Onze de Setembro: pletora de leituras...

Estamos enfrentando um verdadeiro dilúvio de artigos, notas, depoimentos, testemunhos, comentários, opiniões, dos mais inteligentes aos... menos...
Enfim, não quero competir com ninguém.
Eu também já escrevi muito sobre o processo e vou apenas postar aqui o que me parece mais interessante.


O site Observador Político traz muito material interessante (o menos interessante são os comentários de certos visitantes, mas mesmo quando são desinteressantes essas notas são muito reveladoras do que pensam, ou não exatamente, alguns brasileiros que frequentam esse tipo de site).
Ver aqui: http://www.observadorpolitico.org.br/


E agora, livros sobre o 11 de Setembro, do Wall Street Journal: 


Book Shelf:

A Decade After

By EDWARD KOSNER

The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2011

On the gleaming morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was shaving in my apartment in Manhattan before heading downtown to work at the Daily News. I had WINS, the all-news station, on the radio. At about 10 minutes to 9, in the midst of the traffic and weather updates, a voice broke in with a weird report of a small, private plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center's twin towers. Twelve surreal hours later, we published a million copies of a newspaper with a page-one picture of a jetliner knifing into the South Tower and a stark red headline: IT'S WAR.

Indeed, it was. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the aborted mission likely against the U.S. Capitol, killed 2,977 people and ushered in one of the most corrosive periods in American history—a miserable decade of warfare, financial catastrophe, fear, mistrust and rancid politics that has left Americans feeling pessimistic and vulnerable. If 9/11 doesn't resonate as vividly in the American soul as the firing on Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, it plainly matches the assassination of John F. Kennedy 38 years before as a trauma that altered forever how Americans feel about themselves and their place in a remorseless world.

Ten years later, a thick scab has formed over the wound. It's almost impossible to recapture the shock, pain and agonized emotions of those days. The raw feelings are submerged, but daily life offers unavoidable clues—the cliché this time proving true—that things have irrevocably changed, and not for the better. If you doubt it, shuffle along for a half hour in any airport security line.

Much of this results from the inadequate resolution of what was essentially mass murder of innocent civilians in an act of war. The hijackers perished with their victims—no satisfaction there. The two wars that George Bush launched in retaliation for the attack have turned out to be the longest in American history, nearly the costliest, and among the most inglorious. Even the afterglow of the daring execution of Osama bin Laden in May barely lasted into the summer.

What's more, the airliner missiles—a truly new weapon of mass destruction—left a trail not only of blood and tears but of nagging questions, both peripheral and profound. A decade on, despite all the investigations and reports, they still tantalize: Why didn't the FBI brass follow up on field reports of visiting young Arabs trying the learn how to fly jumbo jets? Why didn't the New York fire department equip its men and women with radios that worked in skyscrapers before sending them into the burning towers? Most provocative: Did the Saudi Arabian elite finance bin Laden and his murderous crew with cash and nurture them with U.S.-based spies?

The spate of new books timed to the 10th anniversary of the attacks can't neatly secure these and so many other loose ends, but the best of them reanimate the tragedy of the day and its emotional impact on the survivors and doggedly track lines of investigation that the 9/11 Commission left muddled or unpursued.

"As soon as we got across the first street going south, the first tower collapsed," recalls high-school principal Ada Rosario Dolch, who led her 600 students to safety from their building two blocks from the World Trade Center. "I heard snaps, crackles and pops. Snapping, snapping. I looked back and saw this tsunami wave of blackness coming towards us. It was the first time, I remember, thinking, I'm going to die now. Phew. And then I saw that all the kids were running. It's the end of the world."

Principal Dolch, whose sister perished that day, is one of 25 contributors to Dennis Smith's oral history, "A Decade of Hope" (Penguin, 384 pages, $26.95). An ex-fireman and a prolific author, Mr. Smith aims to show how 9/11 survivors repurposed their sorrow into good works designed to keep alive the spirit and memory of those who were lost. But the book's real impact is its resurrection of the anguished efforts of husbands and wives, parents and children, to get news of the fate of their family members that day and later to search the smoldering pile for traces of their dead. (Eventually, only 174 bodies were found intact; 21,744 body parts were collected.)

