[lit-ideas] Citizenship in Emergency-partial text
- From: Scribe1865@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 01:20:20 EDT
from http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.5/scarry.html
Why citizens were able to stop the terrorists while the military couldn't.
First posted on another list, but I thought readers here would be interested as
well. Complete and extensive footnotes available at the Boston Review Web
site. I have cut sections of her essay for space reasons. -Eric
______
Citizenship in Emergency
Can democracy protect us against terrorism?
Elaine Scarry
For the past year, we have spoken unceasingly about the events of September
11, 2001. But one aspect of that day has not yet been the topic of open
discussion: the difficulty we had as a country defending ourselves; as it
happened,
the only successful defense that day was carried out by the passengers on
Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. The purpose of this essay is to
examine
that difficulty, and the one success, and ask if they suggest that something in
our defense arrangements needs to be changed. Whatever the ultimate answer to
that question, we at least need to ask it since defending the country is an
obligation we all share.
Speed and Security
The difficulty of defense on September 11 turned in large part on the pace of
events. We need to look carefully at the timelines and timetables on that
day. But as we do, it is crucial to recall that the word â??speedâ?? has been
at the
center of discussions of national defense for the last fifty years. When we
look to any of our literatures on the subject, we recall that the word
â??speedâ??
has been at the center of discussions of national defense for the last fifty
years. When we look to any of our literatures on the subject, we find in the
foreground statements about the speed of our weapons, of our weaponsâ??
delivery
systems, and of the deliberations that will lead to their use.
Throughout this period, the heart of our defense has been a vast missile
system, all parts of which are described as going into effect in â??a matter of
minutesâ??: a presidential decision must be made in â??a matter of minutesâ??;
the
presidential order must be transmitted in â??a matter of minutesâ??; the speed
of the
missile launch must be carried out â??in a matter of minutesâ??; and the
missile
must reach its target in â??a matter of minutes.â??
The matter-of-minutes claim is sometimes formally folded into the names of
our weapons (as in the Minuteman missile) and other times appears in related
banner words such as â??supersonicâ?? and â??hairtrigger.â??1 Thousands of
miles
separating countries and continents can be contracted by â??supersonicâ??
missiles and
planes that carry us there in â??a matter of minutesâ??; and thousands of miles
separating countries and continents can be contracted by focusing on the
distance that has to be crossed not by the weapon itself but by the hand
gesture
that initiates the launchâ??the distance of a hair.
â??Speedâ?? has occupied the foreground not only of our descriptive statements
about our national defense but also our normative statements. Our military
arrangements for defending the country have often been criticized for moving
increasingly outside the citizenryâ??s control. The constitutional requirement
for a
Congressional declaration of war has not been used for any war since World War
II: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war in former Yugoslavia were
all carried out at the direction of the president and without a congressional
declaration, as were the invasions of Panama, Grenada, and Haiti.2 Speed has
repeatedly been invoked to counter ethical, legal, or constitutional objections
to the way our weapons policies and arrangements have slipped further and
further beyond democratic structures of self-governance.
This bypassing of the Constitution in the case of conventional wars and
invasions has been licensed by the existence of nuclear weapons and by the
countryâ??
s formal doctrine of Presidential First Use, which permits the president,
acting alone, to initiate nuclear war.3 Since the president has genocidal
injuring
power at his personal disposal, obtaining Congressâ??s permission for much
lesser acts of injury (as in conventional wars) has often struck presidents as
a
needless bother.4 The most frequent argument used to excuse the setting aside
of the Constitution is that the pace of modern life simply does not allow time
for obtaining the authorization of Congress, let alone the full citizenry. Our
ancestors who designed the Constitutionâ??so the argument goesâ??simply had no
picture of the supersonic speed at which the countryâ??s defense would need to
take place. So the congressional requirement is an anachronism. With planes and
weapons traveling faster than the speed of sound, what sense does it make to
have a lot of sentences we have no time to hear?
Among the many revelations that occurred on September 11 was a revelation
about our capacity to act quickly. Speedâ??the realpolitik that has excused the
setting aside of the law for fifty yearsâ??turns out not to have been very real
at
all. The description that follows looks at the timetables of American Airlines
Flight 77â??the plane that hit the Pentagonâ??and United Airlines Flight
93â??the
plane that crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers successfully disabled the
hijackersâ?? mission. Each of the two planes was a small piece of U.S. ground.
Their juxtaposition indicates that a form of defense that is external to the
ground that needs to be defended does not work as well as a form of defense
that
is internal to the ground that needs to be protected. This outcome precisely
matches the arguments that were made at the time of the writing of the
Constitution about why the military had to be â??held within a civil frameâ??:
about why
military actions, whether offensive or defensive, must be measured against the
norms of civilian life, must be brought into contact with the people with
whom one farms or performs shared labor, or the people with whom one raises
children, or the people with whom one goes to church or a weekly play or movie.
