September
17, 2001
Between the Lines
Half-told stories
and lingering questions already abound in the flurry of Bloody
Tuesday coverage
By Steve Perry
Everything is different this time, as
we have been reminded ceaselessly following Tuesday's conflagrations.
A new kind of guerrilla terror has come to our shores, engendering
a new kind of war to be fought in the months and possibly years
to come. It bears noting that one thing, at least, has changed
for the better. Thanks in large part to the Internet, it now
possible for journalists and the citizenry at large (those with
the time and inclination, anyway, which is to say regrettably
few) to sample a broader range of reportage and opinion from
the U.S. and elsewhere than in any past war or national emergency.
I don't mean to sound like
one of those evangelizing e-democracy nerds. A certain measure
of cynicism is invaluable in approaching the torrent of information
now available at a keystroke. Most of what one finds on the Internet
is hopelessly, uselessly redundant. What, after all, is the great
virtue in being able to access a dozen major newspapers and networks
in an age when the establishment media is more than ever speaking
with one voice and perking its ears to the same masters' commands?
Still, the palette of information is undeniably richer now, not
least because the pace of events and the nature of the Internet
itself-a perpetual real-time news medium is a hungry beast-serve
to loosen official control of news and conjecture. If you use
your time judiciously, and make a point of attending to foreign
news websites (a set of links appears at bottom) and the wire
services as well as the usual major media suspects, you can learn
more than your government ever wanted you to know about the drift
of things.
What follows is a set of questions
and conjectures about aspects of Bloody Tuesday and its aftermath
that have received scant or dubious coverage-stories, or intimations
of stories, that turned up buried in other dispatches or surfaced
briefly and then vanished. Quite possibly some of the sources
I have relied on will prove mistaken or misleading in days to
come; it is just as likely, however, that some will turn out
to have disappeared from radar only because the managers of public
information and opinion wished it so.
What was
in that plume of dust and ash from the trade centers, and what
long-range health risks does it pose?
Preliminary reports of air
readings in Manhattan made worrisome mention of airborne poisons
such as asbestos, lead, and dioxin, but officials hurried to
offer reassurance. Under the headline "Monitors Say Health
Risk From Smoke Is Very Small," Friday's New York Times
reported that downwind air samples-mainly taken in Brooklyn-showed
no cause for concern. And press accounts all through the week
emphasized that the documented dangers of asbestos in particular
were mostly related to long-term exposure. That there had surely
never been such a concentrated release of asbestos and other
toxins at one time in one place was a point that passed without
comment.
The sanguine pronouncements
of the experts called to mind the U.S. government's repeated
assurances in the 1950s that the fallout from nuclear tests in
the American West posed no threat to public health-the difference
being that this time the situation was far more desperate and
intractable. Under no circumstances could New Yorkers in general
or the clean-up workers on-site be told that they had no business
breathing the air. Across the border, meanwhile, Saturday's Toronto
Globe and Mail offered a terrifying assessment. I'll quote from
it here, but you ought to read the story for yourself:
"The smoldering rubble
is a vast aggregate of metal, concrete and glass, mixed with
slowly burning paints, solvents, lubricants, insulation, wiring,
office furniture, vehicles and decomposing bodies, which pose
a number of risks, including lung problems and communicable diseases.
"The two 110-storey buildings
were full of every imaginable type of building material and office
equipment, much of it ignited by burning jet fuel and some of
it burning slowly for days.
" 'PVC is the plastic
sheathing on electrical wiring. When it burns, 75 known carcinogens
are released,' said Catherine Coppin of MLT Mobile Lung Testing
Ltd. in Vancouver.
" 'That's just one individual
product, and there were thousands of them burning.'"
What
really brought down United Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania?
In the very early going it
seemed likely that U.S. fighter jets had shot it down en route
to Washington D.C. Then came word that a group of passengers,
upon hearing via cell phone about the other suicide attacks,
decided to take their chances storming the hijackers. The note
of heroism thereby struck was the only bit of good news to emerge
on Tuesday, and it quickly became the accepted version.
