Saturday, October 06, 2007
Opinion, Stephanie Ramage

How to get our groove back

Whoever you vote for, I would suggest that the first step to putting things right is accepting that Sept. 11, 2001 was not an isolated oddity.

A Port Authority sergeant stands at a 2004 memorial service for six people killed when a bomb exploded at the World Trade Center in 1993. CREDIT: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that “9/11 has made us stupid,” as if we were talking about an isolated incident of tossing back too many tequila shots. Americans overreacted, he wrote, “and it is time to get things right again.” But he offered no insights into how to do that beyond not voting for GOP presidential primary candidate Rudy Giuliani. Whoever you vote for, I would suggest that the first step to putting things right is accepting that Sept. 11, 2001 was not an isolated oddity.

On Feb. 26, 1993, only a month into President Bill Clinton’s administration, a bomb built by Ramzi Youssef, who entered the United States on a false Iraqi passport, was detonated in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. Youssef was assisted by Abdul Rahman Yasin, an American citizen who grew up in Iraq. Intended to kill 250,000, the bomb killed six.

A month isn’t long enough to choose a new china pattern for the White House, let alone get one’s bearings regarding how to deal with a world newly devoid of the Soviet Union, so we can hardly hold Clinton responsible for what happened in 1993 at the WTC.

Shouldn’t we be looking for culpability in the previous administration? But if we do that, we would have to apply the same thinking to President George W. Bush, who had been in office for only nine months when tragedy struck once more at the very same location on Sept. 11, 2001, perpetrated by fanatics who shared Youssef’s dogma, if not his passport maker.

In the eight years of the Clinton administration, three things happened that greatly increased the probability of the 2001 WTC tragedy: First, Clinton’s response to the 1993 WTC bombing was to treat it as an isolated criminal matter. This ignored the event’s significance as a symptom of the pan-Islamic movement that had been picking up steam since Europe’s guest-worker programs for Arab laborers kicked in during the 1970s. These programs made a lot of Arab regimes anxious about losing their hold on their middle classes, prompting them to deputize imams to promote stronger allegiance to Islam as a way of fending off the push by the workers to become European citizens. The mostly uneducated imams condemned Western culture, particularly the American pop culture that by then dominated Europe.

Second, Clinton pressured the U.N. to keep in place economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990. Saddam Hussein used the sanctions to his advantage. He rerouted food and medicine to his most loyal enclaves, and by 1996 half a million Iraqi children under the age of five were dead because of our sanctions, a connection that Saddam made sure his people understood. And so did Osama bin Laden, who used photos of dead Iraqi children to recruit people throughout the Arab world to his cause.

Third, in 1995, Clinton finally reacted to pan-Islamism, but in a way that would only galvanize its actors: He authorized Michael F. Scheuer, chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, to implement the extraordinary renditions program, which we have since closely associated with George W. Bush. Last April, in a Congressional hearing, Scheuer testified: “The CIA warned the president and the National Security Council that the U.S. State Department had and would identify the countries to which the captured fighters were being delivered as human rights abusers … I have read and been told that Mr. Clinton, Mr. [Sandy] Burger and Mr. [Richard] Clarke have said since 9/11 that they insisted that each receiving country treat the rendered person it received according to U.S. legal standards. To the best of my memory that is a lie.”

By the end of Clinton’s tenure, the word was out on the Arab street that America had co-opted the Middle East’s most famous torture chambers.

These are the facts.

If we see Sept. 11 within its real context rather than through the lens of publicity-seeking documentarians and self-promoting politicians, we can begin to heal ourselves and the world in a way that is not in conflict with the truth. And that, my dear Friedman, is the best way to, as you say, “get our groove back.” SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.