Why Bin Laden won

Robert Fisk's story is a superb illustration of the point I will attempt to make in this post. On September 11, 2001, the illustrious academic and Middle-East correspondent for The London Independent was on a plane crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Before he boarded the plane, he already had heard that some sort of aircraft - at the time it was believed to be a single-engined propeller plane - had crashed into the World Trade Center. No one panicked, and he boarded the flight, which then took off for the Eastern Seaboard. As the plane crossed over Ireland, a second aircraft was suddenly involved, smashing into the side of the other World Trade Center skyscraper. By the time they reached the Irish west coast and the Cliffs of Moher, The Pentagon had been hit. At that point, Fisk went up to the crew of the flight - most of whom he knew from his numerous previous flights across the Atlantic - and informed them that the United States would likely close its airspace. At that time, they were unsure of where the planes had come from, and him and the chief purser began discussing it, saying that the planes could have come from Latin America, or the west coast...or Europe.
At that moment, the two of them looked at one another, and immediately walked through the plane, picking out passengers they didn't like. Fisk found 13 - three in business class alone - while the purser found 14. Of course, they were all Muslims, who happened to be praying, or looking suspiciously at Fisk because he was looking suspiciously at them, or reading the Q'ran, or anything else that looked remotely 'suspicious' in their eyes. It was at that moment that Fisk realized that Bin Laden - whom he interviewed three times in the 1990's, and whom he was almost certain was behind the attacks - had gotten the better of him. In a fraction of a second, he had changed the incredibly liberal, tolerant, and open-minded Robert Fisk into a racist.

Fisk's story - conveyed at a lecture on Middle East geopolitics he gave at MIT in April 2006 - represents but a part of the larger picture. Following 9/11, our entire liberal-democrat society began to collapse, replaced by the PATRIOT Act, phone and email surveillance, random extraditions of often innocent people to countries notorious for their torture practices - such as the case of Maher Arar, waterboarding and other forms of torture, the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, the deaths of nearly one million civilians between those two conflicts, military tribunals, and a host of other ills that have no place in a free and democratic society. George W. Gump told us that "they hate us for our freedom", and yet if that is the case, would it not make more sense to defy them, to carry on with our freedoms anyways? Nope, at least not to them. To them, it made more sense to begin turning America - and indeed many other western nations - into shadows of police states. In the words of Ben Franklin, we gave up a lot of freedom for a little security. In the end, we lost both, and have earned neither.

Fisk vowed - on several occasions - that he would not allow 19 murderers to change his world. I will not allow them to change mine. It is time that the rest of us did the same. Do not allow 19 murderers - for that is all they really are - to change your world. If you do, then Bin Laden wins. Looking at the headlines on Guantanamo, sorting through pages and pages of internet documents released concerning the military tribunals, reading of the extradition of innocent men to Egypt and Syria - where they were tortured for months on end, it is beginning to look as though he already has.