Seven Days; Terrorist Attacks: How They Changed Our Lives

(static) Hi I'm Stephanie Fowler and this is Seven Days. Our topic this week: the terrorist

attacks, the change they will force on our lives, and the damage they're inflicting on an already struggling state and national economy. [theme music] [theme music] [theme music] Let's meet this week's panel. Richard Aguirre is the state editor for the Salem Statesman journal. David Reinhart is an associate editor at The Oregonian. Hasso Hering is the editor of the Albany Democrat-Herald, and Mark Zusman is the editor of Willamette Week in Portland. Everyone knows that our lives as individuals and as a nation changed forever on Tuesday, September 11th, but none of us is quite sure just what form that change will take. We're still trying to absorb the unfathomable loss of more than 6000 Americans. We're still trying to understand how anyone could hate us that much. We're still trying to

figure out what an appropriate response should be, and we're still cataloguing the wounds to our collective identity. Richard, when people say America won't ever be the same, what do you think they mean? [Richard] I think they mean a range of things that hit us, not only as a society, not only had an effect our economy, on the nation's psyche, and probably the sense of who we are. Many people in this part of the country, and in the and in the state would identify themselves first as Oregonians and I don't think that happened over the last ten days. I think we're more seeking the identity as a single nation, as Americans. But the impacts that are gonna be being felt in Oregon are in some sense gonna be hard to differentiate between the impacts that'll be happening anywhere else. A couple that I would like to mention of the top is of course the possibility and the probability that Oregonians are gonna soon be dying in a war on terrorism, as George Bush has described it. The effects that will be felt on changes in security, places like Portland International Airport, Salem Airport, and other places,

and of course the economic impacts of a week that just ended with the worst stock market losses since 1940, and a 14% drop in value that hit northwest stocks particularly hard. So it's so hard to extricate, between what's happening nationally and in Oregon, but people are gonna feel it and feel it for a long time. I think, Stephanie and Richard, I think that most fundamental change has taken place in the hearts of many people, to the extent that what used to matter a great deal to many of us suddenly doesn't matter much all. I mean some things that have to do with possessions and with careers and with advancements and that sort of thing, I mean nowadays when you think about that sort of stuff, you think, really, who cares? The things that care, that seem to me me at least to be a lot more important are the recognition of time that that you, that you can you can lose it any time, that is, you can lose your life at any time, I mean everybody intellectually would've known that all the time, but this I think has really shocked people into realizing

that, and the kinds of things that you can't really easily replace, such as a relationship with your family and your home and all those kinds of things, what you do with your own time with your free time, what you do at work too, but mostly what to do with your own time, stuff that you want want to do, that suddenly I think has become much more important. And I think you'll find in the next, I don't know, for as long as this impression lasts, you'll find that people will act based on that impression, based on that change, they'll be less striving, they'll be less contentious maybe in public life and in every other way and they'll be more inward directed and more toward more paying attention to what it is that makes their lives worth living. It's a little bit too soon after the events of September 11th to to really have a crystal clear sense of what the long term meaning of this will be, but it- I doubt there's anybody in this studio or any of our listeners who doesn't believe that this is ultimately an extremely pivotal moment in American and world history, and you know I was recalling to think about the

point you were making, Hasso, in the '60s when John Kennedy was assassinated and the phrase was used about the end of Camelot, an expression of talk about this end of this most romantic notion of the fulfillment of the American dream that doesn't doesn't compare, I think, to it, to any extent to the notion to the sense of vulnerability that Americans now face. And it's particularly stark given, I think, as Hasso you're alluding to, that it comes so soon, twelve months, after a sense of absolute invulnerability on the part of America, an economy that was stronger than any in the history of the globe. A geopolitical situation in which we were the only superpower. That has all been shattered, you could argue, in a few hours on September 11th, and it strikes me that while it is hard to sort of look forward, and whether long term that will be a return to the spirituality that you allude to, that this is, without a doubt, the most important historical moment in my lifetime.

