Photo of the Day: Wall of Names, Flight 93 National Memorial, Shanksville PA

Last October, while on vacation in Pittsburgh, I journeyed an hour and a half to the east to a rural, wind-swept field that filled me with awe and sadness. 

As a worker on an upper floor in a midtown Manhattan office building, I had watched in horror as the World Trade Center caught fire and collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001. But, till this afternoon last fall, I had not come face to face with another event of that day.

The Flight 93 National Memorial, near Shanksville, PA, commemorates one particular mass tragedy and act of heroism that day. Flight 93, bound for California, was one of the four commercial airlines hijacked by terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. 

But its 40 passengers and crew, learning what was happening in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground, fought the four hijackers and are believed to have attacked the cockpit with a fire extinguisher. Their action prevented an attack on the U.S. Capitol and the loss of even more lives.

While visiting the site, I took this photo of the Wall of Names, which is located beneath the flight plan and final approach of the doomed plane. Inscriptions of each of the 40 heroes on board are on 40 individually selected and polished stones. Black granite marks the flight path.

It struck me, just as I started to write this post, that an entire new generation of Americans not born on 9/11 has now come of voting age. Reading about the background surrounding 9/11 is one way they can inform themselves on perhaps the formative event of this current century. 

But a more visceral method of absorbing the significance of this time is to visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, as well as Flight 93 Memorial.

Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, on Avoiding ‘Messages of Hatred or Terror’)

“Don’t be taken in by the messages of hatred or terror all around us. Instead, make new friends. Give of your time and always show concern for those who ask your help. Be brave and go against the tide; be friends of Jesus, who is the Prince of Peace.” —Pope Francis, “Message for the Jubilee of Mercy, for Young Boys and Girls,” Jan. 6, 2016

Flashback, September 2001: Bush Urges ‘War on Terror’)

Addressing a joint session of Congress a little over a week after the United States was attacked by al Qaeda terrorists, President George W. Bush stated that the nation was now engaged in a “war on terror” that would involve conventional military action, covert intelligence operations, and disruption of terrorist financing.

The phrase and the commentary surrounding it illustrated both the highly unusual, even unprecedented, nature of the war and the elastic nature of the U.S. government response. Both of these factors explain why it has been impossible to bring the resulting military action to a definitive conclusion.

First, notice what President Bush’s message was not: a request that Congress declare war, even though “war on terror” may have been the most enduring linguistic coinage from the address. Congress has not fulfilled this constitutional duty since WWII. In a way, both the executive and legislative branches get what they want from this state of affairs: a President gets to act with maximum freedom to act, while Congress possesses plausible deniability if a war to which it has explicitly acquiesced goes awry.

Early on, U.S. intelligence determined that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carried out by al-Qaeda, a terrorist network with training camps in Afghanistan. But unlike, say, WWI and WWII, where the United States deemed that foreign governments were directly involved in infringing on American sovereignty, the U.S. sought to get at the perpetrators of 9/11 initially by confronting a party indirectly responsible: the Taliban regime that allowed al-Qaeda to flourish within its borders. 

The nomenclature of a war how it will be prosecuted and, decades later, how it will be perceived. The conflict that raged for four years after the firing on Fort Sumter was known, particularly among Northerners, as the “War of the Rebellion.” (Its primary documents are known as The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, or the “O.R.” for short among historians.)   

As an “Opinionator” blog post in The New York Times’ by Chandra Manning and Adam Rothman a few years ago noted, calling secession a “rebellion” enabled the federal government to invoke the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 authority granted to “suppress Insurrections,” and Article I, Section 9 to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for the same contingency.

It was only after 1881, when former Confederate President Jefferson Davis began to refer to it as the “Civil War,” that Union advocates adopted it. (Manning and Rothman note that the new term was more conciliatory than “War of the Rebellion,” but there may have been another reason why it caught on: it was shorter. That convenience probably led them to resist southern sympathizers’ attempt at a more nakedly ideological phrase for the conflict: “The War Between the States.”)

