I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.
II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.
III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.
IV. The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes. [Continue reading…]
From a speech delivered by Chas Freeman in Moscow yesterday: The objective of the 9/11 attacks was to provoke the United States into military overreactions that would enrage and arouse the world’s Muslims, estrange Americans from Arabs, stimulate a war of religion between Islam and the West, undermine the close ties between Washington and Riyadh, curtail the commanding influence of the United States in the Middle East, and overthrow the Saudi monarchy. The aftershocks of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 kamikaze operation against the United States have so far failed to shake the Saudi monarchy but — to one degree or another — the operation has achieved its other goals.
Among other things, the violent interaction between America and the Muslim world since 9/11 has burdened future generations of Americans with over $5 trillion in war debt, with more debt yet to come. This has thrust the United States into fiscal crisis. The 9/11 attacks evoked reactions that have eroded the rule of law at home and abroad, tarnished the global appeal of Western democracy, and militarized American foreign policy. They precipitated military interventions in the Middle East that have energized reactionary religious dogmatism among Muslims. In other words, the continuing struggle is reshaping the ideologies and political economies of non-Muslim and Muslim societies alike. And most of the changes are not for the better.
As Islamist terrorism has gained global reach, it has provided political justification for a general retreat from civil liberties and ethical standards of governance in secular societies everywhere, not just in the United States. Russia is not an exception to this trend. Ironically, the Middle East was where the moral values upon which modern societies are founded had their origin. The European Enlightenment transformed these norms into secular ideals of reason, tolerance, and human and civil rights that spread widely throughout the world. Trends and events in the Middle East are now setting back prospects for the advance of tolerance in that region even as they drive a widening deviation from the values of the Enlightenment elsewhere.
Although there is a long tradition of heroic sacrifice in Islam, the use of self-immolation as a weapon by Muslims began only in the early 1980s, when Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to the widening and ultimately successful Shiite use of suicide bombings against Israeli, American, and French forces. By the early 1990s, Sunni Palestinians had embraced the suicide belt as a means of resistance and reprisal to the Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. As this century began, various forms of explosive self-destruction began to be widely employed in acts of terrorism against non-Muslims outside the Middle East, including with tragic regularity here in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, in the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and subsequently in the capitals of Western Europe.
When the U.S. invasion of Iraq catalyzed bitterly lethal strife between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, suicide bombing quickly became the weapon of choice for Sunni extremists there. By the middle of the last decade, this technique had begun to be widely used in Afghanistan. What began as a means of last-ditch resistance to invasion and occupation is now a preferred means of retaliation against foreigners seen to have offended the peace of the Muslim umma. Although it is completely contrary to Islamic scripture, suicide bombing has become a predictable aspect of civil strife everywhere in the Islamic world and beyond it. And civil strife is widespread. Much-resented foreign intrusions into Muslim lands have exacerbated intra-Muslim sectarian differences.
Al Qaeda’s kamikaze attack on the United States drew America into a punitive raid in Afghanistan. This soon became a campaign of pacification there. It eventually grew into a widening circle of armed interventions in other Muslim societies. These include the now-ended, tragically counterproductive American attempt to transform the political culture of Iraq and the frustrating, continuing effort by the United States and NATO to do the same in Afghanistan.
It has long been said that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Many would argue that the Soviet Union’s experience in Afghanistan was what finally broke both its spirit and its treasury. Most Muslims believe this. They also believe that America’s misadventures in the Middle East are having a similar, if so far less decisive effect on the United States. As they see it, a great deal of the melancholy among Americans today derives from mounting recognition that U.S. military campaigns in Muslim countries are failing to accomplish their objectives, even as they become both apparently endless and ever more unaffordable.
Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, writes: September 11, 2001 is a milestone date in history that nearly everyone living at the time will recall in detail for the rest of their lives. I will always remember sitting at my desk in my office at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, eyes fixed on the television in the credenza sitting on the other side of the room. I recall watching the towers fall and wondering how it would change America.
Like this 10 September, 10 September 2001 was a Monday. The only reason I know that is because it was the day before an enormous tragedy that is permanently etched into my mind, and that happened on a Tuesday. I went to the same office and sat at the same desk on Monday as I did on Tuesday, but I have no recollection of one day and a vivid recollection of the other. Even though I do not recall any of the details of Monday 10 September, sometimes I think about how America might be different if we could turn back the clock.
On 10 September, the US economy was strong, although it had begun to slow down after a sustained period of growth. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. We were paying down the national debt and there was a $127bn surplus for the fiscal year ending on 30 September. For some, concern about the nation’s debt focused on what might happen in a few years when the debt was completely eliminated and there was no longer a need for US treasuries, a key component in the world’s economy.