Oh, I think it pales in comparison to anything in my life, and I think if you ask a lot of the folks who were around at the time of Pearl Harbor and even through World War II, it pales because the American homeland has been hit, and we are not facing, as has been said often, an enemy with a face, and it's an enemy that is worldwide, that is- that seems to have insinuated itself deep in our society, and we're not quite sure even right- even yet how we're going to handle all this and [inaudble] the military strikes that will inevitably happen are the easy part, really, [inaudible] full of as much loss as they will be but how do we root out the- root out the

cells in this country that we are- we are now learning exist and are nicely financed? Well, I think you'll find,David, that people are likely to overlook in some ways when they remember that the particular barbarious attack and by the way, one of the things that I think has made this change so profound is the particular nature of this attack. I mean people have been- people all around the world have been been bombed, have been- railway stations bombed, hundreds of people killed at one time, and so on, but the the particular cruelty and the barbarity of running you know populated air planes or people with I mean airplanes with people on them into buildings and then having thousands of people inside those buildings perish at the same time, that I think is is unprecedented as far as I know but I think what what what that particular, what the nature of this act does is it will sort of take the edge off certain measures that I think the country will have to take in order to do what, David what you talk about: trying to find the kinds of terrorists or the terrorists who represent the threat.

We know, at least we suspect, that not all the terrorists died in this attack. These people planned, as far as we can tell from the papers, planned this thing for years. Certainly there are others, probably in this country, also planning similar things and what makes most of us worried is that the next thing will have to be bigger to make any kind of impression and the point is we need to find those people before they get to do that. Don't you think that the gravity of the situation is exacerbated also because you know the adage of fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me...You know it strikes me that we should've known this was coming. There is a long standing history of terrorist attacks outside of the United States. There's certainly no ignorance on the part of sentient people in the United States that there are a lot of people who don't like us. There have been innumerous congressional studies and other intelligence reports indicating the ability of a terrorist to do what they did, and it strikes me that I think there is almost this collective sense of

how could we have been so stupid to let this take place and to not listen to what we have been listening to because for the last ten years instead of listening to those concerns we have been engaged in pursuing other interests, well frankly, because we've had other priorities of course and I mean if you look back on just a couple weeks ago the debate over the so called Social Security "lock box" and does really pale in comparison to what's going on now, but there were people who were sounding the warning about this long ago. We all remember stories during the millennium and the threats that were averted and the people that were trying to sneak in through Vancouver with explosive devices so I think there were people who are trying to sound the alarm. It just wasn't as big a priority for many people including our leaders. It might be a bit of a parallel here although i believe it is a pale one that that with the constant warnings that we get in the northwest especially about the big earthquake that is going to come. We have been told over and over again that tens of thousands of people are going to die in in the populated parts of our region when those ten point or whatever it is on the Richter

scale earthquake hits us as it did five hundred years ago or something along those lines. And yet does anybody worry about it? No, not all. Do people do very much about it? Not not much. They strengthen a bridge here and maybe refurbish a building there but nobody's in a panic about. It nobody's really urgently concerned about it. Nobody stores ten weeks of food as we've been advised to do because it'll take that long to get the infrastructure moving again. Nobody does any of that stuff even though we've been warned over and over again. It takes a dramatic, a really dramatic reminder such as we just had to make people pay attention. Well I agree and here we are with that. We have had, if you, if you think back on the last number of years, we have had some dramatic incidents: the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 the Cole [inaudible] the explosion on the USS Cole in 1998. Now perhaps they weren't big enough to engender this kind of response on the part of the administration of that day. Maybe they should have and maybe

if we had looked and looked coldly at it we might have responded but I don't think anybody right today is interested in going back and casting blame. It's time to really move forward because we're going to have enough hard questions to answer [inaudible] in this connection you know it seems to me that the tough part is going to be trying to channel this general suspicion or this general alertness I should say or awareness that we all have. Channel it in the right direction, channel it away from the sort of direction that we've seen in very isolated instances including in Oregon where in one case some people wearing a turban were harassed at a rest stop outside of Eugene on Interstate Five, where in the mid-valley of the [inaudible] of the Willamette Valley a doctor with a Muslim name has seen his patients disappear because they don't want to go to him anymore even though his patients, the ones that come forward, say he's a wonderful guy, he's a caring man and he looks at their body really well. And of course that's the sort of thing that of course just yesterday the incident on the Northwest Orient, in a Northwest flight from

