Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Norah Vincent is a columnist for Salon.
Today, New York City is a war zone. Endless lines of refugees have been streaming through the streets in shock just trying to find their way home. Periodically you'll see a truck or a person among the crowds covered in white dust, and you know immediately that they were at the epicenter and survived. A lot of people migrating uptown are wearing masks, or have towels tied around their necks. They say breathing was practically impossible south of Canal St., and now we're all waiting for the ominous cloud of debris to make its way, in more and more dangerously particulate form, into our airspace. I live in the East Village and can see the cloud hanging over the southern skyline, a famous skyline that is now forever changed. I have a chemical mask that looks like something out of a Pink Floyd movie sitting on my desk.
The one good thing that can be said about this terrible day is that New Yorkers have responded admirably -- no, beyond admirably -- to the needs of their fellow citizens. The lines to donate blood snake around entire blocks outside local hospitals, and people are passing out water to cops and emergency medical technicians. We are a city of tough people united in a massive gesture of compassion and self-sacrifice. I am proud today to be a New Yorker.
Robert C. Gray is the North American editor of the scholarly journal Defense Analysis, and a professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
If you assume that the source of the attack was Middle East terrorist groups, their goal would be to show America the cost of supporting the Israelis, but that's to the extent that they have a rational goal. Of course that's not going to happen, and this is a real blow to any effort to establish a peace process in the Middle East.
The horrifying thought is that these people knew this, and that they are content just to kill thousands of Americans without any real expectation that this action would change policy. Even if we could apprehend the terrorists who did this, we still couldn't get into their minds.
A decade ago, you would have seen many groups rushing forward to take credit for this, even if they had nothing to do with it. Now, that's not so. That changed after the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa when Clinton ordered strikes in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden's bases. These groups understand that if they take credit, and if they have an address, the U.S. will attack them.
If we could get enough evidence against Osama bin Laden, then, given the magnitude of the attack, we would ask the Afghans to turn him over. The other option is to send an elite military strike force in to apprehend him, but that's very unlikely. Whoever the culprit is, you don't lower yourself to their level by bombing a city with innocent civilians. You try to find some specific targets related to the group.
While we don't know for sure who did this, there's really no one on the list other than the Middle East groups, particularly bin Laden. These coordinated, multiple attacks are part of his pattern. Remember, he reportedly planned similar attacks for New Year's, and U.S. intelligence foiled another plan to blow up 12 jumbo jets simultaneously. I've racked my brain for who else could be responsible, but there's just no reason to believe that some obscure group in the corner of the world or someone like Timothy McVeigh could have done this.
The biggest problem with our intelligence efforts is penetrating these groups. We're talking about finding out what a very small group of people is going to do, and we're not so great anymore at having agents on the ground. What's also greatly disturbing is that four aircraft could be hijacked within an hour of each other. We thought that we had taken measures that would make that nearly impossible. We can certainly expect airport security to get tighter.
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