I remember getting up to go to work sometime around 6:30 in the morning. My mom was visiting, sleeping in the living room, so I turned the radio on quietly in the kitchen and thought a contemporary War of the Worlds was on NPR. My mom woke up as I turned on the small television and soon we saw a plane fly behind Dan Rather's head and into the tower that was not burning. It soon became apparent that my first day editing a new TV show wouldn't be that day.
I won't be starting any job five years later on the eleventh, but I will be 17 stories up having my teeth cleaned, and from the dentist's chair, the Hollywood sign is visible. When I look out at the sign tomorrow, I'll be thinking mostly about finding work, and some of that will be about work I don't want: anything for ABC. Will I take it if it's offered? I hope not.
My other thoughts will be on a different Path to 9/11: The New Yorker, Sept. 11, 2006. Although I grew up in California, the magazine has been in all the houses I have occupied for nearly forty six years. To me it has offered the best writing and politics I have seen in print, and it continues to do so to this day wether it is John McPhee on the sunken city or Seymour Hersh on stove piping intelligence at the CIA. It has also had the best cover art as well: I was very disappointed when Gretchen Dow Simpson was dismissed during the Tina Brown era.
But where my other thoughts will start as my teeth are cleaned will be with the New Yorker cover from 9/24/01. And then it will drift to the cover of the issue dated Sept. 11, 2006: Phillipe Petit on a blank white page followed by a second cover page where the tightrope walker is in mid air with the twin tower's foot print below. And as the plaque is scraped from my teeth I will have in my mind a different path to this infamous day than the path ABC is fawning off to more than the public.
In this weeks issue of the New Yorker, between Hendrik Hertzberg's editorial and Steve Coll's missive on bin Laden's bank account at the front of the magazine, and the fiction and critics at the end of the magazine, are four articles that caused my darkened universe to pause:
* Jane Mayer: Junior, America's top Al Qaeda informant.
For nearly a decade, a former Al Qaeda operative named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl has been living in the United States government's witness-protection program, under an assumed identity. A Sudanese citizen and a onetime confidant of Osama bin Laden's, Fadl is expected to serve as a central witness in the prosecutions of at least two suspected terrorists being held at the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Fadl, a dark-skinned man with close-cropped hair and a mischievous smile, entered government custody in 1996, after walking into the U.S. Embassy in Eritrea and confessing to membership in Al Qaeda. Since then, he has lived in at least half a dozen American towns. (He spent the first eighteen months in a Residence Inn in New Jersey, guarded by several armed F.B.I. agents; subsequently, his wife and children joined him in America, and the family was transferred to a series of undisclosed locations.) Fadl, who is now in his forties, is arguably the United States' most valuable informant on Al Qaeda; he has provided crucial intelligence about the group's operations and has made positive identifications of suspected members. At the same time, Fadl--an incessant troublemaker who is known to a small group of F.B.I. agents simply as Junior--has tried the patience of the officials in whose care he resides. "Junior's a problem child," Jack Cloonan, a former special agent for the F.B.I., who is now the president of a crisis-management firm, says.
* Jeffrey Goldberg: The Forgotten War, Hamas considers its options.
Four Skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing drones of the Israeli Air Force. It was late July, the fourth week of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict eclipsed by Israel's other war, against Hezbollah. The men came near the doorway of the vacant building in which I was hiding. A friend, a Palestinian who had arranged this meeting, stepped into the alley and waved them over. It was 3 A.M.
* Lawrence Wright: The Master Plan, What will the next stage of jihad be?
Even as members of Al Qaeda watched in exultation while the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon burned on September 11, 2001, they realized that the pendulum of catastrophe was swinging in their direction. Osama bin Laden later boasted that he was the only one in the group's upper hierarchy who had anticipated the magnitude of the wound that Al Qaeda inflicted on America, but he also admitted that he was surprised by the tower's collapse. His goal, for at least five years, had been to goad America into invading Afghanistan, an ambition that had caused him to continually raise the stakes-the simultaneous bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in August, 1998, followed by the attack on an American warship in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Neither of those actions had led the United States to send troops to Afghanistan. After the attacks on New York and Washington, however, it was clear that there would be an overwhelming response. Al Qaeda members began sending their families home and preparing for war.
* George Packer: The Moderate Martyr, Interpreting Islam for the modern world.
In 1967, a law student at the University of Khartoum named Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim was looking for a way to spend a summer evening in his home town, a railway junction on the banks of the Nile in northern Sudan. No good movies were showing at the local cinemas, so he went with a friend to hear a public lecture by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, an unorthodox Sudanese mystic with a small but ardent following. Taha's subject, "An Islamic Constitution: Yes and No," tantalized Naim. In the years after Sudan became independent, in 1956, the role of Islam in the state was fiercely debated by traditional Sufists, secular Marxists, and the increasingly powerful Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, who, at the time, were led in Sudan by Hasan al-Turabi, a legal scholar. Politically, Naim was drifting toward the left, but his upbringing in a conservative Muslim home had formed him. "I was very torn," Naim recently recalled. "I am a Muslim, but I couldn't accept Sharia" -Islamic law. "I studied Sharia and I knew what it said. I couldn't see how Sudan could be viable without women being full citizens and without non-Muslims being full citizens. I'm a Muslim, but I couldn't live with this view of Islam."
This week the New Yorker devoted four pieces of writing about 9/11 that were punctuated by two photos, one from then and one from now. This is the path that I have taken over the weekend, a literary one that to me reads more accurately, more attentively, more historically, and more hopefully than the other path. I'll probably be a little more fearful tomorrow (I've always had some fear of heights) while my teeth are being ground about, but that fear doesn't come from the path I took this weekend, it comes from a path others are following. Yet I'm still hopeful the direction I'm going in is getting more crowded.