Conversations for the Common Good - Witness to 9/11

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program is made possible through support from Bloomsburg University.

(upbeat music) From Gross Auditorium on the campus of Bloomsburg University in historic Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.

Bloomsburg University at WVIA present "Conversations for the Common Good: Civil Discourse, Civic Engagement."

"Witness to 9/11: A Victim, A Journalist, A Soldier."

- Hi, I'm Larry Vojtko, coming to you from Gross Auditorium on the campus of Bloomsburg University.

Welcome to the latest edition of "Conversations for the Common Good," with opening remarks as William Hudon of Bloomsburg University.

- Good evening.

Thank you for coming.

It's my honor to welcome you to this event.

The first in the 2021, '22 season of Bloomsburg University's "Conversations for the Common Good."

It's a project that started more than three years ago, dedicated to promoting informed civil discourse on topics of political, social, and economic importance, No matter how controversial.

President Hannah hoped to be here this evening, but he could not because of other responsibilities.

But he wanted me to extend his warm greetings and welcome to this evening.

I would like to thank him and the whole office of the president for their unwavering support for this project.

His underwriting has made possible the entire 2021, '22 "Conversations for the Common Good" season, including the really exciting January and February collaboration that we have with the Bloomsburg Theater ensemble here at BU.

The conversation this evening, the event this evening, and all of those that are part of this sequence on the 9/11 attacks, actions and reactions would not be possible if it weren't for the intervention of my colleague, Elizabeth Miller, who's sitting to my right.

It's her remarkable personal story that inspired the series.

Ask her about it.

Learn about it.

Learn about the experience of the other panelists that are here today.

Learn their stories.

It will help you to the complex events of 9/11 and the profound implications that they have for us today.

Thank you, and welcome.

(audience clapping) - Well, this episode of "Conversations for the Common Good" is titled "Witness to 9/11: A Victim, A Journalist, A Soldier, A Community Conversation."

On September 11th, 2001, four planes were hijacked by 19 terrorists.

One plane hit the Pentagon while another crashed into the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The other two planes were flown into The Twin Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City.

As people rushed out of the towers, many rushed in to help, including firefighters and police officers who saved thousands of lives.

Almost 3000 people were killed, including 441 first responders in total.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Our hope is that tonight's conversation promotes dialogue that unites and bridges political and social divides.

We encourage participation from the audience gathered here in the hall.

Now let's meet our panel of special guests who are here to add perspectives to the conversation.

Elizabeth Miller is a Rule of Law Fellow with September 11th Families For Peaceful Tomorrow, and a Bloomsburg University graduate.

Joseph Bennett is a former us army soldier, a pilot, and is also a Bloomsburg University graduate.

And coming to us remotely is Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a staff writer for "The New Yorker."

I welcome each and every one of you.

Now, as we begin this conversation, there are seminal moments in a person's life.

It could be a graduation, a wedding, the birth of a child, but then there are also those particular benchmark milestone moments in the life of a country.

The assassination of JFK, of Martin Luther King, Jr, The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.

But there's hardly any other moment in the history of our country that has proved to be such a seminal moment, that there's a before and there's an after, these attacks on 9/11, these terrorist attacks.

So we're going to start there.

And Joseph Bennett, let's start with you.

What are your memories of that particular day that time?

Could you share your reaction, your responses, not only on that day, but perhaps in the immediate aftermath of that?

- Sure.

So I was a freshman at Mansfield University.

I was on my way to class that morning and walking into one of the campus buildings for the AM class.

I just felt like something was definitely different on campus.

The events had already started to unfold, but I was still pretty ignorant to what was going on.

And a professor came into our class.

So most of us were sitting down 'cause we didn't have cell phones at the time.

So we weren't getting any Twitter updates or Apple News updates on our phones.

And basically just said, class was canceled for today.

Go ahead and go home.

New York is currently under attack by, you know, some sort of unknown entity.

And so a lot of us were just sort of shocked by that initial news.

And we all just were kind of happy to leave class, 'cause we didn't really know what we were reacting to.

And on my way back home, I just happened to just tune in the FM on my car, just FM radio, and just as getting updates that, you know, there was an attack in New York.

There was another attack potentially at the Pentagon and just really just was trying to rush home to get to a television set, like probably many of my other classmates and then other Americans in the country, just this kind of see like what is going on?

