The War on Terror
September 11, 2016 – 15th Anniversary
Reexamining the War on Terror
September 7, 2016
Tom Kean to Head New Panel Exploring Post-9/11 World Post-9/11 World
Former Gov. Tom Kean is getting back to the job of studying international terrorism -- and especially how America can fight it more effectively.
Building on his work more than a decade ago as chairman of the 9/11 Commission and pointing to renewed fears among Americans over a series of recent attacks in the U.S. and Europe, Kean said he plans to launch what he describes as an exhaustive examination of U.S. terrorism strategy and its shortcomings.
"We're in danger. No question about it," Kean said in an exclusive interview with The Record at his office in Far Hills. "What we're doing now is not working in many degrees. We're spending enormous amounts of money to make this country a fortress."
The new study -- scheduled to be formally announced today in Washington by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a non-profit think tank -- would go well beyond the scope of the 9/11 Commission and its 567-page best-selling report in 2004.
The 10-member commission, which included equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats in an attempt to promote a bipartisan discussion, focused primarily on the events leading to America's deadliest terror attack, on Sept. 11, 2001.
This time, Kean said his effort -- which will reunite him with his 9/11 Commission vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressional representative from Indiana -- will take a much broader look at America's war on terror, including the effectiveness of U.S. military power and whether "soft power" strategies that would include economic, educational and diplomatic aid might be more effective in some Middle East and developing nations where terrorist networks have found a home.
"It strikes me it's a lot cheaper than war," Kean said.
But the 81-year-old Republican, who is still considered a leading voice of his party's shrinking moderate wing, warned that this effort may turn out to be a far more combative affair than his two-year chairmanship of the 9/11 Commission, when he fought with the Bush administration and U.S. intelligence services for more access to information about top-secret counterterrorism planning before 9/11 -- and, as he sadly discovered, the lack of it.
The new study is also being timed -- deliberately so, it seems -- to grab the attention of a new presidential administration.
Kean said he plans to finish the study within the first few months of 2017 -- just as the next president is settling into the White House.
Not surprisingly, the current presidential campaign and its contentious rhetoric was a key motivating factor in Kean's decision to launch the study -- and in the national discussion of terrorism he hopes to spark.
"We need unity," said Kean. "We need to look broadly at policy and not just be reactive." With President Obama attempting to preserve his legacy and Republican Donald Trump and
Democrat Hillary Clinton locked in a tight race leading to the Nov. 8 election, Kean said he fears there will be little inclination for a balanced assessment and debate of U.S. terror policies.
"I think it's time to ask ourselves: Is what we're doing working?" Kean said.
Amid the increasingly polarized presidential campaign, Kean said he hopes his study might introduce potentially reasonable voices.
Having a balanced discussion of such a politicized issue as terrorism is certainly a noble wish. But Kean is under no illusions about the nature of politics at this point in time.
"Politics in both parties has become name-calling," Kean said. "People say things that just don't stand up to rational examination."
Kean said it was especially distracting this summer when Obama, Clinton and Trump fought over whether it was appropriate to mention an Islamic link to foreign terrorism.
Kean said he prefers to use "Islamist extremism," a term coined by the 9/11 Commission and widely accepted by Muslim scholars to describe the influence of radical politics in twisting mainstream Islamic theology to promote such ideas as suicide martyrdom.
Kean said that while he remains on good terms with Obama and maintains personal friendships with both Trump and Clinton, he has been turned off by the current political climate and how he feels it has stifled reasoned discussions of terrorism strategy.
Echoing sentiments first voiced in an interview with The Record in July, when he said he would skip the Republican National Convention, Kean said he has still not decided how he will vote in the presidential election. Lately, he said he has been pondering the possibility of supporting a third-party candidate, though he considers that unlikely.
"I'm disappointed in the policy directions that Trump has taken," Kean said, citing, in particular, Trump's stances on immigration. "I'm also disappointed in the lapses in Hillary's judgment, which seem to come out every week now."
With terrorism, Kean said he is particularly interested in studying the ways in which U.S. military action may have contributed to the spread of Islamist extremist terrorist cells beyond Afghanistan, where the 9/11 plot was hatched, to a disjointed network across much of the world -- including the U.S.
"Terrorism has metastasized far beyond Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network," Kean said. At the same time, U.S. policies -- especially military attacks -- have turned many moderate Muslims who might otherwise be friendly toward America into enemies.
