When some kind of tragedy occurs, I often find I remember it through some image, some mental snapshot or brief video. Sometimes it's one of the so-called iconic images - for example, one of my two images of 9/11 is one of the well-known photos of the towers burning, with smoke pouring out of the buildings' wounds. Often it's not, instead it's based on a description I read or a scene I imagine.
For 9/11, for still another sort of mental snapshot, my second image comes from having had to go to New Jersey just a couple of weeks later and driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, a trip I've made innumerable times, looking in the direction of Manhattan - and seeing sky where the towers should have been.
In the case of the tsunami, the image comes from my imagination: In the minutes before a tsunami hits, one of the things that happens is the water near the shore is rapidly drawn away to a dramatic extent. I imagine someone standing on the shore, watching, horrified, as the water disappears, knowing what it means, knowing what's coming - and realizing in that instant that they don't have time to flee.
For the Madrid bombings, it's drawn from a news account of bodies on the platform at the central train station, cellphones ringing unanswered in their pockets with calls from frantic loved ones trying to find out if they're okay.
And now there's London. Perhaps oddly, my image for this is not one involving the Underground. It's of the bus. An eyewitness said the top of the bus blasted straight up into the air and then "floated down." I see the top of the bus, bordered with shredded, jagged metal, suspended, just starting to descend, in an instant of silence before the screams of pain and shouts of shock take over the scene.
What might make that even odder is that while I have ridden a London bus only once or twice (not counting tour buses) I have had a fair amount of experience with the Underground. Reading the names in the news stories - Russell Square, Tavistock Square, Kings Cross, Edgeware Road, Euston Station, Aldgate, Liverpool Street - I keep reacting: I know these names, I know these places, in fact I know the stations affected. In fact, I was once evacuated from the Underground at Liverpool Street station because of a bomb scare. I recall the people going up the stairs out of the station, some moving with a posture of controlled rushing, of hurrying to get out while trying to not be obvious that that was what they were doing, and others with expressions that clearly indicated a greater degree of annoyance at the inconvenience than concern about the possibility of a bomb. (Interestingly, the next two days my wife and I scoured the papers and found not a single word about it. We wondered if the news of such incidents was being suppressed - the UK has something called a "Schedule D" notice where the media is "advised" not to print certain news because of, you guessed it, "national security" - or if they had become so routine that it just didn't seem worth mentioning.)
That part about previous scares may go some distance in explaining the equanimity with which Londoners seemed to treat the attack: This is not the first. Yes, it's the highest death toll, but it's far from the first such attack. Indeed, the very first time I was in London, back in 1976, there were numerous signs warning people about unattended packages. In Paddington Station, while my wife was seeing about our train tickets, I kept an eye on our bags, piled on a luggage carrier. Getting a little bored with the wait, I wandered to a post maybe eight or ten feet away and leaned against it. After a minute or two I was aware of people passing our luggage and regarding it with a wary eye, making me feel obliged to go back and stand by it to relieve their concern. And during a later trip, while we were in London, a truck bomb went off in the financial district. So yes, it was the worst - but no, it was hardly the first.
Though the city was shocked, many people were not surprised. Londoners know they are a terrorist target, principally because of Britain's support for the Iraq war. Police have even said a terror strike was not a question of "if" but "when."All of which, again, may explain at least in good part why in the wake of the latest bombings there were numerous expressions around the UK amounting to "we've been through this before and we are not afraid."
As of the moment I'm writing this, at least three Islamic groups have claimed the, uh, "credit" for the bombings; none of the claims, it seems, are thought particularly credible. In fact, one of the claimants, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, seems to have a habit of trying to take credit for attacks; it also tried to claim responsibility for the Madrid bombings last year along with the earlier attack in Istanbul as well as blackouts in the US and the UK. Instead,
Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, the alleged mastermind of last year's Madrid railway bombings, who also goes by the name Abu Musab al-Suri, has emerged as a suspect in the London attacks, according to unidentified investigators cited in The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday.Whoever is responsible, officialdom is taking pains to label it an "al-Qaeda style" attack, saying it has "all the earmarks" necessary to identify it as such. That isn't saying much when you come right down to it; those earmarks appear to be multiple coordinated attacks, a concept neither original, nor exclusive, to any al-Qaeda-connected group and hardly one difficult for others to adopt. (Yes, coordinated bombings are difficult to carry out, but adopting the idea of doing them isn't.) Nonetheless, the quite real possibility, probability, that this act was carried out by some variant of Islamic fanaticism is being used to establish a psychic political link from London, through Madrid, Istanbul, and Indonesia, back to September 11. (Which, of course, marks the birth of terrorism as far as we're concerned, something which might come as a surprise to people in Indonesia and the UK. Or India. Or Oklahoma City, for that matter.)