What are we missing?

And really that's when I saw all the imagery that we've all have seen for 20 years, just the smoking buildings and the collapse of The Twin Towers, and just the non-stop firefighters and people either rushing to the buildings or rushing away from the buildings.

But I just knew like, you know, for the next few hours and maybe even a couple of days where I think we were all just sort of glued to what was happening.

What was our reaction?

What was the president gonna say?

'Cause I think there was a delay on kind of his address and we just really didn't know what we were facing and what even tomorrow might look like, just based on what we're seeing that morning on 9/11.

- And that experience of 9/11 led, I think, to your military experience, isn't it?

- Yeah, so later that day there was a sound like a widespread call on like even the FM radio, which is kind of weird to even talk about FM radio in today's day and age.

But there was this sound like it was requesting like all national guardsman report to their armories.

And so it just felt like something major was gonna happen.

And as a young adult, I just felt like I'm really missing out on something big.

Like somebody has attacked our country, and I really wanted to be a part of that response.

- We'll get back to get those details on that, but I'm gonna move over to Steve Coll because as a professional journalist, Steve, what are your memories of that day?

It's like a day, but that was like no other.

And I could imagine being in your profession, it was a particularly memorable day and in a different sort of way than say Joseph has a as a college student.

- Yes.

I was at the Washington Post.

I was the managing editor of the Washington Post at the time.

I had previously been a correspondent in Afghanistan and south Asia and had written about Bin Laden and the rise of Al-Qaeda as early as 1993.

And on 9/11, I was at home working in my home office that morning.

And I had CNN on a little TV next to my desk on mute because my responsibilities were to manage the newsroom.

So I was always watching out for breaking news.

And the first plane went in and I thought that's a freak accident.

This is going to be a very busy news day.

And I went in to collect my things because I was living just outside of Washington DC, and I had to drive into the newsroom.

And then the second plane hit.

And I said to my wife who was sharing this little office with me, oh, that's Bin Laden.

I think a lot of people around Washington who had by accident of professional assignment followed Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan had similar reactions, at least some of them on the first plane.

Took me til the second plane.

And I drove into the city, listening to the news and hearing that the Pentagon had also been attacked.

And it was an eerie feeling because I had been a conflict reporter in war zones in different parts of the world.

And so I knew the, the feeling of being under attack, and the uncertainty that comes with that.

But I was reflecting that I'd never experienced that in the United States.

And I felt aware that so many Americans around me were experiencing this as an absolute shock, a bolt out of the blue.

And so, yeah.

Then I got to the newsroom, and the next three, four weeks were really a blur.

My responsibility that first day was to put out a special edition about the attacks.

But because I had this background of covering the war in Afghanistan and knew something about where Al-Qaeda had come from, I within about six weeks or so, I decided to write a book about the run-up to 9/11, the origins of 9/11, and to add to my experience a lot of research.

And that was the book that, that became became "Ghost Wars."

That's my experience in a nutshell.

- Now, Elizabeth, your experience is very different now, and in a way I'm interested because you were so young, what your memories would be, but it's also a particularly personal experience for you.

So, tell us about your story.

- Yeah.

So I was six on 9/11, so I can definitely relate to a lot of younger individuals, and the individuals who weren't necessarily born at that time, because it's an early memory and something that's distant yet, you know, for me, very close at the same time.

So as I was saying, I was six.

My father was a firefighter for Rescue Company 5 on Staten Island.

And it was common for him to not necessarily come home on a day-to-day basis because of his shift.

And I remember, actually, and I don't know if I've, It's vivid in my head, but I'm not sure if it's because I've communicated it so often, or if it's fabricated by what my mom has said, but nonetheless, of course, it's real to me.

And I was always an eavesdropper and (laughing) I overheard some of the teachers at my school talking about something that happened.

A plane had hit a building in the city.

And I got into my mom's van.

She picked us up, and I'm like, mom, this plane hit a building in the city.

How crazy.

And my mom was like, Elizabeth, that's enough.

And my mom, that's not who my mother is.

So that felt off.

And that's all that I necessarily remember from the day of.

And then everybody was constantly at my house.

People were bringing food.

So it's really awful to say, but there was an excitement to it because, wow, all these people in the neighborhood are coming over.

