The scars of Sept. 11 run deep
On the streets of New York after 9/11, I saw the start of two decades of pain, death and brutally misguided responses
New York’s Times Square was calm, and the silence was unsettling. Broadway was dark. There were no tourists. There were no Disney characters lurking optimistically and you couldn’t find a taxi or a knockoff handbag. It was nearing midnight on Sept. 14, 2001.
When I had arrived in the city three days earlier, the remains of the World Trade Center were still floating in the air, and the search for survivors was frantic. The snowdrifts of paper — swirling about the city and coating the gravestones at St. Paul’s Chapel — were chilling. Thousands of charred reports, financial statements and contracts, now just the insignificant diaries of the dead.
Unable to sleep, I’d wandered to Times Square near midnight where, staring down at me, was Arnold Schwarzenegger. His upcoming film was about a vigilante firefighter who sought revenge after terrorists killed his family. In my notepad, I wrote the title: “Collateral Damage.”
Hijackers on three planes had struck the two towers and the Pentagon, as well as crashing a fourth plane in a field in Pennsylvania, killing a total of 2,977 people.
On Sept. 14, president George W. Bush stood on the remains of the WTC, bullhorn in hand as weary first responders shouted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” The swaggering Texan told the crowd that the world was listening. “And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
My story that day wasn’t about Bush, though. “Mayor Rudy Giuliani was at the base of the World Trade Center, the area now called ‘Ground Zero,’ just 10 minutes before it collapsed,” I wrote. “He is the city’s grief counsellor, the disseminator of information, and a tireless cheerleader. Once contentious as a politician, he is emerging as the city’s symbol of hope.” I wasn’t the only one enamoured of Giuliani’s leadership. He would later become Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and was knighted by the Queen. Oh, how times have changed. For nearly 20 years after the devastating attacks, I was the Star’s national security reporter. It afforded a unique journalistic perspective covering the politics, the bureaucracy and the power of the West where policies were made, but also travelling to far-flung locales where the impact of those policies was felt. I wrote stories on drone strikes that sometimes hit their targets and sometimes did not, killing civilians and creating a new generation of fighters. I watched the formation of al-Shabab in Somalia, al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula in Yemen, and the rise and fall of ISIS, noting how the latter dressed their hostages in the orange prison suits of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Slowly, our society became more militarized and surveilled.
Perhaps the most prescient moment I covered two decades ago, in the chaotic weeks following the 9/11 attacks, was when I wandered into an empty restaurant at Ninth Avenue and 51st Street — the Afghan Kebab House. The restaurant chain had been started by Shafi Rouzy, who had come to the United States after fleeing his home in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, during the 1979 Soviet invasion. Taped to the window outside the restaurant were yellow ribbons and an American flag, just like those that hung at almost every other Manhattan restaurant. But there was also a handwritten note on yellow lined paper: “To our neighbors, fellow New Yorkers and everyone affected by the terrible tragedy at the World Trade Center. Please accept our sincere and heartfelt condolences. We also feel such shock and horror.” The “also” wasn’t underlined, but it’s what struck me most.
The Sept. 11 attacks were not the first time in history that an event ushered in a fear of the “other” — and it won’t be the last. But of all that has changed, of all that went wrong in its aftermath, this effect was the most corrosive. And it helped lay the groundwork for what has followed. On Oct. 7, 2001, the first bombs fell in Afghanistan. Two months after that, on Dec. 7, the Taliban offered to lay down their weapons.
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan at the time, said “tomorrow the Taliban will start surrendering … I think we should go home.” If the Americans would stop bombing, and the Taliban’s leader Mullah Omar could live “in dignity,” as opposed to custody, the Taliban would hand over al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The offer was flatly denied.
Zaeef would later be captured and sent to Guantanamo Bay for four years. It would take another decade, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost until bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, was captured and killed in Pakistan.
Another decade after that, the U.S. did negotiate with the Taliban, under the auspices of an American president who prided himself as a dealmaker, Donald Trump. But it was the Taliban now who had the upper hand. Zaeef was in Doha, Qatar, when the deal was signed, and was a key player in the behindthe-scenes negotiations.
