Consultant Dan
02 May 2011
Osama Bin Laden's death and a memory of 9/11
The death of Osama Bin Laden will not change the world as much as Al-Queda’s 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, but it is an historic event.
I was at a Greens organic dinner fundraiser in Sydney, when the first plane flew into the twin towers. A party member heard of the news and came to tell me because he thought that I should know, since I was responsible for media relations. In my mind’s eye, I visualised it was a small plane, because small planes had crashed into NY sky scrapers before.
When I got home around midnight I turned on the ABC and saw how wrong I was. I remember sitting on the floor, talking to people on the phone as the second plane flew into the tower, terrified by the death and suffering being caused.
Like the newsreaders, I was too stunned to register the importance of the event. The first person I heard to say that ‘this has changed the world’, was Ben Oquist (Chief of Staff to Senator Bob Brown), speaking from his mobile phone, as we watched the live footage of the unfolding disaster.
Ben is a brilliant political thinker, observer and participant. He predicted that the attack was going to herald in an era of war and a war-time deadening of ideas in the west. It justified the war-mongering of President Bush and the khaki elections that kept PM John Howard in power in Australia.
I first saw the twin towers when I visited New York City in 1977. I loved them because they looked like the future to me. Space, technology and science were passions of mine. In 2001, I still had a 3-D postcard of the Twin Towers from NYC.
Postscript: Robert Fisk says the death is ‘pretty irrelevant’ compared to the recent democratic uprisings in the Arab world
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