Worries about the consequences of a debt-free America evaporated soon thereafter. After tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a near-collapse of the economy, US treasury department figures show the nation’s debt grew from less than $6tn in 2001 to nearly $16tn today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate has remained over 8% throughout 2012 after peaking at 10% in October 2009.
Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski write: A growing number of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.
These doubts about the CIA first emerged among a group of 9/11 victims’ families whose struggle to force the government to investigate the causes of the attacks, we chronicled in our 2006 documentary film “Press for Truth.” At that time, we thought we were done with the subject. But tantalizing information unearthed by the 9/11 Commission’s final report and spotted by the families (Chapter 6, footnote 44) raised a question too important to be put aside:
Did Tenet fail to share intelligence with the White House and the FBI in 2000 and 2001 that could have prevented the attacks? Specifically, did a group in the CIA’s al-Qaida office engage in a domestic covert action operation involving two of the 9/11 hijackers, that — however legitimate the agency’s goals may have been — hindered the type of intelligence-sharing that could have prevented the attacks? And if not, then what would explain seemingly inexplicable actions by CIA employees?
As we sought to clarify how the CIA had handled information about the hijackers before 9/11, we found a half dozen former government insiders who came away from the Sept. 11 tragedy feeling burned by the CIA, particularly by a small group of employees within the agency’s bin Laden unit in 2000 and 2001, then known as Alec Station.
Among them was Gov. Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was responsible for investigating 9/11. He agreed to an on-camera interview for our documentary in 2008. He surprised us by voicing many doubts and questions about the CIA’s actions preceding Sept. 11 — and especially about former CIA director George Tenet.
Four years after Tenet testified to the commission, Kean said the CIA director had been “obviously not forthcoming” in some of his testimony. Tenet said under oath that he had not met with President Bush in the month of August 2001, Kean recalled. It was later learned he had done so twice.
Did Tenet misspeak? we asked the New Jersey Republican.
“No, I don’t think he misspoke,” Kean responded. “I think he misled.”
David Rose writes: One morning in June 2001, three months before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, I happened to be interviewing a senior official from the British Secret Intelligence Service, M.I.6. His current focus was the war on drugs, not international terrorism, but he shared a piece of information that united the two subjects.
A short time earlier, the official told me, the U.S. National Security Agency had intercepted a call between two satellite-telephone users in Afghanistan—the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They had been discussing the Taliban’s ban on growing opium poppies, imposed the previous summer—a remarkably effective edict that had shrunk production in areas they controlled almost to zero.
According to the M.I.6 official, bin Laden sounded unhappy. “Why stop growing opium?” he asked. “Heroin only weakens our enemies.” There was no need to worry, Mullah Omar replied. The ban was merely a tactic. “There has been a glut, and the price is too low. Once the world price has risen, the farmers can start growing it again.”
The real lesson of this overheard conversation was not its specific content but the fact that it could be heard at all. Electronic eavesdropping clearly had potential in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But in the years before 9/11, when bin Laden’s terror plot was first being discussed, that potential remained limited. The reason was simple: Afghanistan had no cell phones, no Internet, and only a rudimentary landline network, which did not work at all outside the country’s largest cities. This could be remedied, however. Indeed, by the end of 1999, the Taliban government had embraced a full-fledged American scheme to install a modern cell-phone-and-Internet system in Afghanistan. It could have been up and running within months. The Taliban had already granted an exclusive license to a U.S.-owned firm, the Afghan Wireless Communications Company.
More to the point, electronic modifications concealed within the circuitry would have allowed every call and every e-mail emanating from Afghanistan to be relayed without interference to N.S.A. headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. “This project was a dream,” says one former senior F.B.I. counterterrorism specialist who knew about the scheme at the time. “To be able to wire up a country from ground level up—you don’t get too many opportunities like that.” No, you don’t. But at the critical moment, the Clinton administration put the project on hold, while rival U.S. agencies—the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the C.I.A.—bickered over who should control it.
In the decade since 9/11, investigations by journalists and government commissions have explored the many missed opportunities to prevent bin Laden’s attacks. Overall, it is the story of a catastrophic failure to connect the dots. One can argue—and many have—that the connections emerge more visibly in retrospect than they ever did as events themselves unfolded. But the affair of the Afghan cell-phone network—put on hold until time ran out—falls into a category by itself. It was a course of action whose value and urgency were acknowledged by everyone, but it was impeded nonetheless. The cell-phone plan “was one tool we could have put in Afghanistan that could have made a difference,” a former C.I.A. official says. “Why didn’t we put it in? Because we couldn’t fucking agree.”