Preserving such a civil frame was needed to prevent the infantilization of the
countryâ??s population by its own leaders, and because it was judged to be the
only plausible way actually to defend the home ground.
When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in
Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions
of
national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other,
operating in a civil frame, is distributed and egalitarian. Should anything be
inferred from the fact that the first form of defense failed and the second
succeeded? This outcome obligates us to review our military structures, and to
consider the possibility that we need a democratic, not a top-down, form of
defense. At the very least, the events of September 11 cast doubt on a key
argument
that, for the past fifty years, has been used to legitimize an increasingly
centralized, authoritarian model of defenseâ??namely the argument from speed.
American Flight 77
American Airlines 77 was originally scheduled to fly from Washington to Los
Angeles. The plane approached the Pentagon at a speed of 500 miles per hour.5
It entered the outermost of the buildingâ??s five rings, ring E, then cut
through
ring D and continued on through ring C, and eventually stopped just short of
ring B.6 Two million square feet were damaged or destroyed.7 Before September
11, the Pentagon was five corridors deep, five stories high, and in its
overall shape, five-sided. Three of the Pentagonâ??s five sides were affected
(one had
to be leveled and rebuilt; the other two were badly damaged by smoke and
water).
One hundred and eighty-nine people diedâ??64 on the plane, 125 working in the
Pentagon. Many others were badly burned.8 Thousands of people work in the
Pentagon.9 Two factors prevented many more people from being killed or badly
burned. First, the building is stacked horizontally, not vertically like the
World
Trade Center towersâ??it is built like layers of sedimentary rock that have
been
turned on their side and lie flush with the ground. Second, one of the
sections hit was being renovated and was therefore relatively empty of people
when
the plane entered.
While we continue to lament the deaths and injuries, and while we continue to
find solace in the fact that the number of deaths and injuries was not
higher, one key fact needs to be held on to and stated in a clear sentence: on
September 11, the Pentagon could not defend the Pentagon, let alone the rest of
the
country.
The U.S. military had precious little time to respond on September 11 (and
this fact has been accurately acknowledged by almost everyone, both inside and
outside the country, who has spoken about the day). But by the standards of
speed that have been used to justify setting aside constitutional guarantees
for
the last fifty years, the U.S. military on September 11 had a luxurious amount
of time to protect the Pentagon. They had more than minutes. The pilots of
the F-15s and F-16s that flew on September 11 made no mistakes, displayed no
inadequacies, and showed no lack of courageâ??but what they tried to do now
appears
to have been a structural impossibility.
One hour and twenty-one minutes go by between the moment FAA controllers
learn that multiple planes have been taken and the moment the Pentagon is
struck.
Controllers hear the hijackers on the first seized plane (American Flight 11)
say â??we have some planesâ?? at 8:24 a.m., a sentence indicating that the
plane
from which the voice comes is not the sole plane presently imperiled. The
information that â??some planesâ?? have been taken is available one hour and 21
minutes before the Pentagon is hit by the third seized plane at 9:45 a.m.10
Fifty-eight minutes go by between the attack on the first World Trade Tower
(at 8:47 a.m.) and the crash into the Pentagon (9:45 a.m.). This means that for
almost one hour before the Pentagon is hit, the military knows that the
hijackers have multiple planes and that those hijackers have no intention to
land
those planes safely.
The crash of American Flight 77 into the Pentagon comes fifty-five minutes
after that plane has now itself disappeared from radio contact (at 8:50 a.m.).
So for fifty-five minutes, the military now knows three things:
1. the hijackers have multiple planes;
2. the hijackersâ??far from having any intention of landing the planes safelyâ??
intend to injure as many people on the ground as possible;11 and
3. Flight 77 has a chance of being one of those planes since it has just
disappeared from radio.
When, six minutes later, the plane loses its transponder (so that its radar
image as well as its radio contact is now lost), the chance that it is one of
the seized planes rises.
By the most liberal reading, then, the country had one hour and twenty-one
minutes to begin to respond. By the most conservative reading, the country had
fifty-five minutes to begin to respond.12 The phrase â??begin to respondâ??
does
not mean that an F-15 or F-16 could now attack the plane that would hit the
Pentagon. At the one hour and twenty-oneâ??minute clock time, the plane that
will
eventually hit the Pentagon is only four minutes into its flight and has not
yet been hijacked. It means instead that a warning threshold has just been
crossed and a level of readiness might therefore begin: at one hour and
twenty-one
minutes, fighter pilots could be placed on standby on the ground with engines
running; at fifty-five minutes, fighter planes could be following the third
plane, as well as any other planes that are wildly off course with radio
contact
missing.