Kean said a variety of surveys indicate that large segments of the Islamic world generally view the
U.S. negatively because of its long-term military incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He cautioned that he was not opposed to using the military against terrorists, even large-scale
invasions by U.S. soldiers. But Kean said current U.S. policy seems far too haphazard, with special-operations soldiers used in one nation, unmanned drones in another and brigade-sized units in yet another as an occupation force.
"People ought to not look at the United States always as the country with the troops on the ground," Kean said. "They look at us as the guy with the drones. They look at us as the guy in the tank. If we continue to be the man in the tank, we're going to be trying to fight with one hand tied behind our back."
Another area of study, said Kean, is cyberterrorism against U.S. government agencies as well as a wide array of corporate institutions, including key energy supply grids and banking. He said America's intelligence agencies are decades behind in staving off cyber-attacks.
Kean said some intelligence experts now believe that vulnerable computers represent America's top terrorism threat.
"We don't have a proper defense," Kean said, citing a variety of scenarios described to him by
U.S. counterterror officials, including attacks on computer systems that control nuclear power stations and Wall Street financial transactions.
"That's not science fiction," Kean said. "It's in the realm of the possible."
How Kean's study is received will likely depend in large measure on who the next president is --and, also, whether the political fissures running through Congress can be patched up.
Another factor that could affect the study is whether America is targeted for more terrorism, especially by disenchanted Muslim-Americans who attack as so-called lone wolves, without the broader support of a formal terrorist network.
Kean said he is not worried about whether his staff at the Bipartisan Policy Center can complete a solid assessment in the early months of the new presidential administration.
The key question, he said, is how long it will take to get the attention of Congress, the White House and the web of more than a dozen U.S. intelligence services and then to begin to change policies.
After the release of the 9/11 Commission report, Kean and his fellow commissioners --Republicans and Democrats alike -- spent a year trying to reform U.S. terror policy and intelligence gathering. They never fully succeeded.
The first step now, Kean said, is recognizing the true nature of the enemy.
"We're fighting an idea. This is an ideology," he said. "You can't beat an ideology simply by military means. We've got to use everything in our arsenal."
Reflections From Across the River
September 11, 2016
THE HUDSON was choppy that morning. Looking back now, it seemed as if the mighty river that separates New Jersey from New York knew that something terrible had just taken place at the World Trade Center, something that would change America in ways we never imagined.
We all have our memories of Sept. 11, 2001 -- where we were when we heard about the towers and the hijacked planes, what we said to each other, perhaps even what we wore. Or whether we prayed. Wept. Or cursed. Or just kept silent.
I stood on a Hudson River dock near Exchange Place in Jersey City.
The towers had just collapsed in a massive gray-brown cloud, leaving a hole in the skyline -- as if someone had just lost a tooth.
I tapped a police officer on the shoulder.
"What's that sticking out of the wall over there," I asked, pointing to what seemed like a broken branch that had jammed itself into the side of the building across the river.
"That's a steel beam from the trade center," the officer muttered.
The Twin Towers, which seemed so impregnable and eternal, were gone, literally in a puff of smoke. What once seemed so monumental had fallen helplessly. And the tower's multi-ton steel beams -- some of them a foot thick or more -- had been tossed around the lower Manhattan neighborhood like tree limbs in a storm, propelled through the air and stabbing other buildings as
if they were soft pieces of fruit.
A tugboat pulled up, rocking side to side in the river chop. A team of Jersey City police officers jumped onto the deck, all of them assigned to rush into the patch of landscape we soon called Ground Zero.
I jumped on the tug, too.
After the tug docked in Manhattan and I walked into Ground Zero, I felt the oppressive silence. The sidewalks were swathed in a white ash. Papers fluttered everywhere. A memo, its edges singed with fire, swept by my feet as I stepped from a curb near Vesey Street.
And then I saw the pile of rubble -- seven stories high, with smoke billowing and flames shooting up from deep fissures.
Who knew what would come from this horrific scene?
In the years that followed, America developed color-coded terror alerts. Then came the anti-Muslim fervor. And the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And the U.S. invasion of Iraq under the pretense of ferreting out illegal weapons of mass destruction. And the revelations of waterboarding and other forms of torture.