We are living in the State of Exception. We don’t know when it will end, as we don’t know when the War on Terror will end. But we all know when it began. We can no longer quite “remember” that moment, for the images have long since been refitted into a present-day fable of innocence and apocalypse: the perfect blue of that late summer sky stained by acrid black smoke. The jetliner appearing, tilting, then disappearing into the skin of the second tower, to emerge on the other side as a great eruption of red and yellow flame. The showers of debris, the falling bodies, and then that great blossoming flower of white dust, roiling and churning upward, enveloping and consuming the mighty skyscraper as it collapses into the whirlwind.
To Americans, those terrible moments stand as a brightly lit portal through which we were all compelled to step, together, into a different world. Since that day ten years ago we have lived in a subtly different country, and though we have grown accustomed to these changes and think little of them now, certain words still appear often enough in the news—Guantánamo, indefinite detention, torture—to remind us that ours remains a strange America. The contours of this strangeness are not unknown in our history—the country has lived through broadly similar periods, at least half a dozen or so, depending on how you count; but we have no proper name for them. State of siege? Martial law? State of emergency? None of these expressions, familiar as they may be to other peoples, falls naturally from American lips.
What are we to call this subtly altered America? Clinton Rossiter, the great American scholar of “crisis government,” writing in the shadow of World War II, called such times “constitutional dictatorship.” Others, more recently, have spoken of a “9/11 Constitution” or an “Emergency Constitution.” Vivid terms all; and yet perhaps too narrowly drawn, placing as they do the definitional weight entirely on law when this state of ours seems to have as much, or more, to do with politics—with how we live now and who we are as a polity. This is in part why I prefer “the state of exception,” an umbrella term that gathers beneath it those emergency categories while emphasizing that this state has as its defining characteristic that it transcends the borders of the strictly legal—that it occupies, in the words of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “a position at the limit between politics and law…an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political.”
Call it, then, the state of exception: these years during which, in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside, the years during which we live in a different time. This different time of ours has now extended ten years—the longest by far in American history—with little sense of an ending. Indeed, the very endlessness of this state of exception—a quality emphasized even as it was imposed—and the broad acceptance of that endlessness, the state of exception’s increasing normalization, are among its distinguishing marks.
Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we’d all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago.
But then armed officers stormed my plane, threw me in handcuffs and locked me up.
My flight from Denver landed in Detroit on time. I sent a text message to my husband to let him know we had landed and I would be home by dinner. The plane stopped on the tarmac, seemingly waiting to have the gate cleared. We waited. I played on my phone, checking Facebook, scrolling through my Twitter feed. After a while of sitting there, I decided to call my husband to tell him the plane was being delayed and I would call him when I got off the plane.
Just as I hung up the phone, the captain came over the loudspeaker and announced that the airport authorities wanted to move the airplane to a different part of the airport. Must be a blocked gate or something, I thought. But then he said: Everyone remain in your seats or there will be consequences. Sounded serious. I looked out the window and saw a squadron of police cars following the plane, lights flashing. I turned to my neighbor, who happened to be an Indian man, in wonderment. What is going on? Others on the plane were remarking at the police as well. Getting a little uneasy, I decided the best thing for me to do was to tweet about the experience. If the plane was going to blow up, at least there’d be some record on my part.
Stuck on a plane at Detroit airport…cops everywhere
Soon the plane was stopping in some remote part of the airport, far from any buildings, and out the window I see more police cars coming to surround the plane. Maybe there’s a fugitive on the plane, I say to my neighbor, who is also texting and now shooting some photos of the scene outside. He asks me to take a few, as I have a better angle from my window seat. A few dozen uniformed and plainclothes officers are huddled off the side of the plane. I don’t see any guns, and it isn’t clear what’s going on.
So I continued to tweet:
A little concerned about this situation. Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can’t get up.
Then what looked like the bomb squad pulled up. Two police vans and a police communication center bus parked off the road. I started to get nervous and rethink my decision to fly on 9/11.
Cops in uniform and plainclothes in a huddle in rear of plane.
We had been waiting on the plane for a half hour. I had to pee. I wanted to get home and see my family. And I wanted someone to tell us what was going on. In the distance, a van with stairs came closer. I sighed with relief, thinking we were going to get off the plane and get shuttled back to the terminal. I would still be able to make it home for dinner. Others on the plane also seemed happy to see those stairs coming our way.
I see stairs coming our way…yay!
Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen–bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.