One hour and twenty-one minutes and fifty-five minutes are each a short timeâ??
a short, short time. But . . . by the timetables that we have for decades
accepted as descriptive of our military weapons, by the timetables we have
accepted as explanations for why we must abridge our structures of
self-governanceâ??by
the intoxicating timetables of â??rapid response,â?? the proud specifications
of
eight minutes, twelve minutes, four minutes, one minuteâ??by these timetables,
the September 11 time periods of one hour and twenty-one minutes or of
fifty-five minutes are very long periods indeed.
The transition from the moment Flight 77â??s radio is off (at 8:50 a.m.) to the
moment it disappears from secondary radar (8:56 a.m.) is crucial, for it
begins to confirm the inference that this is one of the hijacked planes.13 A
sequence of confirmations now follows. While the FAA controllers have been
unable
to reach the plane, now the airline company also discovers its inability to
reach Flight 77 on a separate radio (shortly after 9 a.m.)14 At 9:25 a
passenger,
Barbara Olson, places a phone call to her husband in the U.S. Justice
Department, Theodore Olson, stating that the plane is under the control of
hijackers.15 Because the passenger is well known to the Justice Department
listener, no
time need be lost assessing the honesty and accuracy of the report. This means
that twenty minutes prior to the moment the Pentagon is hit, the Justice
Department has direct, reliable voice confirmation of the planeâ??s seizure.
So for twenty minutes prior to the hitting of the Pentagon, the military is
in the position to know three things (the third of which differs decisively
from what it knew at the fifty-five minute marker):
1. the hijackers have multiple planes;
2. the hijackers intend to injure as many people as possible;
3. Flight 77 is certainly one of the hijacked planes: it has disappeared from
radio, has disappeared from secondary radar, has disappeared from the company
radio, and has been described to the Justice Department as â??hijackedâ?? by a
passenger whose word cannot be doubted.
The steadily mounting layers of verification listed in number 3 continue. At
9:33 a.m., an FAA air traffic controller sees on radar a â??fast moving blipâ??
(or â??fast moving primary targetâ??) making its way toward Washington air
space:
this level of verification comes twelve minutes prior to the planeâ??s crash
into the Pentagon. At 9:36 a.m. an airborne C-130 sees the plane itself and
identifies it as a â??757 moving low and fast.â??16 This further confirmation
comes
nine minutes prior to the collision. No one can suppose that in nine minutes
planes could be scrambled and reach the hijacked plane (even if we have, for
decades, listened dutifully to descriptions of much more complicated military
acts
occurring in nine minutes). But certainly the layers of alert, of scrambling,
of takeoff, of tracking, could have begun one hour and twenty minutes
earlier, or fifty-five minutes earlier, not nine minutes earlier. Nine minutes
is
presumably the time frame in which only the last act of military defense need
be
carried out by the fighter planesâ??if there is any reasonable last act to be
taken, a question to which I will return.
During much of its flight, American Flight 77 was over countryside (rather
than over densely populated urban areas).17 The six successive layers of
verification need to be spatially displayed so that we can begin to picture
where the
plane was during each of them:
loss of radio (55 minutes remain)
loss of transponder (49 minutes remain)
loss of contact with the airline company (approximately 36 minutes remain)
a passenger calls the Justice Department (20 minutes remain)
a radar image is seen moving toward Washington whose source is not using its
officialâ??secondaryâ?? radar (12 minutes remain)
a C-130 sights a Boeing 757 flying fast and low (9 minutes remain)
Assuming an airspeed of 500 miles an hour, we can infer that at the time we
learn that both the radio and the transponder are off (the second layer of
confirmation), the plane would be 441 miles from Washington with many miles of
sparsely populated land beneath it.18 By the fourth confirmation (Barbara
Olsonâ??s
phone call), it would be 180 miles from Washington. By the sixth
confirmation, that given by the C-130, the plane destined for the Pentagon
would still be
81 miles from Washington and the possibility of minimizing injury to those on
the ground would be rapidly vanishing with each passing mile.
Again, the point here is not to say, â??Why couldnâ??t these airmen shoot down
the plane?â?? Time made that extremely difficult. But much smaller units of
time
have been invoked to explain our battle readiness over the last fifty years
and to license the centralization of injuring power rather than a decentralized
and distributed authorization across the full citizenry that is, according to
the U.S. Constitution, our legal right and our legal responsibility to
protect. There is a second profound reason the act could not be (ought not to
have
been) carried outâ??the problem of consent, to which I will return when we come
to
Flight 93.
Let us see what actions the military undertook during this time. The country
has fourteen National Guard planes responsible for defending the country. Five
of those planesâ??two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod and three
F-16s from Langley in Virginiaâ??were called into action on September 11. These
five
planes were not the only military planes in the air that day. Once the
Pentagon was hit, the FAA ordered all aircraft to land in a beautifully
choreographed landing of 4,546 planes over a period of three hours. When the
FAA announced
the order, 206 military planes were in U.S. airspace (most engaged in routine
exercises, actions unconnected to the immediate defense of the country);
ninety remained in the air after the grounding (their duties have not been
entered
into the public record).19 But it is only the five National Guard planes that
were called into action against the seized passenger airliners that will be
described here.
