YELLOW

A10 Saturday/Sunday, September 10 - 11, 2011 * * * * * * THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

U.S. NEWS

I have a necktie adornedwith tiny images of a rabbitpopping out of a top hat. Thetie has moved with me topostings around the world,always carefully tucked in asafe spot. The last time I woreit was Sept. 11, 2001.

We all have our relics, andthis one’s mine. Its whimsicalimage of luck and chance—

pulling a rabbitout of a hat—cutsboth ways, andtragically so. Iknow the World

Trade Center could have fallenwestward and crushed The WallStreet Journal’s headquartersacross the street where I wascovering the story. But it didn’t.Instead, others died.

Shortly after two airplanesdestroyed the Twin Towers, Iasked a man with a small boatfor a lift across the HudsonRiver to New Jersey. The dockand the Journal’s offices nearbywere choked with smoke anddebris. As a handful of us—coated white by the remnantsof the pulverized towers—slowly motored across theriver, I remember looking backat southern Manhattan andthinking this would only getworse, that old grudge matcheshad taken an ambitious turn.

On the Jersey side of theriver, triage units and ranks ofcots had been set up to receivewhat was expected to be animmense number of injured.But the cots were empty. Therewere few injured survivors inthis calamity. Mostly, therewere just the dead.

I was headed to ourcorporate campus about anhour south of New York to helpput out the paper. The train outof Newark, N.J., was packedwith workers in crisp suits anddresses standing next to thedisheveled survivors who hadoutrun the clouds of debris.The former looked worried. Thelatter had thousand-yard stares.

In the days and weeks thatfollowed, the Journal wouldbuild improvised newsroomsfirst in New Jersey, then intemporary locations inManhattan before finally

returning to our patched-upheadquarters a year later.

Like the rest of the nation,we were consumed by thecascade of events that followedthe attacks: the heartbreakinglyfutile search for survivors at theWorld Trade Center; the pursuitof the attackers; the invasion ofAfghanistan; the emergence ofanthrax in the U.S. mail; themurder of our colleague, DannyPearl, in Pakistan at the handsof the man who planned theSept. 11 attacks; the fractiousdebate on what to do aboutIraq; and the fateful invasion ofthat country, too.

Throughout all this, NewYork City was mourning, tryingto metabolize the attack on theTrade Center and the rush ofevents that followed. The siteitself was a smoldering heap ofwreckage for weeks, amammoth crime scene. Instead,many of us gravitated to themakeshift memorials outsidehospitals and churches whereleaflets taped to walls picturedmany of the nearly 3,000 killed.

Outside firehouses we signedcondolence books next tophotos of those who had died. Iremember counting the numberof dead at one station house,and wondering whether therecould be anyone left inside.Some 400 firefighters,paramedics and police officerswere killed when they stormedinto and up the buildings whileothers were running out. Thesound of bagpipes playing

“Amazing Grace” at funeralprocessions could be heard onevening newscasts for months.

There were memorablewords, too:

A mayor’s empathy andeloquence—grieving andpragmatic—caught thesentiment of the city: “This wasnot just an attack on the city ofNew York or on the UnitedStates of America. It was anattack on the very idea of afree, inclusive and civil society.”

A president gave voice to theanger of the nation, sometimesin words that risked polarizing acomplex world: “It’s going to beimportant for nations to knowthey will be held accountable forinactivity. You are either with usor you are against us in thefight against terror.”

Newspapers were filled withprofiles of victims of the attack.They were evocative andtransfixing, and recounted thedimension of the city’s loss.

I think of those profiles eachtime I see another list in thepapers of soldiers killed inAfghanistan or Iraq, the menand women writing the nextchapter in the history of theSeptember 2001 attacks. Thedeath notices are usually morebrief: name, age, rank, unit,home town. I wish we knewmore about each. There was aphoto in the paper the otherday of a widow at a militaryfuneral, her young daughter onher lap straining toward thecasket. So far more than 6,000

Americans have died in thewars, tens of thousands havebeen wounded.

In the years after the attacks,the Trade Center site becameits own battleground—hobbledat times by delays and fierce,obsessive fights over whatwould be built, how the deadwould be memorialized andwho would be allowed to praynear its grounds. When a friendof mine came home in 2010from combat tours in Iraq andAfghanistan, he was bewilderedby America. He felt the countrywas distracted by lesser things,largely oblivious to the warsand the soldiers fighting them.