The “War on Terror” (soon known as the “Global War on Terror,” or the bureaucratic shorthand GWOT) was seemingly designed both to describe the asymetric warfare of the enemy and to seize the moral high ground claimed by victims. But it also opened the doors to a situation difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. (No sooner would the resources of al-Qaeda be dramatically reduced, for instance, than ISIS rose from its ashes.)

At the same time, a broader name for the war allowed the Bush administration to push to the limit of public opinion. Within three days of 9/11, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and even Bush himself were requesting reports on possible Iraqi involvement with the attacks—and expressing annoyance when intelligence agencies did not turn up credible evidence of this. (See, for instance, this account of the preparations for the Iraq war with Iraq by Joyce Battle, senior analyst for the National Security Archive at George Washington University.)

Had Bush delivered a sharply focused message after 9/11, he could have confined military and political objectives to the demands he made on the Taliban in Afghanistan (e.g., “Deliver to United States authorities all of the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land”). Those demands might have involved time to bring to a successful conclusion, even bloodshed. But they would not have required a constant change in priorities with new countries and organizations in this regional drama.

Bush thrust these new actors to the forefront only four months later in his next State of the Union address. Not without some controversy, he denounced an “Axis of Evil” of state-sponsored terrorism: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the mullahs of Iran, and one of the last surviving Communist regimes, North Korea. 

Linguistic purists might have noted that the original Axis powers that inflicted World War II on the world were already dictatorial, so the “Axis of Evil” was a redundant phrase and the trio might have been better called “the New Axis.”

But the Bush Administration missed an even larger point: in the run-up to WWII, Germany, Italy and Germany were formally bound by treaty, facilitating the military actions of each around the globe. In contrast, 21^st-century Iraq, Iran and North Korea might have been hostile to the U.S., but had shown no inclination to cooperate militarily. (In fact, tensions between Iraq and Iran remained high, only a dozen years after a drawn-out, bloody war between the two.)

Moreover, none of the three could be shown to have aided al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. The “Axis of Evil,” then, was an advertising slogan more than an actual structure of international affairs. If you want to be charitable, you could call it a metaphor.

But the use of metaphor was a huge part of the problem with the term “the war on terror” itself, which was no more of a metaphor than WWI, WWII, or any other 20^th-century American war. Thousands of service personnel are not put in harm’s way for a “metaphor.”

There have been instances when “war” has been used, correctly, as a metaphor: Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and a phrase that Jimmy Carter borrowed from philosopher William James to describe his energy conservation program: “the moral equivalent of war.” If any of these “campaigns” resemble the war on terror, however, it lies in the meager results achieved despite immense Presidential ambitions and government expenditures.

The War on Terror not only defined Bush’s presidency, but limited the options, linguistic and otherwise, of his successor. In a 2010 article in The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder pointed to a new initiative of the Obama Administration, intended to replace the War on Terror: Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).   

The new term, meant to promote the use of “soft power” in stemming terrorism, displays none of the imagination of its predecessor, however. It reeks of the bloodless bureaucrat, someone ready to talk an issue to death rather than to solve it. It’s death by linguistic rather than military drone.

 

Flashback, July 1915: NY, DC Rocked by German-Born Saboteur

This past Independence Day weekend, as they have done since the turn of the millennium, Americans heard warnings about terror plots on their own soil. A century ago, the nation dealt with similar threats—and, as in 2001, they were stunned to find one plot came to fruition, in both America’s political capital and its financial and media center.

In 2015, these foreign plots involve terror unleased in the name of Islam by fringe groups unaffiliated with a specific country; in 1915, they took inspiration from—or were specifically directed by—a tangible government: Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. But the reactions they produced—dread on the part of ordinary Americans, all-stops-out manhunts initiated by law enforcement and military officials—remained, to a large degree, similar.

