Less than a week before Osama bin Laden was killed, I visited Ground Zero. Most prosaically, it is a building site. Even with the contours of the inevitably spectacular Freedom Tower becoming more visible, it is the rougher elements that dominate: the cranes; the unpolished, uncovered concrete; the barbed wire on the fences that rim the former site of the twin towers. There's dust in the air and you can't help breathing it in. At first blush, it's all profoundly ordinary.
But stay a while and you are struck by the silence. The sounds of construction may punctuate it, but they do not obliterate it. There's an eeriness here that is anything but mundane. In a town of boundless, infectious, magnificent energy, this site is an island; a place of stillness in a city set to vibrate.
Silence. Stillness. Reverence. It's a new sort of cathedral, haunted by the ghost of what happened a decade ago today. This is the nature of terrorism. It is designed to invade the psyche and haunt it. To change the way you think, and then act. Ultimately it has little to do with those it kills - even if there are 3000 of them. It is about those who remain.
In that sense, the fact that every mainstream media outlet is marking this terrible anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks is a victory for the perpetrators. Terrorism is least successful when it is ignored; when it is denied what Margaret Thatcher called the ''oxygen of publicity''.
But it is impossible to ignore this. It was more than merely symbolic or spectacular. It was cinematic. When the first plane struck the north tower, the cameras of the world rushed to film the carnage. Al-Qaeda gave them 17 minutes to set up. With lenses now trained on the World Trade Centre, images of the second plane smashing into the south tower were beamed live across the globe. You've seen them a thousand times since. Their presence is permanent. But beneath its cataclysmic appearances, the component parts of this attack were surprisingly modest. This was not the product of expensive, high-tech weaponry. It was the work of 19 men with box cutters. In fact, this was their greatest asset. It is difficult to imagine a nation being able to destroy the World Trade Centre. Its weapons are too detectable, its visibility too obvious and the political consequences too grave. The sheer size of this attack conjured up the image of a colossus that could strike anywhere at will, but it was misleading; a vast overstatement.
There was always a danger of misreading these attacks, and we did. From the beginning, we failed to understand what we were confronting. The story of this decade is how this misreading led us to dark places with some lamentable consequences. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, and societies became divided. No doubt much of this pleased bin Laden, whose guilt is plain. But it is worth considering how we got sucked into contributing to the process...
But stay a while and you are struck by the silence. The sounds of construction may punctuate it, but they do not obliterate it. There's an eeriness here that is anything but mundane. In a town of boundless, infectious, magnificent energy, this site is an island; a place of stillness in a city set to vibrate.
Silence. Stillness. Reverence. It's a new sort of cathedral, haunted by the ghost of what happened a decade ago today. This is the nature of terrorism. It is designed to invade the psyche and haunt it. To change the way you think, and then act. Ultimately it has little to do with those it kills - even if there are 3000 of them. It is about those who remain.
In that sense, the fact that every mainstream media outlet is marking this terrible anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks is a victory for the perpetrators. Terrorism is least successful when it is ignored; when it is denied what Margaret Thatcher called the ''oxygen of publicity''.
But it is impossible to ignore this. It was more than merely symbolic or spectacular. It was cinematic. When the first plane struck the north tower, the cameras of the world rushed to film the carnage. Al-Qaeda gave them 17 minutes to set up. With lenses now trained on the World Trade Centre, images of the second plane smashing into the south tower were beamed live across the globe. You've seen them a thousand times since. Their presence is permanent. But beneath its cataclysmic appearances, the component parts of this attack were surprisingly modest. This was not the product of expensive, high-tech weaponry. It was the work of 19 men with box cutters. In fact, this was their greatest asset. It is difficult to imagine a nation being able to destroy the World Trade Centre. Its weapons are too detectable, its visibility too obvious and the political consequences too grave. The sheer size of this attack conjured up the image of a colossus that could strike anywhere at will, but it was misleading; a vast overstatement.
There was always a danger of misreading these attacks, and we did. From the beginning, we failed to understand what we were confronting. The story of this decade is how this misreading led us to dark places with some lamentable consequences. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, and societies became divided. No doubt much of this pleased bin Laden, whose guilt is plain. But it is worth considering how we got sucked into contributing to the process...
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