Then came the toll on America's soldiers -- almost 4,500 dead in Iraq, 2,400 killed in Afghanistan and more than 50,000 wounded in both nations, not to mention the thousands of others emotionally broken from multiple deployments, including a record number of others who committed suicide. Nearly forgotten were the untold numbers of Iraqi, Afghan and civilians who died in the wars, too.
Yes, the Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden. But the generals back in the Pentagon and the White House war planners seemed to have lost sight of something precious -- that when our nation sends its men and women into combat, there needs to be a good reason.
Who knew we would be asking that question? And who knew our politics would be so crippled, too?
Congress froze itself in icy pettiness. Campaigns became overly scripted and market-driven, financed by special interests who have figured out that money buys access. And now, incredibly, we face a scenario in this fall's presidential election that is unprecedented in American history: two candidates, who are each viewed unfavorably by a majority of American voters.
How did this happen?
Terrorism is spreading like a cancer -- "metastasized" as Tom Kean, former governor and 9/11 Commission chairman, noted recently. Since the 9/11 attacks, blood flowed in Fort Hood and Paris and Brussels and Baghdad and Aleppo and Nice and San Bernardino and Orlando -- to name just a few massacres. In each case, the terrorists claimed to murder in the name of some sort of god and they embraced a theology of suicide that they confuse as martyrdom.
There is more, of course. The damaging social, spiritual, political, economic and personal tentacles that grew from the Sept. 11 attacks are too numerous to list. But they add up to a disquieting reality -- that America has changed and its institutions and political leaders of all stripes have fallen short in guiding the nation.
During the past month, as I dived into a special assignment that caused me to look back at the Sept. 11 attacks, I have been inexorably drawn back to that morning on the Hudson River and my first sight of Ground Zero.
I did not return to New Jersey for three days. And then, I kept returning to Ground Zero, chronicling the stories of the emotionally broken firefighters, police and construction workers who desperately tried to find survivors, hoping their dirty work would offer comfort. Now far too many suffer from respiratory ailments from breathing too much toxic dust.
Thankfully, thousands of office workers escaped before the towers collapsed, guided by brave firefighters and cops who remained at their perilous posts -- and died. But nearly 2,800 people perished that day. And 40 percent of them -- more than 1,100 victims -- have never been identified, leaving their families and friends unable to conduct a funeral or a proper burial. The remains of the unidentified now sit in a repository on the bottom floor of the 9/11 Museum.
Dispute at museum
That repository in the museum is certainly a solemn place. But, in keeping with how divided our nation has become, the mere placement of those unidentified body parts on the lower level of the 9/11 Museum has become a topic of angry debate, with some victims' families demanding they be moved to a mausoleum aboveground where no one will have to buy a ticket to honor them.
On that first day and in the months that followed at Ground Zero, I found little of the toxic anger that now permeates America. I found mostly love and kindness -- from those who combed the rubble for human remains and personal items, from the volunteers who flocked to the site with clean clothes and new boots for the workers, from even the therapists and masseuses and cooks and clergy who came to lend a hand or a comforting word to so many broken souls.
And then, all that unity and goodness disappeared, evaporating into the silly politics and anger that has drained us.
On this 15th anniversary of the worst terror attacks in American history, it's worth asking what has happened to America.
Today, I'll return to Ground Zero. Yes, I'll wonder what happened. Mostly, I'll try to remember how the nation came together back then, if only for a short time.
A Call for Unity
September 12, 2016
Speakers and Mourners Cite Nation's Divide
NEW YORK -- Once again, it began with the lonely ringing of a silver fire bell and ended almost four hours later with the melancholy notes of taps.
And once again, for the 15th consecutive year after the 9/11 terror attacks, Ester Santillan of Parsippany stood on the patch of lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers once were to remember a daughter killed along with almost 3,000 others.
"She was wonderful," Santillan, now 72, said of her daughter, Maria Theresa, 27, who perished only nine months before she was scheduled to marry her high school sweetheart. "I miss her smile."
This year, however, Santillan said she misses much more than Marie Theresa's infectious, joyful expression. Santillan now worries about the divided state of her nation, and wishes she felt the same sense of common purpose that bolstered America 15 years ago, after Islamist radicals crashed hijacked commercial jetliners into the Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania farm field.
"There was unity during that time," Santillan said. "I hope the officials in the government don't forget that."