Shortly before midnight on July 2, 1915, an enormous explosion rocked the U.S. Capitol. In short order, it was traced to a bomb left in the Senate Reception Room. While no fatalities occurred (in those sleepier, pre-air-conditioning days, the nation’s lawmakers were not in session), the Reception Room was destroyed.

While Washington law enforcement sifted through the debris searching for clues the following morning, banker J. P. Morgan, Jr. was shot twice at the door of his Long Island estate. The assailant, armed with two pistols and few sticks of dynamite, was immediately subdued by Morgan’s servants, then arrested.

Something curious—even more than what had just transpired in the two cities already—then took place. The gunman, having identified himself to police as an instructor at Cornell University named Frank Holt (see accompanying photo), claimed that he wanted to force Morgan to use his influence to prevent American munition manufacturers from arming the Allies against German in the conflict then raging in Europe.

On the night after the Senate explosion, a number of readers of the Washington Evening Star newspaper were startled by this headline: “Letter Received by the Star Thought to Have Bearing on the Explosion.” In particular, Chief Detective Robert Boardman in the capital focused on this line in the Star letter, signed by “R. Pearce”: “Europe needs enough non-contraband material to give us prosperity.... We would, of course, not sell to the Germans either, if they could buy here.”

It sounded strikingly similar to the statement made by Holt to the police: “If Germany should be able to buy munitions here, we would positively refuse to sell them to her... Do we not get enough prosperity out of non-contraband shipments[?]” Intrigued, Boardman cabled detectives in New York to press Holt about this, as well as a corollary question as to his whereabouts the night of the Capitol explosion.

At first, Holt denied any connection to the Senate Reception Room explosion, claiming he had been in a New York City hotel that night. But subsequently, under what New York Police Department bomb-squad head Captain Thomas Tunney admitted were “third-degree methods,” he confessed: He had reached DC on the afternoon of the 2^nd, assembled the bomb in a hotel, had set it on a timer, walked in the Capitol without any guard asking where he was going, left the bomb in the reception room, waited outside the building till he heard the explosion, and was out of the city on a New York-bound train shortly after midnight.

Having made one confession, Holt was ready to divulge somewhat more. He was linked, he said, to Abteilung IIIB, a German secret intelligence network already active in the U.S. Holt warned about missing sticks of dynamite, and took special pleasure in predicting an operation that would occur the nest day.

Holt did not live to see this action, having committed suicide in his cell on July 7. But his death did little to ease Americans’ concerns, especially since the SS Minnehaha did catch fire in the Atlantic that day.

At the same time they tried to prevent the disaster he predicted, the authorities tried to make sense of who Holt actually was. Besides “R. Pearce,” Holt had also used the aliases “Charles Hendricks” and “Mr. Patton.” Yet another identity, however, appears to have been his real one: Erich Muenter, a Harvard professor of German language studies who fled Boston in 1906 after the poisoning death of his wife.

Mexico became Muenter’s hideaway for several years, until he crossed the border back into Texas. Now, under a new identity, with a new wife, he worked his way back into the groves of academe. Amazingly, he found employment again in the more insular world of the Ivy League, with nobody the wiser that this German professor at Cornell was the same man who had fled Cambridge less than a decade ago.

Muenter's activities came at a time of anguished transition for German-Americans. According to historian Maddalena Marinari, before the outbreak of WWI, they had been held up as

the “model minority” that had assimilated seamlessly into American society. But the outbreak of the conflict in Europe left them dangerously vulnerable to charges of disloyalty—and the security policies of their ancestral homeland didn’t help.

Howard Blum, in Dark Invasion (2015), has called this latter German network of sabotage and spying "the first terrorist cell in America." That term “terrorist” is loaded with all kinds of after-the-fact problems (e.g., terrorist cells usually claim credit when a bomb goes off, whereas the German network invariably slinked away into the shadows).

