The Unanswered Question of 9/11

The Unanswered Question of 9/11

By Avraham Azrieli*

On the evening of Friday, February 28, 1993, I walked from Wall Street to my apartment in Battery Park, near the World Trade Center.  Smoke still petered out from broken windows in the lower floors of the North Tower, and a cluster of ambulances awaited hundreds of evacuees as they were being carried out, overcome by asphyxiation and anxiety.

Having grown up in Israel, the experience of passing by the site of a terror attack wasn’t new to me. But over there, the misguided messengers of Allah were more modest, attacking buses and nightclubs and pizzerias, aiming their explosives in direct intimacy to softer targets such as flesh and bones and hearts. In comparison, attempting to bring down the largest pair of buildings in the world with a rental Ryder van seems like a grandiose yet futile exercise in poor math.

Across the street from the tower, standing amidst the crowd on the sidewalk, I looked up, all the way to where the flat expanse of steel beams and thick glass reached the clouds.  How could anyone expect a pile of homemade explosives to topple this global symbol of human ingenuity, this massive structure that was as wide and long as a whole city block? Had they not realized that the foundations under our feet reached so deep into the island rock that Manhattan would have to crack open and break in half before the towers fell over?

A few nights later I glanced out of my living room window, and the lights were back on, burning brightly in the Twin Towers’ windows, illuminating all those thousands of offices. The lights broadcasted a concrete and reassuring message of continuity that was visible not only from my window in the dwarfish twenty-story building next door, but from the windows of hundreds of thousands of apartments all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, from the windows of countless homes up and down the west bank of the Hudson River in New Jersey, and from rows of tiny windows in jetliners flying into Newark, JFK and La Guardia from every state, country and kingdom in the world—including the distant lands from which came the plotters, financers and executors of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

Within a week, as I walked by the towers on my way to work, there was no smoke coming out of broken windows, no glass shards on the sidewalk, no ambulances or spectators. The World Trade Center, lightly scarred, was back in business. And for me, as for many other Americans, this was a bright show of New York City’s resilience and an unshakable demonstration of American invincibility – we had been prickled by a nuisance enemy who was primitive and crude, an enemy who miscalculated, underestimated, and was ill-prepared to confront the mighty United States of America.

Alas, eight years later, the events of 9/11 proved that it wasn’t our enemy who miscalculated, underestimated, or was ill-prepared. Rather, it was us—the American people and the government agencies entrusted with the duty to protect this country. We had miscalculated, underestimated and were ill-prepared.

During the months leading to 9/11, our enormous defense forces and myriad spy agencies had failed at every opportunity—and there had been many opportunities—to expose and stop a group of known terrorists who, with painful ease, entered the United States, studied how to fly (but not how to land) airplanes, and used store-bought box cutters to launch the worst attack perpetrated on mainland American soil since the Spanish war, which happened so long ago that its traces are considered archeological sites.

And the Twin Towers, which stood high above my apartment building, are no longer there, no longer sending a nightly message of light to millions of windows in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as well as to throngs of airline passengers peering down from their tiny windows at the island of Manhattan.

A lot has happened in the decade since the 9/11 attacks, much of it in retaliation for, or as a consequence of, that terrorist attack on the United States.  Ten years later, we’re still fighting wars in faraway deserts, our soldiers still come home on stretchers or in coffins, and our out-of-office politicians still get paid the big bucks to write thick autobiographies to justify what they did in response to 9/11 and the damage their actions have caused to American moral, military and financial strengths. Ten years later, we’re still spending our tax dollars (and foreign debt) to feed the very homeland security apparatus that had failed us on 9/11. Ten years later, we’re still exhausting much of our social discourse on unconstitutional anti-immigrant laws, unpopular overseas military expeditions and inconsistent foreign diplomacy conundrums, all born of little more than veiled xenophobia. Ten years later, we’re still championing innovative new forms of airport security as if every little old lady from Kansas is a clandestine martyr in the service of the late Osama Bin Laden.

But despite the trillions of dollars spent on destroying our real and imagined enemies, the Twin Towers have not been rebuilt. In fact, it is now clear that the Twin Towers will never be rebuilt. And so, the question I am asking now, ten years later, might be criticized as purely philosophical, but is rather practical: When a message of light is turned off permanently, does its absence constitute a new message—a message of darkness?

* Avraham Azrieli’s latest novel is The Jerusalem Inception. www.AzrieliBooks.com

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