Dad Interview 2

A student named Clara interviews her dad about his experiences during and after the 9-11 attacks. Her dad recalls the shock and confusion of that day, trying to reach his brother in New York, and eventually finding out that his brother was safe. As a political science student, he analyzed the government's response to the attacks and criticized their handling of the situation. He protested against the invasion of Iraq and became more politically active. He also noticed the rise in Islamophobia and the negative impact on Muslim residents in the US. Overall, he felt that the government's choices changed politics and had a lasting impact on the country. Hello, and welcome to the Living Memory Project podcast of 2024. My name is Clara, and I'm a student in Ms. Mack and Mr. Duncombe's 10th grade World Studies class. I'm going to talk about 9-11 and how it impacted everyday Americans like my dad. As you listen to my dad's story, I hope that you can do your best to understand where he's coming from and possibly be inspired to rise up against the injustice. Today, we'll be discussing his memories as an individual with a brother in New York at the time, his thoughts as a grad student and studying political science, and retrospectively how he feels about the aftermath of 9-11 in a sort of chronological time-lapse of actions and consequences. I was in grad school at the time. I was getting my PhD in political science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and so I wasn't near New York, but I had grown up in New Jersey, and my brother, John, worked in finance in New York. I just remember on that day hearing that a plane had hit the World Trade Tower and being like, what are you talking about? Planes don't hit buildings. And people were like, no, really? And this was a long time ago, and people, like, they wheeled out a computer into the computer lab, and we all were, like, huddled around this, like, one pretty small TV, you know, which just had that continuous loop of the plane hitting the building. And we were just, I just, like, stunned silence. And I remember trying to call John, because he was in New York, and, like, you couldn't get through. Like, there was no calls going through anywhere. It was just sort of a really different kind of experience that I've never had before since. No, I, so, I think I didn't find out that he had gotten back to Connecticut for five or six hours. And I don't think I spoke to him directly. I think he got in touch with my parents, who then told me, I think he called them first. He worked in finance in New York, like, he knew people who were in the building. In fact, he had a relative who died in the attack. Yeah, it was kind of like a, I don't know, you think, well, that could have been him, right? I mean, he didn't work in the building, so it's not like he was in an attack, but, like, so I found out later that night, but it was hours that I didn't know. So, let's take a step back. My dad was one of the millions affected by 9-11. Why am I interviewing him? Well, I'm interviewing him because of his unique perspective as a grad student studying political theory at the time of the attacks. I'm hoping that, because of this, he can provide some insight into what the government did wrong and what it might have done right. Do you think your experience with 9-11 as, like, as an individual who is, like, just a citizen of the country, differs at all from your analysis of it as a political scientist, or do you think those are, like, the same thing? I think they're probably different. If I wasn't in a political science Ph.D. program, I wouldn't have thought about it quite in the same way. And when you're in a Ph.D. program, you're reading so much, and you're, like, pushed to apply all these different theories, right? And so, you know, you're reading about colonialism, you're reading about imperialism, you're reading about orientalism and how we treat other people in different ways, and we characterize them as less than, and it allows us to do X and Y. And so, and then, you know, I was learning about the law and how important the law was, and then how, you know, in Nazi Germany, the rule of law was undermined, and that was part of what allowed fascism to come to play. And so, you're taking all this information and you're applying it to this, like, which seemed like a really unprecedented moment, and you're, like, I just had to, in some sense, engage with it more than a person who, you know, was doing something else, because that was part of what I actually needed to do for my coursework. So I remember being at a protest, going, where's everyone else? Why aren't more people out here? And, you know, and I think people have other things to do, right? And, like, it didn't seem imminent. Like, that's a war that's happening across the globe. How does that affect me? Do you know what you think the U.S. government should have done? I think there was a moment where they could have gotten the people who are now talking to one another to institutionalize cooperation. We don't have to have a political system where you're, like, cheering for a political party like you are a baseball or football team. If the Democrats win, I shouldn't really be happy that the Republicans are losing. And I think in that moment we could have kind of shifted away from the polarization that happened afterwards. And the way the American people could have done that is rewarding people who stood for what they thought was right in agreeing with the other party to do stuff. Looking back on it, it is the thing that really mobilized me politically. Like, that I, I mean, you know, I grew up in a household, you know, where my dad came from Italy and, you know, talked about how great the U.S. was growing up and the American dream, and yes, his life was super hard, but he came to the U.S. and was able to succeed. And so I had this very, like, sort of, I don't know, rosy view of the U.S. and its role in the world. And I still, like, hope that it could be that place. But 9-11 kind of, you know, made me realize how easily the things that I do like about the country could slip away. And so, you know, it was a moment where we were attacked, but in our response to that attack, I think we might have lost some of what was actually good about the country. And so, yeah, so, I mean, it was a pivotal point for me in just recognizing how important politics is and how easy it is to sort of lose what you kind of take for granted. George Bush responded to this national trauma with this speech. We receive a credible threat. Now, the American people have got to go about their business. We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business, where people don't shop. That's their intention. Their intention was not only to kill and maim and destroy. Their intention was to frighten to the point where our nation would not act. Needless to say, my dad was less than pleased. I thought that was really weird. You have this opportunity to do something good, and you're telling people go to the mall. There were malls back then. And buy stuff. And then it became more like, OK, what are we doing? Then I saw some of the Islamophobia kind of cropping up and people getting panicked about Muslims in the country and anti-Muslim sentiment really going up. That was sort of almost like the side thing, because people wanted to know, who are the terrorists? What are we going to do about it? How are we going to make sure we're not