But these German activities were meant to disrupt American policies. The German General Staff’s plans hinged on knocking the British and French out of the war, which meant degrading the links between those two powers and America—which, for all the professions of neutrality by President Woodrow Wilson, remained inextricably tied, by colonial heritage and trade, to England.

Two months before the Senate Room explosion, Germany’s sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania had ratcheted up tensions between the United States and Germany.  As I explained in a prior post, though the circumstances around the sinking were murkier than American war hawks would admit, relations between the two countries continued to deteriorate, as Germany continued its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

These tensions were intensified by the spy network. In the two years preceding America’s declaration of war, the following incidents—which, we now know, were initiated by the spies—unnerved the public:

* American horses shipped off to Europe to assist in the Allied war effort were infected with anthrax cultures on American soil;

* Irish dockworkers were sometimes persuaded to plant small cigar bombs that caused fires on ships;

* Spies leveled the country’s largest munitions factory, the “Black Tom” plant in New Jersey, on July 30, leading to the deaths of more than 50 people.

In an article for the Brookings Institute four years ago, Peter Skerry compared the situation of Islam in the United States today to a century ago, where a different religion was eyed suspiciously—Roman Catholicism, another “assertive, triumphalist, immigrant faith.” But he immediately—and correctly, I think—finds a better comparison, to German-Americans of that time.

German-born sailors in the U.S., for instance, notes Blum in an interview with NPR, represented a potential large potential source of internal unrest:

“There were bars all along the [New York] waterfront that were just filled with Germans, and these were people who had nothing, really, but time on their hands. They were bored, they were concerned because many of their relatives were involved in fighting in Europe, and here they were, cut off from it. They missed the homeland, they missed the war, and it was creating a situation where here was, in effect, a ‘fifth column’ in America. At one point the German ambassador threatened that ... they would rise up against the United States if the United States entered the war.”

All of this represented rather free-floating discontent until Capt. Franz von Rintelen was recruited in Germany to head “the Manhattan Front.” Operating out of the New York Yacht club, this aristocratic naval officer within weeks managed to employ the services of sailors and officers from roughly 80 German ships in New York harbor. Even after British intelligence detained him and prevented his return to the U.S., the network he established continued without him. (Holt/Muenter, for instance, appears to have been a precursor of the “lone wolf” assassin/terrorist with whom Americans would become far more familiar in the Sixties, notably Lee Harvey Oswald.)

That network drew from a large demographic cohort. While the 9/11 plotters created chaos in their wake, American Islamophobes have largely exaggerated their continuing capacity for mischief: The best estimate is that Moslems comprise only about 1% of the U.S. population today.  In contrast, those of German descent comprised approximately 1 out of every 10 Americans a century ago.

Most German-Americans of a century ago and Moslem-Americans today have adapted well to their new country. But many remain profoundly ambivalent about military conflict aimed at their ancestral homelands, and their denunciation of the drift toward war in both eras further served to isolate them.

As calls mounted to intervene in order to stop Germany and its allies from committing what were seen as “atrocities,” German-Americans went against the grain, advocating for neutrality. That position became increasingly untenable as Germany’s ham-handed methods of dealing with America—including offering Mexico assistance in recovering lands lost in the Mexican-American War (the infamous “Zimmerman Telegram”)—alienated U.S. policy-makers, the media and the public. 

Their positions were also often voiced freely, including in one New York City daily newspaper that sold 75,000 copies each day just in the German language.

Contrary to what many Americans today believe, suspicion about those regarded as inimical to American life did not start with the War on Terror, nor even with the Cold War. The actions of Holt and other Germans in the U.S. made the great mass of German emigrants loyal to their new country fall under suspicion, to an often ridiculous extent. Sauerkraut was rechristened “freedom cabbage”; hamburger, “Salisbury steak”; and frankfurter, “hot dog.” With the outbreak of war, approximately 6,000 German and Austrian nationals were arrested as potential threats to national security, and there was a push to outlaw the teaching of German.