00:00I was working for a local community newspaper called the Brooklyn Paper and we were getting
00:06ready for what was supposed to be a big day of covering just about every seat in New York
00:12City was up for re-election and it was primary day.
00:15I think my first inkling of something different going on was when I saw an alert for a plane
00:22into the World Trade Center.
00:24Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City.
00:29It happened just a few moments ago apparently.
00:32Turn on the TV, I have a Today Show on and there's this gaping hole in the North Tower of
00:38the
00:38World Trade Center, smoke billowing out.
00:41Still really no idea of the enormity of what was happening and what was about to happen
00:47in that moment.
00:48As I'm watching Today Show, boom, they have a live shot going and that second plane comes
00:55slamming into the South Tower minutes later.
00:58And then you start thinking in terms of, well, first of all, we're under attack.
01:03I live maybe three blocks off of where the promenade would be.
01:07The promenade is an overlook onto the East River, which then of course overlooks lower
01:11Manhattan.
01:11In the moment I was watching that impact on the Today Show, split second maybe or two
01:17later, my whole apartment rattled.
01:20I ran out to go down to the promenade.
01:22There were a bunch of people watching in horror, smoke billowing, fire billowing out of these
01:28two buildings.
01:29They were icons of lower Manhattan.
01:31And it literally looked like the top of the tower was tilting and then sort of had toppled
01:38off.
01:38And then it was like just a whole lot of smoke, but like a rumble, like I'd never heard in
01:43my life.
01:44Then all of a sudden it was gone, just like that, like in the blink of an eye and smoke
01:49and debris and it was gone.
01:52So it was the sky is falling.
01:54It was we're under attack.
01:56And it was something that certainly my generation had never experienced before.
02:00And the only generation that would have experienced anything even close to it would have been
02:04during World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
02:07I was seven years old on September 11th, 2001, living on Long Island with my family.
02:13A telephone was wheeled into my classroom and my teacher took the call.
02:19I think her husband worked in the city and she gasped.
02:22And there was some sort of like confusion and she didn't really know what was going
02:26on.
02:27There were announcements like kids started getting like taken out of school and my name
02:31was called.
02:32My dad happened to be off that day and picked me up from my elementary school with my four
02:37year old brother in tow.
02:39I asked him what like what was going on and he was like, there's been an accident.
02:42We drove to my aunt's house and her husband worked in lower Manhattan.
02:48And his brother was a firefighter.
02:51His name was Terrence McShane and he was part of Ladder 101 and he made the ultimate sacrifice
02:57that day.
02:58We found out later.
02:59Now that I'm an adult myself, it just it hits differently, especially as a New Yorker,
03:05like living in this city that's always been a dream of mine to live in and hearing the
03:10sirens wailing every day.
03:12And just seeing how the city has rebuilt itself and carried on in 25 years.
03:16But we never forget.
03:18I heard about the attack on the first of the Twin Towers as I was coming into land at Ben
03:25Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv of all places, which was an extraordinary moment because, of course,
03:30like every other journalist around the world who was a specialist in this realm, my employer
03:35at the time, the Evening Standard, called me and said, this has happened.
03:39And if it's a terrorist attack, who could it be?
03:44And by the time the second tower had been hit, we knew it was a terrorist attack.
03:50And pretty much at that point, I sent press the send button on my story, which argued that
03:57the finger of blame would most likely point towards Al Qaeda, which at the time was not
04:03unknown by any means, but was not known in the much broader realm of the international
04:10community.
04:11It wasn't a household name, this group known as the base run by Osama bin Laden.
04:16I knew, but most people wouldn't have done, obviously, you're not specialists, that he was
04:20now based in Afghanistan, having been kicked out of Sudan, which is really the first time
04:25he came to any prominence in the international sphere.
04:29But this was a man who was absolutely dedicated to try to create what he actually achieved,
04:37which was in the end, a clash of civilizations, the international response to that, the American
04:43very rapid response when George Bush Jr., who'd been in a primary school when he first heard
04:51of the attacks, invoked NATO's Article 5, which meant that an attack on one was an attack on
04:59all.
04:59It was very easy to arrange an international coalition and then really quite quickly, American
05:05special forces, British special forces were deployed to Afghanistan.