Lee Ielpi, a highly decorated, retired FDNY chief, found his son Jonathan's body after three months, but stayed for six more looking for others—so long that a writer named him "ambassador to the dead." And there are glimpses of carnage that instantly etch themselves into memory. Fireman Ken Haskell describes finding a body sheared perfectly in half from head to toe: "His eye was open; expressionless . . . his face didn't have a mark on it."

It is impossible to read Lee Ielpi's narrative and others like it and the messages to the dead from kin in "The Legacy Letters" without weeping. And, for all the redemptive talk, the anger and politically-incorrect analyses of the survivors and like-minded politicians is a bracing reminder of how deeply the trauma of 9/11 is embedded in many hearts.

"They say the [extremist] imams don't speak for them," Rep. Peter King tells Mr. Smith about some of his Muslim constituents on Long Island. "If Catholic priests got up and said to kill all the Jews, I hope some Catholic leaders would stand up and say, This is wrong. When I ask why nobody in the Muslim community stands up, they say, That is not our tradition."

Many 9/11 families and others were incensed at the plan to build a mosque and cultural center close to Ground Zero. Even more fury was unleashed over the design of the National September 11 Memorial in the footprint of the fallen towers. The passionate battle over the memorial is nearly bleached out in "A Place of Remembrance" (National Geographic, 224 pages, $19.95) an anodyne picture-and-text album about the memorial. An elite design panel chose "Reflecting Absence," an austere pair of hollow square fountains set in a grove of 400 swamp oaks with the names of the victims inscribed on bronze parapets surrounding the pools. Relics from Ground Zero were to be displayed below ground in a museum on the site.

Architect Michael Arad's elegant abstraction infuriated many of the survivors. "You wouldn't go to Auschwitz and remove the death camp remnants and artifacts in order to better express our feelings," the brother of a lost fire officer fumed to Mr. Smith. The families were further outraged by the initial decision not to identify by unit the 406 firefighters, police and other first responders who died and to mix their names with those of the victims they tried to rescue. Ultimately, the first responders' affiliations were added, but not everyone was mollified.

There are more tales of heroism and slaughter in "The Eleventh Day" (Random House, 624 pages, $30) a detailed chronicle by the British journalists Anthony Summers and his wife, Robbyn Swan. But the book's essential contribution to the annals of the attack is its painstaking examination of questions the 9/11 Commission finessed in its 2004 report and in its newly published update: Did Saudi princes, charities or the military fund bin Laden and his hijackers, help them after they reached the U.S., and withhold intelligence that might have thwarted the attack or clarified the investigation afterward?

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi as, of course, was bin Laden. With American airspace still closed, dozens of Saudi royals and members of bin Laden's extended family were airlifted back to Riyadh, most after only perfunctory questioning by the FBI. And just two days after the attacks, President Bush was smoking a cigar on the Truman balcony of the White House with Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador and man about Washington, in the company of Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.

Pureeing their own research with published sources, Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan confect a circumstantial case involving protection money paid by members of the huge royal family to keep bin Laden's terrorism outside the kingdom's borders, intercession by Saudi cultural agents—likely spies—to help two of the hijackers in California, and stonewalling by Saudi intelligence after the attacks.

Provocatively, a 28-page section of the findings of the Joint Congressional investigation of 9/11 dealing with the Saudi connection was redacted on national security grounds, Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan report, by order of the White House. Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, the one-time chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who headed the joint inquiry and is no liberal firebrand, told the authors that the Saudi government and elite helped some of the hijackers, if not all. The authors quote an official who saw the text before it was eviscerated saying: "If the 28-pages were to be made public, I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight."

These questions will recede again into the background this weekend when the memorial is dedicated and opens to visitors. One World Trade Center—mercifully no longer designated the Freedom Tower—is already 80 stories toward its ultimate height of 104. Ground Zero will be no more. But the nightmare of 9/11 will shadow the American imagination forever.

