Sunday Steyn

9/11 enemies are still hiding in plain sight: "suppose my I'll-never-forget-where-I-was recollections are pretty typical: a half-curious pricking up of the ears when they cut into the morning show on the radio with breaking news about a plane hitting the World Trade Center -- it sounded like a twin-prop or Lear jet -- and then the slow realization when the second plane hit that something bigger was going on. My editor called from London a few seconds later, and I switched on the TV. But, even in the midst of unprecedented forms of mass slaughter, humdrum routine goes on for the rest of us: I was having some furniture delivered that morning, and the guy interrupted me to ask where I wanted one of the pieces to go, and when I turned back to the screen only one of the smoking towers was still there. 'What happened?' I said. 'It fell down,' the delivery guy shrugged, and ambled back to his work.

He was sort of right. It fell down, but it burned for another 100 days, as America's rage did -- for some. For others, it was already fading, the 'day that everything changed' already lapsing back into the feeble passivity of one of those weird one-time-only 'tragedies,' after which everything goes back to the way it was.

What was taking place that Tuesday morning was, as a lot of people said, "unimaginable." But once it happened, once we no longer had to imagine it, my main memory of that day is of how quickly the mind leapt forward to encompass the new reality. When the second plane hit, it was obvious not just that this was no accident but also that it would be impossible to find two commercial airline pilots willing to fly, even at the point of a gun, their jets into skyscrapers. " read more

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