Now, in some ways, comparisons between this and 9/11 are a stretch: Fifty dead is not 3,000 dead; interruption in service in sections of the Underground is not a pair of hundred-plus-story buildings brought to the ground. (On the other hand, it's equally fair to point out that those earlier bombings in the UK, many of them laid at the feet of the Provisional IRA, the Provos, did not provoke the UK to invade Ireland. Or anywhere else.)
Yet of course in another way it is precisely the same as 9/11: a terrorist attack. Designed, intended, to instill fear and confusion. An attack against innocents, against everyday people, against "soft" targets, rather than against targets and people who hold the actual power. Calculated, cold-blooded murder, every bit as callous, as planned, as anything the CIA or any of our other favorite bogeymen have done. (A thought to the side: Does the calm planning make it worse? Or is utter indifference worse? There was a village in North Vietnam, the name of which I've long forgotten, which was considered to be the most-bombed village in the country during the Vietnam War. Crews of B-52s, having completed their missions, would fly over this village on their way back to base. If they had any bombs left, they would drop them there. It wasn't that there was anything of military significance there, it was just that the B-52s had bombs and the village was along the way. So it got bombed over and over and over. Is that kind of cruelty, inflicted with a shrug and not a thought to what was actually being done, somehow not as bad as that done deliberately and consciously? I honestly don't know, but surely each has its own pew in the Church of Evil.)
Now, I'm going to have my Ward Churchill moment here and say that something about which our much-maligned essayist was right is that none of us, or at least very few of us, have truly clean hands. Very few of us are truly innocent, free of all vestiges of guilt. When it comes to US (and UK) policies in Iraq, across the Middle East, and beyond, when it comes to the effects, the predictable - the predicted - effects, of those policies, innocence is hard to come by. It would be very difficult if not impossible to find an American who has not derived a clear economic benefit from the decades, the centuries, of political domination and economic exploitation the West has maintained over much of the rest of the world, a domination and exploitation that continues today in the policies of the World Bank and IMF, in instruments such as NAFTA and the WTO - and, if the White House has its way, in CAFTA. The power of that exploitation has rebounded to our benefit; more recently, the harm wrought by that exploitation has rebounded to our pain. We all have some amount of blood on our hands.
But something for which Churchill seemingly did not allow but we must if we're to see clearly is that shared guilt does not mean equally-distributed guilt. It's quite likely that there are several orders of magnitude of guilt separating the presidents, ministers, and assorted mucky-mucks who assembled at Gleneagles from the very guiltiest of those who died on Thursday. Frankly put, the guilt of those who have power, by the very fact of having that power, far outstrips, is simply not even measurable on the same scale as, those who do not have it, even less those who challenge it.
Still, it seems that for some even that magnitude of guilt is not enough. Already we are seeing the rumors, the too clever by half "analyses" of "telling details" and "OMIGOSH!" moments that, we are demanded to believe, clearly, undeniably, add up to the fact that the real bombers were, well, no one seems quite sure if it was MI6 or the CIA, but by gum it was one or the other! Unless it was both. Or Mossad. But it sure wasn't anybody they say it was!
One thing that has come up is the report that according to an
[Israeli] Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, ... British police warned the Israeli Embassy in London of possible terror attacks minutes before the first explosion.Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to speak at a conference at the Great Eastern hotel near the Liverpool Street Underground station, acknowledged receiving a warning from his embassy to instead "stay put," but Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom insisted that was after the initial explosion.