My last tweet:
Majorly armed cops coming aboard
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained. [Continue reading…]
There is unacknowledged freedom associated with whatever becomes inscribed in our individual and collective experience of transformative events. For many older Americans the events most vividly remembered are likely to be Pearl Harbour, the assassination of JFK, and the 9/11 attacks, each coming as a shock to societal expectations.
I doubt that other societies would have a comparable hierarchy of recollections about these three days that are so significant for an understanding of American political identity over the course of the last seventy years.
To make my point clearer, most Japanese would almost certainly single out Hiroshima, and possibly the more recent disaster that followed the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima meltdown. Germans, and many Europeans, are likely to be inclined to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, while most citizens of former colonies are undoubtedly moved by the day on which their national independence was finally achieved.
Because American responses to such transformative events are likely to be global in their effect, there is a greater tendency to share American preoccupations, but this is misleading because interpretations diverge depending on place and time. This diversity amid universality is probably truer for 9/11 than any other recent transformative event, not because of the drama of the attacks, but as a result of the connections with surges of violence unleashed both prior to the attacks and in their aftermath, what I would identify as the perspectives of 9/10 and 9/12.
Shifting ever so slightly the perspective of the observer radically alters our sense of the event’s significance. Just as 9/12 places emphasis on the American response – the launching of “the global war on terror”, 9/10 calls our attention to the mood of imperial complacency that preceded the attacks.
This national mood was (and remains) completely oblivious to the legitimate grievances that pervaded the Arab world.
These grievances were associated with Western appropriations of the region’s resources, Western support lent to cruel and oppressive tyrants throughout the Middle East, lethal and indiscriminate sanctions imposed for an entire decade on the people of Iraq after the first Gulf War, deployment of massive numbers of American troops close to Muslim sacred sites in Saudi Arabia, and America’s role in Israel’s oppressive dispossession of Palestinians and subsequent occupation.
From these perspectives, the crimes of 9/11 were an outgrowth of the wrongs of 9/10 and unreflectively led to the crimes and strategic mistakes made since 9/12.
In recent years, the Department of Homeland Security has provided grants for hundreds of police departments across America to buy $300,000 Lenco BearCats in the name of counter-terrorism.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, a strange consensus quickly emerged in Washington: this was just al Qaeda’s first homeland assault. There would be further attacks and most likely what was to come would be even worse — far worse.
With a sense of foreboding and determination we ventured into the third great era for America as world leader — what was briefly dubbed a New American Century.
First came the fight against global fascism which resulted in unqualified victory at the end of World War Two.
Then came the American-led Western alliance to halt the advance of communism.
Even if the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t bring communism to an end, the end of the Cold War supposedly marked the dawn of a New Global Order in which America reigned supreme as the sole Super Power.
And if after the Cold War, a decade of globalization lacked the ideological clarity needed to satisfy conservative America’s sense of righteousness and moral purpose, or the military focus that would satisfy the Pentagon, all of that was to end with 9/11 as once again the United States assumed its role as world savior.
A president whose own sense of purpose had until then extended no further than his desire to continue a family tradition, was now fired up with a mission as he led the world in a struggle between good and evil.
Yet behind Bush’s apparent boldness was the confidence of a man making a very safe bet.
In response to the attacks the president and the political class across America made a simple calculation: if they were to overstate the threat posed by terrorism they could do so with virtually no political risk and potentially great political rewards. Indeed, the greater the exaggeration the less the risk.
At the same time an honest assessment of the threat posed by al Qaeda would be freighted with enormous risk.
That meant that a dishonest assessment of the threat posed by terrorism would also be a safe assessment.
If there were no further major attacks then this would be taken as the measure of a successful counter-terrorism policy; not a reflection of al Qaeda’s inherent weakness.
Bush immediately understood this and quickly declared war. This, the neocons rapturously declared, was Bush’s great “insight”: we’re at war.
Since we couldn’t be sure exactly where the enemy was located, then just to be safe, we assumed he was everywhere. So this wasn’t going to be just another war — it would be a global war.
America had defeated fascism and then communism and now it was going to take on a battle soon predicted to last for the rest of our lives: a long war against global terrorism.
With the smoke still rising from the ruins of the Twin Towers, no one had the guts to state the obvious: whatever threat al Qaeda might pose, it was surely minute compared to the Soviet nuclear arsenal during the Cold War or the nation-crushing military forces of Japan and Germany during World War Two.
If 9/11 had really been another Pearl Harbor, where was the amassed power that made it clear: this is just the beginning, there is much worse to come?
Asymmetric threats notwithstanding, could a few terrorist camps in eastern Afghanistan really constitute a credible threat to the preeminent military and economic power in the world?