The two National Guard F-15s that took off from Otis Air Force Base on Cape
Cod attempted to address the events taking place in New York City. They were
called into action one minute before the first World Trade Center tower was
hit;
by the time the second tower was hit they were 71 milesâ??eight minutesâ??away
from Manhattan. Should they then have continued down to the Washington area?
(By this time, the plane destined for the Pentagon had its radio and
transponder
off and was reachable by neither air controllers nor the airline company.)
The answer is no. The two F-15s needed to stay near New York City, where it was
reasonable to worry that a third hijacked plane could approach. From September
11, 2001, until March 21, 2002, New York airspace was protected 24 hours a
day by F-15s, F16s, and AWACS.
Three F-16s at Langley, Virginia, received their first order from Huntress
Defense Section at 9:24 a.m. This is a late start: twenty-two minutes after the
second World Trade Center tower has been hit, thirty-four minutes after the
plane destined for the Pentagon has lost its radio, twenty-eight minutes after
it has disappeared from secondary radar, and fifteen minutes after the airline
company has failed to reach the plane on its own radio. By 9:30 a.m. the three
Langley F-16s are in the air traveling at 600 MPH toward New York City. Soon
they are instructed to change their course and are told that Reagan National
Airport is the target. They are flying at 25,000 feet.20 The hijacked plane is
flying at 7,000 feet. They reach Washington, D.C., at some unspecified time
after the 9:45 collision of Flight 77 into the Pentagon. As they pass over the
city, they are asked to look down and confirm that the Pentagon is on fireâ??
confirmation that by this point civilians on the ground have already provided.
There are profoundly clear reasons why the military could not easily
intercept the plane and bring it down in a rural area. But each of those
reasons has
counterparts in our longstanding military arrangements that should now be
subjected to rigorous questioning. First: Flight 77â??s path was hard to track
since
its transponder had been turned off. Yes, thatâ??s trueâ??and so, too, any
missiles fired on the United States or its allies will surely be traveling
without a
transponder; their path will not be lucid; their tracking will not be easy.
Second, the fact that Flight 77â??s radio was not working couldnâ??t be taken
as a
decisive sign that it was a hijacked plane since at least eleven other planes
in the country had radios not working (none of the others hijacked). Yes, that
â??s trueâ??and with missile defense there are likely to be not eleven but
hundreds of decoys and false targets that will have to be nimbly sorted
through. As
difficult as it was to identify the third seized plane, it must be
acknowledged that the flight had elements that made it far easier to identify
than the
enemy missiles our nation has spoken blithely about for decades: the direct
voice confirmation provided by the passenger phone call to the Justice
Department, most notably, will not have any counterpart on a missile attack;
nor can we
reasonably expect six layers of verification of any one enemy plane or
missile.
A third crucial explanation for the failure to protect the Pentagon is that
an F-16 cannot shoot down a passenger plane by arrogating to itself the right
to decide whether the lives on board can be sacrificed to avert the possibility
of even more lives being lost on the ground.21 Yes, that is trueâ??and yet for
decades we have spoken about actions that directly imperil the full American
citizenry (including presidential first use of nuclear weapons against a
population that the president acting alone has decided is â??the enemyâ??)
without ever
obtaining the American citizenryâ??s consent to those actions.
Each of these three explanations for why the attack on the Pentagon could not
be easily averted raises key questions about our longstanding descriptions of
the countryâ??s defense, and yet so far does not appear to have in any way
altered those descriptions. September 11 has caused the United States and its
allies to adjust their timetables only in those cases where the scenario
imagined
closely approximates the events that occurred in the terrorist attack itself.
In England, for example, â??MI5 has warned Ministers that a determined
terrorist
attempt to fly a jet into the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria could not
be prevented because it is only two minutesâ?? flying time from transatlantic
flight paths.â??22
While two minutesâ?? time makes it impossible to defend Cumbria against
terrorists, two minutes is apparently plenty of time for carrying out missile
defense
by the United States and NATO allies. Here is a postâ??September 11 description
of Englandâ??s â??Joint Rapid Reaction Forceâ??: â??A new satellite
communications
system has been installed to allow planners in Northwood to transmit target
co-ordinates to the royal Navyâ??s nuclear submarines equipped to fire Tomahawk
cruise missiles. HMS Trafalgar and HMS Triumph in the Indian Ocean both have
this system. Within minutes of the Prime Minister giving permission to fire
from
Downing Street, General Reith could pass on the orders to the submarine
nominated to launch the precision attack.â??23 What would be the response by
Western
democracies if a terrorist now used chemical, biological, or even nuclear
weapons? In an article describing advice to Tony Blair from his defense
ministers,
we learn that â??one of his most trusted advisers believes that a highly
effective way of preventing such an attack is to threaten states that succor
the
terrorists with a nuclear wipe-out, within minutes of such an attack, without
waiting for intelligence reports, United Nations resolutions or approval from
NATO.
