After
How America Confronted the September 12 Era
by Steven Brill
After is worth reading, and that is saying a lot in the September 12 Era. It isn't pasted together, it has no photographs of Special Forces in Afghanistan, and it doesn't offer a prescription for quashing terrorism—not many 9/11 productions can make those claims—but it's a work you must think about as you read, and will think about for a long time after.
Brill (American Lawyer, Court TV, Brill's Content) knows everybody, and in this book he lets many of them tell what happened to them. It may remind you of a disaster movie where the first half collects all the back-stories about why Telly Savalas came to the hotel, then you get the disaster and the rescue, and finally Roy Scheider assuring you it will never happen again. Except here the disaster and the rescue come first and the stories tell how the people scattered, and there's no reassurance at all.
Well, that's not right. You can find reassurance in that all these folks respond in a way you'll recognize. Some of them suffer, all of them grieve, many of them send help, most of them form resolves about the future, none of them sinks finally into despair.
Brill has contacts in state and national government and also with the families of Windows on the World restaurant staff members and firefighters. He gets through many, many interviews in the year after September 11, without rushing in the slightest. In a rather flat tone, he presents you with new and often surprising information about people you ought to keep in your focus.
Many of the Washington, D.C., passages show folks in the White House, Homeland Security and elsewhere creating "threat matrices" and using them as decision aids. No doubt that is a Microsoft Excel way of rating terrorists on more than one dimension; perhaps assigning scores for depth of motivation, access to means, opportunity to act, likelihood of detection/deterrence, severity of consequences, that sort of thing. In a spirit of reciprocity I made my own threat matrix based in part on what I learned from Brill. It showed, to my confusion, that Tom Ridge is hardly a threat at all (I mean to our Constitution); he seems an able and earnest person who can see in more than one direction at a time. Three out of 10. The President, likewise, in his own person does not menace our liberties much (4.5), but his Attorney General has motives deeper than his intelligence, all the means in the world, and little compunction about what follows from actions he means to take (8.5 to 9). Admiral Loy at Transportation Security gets high scores for smarts and respect for his subordinates' skills; he's also aware that the lines have to keep moving and it looks bad for the government when they do a cavity search on your great-aunt (3). Bob Barr, the former loonie congressman, rates as a potentially great defender of American rights (1).
Let me stress that Brill didn't generate these scores nor did he concern himself with sizing up Cheney or Ashcroft as clouds on your horizon. Indeed, he is more than generous with the A-G, showing that the poor man's boss gave him a mission that was shockingly more than he was ready for. No, the matrix and the results are mine, and the fact that you don't accept my premises should not deter you from reading Steven Brill's fine report of a year when nothing could really be OK.
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After