The Scars of 9/11

 

By David K. Shipler 

                About a dozen years after September 11, 2001, I asked a class of college undergraduates what they remembered about the attacks. They had been kids, and those who answered remembered most vividly their parents’ reactions, not their own. It was a fascinating illustration of one dynamic of trauma: the response of those around you figures into how you carry the injury forward. So it has been with the country’s behavior in the last twenty years.

                Chaya Roth, a Holocaust survivor whose mother and sister were repeatedly sheltered and saved by non-Jews as they fled across Europe, eventually recognized the healing effect of the courageous generosity—a post-traumatic syndrome of another kind. “That is why I never lost faith or hope in people,” she told me. “If one goes through difficult times, but comes out of these alive, it is because in the last analysis there was someone who provided help.”

                What has happened among Americans? Yes, at first we rallied in an uplifting sense of kinship. Three days after 9/11, as I drove to Kent State in Ohio for a colloquium on race, every American flag hanging from an overpass brought a rush of mournful pride, almost tears. At the university, during a small reception, a professor who was surely a star in her church choir suddenly began singing “America the Beautiful.” Some wept openly, others wept within, both in sorrow and in celebration of the bonds of harmony.

 And then? The administration of President George W. Bush, combined with local police departments across the country, proceeded to inflict damage on civil liberties that no subsequent president or Congress has been brave enough to repair. The FBI was instructed to investigate every citizen’s tip, no matter how ludicrous or obviously based on personal vendetta. One FBI agent told me that some of his colleagues shared his distaste for the strategy, worrying that innocents would be targeted.

As indeed they were. Muslims were surveilled, hounded, and jailed on the slimmest of pretexts, and held for months during slow-paced background checks that uncovered no terrorists but might naturally have sown the seeds of antipathy toward the United States. The consequences for those illegally in the country were so severe that abused wives feared calling the police, and some undocumented Pakistani residents fled from the US to Canada seeking asylum. When Canadian authorities couldn’t process them fast enough, they crammed into churches and homes in northern Vermont or took refuge in their own vehicles in the deep of winter.

Suffering Spring

By David K. Shipler

                Daffodils came early this year, deceived by a premature spate of warmth, then slapped with reality by a cold snap. But now the most exquisite season in and around the nation’s capital has begun to take hold. The plum tree in front has blossomed along with the magnolias across the street. The cherry trees are at their peak, their feathery white petals blowing off and descending like snow flurries. The azaleas will not be far behind.

                It is a cruel spring of dissonance. It is like that crystal autumn day, September 11, 2001, whose beauty should not have allowed the terror and the death. It is like wartime Vietnam, whose stunning landscapes should not have made room for combat. This should be a soothing time of annual rebirth, with no place for the discords of illness and fear.

                Like a family in crisis, America and every other nation will learn good and hard lessons about itself. This will weld us or break us. We will find common purpose or deepened fissures. If we summon wisdom, we will discover what matters and what does not, who are heroes and who are not, who are leaders and who are not—regardless of their titles, positions, or pretenses.

                 Human beings rarely resign themselves to powerlessness. To flee from war, crime, or hunger, refugees uproot themselves and journey into risky unknowns. Against suicide bombings, citizens search for a semblance of control. They reach for tricks and tactics that seem rational, hoping to reduce the unwanted probabilities. In Israel when buses were being blown up, drivers tried to avoid stopping near buses at red lights. In Lebanon and Vietnam, canny locals stayed off country roads that felt too quiet. Smart cops in every tough city in the world learn to watch and listen all around them, to read body language, if possible to put an engine block between them and a suspect who might be armed.

                 The habit of staking a claim to some small territory of control is surely embedded in our animal survival instinct. Sometimes our methods are futile, often so against random violence. Sometimes they are illusory, giving us a sense of power more imagined than real. Sometimes they are practical, and therefore comforting, as we wash our hands while singing Happy Birthday twice, stop touching our faces, use gloves or paper towels to handle the gas pump, sterilize our doorknobs and kitchen counters, and look to the health professionals’ steady and factual advice. Thank heavens for Dr. Anthony Fauci!

                But there are limits to human powers, of course.

The Scourge of Military Commissions

By David K. Shipler

                Of all the self-inflicted wounds by the United States since 9/11, the flawed military commissions set up to try suspected foreign terrorists rank high on the list. At Guantanamo, the commissions have been bogged down in a swamp of dubious ethical, legal, and procedural practices. Their constitutionality has been challenged, their partial secrecy denounced.

