Homeland, p.7
Homeland, page 7
The secret, Eco thought, was to be found in the fact that the film was made up as it was shot. The script was only half-written when shooting began, which meant that no one on set, not even the director himself, could know with certainty what the characters would say or which of her two lovers Ingrid Bergman would choose. Forced to improvise, the director, cast, and crew drew on the various storytelling and filmmaking clichés they had at hand, one after another. Crucially, they didn’t just choose a few of them. “When the choice of the tried and true is limited,” Eco wrote, “the result is a trite or mass-produced film, or simply kitsch. But when the tried and true repertoire is used wholesale, the result is…a sense of dizziness, a stroke of brilliance.” Casablanca used all of the clichés, all at once, and this was the key to its genius. Eco cataloged them: the location, Morocco (“the Exotic”), “Unhappy Love,” a “Passage to the Promised Land,” the “Magic Key” (the visa every character chases), the “Fatal Game” (roulette), the “magic circle” (Rick’s Place) where “everything can (and does) happen,” the “Last Outpost on the Edge of the Desert,” and the “Triumph of Purity” at the end (only those whose intentions are pure can have what they want). To an extent unmatched by any previous film, Casablanca piled every storytelling cliché in the book on top of one another, and it was rewarded with a place in film history that remains unassailable today. “When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths,” Eco wrote. “Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us.”[59]
Though it would take weeks to unfold, something similar started to happen on television and in the media more generally around 6:00 p.m. on September 11. That’s when President Bush arrived back in Washington, D.C. After a day that produced many Hollywood-style images of destruction and mayhem but refused to follow anything like a Hollywood script, here, finally, was a scene that could make people feel good. The president’s frightening, improvised odyssey around the country was over, and here he was exiting the helicopter, saluting the Marine at the bottom of the staircase, and striding toward the White House, just as so many presidents before him had done so many times. Other officials had prepared the ground and set the tone for his arrival. “There is a pervasive sense of anger among the military officers I’ve talked to today,” a reporter told Peter Jennings. “They have mentioned, again and again, Pearl Harbor….They are ready to go to war, there is a sense of war here at the Pentagon.”[60] William Webster, the former director of both the FBI and the CIA, phoned in to urge that America’s intelligence agencies not be weighed down with oversight as they went hunting for the perpetrators. “Professionals are very willing to do their job under court orders and the appropriate procedures,” he said. “All that they ask is that they not be unduly burdened by restrictions that in times like this get in the way of finding the culprits and bringing them to justice.”[61] The chairman of the Joint Chiefs came on the air. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, breaking the fourth wall to address Americans directly, “your armed forces are ready.” He was followed by Senator Carl Levin, who said that terrorists “are the common enemy of the civilized world.” Levin, in turn, was followed by Senator John Warner, a Republican, who said that “Congress stands behind our president, and the president speaks with one voice for this entire nation.” As for Bush himself, an ABC reporter described him as “agitated and angry.” Bush’s press secretary added that “the president is very eager to make plain tonight that his mood is retaliatory….We will find these people and they will suffer the consequences of taking on this nation.”[62]
For an exciting moment, it even seemed that the terrorists were already on the receiving end of America’s anger. Just before 6:00 p.m., CNN reported that explosions were going off in Kabul, Afghanistan. The network’s international correspondent had heard perhaps a dozen blasts around the city’s perimeter, as well as aircraft overhead, and he had seen tracer fire shooting up from the ground. Based on his experiences reporting in Belgrade and Baghdad—in other words, based on his intimate knowledge of the savage wilderness outside America’s borders—the correspondent judged that the detonations sounded more than anything like “large missiles.” It was the middle of the night in Kabul, and so CNN could only report what its correspondent could see and hear from the roof of the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, but it certainly appeared to him that the Afghan defense forces had detected a “threat in the air.” There was a fire on the horizon. It had begun as a “faint yellow” but was now a “bright orange blazing.” Detonations were going off in “multiple areas,” reverberating off the mountains that surrounded Kabul, and rockets were being launched into the sky. By this point, it was widely known that American officials suspected that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks in the United States, and it was also known that bin Laden had established his base of operations in Afghanistan. In addition to the fire burning on the horizon and the explosions pounding the area near Kabul’s airport, CNN’s reporter could see other flashes reflecting off the underside of clouds farther out. He allowed that those flashes could just be lightning, but one couldn’t discount the possibility that the bombardment was occurring across a wider area.
