Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The September 11 attack
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
“GOD, it has been terrible. The place is in a shambles, people are absolutely shattered.”
This is how Alex Boraine, former co-chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, began a telephone interview from New York, describing the events of 9/11, a calamity he witnessed at extraordinarily close quarters.
Boraine’s office – he was then the head of a new International Centre for Transitional Justice in Manhattan – was on the 33rd-storey of a building which, until the fateful day of September 11, 2001, fell in the shadow of the soaring twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The day had begun unremarkably for Boraine – until, just before 9am. “I happened to look out of the window and could not believe what I saw. It looked like thousands of bits of paper fluttering through the air.”
Hoping to get a better view, he walked over to another window, this one affording a better view. What he saw was staggering… “the first tower blazing away, and what looked like figures leaping out”.
He grabbed the phone to call his wife, Jenny, at their Greenwich Village apartment and tell her to switch on the news “so that we could figure out what was going on”.
He’d no sooner returned to the window than “there was this big airliner tearing in, clearly targeting the building, and smashing into it, with a huge ball of fire and smoke. It was just absolutely unbelievable.” And so it was for the world. The September 11 attack by the al-Qaeda terror group involved four hijacked passenger planes in a co-ordinated operation that cost the lives of 2 997 people and injured 6 000 others.
Two of the planes were flown into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center. Both 110-storey towers soon collapsed. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon, headquarters of the US Department of Defence. The fourth plane was steered towards the capital, Washington DC, but crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after some passengers tried to overcome the hijackers.
Alex Boraine was in the street when the first World Trade Center tower collapsed.
His account of leaving the crisis- stricken precinct was vivid: “There were hundreds of us going up Broadway, on foot. There was no traffic except for ambulances and fire trucks and police vehicles screaming down.
“I must have got about 500m when suddenly there was this frightening noise, like an express train bearing down and I looked over my shoulder and saw the first tower collapsing, with debris and smoke and dust billowing towards us.
“It was terrifying. People started screaming: ‘ We’re going to die, we’re going to die’, and running, we were all running for our lives with this unbelievably huge cloud pouring down between the buildings like lava, black and white smoke, cement dust, smothering everything.
“It was in our noses, our mouths and hair. At least we were running mostly ahead of it, but there were hundreds of others in the thick of it, blinded.
“The impact of this truly huge building collapsing is beyond comprehension.
“The noise, the force of it. It was an absolute tragedy. And when I finally reached our apartment, I walked in just in time to see the second tower coming down.”
Boraine, a former MP and, after leaving Parliament in despair in the 1980s, a key figure in the preludial talks with the exiled ANC that eased the way to negotiations, was, by 2001, steeped in thinking through the implications of strife.
And at the calamitous moment of 9/11 – as the terror attacks came to be called – his observations were acute.
In their “stunned bewilderment”, he said, “few Americans are able to recognise that American values are not as widely shared as they would like to believe” and that “some US actions in the Middle East and elsewhere have produced a deep hatred and a deep loathing of the American system and way of life”.
Boraine added: “This is an assault on freedom, but it’s a specific brand of freedom.
“There’s a general abhorrence among some world communities for Western freedoms and ideas, which go hand in hand with the economic system; with its haves and have nots.
“But the US has been aggressive in pursuing its own freedom at all costs.
“So while I think in a sense it’s accurate to say this is an attack on freedom and democracy, and the attackers must not be allowed to succeed in that, I think that America finds it hard to accept it is being singled out by a large part of the world.”
This was reflected in the report a day after the attacks – “Some rejoiced, some cried, but most Palestinians fear repercussions” – in which readers learnt of rejoicing in West Bank streets.
Even among those who did not revel in the calamity, the report said, were some who felt that “this horrendous slaughter had somehow proved a point”.
One was Mahmoud Abdullah, “who was at home in Bethlehem watching television when news of the terror assault on the US broke.
“I told myself that this is a strike from God, and it showed that there are some forces stronger than the Americans in this world,” he said yesterday.”
Boraine’s was not the only South African connection in the 9/11 attacks.
South African immigrant to the US, leading businessman Edmund Glazer, 41, was killed in one of the aircraft that smashed into the World Trade Center.
Glazer, the chief financial officer and vice-president for finance and administration at MRV Communications, was one of 92 people on board. He had opened the Nasdaq Stock Market only two months earlier, when he was described in an LA Times report as “the immigrant who had followed his dream”.
Glazer boarded the American Airlines No 11 plane bound for Los Angeles from Boston for a routine trip to his company’s home office in Chatsworth, California.
Another South African victim was computer programmer Nicholas Rowe, 29, who worked on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. His American girlfriend, Michelle Baker, said Rowe had been at a conference at the centre that morning.
“After the plane hit, he phoned a friend to ask him to search online to find out what had happened to the building. We never heard anything after that,” Baker said.
One of the most uncanny connections was contained in a book, published a month earlier, by South African scenario expert Clem Sunter and co-author Chantell Ilbury, called
The . Mind of a Fox
It contained a putative letter to the US president, dealing with risks and opportunities of various sorts, but including some thoughts on “surprises beyond your control”. The authors specifically highlighted the real risk of an attack on US cities. In such an event, Sunter and Ilbury conjectured, the US would be faced with a choice between two scenarios.
One was the “gilded cage” scenario in which Bush “shuts down America, turns inward, tries to keep the world out and attempts to maintain tight security within an impenetrable cage, ignoring mounting anger outside, and mounting poverty among those who feel the negative impacts of globalisation”.
The other was the “friendly planet” scenario, “an attempt to find common ground with the poor, to tackle environmental problems, put a friendly face on globalisation, and work co-operatively for global security and well-being… and, thus, enlightened self-interest.”
And Sunter’s estimation in an interview a day or two after the attacks was: “Security being the most basic of human needs, the ‘gilded cage’ option is the most likely scenario.
“I think that in the short term, we will see some pretty counter-productive responses in the sense that you will not be establishing the right network to create genuine world security.”
This would be a pity, he suggested at the time.
“Our scenarios clearly show… that you cannot be a winner if you’re surrounded by losers. The world is interdependent, and if you want to be successful, you have to try to make sure that people around you are, too.”
Nobody doubted 9/11 would have a long- lasting impact. Many would argue that the “gilded cage” scenario has reached its acme, these 16 years later, in the presidency of Donald Trump.