â??24 Does the Bush administration have plans in place for such attack? Might
it be our duty to inquire?
The plane that took the Pentagon by surprise could not be stopped despite a
one hour and twenty-oneâ??minute warning that multiple planes had been
hijacked,
despite a fifty-eightâ??minute warning that the hijackers intended to maximize
the number of casualties, despite a fifty-fiveâ??minute warning that Flight 77
might possibly be a hijacked flight, and despite a twenty-minute warning that
Flight 77 was certainly a hijacked flight. Yet so confident are we of our
ability to get information, of our power to decipher complex lines of
responsibility, of the existence of evil and of the transparency of that evil,
that we are
still today talking about the two or three minutes to send cruise missiles and
even nuclear genocide to foreign populations. This despite eleven monthsâ??
475,000 minutesâ??in which we have been unable to determine who sent anthrax to
the
U.S. Senate and various centers of television communication.
United Flight 93
United Airlines Flight 93 was a small piece of American territoryâ??roughly 600
cubic meters in its overall size. It was lost to the country for
approximately forty minutes when terrorists seized control. It was restored to
the country
when civilian passengers who became citizen-soldiers regained control of the
groundâ??in the process losing their own lives.
The passengers on United Flight 93 were able to defend this ground for two
reasons: first, they were able to identify the threat accurately because it was
in their immediate sensory horizon (unlike the F-16s that hoped to intercept
the plane that hit the Pentagon, the passengers on Flight 93 did not need to
decipher their planeâ??s flight path from the outside, nor make inferences and
guesses about lost radio contact). The passengers were also able to get
information from unimpeachable sources external to the plane: crucially, they
did not
rely on information from a single central authority but obtained it from a
distributed array of sources, each independent of the others. Second, it was
their
own lives they were jeopardizing, their own lives over which they exercised
authority and consent. On the twin bases of sentient knowledge and
authorization, their collaborative work met the democratic standard of
â??informed consent.â??
When the U.S. Constitution was completed it had two provisions for ensuring
that decisions about war-making were distributed rather than concentrated. The
first was the provision for a congressional declaration of warâ??an open debate
in both the House and the Senate involving what would today be 535 men and
women. The second was a major clause of the Bill of Rightsâ??the Second
Amendment
right to bear armsâ??which rejected a standing executive army (an army at the
personal disposal of president or king) in favor of a militia, a citizenâ??s
army
distributed across all ages, geography, and social class of men.25 Democracy,
it was argued, was impossible without a distributed militia: self-governance
was perceived to be logically impossible without self-defense (exactly what do
you â??self-governâ?? if you have ceded the governing of your own body and life
to
someone else?)
United Flight 93 was like a small legislative assembly or town meeting.
Figure 2 shows the assembly structure. The residents on that ground conferred
with
one another, as well as with people not residing on the plane. Records from
the on-board telephones show that twenty-four phone calls were made between
9:31
a.m. and 9:54 a.m.; additional calls were made from cell phones.26 In
approximately twenty-three minutes, the passengers were able collectively to
move
through the following sequence of steps:27
1. Identify the location throughout the plane of all hijackers and how many
people each is holding. We know that passengers registered this information in
detail because they voiced the information to people beyond the plane: Todd
Beamer relayed the information to Lisa Jefferson (a Verizon customer-service
operator); Jeremy Glick relayed it to his wife;28 Sandy Bradshaw to her
husband;
Mark Bingham to his mother; Marion Britton to a close friend; Elizabeth Wainio
to her stepmother; and CeeCee Lyles to her husband.
In terms of democratic self-defense, these conversations are crucial (both at
step one and at each of the seven steps listed below) to preserving the civil
frame that the founders identified as so essential to military defense. The
conversations enabled extraordinary events to be tested against the norms of
everyday life. They were both intimate and an act of record-making: how else to
explain Mark Binghamâ??s self-identification to his mother, â??This is Mark
Bingham.â?? He both gave his mother the statement that the plane had been
seized by
hijackers (â??You believe me, donâ??t you?â??) and in effect notarized the
statement
by giving a verbal signature.
2. Hear from sources outside the plane the story of World Trade Center
towers. This information was key: it informed the passengers that they would
almost
certainly not be making a safe landing; it also informed them that many people
on the ground would also suffer death or injury from their plane.
