An American Tragedy 9/11/2001

I wrote this the day after the twin towers went down.

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

World Trade Center, Pentagon, Attacked by Hijacked Planes

By Peter Gorman

NEW YORK CITY—It’s Wednesday afternoon, September 12.

Acrid smoke is making it difficult to breathe here in

the High Times offices on East 19th Street in

Manhattan. The smoke is from the fires still burning

further downtown, where the twin towers of the World

Trade Center collapsed in a heap of rubble and dust

and human suffering yesterday morning, after two

hijacked planes headed from Boston and DC to Los

Angeles were flown at nearly full speed, and with full

fuel tanks, into them.

It is too early yet for blame to have been assigned

for the monstrous attack, though several pundits have

tried to place it at the feet of Osama bin Laden, the

notorious terrorist who was trained and used by our

own CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Others have pointed the finger at Islamic

fundamentalists, particularly Palestinians, and former

CIA Director James Woolsey has spoken of "state

sponsorship" being responsible, with Iraq as the

probable state at fault.

At this point in New York, Boston, and Washington, the

blame almost doesn’t matter yet. Those responsible

will be caught and dealt with in a frightening manner,

make no mistake. The US and its allies will exact a

toll far greater from those who did the damage than

the damage done. But here, now, they haven’t even

begun to count the bodies yet. There were more than

200 killed aboard the four hijacked planes involved in

the attacks—three successful and one unsuccessful—on

the American symbols of corporate and military might.

An estimated 200 firefighters, who were the first to

arrive on the scene in New York, even before the first

tower collapsed, are thought to have died while trying

to evacuate that tower’s tenants. Dozens of police and

emergency medical workers are presumed dead as well.

Here in New York, they are not faceless. Two of the

police on the scene who survived were my older brother

and his son. The same is true of the families of the

dead in the hijacked planes. They are our brothers,

sisters, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, cousins

and friends, as are those who died in the horrible

disaster at the Pentagon.

I have fought them on political grounds, as I have

railed against the corporate greed of America

represented by the Twin Towers, but I have never for a

moment wished them harm. One of my friends who worked

at the Twin Towers lost at least 600 coworkers and

friends yesterday. He and a handful of others from his

firm survived by the happenstance of going to work

late on the day someone decided that the symbolic

destruction of the towers was of greater value than

the lives of those who earned their rent money there.

In all, the death toll will certainly reach into the

thousands.

There will be time to talk about the reasons for this

immense tragedy. There will be time to assign blame.

There will even be time for exacting retribution to

ensure this will not be perpetrated again. But for

now, it is a time of mourning. It is a time to rally

around loved ones and for thanking whatever god you

believe in that you and yours were not on those

planes, were not at work in the Pentagon or those

towers, were not assigned the job of rescuing those

trapped inside when they collapsed. Now it is only

time to find and bury the dead and speed them on their

way.

—September 12, 2001