It was a theme echoed repeatedly on Sunday, in private conversations and sometimes even in brief commentaries from the stage, as almost 8,000 people converged on the National September 11 Memorial Plaza in lower Manhattan for the annual four-hour reading of each victim's name.
From its early years, the ceremony to honor those killed in the nation's deadliest terrorist attack has become a deliberately non-politicized touchstone for remembering the nation's core values, such as unity in the face of a crisis. This year, however, against the backdrop of an increasingly polarized presidential campaign, many mourners seemed to sense a need to voice a call for common ground.
"September 11 was one of the worst days in American history, but it was in many ways one of the best," said Rory Doyle, who grew up in Haworth and came to the Memorial Plaza to honor his friend Daniel McGinley, 40, of Ridgewood, who was killed on Sept. 11. "Everybody came together."
But Doyle and many others in Sunday's crowd agreed that the mood of America now is clearly different than it was in the weeks after 9/11.
"We're fractured right now because you can't answer the questions without getting politicized," said Charles Wolf of Manhattan, who lost his wife, Katherine, 37, an executive at the Marsh and McLennan insurance brokerage, whose offices were on the 97th floor of the north tower.
As with previous ceremonies -- and, in particular, as organizers went to great lengths to keep the focus on victims -- political figures were not allowed to give speeches or even be recognized. In the early years, if politicians approached the podium, it was only to read a poem or Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Since 2012, however, no political figures have been invited to speak.
That did not stop politicians from showing up, however, including some of the election's most
combative figures. Governor Christie was there, along with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the city's current mayor, Bill de Blasio.
Republican Donald Trump walked onto the plaza around 8:30 a.m. to brief bursts of applause, punctuated by a few jeers. Democrat Hillary Clinton's arrival a few minutes later did not cause any reaction from the crowd, but video of her losing her balance and almost collapsing while leaving the event resulted in a steady stream of political ripples and speculation. It was later said she was suffering from pneumonia.
The incident -- and its politics -- served as a counterpoint to the mood of the ceremony and its continued calls for America to resurrect the sense of unity that enveloped the nation after the 9/11 attacks.
Michael Frazier, a spokesman for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, said organizers of the ceremony did not instruct readers of names -- or even the handful of victims' relatives who offered brief reflections -- to refrain from mentioning politics or political candidates. He said the absence of politics from the ceremony has become an understated -- and widely understood -- rule among participants.
"They come here to remember the people that were lost," Frazier said of the victims' relatives. Certainly that seemed to be the case for Lionel Keaton.
As he waited in the shade of an oak tree to hear the name of his cousin, Tamitha Freeman, 35, who died in the collapse of the south tower, Keaton said he had little patience for the political fissures now running through America.
For Keaton, 54, it was enough to focus on the tragedy of Freeman's death. She was a single mother to a 1-year-old son, Xavier. Freeman, who worked as a client representative for the Aon insurance firm, was also engaged to be married.
Keaton, who lives in Charlotte, N.C., said that his cousin's death had become a catalyst to bring his own family together -- so much so that more than 50 relatives traveled to Manhattan by bus from North Carolina for Sunday's ceremony, many of them wearing T-shirts with Freeman's photo. "We're very much closer as a family," he said. "The country has gone in a different direction."
In one of several brief reflections during the ceremony by victims' relatives, Granvilette Kestenbaum of Montclair, whose husband, Howard, also worked at Aon and died in the collapse of the south tower, said that she has made a special effort to reach out to victims of terrorism in other parts of the world.
With her daughter, Kestenbaum, who is Jewish, met with Muslim victims of the 2005 terror bombing in Amman, Jordan. She also comforted victims' relatives after the 2004 train bombings in Madrid.
"The things which separate us really don't," she told the crowd. "We're all connected."
Later, Joseph Quinn, whose brother, James, a Cantor Fitzgerald executive, was killed in the north tower, urged the crowd to become a force to resurrect the national unity America felt after the 9/11 attacks.
"A part of me misses those days," said Quinn, who served two combat tours with the Army in Iraq and another in Afghanistan as a tribute to his brother.
"In our current political environment, it may feel we're divided," Quinn said. "Don't believe it." The crowd applauded. But Quinn was not finished.
He urged everyone to turn off their TVs, to leave their homes and greet their neighbors. "Be the unity the world needs," he said.