On Feb. 20, 2020, Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo signed a deal to withdraw U.S. troops, telling reporters, “We are seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.” The so-called war on terror has always been a partisan issue, but all sides of the political divide have contributed to a litany of disastrous foreign policies, either through actions or acquiescing. The Bush administration may have created the legal quagmire that is Guantanamo, but Barack Obama failed to shut it down. I reported from the U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay during Obama’s inauguration. His first act in office was to suspend the Gitmo warcrime trials. A day later, he ordered Guantanamo closed, shuttering the place that had become a powerful symbol of U.S. hypocrisy and arrogance. He said the U.S. would regain the “moral high ground.”
But Obama lost control of the issue and fear-mongering took over. The base remains operational, and the Guantanamo trial for five men accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks isn’t close to starting.
Throughout, when it comes to justice post-9/11, we Canadians have often donned a cloak of superiority. Aside from our refusal to join the Iraq War, there have been few principled stances, however. In recent years, Canada has approved more than $284 million in exports of Canadian weapons and military goods to countries bombing Yemen. That was not noted when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a $65-million aid package to the country suffering what the United Nations called “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time.”
“It’s a bit like helping pay for somebody’s crutches after you’ve helped break their legs,” Cesar Jaramillo, executive director of Project Ploughshares, a research and advocacy organization that studies Canada’s arms trade, told me at the time.
But no post-9/11 Canadian story has been more contentious, or emblematic of our country’s stance in the last 20 years, than that of Omar Khadr. Anytime I wrote on the former Guantanamo detainee’s case the reaction was swift, emotional and often threatening. One of my articles — a rather dry report on the latest legal turn — was mailed to me smeared with feces.
Lost in the anger, which mainly sprung from public comments made by his mother and sister, was perspective: Khadr was 15 when he was captured, tortured and tried in a system that history has repeatedly shown does not stand up to legal scrutiny. Moreover, after thousands of American, Canadian and coalition forces were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, Khadr has the distinction as the only captive ever prosecuted for murder. Before 9/11, however tragic, the death of a soldier in combat was not a war crime. Canada was eventually forced to dole out $10.5 million in taxpayer money after our Supreme Court found that Khadr’s rights had been abused.
Then there was Maher Arar, tortured in Syria. Another $10 million for Canada’s role. And $31 million in compensation for the torture of Canadians Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin. There’s a chance in another 10 years there will be lawsuits stemming from the Canadians now being held as suspected ISIS members in a Kurdish-run camp in Syria.
Don’t expect this issue to figure prominently during the election. No one wants to talk about bringing home Canadians who left willingly to join a terrorist group. But how can we shirk our responsibility? The Kurdish forces that are left holding these defecting or captured ISIS members are begging countries to take their own citizens. Some countries have, but not Canada. On the 20th anniversary, the names of the 9/11 victims will be read out in a ceremony where the World Trade Center once stood.
One of the names is David Barkway, a Canadian. His pregnant wife Cindy had tagged along on his work trip to Manhattan for a mini-vacation when the planes struck. The next morning, when David didn’t show up at the hotel room, Cindy went to the missing persons bureau. She was given number 180. Later, she took her husband’s toothbrush to the centre for DNA testing. When I interviewed her just as she was leaving New York to get home to their two-year-old son, she said it was hard to go. It felt like an admission that he would never be found. Her strength was humbling. Four months later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She named him after his dad.
The names of the 15 firefighters from “The Pride of Midtown” fire hall will also be read out. Five of the hall’s trucks responded to the attacks on Sept. 11 and only one made it back. The station later became a shrine, adorned with flowers and posters and flags.
“All gave some, some gave all,” screamed a sign read by the survivors.
“It’s really the toughest place in the city to work. No one wants to say that because we’re just so grateful for the public support we’ve received but it has to end soon,” firefighter Richard Kane told me in 2002.
None of the firefighters wanted to talk about luck as the reason they survived. On the morning of 9/11, heading for the WTC, Kane’s lieutenant realized he had left his helmet behind. “Leave it, we’ve got to go, leave it,” Kane remembered yelling. But they quickly turned their truck back, so he could get it at the fire hall. They were two blocks away when the second tower fell.
Twenty years later, and so much anguish. The 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will be a day to remember all those lost that horrible morning.
But the pain ripples forth. For the troops sent to fight neverending wars. And for the hundreds of thousands who died around the world, in the name of conquering an amorphous enemy called “terror.”
Collateral damage: Defined as the “injury inflicted on something other than an intended target.”