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had it coming, because of its foreign policies and its 21st.-century colonialism and its hubris. got it all wrong that proclaimed, as swiftly as the very day after, the U.S. Sometimes it comes from allies, too, and even from within, especially from the chorus that says the U.S. The hate hasn’t dimmed and the question continues to haunt. “Why do they hate us?” Americans asked of the Islamic jihadists. would invade Afghanistan, would turn it into an existential war,” one of them told me. What the most incisive claim is that bin Laden made a horrible miscalculation, sending his suicide crews onto those planes, aiming them at New York and Washington, D.C. I’ve spoken with terrorism experts in recent days, trying to gain perspective on 9/11. “Osama bin Laden,” whispered a few, because they were international terrorism savants and they suspected. Bush whisked from an elementary school in Florida, where he’d been reading to children, to a Strategic Air Command bunker in Nebraska, deep inside the earth. With another airliner plowing into the Pentagon and yet another crashing into a Pennsylvania field - rebelling passengers, in a tremendous act of self-sacrifice had stormed the cockpit - the country was put on its highest military alert since the Cuban missile crisis, military jets scrambling, President George W. People were tender and considerate with each other, belying New York’s reputation for discourtesy.īy nightfall, four of the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed. I don’t know why he did that, except New York was a very kind city that night and for many days after. We had talked our way through every barricade because a police detective had given us both blue Con Ed hard hats, signifying the rank of inspector. Paul’s cemetery, with my late, great friend Christie Blatchford from the National Post. I was right here, on the evening of 9/11, in the St. We were inhaling vapourized human beings along with everything else in that toxic miasma. Blackened computers and luggage and ragged remnants of clothing. Shoes everywhere, whether from the fleeing or the massacred. It had rained people, too, dozens who jumped before the towers crumpled, because they were trapped as fires raged overhead and below.Ī firefighter found two victims still buckled into their plane seats, side by side. When they imploded in on themselves, the pulverized hulks cratering a hole 70-feet deep, the eruption sent a funnel of ash and detritus whooshing violently along streets in the financial district and beyond, covering pedestrians, automobiles, fire trucks overturned like toys, while an avalanche of paper rained down, like a snowdrift or a morbid tickertape parade. Yet a certain affection grew over time because they were so prominently … there, such a defining part of the skyline. They were ugly buildings, in truth, just about everybody said so. The Twin Towers took 15 years to build and 10 seconds to collapse, each of them. There were so many coffins interred empty.Īfter a week, just 159 bodies had been recovered. Upwards of 1.8 million tons of debris would be hauled away from the site over the next nine months, carefully sifted for any trace of a human body, something to identify, later to be placed into a coffin for burial. 11, 2001, as a sulphurous cloud hung heavy over New York.Īnd certainly not here, as first responders crawled over a wreckage still roiled in flames, desperately searching through rubble, mangled metal and twisted rebar for survivors, tunnelling and axing and scraping. The inconceivable strike in Manhattan triggered a two-decade “war on terror,” one many believe has been lost.įew were thinking of that on the night of Sept. That attack didn’t come against the continental homeland. Hijacked commercial planes, using Americans to kill Americans, had been flown into the World Trade Center in the greatest catastrophe to strike the United States since Pearl Harbor. Here, exhausted, unflagging firefighters came to rest against the gravestones, taking only short breaks - I handed them water - even smoking a cigarette, before returning to the hellacious conflagration just 100 metres away. Scuffed but miraculously otherwise undamaged on 9/11. The dead are oblivious to their surroundings, to a metropolis endlessly reinventing itself. This stone chapel - it’s the oldest church in the city, completed in 1766 and the only surviving pre-Revolutionary building in Manhattan - is where a Thanksgiving service was held the day after George Washington’s inauguration. Here lie the remains of the New York Originals, inscriptions on the decrepit monuments, a roster of the city’s oldest and most prominent families. Paul’s Chapel, the ancient tombstones lean and sag, continuing to crumble and erode, looking like broken teeth. NEW YORK-Behind the wrought iron paling that encircles St.