3. Verify by multiple sources outside the plane the World Trade Center story.
Jeremy Glick, for example, told his wife that the account of the World Trade
Center attacks was circulating among the passengers. He explicitly asked her
to confirm or to deny its truth: â??Is it true?â??
4. Consult with each other and with friends outside the plane about the
appropriate action. Jeremy Glick told his family the passengers were developing
a
plan â??to rushâ?? the hijackers and he asked their advice. Todd Beamer told
Lisa
Jefferson the passengers will â??takeâ?? the terrorists (she cautioned: â??Are
you
sure thatâ??s what you want to do?â??) Tom Burnett told his wife a group of us
â??
is going to do somethingâ?? (she urged him to lay low and not make himself
visible). Sandy Bradshaw told her husband she was at that moment filling coffee
pots
with boiling water which she planned to throw at the hijackers; she asked if
he had a better plan (he tells her she has the best plan and to go ahead).
5. Take a vote. Jeremy Glick described the voting process to his wife as it
was underway.
6. Prepare themselves for taking a dire action that may result in death.
CeeCee Lyles, unable to reach her husband, left on the phone a recording of
herself praying, then later reached him and prayed with him; Tom Burnett asked
his
wife to pray while he and others on the plane acted; Todd Beamer and Lisa
Jefferson together recited the Twenty-third Psalm.
7. Take leave of people they love. Each of the passengers who was in
conversation with a family member stated aloud his or her love for the
listener; Todd
Beamer asked Lisa Jefferson to convey his love to his family. The family
members reciprocated: â??Iâ??ve got my arms around you,â?? Elizabeth Wainioâ??s
stepmother told her.
8. Act.
Many passengers described the plan to enter the cockpit by force. Not every
passenger assumed death was certain. Jeremy Glick left his phone off the hook,
telling his wife, â??Hold the phone. Iâ??ll be back.â?? Todd Beamer also left
the
phone line openâ??either because he expected to come back, or as an act of
public
record-keeping. The two open lines permitted members of the Glick household
and Lisa Jefferson to overhear the cries and shouts that followed, indicating
that action was being taken. CeeCee Lyles, still on the phone with her husband,
cried, â??Theyâ??re doing it! Theyâ??re doing it!â?? Confirmation is also
provided
by Sandy Bradshawâ??s sudden final words to her husband: â??Everyoneâ??s
running to
first class. Iâ??ve got to go. Bye.â??29
The passengers on United Flight 93 could act with speed because they resided
on the ground that needed to be defended. Equally important, they could make
the choiceâ??formalized in their public act of an open voteâ??between certain
doom
and uncertain (but possibly more widespread) doom. They could have hoped that
the hijackers would change their planned course; they could have known that
death by either avenue was certain, but one avenue would take them to their
deaths in several minutes (rushing the hijackers and crashing the plane) and
the
other avenue would perhaps give them another half-hour or hour of life
(waiting for the plane to reach its final target). They could have chosen the
second;
many people have chosen a delayed death when given the same choice. It is, in
any event, the right of the people who themselves are going to die to make
the decision, not the right of pilots in an F-16 or the person giving orders to
the person in the F-16â??as both civilian and military leaders have repeatedly
acknowledged since September 11.
It may be worth taking note of the fact that the hijackers themselves
correctly foresaw that the threat to their mission would come from the
passengers (â??
citizen soldiersâ??) and not from a military source external to the plane. The
terrorists left behind them multiple copies of a manual, five pages in
Arabic.30
The manual is a detailed set of instructions for the hours before and after
boarding the planeâ??â??an exacting guide for achieving the unity of body and
spirit necessary for success.â?? The ritualized set of steps includes: taking a
mutual pledge to die; carrying out a ritual act of washing, invocation, and
prayer; and dressing according to prescribed recommendations on the tightness
or
looseness of clothing.
The manual does not tell the terrorists what to do if an F-15 or F-16
approaches the planes they have seized.31 It instead gives elaborate
instruction on
what to do if passengers offer resistance. We should not ordinarily let
ourselves be schooled by terrorists. But terrorists who seek to carry out a
mission
successfully have to know what the greatest threat to their mission isâ??and
the
handbook indicates that the great obstacle was perceived to be first, the
passengers, and second, the reluctance the hijackers might feel to kill any
resisting passengers. They are instructed at length and in elaborate detail to
kill
any resister and to regard the killing as â??a sacred drama,â?? a death carried
out to honor their parents. (That the hijackers would unblinkingly crash into a
skyscraper taking thousands of lives yet balk at the idea of killing people
hand-to-hand and therefore require detailed counseling to get through it is
perhaps no more surprising than the fact that we listen every day to casualty
rates brought about by the military yet would not keenly kill in hand-to-hand
combat.)