So it's a happy chaos, although that's how you perceive it when you're six years old.

And the only other thing that I kind of vividly remember was the terrorism threat level on the television screen because the TV was on at all times.

And it wasn't until, you know, September 11th was on a Tuesday.

It wasn't until that Friday that my mom had sat us down and said, girls, your father isn't coming home.

And I think she had said something about like him being an angel.

She never really uttered that he was dead, but he was a first responder who gave his life on 9/11.

- When did it finally really sink in that dad wasn't coming back?

Did that take a little bit of time?

- You know, at six you're like, okay, this is very strange.

So you cry out of shock.

I think it was, I don't ever remember it hitting me at a certain period, like the concept of, I guess, of his death, but it wasn't until high school where I could really wrap my head around the fact that, one, I had lost my dad.

Two, it was on such a national scale that his loss, although it was my personal loss, was not a private loss.

It was a country loss as well.

So it was really hard to navigate that.

And I don't think it really sunk in until I was in high school.

- And you mentioned, remembering seeing the terrorism threat level.

Before that, terrorism seemed to be something that was over there, some place else.

And now it is on our land.

Now we have to deal with it.

It was always some somewhere in the Middle East or somewhere, that terrorism.

So, Steve Coll, let us talk about terrorism.

Can we define that?

How did that... Can you relate to what I was saying about, you know, it was something somewhere else for Americans, and now it was very present for us.

- I think that's a really important point because when we talk about 9/11 as a pivot point in American history, I think the shock of the attacks, the sense of disorientation and the fact that the United States had not been attacked on its own soil by any enemies since Pearl Harbor, and that there was no living memory of catastrophic terrorism, certainly not on that scale.

There had been terrorism in the United States at regular intervals.

Some of it devastating such as the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City during the 1990s.

And then there was an earlier attack on the World Trade Center carried out by a kind of truck bomb that killed a number of people, but never came close to bringing the building down.

But I think you're right.

Americans felt secure behind two oceans, and the sense of vulnerability and the sheer scale.

And also the mystery of where this had come from was disorienting.

Mostly it was the scale.

And so when you ask, what do we mean by terrorism, of course, the word is a little bit of a slippery slope because one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

But by and large, what it refers to is the use of violence by small groups to create a result way out of proportion with their own strengths.

So sometimes political scientists and the like refer to this as asymmetric war.

So a small group making a big bang.

And this was discovered by stateless groups in the television age, that television could amplify the power of a single hijacking for example.

And it was really in the 1960s in the Middle East at the age of spectacular terrorism was born.

And as one analyst put it, in many cases, what terrorists wanted was a lot of people watching, but not a lot of people dead because they were trying to create an effect.

What made Bin Laden different was he wanted a lot of people watching and he wanted a lot of people dead.

He had a kind of millenarian almost nihilist outlook on his own mission.

And 9/11 was the day he in his world, he shot the moon on 9/11.

And the last thing I'll say, this was something we didn't understand.

Understandably, we thought, well, my goodness, there must be more of these coming.

Look at the capacity he's shown to carry out such a devastating attack in two major American cities.

Surely there's more coming.

What it was impossible to understand at the time, was that this was a big lucky strike from Al-Qaeda's point of view and that they would never again come close to achieving the death toll or the effects that they achieved on 9/11.

- Well, I'm not sure that many of us at the time, whether it's citizens or the leaders felt that it was very lucky.

I mean, we knew it happened, but the response to that, reaction to that was immediate, and we have to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

And we'll talk a little bit more about some of the responses to that.

But I wanted to talk with Joseph Bennett about this, because you entered the military now.

We started that conversation a bit and you're answering the call and I was interested in your motivation for that.

Was this, you know, talking about terrorism, was it something that we have to, was it about getting back at the terrorist from you, or was it something that protecting the country?

What motivated you to, and then tell us more details about your service to the country.

- Okay.

Well, definitely in my family background, there's definitely a lineage, a little bit of people serving in the military in the military in different capacities, whether it was in the Navy or whatnot.

But really, when I saw the events unfold on 9/11, I just, I guess something just sort of stirred inside me that really sort of interested me in wanting to join.

And so I reached out to a recruiter and explored those options, and then on October of 2001, I signed an enlistment agreement and started my journey into the military.

