Here on Wednesday, 7 September 2011, the 2001 memorial rehashes are at full volume and likely won’t start tapering off until at least this time next week. The New York Times alone has already made commemorative pieces practically their own subgenre. As of this writing, the home pages of both Haaretz in Israel and The Guardian in Britain have pictures of exploding and collapsing buildings in New York. The BBC’s home page is similarly adorned. And, in a global twist that would’ve outraged the shell shocked media people of ten years ago, Al Jazeera English is currently sporting three opinion pieces with “9/11” in the title as well as two photo montages.
For all their gaudy sadness, those stories are looks in the rearview mirror that don’t tell us anything new. Last night BBC radio had a short interview with a British man who lived just a few blocks south of the World Trade Center in 2001. His tale was powerful and immediate in a way only eyewitness accounts can be, but it wasn’t all that different from the thousands of other such accounts that have been recorded over the years. Last Friday’s New York Times, on the other hand, had something that genuinely adds to a complete understanding of not only the 2001 attacks, but of our reactions to them, which have been far more lasting and important.
Reported from Tripoli, the article tells the story of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan arrested in Malaysia in 2004, sent to Thailand at the request of the U.S. government, tortured, and then shipped back to Libya to be held for six years of solitary confinement. He was released only last year when he and his fellow band of Islamist rebels agreed to renounce violence. Now he is in charge of the new Libyan government’s forces in Tripoli and is saying all the right things:
“The February 17th revolution is the Libyan people’s revolution and no one can claim it, neither secularists nor Islamists,” he said. “The Libyan people have different views, and all those views have to be involved and respected.”
The Times article makes much of the fact that our government isn’t exactly pleased with Belhaj’s newfound place in officialdom. No doubt government paranoiacs would point out that it’d be easy for him to spin an American reporter in the chaotic climate of power vacuum Tripoli. After all, if he really was the kind of dangerous man our rendition and torture programs were designed for, wouldn’t Western pleasing platitudes like that be exactly what he would say?
At the same time, Belhaj is no longer a wanted man. Indeed, given the politics of today, having spent six years in a Libyan prison for opposing Muammar Gaddafi is about as high a badge of honor as one can have. The article ends with what can only be described as a plea for justice far more civilized than the kind he was initially given in Malaysia, Thailand and Libya:
While Mr. Belhaj insisted that he was not interested in revenge, it is not a period of his life that he has altogether forgotten. “If one day there is a legal way, I would like to see my torturers brought to court,” he said.
Given the uncertainties in Libya at the moment, Abdel Hakim Belhaj’s story is far from over. But it’s been a very instructive one so far. He’s gone from American ally (he fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan), to American prisoner, to the military chief of a capital city that the U.S. bombed in 1986 and 2011. That he got his current position with a big assist from his erstwhile allies/captors just makes things that much more illustrative of the myriad ways the 2001 terrorist attacks have affected the wider world.
Belhaj’s life was indelibly marked by the 2001 terrorist attacks and the vastly more influential American response to them, and he is far from alone. Ten years on it’s worth remembering not only the direct victims of that day, but all of the worldly complexities that too often get ignored. Solemn memorials are well deserved, but not at the expense of the wider understanding that places them in context and perspective.
