| On 11 September 2001, I was in Washington, D.C.; President George W. Bush was not. The Vice President in the White House had gone deep underground. The Capitol building had been emptied of its elected legislators. The streets gradually filled with traffic flowing in an untimely homeward direction as offices closed and their occupants began returning to the suburbs, to retrieve their children prematurely from schools. The capital of the United States was in a state of quiet, orderly panic. People did whatever they had done the day before, only earlier. Until the President returned to the White House in the evening, control of the capital seemed to lie not with the Administration but with the media. In the absence of a visible President, television was king. |
| In one way, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 Sept. were the single most devastating and tragic act of terrorism in modern times. They shook the civilized world out of its complacent reverie. It was at another seismic level a man-made earthquake that aimed at destroying what it regarded as the twin temples of commerce and the pentagonal monument to militarism. This invasion of America’s privacy exposed what many pacifist civilians have long suspected - the inherent vulnerability of the modern military machine. Within living memory, the German pilot Rust did that by landing his light aircraft undetected in Red Square. The Chinese dissenter did it by standing unarmed before an oncoming tank in Tien Amen Square. And the American undergraduate did it by putting a flower stem in the barrel of a university campus during a protest against the Vietnam War. Each had caught a snoring giant off-guard. The difference between them and the holocaust on 11 Sept. lay in the gruesome scale and the lethal significance of this latest act of faceless defiance.[EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 19 October 2001, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006) |
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