Detroit where four Arab Americans were denied access to the plane because other passengers said we don't wanna fly with them and the airline sided with a majority of passengers. Except in this case here's the thing: you're standing in a line at an airplane. I mean look there's just picture this you're stand there after this happens. Everybody's nervous and everybody's worried and suddenly four guys who look middle eastern come join the line. They don't seem to be attached to anybody supposing they're not. Are you going to take a chance, no matter how how tolerant you are no matter how you despise profiling anything of that kind? You say well you know I don't know, I think maybe I'll just step out of the line. It is, is that unreasonable? Is it unreasonable to be suspicious or worried? I, the other night, I came out of a building. The parking lot attendant was of middle eastern extraction and the guy that I was with and I took special pains to say hello because this must be an awful time for innocent, for

those people who've had nothing to do with this. On the other hand there...We're going to be learning over the next weeks that these networks are so [inaudible] they're so deep and part of our lives. Should we simply ignore that reality? It's...I don't think... I mean how do we balance that, and what are willing to sacrifice in terms of our freedoms and our civil liberties in order to maybe not assure our security but at least give us a sense of security? And should there be a difference between profiling in an airport 10 days after this happened and murdering someone happens to be wearing a turban at a gas station which is what happened in Arizona [inaudible] there's a range of responses and I would guess what I would say is a more sophisticated response: the fact that a few of these people who ended up boarding these kinds that hijacked were on alert lists, who had been sought

for questioning and arrest indicates a major lapse of security. It seems to me that that's a major level first, but something like profiling...it's easy for people who are not potentially affected to say we have to put up with a little bit of their loss because of the four panelists here I'd be a kind of person who they would take a look at and as someone who's Mexican American but who's been asked many times, 'Are you Iranian?' It does resonate more with me because your bags aren't gonna be searched. My bags might be searched, especially if I don't shave for a couple of days [inaudible] so it is easy to say we'll have to put up with a little bit because your luggage isn't going to be searched. You're not going to get the crossway looks, and you're not going to have the flight attendant paying extra attention to you. You know one of the most, I thought, important and frankly strategic things that the president has done since September Eleventh was his visit the to Muslim Cultural Center in which, you know, he made it clear symbolically that this is not a war against the Islamic religion. This is, this is a battle against terrorists who at least as far as

they can tell appear to be from Arab American descent, but in two weeks since your favorite editorial page in the New York Times described us as a post complacency America, there clearly is going to be an attempt to tighten up and in some cases to challenge some of our very civil liberties and i think it's very important for all of us particularly as journalists to be careful not to go too far in one direction or another either saying that there cannot be any breaks in any attempt to challenge this in the pursuit of these terrorists or that there can't be any change. I mean one of the changes they're talking about is the ability to deport, to detain immigrants before you decide whether to arrest them for forty eight as opposed to twenty four hours. In my mind that's not an unreasonable response. They're talking about loosening wiretap laws. I don't know what the details are yet, but it seems to me it's incumbent upon us to get a clear sense of exactly what they're talking about before we with a broad brush say that we can't do this or we could...One other point you know there's a wonderful book that's written by a journalist who used to live in Oregon who now works for the Wall

Street Journal named Gregg Zachary called The Global Me who points out that the financial strength of this country forget you know how it feels how we feel about it in terms of whether or not it makes us feel good, the financial strength of this country is the great melting pot, the fact that this country unlike no other in the history of the globe has been able to embrace different cultures and different traditions and frankly to some extent it is what threatens the Osama Bin Ladens of the world. We can't loose hold of the need to embrace that, that that is our strength and I think within that we're going to have to work out the details. I think Mark the whole point, and you alluded to that just now, is to be reasonable about the whole thing when you have...I mean you can construct all kinds of thought experiments so you can have somebody who you know looks middle eastern be at an airline counter who has not shaved say two or three days to take your example, and you take a little old lady with blue hair: which one is going to be subjected to the more intensive questioning about her intentions and who packed

her bags and all that kind of stuff? Well, and if there is a difference in the treatment of these two people is that particularly unreasonable? It is not unreasonable, I submit, until an airliner gets hijacked by two or three blue haired old ladies, [inaudible] and when that happens of course we have to change again but in the meantime i think you ought to pay some attention to what the reality is and I think the reality so far as we've been reading about in any case was that the, that the terror network that we're talking about is of middle eastern origin at least well it is working of middle eastern origin so it makes sense to try to have some middle eastern component to the investigation of that or to the effort to counteract it. It just makes it makes no sense to ignore that altogether and to subject...I mean well no it makes no sense to ignore it altogether. There are certain things that have to be done in order to be fair [inaudible] anybody would advocate reasonably that it be ignored. The only thing that I'm suggesting is that we have now reached a stage of sophistication in this country with the