CNN then shifted over to one of its political correspondents, who was on the line with the former secretary of defense William Cohen. She finally put into words the suspicion—the hope, rather—that had prompted CNN to pay attention to Kabul in the first place: “Is this something that is likely to be the United States retaliating, which I think is what immediately comes to people’s minds?” Cohen threw cold water on the idea, correctly pointing out that the U.S. was most likely still in the intelligence gathering stage of formulating its response and further noting that Afghanistan had been in the grip of a civil war for some time. The simplest explanation for the fighting was that it was just part of that ongoing war (as it would turn out, that was also the correct explanation). This did not satisfy CNN, whose reporter pressed Cohen. She had just got off the phone with George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, a man with the magnificently American name Lawrence Eagleburger, and he had told her that what the country needed to do “was strike against countries like Afghanistan that are harboring terrorists, and not wait to find out exactly who was responsible for today’s atrocities.” Cohen rejected that idea as well, but CNN pushed on, speaking next to the Republican senator Orrin Hatch. “Again,” she began, “we’re stressing that we have no idea who is behind these attacks in Kabul,” when what she was really stressing was the opposite, the possibility that America’s missiles had already started to fly. “But if this were the West,” she continued, enlarging the aggrieved party from a single country to an entire civilization, “if this were the United States, would it be appropriate to retaliate so quickly?” Hatch replied, more or less, that it would. He’d tried to warn people about bin Laden all the way back in 1996, after all, when he went on Meet the Press.[63]
The skirmish in Kabul, being totally unrelated to what was happening in the United States, did not actually satisfy the hunter myth’s requirement for swift and violent retribution, but that did not stop the television networks from pretending that it did. That kind of thing happened a lot over the following weeks. In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi pointed out that in its September 13 issue, Newsweek ran a photograph of a firefighter carrying a little girl to safety with the caption, “Horror at home.” But the photograph wasn’t taken on September 11—it was from the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.[64] It wasn’t as though Newsweek lacked for actual photographs of September 11 to choose from, but contemporary images didn’t tell the kind of story that Americans had been conditioned by their own mythology to want: a story about women and children being rescued by men. September 11 couldn’t provide images of firefighters pulling little girls out of the flames, though, because in addition to the fact that very few people survived to be pulled out of the rubble, a majority of the workers at the financial firms that dominated the upper floors at the Twin Towers, as well as those working for the military at the Pentagon, were men, and almost all of the victims of September 11 were adults. Men accounted for 75 percent of the dead, and just eight children, all of whom were aboard the hijacked planes, were killed in the attacks. Newsweek’s publication of a six-year-old photograph of a totally different event was a kind of work-around, a way to give the people what they wanted even if reality refused to cooperate.
Faludi went on to observe that the mythological tableau of a pious mother tending to her cabin hearth while a husband stood guard with a rifle in hand also seemed to govern the kinds of lifestyle pieces that the media churned out after the attacks. Virginia Heffernan, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, believed the attacks had sent women rushing to the altar, casting off whatever ambivalence they might previously have felt toward holy matrimony. “The old indecisiveness comes to seem out of sync with the country’s renewed sense of purpose,” Heffernan wrote. “It seems somehow unpatriotic.”[65] Another story from the newspaper’s style section observed that while single women might previously have understood themselves to be happy adults with rewarding careers and rich social lives, the attacks had demonstrated that what they really felt was loneliness. If these reformed women wanted to settle down, they were truly going to need to settle, or, in the article’s words, “reprioritize the rigid criteria they apply to selecting a mate.”[66] Men weren’t exempt from this kind of patronizing advice, either. The Washington Post observed that the “touchy-feely sensitive male” was out. America might have had its fun demonizing alpha males as antisocial and violent, but metrosexuals weren’t going to win the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It was time to find a new appreciation for those strong men who had been “psychopathologized by howling fems.”[67]
But just as Newsweek’s Oklahoma City photograph didn’t reflect the reality of what took place on September 11, this flurry of articles about women’s new desire to marry did not reflect any concrete change in Americans’ romantic practices. Divorce rates briefly dropped after the attacks, which makes sense: People confronted with a destabilizing catastrophe like September 11 are unlikely to want to add more instability to their lives, even if those lives are unsatisfying. But marriage rates didn’t spike; in fact, they didn’t change at all.[68] Heffernan’s friends might well have bemoaned their solitude for a period of time, but there was no wider rush to the altar.
September 11 also prompted an immediate discussion on television about how many rules America would be willing to break in its pursuit of revenge. This is one of the most important traits of Indian fighters like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and General Custer, the willingness to go beyond what polite society permits so as to ensure that polite society survives. Civilized war, after all, is for civilized people. If you want to win a war against barbarians, you have to be willing to behave like one. Just after 6:15 p.m., ABC’s local affiliate in Washington interviewed Eric Holder, who had previously served as deputy attorney general for the Justice Department and would go on to become attorney general under President Obama. “It has long been a belief,” the anchor said, “that this nation will not assassinate a foreign leader or a target. Is there a different set of circumstances that come into play as a result of today’s terrorist attacks?”
