It isn't just "freedom" they hate

Those who rained terror upon the U.S. may have had real grievances -- and we shouldn't feel guilty about discussing them.

By Sara Pursley

Sep 22, 2001 | A few weeks ago I reread "Slaughterhouse Five," a slim novel about the Allied firebombing that turned the city of Dresden into a pile of rubble overnight. Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the firebombing as a prisoner of war and was one of its few survivors, wrote in the first chapter (a chapter about the impossibility of writing the book): "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."

I watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center burn, and the second one collapse, from the Pulaski Bridge connecting Brooklyn and Queens. With me were several dozen other New Yorkers from the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Long Island City -- Eastern European, African-American, Anglo-American, Latino, Arab, Asian. There was no sound attached to the unbelievable sight, and we returned the silence, our hands covering our mouths. I could only think in words -- "I'm watching so many people die." I couldn't turn the words into pictures or meaning; I didn't have the imagination for it.

Over the next few days there would be countless stories of the almost nonchalant heroism of New Yorkers, and I believed them all, easily. People filed down the stairs of the World Trade Center in an orderly fashion, even though everyone thought they were going to die. One thousand people made a human chain leading out of the smoke, because nobody could see. Over 300 firefighters died trying to save the lives of those trapped in the towers. A man called his wife and said he was about to carry his wheelchair-bound friend down the stairs; neither was heard from again. A Hasidic man from Brooklyn stopped running to pick up an Islamic man from Pakistan, who had fallen to the ground as the cloud of debris swept toward them. Even Mayor Giuliani was, I thought, spontaneously and reassuringly human -- the only politician I saw whom I could tolerate watching, the only one who didn't even try to say anything intelligent about the massacre on that first day.

But eventually one has to start saying things, even when the most logical things have a touch of absurdity to them. And as if to both prove and disprove the impossibility of saying anything intelligent, Vonnegut would write a few pages later: "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee."

One of the more chillingly surreal moments in the days following the attack unfolded, for me, at the memorial service in Washington, during the "Day of Prayer and Remembrance" on Friday. Everyone who was anyone in D.C. packed into the church, including most of the country's living ex-presidents. As the television audience, we became witnesses to a most extraordinary ritual of hypocrisy and deceit, culminating in the words of George W. Bush that "this nation is peaceful."

The vast majority of American people may be peaceful, but our government is not. And it is, as always, the people who pay the price. I wondered how many of the ex-presidents sitting in those pews would agree with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose response to the attack was: "No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents."

I wondered what could be in the mind of Jimmy Carter, for example, whose administration initiated the policy of arming and training the fundamentalist pawns on what his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski referred as "the great chessboard" in Afghanistan, feeding a war that has cost an estimated 1.5 million lives. This is not counting those lost in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, whose deaths may turn out to be a direct, rather than simply an indirect, continuation of this very "game" -- since it soon included the arming and training of Osama bin Laden himself. The Afghan people, as journalist James Ingalls wrote, are "no strangers to the terrorism of bin Laden and his friends," thanks in part to Carter and subsequent administrations, but that won't save them from becoming the main targets of American retaliation.

Next Page: There was not an ex-president in that church who did not have the blood of Arab and Muslim civilians on his hands

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