9/11 Revisited
(A Terrible Beauty Is Born)
Many people remember exactly what they were doing at certain monumental times. I can recall the day I heard that The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, where exactly I was when I heard that Robert Kennedy has died from mortal wounds. I even remember the tabloid 'In Memoriam' supplements which the media had produced following the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and which my Mom had hung on the wall in the kitchen, near to the picture of Pope John XXIII. So too with 9/11. It was something after 2 in the afternoon. I was doing my mundane household chores of laying a carpet in the rooms my Mom and Aunt occupied. My mobile phone rang. It was R, a Scientific Adviser to a Government Department who kept me regularly up to date on many issues. R has now sadly passed away but I must thank him for alerting me to a multiple of possible terrorist scenarios well in advance of 9/11. I cannot recall that we ever discussed this particular one - but we did discuss other possibilities and the need for continuing vigilance. At one point, in the 1990s, R invited me to visit a security-vulnerable installation so that I could grasp the enormity of the problems first hand. R told me that there was a terrorist attack in progress on the Twin Towers in New York. As we were good friends and always joking at first I thought he was just kidding - and I laughed it off with a rhetorical joke. After a few seconds it was clear that this was no joke and something monumental was in progress. Like many people I was transfixed by the events unfolding. It seemed almost like a dream. Something surreal which surely could not really be happening. I would wake up any minute and realize it was all a dream. I simply found it difficult to believe the events unfolding before my very eyes. I was stunned. Feeling quite helpless with a world of sympathy for those who would rather take a leap of fate than be consumed to cinders in the ensuing inferno and thinking how merciful God had been to those who were erased in an instant. That evening I had prearranged a get together with friends I had not seen for several years,staying over for the week. It was meant to be a happy occasion but beneath all the smiles and laughter we could all sense each others nervousness and premonitions of fear and uncertainty for the future. There was a lot of speculation but no answers. I had previously been on the Advisory Board of The European Review with, amongst others, Dr. Anthony Verrier, (Through the Looking Glass: British Foreign Policy in an
Age) who was at that time also a Senior Adviser at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. I looked at back copy issues of The Review, at the many interviews the journal had published with, for example, the (then) Director of The CIA, George Tenet,'Security Threats To the U.S.';an interview with the then Director of the FBI, Louis J. Freeh; a rather reassuring article by Richard N. Haass entitled 'The Biggest Islamic Threat isn't Terrorism' and others, just to try to make some sense of what was happening and possibly gauge exactly what direction we should be focused on to understand the fateful distorted events. I felt I had to keep our despondent spirits high, whatever the cost to good taste. Fortunately they were Welsh and of Irish stock so they understood what I was saying, no offense meant nor taken with my jocular interjections. I did get a despairing utterance (in laughter) of 'shut the f*** up will you Pat!' from one who had already found all the answers at the bottom of Paddy's Single Malt. But apart from that, there was a glum silence all around. I think that, with hindsight, my sense of humor at such an awkward moment just might well have taken us all through that sinister evening. What I do remember was that outside in the warmth of that September evening, there was an unusual silence. Many people who would have their back kitchen lights on, were switched off. It was eerily dark. There was a deathly silence coming from the garden and all the neighboring gardens. It screamed a pregnant pause, before something, something unknown, but momentous and ominous, had crossed over from the dark side and cometh this way. Little did any of us appreciate, at that moment in time, that things had changed, changed utterly, and a terrible, terrible beauty was about to be born.
Patrick Emek
September 2013