- Well, tell us more details about what you did in the military, 'cause your story is very compelling.

- Well, shortly after basic training and AIT where you get qualified as just basically a basic soldier with some basic skills, I went to Germany as part of a force protection mission with The National Guard.

And basically we were just checking IDs and helping the active duty component train up for what would turn into the Iraq war.

But we didn't really do much military training for ourselves.

It was mostly just force protection, checking IDs, making sure these facilities were secure.

And then 2005, 2006, I was actually enrolled as a student here at Bloomsburg, but in early of 2005, we were called to get ready to go to Iraq.

And so I went to Iraq in 2005 through the summer of 2006.

I served as a sniper in Ramadi, Iraq, and that's really what changed a lot of how I viewed the world, our role in it as Americans.

And really just, I think what really changed how I was looking at how I, why I joined and what we were doing was just really that human cost of war itself.

Not just for what the burden that us soldiers will carry, but really the effects on the populations that we're there to secure and protect and empower while we were overseas.

- So elaborate on that a little bit.

So, the populations of the country you were in, and so you felt somehow a responsibility to them as well.

Is that correct?

- Correct.

- Yeah, so there were often, what would happen at least where we were in that time period in 2005, 2006, we had a lot of foreign fighters that were influxing into the country, through unsecured borders.

And what would happen is they would basically terrorize the local nationals within the city.

So anybody who was thought or rumored to be working with coalition forces on any capacity, whether you knocked on their door and they would answer, oftentimes what we would do is occupy a home that had a family in it.

And we would use that to interdict ID teams that were inflicting a lot of harm on us troops at the time.

But what would happen is a lot of the times these families would plead with us to leave because if we didn't, the foreign fighters would come in and potentially kill their children, you know, torture mom and dad.

And so what I started to see was just, really just not as some just like, oh, they're Iraqi people, as much as they're just people like I am.

And there's real love for their families.

There's real concern, and really just, there were times where we would actually leave a home, 'cause we just didn't want to endanger a family.

And a lot of that was more because of my team leader, 'cause he was a father at the time and I was just a young college student.

So he had that connection of just being a parent and understanding like what kind of fears and concerns a parent would have, versus me as a college student.

It was just, you know, I'm there to conduct our mission, but it's his call, and we would just kind of go with that.

- I hope we get some more time to talk about some of your time in Afghanistan too.

But just want to point out that very soon, we'll be taking questions from the audience in our panel discussion here.

Elizabeth, you had a very, a very heartfelt op-ed in "Time Magazine" that I read, that was just published recently, in the observance of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

And you shared that your wounds are still raw, quote unquote.

Wounds are still raw knowing that your father, as we know now, that lost his life in that.

But can you tell us more about that feeling, the wounds?

I was really interested in, you know, you're talking about wounds that go beyond the personal wounds.

And could you elaborate on that for the folks who haven't read that op-ed?

- Yeah, sure.

So again, being six, when my father passed, there was a lot that I needed to figure out and understand, and actually "Ghost Wars" was a major part of that.

But so I decided to study Bin Laden actually, while I was here at Bloomsburg University and figure out why he thought it was necessary to attack the United States.

And I think because I had the educational resources to figure those things out, I could paint the full picture from a historical perspective of why this happened.

What's going on in the Middle East?

How does this relate to Islam as a whole?

And when you look at it, you know, and with anything, the individuals who did what they did on 9/11 are here, and the entire Middle East is here.

So what does that show?

And I think in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and people reacted fearfully with hate and anger.

And when that happens, you don't see the full picture.

And I never wanted to be that type of person.

And that's not how I was raised.

That's not how I grew up.

So for me, I feel like because of the way the US conducted itself after 9/11, by perpetrating more violence in order, you know, the goal was for protection, but kind of what you were saying, you know, we're all human.

And what does that say for human loss?

Because a loss is a loss.

And so, the wounds still raw kind of relates to the fact that with the way the US, again, conducted itself, I felt complicit.

I felt like the loss of life everywhere else was in part because of me.

The torture at Guantanamo was on my behalf, you know, revenge for your father.

And it's not something I ever asked for.

And I think because of the way that that all played out for me, my wounds are still raw and they'll forever be raw because 9/11 isn't over and the aftermath of 9/11, as we see, you know, with what happened on January 6th, it will forever play itself in different parts of our history, in different parts of our current events.