It is worth pausing here for a moment to observe just how strange this question was, especially because it is such an instinctive and natural question for Americans to ask. Bin Laden, by that point the day’s prime suspect, was an international pariah, a man forced to shelter in one of the world’s poorest countries. Meanwhile, the United States had at its disposal the strongest military in world history, plus the unadulterated goodwill of the international community. Pressuring the Taliban to hand over bin Laden in exchange for its continued survival was not likely to be difficult. Indeed, the Taliban made exactly that offer in October 2001; the United States turned it down.[69] At the very least, it would have been no more difficult for the United States to formally declare war on Afghanistan and then use the overwhelming might of its conventional military to capture or kill al-Qaeda’s leader. Both of those options would have been well within the boundaries of American law, and there was no reason to think that either option would fail.
What’s strange, then, is that Holder’s interviewer jumped immediately to an unnecessary third option, in which America would mete out justice beyond the boundaries of its own laws. Holder, one of the most powerful lawyers in the country, took up this third option with enthusiasm. “Federal law prohibits the assassination of individuals or leaders of countries,” he began, “but federal law does permit us to go after people for defensive purposes, and a person like bin Laden, given what has happened today and what he has done to this country in the past, I think certainly would fall outside that prohibition of assassination.” Legal semantics aside, the most obvious interpretation of Holder’s words was that despite America’s legal prohibition on assassination, the gravity of bin Laden’s actions justified killing him. That’s certainly what Holder’s interviewer understood him to be saying. “So if President Bush gives the order,” the anchor said, “Osama bin Laden can be assassinated legally within the parameters of United States law?” “Yeah,” Holder said, before engaging in one last bit of hairsplitting. “I wouldn’t use the term ‘assassination.’ ”[70] He might as well have winked.
Another strange aspect of the Holder interview was that no government official had yet confirmed that bin Laden was the architect of the attacks, though anonymous intelligence and Bush administration figures had voiced their suspicions throughout the day. The public knew almost nothing concrete about the attacks beyond what they had been able to see on their television screens; hard facts about who had carried out the plan, or where they came from, or how they did it remained obscure.
The simple version of the story that would be pieced together in the following weeks and months goes like this: At some point in the mid-1990s, a Pakistani extremist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to think about using commercial aircraft to attack the United States. Though he was not a formal member of al-Qaeda, he hoped that Osama bin Laden’s group could supply the money and operatives needed to carry out the operation. Bin Laden, born to an aristocratic Saudi family in 1957, had founded al-Qaeda in 1988, and by 1996 he was living in Afghanistan and raising money to train mujahideen fighters. KSM met bin Laden in Afghanistan and proposed what would come to be known as the “planes operation,” and bin Laden decided to support it in April 1999.
After selecting the targets in collaboration with KSM and deciding it would be a suicide mission, bin Laden began choosing people who would put the plan into action. Some of the operatives trained in Afghanistan and then received instruction about the United States in Karachi, Pakistan. From there, the operatives made their way to America via Kuala Lumpur, and another group of aspiring jihadists based in Hamburg joined up as well. By early 2000, members of the plot were arriving in the United States and undertaking flight training in Oklahoma, Florida, Minneapolis, and Arizona. Bin Laden and KSM also recruited operatives who would serve as the “muscle,” that is, carry out the hijacking and keep passengers at bay while the pilots took control of the plane. These operatives began to arrive in the United States in April 2001. By July, all nineteen operatives were inside the country. Fifteen came from Saudi Arabia, one from Lebanon, one from Egypt, and two from the United Arab Emirates. On the morning of September 11, they boarded four separate flights, two departing from Boston, one from Newark, and one from Washington, D.C. All four planes were headed for California. Armed with knives, box cutters, and pepper spray, they hijacked their flights shortly after takeoff and then diverted the planes to their final destinations.
The time required to compile this information, however, could not be allowed to delay America’s response, and heading into the evening, different parts of the federal government began to present themselves to television cameras in formal tableaux of mourning, unity, determination, and resolve. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert spoke on the steps of the Capitol, with members of Congress behind him, and glowered, really glowered, while saying that “those who brought forth this evil deed will pay the price,” his rhetoric simultaneously recalling old Westerns and the Bible. The camera pulled back as he spoke, and by the time it had finished zooming out, one could see thirty-one different people on the screen. At least twenty-nine of them were men, and all of them appeared to be white. Hastert asked for a moment of silence, after which the assembled legislators began to disperse until someone broke out with the opening strains of “God Bless America.” At the end of the song, Congress applauded itself.[71]
Around 8:30 p.m., President Bush arrived on the screen to speak from the Oval Office. His travels were finally over. Here was the president as he was meant to be seen, seated at his gleaming oak desk in the room that symbolized his power, with an American flag behind one shoulder and a flag bearing the country’s seal behind the other. Peter Jennings introduced the speech as a kind of political climax to the day’s events, summarizing Bush’s travels and then emphasizing the significance of what he was about to say. “The president is back in Washington now,” he said, “and there has been no time in his presidency, and there may never be a time like this again, when it has been so important what he says to the country, because I think we all know at moments like this the country looks to the president of the United States for understanding, for knitting the country together. Some presidents do it brilliantly, and some do not. Here is Mr. Bush.”
