Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Terrorist attack will scar American psyche forever
By Jaime Walker
Skiff Staff

It is the kind of terrorism you might see in the movies. But when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and another took an entire section out of the Pentagon Tuesday morning, the reality of the attack was more horrifying than any movie script.
The real-life images of what happened to the United States of America on Sept. 11, 2001, will be etched into the international consciousness forever. Tuesday’s date will top the list of America’s historically tragic moments.

Our nation will never be the same.

We will never view terrorism as something that happens in other, perhaps less civilized, countries.

From this point forward, it will be harder to question military spending, and even easier to doubt the efforts of the FBI and CIA.

In an instant America went from being the world’s most powerful and theoretically well-protected nation, to a country running scared.

The World Trade Center, New York City’s pillar of economic dominance, crumbled before our eyes.

A wing of the Pentagon, America’s symbol of military strength, was destroyed.

Some of our nation’s greatest icons have been reduced to rubble. And we didn’t see it coming. We’re not even sure we saw it at all.

President George W. Bush, who was on a trip to Florida when the attack occurred, did not return to the White House until late Tuesday evening. His absence, although mandated, holds great significance. As long as Bush could not return to Washington, it’s as if we as a nation admitted we’d been caught off guard.

Terrorism of this magnitude isn’t supposed to happen in America.

But it has.

And now America is on alert.

During the Cold War, we prided ourselves on a Department of Defense able to track the evils of communism around the world and in our back yard. When the Iron Curtain fell, we got complacent. We no longer have that luxury.

Officials don’t know who to blame for the attack. But what they do know is whoever orchestrated it must have had access to the most sophisticated aspects of aviation intelligence. They understood more about our government than we want to admit.

And they had a really big ax to grind.

At this time the top suspect is Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire, believed to be the mastermind behind other terrorist attacks on the United States. One of bin Laden’s associates was to be sentenced Tuesday for his role in the 1998 bombing of a U.S. Embassy in Tanzania.

Officials with the government of Afghanistan have denied bin Laden’s involvement and said they have nothing to do with it. But The New York Times reported this week that officials with bin Laden’s organization were ready to declare a holy war on those who spread lies.

The American people have a whole lot of questions. Officials don’t have a whole lot of answers. But we need to use caution when assigning blame.

We should not let our grief, our shock, our anger or our desire for revenge cloud our judgment as we deal with this attack.

We should, however, be swift and accurate in our assessment of this tragedy.

We owe it to the dead and the injured. We owe it to ourselves to rebuild America with renewed passion and a greater sense of the importance of security.

We are a nation who wants to feel safe again.

Jaime Walker
j.l.walker@student.tcu.edu