Judith Miller: Three reminders of terrorism's enduring threat
[Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a FOX News contributor.]
More than most Americans, New Yorkers remember September 11. Almost everyone in this city lost someone, or knew someone who lost someone, in the Twin Towers. For months following the attack, our air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of death. Some New Yorkers have never stopped grieving for those who died in the deadliest terrorist strike in American history. But if other Americans need reminders of why we forget terrorism at our peril, this week provided them.
On Monday came the belated conviction in London of three British Muslims—Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28; Assad Sarwar, 29; and Tanvir Hussain, 28—on charges of conspiring in 2006 to blow up at least seven airliners bound for the United States or Canada in what was intended to be the deadliest terrorist strike since 9/11. Had the attack succeeded, an estimated 2,000 passengers, most of them American, would have died. The jury was told that the plotters were only days away from launching their planned suicide attacks when British police began rounding up some 25 suspects in the plot.
This was the second time that a London court had tried to convict the men. The first jury found insufficient evidence that airplanes were the target. And even in this second attempt, the jury acquitted four more alleged conspirators and failed to reach a verdict on an eighth...
... Later this week came another chilling reminder of 9/11. A new photograph of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of several “high-value detainees” currently being held at the Guantánamo Bay naval station in Cuba, began circulating on the Internet. The photo, depicting a thin, trim, full-bearded KSM sitting serenely in a clean white thobe and red-and-white-checkered headdress, came courtesy of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had given it to KSM’s family to assure them that he was alive and well. The family apparently provided the photo to a website sympathetic to al-Qaida, and this first photo ever of KSM in captivity is now being used to bolster the spirits of Islamic militants throughout the world. The incident reminds us that not a single 9/11 plotter has yet to be convicted. Nevertheless, President Obama has vowed to shut Gitmo, where 226 foreigners suspected of military or terrorist attacks are being held, by January 2010. The legal fate of the detainees remains uncertain.
Finally, a senior American envoy in Vienna warned on Wednesday that Iran has now accumulated enough low-enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb, provided the fissile material is further enriched to weapons-grade level. Speaking at a board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ambassador Glyn Davies spoke publicly for the first time about Iran’s movement toward a “break-out capacity,” the subject of another intelligence feud that has raged across the Atlantic—this one between American and Israeli experts on weapons of mass destruction. Israel has been urging Washington to take stronger actions now, before Tehran can build and test an atomic weapon, while the Americans have argued that there is still time for diplomats to try to dissuade Iran from pursuing nukes...
... Yet many Americans seem intent on forgetting the lessons of 9/11. If we are what we remember, America’s willed amnesia about the danger of terrorism and other atrocities should be unsettling. Meanwhile, in another telling event this week, Russia ordered its high school students to start reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the three-volume epic, published in 1973, that had long been banned. While Americans ignore lessons of the past, others are starting to remember them.
Read entire article at City Journal
More than most Americans, New Yorkers remember September 11. Almost everyone in this city lost someone, or knew someone who lost someone, in the Twin Towers. For months following the attack, our air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of death. Some New Yorkers have never stopped grieving for those who died in the deadliest terrorist strike in American history. But if other Americans need reminders of why we forget terrorism at our peril, this week provided them.
On Monday came the belated conviction in London of three British Muslims—Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28; Assad Sarwar, 29; and Tanvir Hussain, 28—on charges of conspiring in 2006 to blow up at least seven airliners bound for the United States or Canada in what was intended to be the deadliest terrorist strike since 9/11. Had the attack succeeded, an estimated 2,000 passengers, most of them American, would have died. The jury was told that the plotters were only days away from launching their planned suicide attacks when British police began rounding up some 25 suspects in the plot.
This was the second time that a London court had tried to convict the men. The first jury found insufficient evidence that airplanes were the target. And even in this second attempt, the jury acquitted four more alleged conspirators and failed to reach a verdict on an eighth...
... Later this week came another chilling reminder of 9/11. A new photograph of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of several “high-value detainees” currently being held at the Guantánamo Bay naval station in Cuba, began circulating on the Internet. The photo, depicting a thin, trim, full-bearded KSM sitting serenely in a clean white thobe and red-and-white-checkered headdress, came courtesy of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had given it to KSM’s family to assure them that he was alive and well. The family apparently provided the photo to a website sympathetic to al-Qaida, and this first photo ever of KSM in captivity is now being used to bolster the spirits of Islamic militants throughout the world. The incident reminds us that not a single 9/11 plotter has yet to be convicted. Nevertheless, President Obama has vowed to shut Gitmo, where 226 foreigners suspected of military or terrorist attacks are being held, by January 2010. The legal fate of the detainees remains uncertain.
Finally, a senior American envoy in Vienna warned on Wednesday that Iran has now accumulated enough low-enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb, provided the fissile material is further enriched to weapons-grade level. Speaking at a board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ambassador Glyn Davies spoke publicly for the first time about Iran’s movement toward a “break-out capacity,” the subject of another intelligence feud that has raged across the Atlantic—this one between American and Israeli experts on weapons of mass destruction. Israel has been urging Washington to take stronger actions now, before Tehran can build and test an atomic weapon, while the Americans have argued that there is still time for diplomats to try to dissuade Iran from pursuing nukes...
... Yet many Americans seem intent on forgetting the lessons of 9/11. If we are what we remember, America’s willed amnesia about the danger of terrorism and other atrocities should be unsettling. Meanwhile, in another telling event this week, Russia ordered its high school students to start reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the three-volume epic, published in 1973, that had long been banned. While Americans ignore lessons of the past, others are starting to remember them.