The suicide missions that destroyed the World Trade Centre and one wing of the U.S. Pentagon killing thousands of people on September 11, 2001, connect to wider patterns.
The first mark of a truly civilised person or culture is that they can "put themselves in the other's place". This is an ancient recognition, linking teachings of both Confucian and Christian founders, and it is daily preached to children as the basis of being human. Yet when the U.S.'s most populous city is hit by the equivalent of three large bombs terrorising and murdering thousands of people, one would have hoped that the recognition would at last have dawned that a country's most populous city being bombed is a terrible event, a crime against humanity in its mass destruction of innocent civilians and their infrastructures. One would have hoped that the lesson taught to children over millennia would have been felt from the inside as people witnessed on the lifeground the terror, suffering and death.
Yet in all the outrage and condemnations that have flooded from reported public figures and observers around the world, not one has made the connection. None has "put themselves in the other's place" to connect what happened to New York to the more life destructive bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructures in Baghdad in 1991, or Belgrade in 1998. In Iraq, a UN-estimated 5000 children a month have died year in and year out because of the infrastructure bombing, as well as by the contamination of the countryside by nuclear-tipped weapons and their deadly after-effects. In both countries, the most developed social infrastructures in their regions have been irreversibly destroyed by the attacks. The bombings of capital cities in each case went on, in fact, not just for a few hours, but days and weeks on end without stop, while people in the U.S. and allied countries watched the exploding bombs night after night on their home televisions as the top-rated entertainment of the time.
But the New York attack goes deeper in unseen connections. How could it have happened? After all, the pervasive Echelon surveillance apparatus and the most sophisticated intelligence machinery ever built is unlikely not to have eavesdropped on some of the very complicated organisation and plans across states and boundaries for the multi-site hijacking of planes from major security structures across the U.S. - especially since the suicide pilots were trained as pilots in the U.S., and the World Trade Centre had already been bombed in 1993 by Afghan ex-allies of the CIA. Since the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, is himself an ex-CIA operative in Afghanistan, and his moves presumably under the intensest scrutiny for past successful terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998, one has to reflect on the connections.
One would be naive to think the Bush Jr. faction and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers who had stolen an election with its man rated in office by the majority of Americans as poor on the economy (a Netscape Poll poll taken off the screen when the planes hit the towers), and more deplored by the rest of the world as a deep danger to the global environment and the international rule of law, do not benefit astronomically from this mass-kill explosion. If there was a wish-list, it is all granted by this numbing turn of events. Americans are diverted from a free-falling economy to attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush regime's popularity climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite armed security apparatus have more money and power than ever, and become as dominant as they can over civilians in "the whole new era" now being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and Israel's apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time. Even the surgingly popular "anti world-trade" movement is now associated with foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade Centre.
The more you review the connections and the sweeping lapse of security across so many co-ordinates, the more the lines of force point backwards.
Behind the terrible event on all sides, the deepest problem is not seen. The closed mind of life-disconnection is being locked in. Even now, even after suffering through the inside taste of bombed-city horror in the capital of the world's number one aerial bombing nation, the leaders and their peoples across borders are now being drawn into preparing and calling for more. None but the silenced grasp the meaning that stands before them in the rubble, the death and the pain.
Bombing civilian population centres is evil - whether from outer-space as now researched by the Bush administration, or by kami-kasi hijackers dive-bombing into city skyscrapers more close-up. With rising talk about "the civilised world against the uncivilised world" and demands to do it again, the mind-lock has to be broken. It is not just that the evil of aerial bombing civilians exposes our own civilians to still more bloodshed and terror ahead, while military gangs and complexes grow richer and more in command. Bear in mind that over 90% of military-wrought deaths in the world have been unarmed people since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At some point the pretense of "civilisation" and "the free world" by our leaders has to move beyond ideological cant to be more than lawless mass murder in emperor's clothes.