And that's really hard for me to swallow sometimes.

- Just very briefly, can you tell us a little bit about the organization with Peaceful Tomorrow?

- Yeah.

So, I'm a Rule of Law Fellow for an organization called September 11th Families For Peaceful Tomorrows, and they were created and founded in 2002.

And they decided that instead of reacting with that fear, hatred, they wanted to join together and look for peaceful resolutions in the aftermath of 9/11.

So they do wonderful peace work, wonderful advocacy on anything related to 9/11, promoting peace with what goes on, you know, in the US government, what goes on at Guantanamo Bay.

And they're really just wonderful people who are friends because of the worst circumstances, but they do wonderful work.

- I could only hope that I would have as much compassion as you do, something like this.

- It's not easy being compassionate, you know.

People sometimes are like, hmm.

(laughing) - At any time, if you have a question, in the audience has a question, just step up to a microphone and then I will address you.

If you could, when you do that, I'll ask you to introduce yourself, and then you can ask a question of the panelists.

But I wanna continue with Mr. Coll here.

And Elizabeth alluded to some of the reaction, the response to the United States and what we did in the war, alluding to Guantanamo Bay, (indistinct) Patriot Act.

I want to know from your perspective, what do you think in these last 20 years, and particularly in the more immediate response, what do you think the United States got right, and what do you think we got wrong?

- Wow, that's a big question.

And I'm not really, you know, an opinion driven journalist.

I'm really trying to help people understand what happened.

But I think if you look at it in the context of American history and what unfolded, and the initial response to 9/11, going into Afghanistan with a small force with Afghan partners to directly disrupt the known group that had carried out such a devastating attack, that was an appropriate use of force, I think in my judgment, also in the judgment of 90 some odd nations around the world.

And part of the motivation was that nobody knew what was coming next, and so they wanted to disrupt the headquarters that had just carried out this attack.

After the Taliban fell, the question of what then to do in Afghanistan became a difficult one, and we'll table that.

Next came Iraq.

And there, I think the departure from both American history in these kinds of contexts, I would argue, but also of the departure from global consensus to invade Iraq where Al-Qaeda was not located, on the basis of a much broader argument for a war on terror, which was an argument that really didn't persuade quite a lot of the world.

That, I think we can all agree, especially since there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I think many people would, including the authors of the invasion, knowing what you know now, you wouldn't do it again.

You can have an argument about whether on the basis of the information available, it was a sound judgment, but it ended up being enormously costly, more costly than anything that unfolded in Afghanistan.

And I think that sense of a long and very costly involvement in a war waged on what turned out to be the wrong premise, did a lot to undermine confidence in American leadership, both abroad and in the United States.

- And we're talking a lot about New York City and the attacks of 9/11.

Let's not forget, there were also the attack on the Pentagon.

We had the flight that crashed in Western Pennsylvania that, well, we're not exactly sure where it was headed, but some say to Washington, maybe the Capitol, maybe The White House or some other destination.

But on that day, like we had not only people like Elizabeth's father who were heroes in the first responders, the folks that were on the plane, the actual passengers on a flight 93, and they took it into their hands to do something and perhaps prevented even more destruction.

And so they, you know, it's about what is a hero?

And there were heroes of all different sorts that day.

And Joseph, I think that, you know, the usual way we think of a hero is like yourself, who went to and fought for the country in a foreign land.

How can we identify hero and how might we respond to these acts, and how do we know?

We all would hope that we would respond a certain way, like the passengers on that flight.

But what in your mind of mind is bravery or heroism, and do we see that possibly coming today?

If something like that ever happened again, would we be able to respond to that?

- Yeah, I think bravery wise, I think a really recent example would be the service members who were killed at Kabul Airport.

They had the intel report saying that they were in an exposed situation.

There was a threat of potential car bombing or some sort of vehicle borne explosive.

But they still responded to their duty, knowing that that danger was there.

I think that's, to me is that's real courage, is facing that down, knowing that, you know, maybe you're only working eight hours on that guard at that shift, at that gate, knowing that, you know, you might not come back, you know, from that shift.

But heroism and encourage and bravery, I do definitely think we can identify those things.