So it was with considerablenational relief, and appreciationof those soldiers, that wordcame in May that Osama binLaden had been shot and killed.The al Qaeda leader andmastermind of the Sept. 11attacks wouldn’t live to see this10th anniversary. The nationfelt catharsis, and deep respectfor those who had pulled it off.

The celebrations gotawkward at times. Revelersoutside the White House andmany other venues climbedlampposts, draped flags andshouted out the supremacy ofthe U.S., exulting in the killing.

I remember thinking thatthere’s a not-so-thin linebetween thankfulness andtriumphalism. America wasprojecting this image to anervous world eager for U.S.leadership and worried that thelegacy of Sept. 11 stillpreoccupies the country,keeping it from addressingother, tricky global dangers.

Down at the old World Tradesite, meanwhile, constructionwas finally in full swing, fillinga vast hole in Manhattan. WhenI visited the grounds Friday,new buildings were rising fast.The scene felt optimistic.

As for my necktie with therabbit popping out of the hat, Ithought about framing it andhanging it on a wall. But in theend I kept it wrapped in a safespot where I can bump into itnow and again.

If I look closely, I can stillsee tiny bits of white dustcaught in its threads—specks ofall that happened that day.

BY JOHN BUSSEY

When the Towers Came DownAn Eyewitness to Destruction Reflects on the Course of Events Triggered by 9/11

Atta’s Sister Won’t Dwell on ‘Why’CAIRO—For some families

touched by the 9/11 attacks, Sun-day’s anniversary is an occasionfor forgetting rather than remem-brance.

Ten years after MohammedAtta flew American Airlines Flight11 into the north tower of theWorld Trade Center, his sisterstoutly refuses to discuss withthe media a tragedy that wasfoisted onto her life.

“I cannot forget,” said Monael-Amir, a consultant of internalmedicine at Dar al-Fouad Hospi-tal, one of Egypt’s most presti-gious medical centers. “But thiswas 10 years ago.”

The Atta family was not al-ways this circumspect. In theyears following the attacks, Mr.Atta’s father, who is also namedMohammed, invited reporters towatch him cycle through whatappeared to be a whirlwind ofgrief, at first claiming his son wasstill alive and the victim of anelaborate Israeli plot. In themonths following the attack, theelderly lawyer referred to his sonin the present tense, telling theBBC and other news outlets thathe was still awaiting his son’s bi-monthly telephone call.

By 2005, the elder Mr. Attaappeared to have accepted, andindeed embraced, the loss of hisson. When a CNN producer talkedto him shortly after deadly at-tacks in London in July that year,he boasted that his son’s heroismhad marked the advent of a 50-year religious war. He demanded$5,000 for a televised interview—money he said would go towardfunding further terrorist strikesagainst the West. CNN declinedthe interview but reported the

conversation on its website.In several other interviews, the

senior Mr. Atta described his sonas gentle, quiet and apolitical—aman incapable of organizing andexecuting a terrorist attack thatwould redraw the geopoliticalmap. In fact, Mr. Atta is widelyacknowledged as one of the prin-cipal masterminds behind the9/11 attacks.

Born in September 1968 in anindustrial northern Egyptian citycalled Kafr el-Sheikh, his familylater moved to Egypt’s capital,where Mr. Atta studied architec-ture at Cairo University beforemoving to Hamburg, Germany, topursue a degree in urban plan-ning. It was in Hamburg that Mr.Atta fell in with a crowd of mili-tant Islamists. His new, conserva-tive friends urged him to move toAfghanistan where in 1999, Mr.Atta attended a training courseat a camp run by al Qaeda.

The senior Mr. Atta died fouryears ago “as anyone else woulddie, in his home,” Dr. Amir said.

She and her sister Azza, a zo-ology professor at the Universityof Cairo, have figured in severalchronicles of Mr. Atta’s life, buthaven‘t been quoted. Some whospoke with the senior Mr. Attahave speculated that his daugh-ters’ academic success may haveadded to his son’s alienation.

But the perennial question of“why?” is one that Dr. el-Amirstill declines to speculate on.

“My father was the only onewho spoke to the media,” shesaid on the phone in fluent Eng-lish. Declining further comment ina brief conversation, she said,“None of this is my problem.”

—Matt Bradley

Mr. Atta flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower.

Getty

Images

DAY AFTER: The Sept. 12, 2001, front page of The Wall Street Journal

9|11ADecadeAfter

CM Y K CompositeCompositeMAGENTA CYAN BLACK

P2JW253000-6-A01000-1--------XE

P2JW253000-6-A01000-1--------XE