The key word here, appearing in the first article, is, of course, "before," and this is one piece in a chain of, if I can abuse the word far enough, "evidence" deployed by Prison Planet, one of those maddening sites that occasionally has some useful stuff but spends most of its time so wrapped up in its own black helicopter-type paranoia that the best way the government could shut it down would be by citing it as an authoritative source. Here, they apparently join with others who insist that the later denial of the initial report was "changing the news" in an act of deliberate suppression - even though the earlier story was still there for anyone who bothered to look for it.
Another part of this, again from Prison Planet, is the OMIGOSH! story that
[a] consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.This was drawn from a BBC "Five Live" (which Prison Planet mistakenly calls Radio 5) interview Thursday evening with one Peter Power, managing director of a "crisis management" firm, who said that at the exact time the bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person exercise about the Underground being bombed at the same locations as actually occurred.
To Prison Planet, this is the final nail in the coffin.
The fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. ...That is, the exercise was set up as a cover to enable government agents to carry out the bombings without getting caught. Aha! The evildoers have been revealed!
The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartamentalized government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.
The thing is, maybe it's because I have a science background, but I have a rather higher standard of proof than rumor and assertion. For example: If British police did in fact tell the Israeli Embassy to have its people "stay put" prior to the first blast, that would be significant. But did that happen? In fact, we don't know. All we do know that points that way is a statement from an unnamed Israeli government official who, if you take the story as written, said they were warned by British police of "possible terrorist attacks." Did the police say "in the next few minutes?" Did they advise Israeli officials to take any particular action (such as, for example, "stay put")? Did they point to specific intelligence? Was this a particular warning or a general one because of the G8 conference? So far as I'm aware, we know the answers to none of those questions. Maybe the worst interpretation is true. I certainly won't deny the possibility even as I deny the likelihood. But the immediate point is that the argument for a government conspiracy requires certain answers to those questions and obtains them by nothing beyond pure assumption.
As for the exercise, note first that Prison Planet distorts the "time" element. Power said that at the time of the bombings, his company was running an exercise involving bombs at those same places. But Prison Planet turns that into saying it involved the Underground "being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life." [emphasis added] That is not what Power said; he said nothing about the timing of the bombs, much less about "exact" times.
Beyond that, there is always the possibility of coincidence to explain the matching sites and overlapping times. However, the closer the match, the less likely a coincidence becomes. Still, there is another explanation right at hand that obviates the need to argue such degrees of probability: Instead of being infiltrated by government terrorists intent on killing their fellow citizens for an uncertain political gain, the plan had been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists who got involved with the company because they saw this as a good means to locate security weaknesses - since that's among the things that exercises like this are supposed to uncover - and took advantage of it in exactly the way Prison Planet is arguing the government of the UK did. Occam's Razor shouts that that is the preferable explanation.
In short, I just don't buy the "government terrorists did it" routine. Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That is a standard which has not begun to be met here.
But it seems to run that way: 9/11 was an insider job. Nick Berg was killed by the CIA. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi doesn't exist. Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset. The list goes on, lengthened at every new opportunity.
It seems that we can't tolerate moral ambiguity, we can't handle ethical complexity, we can't deal with the idea that there can be more than one set of black hats in the world (and no, kiddies, I don't mean hackers). But that world will, unhappily for us, refuse to define itself by our expectations or confine itself to our desire for simple, utter clarity. There is evil, there is destruction, there is hate in the world that can't be explained away as a tool of capitalism or Western imperialism or Republicans. I know some folks out there in the left blogsphere - I could name some - will find this hard to believe, but there are evils in the world that aren't even the result of capitalism or imperialism or Republicans.
That unavoidable ambiguity, in the end, leaves us with the act itself. It's easy, too easy, for some among us to parse morality, to go to history or abuses inflicted to find excuses for abuses received. But as I said a while back in a slightly different context, blood is blood, dead is dead, and murder is murder. There is no "political cause" here, no "greater good," no claim to be made for "liberation" or "justice," nothing but violent death, shattered glass, shredded metal, and smoke.
When we hit the very bottom line, the very moment of judgment, some things are just wrong. Abu Ghraib was wrong. Torture is wrong. The invasion of Iraq was wrong. And this was wrong. Because blood is blood. Dead is dead. Murder is murder. And it's time we grew up and acknowledged those simple facts. The faster we do it, the better off the world will be.
Updated to clarify that the warning Netanyahu said he received was from the Israeli Embassy, not directly from the British police.
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