I've seen it on multiple deployments, you know, and I think it really is just knowing that that danger is always there and just conducting yourself in a manner that is honorable to yourself, but also more importantly to the person next to you, 'cause you're both sharing the burden of what you're doing overseas.

And so I think within our own service, you know, I think we kind of like, we rely on each other for that.

And that's sort of how we, I would say, not to speak for everybody, but that's sort of how I look at it.

- Elizabeth, almost everyone watching this and in the room would say that your dad was a hero, and probably you would say that as well.

And do you look upon him like that?

- Yeah, I do.

- And I think that some people might think of, you know, I'm interested in how, you know, heroes in a different sense.

And I think that some of us would identify you as a hero too for getting involved in a very real sense.

Can you give some advice for those of us who want to, you know, become more involved and make a difference in our society and in our body politic?

- I think it's something that can be done in the littlest way.

It doesn't have to be, you know, on a national scale.

It can be doing the right thing within your community.

I think social media sometimes is frowned upon.

But sharing that post, that encourages leadership, women empowerment, even those littlest things of sharing a post sometimes is like, wow, I never thought about that from an that from an outside audience.

I think what's most important is being true to yourself and not being afraid to speak up when you feel as if something's wrong, even if people are going to look at you, like, I cannot believe this is coming out of her mouth, which is something I've experienced.

But you know in your gut.

And I think that's something that I would encourage, you know, speaking out, educating yourself, informing yourself on the topic that you find important, giving back in the littlest way.

And that's done a lot here on campus, I know.

And that's the start.

- I think that speaking up for what you believe in and standing your ground is getting, seems to be more difficult than ever.

I mean, we take a look at, you know, some have said that our American democracy is certainly challenged and some have described it as in crisis.

And, you know, we have division, we have partisanship.

It has increased, certainly.

I think we can all agree on that.

It has increased over the, certainly over these last 20 years.

Now, Mr. Coll, you have studied Osama bin Laden, and the Bin Laden family, written a whole book on them.

Given the state of the country right now, if Osama bin Laden were alive today, I think we could probably all agree that he would be glad to see this dissension, this division, this partisanship.

But do you think he would be able to draw a line from what happened on 9/11 to where we are right now in our country?

- It's a good question.

I feel confident that he would claim that there was a line between his revolutionary actions as he would describe it and the results that, you know, the troubled divisions and challenges that the United States face.

But I think we should be wary of that claim.

First of all, Bin Laden claimed to have personally brought down the Soviet Union because of his marginal role in the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So he's not a very reliable witness about his own accomplishments.

I also question the direct relationship between the trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the impact it had on the country.

Even the very costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the state that we find ourselves in, were those contributing factors to our polarization, to our loss of confidence in institutions and leadership?

Yes, but we've been losing confidence in institutions, and leadership going back to the 1970s.

And they certainly weren't the only factors that have shaped our country today.

I mean, we had The Great Recession of 2009, which was the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression.

Many families have lost income growth, have lost the kinds of jobs that gave a sense of progress from generation to generation.

There's an enormous economic inequality in the country.

We have, you know, some of the most wealthy billionaires, so wealthy that they've amused themselves flying into space while many of the rest of the country struggle, you know, to manage their debts and to put their children through school.

I'm not saying that, you know, any of these portraits are simple.

I'm just reminding ourselves that if we're divided, if we're angry, we have more reasons than 9/11 to be so.

And I also think that Bin Laden doesn't deserve credit for what we've done to ourselves.

(laughing) I mean, any of that.

He was a man, you know, sort of possessed of fantasies about his own power.

He was effective as a terrorist leader in a very evil, kind of narrow way.

But I would kind of erase him a little bit from such a central place in our circumstances.

- Yes, it might be a little too easy to just point to Osama bin Laden as the boogeyman who's created our problem when some of this is of our own making.

Now we have, let's talk a little bit about this idea of good and evil, because it seemed like we were, you know, that was where we were on that day on 9/11.

And now of course, in New York City, there is a memorial, a museum for the 9/11 memorial.

And in his review, when that opened in his review of the 9/11 Museum for the "New York Times," Holland Cotter wrote, "The prevailing story in the museum as an a church is framed in moral terms as stories of angels and devils."

But for many, was that not really how we saw that initially?

