My Recollections of 11th September 2001

Ten years after the "9/11" attack, the chief memory I have is of being unable to comprehend the scale of what had just happened.

I had slept late, then had lunch/breakfast, then turned on the television to find the usual programmes were replaced by news coverage, and the towers of the World Trade Centre were shown burning like two macabre candles. After a few minutes, they showed the news helicopter's footage of the second collision, and pictures of the crash site in Washington DC.

I wasn't able to understand the scale of the buildings. I wasn't able to understand the scale of the jet fuel explosion. I wasn't able to understand that it could take more than an hour to evacuate a building. The concept of a building that took that long to evacuate seemed ludicrous to me. And I wasn't able to understand that the fires had left people trapped above the impact points. I also wasn't able to understand the radius of the effects of the collapse of the towers.

When the towers collapsed, at first I thought that all I had seen was the destruction of inanimate structures, and symbols of US economic hegemony in the world. Given my political views, that seemed like something to celebrate! It was tragic, of course, that so many people must have died in the actual impact, and that was not something to celebrate, and I would never have bought the destruction at that cost, but at the same time it seemed like a great symbolic blow.

Only after listening to the news anchors' explanations subsequently did I realise that I had seen on my television screen an event that involved the deaths of thousands of people at once (at that stage, they were still talking in terms of around 6,000 possible casualties, later the true figure turned out to be about half that), and that it was a hideous tragedy of immense proportions. I felt sick that in that initial moment I had felt more joy than sorrow, because I had not understood that there could still be people alive in the buildings when they started to collapse. The destruction of an inanimate symbol might be celebrated, but the destruction of so many lives could never be, and that dissonance between what I had felt when I thought it was the first situation, and what I felt when I finally understood what the true situation was, remains painful for me, along with the sympathetic pain for those who lost loved ones in the tragedy.

Later that day, I had to take the dog for a walk - some things need doing whatever has happened in the rest of the world. As I was walking out to the common, a bright rainbow shone overhead - a phenomenon so often taken as a symbol of hope or divine intervention in the myths and beliefs of our forefathers. It was astonishingly beautiful and quite jarring in contrast to the feelings I carried with me from the news that had been broadcast to my home, and the feelings that resulted from it. All I could think of was to wish that that symbol had been sent where it was needed most, to the people of New York and Washington DC.

That evening, I logged on and discussion had already started in various email discussion groups I was in. I made, even at that early stage, the prediction that many many more people would be killed this time by US and British forces, as a consequence of the terrorists' actions. At that stage, I was still supremely sceptical that it even was terrorism, and the conspiracy theories about using it as a pretext for war were already surfacing in my mind (I now think that there probably was not a conspiracy, but I am always suspicious of official explanations). At that point, the media speculation was still focussed on Palestinian terrorism (fuelled by the fact that there was news footage of Palestinians celebrating the attack), and I was sure that thousands more would die in revenge attacks, that Israel would use it as a pretext for punitive activities against the Palestinian people, and that the tragedy had only just begun.

That was how my day ended: with the anticipation of greater tragedy still to come, not on US soil, but in the Middle East. When the names of Al Qaida, Taliban and Afghanistan (and from US sources, Iraq and Saddam Hussein) started to emerge as the assumed culprits, it became clear where the further deaths I had predicted on the evening of September 11th 2001 would take place.