Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
It is hard to watch a society's political virtues mocked as weakness by an uncomprehending foe. The fireball attacks of September 11 against the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon consumed the lives of more than 3,000 ordinary people—Americans and foreign visitors , business people, secretaries, schoolchildren visiting the Pentagon, travelers flying home. Like Joseph Conrad's terrorist who wished to destroy pure mathematics and settled for the Greenwich clock tower, this was an attack on civil society and global economy, and worst of all, on the innocence of noncombatants.
1 American Bar Association Task force on Terrorism and the Law, “Report and Recommendations on Military Commissions,” January 4, 2002, available at http://www.abanet.org/leadership/military.pdfGoogle Scholar.
2 Weisner, Benjamin, “A Nation Challenged: The Strategy—Ex-Prosecutor Wants Tribunals to Retain Liberties,” New York Times January 8, 2002, p. A13Google Scholar.