From a cloudless sky: remembering 9/11
I was prompted to consider my recollections of that fateful day, and to try to recreate how I and others felt in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks
I wanted to write about 9/11 for three reasons. The first and most immediate is that last night I watched Paul Greengrass’s outstanding docudrama United 93, which I had somehow (not by volition) avoided since its release in 2006. It essentially tells the story of one of the hijacked passenger aircraft that day, the United Airlines Boeing 757-222 which was designated Flight 93, taking off from Newark International Airport and bound in theory for San Francisco. As we know, it was one of the flights hijacked by terrorists from al-Qa’eda and diverted, their intention being to crash it into a federal building in Washington, DC, likely the US Capitol building. But a group of passengers, with extraordinary bravery and determination, overpowered the hijackers, and the aircraft crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington. There were no survivors. When the vice-president, Dick Cheney, was informed of the crash, he is reported to have said “I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane”.
Another reason was that we have just passed the 20th anniversary of the beginning of military operations against in Iraq, the campaign which owed some of its inspiration to the events of 9/11 (although there were no links between al-Qa’eda and the brutal régime of Saddam Hussein, whose roots were in Ba’athist ideology and therefore secular, socialist and pan-Arab). I feel slightly conflicted about hitting the 20-year mark: in some ways, it doesn’t seem that long ago, and other things which happened around that time are extremely vivid in my recollection. Yet the world in which we live, especially in terms of our strategic relationship with the Middle East but more generally too, is so different as to be nearly unrecognisable; so in that sense 20 years seems a modest amount of time to have passed.
The factor which prompted this whole exercise, however, was my trip a couple of weeks ago to St Andrews, my alma mater, where I gave a talk to the undergraduates of the History Society. I talked mainly, as requested, about my time in Parliament, what the job was like, how I got there, what assessment I made of the place and the people in it and so on, but my hosts had also asked me to say a few words about my time as a student at St Andrews. That was a long time ago and a goodly stint: I matriculated in 1996 and was a student until 2005, living in town for all but the last year (when I lived in Edinburgh and went up once a week to teach). It occurred to me—and I confirmed this with the audience—that, as current undergraduates, none of them had even been alive when I arrived in St Andrews 27 years ago, and that prompted me to think about how different life had been. One of the biggest differences, it then struck me, was that they had all been born and grown up after 9/11, with that terrible day and its enormous implications simply an accepted part of their lives.
My memory is good, but it is not linear. I think many people have this experience, but there are pinpoints or episodes or just vague impressions or atmospheres I can recall from really quite a young age, then nothing for some time. It doesn’t become a more or less continuous narrative until, I suppose, well into double figures in terms of age. For example, I can remember some flashes of my third birthday in 1980, a few fragments of our moving into the house I would grow up in, in Sunderland, at the beginning of 1981, and I had an awareness of things happening beyond my immediate world during the Falklands War in the first half of 1982. My late mother used to tell me that, sitting in my high chair, I was transfixed by television coverage of the two papal deaths, elections and coronations of 1978, when I was still only a few months old. I don’t have any memory of that, although, I must confess, it does sound like me.
As it happens, though, I remember the day of 11 September 2001 very well indeed. I had been for a haircut in the morning (an inconsequential detail but there for added colour, if you like) and I was in the bathroom at the top of the house. I had switched the radio on out of habit, and it will either have been Radio 2 or Radio 4. The east coast of America was on Eastern Time, five hours behind British Summer Time (which I will henceforth use), so the first aircraft must have hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 1.46 pm. That makes sense to me: when I switched on the radio, I unexpectedly found the news, and they must have stayed with their news teams after picking up what was happening. I came in at a point after the first strike but before the second, so, I would guess, some time between 1.50 pm and 2.00 pm.
The news was shocking. Like most other people, I assumed initially that it must have been a small aircraft which had somehow deviated from its route and ended up hopelessly—and fatally—confused; my first thought was of the incident some years before when a German teenager, Mathias Rust, had somehow landed his Cessna light aircraft in Moscow, not far from Red Square and the Kremlin. That had been May 1987. Rust, although reckless, had been a peace activist, and he had later described his flight as an attempt to create an “imaginary bridge” from West to East and thereby defuse tensions between the two opposing power blocs of the Cold War. What had happened in New York had not been so peaceful, clearly, whatever the story behind it.