Good against evil.

So let's talk about that.

Was it a matter of a collective good against a collective evil?

Was it matter of a collective good against a specific evil, Osama bin Laden and the perpetrators, or were the attacks, you know, perhaps they caused a force for good to do some immoral acts in order to fight evil on its own terms.

So Joseph, can you speak to that, this idea of good and evil?

Because I think for you, that has, you know, that whole feeling seems to have shifted and evolved the feelings that you had as a young, you know, just in college versus to right now.

So, how would you respond to that?

- Yeah, I think the dynamic of good versus evil is a great, simple way to sell the war, I think, initially.

And I think even as a young soldier, it's easy to sort of contextualize like what we were doing over there, as we were this, you know, force for good, protecting our homeland against further attacks.

And I think a common sentiment that I would encounter, especially as a young soldier in Iraq was if we don't fight them there, we'll fight them here.

And then as my deployments, as my time overseas went on, I just realized that's not the case at all.

And nothing could be further from the truth, in that regard.

And I definitely think we did a lot of good things over there.

I think most soldiers were actors of good faith, but that's not to say that there weren't some soldiers that just did things that were antithetical to what our mission really was and what we hope to embody as Americans, as far as values and principles.

- Elizabeth, I want to bring this question to you, but I also want to point out that we're running out of time.

So if you do have any questions, of the audience members who have any questions or comments, now would be the time to stand up and enunciate them.

So, Elizabeth, it seems like you really thought about this issue a lot.

I'm just inferring that this good against evil and what we did and how we responded in that reaction.

- I kind of agree in the sense that good and evil is a very easy type of phrasing to slap onto something.

But it takes away the human.

And I think when we don't look at things by, okay, this is a human individual, they are people.

When you just paint somebody as good or bad, like who decides that?

Who decided that the entirety of the Middle East and all of those who practice Islam are bad people because of 9/11?

And I think it's, I don't think anything is black and white.

I think everything is gray.

So for me, it's a very tricky question.

- Yeah, I think it really is.

And most of the time, really, as we go through life, we come to understand that everything isn't black and white and it's not this way or that way.

And all we can try to do is the best we can under the circumstances at that time.

We have a question from the audience.

Could you please state your name, give us a little bit about yourself and then tell us your, ask your question.

- My name is Safa.

I teach at the history department at the university here.

And something that I find remarkable in both of your comments was this connection between hopelessness and radical actions that people engage in, terrorists engage in.

And I was wondering if you could let the audience know, perhaps when did you become aware of the intentions, the motivations of Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden in particular.

And do you think it matters to know what their intentions were in order to grasp the hopelessness that might drive people to radical action?

And if there is a lag in understanding, seeing the action and understanding the motivation behind, do you think this is a disservice to the larger population in general, to not understand why they're engaging in these actions?

- Do you want to start, Elizabeth?

- Yeah, I can deal with that.

So I think when we look at 9/11, we often look at the event and the aftermath.

We don't look at the before and what was leading up to it.

So it's easy to dismiss somebody like Bin Laden, an organization like Al-Qaeda as being, you know, uninformed individuals about what went on and having these awful ideas.

But I think we fail to realize that everybody has a reason for doing something, whether we agree with that reason or not.

And so, as disillusioned, maybe in a sense that Bin Laden was, he was frustrated with the presence of the US in the Middle East before 2001.

And, you know, maybe Steve or Joe could speak more to this as well.

But there's a lot more to it that we often overlook.

And when you don't look at the full picture, you're missing things.

So it's very hard to understand the aftermath of 9/11, unless you look at the radicalization and the events of, you know, international politics beforehand.

- Yes.

And now Joseph you're studying international affairs now.

So to that question, in searching out these motivations, did that help inform your perceptions and your attitudes now?

- Oh, of course.

I mean, when the events first unfolded and even the immediate aftermath, you know, the first few months, or even the first couple of years, I never really knew what Bin Laden's grievances even were.

And I don't think they were ever really communicated to the American public very well, at least not that I can remember.

But when I realized that what Liz had said that, you know, he was really upset with our presence or our sustained presence in the Middle East, specifically in Saudi Arabia is sort of the key feature of his grievance and attacking the United States.

I sorta came around to, you know, why did he do the attack of 9/11?

But it wasn't really without precedent.

