BO: 9/11 enemies are still hiding in plain sight

9/11 enemies are still hiding in plain sight
September 10, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I suppose my I'll-never-forget-where-I-was recollections are pretty
typical: a half-curious pricking up of the ears when they cut into the
morning show on the radio with breaking news about a plane hitting the
World Trade Center -- it sounded like a twin-prop or Lear jet -- and
then the slow realization when the second plane hit that something
bigger was going on. My editor called from London a few seconds later,
and I switched on the TV. But, even in the midst of unprecedented forms
of mass slaughter, humdrum routine goes on for the rest of us: I was
having some furniture delivered that morning, and the guy interrupted
me to ask where I wanted one of the pieces to go, and when I turned
back to the screen only one of the smoking towers was still there.
"What happened?" I said. "It fell down," the delivery guy shrugged, and
ambled back to his work.
He was sort of right. It fell down, but it burned for another 100 days,
as America's rage did -- for some. For others, it was already fading,
the "day that everything changed" already lapsing back into the feeble
passivity of one of those weird one-time-only "tragedies," after which
everything goes back to the way it was.
What was taking place that Tuesday morning was, as a lot of people
said, "unimaginable." But once it happened, once we no longer had to
imagine it, my main memory of that day is of how quickly the mind leapt
forward to encompass the new reality. When the second plane hit, it was
obvious not just that this was no accident but also that it would be
impossible to find two commercial airline pilots willing to fly, even
at the point of a gun, their jets into skyscrapers. Which meant that,
at the moment of impact, these flights must have been in the hands of
terrorists who'd trained as pilots presumably for the purpose of this
mission: They had acquired at least basic skills in a profession that
would guarantee a good life anywhere on the planet; they could be
pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers. But
instead they went to pilot school to make one flight one time one-way,
into a tall building.
And halfway across the world, on the streets of Ramallah, people filled
the streets and cheered and passed out candy. They celebrated at
Concordia University in Montreal, and in northern England and in
Scandinavia, too, but I didn't find that out until e-mail from readers
began coming through later in the day. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden
and his colleagues followed events on the Arabic Service of the BBC.
(Not all the BBC's output is in Arabic; it just sounds like it is.)
As the years go by, it's these curious examples of cultural
interconnectedness that stay with me. "Interconnectedness" is the word
used by the late Edward Said, the New York-based Palestinian
grievance-monger and eminent America-disparager: A couple of weeks
after 9/11, the professor deplored the tendency of commentators to
separate cultures into what he called "sealed-off entities," when in
reality Western civilization and the Muslim world are so "intertwined"
that it was impossible to "draw the line" between them. National
Review's Rich Lowry was unimpressed. "The line seems pretty clear," he
said. "Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was
the West's idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the
planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam's idea."
Very true. But that may be the only "interconnectedness" a large part
of the world is interested in: state-of-the-art technology in the
service of ancient hatreds. Edward Said was right: There are no more
"sealed-off entities." The "modern world" and the "primitive world" are
more like those overlaid area codes the phone company's so partial to.
So a man can roar "Allahu Akhbar!" as he plows his jet into an office
building. Even the most primitive parts of the map aren't that "sealed
off" these days. After all, why were they listening to the BBC's Arabic
Service in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't an Arabic-speaking country.
They parly-voo the old Pushtun and Dari and Turkmen and whatnot. But on
Sept. 11, 2001, the nation was, in effect, under colonial occupation by
thousands of Arab and other foreign jihadists. We think of the badlands
of the Afghan-Pakistani border as a remote region of isolated peoples
whose rituals have been unchanged for centuries. Yet the truth is that
these village tribal cultures have been wholly subverted by Saudi money
and ideology. The House of Saud's toxic kingdom, a land where the
beheading schedule is computerized, may be a more apt emblem of the way
an "interconnected" world is heading than we like to think.
One man in the Twin Towers that Tuesday morning must have understood.
John O'Neill, a dogged counter-terrorism guy with a whiff of the
old-school G-man about him, had just quit the FBI and started work as
head of security at the World Trade Center. He made it downstairs where
the confabs with rescue workers were punctuated by the thud of bodies
from the first jumpers landing on the lobby roof. In the plaza outside,
body pieces fell randomly over chairs set up for a lunchtime concert.
In the final moments of his life, O'Neill must have felt his world come
full circle. Six years earlier (as vividly recounted in Lawrence
Wright's The Looming Tower) he'd organized the capture in Pakistan of
Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a
terrorist who'd planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.
In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: "The failure to prevent
Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a
failure of imagination." That's not really true. Islamist terrorists
had indicated their interest in U.S. landmarks, and were known to have
plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O'Neill
could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal
bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: After all, they
took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident
that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at U.S.
flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would
ensure nothing was done about it.
Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes,
filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms:
All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are
Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef's successors make their
ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology
in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend
naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens,
one morning we will wake up to another day like the "day that changed
everything." Sept. 11 was less "a failure of imagination" than an
ability to see that America's enemies were hiding in plain sight.
They still are.

.

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