? Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for the 1995 attack, and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols, who was also convicted and is serving multiple life sentences in federal prison, claimed that the date was chosen because it marked the second anniversary of the end of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. They also wanted to attack the feds because of the federally led Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho, which took place about six months before the Waco standoff.

I visited the Oklahoma City site in July 1995 and wrote this about the visit in The Arizona Republic edition of Aug. 13, 1995:

“There’s a part of the imagination that demands that the site of a terrorist bombing ought to exotic or impressive – a war-torn capital like Beirut or a landmark like the Eiffel Tower.

“After all, what could a bomber gain by intruding on the workaday world?

“Yet the corner of Fifth and Harvey in downtown Oklahoma City, where the nine stories of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building once sat, is as average as most corners in downtown Phoenix.

“There’s a post office on one corner, an apartment house on another, and just a half-block away there’s a church.

“All of them are boarded up because the blast that bit like a giant’s maw through the federal building on April 19, blew out their windows and rocked their foundations.

“Some trees along Harvey have had their bark scraped by the blast.

“The streets are cordoned off for several blocks around. Hard-hatted workers are busy refurbishing the buildings that can be saved and tearing down those that can’t.

“A high-rise building about a block away down Fifth seems nearly ready for reoccupation. It looks like an average construction site. No coverings or furnishings visible through the windows, but newly painted walls wait for inhabitants to return.

“I was in Oklahoma City because it was a convenient stopping place on the way home from vacation several weeks ago.

“My children, remembering the televised devastation, asked if we could visit the site. It seemed right to pay our respects to the 168 dead and the more than 300 wounded.

“In hushed tones, almost embarrassed to be intruding upon the grief and shock of the local people, I asked the desk person at the motel if she could direct me to the bombing site.

“She responded in a normal voice, as though it was not a strange question. Her only caution to us was that she didn’t know what streets downtown were still closed.

“We found metered parking on a side street and walked over.

“I thought we would be the only people there, but found instead that there was a constant trickle of visitors walking down Harvey to take a look at the site.

“An off-duty fireman discussed the rescue operation with a pair of men.

“Other visitors were accompanied by average local folks, who described matter-of-factly where they were when the blast happened.

“Some inevitably take pictures. People speak in hushed tones.

“The lot where the Murrah building stood is surrounded by a chain-link fence that guards nothing but some mounds of dirt since wrecking crews completed the demolition that the bomber began.

“The visitors have turned the fence to another purpose.

“They’ve hung yellow ribbons, roses, black ribbons, crosses made of sticks, pieces of notebook paper with hastily scribbled prayers on them, even maps and invoices from the links of the fence. The impromptu expression of grief has created a shrine to the dead and injured.

“One note reads, ‘To all the victims and families. We’ve come all the way from New York. God give you strength.’

“Walking toward the site, it takes a moment to figure out where the Murrah building stood.

“An emotional wave surged through me when I realized, ‘This is the place.’ I wasn’t prepared for tears, but I never visited a site where so many died at once so senselessly.

“It had seemed vague and unreal on TV. Not so in the brutal sun of a Midwestern heat wave.

“The ordinariness of the place made the impact all the more staggering.”

These are just some of the reasons that I didn’t see the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as a moment that changed everything. It seemed a natural evolution of all this violence, just as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were further steps in this evolution.

Now we have drones that we can pilot from afar without suicidal pilots within. It’s the evolution of violence.

Remember that the hijacking of the planes to be used as guided missiles was itself an evolution.

There were many plane hijackings before those. The previous hijackers had demands in return for the safe return of the planes and the passengers. These terrorists had no goal but destruction, and gave up their own bodies and those of all those passengers and those of the people in the buildings and the first responders who raced into the breach.

They believed they had been wronged and wanted to inflict harm on those who wronged them. What, then, did their actions change?