I mean, Reagan pulled out our troops out of Lebanon after that big attack in the 80s.

Clinton withdrew our forces from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident.

And so really, it really looks like Bin Laden was just trying to force our hand and really knowing how popular opinion really sways our politics to getting us to leave the Middle East.

And unfortunately it just had the opposite reaction.

And I'm sure that really wasn't his intention.

Well, I'm not sure.

But I can only imagine that really wasn't his intention was to get us to entrench ourselves there.

- Mr. Coll, do you have anything to add to the motivations that led to the attack?

- Yeah, I mean, I think they've been well-described.

I guess my own experience of narratives of radicalization, whether in Bin Laden's case or in the cases of his many followers or his lieutenants, is that it's complicated.

There's a push that arises from the despair or frustration of individuals or their educations or the way they just see justice in the world and what motivates them.

There's also a pull, which is that groups, group solidarity, mentors, teachers draw these unmoored individuals into radical action.

And I think it's a little bit like a fingerprint.

Each story has its own features, but they do have common patterns.

I think in Bin Laden's case, you know, we have to remind ourselves, he grew up in privilege.

He was wealthy.

He went to business school.

He volunteered for service in the Afghan war, and then he acquired radical ideas about world power.

And he sought to attack non Islamic superpowers in the hope that he could bring in what he saw as a more righteous Islamic age.

So his attack on the United States had ideological features, more than features of say, for example, personal impoverishment, or joblessness, or restiveness that you can see in other narratives of radicalization.

- I think it's also important to point out that whether we're talking about Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or this group, or that group or Hezbollah, and I think we tend to kind of lump them all together.

But all of these different groups have different motivations and different goals in mind.

And that's really, really hard to grab onto and get our minds around.

And, you know, it's just not a simple situation, simple circumstance.

We're really running out of time, just a few more minutes left.

And so just a general question now.

Many have said that 9/11, since 9/11, the United States has been changed forever.

We're headed in a different path and forever change.

So basically, do you agree with that or disagree?

Or where do we see the future of the United States?

And Mr. Coll, let's start with you.

- Certainly the United States has changed forever in some important ways.

We recognize now that oceans and borders are only so strong in an interconnected world and a world of jet travel and free flowing ideas across all borders.

So, I think the United States grew up as a country believing that it was isolated from the rest of the world and could make its own choices.

I think 9/11 has forever connected us to the rest of the world through that trauma, but also through the kind of globalization that made that trauma possible.

But as a nation, as a democracy, as a constitution, I tend to think we're more responsible for our own story than 9/11 is.

This is a country that fought a civil war, survived it, reconstructed.

We have so many structural challenges that have nothing to do with some of Bin Laden's view of us.

And so, I don't think that the story that the story that's gonna unfold in the next 20 years is a story that I would tie directly to 9/11.

- So Joseph Bennett, what are your comments about that?

Mr. Cole is speaking that, you know, we have the power to affect the future of our country, and it's not all about what happened on 9/11.

- No, I agree with him.

I think this last 20 years is sort of an indictment of the establishment class of our political leaders.

There's just been almost zero accountability for the last 20 years, and I think we're seeing the consequences of that, really the consequences, the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

But really even what you saw with January 6th, this increasing polarization of our society into almost basically two different camps, because they're almost our only options.

And really just, how do we lower that polarized temperature, that partisan temperature to really sort of come back to the middle and just kind of see each other as fellow Americans.

And how do we re-establish our place in the world?

And really, how do we reestablish our civility within our own society?

- [Larry] And Elizabeth, you have the final word.

- I'm hoping that, you know, 20 years after 9/11, maybe we should stop focusing on 9/11 as the end all be all of how we are and look internally on how we operate as a country, and we need to do a lot better.

And maybe I'm being optimistic, but I'm really hoping that we eventually get there.

- Well, it's really up to your generation to lead the way, that's for sure.

Well, we've come to the end of our conversation, and I would like to thank our panel members of Bloomsburg University and our audience for being a part of this edition of "Conversations for the Common Good."

Witness to 9/11: A Victim, A journalist, A Soldier.

A Community Conversation."

On behalf of WVIA, I'm Larry Vojtko.

Thank you so much for watching.

(audience clapping) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible through support from Bloomsburg University.