Some of their military judges have demonstrated bias, and one was reprimanded this week by the powerful Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which vacated all his orders back to Nov. 19, 2015, the date he initiated a conflict of interest by applying to the Justice Department to be an immigration judge. All rulings on his orders by the Court of Military Commission Review were also set aside, wiping the slate almost clean of pretrial decisions in the case, now requiring re-argument on many of the issues. It was a telling illustration of the mess that’s been created.

Without the military commissions, it’s a good bet that the most prominent prisoners at Guantanamo would have been executed years ago, or at least be sitting on death row waiting for the needle. They would have been tried in civilian federal courts, which Republicans have blocked, although the courts are the jewel in the crown of the American judicial system. If juries had found them guilty, it’s hard to imagine anything but the death penalty. Instead, the alleged organizers of the 9/11 attacks and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen have been in U.S. custody for more than 15 years, at taxpayers’ expense, waiting for trial by military commissions that are so ill-conceived as to be vulnerable to obstruction by prosecutors and multiple motions by defense attorneys seeking to guard their clients’ rights.

The Immortality of Presidents

By David K. Shipler

            History is supposed to have an unerring eye for ultimate accuracy. From the distance of time, historians are expected to act as the final judges, to cut ruthlessly through to the truth. It is fitting to reflect on this now, during a week of renewed mourning for President John F. Kennedy, who was felled in Dallas by an assassin half a century ago.

He and Jackie were dazzling. They tapped Americans’ vestigial yearning for royalty, the excitement of stylish celebrity, and the deep need for optimistic commitment to high purpose. Yet as popular as Kennedy was—his Gallup approval rating averaged 70.1 percent—he was never so widely admired as he became after his death. Indeed, Gallup’s graph of his rating shows a gradual, yearlong downward slope to 58 percent the week before he was killed—still higher than President Obama has enjoyed since the first six months of taking office, but a significant decline nonetheless. It followed a sharp bump up 13 months earlier after JFK faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. (Presidents’ percentages typically rise after a national security crisis, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s did after Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush’s following 9/11.)

One is tempted to wonder what course the line on that graph would have taken had JFK lived and had been able to win a second term.

To Vote or Not To Vote

By David K. Shipler

            “Have you registered to vote?” the white cashier asked the black cashier at a hardware store. Both young women looked barely 18.

            “No,” the black woman answered, because then she’d get called for jury duty.

            I groaned out loud. So did a man at the next counter. You have to vote, we told her. In the quarter century since I’d moved to this county in Maryland, I explained, I’d been called for jury duty a total of two times. The other guy said his total was zero. Then he corrected himself: once, he said.

            People give lots of reasons for not voting, and the lower the income, the lower the turnout, a fact that hurts Democrats and those who want to boost government anti-poverty programs. I’ve heard non-voters say that voting won’t change anything and takes time they don’t have. They can’t get off from work, they’re stressed and busy, and they’ve been made dizzy by the barrage of lying campaign ads. But to avoid jury duty? That was a first. (It was also mistaken, because jury pools in Montgomery County, where we were standing, are drawn from lists of licensed drivers as well as registered voters.)

“This is terrible!” my fellow shopper declared. “It’s part of being a citizen.” You have to vote, we both told her. She gave us a pleasant smile.

Unfit Running Mates

By David K. Shipler

Only once since Ronald Reagan chose George H. W. Bush as his running mate in 1980 have Republicans picked a vice presidential candidate who was qualified to step into the Oval Office if necessary. He was Jack Kemp, former Housing Secretary, who ran with Bob Dole in 1996, a smart and solid man who could have been a decent president.

With all the rest, the Republicans have exposed the country to a high-stakes gamble with very bad odds. In 1988, Bush selected Dan Quayle, an inexperienced senator whose perpetual deer-caught-in-the-headlights look made him seem less than intellectually capable. He was a lightweight vice president who only recently, in cogent criticism of his party’s swing to the hard right, has shown the good sense he would have needed as president.

Dick Cheney, Vice President under George W. Bush, displayed such contempt for the Constitution’s protections of individual rights after 9/11 that, as a president unrestrained, he would have damaged the country’s structure of liberty even more extensively than Bush allowed him to do. (One Cheney gambit, which Bush rejected, was to knock down a pillar of American freedom by sending the Army in pursuit of a hapless so-called “sleeper cell” of wannabe terrorists in upstate New York. They were duly prosecuted by the civilian system.) Much of Cheney’s legacy has persisted under Obama.