advanced electronic technology to be able to eavesdrop on calls right now, to be able to search phone records and computer records and if our administration which is now saying with confidence they know who did it and where they are I think the only thing that's that i'm suggesting is that we should be more targeted in our approach and not cast such a wide net that we infringe on rights of people to travel freely and free association in this country. I'm sure you're not going to get any disagreement out of us on any of that. That makes perfect sense and that's the reasonable approach, to try to get the technological answer first of all and try to detect hijackers and assassins and bombers and all that, try to detect them if at all possible. But you know we've been told about the difficulty in that approach and I mean there's the whole encryption issue that has to do with the computer communications and with privacy issues and all that sort of stuff and it seems to me that if we get too much involved in a debate and hung up on that sort of thing that a debate on just exactly how far we can go,

all kinds of things can go on in the next year or six months that we don't want to go on. [inaudible] sacrifices that that every citizen the country would really, is probably going to be required to make in terms of their freedom and their own sense of privacy vis a vis the activities of the federal government law enforcement agencies. Well i think if we take the El Al model the Israeli airline, the Israeli airline model we are definitely going to be all of us prone to more questioning. There are interviews that you go through in that, I understand, sometimes coming, sometimes going, where they can last up of the forty five minutes, a half hour to forty five minutes, and some people will be more prone to being interviewed than others and that's part of it. I think a lot of this we've

had a good run of a number of decades being concerned about our individual rights and, and kind of focusing on are our individual and group grievances and not looking at the larger whole and I think that ended in some way on the on the the eleventh of September, and we are going to be much more concerned about the larger public good or we're...and maybe the voices of caution will have their day for a while, maybe until...You know realistically I don't think there's an American who's gonna view having to spend another thirty minutes at the airport frankly as a sacrifice. I mean I'm gonna feel safer on a plane if I have to do that. I think the sacrifices that perhaps are implicit and perhaps are raising some concerns I think we talked about a little bit, but I'm thinking of for example during the sixties when you talk about sacrifices when an expansion of

wiretap laws or one where intrusion by the federal government into people who opposed the Vietnam War or go back further than that, who were in favor of civil rights and had their lives pried upon. If there are people in this country who believe that we shouldn't go to war against the terrorists, part of what makes this country great is the ability for those people to talk whether they're right or wrong, and if the expansion of our law enforcement mechanism somehow limits their ability to express themselves in that way in my mind that's the kind of sacrifice that I think will create a bit of the backlash. And I think Mark I think we have progressed now to the point where that is likely to be impossible that sort of thing is going to be impossible to do. We've already seen even in this upwelling a lot of popular support and unity around the country we have seen people not be afraid to step forward and say, look i think we ought to go slow or we ought to do something else and so on. I think one of these things that this whole issue has brought to the forefront that nobody paid any attention to and in fact of the word has not come up at least that i ever heard of before

is "homeland defense." I mean that seems like something out of the thirties or the forties, it just seems... seems but it is something that especially in connection with other problems Oregon might benefit from in the sense that we might be more prepared for all kinds of things once we start thinking about the sorts of things that we have to do in this connection but that also might be useful in others: the earthquake I mentioned or some giant fire if we ever have one again and that sort of thing. I mean the storing of supplies, the coordination of emergency people and all that kind of stuff. That happens now on paper pretty much and it's on a shelf somewhere and nobody pays attention, will get some new attention here. I'm not optimistic that that would be the case. I think that would be great if it were. I mean Salem, the city of Salem, the voters have twice turned down what i think would have been a very reasonable request by firefighters to upgrade the emergency systems that they have to add more equipment to add more firefighters to add more police officers. We've got lower levels now than we've had in decades [inaudible] tomorrow it would pass, I'll bet. Do you really think so? I do. I guess the

question is will it, would it pass six months from now? I mean in a time when people are going to be increasingly suffering lay offs and job losses and when Oregon slips deeper into what's likely to be a recession it'll be harder, I think, absence a clear and compelling case that's going to have continue to be made that those sacrifices have to be made. I don't think it gets much clearer even in Salem, Oregon, far from Washington, DC, the Pentagon, far from the trade towers than it became on September eleventh. But I'm wondering if there's still, if you all detect any sense of complacency still here in Oregon. There's sort of still some, you know, whistling in the dark and 'Oh those poor people in New York'. You know, you probably have all experienced what I have which are sort of awkward social situations since the eleventh of September and as journalists we're a different sort of a breed. No awkwardness. No awkwardness? No. I have been engaged in, you know, you get in social situations where you assume that all this is all that you want to