05:09And by the end of the year, so was I in the month of October, November, we all found ourselves
05:15in Tora Bora near the base of Al Qaeda in the campaign to destroy that movement and perhaps
05:24capture or kill the Sheikh as he was known on the radio himself.
05:28But all of that unfolded from that extraordinary day for me when I was in Israel, a place that
05:35was in no way unused to much more focused domestic Islamic terror, particularly from Hamas, but
05:43Hamas never had any international ambitions.
05:46The internationalization, though, partly of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came about
05:53really as a result of how angry the Islamic world and the Arab world in particular was
05:59about, especially what they saw as the violation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which had happened a few
06:07years prior when Ariel Sharon went up onto the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the Temple Mount for
06:13Jews, and provoked the second Intifada, and it was that Intifada that was one of the recent
06:19driving energies behind the very basic fundamentalist Islamic traditions that informed the Wahhabi
06:29ideology of what in the end became Al-Qaeda.
06:33But this was an extraordinary moment in the world that we're still living with today, and
06:38we knew that the world had changed and changed really forever, for the rest of our lifetimes.
06:44We knew after that our lives as journalists and really as civilians around the world would be defined
06:51by Islamic terror and this clash of civilization.
06:54And now, of course, we have additional problems in additional clashes of civilizations, notably
07:02right now with Russia, and in the longer term, most certainly with China.
07:08On the morning of September 11th, I was four years old, I was at home with my mom,
07:15and we had just moved out of New York City. I was born in the city in lower Manhattan, actually.
07:22And so up until that point, I had grown up just a couple miles away from the Twin Towers.
07:27We had a very clear image of them from the apartment I had grown up in up until then.
07:33And my sharpest memory from that day is just watching my mom sobbing, watching the television set
07:41as the news developed.
07:42My mom was an immigrant from Colombia, so this was, you know, all she really knew of the United States.
07:48She would take me to the World Trade Center and walk around almost every day.
07:53The high school I went to actually had a lot of students who had lost parents, either working
07:58in the World Trade Center or working as first responders. And because of that, we received a beam
08:05from one of the buildings on the 10-year anniversary of 9-11. I was a freshman at the time,
08:10and I remember we
08:11did a very big ceremony where everyone walked out, you know, in our school uniforms, holding little
08:17American flags, and we said a prayer. Growing up as a New Yorker in the aftermath of 9-11 meant
08:25growing
08:26up with a sense of resilience, but also an underlying awareness that the world had changed. After that,
08:34you felt it in the deep sense of reverence throughout New York as a whole. Every time the beginning of
08:41September rolled around and in the way New Yorkers sort of instantly learned to look out for one
08:50another and care for each other. At the time of 9-11, I was the chief leader writer for The
08:56Independent.
08:57I wrote the editorials which set out The Independent's view. They were unsigned, so they were setting out the
09:05view of The Independent as an institution of 9-11. And I remember that day vividly. I mean, I don't
09:15remember
09:16the details, but I do remember the extraordinary gap between the first tower being hit, which everybody
09:23assumed was an accident, and then 20 minutes later, or I think it was actually 17 minutes later, the second
09:30tower was hit,
09:31and it became obvious that it was a terrorist attack and a very, very serious one. I had to write
09:37editorials
09:38over the next few days. I don't think I wrote the one immediately after the attack, but over the next
09:44few
09:44days, as we tried to grasp the significance of this event, I had to write articles saying what The Independent's
09:54view was. I remember that initially, I don't think I'd grasped the significance of the situation. I thought
10:02this was a very sad event, but I hadn't really understood how it would unleash the war on terror,
10:09the whole stream of consequences that followed. But I did wonder at the time, although personally, I'm
10:19always, I've always been a great admirer of Tony Blair's. I thought that Tony Blair was making a
10:25mistake in aligning himself so closely with an American president who was so determined to fight
10:32what I thought was an unwinnable war against an undefined opponent. That night, we went back to the
10:41promenade, people were gathering, people were singing patriotic songs. Everybody was everybody's best
10:48friend in that moment. And I'm not saying this as a means to say that there was a good that
10:53came out
10:53of 9-11 because there's no good that could ever come out of that. But it was just that New
10:58York
10:58City showed its resilience and its reaction and its willingness to band together and come together
11:05in that kind of moment.
11:18Thank you so much.
11:21You
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