It is still unbelievable.  This is the United States, after all.  Hijackers hijacking a plane.  Not one, not two but three.  With box-cutters.  Then, they ran the fuel-loaded plane missiles straight into buildings.  Not any building but the Pentagon and the Twin Towers.  Thousands of lives were lost instantaneously: innocent office workers, plane passengers.  Dozens more perished in rescue attempts: fire fighters, policemen.   Children orphaned, loved ones lost.  Just imagine: you are in the 40^th floor of a building; you look out the window and there is a jet plane aiming right at you.  Can you believe the horror?  If you are a family member of one of those who perished, what must be your agony to see a replay of the plane slamming into the building over and over and over? 

And what would justify such horror?  Nothing, of course, which is ever more aggravating to a reasoning mind.  America had been through this before, although on a smaller scale. Remember Timothy McVeigh?  After his bit of insanity, the journalists asked the psychologists and the friends for a clue into his mind.  Maybe it was the divorce of his parents�when his mother abandoned the family when he was ten?  Maybe it was his fear of being a life-long underachiever despite his superior intellect?  Maybe it was his rage against minorities and women?  Maybe it was the collapse of communism�an enemy he had prepared to fight all his life?  Maybe it was his obsession with guns? The militia movement? The government�s abuse in Waco Texas and Ruby Ridge?  Whatever it was, by the time he was ready to take out hundreds of innocent lives in Oklahoma City, he had declared the United States government as �the enemy� and he was, in his irrational mind, in a state of war. 

The nineteen terrorists who hijacked the planes are nineteen Timothy McVeigh.  Where his obsession was guns, theirs was planes.  Where he saw the Federal Government�and all its employees--as the enemy, they saw the United States�and all its citizens (including Muslim Americans)�as the enemy.  Friends and family of Timothy McVeigh could not believe that such a shy, awkward boy could be responsible for the massacre: he was just too normal, they said.  

Life Lessons 

In the end, what is particularly frustrating about this tragedy is a life lesson that events of great consequence can be triggered by inconsequential and, by all accounts, unbalanced people.   John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald.  Hard to believe but true.   Martin Luther King was shot by John Earl Ray.   John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.    Thomas 15X Johnson shot Malcolm X.   John Lennon was killed by an assassin whose name, according to Lennon�s fans (and we are), shouldn�t be mentioned to deny him the notoriety he craved.    

That a loss of this magnitude can be instigated by relatively obscure and small-minded people is hard to fathom�and thus, the conspiracy theories.  The extended family of the nineteen terrorists�the Arab people�just cannot believe that they did it because, well because Arabs are not that sophisticated.  And if it is not the work of Arabs, say some Arabs, then it must be the work of Israel (of course.)  But it is so.  Regrettably for Arabs�and Muslims�the fact remains that 19 people who did a monumentally hideous act that resulted in the death of 3,000 innocent people call themselves Muslims and hail from Moslem countries.  

After the mourning comes the reaction.  Under the leadership of George Bush, the United States has taken measures to safeguard the security of its citizens.  Many of these measures are, no doubt, prudent and long overdue.  In retrospect, security was lax at airports.  And so on. 

But it has also taken measures that are clear violations of Americans civil liberties.   It has created special categories of �person of interest� that are designed to deny Americans their right to due process while the government finds something to charge them with.  This is specially bad�not for America�which has a 200+ years of constitutional republic government, institutions and advocates of human rights, jurisprudence, and accountable governments and will, no doubt, recover from its excess.  It is quite bad for the rest of the citizens of the world who are unfortunate enough to live and die in nations which are ruled by outlaw governments. 

Eritrea: American Ally? 

Case in point: Eritrea.   The Eritrean government takes particular glee at pointing to the post 9-11 United States government to justify every insane act it undertakes.  You accuse us of detaining our citizens without charge?  So did the United States with John Walker Lindh, the �American Taliban� (never mind that he was apprehended red-handed in a war against his country AND he ultimately was represented by a lawyer in the People�s case against him.)  You accuse us of restricting the rights of journalists?  So did the American government with its adoption of secret powers. (Never mind that this is being roundly criticized by the media, which, as far as we know, have not been summarily arrested.)  Of course, the United States executive branch of the government has not arrested any member of the legislative branch.  The closest they came to that is to have an agency of the executive branch�the FBI�demand of the legislative branch�the Congress�that they submit to lie-detector testing to ensure that they were not responsible for an embarrassing leak.  To which, the Congress rightly responded: take a hike.  

Like many tyrannical governments, the Eritrean government is trying to position itself as America�s great ally when, in fact, the only relationship it can offer the United States is similar to the one offered by other tyrannical regimes: cheap resources.  Saudi Arabia�s claim to being an American ally is its usefulness in providing cheap oil; the Isaias government�s claim to being an American ally is its readiness to provide cheap military base.  But, by now, the United States government knows that an authoritarian regime cannot possibly be an American ally: it scorns all values of freedom, liberty, democracy, free press, religious freedom and human rights.  How many years will it take the United States government to understand that the Eritrean tyrant�who has been busy shutting down all movements for democratization within Eritrea, arresting citizens en masse, shutting down the press, enslaving the people and closing churches�is no American ally?  How can a regime which hates values espoused by the American Revolution�as the Isaias regime does--be considered an American ally?   How can a regime which used the events of 9-11 to calculate that United States would be too focused on the war against terrorism to pay mind to a regime stifling  popular uprising for democracy be an American ally?

An Eritrea Without A Free People Is Still Not Free

The Awate Team