Monday, September 11, 2006

9/11/2001


I was in Atlanta. Only a few weeks earlier I had made some aquaintances there and had returned for a weekend of fun. I was scheduled to fly home on 9/12. We had been out late the night before 9/11 and so I was asleep when the attacks occurred and did not engage in the news until after both towers had collapsed. My assistant, who thought I was in New York, called relentlessly until she was able to get through. "The United States in under attack!", she kept repeating, wanting to know if I was OK.

It was hard to know what to do next except stay glued to the TV, try to reach friends in New York, wait for another attack of another building. As an emergency medical provider, my natural thought was to figure out if I was needed in any capacity but being so far away from the tragedy and so far from home, all I could feel was helpless. At some point, we decided to head out to get some lunch. Because Atlanta has some potentially important offices like the CDC and because of the bombing at Olympic village, security was extremely tight and many highways were closed to traffic. At lunch, everyone in the diner was silent talking quietly to each other about what just happened, wondering what all of it meant for the future.

Back at my hotel later that evening, I started to make preparations for my own travel home. All flights had been grounded but there was news that air travel was going to resume. How strange would it be to get on a plane after all of this? In communications with my travel agent, I discovered that no flights from Hartsfield airport would be leaving any time soon. My travel agent was able to arrange a rental car for me but when I tried to go to the agency, I was turned away by US marshalls with automatic weapons. At another agency, I waited in line for hours with no guarantee of getting a car. I felt a bit selfish but really I just wanted to get home where things were familiar and presumably safe.

Fortunately, I secured a rental and began my 14 hour trek back to the Midwest, back to home. Maintaining cell phone contact with my friend Jen, she said "just get home, drive safely." From highway to highway through the south, the bluegrass states, and central US, radio stations played patriotic songs. Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American" was in heavy rotation. At each gas station, I talked to people. Everyone had their own theories, their own stories, their own prediction of what the future would hold for our country. Every piece of gas station type Americana like flags, shot glasses, window decals were flying off the shelves. When I reached the tollbooths of Chicago and I realized that I was in the homestretch, my anxiety began to subside. At home, there was nothing to do but watch the news and wait, unable to deny how vulnerable we all felt.

Two months later, I would visit New York for a friend's birthday. I was able to walk down to a position near the cleanup effort at Ground Zero. At some point, no cars were allowed on the streets. Never have I walked down a street in Manhattan during the middle of the day when I wasn't surrounded by the hustle and bustle of traffic and everyday life. But as I approached closer to Ground Zero, the streets still dirty with dust, people just milled around in disbelief, sorrow, complete silence, and quiet respect. Days later, I would be sitting at LaGuardia waiting for my flight home when a jumbo jet would crash in New Jersey. While eventually deemed not to be a terrorist plot, at the time I again felt helpless trapped in the airport unable to leave since all the highways and tunnels and subways back to the city were shut down. Again there were marshalls with automatic weapons. Again everyone looked ahead toward an unknown future.

Five years later, our sense of safety and security is still always tied to that sense of the unknown. We try to forge ahead. But our men and women fight an elusive enemy overseas, buses explode in London, hurricanes ravage entire cities, and the human condition continues to test our own sense of human decency. Just as the New Yorkers still look at a familiar skyline with the knowledge that something is missing, we all look at our lives and our futures differently since 9/11, a day that nobody could forget.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Another Definition of Terrorism

Politics suck! Call me paranoid, call me naive, call me conspiratorial, but it seems like nothing is done or announced or instituted or passed unless it is timed perfectly for an election. Is it any wonder why the people's vote on the marriage amendment in Wisconsin was postponed until this November? Why? To try to get conservative voters to come out to the polls to vote on that issue and meanwhile oust Governor Doyle. They had the opportunity to push it sooner but specifically placed it on the November ballot.

The most recent example in my mind comes just a few days ago as President Bush announced that 14 high ranking terrorist plotters that in some cases have been held for years have divulged their last ounce of intelligence and are ready for trial. And when I say divulged, I mean legally or illegally coerced into divulging. And the administration is going to offer them to the American people on a plate just nine weeks before the mid term elections when maintaining a Republican foothold is essential. Years of interrogation and they fall right before mid term elections. Now that's timing. And to ice the cake, we'll invite family members of those who lost their lives on 9/11 to the East Room of the White House and make the announcement in front of them.

Here's the kicker. It's not enough to ride on a wave of public applause for capturing and bringing terrorists to justice. The administration wants it all. They have outlined for Congress how the terrorists should be tried and outlines how future suspects should be held and interrogated again holding unilateral control in the hands of the executive branch. Of course Congress has the final say but c'mon. Just nine weeks before mid term elections, can any politician be seen as "soft on terrorism"? The New York Times put it best. "In calling for public war-crime trials at Guantánamo Bay, President Bush is calculating that with a critical election just nine weeks away, neither angry Democrats nor nervous Republicans will dare deny him the power to detain, interrogate and try suspects his way."

The administration further pushes buttons by saying that we have the terrorists and the only thing that is holding up their trials is Congress's decision on how they will be tried, proverbially shifting the ball to their court. But they've had them secretly in undisclosed CIA prisons for years. Now, nine weeks before an election, when many members of Congress want to devote time to campaigning, they are pushed to make a decision.

I wonder whether there is a fine line in this case between saavy politicking and a new form of coercion. Is the administration relying on Congress to make the right decision or is the administration just holding them hostage in a disclosed prison called Washington DC. Has the administration made it difficult for Congress to live, breathe, act, think in an American way? Is this just a different kind of terrorism?