Mr. Kosner, a longtime magazine editor, was the editor in chief of The New York Daily News on September 11, 2001.

The 9/11 Decade - Editorial Wall Street Journal

The 9/11 Decade

The U.S. is safer and has not sacrificed its civil liberties.

Review and Outlook

The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2011

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the World-Wide column of The Wall Street Journal carried items on a suicide bombing in Istanbul that killed two policemen, fighting between Israelis and Palestinians and Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria. A longer front-page story warned of another menace: the increasingly violent tactics of anti-globalization activists. "In Europe," the Journal reported, "security forces see themselves as facing an urban-guerrilla movement, a view that justifies sterner means than might be acceptable in the U.S."

Would an early-morning reader of the Journal have been able to detect in these news flashes any hint of the furies that would burst upon America within hours? Probably not. As Roberta Wohlstetter noted in her classic study of why the U.S. was taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor, information that seems meaningful in retrospect tends, in real time, to be drowned out in a static roar of information, all of it contending for our attention. In September 2001, seers might as easily have predicted that the great global challenge of the next decade would have been containing the spread of the human variant of mad-cow disease (a case of which had just been found in Japan), rather than the threat of global Islamic terrorism.

Ten years on, nobody worries about a mad-cow pandemic, an excellent case study of how the West routinely talks itself into bogus panic. There is, however, plenty of talk about how the threat of terrorism has been overhyped, or how America's efforts against terrorists have been a costly distraction from the challenges of a rising China or the faltering economy or global warming or any other crisis, real or hypothetical, that supposedly demands our single-minded focus.

Yet there was nothing hypothetical about what happened in New York, Pennsylvania or at the Pentagon that day, nor anything bogus about the anthrax attacks, still not definitively solved in our view, later that month. The same can be said of subsequent atrocities in Karachi, Tel Aviv, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, Amman, Baghdad, Mumbai and Fort Hood, among many other places. And while the risk that terrorist groups could use weapons of mass destruction so far remains mostly speculative, there is little doubt that they will use them to kill unlimited numbers of people if only they can acquire them.

Put simply, by the evening of 9/11 it was clear that the threat of Islamic terrorism was real, urgent and growing, and that it would require from the Bush Administration a serious and sustained response, both on offense and defense. Few Members of either party doubted this when the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists passed the Senate 98-0 a week after 9/11, or when the Patriot Act passed in the Senate by a vote of 98-1 the following month, or when the authorization for the war in Iraq passed the Senate 77-23 a year later.

Nor were many doubts expressed by senior members of the House and Senate (including Nancy Pelosi) when they were repeatedly briefed by the Bush Administration on the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, including waterboarding, or on the warrantless wiretap surveillance program, or on the CIA's use of "black sites" to interrogate terrorist suspects. "We understood what the CIA was doing. . . . On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support to carry out its mission against al Qaeda," recalled Porter Goss, then the Chairman of House Intelligence Committee, in an April 2009 Washington Post op-ed.

The comity wouldn't last. Yet from the perspective of a decade, what's notable about the counter-terrorist architecture erected by the Bush Administration (with initial bipartisan support) is how effective it has been. On 9/12, few people would have dared venture the prediction that the U.S. would not suffer another major attack for at least a decade. But that's what happened—or, to put it more accurately, what has been achieved.

This has not been for lack of trying by terrorists. A list recently compiled by the Heritage Foundation records 40 foiled plots since 9/11. Some of these have been amateurish, and others were uncovered as a result of FBI sting operations in which there was no immediate risk to civilians. A few, like the near-misses of shoe-bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, were averted at the last instant thanks to the vigilance of watchful passengers.

But other, potentially more deadly, plots were detected and foiled thanks to the mandate and backing given the CIA and other agencies in the wake of 9/11. According to Justice Department memos released in 2009 by the Obama Administration, "since March 2002, the intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the CTC's [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda. . . . The substantial majority of this intelligence has come from detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques." Our friends on the left often call these memos the "torture memos." The real torture is what happens to maimed victims of terrorist atrocities that intelligence agencies were blind to prevent.