But if that was indeed how
the plane wound up crashing short of its target, why were pieces
of debris subsequently discovered up to eight miles from the
crash site? This fact, little-mentioned but uncontested by official
sources, suggests there was an explosion aboard the plane. In
that event, two possibilities: Either the hijackers possessed
a bomb of some kind or someone fired on it. The former is possible
but unlikely, since none of the other planes seem to have contained
bombs and because attempting to carry a bomb on board is a decidedly
riskier proposition than arming yourself with box-cutter blades.
That leaves aircraft-on-aircraft fire. And on Thursday Reuters
put out a wire story that began this way: "Federal investigators
said on Thursday that they have not ruled out the possibility
that United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania"
The Reuters piece went on to say that one passenger talking on
his cell phone reported hearing an explosion.
And then no further word, at
least none that I could find in national media. Friday's Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette featured a denial by NORAD that its fighters had
shot the plane down, but that was the end of the matter. It's
a curious thing. Unlike the question of the air in Manhattan,
there is no ostensible reason to stonewall here. If news surfaced
that the Air Force did shoot down Flight 93, it would most likely
bolster public confidence: At least then the government could
claim it had done something effectual under the heat of attack.
Perhaps the judgment is that the heroic tale of a passenger revolt
is a rallying point; in any case, the curious and salient thing
is how silent the media have been in the face of the physical
evidence (debris scattered over eight miles?) and at least
one on-the-record concession of the possibility by an FBI agent.
It only proves how completely even a story of considerable prominence
and undeniable import can vanish from under our noses when the
right people want it to.
A footnote, incidentally, on
the real-time military response to the attacks: Over the weekend
rumors spread round the Internet that there was video footage
of the second WTC crash which showed another plane, possibly
a fighter jet, flying past the scene and veering away seconds
after impact. On Sunday night Fox News aired the footage in question,
and there is indeed another streaking object visible in the shot
some time after the explosion at the south tower. (A handful
of frames are reproduced below.) It's impossible to tell from
the grainy image what it is, but it clearly seems to be proceeding
along a trajectory that would preclude its being crash debris.
Did a military jet arrive on the scene too late to do anything?
Here's betting this matter, too, quickly falls off the table.
Did U.S.
intelligence services fail to heed warnings of the pending attack?
The tales have spread thick
and fast in major media and on Internet mail lists. An Iranian
imprisoned in Germany phoned U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly
to warn of impending attack; bin Laden himself is said to have
circulated a video three weeks ago in which he boasted of an
imminent offensive; on Wednesday a Goldman, Sachs employee in
Japan posted a message to a Gore Vidal fan list in which he claimed
the company's personnel were advised to stay away from U.S. government
buildings on Tuesday. And so it goes, ad nauseam.
Against all this, one has to
consider that such warnings are now a staple of business and
government communications: background noise. Whether there was
specific and credible intelligence regarding these particular
attacks is another matter. American pols and intelligence apparatchiks
are amply ready to point fingers in the interest of transferring
blame or securing additional funding for future spy operations,
but all this should be taken with a grain of salt, because what
they most wish to convince the public, and themselves, is that
what happened on Tuesday was foreseeable and preventable. That
remains very much an open question.
What seems undeniable is that
the CIA and other shadow agencies of the U.S. government now
find themselves caught up short by the Cold War model of espionage
on which most of their endeavors are modeled. (In the words of
one characteristic press account published in the UK this weekend,
"The CIA has failed to infiltrate Osama bin Laden's terrorist
network because its men are not prepared to spend long periods
without sex or go into any area where they might get diarrhea")
In other words, they act as if geopolitical intrigue were still
exclusively the white man's burden. The supposition seems entirely
sensible, but even if it's so it doesn't necessarily mean they
can consistently penetrate the kinds of small-to-moderate scale
guerrilla operations the U.S. now wishes to expunge. CP
Steve Perry is a freelance reporter and contributor
to the excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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