Everything changed at 2.03 pm, when the second aircraft hit the South Tower. That clarified the situation in an instant, and I remember saying out loud to myself “Oh God, it’s deliberate”. I don’t claim to have had any special insights: it was pretty clear that, even lacking any other information or context, two aircraft crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center within a little over 15 minutes was not a coincidence. Some facts therefore became obvious. The United States were under attack by a bold and ambitious enemy which had thought big in planning its strike (and that was before we knew about the other two aircraft, Flight 93 and the American Airlines Boeing 757 which would crash into the Pentagon, the home of the US Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia, at 2.37 pm.)
(I might as well say here that I have very little time for the conspiracy theory that the Pentagon was hit, not by a passenger aircraft at all, but by a missile. The main foundation of this theory is that the hole in the building is not big enough nor was there enough debris. You can browse the internet yourself for any number of ways to debunk this bizarre notion, but I will point to the facts that the hole in the outer E-Ring of the building is substantially wider than conspiracy theorists allow, that the aircraft lost its wings before it finally hit the building, and that most of the “missing” debris was inside the building, not outside.)
One of my first impressions was the scale of what was obviously a coordinated attack. I can’t now recall if the public mind automatically went to Islamic terrorism, though al-Qa’eda had carried out bomb attacks on the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998 and a suicide attack on the destroyed USS Cole when it was at dock in Aden in 2000, so they were already identified as a major threat. (For a great miniseries which also tells the story of inter-agency scrapping to hunt down Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11, I highly recommend the Hulu-commissioned The Looming Tower, based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.) That said, the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil until that date had been only six years before, when two anti-government white supremacists, Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, had left a rental truck containing nearly 5,000 lbs of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture parked underneath the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion had killed 168 and injured nearly 700 more, damaging the building badly enough that it subsequently had to be demolished.
McVeigh and Nichols were a world away from bin Laden and his fellow jihadists. Although coldly homicidal, they had been radicalised by the bloody siege and seizure by federal forces of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, in 1993. Although the deaths they caused were just as final, their motivation drew on almost-quaint roots: the bombing took place on the second anniversary of the last day of the Waco siege but also the anniversaries of the Revolutionary battles of Lexington and Concord; McVeigh wore a T-shirt bearing the words “Sic semper tyrannis”, supposedly shouted by John Wilkes Booth shortly after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson’s epistolary remark “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”; and he carried an envelope full of revolutionary material including a quotation from John Locke which states that it is lawful to kill someone who would take away your liberty.
The scale combined with a sense of shock. I think shock struck people in different forms: some Americans I have subsequently spoken to were taken aback, McVeigh and Nichols notwithstanding, by the very fact of a terrorist attack within the United States. The embassy bombings, after all, and the attack on the USS Cole, while wounding affronts, had taken place overseas. The events of 9/11 happened in Lower Manhattan and Virginia. The fact of the attacks was perhaps less shocking to a British audience, certainly those of my age and older, raised on a grim diet of IRA outrages. September 2001, remember, was only five years since the bombings in Docklands and Manchester, and eight years after the bombings in Warrington and Bishopsgate. That same year, 2001, the Real IRA splinter group had detonated car bombs at BBC Television Centre and in Ealing, though neither had caused any fatalities.
But 9/11 had a scale and a sense of drama that was almost operatic. It seems implausible that the plotters had not considered the symbolism and the visual impact of their plans: they struck at the Twin Towers, icons of the New York skyline and representative of the US’s global economic reach, the unmistakable shape of the Pentagon, the military heart of American imperialism, and probably also intended to obliterate the seat of its democratic legislature. These were all the things which fundmentalist Islam hated, and hates. Dr Tim Wilson, director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, has written powerfully and persuasively of this iconography. He describes the targets as the “signature structures” of US political strength, and notes that, had not the passengers brought down United Airlines Flight 93 short of its target, “the defining image of 9/11 might well have been the US Capitol dome cracked open as casually as an egg”.