That's a lesson the Obama Administration has taken to heart. Though the President came to office promising to undo his predecessor's antiterror legacy, he has for the most part preserved it. That goes for re-authorizing key provisions of the Patriot Act (including that favorite ACLU bugaboo, the so-called library-records provision); moving forward with military tribunals for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees; keeping Guantanamo open (albeit grudgingly), and giving the CIA authority to dramatically increase the use of drones against terrorist leaders. As for some of Mr. Obama's other promises, such as ending the use of enhanced interrogations or closing down the black sites, these were already accomplished facts well before George W. Bush left office.

Constrained interrogations excepted, these developments not only increase America's margin of safety against another attack, but also put the Democratic Party's visible imprimatur on the war on terror, much as Dwight Eisenhower's foreign policy put the GOP stamp on Harry Truman's containment policies.

They also expose the accusation that President Bush was trampling America's civil liberties as a particularly vulgar partisan maneuver—one that magically disappeared the moment Mr. Obama came to office. We certainly don't like removing our shoes at the airport, but the larger truth is that American civil liberties are as robust today as they were on the eve of 9/11. Then again, we shudder to think of the kinds of measures the American public would have demanded had there been further attacks on the scale of 9/11. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, it's worth recalling, was mainly the doing of those two great civil libertarians Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren.

That point is also worth noting when considering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with operations the U.S. has conducted everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia. It is hard to see how the U.S. could have inflicted the hammer blows it has against al Qaeda—bringing it, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has argued, to the edge of "strategic defeat"—had it not confronted them directly in their own heartlands. Though the Iraq war had its own justifications, it remains the fact that al Qaeda sustained some of its hardest military reversals in the Sunni triangle north of Baghdad.

As for Afghanistan, it's worth asking whether Osama bin Laden would be dead today if President Obama had taken the advice of those who, from the moment he took office, wanted a full and immediate withdrawal from the country. We would add that not least among the reasons for the U.S. to remain militarily engaged in Afghanistan is to prove bin Laden's central contention—that Americans have no stomach for a long-term fight—wrong.

Weakness, Donald Rumsfeld once observed, is provocative. Taking care to avoid a perception of weakness ought to be a chief consideration of U.S. policy makers as they consider their next steps in the Middle East. The regime in Tehran, closer now than they ever have been to realizing their nuclear ambitions, is certainly watching.

This week reports surfaced of credible threats of a terrorist strike on tomorrow's anniversary. The war against Islamic militancy is far from over. But having waged a Cold War against the Soviet Union for 45 years, Americans are no strangers to long struggles in defense of freedom, our own as well as that of others. The course of the first 9/11 decade should, for all of the pain it has imposed, give us confidence that we can see the battle through. We only hope we won't need our enemies' reminding that there is no alternative.

Revista Espaço Acadêmico - Dossiê Onze de Setembro

Na verdade, o dossiê se resume a três artigos, um dos quais escrito por mim, o outro pelo próprio organizador do dossiê. Apenas um artigo a mais, para um assunto tão importante. Fiquei verdadeiramente surpreendido. Pensei, antes, que muito mais gente se disporia a escrever sobre tema tão relevante das relações internacionais.
Ou apenas não escrevem mesmo, o que não parece ser o caso, pois todos querem publicar para acumular pontos, ou então não dão nenhuma importância ao evento em questão:

Revista Espaço Acadêmico,  nº 124, setembro de 2011. Acesso: http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/EspacoAcademico/issue/current 

Meu artigo: 

Onze de Setembro, dez anos: recepção no mundo, reações no Brasil

Revista Espaço Acadêmico, dossiê especial Onze de Setembro

(ano 11, n. 124, setembro de 2011, p. 21-26; ISSN: 1519-6186, link: http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/EspacoAcademico/article/view/14042/7731). 

Relação de Originais n. 2290; Publicados n. 1043.