Remembering 9/11

I was in my car on the way to Harvard University where I have worked for 56 years. On the radio it was announced that planes had flown into the world trade center At Harvard the TV set had already been switched on in a conference room and we saw the towers fall.

As a teenager in the UK during world war II I had been a member of a first aid party and a volunteer assistant fireman. How could I help? I thought (incorrectly) that there would be a lot of blood needed and encouraged colleagues to offer blood at once. Also since 1970 I had thought a lot about accidents, including sabotage, and thought deeply about how the procedures that accident experts had thought up could be applied.

In England we were taught to be prepared. If an incendiary bomb (weighing 6 pounds) fell on the house we had three minutes to extinguish it on an upper floor before the whole house caught fire. In 1944 when the V1 missiles came, we had 8 seconds after the engine cut out before the missile exploded on the ground. 8 seconds is enough time to take cover away from windows and under a table. After checking into a hotel I would walk down the emergency stairs to be sure I knew where they were. In 2001 I wrote about these reactions and talked in several conferences but had little influence on the disastrous, mostly secret, government reaction.

I soon found that Americans - particularly those in the government in Washington - had no idea how the rest of the world works and thinks. For example the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December 1941 is considered a tragedy: In the UK it was an extraordinary relief. Winston Churchill in his history of the second world war spends 2 pages explaining this. The British were no longer alone. He almost said we had won. Likewise those of us who had suffered the terror that could come from the skies at any moment in that long 6 year war did not feel that life had changed much by the 9/11 tragedy. But I noted with pleasure the immediate world wide sympathy for the US including for example the photograph of a young Palestinian boy in Jerusalem with a placard saying “Terrorism is our Common Enemy”. That world wide support did not last. We threw it away.

In 2002-2003 I watched with dismay the way the government used false intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. I had visited Iraq in 1982 and looked at the reactor that had been bombed the year before and met the physicist Dr Jafar Dhia Jafar who, to my regret, was persuaded in 1981 to spearhead work on a bomb. Most scientists knew that the work was stopped in 1991 and in 2003 was non existent. Less obviously the Iraqis could not have had much biological warfare material. Yet the government preferred to believe the false stories of Iraqis who told them what the hawks wanted to hear.

Since then I have watched helplessly. At the tenth anniversary of 9/11 we should all note that Usameh Bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He scared Americans and they and their government responded blindly and with unusual viciousness. Americans struck out in all directions. We have lost many freedoms. In 1945 America was very widely viewed as a country of generosity, hope, enthusiasm and forgiveness. It is no longer. That loss is what we should all mourn on this tenth anniversary of a terrible event.

Richard Wilson http://phics.harvard.edu/~wilson