Conclusion
I have intended here to open a conversation about our general capacity for
self-defense. I have compared the fate of the plane that hit the Pentagon and
the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The military was unable to thwart the
action of Flight 77 despite fifty-five minutes in which clear evidence existed
that the plane might be held by terrorists, and despite twenty minutes in which
clear evidence existed that the plane was certainly held by terrorists. In
the same amount of timeâ??twenty-three minutesâ??the passengers of Flight 93
were
able to gather information, deliberate, vote, and act.32
t to the country if such people would now begin to share those views with the
public. But such views can in no way preempt or abridge our own obligation to
review matters, since the protection of the country falls to everyone whose
country it is.
More particularly, September 11 called into question a key argument that has
been used to legitimate the gradual shift from an egalitarian, all-citizensâ??
military to one that is external toâ??independent ofâ??civilian control: the
argument from speed. The egalitarian model turned out to have the advantage of
swiftness, as well as obvious ethical advantages. This outcome has implications
for three spheres of defense.
1. Defense against aerial terrorismSeptember 11 involved a partial failure of
defense. If ever a country has been warned that its arrangements for defense
are defective, the United States has been warned. Standing quietly by while
our leaders build more weapons of mass destruction and bypass more rules and
more laws (and more citizens) simply continues the unconstitutional andâ??as we
have recently learnedâ??ineffective direction we have passively tolerated for
fifty
years. We share a responsibility to deliberate about these questions, as
surely as the passengers on Flight 93 shared a responsibility to deliberate
about
how to act. The failures of our current defense arrangements put an obligation
on all of us to review the arrangements we have made for protecting the
country. â??All of usâ?? means â??all of us who reside in the country,â?? not
â??all of us
who work at the Pentagonâ?? or â??all of us who convene when there is a meeting
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.â?? What the Chiefs of Staff think, or what
analysts
at the Pentagon think, is of great interest (as are the judgments of men and
women who by other avenues of expertise have thoughtful and knowledgeable
assessments of security issues); it would be a benefi. To date, the egalitarian
model of defense is the only one that has worked against aerial terrorism. It
worked on September 11 when passengers brought down the plane in Pennsylvania.
It again worked on December 22, 2001, when passengers and crew on an American
Airlines flight from Paris to Miami prevented a terrorist (now called â??the
shoe
bomberâ??) from blowing up the plane with plastic explosives and killing 197
people on board. Two Air Force F-15s escorted the plane to Boston and, once the
plane landed, FBI officials hurried aboard; but the danger itself was averted
not by the fighter jets or the FBI but by men and women inside the plane who
restrained the 6'4" man using his own hair, leather belts, earphone wires, and
sedatives injected by two physicians on board.
When a passenger plane is seized by a terrorist, defense from the outside (by
a fighter jet, for example) appears to be structurally implausible from the
perspective of time, and structurally impossible from the perspective of
consent. The problem of timeâ??time to identify that a plane has been seized,
time to
identify accurately which plane it is, time to arrive in the airspace near the
seized planeâ??was dramatically visible in the case of the plane that hit the
Pentagon, even though much more time and more layers of verification were
available that day than are likely to be available in any future instance. The
time
difficulty was visible again on January 5, 2002, when a fifteen-year-old boy
took off without authorization from Petersburg-Clearwater International
Airport, crossed through the airspace of MacDill Air Force Base (the
headquarters
for the U.S. war in Afghanistan), and then flew into a forty-twoâ??story Bank
of
America skyscraper in Tampa, hitting at the twenty-eighth floor. Two F-15
fighter jets â??screamedâ?? toward him from the south, but reached him only
after he
had completed his twenty-five minute flight.33 The time problem was visible
once more on June 19, 2002, when a pilot and passenger in a Cessna 182
accidentally crossed into forbidden Washington Monument airspace, flew there
for twelve
miles (coming within four miles of the White House), and then crossed out
again before armed F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base could reach them.
Even if the nearly insurmountable problems of time and perfect knowledge can
one day be solved, how can the problem of consent be solved? There is no case
in war where a soldier is authorized to kill 200 fellow soldiers; how can an
airman be authorized to kill 200 fellow citizens? How can anyone other than the
passengers themselves take their lives in order to save some number of the
rest of us on the ground? During the seven months that F-15s and F-16s, armed
with air-to-air missiles, flew round the clock over New York and Washington,
what instructions did they have in the event that a passenger plane was seized?
What instructions do they now have for their more intermittent flights? Are
such instructions something only high-ranking officials should be privy to, or
might this be something that should be candidly discussed in public?
It seems reasonable to conclude that on September 11 the Pentagon could have
been defended in one way and one way only, by the passengers on the American
Airlines flight. This would have required three steps: that multiple passengers
on the plane be informed about the World Trade Center towers;34 that the
passengers decide to act or instead to abstain from acting; and that, in the
event
that they choose to act, they be numerous enough to successfully carry out
their plan. As far as we know, none of these steps took placeâ??in part
because,
as far as we know, there were not multiple passengers on board who knew about
the World Trade Center towers. It is possible that one or more of these steps
took place, even though they have not been recorded.