talk about and there's almost an avoidance of it which is in part due to discomfort but I do think frankly part of it is, 'Oh that's DC and New York' and no one would ever admit that, but there is a part of me that thinks boy aren't we glad we live right here in Portland? There was an article in the paper this morning and it said oh, you know, oh all of a sudden Oregon's not important enough you know to be anyone's target for anything and I think...Stephanie you may have, there may be some people who feel that way that it's really somebody else's problem, but I think all of us have been inundated with letters from, to the editor lately, I mean really inundated as I've never been before from people who pour out their hearts in a way that makes you think that they care more about the fate of the victims of this attack and they have ever cared about anything else. They identify with them, they identify with the with the damage that was done, not to New York or Washington or Pennsylvania or airplanes or anything, not to the market but to the country and I think more than ever before I think you find, at least i get the sense from all these letters, maybe thirty, forty, fifty maybe a hundred, I didn't really count them, that

people really are pulling together in a way that I've never seen before. Yeah I would agree in the sense the majority I've never received anything like the outpouring of a sense of the support your talking about as well as people who have this yearning desire to do something. We just want to be part of helping somebody do something to get us through this and we don't know what what can we do. But do we know how to do anything and are any, are our cities, our state government doing anything to help us protect ourselves in the event of another terrorist attack? And you know many of people who know a lot more than that I do suggest that the next one is the more likely to be biological or chemically oriented. Doesn't it seemed to me it would take a whole lot to just drop a little something in Bull Run reservoir and destroy this city or any other city's water supply. In the what sixteen days since September eleventh this country has not yet developed an appropriate response to even another...I mean and I was talking before the studio, I went to Seattle to see a Seattle Mariner's game with my son earlier this week. The level of security was no more rigorous despite all the [inaudible]

[inaudible] I think the impetus has been given to do something, I mean the president appointing his cabinet department for homeland defense, I think every local government, every state government and Oregon, no matter how the budget surplus, I mean no matter what the budget situation is in Oregon, which is dire, there're gonna be some some efforts made to try to prepare for something. Obviously we've been processing a lot of information over the last week and a half. What I do think we have seen and I think it is sustainable and will be sustained and that is this this longing almost to work together to put away our individual wants and needs. I think you've seen in the way people respond to each other on the highways or in the grocery store and let's remember we've gone through a period over the last maybe ten years, five to ten years, where we've looked longingly at the greatest generation and their sacrifice and it's

something that we've looked at we've almost lavished praise on these folks and I think there's something that this is tapping into. And I hope we can learn lessons from that greatest generation because I share your sense that there is a different spirit about it but I don't think there's a spirit to return and repeat mistakes that were made by the greatest generation but to learn and maybe to try different responses because I think what the president is warning against is that this is going to have to be a different kind of a war and a sustained war and just my sense of this country though is patience is not one of our virtues. No it isn't, and so what happened to this country to the mood of this country what happens to Americans who are expecting you know and an almost demanding some sort of visible retaliation and that makes them feel, you know, that these six hundred thousand you know sixty four hundred people have been avenged, and nothing happens that is visible to us? I don't think nothing will happen. I think they will get something.

they will get and that I think the problem is what happens after this retaliation which will happen there's another attack. Then what happens to the American spirit? Well I think we ought to have some confidence in it. I think what's been shown so far is that we ought to have confidence in it and that we can resist and spring back from all kinds of stuff that happens to us as long as we are doing something and it's not just attacks overseas. I think people, David, I think in line with what you said, I think that people are almost asking to be asked to make some sacrifice whether it's with taxes or with anything. And we are being prepared it seems to me by our leadership, Republican and Democrat, from the president to the congressional leaders, for a long struggle a long fight, and a fight that will have...That doesn't mean that an impatient people will know what to do with that. Well, we have endured long struggles before. World War Two was that

kind of struggle, the Cold War was. Okay, okay that's it for now Richard Aguirre, David Reinhart, Marc Zusman and Hasso Hering, thanks for joining us this week on Seven Days and thank you for watching. Good Night [theme music] [theme music] [theme music] [theme music] [theme music]