Even if there was evidence that al Qaeda had diabolical ambitions, the evidence of its capabilities was much less impressive. When the long-predicted follow-up attacks emerged, they weren’t exactly attacks on America. Shoe bombers and underpants bombers could put hundreds of lives at risk but they didn’t really threaten a whole nation.
The cowards’ logic dictates, however, that no risk is too small and no security strategy too expensive. America could never become too safe.
The application of this logic not only opened the door to the creation of a massive new government bureaucracy, Homeland Security — along with its attendant terrorism industry — but it also made a war against Iraq look unavoidable.
An operational link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda did not need to be conclusively proved; it would be sufficient to merely generate fear about such a possibility. We didn’t need to know that he had weapons of mass destruction; we merely needed to fear that he might soon possess them.
Again and again we were impressed to believe that possible threats were more important than imminent danger. Fear became the signpost to necessity.
And the political class, whether inside or outside government, bought into this idea with virtually no dissent.
By the time this strategic outlook could be seen to have bankrupted this country, everyone who had been promoting it would have already reaped their own political and material rewards.
If challenged — don’t you think you’ve spent too much? — the glib answer was bound to come back: who can set a price on the value of American life?
Well, tell that to the unemployed. Tell that to Americans who have vastly less reason to worry about al Qaeda than they do about paying their mortgage.
A decade after 9/11 how many Americans should be in any doubt that $6 trillion is too much?
“There’s going to be a terrorist strike some day,” warns former Bush administration official Richard Clarke. “And when there is, if you’ve reduced the terrorism budget, the other party — whoever the other party is at the time — is going to say that you were responsible for the terrorist strike because you cut back the budget. And so it’s a very, very risky thing to do.”
But note, very clearly: that is a political risk — much less a security risk. It endangers politicians much more than the people they represent.
“You can look, if you’re objective,” acknowledges Clarke, “at all of this money and all of this effort and say: What would have happened if we hadn’t done that? And in almost every case, nothing would have happened.
“It’s true that there hasn’t been another attack. It’s not true that all of this expenditure and all of these people have stopped it.”
Immediately after 9/11 the most frequently cited threat to America supposedly came from al Qaeda sleeper cells — an invisible enemy within, poised to strike again. Such sleeper cells either never woke up, or more likely never existed.
Instead, a different threat emerged — not one made up of a few fanatical Muslims, but instead filled with thousands of seemingly loyal Americans. Men and women who thought that they could help protect this country and get rich in the process. Like traders in a stock market for emotions, they realized that fear would never get over-priced.
As this country faces a much graver economic threat than any threat from terrorism, political boldness and courage are called for, yet none can be found. America’s political, military and commercial elites have spent the last decade betting on fear, investing in fear and consumed by fear.
In a culture of unchallenged fear, we find thus ourselves ruled by cowards.
Nael Mosallam watched the 9/11 attacks from a rooftop in Brooklyn. He was doing construction work – re-roofing a rowhouse – when another worker tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out a low-flying plane over Lower Manhattan. “Everybody was shocked, nobody moved,” he said.
He walked home in a daze, horrified, like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers.
But the personal impact of the attacks did not set in until several hours later, when he turned on the television and saw footage of the reaction in the Middle East.
“They were saying the Palestinians did this, showing video of people in Gaza celebrating, handing out sweets, laughing,” he said. “I saw that and I knew, that was it, I knew I was gone.”
It took several months, but Mosallam’s premonition was correct: Mosallam, like hundreds of other Arabs and Muslims, was swept up in an FBI raid for alleged connections to terrorism; he spent three years in prison before finally being deported to his native Gaza.
Mosallam was in the United States illegally; he crossed over the Canadian border in 1996. The US government had the right to deport him.
But he was, by all accounts, an otherwise law-abiding and productive resident. He had a job, a home, and references who could (and did) vouch for his character, according to paperwork from his immigration hearings and from human rights groups who took up his case in 2003.
Mosallam denies any connection to terrorism, and indeed the US never charged him or presented any evidence. A search of public records turned up no other criminal convictions or tax problems.
If 9/11 had never happened, Mosallam said, he would probably still be living and working in New York. Instead he is back in Gaza – “the cage”, as he called it – living with his parents, eking out a marginal living in a restaurant.
Like this 10 September, 10 September 2001 was a Monday. The only reason I know that is because it was the day before an enormous tragedy that is permanently etched into my mind, and that happened on a Tuesday. I went to the same office and sat at the same desk on Monday as I did on Tuesday, but I have no recollection of one day and a vivid recollection of the other. Even though I do not recall any of the details of Monday 10 September, sometimes I think about how America might be different if we could turn back the clock.
Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we’d all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago.