On ruins

The United States has learned a lesson from the tragedy on September 11, 2001

Photo: pwpla.com

On ruins. The term “war with terror”, which George Bush announced after September 11, has long disappeared from official American everyday life. No, terrorism has not gone anywhere. Just to fight him was preferred differently

New York, Manhattan, Ground Zero is the very ill-fated place that has forever eaten in memory. In place of the defeated pair of skyscrapers, nothing has yet been built. But the skeleton of the future giant tower is already rising over the former pit. At first, she was called in a purely Bushevsk spirit of the Freedom Tower, but over time they decided to call simply - “World Trade Center, House 1”.

Around the heap

That day is still before my eyes. "Smoke went from the World Trade Center!" -A friend who was traveling from New Jersey to work in New York woke me up on the phone. A siren hung over the city.

After 18 minutes, another airliner crashed into the second skyscraper of the WTC, and commentators spoke about the new Pearl Harbor. After another 20 minutes, one giant tower fell apart, and soon after it settled and turned into a pile of fragments of the second. Thousands of tons of reinforced concrete fell on the pavements, under which tunnels of the metro lines run in this part of Manhattan. There were rumors that the wreckage was buried with three compositions with passengers. Another rumor read that from the ruins they removed the cabin of airliner with a dead terrorist at the helm. It was said that during the collapse of the skyscraper, one man moved smoothly down in the wake of the debris and survived.

All this is from the same opera as the subsequent theories, according to which the towers were brought down not by Osama, but by Bush.

The subway stopped. For half a day, hundreds of thousands of employees walked past the author of these lines who left Manhattan to the sleeping areas of Kuins and Brooklyn.

There was no special panic in the city. The authorities blocked bridges and tunnels leading to Manhattan, and called for the townsfolk not to stick their nose out of the house, as well as contact a nearby hospital and offer blood. It needed much less than expected, because there were few wounded under the ruins.

Restricted area

A week later, the wind blew south all day, towards the ocean, and in Manhatten there was no familiar smell of pale plastic. Only the bustling of the city of trouble was reminiscent of only a fat with a thick mandatory candle left by someone at the entrance, slow access to the Internet and star-striped flags in the windows of a residential building opposite.

The flags were everywhere: on the antennas and on the hoods of cars, in the windows of boutiques, restaurants, dry cleaners and fashionable coffee houses Starbucks, who lost many of their regulars on that Tuesday, in the Chinese funeral Bureau of Cheun San, on the famous Malberry-Street, John Gotti, who was dying in the prison in the prison in the prison From cancer, on the helmets of builders.

The flags began to seem talismans, behind which the Americans were hiding from trouble. The majority was sure that September 11 would be repeated now regularly.

The centers of grief began on the way to the southern tip of Manhattan, where behind the police cordons he smoke that the rescuers were called just in a bunch. Entire quarters on Lexington Avenue were sealed by ads with photographs of missing people. Further to the south lay a junion-scavenging, which turned into a huge memorial.

The border of the forbidden zone, by the end of the first week, moved far south to the south, to Chemberce Street. The close approaches to the heap guarded the police and national guards in steel helmets, with water bottles instead of weapons. They shouted that it was impossible to shoot.

"Why not?" - I politely asked the Police Academy, who guarded one intersection of a short cadet, which had not yet been given either a strip or a Glock’s service pistol.

“Because my boss ordered so! She snapped, thought and added: - Freedom of print here ends. Restricted area". She said not even “forbidden”, but “frozen” - Frozen. It is unlikely that she herself came up with this formulation, most likely, she repeated the words of her bosses.

At the end, Greenwich Street towered a brown pile of fragments a height of several floors, from which clubs of white smoke still pulled out. It was the same heap under which almost 3 thousand people lay. At that time, there were more than a million tons in it. Instead of a heap, sometimes they said - an epicenter. When a heap was replaced by a pit, they began to call her a bathroom.

In the window of one bench on the 23rd street, it was written "I am from India." This was not the only model of prudence in New York. On the corner of Greenwich and Reed was the Indian restaurant Saalam Bombay. God protects the banned: on the window glass the announcements "God, bless the United States of America!", "We pray for the victims and their family."

Greenwich Street was divided by blue police barriers who guarded the loud national guards. On the right side of the street are the van of the Red Cross and the army of salvation. Hundreds of bottles of water, whose stacks stood nearby on the ground, were dumped on the folding tables in front of them. In life I have not seen as much bottle water as after September 11.

The middle of the street is filled with people. In one direction, rescuers wandered from the shift in helmets and with pink respirators on the necks, some serious men with aluminum suitcases, nonresident firefighters in heavy boots and heavy rubberized cloaks, and policemen.

William Harris, the owner of one of the construction companies hired by the city for rescue work, says, restraining himself with difficulty: “We all have a desire to pull someone alive, the guys are pouring manually until blood comes from their fingers.” It was clear that from day to day, the mayor of New York Rudolph Juliani would announce that there was no more hopes to find someone alive. Then Harris will manage that his people no longer dig their hands, and move their excavators to a heap. “I have a request: think about relatives,” he said to the En-Bi correspondent, “mention less that only parts of the corpses are being found so far. After all, their families are watching all this. ”

In the very place where the WTC towers stood, two powerful color towers of blue color shot into the sky - this light show symbolizes the unfading memory of the victims of the attack. If you look at him close, the firefly, flying through the rays, are visible - and it seems that these are the souls of the dead. Photo: itstactical.com

A month later

From the southern part of Broadway to the ruins is a stone's throw. Although it rains more than once on September 11, they were still at home in light gray dust, and for some reason the jewelry store on the corner of Maden Lane was generally left in its original form: it was so covered with dust that people painted its walls to the second floor. There are bred slogans like “Heroes live forever!”, Flowerers, curses of Osama. In the windows lay a layer of volcanic dust in two fingers thick, and where its whole heaps, among which the stands from expensive hours and jewelry with inscriptions Omega, Gucci, Maurice Lacroix or Tudor towered.

A month later, streams of water from the corpuscles were still beaten through the ruins, and white smoke still crawled out and pulled the smell of burning plastic, so some breathed through scarves, sleeves or blue gauze masks, which at first sold $ 2, and now he distributed a red cross for free of charge: a office continued to burn in the bowels of the ruins Furniture and thousands of kilometers of cable.

Massive steel beams stuck out of the heap, and next to it the arrows of giant cranes towered and yellow excavators with claws crawled. When I left, a bus with rescuers crawled out of the epicenter. On his side was an advertisement for a new action movie with Johnny Depp. The film was called from Hell ("from hell").

New mode

The attacks of September 11 did not have protracted economic consequences. True, they ultimately cost many billions, but the American GDP is currently about $ 15 trillion. Within seven years after the attacks, from 2001 to 2008, the US economy and New York blossomed, and Manhattan's southern tip continued to be the financial center of the planet. The changes have broken a completely different properties. Following the pathos lawmaking of a “patriotic act” adopted in October 2001 (“USA Patriot Act”), sharply criticized by human rights defenders for expanded powers of special services*, a giant state security apparatus arose: according to Washington Post, it includes 1200 state organizations, 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies and 1900 companies 854 thousand employees with secret tolerances. However, outside the borders of this, albeit not a very narrow circle of special services, the new anti -terrorism regime is almost not felt by the townsfolk, and millions of Americans who do not go beyond the “district center” do not face him at all.

It is worse for air passengers forced to undergo checks, which many consider humiliating: remove belts and belts, remove shoes, “enlighten” with an X -ray and so on. "So far there is such a garbage at the airport, I will not fly in my life!" -In the hearts, says the Jeff Campanella, the Jeff Campanella, which, obviously, does not have relatives in other cities of a huge country. Inspections at the entrance to the federal courts also acquired a radical nature: it is again necessary to remove belts and shoes. It is interesting to see venerable lawyers meal in line for the gender, forcing the local oligarchs and government officials to tremble.

“The flags began to seem talismans, behind which the Americans were hiding from trouble. The majority was sure that September 11 would be repeated regularly "

Railway passengers are accustomed to meet at both New York stations police patrols with short German MP-5 machine guns and soldiers of the National Guard in field and hip hip. They are almost never noticed, although they look at the service shepherds sitting next to them with tenderness. The Americans are obsessed with animals.

The metro announces that the police can search your large hand luggage, but in ten years I had to see this only once. The calls hang: “If you see something, then say something,” that is, tell the conductor about the bundle left in the carriage. But the same posters were in the London metro in the late 70s. Once the author saw how a bundle was simply thrown out of the carriage onto the platform. If he then exploded, it would become known about this. So, did not explode.

On the other hand, in the USA there are no checks at the entrance to stores, as in Israel. No one heard the FBI to visit the libraries and studied forms in search of terrorists, as George Bush allowed, who was mercilessly blaspheming for this. However, the FBI had the right to do this before, only with a judicial order.

Eternal pendulum?

It is generally accepted that the political addictions of the Americans hesitate like a pendulum. A few days before the attack of September 11, only 13% of the US citizens believed that their country should be the "only world leader." And less than a third of the respondents spoke for increasing military spending. Immediately after September 11, the people's mindset of the people changed dramatically. An American flag grew on each bush, the rating of the presidential-chief was approaching 100%, the invasion of Afghanistan was held with a bang, after which Congress voted together for the war with Iraq. Now polls are shown again: only 12% of the Americans would like to see their country the only superpower, i.e. Even less than on the eve of September 11, 2001. And the number of those who advocate increasing the cost of national security has decreased to 26%.

“One of the reasons for the reversal in consciousness,” says historian Niall Ferguson, “may be that the wars that America waged in the last decade did not live up to expectations.” True, the terror war ended in victory, if we consider as a victory the fact that after September 11 there was not a single serious terrorist attack in the United States. But the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns turned out to be much more difficult than everyone expected, and still last. Perhaps it was also played by the fact that the last financial crisis turned out to be more serious than experts predicted, and overshadowed the events of September 11 in the national mind.

In those months, when Manhattan was the smell of foul plastic, President Bush was omnipotent and could spend anything through Congress. For example, to order the Americans to divide and go to the flash mob. But already in 2002, the democrats began to timidly argue with the owner of the White House. By the 2004 elections, the opposition spoke in full voice, the Iraqi war lost popularity, the “International Amnesty” called the special tuli, created in 2002 in Guantanamo, “the Gulag of our Days”, and the media criticized “Third Deerications” and the issuance of suspects in terrorism in countries where they do not know other interrogations. A year later, in 2005, Europe was shocked by the scandal around the secret prison of the CIA in Poland and Romania, where they brought to torture suspects in terrorism **, in 2009 the list of “time countries” was replenished by Lithuania. All these scandals, which one way or another, settled in the Procrustean bed of the fight against terror, gradually prepared a change of power in the United States.

In the fall of 2008, the Americans, tired of the Bush team, scandals and prolonged military campaigns “behind the three seas”, chose the president of Barack Obama, who personified the change. He solemnly promised that Guantanamo would be covered in January 2010. But then the pendulum swayed again. The prison in Guantanamo has not yet been closed and, according to her head Admiral Jeffrey Harbson, "even if the order (president) will go today, at least six months should be closed at the closing of the prison." Suspects in terrorism are still going to judge in military commissions, which the American intelligentsia together stigmatized. American troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. And ordinary Americans are again unhappy, primarily the size of the military budget.

But this does not mean that everything has returned to their own. Today, if air passengers see that someone in the cabin is smoking under the sneak, they are not fluctuating on the culprit. When an SUV smoked at Times Square, a street merchant immediately called the police ... There are many examples. The past 10 years woke vigilance in the Americans, and they save the country from repetition on September 11.

Boris Yunanov took part in the preparation of the material

* In February 2011, Congress extended this document until December 8, 2011

** American law prohibits torture in American territory.