September 11 2001: The Personal and the Political
In 2002 I edited a book entitled Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent. The book challenged the legitimacy of the bombing of Afghanistan and the eventual military invasion of Iraq. Eventually I wrote about the occupation of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and so on. But my personal story starts in Venice, the day before Manhattan’s twin towers were brought down.
It was a beautiful late summer’s day as we struggled with heavy bags across the crowded Ponte degli Scalzi. Still more stone steps took us inside Santa Lucia’s booking hall and a one-way ticket to Verona. Our time on San Giorgio had been memorable. Discussion, comradeship and striking views across the busy Canale della Giudecca to San Marco. The sunsets were stunning.
Venice is a remarkable city: the Jewish ghetto, the historic working class Giudecca, Castello’s back streets and bars, the islands and the rock and roll of the vaporetti – the water buses. As we relaxed into the brief train journey to Verona we had no notion that within 24 hours our lives – personal and political – would be turned upside down.
We arrived on a warm, sun-lit evening. It was September 10 2001.
We ate in the Piazza dei Signori, wandering back to the hotel through the narrow, marble-paved streets. The next morning, we awoke to a hot day and decided to walk the city, from the castle walls along the river to Juliet’s balcony. Hot and needing a rest we set off for the hotel.
Visiting the Roman Arena was an afterthought. As we approached an ambulance was leaving. A woman had fallen inside the arena; hardly surprising, given its high, smooth steps. We climbed to the top. A magnificent view. Down safely we wandered through high-walled passages, their worn, stone floor a legacy of two thousand years and millions of feet.
A fraction of a second – that’s all it took. Laughing and messing about – then I was down, my left leg trapped under my body. The deep, sickly pain of serious damage. Lying there motionless, people stepped over me. It seemed like an age. Mountaineer, hill-walker, rock-climber … brought to earth by a makeshift disability ramp.
Hours later and a trolley ride through Verona Hospital’s labyrinthine underground corridors; coming up for air in an orthopaedic department. The consultant examined my useless leg. Indifferent, aloof he was distracted.
‘You have no ligament trouble. But the plane it crashes into two towers at the World Trade Centre. And at the Pentagon.’ I thought, ‘This guy’s nuts. Both towers and a building in a different city’.
‘Possibly 10,000 dead. The towers, they collapse. The Pentagon is on fire’. Then, matter-of-fact, he told me to rest my leg. Most probably it was a ruptured muscle.
That was me. A return trip through the bowels of the hospital and released into the warm night. I know exactly what I was doing when the second plane hit the World Trade Centre. I was flat on my back in Verona’s ancient arena.
Trying to make sense – emotional, physical, political – of September 11, I return to that painful night in a Verona hotel room. Aghast, we watched CNN’s transmission from downtown Manhattan. Fire-fighters and rescuers racing into the disaster zone passing dust-covered, ghost-like workers coming from the opposite direction – running or staggering for their lives.
Cameras focused on workers trapped in offices high above the flames, some throwing themselves from windows to avoid choking or burning to death. Later they came to be known as the jumpers. Even then, in the immediate aftermath, it felt like irresistible voyeurism.
As the towers collapsed, clouds of grey, toxic dust engulfed all and everything in their path. Then came the first reports of agonised telephone calls: final goodbyes to loved ones. Reminding us of rescue workers recounting disaster scenes where all they could hear from the debris was the persistent ringing of mobile phones.
The total destruction of one of the world’s largest building complexes and the deaths of over three thousand civilian workers. It raised a terrifying question: where next?
Through those early moments I was shocked. Shocked by the callous ferocity of the attacks, the randomness of death and suffering, the capacity and ability of the hijackers to puncture the US security network at so many levels, the casual ease with which they had lived in the US, preparing their complex, devastating project.
Individually, collectively, they made mockery of the world’s most advanced and expensive intelligence services. Their crimes against humanity were derived in a reasoned hatred, a distorted fundamentalism transforming belief, intellect and compassion into a mutant, predatory, ‘final solution’ politics.
Yet to portray these men as psychopathic killers, whose blood-lust emanated from individual or cultural pathology, diminishes the historical, political and economic contexts which feed and nurture uncompromising moral certainty.
Terrifying acts are not conceived in a political vacuum. They are derived and develop within the manipulation of personal and cultural identity. They are reinforced through words that slip easily from the tongue, make headlines and capture – then imprison – the imagination.
Words that demonise, vilify and condemn: deliver us from evil; the massacre of the innocents; wicked beyond humanity; savages not humans; barbarism versus civilisation.
In such accounts, tabloid journalism’s stock-in-trade, so depraved are the perpetrators, so far are they outside ‘our’ world, they are beyond redemption. They are the ‘other’, not only outsiders and outlaws, but a sub-species.
It is a dangerous construction that leads directly to abandoning the rule of law, rewriting the rules of engagement and the introduction of special powers. For, if the ‘enemy’ is beneath contempt, the war against it can be unconditional.
In demonising perpetrators, in portraying humans as monsters, a climate is created and sustained in which history, politics and culture are wilfully ignored. Understanding and knowledge are sacrificed to an all-consuming desire to take revenge.
As relatives went to Manhattan in search of the missing, the scenes were like those faded, grainy photographs of women and children, wrapped in shawls at pitheads quietly awaiting news of their menfolk trapped underground. Near to ‘Ground Zero’, they held treasured photographs, pasted descriptions on walls, on hoardings and make-shift notice boards; dignified shrines to lost lives.
How easy it is to appropriate the spirit of grief, the heartfelt expressions of sympathy and public displays of empathy. When George W Bush finally made his overdue appearance in New York, he promoted a mood of vengeance masquerading as the pursuit of justice.
Behind closed doors Bush, and the hawks he inherited from his father, were already planning their war. They were US insularity personified; a simplistic mind-set that reduced complex political-economic and socio-cultural dynamics to the ranch barbeque conversation of ‘good folks’ and ‘bad folks’.
And so, a US President elected in controversial circumstances who, when asked, could not name the President of Pakistan, was catapulted feet first into a world political crisis.
Shocked but not surprised. That was my initial reaction. Shocked by the outcome of those terrible and terrifying missions, by the repeated failures of international surveillance and security systems and by the warping of deeply held religious convictions to represent suicide and murder as holy war.
Shocked but not surprised. For the US secures its military-industrial power, its command of resources, its Coca Cola - McNasty's culture, with an unqualified certainty that its white, anglo-saxon, Protestant ideologies and lifestyles are right and righteous.
Through this combination of moral and cultural certainty all states who give freely of their resources, open their borders, welcome exploitative terms of investment and buy into the American Dream are friends. The rest are foes. Neo-conservatism and neo-colonialism hand in hand.
On September 12 the taxi collected us from our Verona hotel en route to our cheap, ‘no frills’ flight home. Little did I know that I had severed my quadriceps tendon, the blood from the ruptured muscles swelling my thigh.
In the weeks after surgery I suffered blood clots to both lungs. Rushed into Intensive Care, I faced my own mortality. Bush and Blair, meanwhile, faced the mortality of others as they prepared to bomb Afghanistan.
That moment, so close to death, dramatically contrasted with the sure death, mutilation and displacement inflicted on a country already in ruins. Blood clots, no more than a simple twist of fate, set against the purposeful, planned and ruthless execution of death and destruction, reported by allied spin-masters as ‘collateral damage’ or ‘casualties of war’.
Some irony that the very state providing the means to save my life, simultaneously provided the means to destroy others. And it did so in our names.