In stating that the egalitarian model is our best and only defense against
aerial terrorism, I do not mean that passengers in any one case must choose to
act, or thatâ??having so chosenâ??they will be successful. I mean only that
this
is the one form of defense available to us as a country, which passengers are
at liberty to exercise or refrain from exercising. Measures taken by the nation
that are internal to the plane (locks on cockpit door, the presence of air
marshals, the cessation of the round-the-clock fighter jets over New York and
Washington35) are compatible with this form of defense.
2. National defense in the immediate present. The contrast between the plane
that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania invites
consideration of the need to return to an egalitarian and democratic military
not
only in the specific case of aerial terrorism but in all measures we take for
the nationâ??s defense in the present year. Some may argue that we cannot
generalize from one day. Can we generalize from zero days? One day is what we
have.
What makes this non-risky is that rather than requiring us to come up with some
new system of government, all it requires is returning to, and honoring, the
framework of our own laws.
Since September 11 we have witnessed many actions taken in the name of
homeland defense that are independent of, or external to, civilian control.
Foreign
residents have been seized and placed in circumstances that violate our most
basic laws; the war against Afghanistan was underway before we had even been
given much explanation of its connection to the terrorists, who were all from
Saudi Arabia or Lebanon or Egypt or the United Arab Emirates and not from
Afghanistan; that war now seems to be over even though we donâ??t know whether
we
eliminated the small circle around Osama bin Laden, for whose sake we believed
we
were there; we are now tripping rapidly ahead to the next war, listening
passively to weekly announcements about an approaching war with Iraq that has
no
visible connection to the events of September 11; the presidentâ??s formulation
of
this future war sometimes seems to include (or at least not to exclude) the
use of nuclear weapons and the animation of our nuclear first-use policy.36 The
decoupling of all defense from the population itself lurches between large
outcomes (presidential declaration of war) and the texture of everyday life.
According to the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the
federal agency called the National Communications Systems has â??proposed that
government officials be able to take over the wireless networks used by
cellular
telephones in the event of an emergency,â?? thereby pre-empting the very form
of
defense that did work (the citizenry) and giving their tools to the form of
defense that did not work (the official government).37
We are defending the country by ceding our own powers of self-defense to a
set of managers external to ourselves. But can these powers be ceded without
relinquishing the very destination toward which we were traveling together, as
surely as if our ship had been seized? The destination for which we purchased
tickets was a country where no one was arrested without their names being made
public, a country that did not carry out wars without the authorization of
Congress (and the widespread debate among the population that such a
congressional
declaration necessitates), a country that does not threaten to use weapons of
mass destruction. Why are we sitting quietly in our seats?
In the short run, returning to an egalitarian model of defense means: no war
with Iraq unless it has been authorized by Congress and the citizenry; no
abridgment of civil liberties; no elimination of the tools that enable citizens
to
protect themselves and one another (such as cell phones)â??and above all, no
contemplated use of nuclear weapons.
3. National defense in the long run. Europeans often refer to nuclear weapons
as â??monarchic weaponsâ?? precisely because they are wholly external to any
powers of consent or dissent exercised by the population. In the long run, the
return to an egalitarian model of national defense will require the return to a
military that uses only conventional weapons. This will involve a tremendous
cost: it will almost certainly, for example, mean the return of a draft. But a
draft means that a president cannot carry out a war without going through the
citizenry, and going through the citizenry means that the arguments for going
to war get tested tens of thousands of times before the killing starts.
Our nuclear weapons are the largest arsenal of genocidal weapons anywhere on
earth. These weapons, even when not in use, deliver a death blow to our
democracy.38 But even if we are willing to give up democracy to keep ourselves
safe,
on what basis have we come to believe that they keep us safe? Their speed? A
Cessna plane (of the kind that proved impossible to intercept in Florida and
Washington) travels at approximately 136 feet per second; a Boeing 757 (of the
kind that proved impossible to intercept as it approached the Pentagon)
travels at 684 feet per second; a missile travels at 6,400 feet per second.39
On
what have we based our confidence about intercepting incoming missiles, since
the
problem of deciphering information and decoupling it from false decoys will
(along with speed) be much higher in the case of the missile than in the cases
of the planes?40
Nuclear weapons are an extreme form of aerial terrorism. It is with good
reason that we have worked to prevent the proliferation throughout the world of
nuclear weapons (as well as biological and chemical weapons of mass
destruction). But in the long run other countries of the world will only agree
to abstain
from acquiring them, or to give them up in cases where they already have them,
when and if the United States agrees to give them up. The process of
persuading Iraq, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, as well as our immediate
allies,
to give them up will commence on the day we agree to restore within our own
country a democratic form of self-defense.
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