Wilson also pinpoints an idea which did not occur to me at the time but which has crawled into my subconscious in the years since. While the scale of destruction matters in terrorist attacks, he demonstrates that 9/11 had a quality which almost no other previous event had had: it was a movie, not a still. As Wilson explains it:
Both of the aeroplanes that struck New York had taken off from Boston: but they had been scheduled 15 minutes apart. That small gap made all the difference. At 8.46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. At 9.03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 went into the South Tower. Even though mass camera phone ownership still lay in the future, 17 minutes was ample time in the New York of 2001 to train hundreds of tourist video recorders and TV cameras upon the Twin Towers: and thus to capture their final minutes of existence. Unlike the other attacks that day, there is absolutely no shortage of visual footage of the death throes of the Twin Towers. Here was a drawn-out visual spectacle of such grandeur that it satisfied even the megalomaniac Osama Bin Laden.
Other attacks could be shown as still images, but only 9/11 unfolded live in front of the world. That gave it a media punch that was unparalleled (and remains so, in many ways). There was one more factor: the skies over New York on 11 September 2001 were a stunning, clear, pale blue. There was neither cloud nor haze to obscure the view as the hijacked aircraft approached and then tipped, almost lazily, towards their targets. By chance, the Weather Channel was monitoring a storm, Hurricane Erin, off the US north-east coat, and, for a while, the satellite imaging which they were using to track the weather event also showed the plumes of dark smoke coming from the stricken World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
It was as perfect a metaphor as the plotters could have designed. For many, the attacks came out of a clear sky both figuratively as well as literally. The intelligence community was not quite as astonished, though subsequent analysis has demonstrated that more could have been done to anticipate and perhaps mitigate the attacks, but it was understandable that the ordinary viewer did not automatically connect the unfolding nightmare with a growing geopolitical threat from the Middle East. I said recently to my friend Mark Heywood, an experienced screenwriter and cinematic guru, that it really had been a perfect visual scenario. “Don’t think they didn’t think about that,” he replied.
The last thing which struck me with particular force on that day was the size and decisiveness of the US response, at least from the outside. the last aircraft to find its target had struck the Pentagon at 2.37 pm. Only eight minutes later, at 2.45 pm, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) closed down US airspace. All aircraft still in the air were instructed to land at the nearest airport, no more aircraft were to take off, while no more international flights were allowed in. The skies above the US were suddenly a huge no-go area. Civilian flights were suspended until at least 12 noon ET the following day. Almost immediately, Transport Canada closed Canadian airspace. It was the first time that US airspace had been closed without advance planning.
It was a massive undertaking. Anyone who remembers the chaos of April 2010, when the eruption of volcano at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland forced most of Europe’s airspace to be closed, will recall how long the tail of disruption proved to be, with planes and passengers finding themselves stranded in the wrong countries and travel operators struggling to piece together new logistical plans. The same followed in the wake of the FAA’s decision on 9/11: I remember that my stepmother was at a conference in County Cork and faced enormous difficulties in making even the short return journey to Britain. Nevertheless, the US authorities responded quickly and effectively to thwart the threat of any further hijackings.
Looking back on 11 September 2001 after more than two decades, the overwhelming impression is one of shock, of a sense that everything had changed. We were, after all, beginning to adjust to the post-Cold War world, even if Fukuyama’s prediction of the “end of history” had not quite proved accurate. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, as its successor states reordered themselves and Russia began to assess its place in the new political circumstances, the United States emerged very quickly as the only superpower in a unipolar world. The focus of foreign policy—in which President Clinton initially lacked experience and had limited interest—during the 1990s was of humanitarian intervention, in Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Kosovo, as well as contributing to the nascent peace process in Northern Ireland. That world, to some extent build on an underestimation of the threat of fundamentalist Islam, came to an end on 9/11.
The young people in St Andrews to whom I spoke a fortnight ago have grown up in the post-9/11 world. I happen to have been on the precise age for the attacks that day to mark a watershed in geopolitics which has shaped my approach to global affairs. I remember what the Before Times were like, but I have lived in the new world for long enough now to be completely immersed in it. As the recent 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq reminds us, we are still seeing the aftermath of 9/11 unfold and develop. In assessing 11 September 2001, therefore, one is tempted to reach for Zhou Enlai’s supposedly apocryphal remark about the French Revolution: it is too early to tell.