War on Terror Revisited

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, September 10, 2004

Imagine it was today, September 10, but three years ago. Do you remember that day? Or the week before it, when you were preparing your kids for the first day of school or planning out your Rosh Hashana recipes? Probably not.

But I'll bet you remember what you were doing late in the afternoon the next day, when the news of the terrorist strike against New York and Washington began to spread. Maybe you were listening to local radio when the news broke, first in trickles, then in a firestorm of horror. Then you moved to the TV to watch the news, and witnessed an event that has shaped so much of life since it occurred.

Some calamities are long and extended, while others are over in an instant. 9/11 was both; New York's Twin Towers toppled soon after two commercial planes rammed into them, and nearly 3,000 people were later found dead or went missing (initial estimates, logically, said that tens of thousands had died). But the new reality, an ongoing effect of the attacks – in which terrorism showed itself able to strike at the heart of the West – brought home the lesson that life would never be the same again.

I'm sure most of us, if asked, could come up with a candidate for a world event that provoked significant changes prior to 9/11, but the likely candidates almost certainly all took place before the Internet era. If nothing else, more information and analysis is available about 9/11 than perhaps any other major event in human history, because it occurred before the eyes of millions in a country – and a city – where electronic communication was so advanced. There are lots of on-line records of the event itself, and the days and weeks that followed.

Everyone remembers watching the footage of the planes crashing into the buildings; we've likely seen it on TV dozens of times. But somehow watching it on your PC is far more intimate, and I found the scenes even more dramatic and shocking than I remembered. The first film of the event – the famous tourist video that recorded the first plane crash – can be seen online at http://www.twin-towers.net/tt_video.htm, along with the CNN video of the second plane crash and the towers' collapse. Interviews, first person accounts, and local and international broadcasts of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, and the days that followed, are all available at the site as well.

9/11 was followed as closely on the Web as it was on TV, and of course there are still tens of thousands of sites analyzing the events from all angles. Web sites are always getting updated, making it difficult to preserve a moment in time in cyberspace. Fortunately, the Library of Congress, in association with a number of on-line groups, has managed to collect and archive mirrors of the first reports and reaction reflecting various aspects of 9/11 on thousands of Web pages, and the fruit of its efforts can be seen at http://september11.archive.org. The site includes archived copies of government sites, such as FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that was in charge of coordinating rescue efforts, and non-profit and private organizations, all portraying information and opinions on the tragedy.

President Bush declared war immediately. "This enemy hides in shadows and has no regard for human life," he said in a speech that night. "This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover, but it won't be able to run for cover forever. This is an enemy that tries to hide, but it won't be able to hide forever." This speech, along with others by government officials in the days and weeks that followed, can be heard and read at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricofterrorism.htm. Among other speeches is a statement by Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a congressional committee, and a message Osama Bib-Laden sent to the terrorists on Sept. 10.

And then there were the victims, the ones who arrived at work that day but didn’t get to leave. The 9/11 Memorial site http://www.september11victims.com) has the names of all 2,996 dead and missing victims (as of August 26, 2004), as well as profiles and tributes. Victims are also listed by country of citizenship, residence, profession, and company. You can see a montage of the victims and photos of the WTC at http://attacked911.tripod.com, and more information about the victims can be seen at http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/images.

And after the attack came the war on terrorism, with its two major battles so far in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Taliban were historic supporters of radical Islamic terrorism, and Osama Bin-Laden was said to have been hiding there, and Saddam was said to have weapons of mass destruction that could be put to the service of arch-terrorists. Whether the American people agree with President Bush's declaration of war will probably be definitively known only after this November's election, but if Bush has been accused of "going too far" in Iraq, one of his motivations is likely trying to make up for the United States' not doing enough in the pre-9/11 era to prevent terrorism. The 9/11 Congressional commission concluded that, overall, few in government or out of it were taking the possibility of a serious terrorist attack in the U.S. seriously. The commission recently released its official report on how the terrorists were able to pull off 9/11 and how to prevent it from reoccurring, and you can read the report in full at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5488276.

Americans may have not been too security conscious before 9/11, but they sure are now, and today there are many sites supplying news and analysis on terrorist activities around the world. One of the most interesting sites is the Northeast Intelligence Network (http://www.homelandsecurityus.com), which researches terrorism related information and links to and incidents on terrorism. The site provides a link to an even more interesting Web page, http://www.stevequayle.com/index1.html, which provides more information about terrorist threats and events, as well as links to yet other sites, such as this scary looking one, http://standeyo.com/News_Files/NBC/Terrorist_cells.html.

Events of great magnitude generate a buzz of opinions and ideas as to how and why the event occurred (http://www.freemasonrywatch.org/lincoln.html), and 9/11 is no different. Unfortunately, much of the theorizing is a propaganda attempt on the part of anti-Israel and/or anti-Bush groups to prove or otherwise implicate Israel as pushing the U.S. to war against Iraq and Muslim terrorists who really have no beef with America, and President Bush as the Zionists' willing lackey who had his own reasons for fighting the war on terror, including expanding his family's chokehold on the One World Government which he is in charge of, and increasing his control of the world's oil supply. To that end, goes the dogma, Bush knew all about the attack in advance. Advanced forms of this conspiracy theory even hold that the WTC was destroyed not by the impact of the planes hitting them, but by missiles or explosives. http://www.propagandamatrix.com/archiveprior_knowledge.html is a typical collection of paranoid musings, and http://www.serendipity.li/wtc.htm says that the whole thing was a real estate ploy to collect insurance money and sell the empty real estate to the highest bidder.

One of the stories surrounding 9/11 responsibility has to do with the "4,000 Jews who didn’t show up to work on 9/11 because they knew in advance," a story that has been shown to be an urban legend (http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blxterror.htm). We, of course, know that there were hundreds of Jewish victims – perhaps over 400 Jewish dead (http://www.thejewishweek.com/bottom/specialcontent.php3?artid=365), nearly a fifth of the confirmed victims, in line with what would one would expect in a big building in New York. No Jews were warned to stay way, but another, far more chilling rumor has been confirmed, that is that Pakistani high school students in Brooklyn apparently knew all about the attack in advance at least according to this article (http://billstclair.com/911timeline/2001/msnbc101201.html) archived from MSNBC.

But how did the story of Jews getting advanced warning gain so much credibility? This interesting article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20379-2004Aug20.html) in the Washington Post says that Bin-Laden had prepared this story in advance of the attacks in order to blame the Jews – and expected it to be believed because the attack was supposed to take place not on 9/11, but on 9/18 – the first day of Rosh Hashana in 2001, when there really would be few, in any, Jews in the WTC! According to the article, the terrorists moved their schedule forward because of fear that one of their number would reveal something about the plot while under interrogation. But the story about the Jews missing work was planted in the Arab press anyway, right on schedule. This is a example of the "Big Lie" technique at work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie), and the fact that this story, despite the facts, is considered the gospel truth by many people all over the world should have us all really worried.

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