attacked again? That was really the narrative at the time. So I became pretty critical of George W. Bush throughout his term. When he wanted to invade Iraq, I protested. And it was the first time I ever protested. We should not be occupying another country. We should not be attacking another country with no provocation. And so that whole thing kind of mobilized me. I need to try to make sure our country doesn't go off the wrong path. I didn't realize all the horrible things. You can see why we did what we did, but also you're endangering millions of other people. And that sort of scared me. So I guess, in short, the government didn't really agree with my dad. And the choices they made after wound up changing politics forever. So I thought in New York, given the unprecedented nature of things, I thought the politicians did a good job trying to help the people as much as possible, everyone who was injured, everyone getting services to people. In the country at large, I was impressed that all the politicians were kind of coming together. It was almost kind of heartening, like right after the attack, I didn't understand the Islamophobia that was going to come. What I saw was the country, everyone kind of pulled together in a way that I was like, wow, this is odd. Republicans and Democrats are all supporting one another and trying to figure out what's the best thing to do. This is interesting and maybe positive in the sense that I thought it was going to bring us together. He labeled Iran, South Korea, and maybe some other country, the axis of evil. And because Iran was sponsoring terrorists, they still do. And so he was trying to say that the U.S. was standing for freedom and the West was standing for freedom against. He made this enemy that he just sort of made up. They're the axis of evil. These are the people that we really need to fight. And so it justified an increase of U.S. military attacks on other sovereign countries to kill terrorists across the globe. I didn't really understand how much of an effect it had on Muslim residents in the U.S. until I befriended some later on in life and then saw what they went through and how they were detained at the airport. Like they would be shuttled away and searched and questioned every time they went through. I was never that never happened to me. Right. They were treated very, very differently. And I never saw it because it didn't happen to me. And I didn't have a lot of close friends who it happened to. And so I wish I would have understood that and sort of pushed against that a little bit. And said, you know, these are our fellow Americans and everyone should feel safe in the country, not just some people. So, yeah, the Patriot Act gave them unparalleled power to police people and to surveil American citizens. And I thought that was scary. And so then I became increasingly critical and worried about the direction we were going. And then later on, Bush labeled a bunch of people the axis of evil. And I think labeling huge swaths of the globe evil is problematic and can be dangerous. So I became more concerned afterwards. But at first, obviously, I was sort of shocked and like angry and sad. But I was also sort of like, oh, maybe this is like maybe, you know, we will come more together from this. And then that kind of dissipated over time. And then the sort of overreaching, I thought, of the government on American rights. And then setting up Guantanamo Bay and violating, you know, holding people without trials. All that kind of stuff really worried me over time. But that didn't come into focus for some time. Like, I feel like there was a moment that was it was a possibility that we lost. And then we divided the country again. And, you know, and so things like the Patriot Act, I think, went too far. I don't think you can just gather all people's data and put them into a database that you can surveil that. Like, I thought Guantanamo Bay went too far. So I would not have done that initially. Like, I thought we should have if we had evidence, we should have tried them through military tribunals and then had a judicial system. And if not, we had to release them. Now, like, we can't set up this system where we can do whatever we want. Like, we now we have killed American citizens abroad with drone strikes without a trial. And I think that was set up by Guantanamo Bay. And so all of these things that we did, I think, open the door for a lack of lawfulness and undermining of the rule of law. And so I, you know, I wish we hadn't opened that door. When we went into Afghanistan and we fought and in other places to try to fight terrorists, we captured people. And we captured people who we thought might be involved in terrorist plots. So we just scooped them up. Now, what are we supposed to do with them? Well, under the rules of war, if they're enemy, if they are, you know, prisoners of war, you're supposed to return them and treat them in a certain way. Usually there's swaps that are done from both sides. The thing is, they weren't fighting for our country. They were part of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups. So then what do you do with them? Well, we said that we can, if we label them enemy combatants, that if they're not fighters with a country, then we create this category of enemy combatant for just that case. Well, they revised this category. And what it did is it put them outside of U.S. law and outside of the rules of war, so like international law. So we created this black box and we said, this is enemy combatants. Now, what does that mean? We don't actually need to follow military tribunal rules. We can hold people indefinitely without charging them, which is habeas corpus rights. And we did that. And we can't do it on U.S. soil because that would be unconstitutional. So we did it on Guantanamo Bay because that's outside of our legal system. And so we took who we thought were dangerous people and we kept them there. But then the question is, what do you do with them? They obviously now really, really hate us. Like if they weren't terrorists before, they really hate us now. But we don't have enough evidence to actually convict them. So we just kept them there. And there's still people who are there. President Obama tried to bring them to the U.S. and try them. And that was a political no-go. Like no state would accept them. And it was a political football. People were like, I mean, because what happens if you don't convict them? Then you have to let them go. And they don't like, do we want to let people who we've abused go? Now they actually might be really dangerous to us. So we've created this situation where we have this very expensive prison. It doesn't have that many people there anymore, but we're holding them indefinitely. And violating what would be international law and domestic law, but we've created a new law that is outside both. In today's podcast, I took you back to 2001, when the towers fell, all the way back through today through the eyes of my dad. When I started talking to him, I hadn't really realized that 9-11 was avoidable if you were in America at the time. Everyone in the United States was impacted by it in some way, though wildly different depending on the person. It wasn't the first time we had a national trauma, but it was one of the most vital. At the time, the U.S. seemed invincible at the top of the world. That made the sudden shock of 9-11 more impactful, more terrifying. So most Americans agree that 9-11 was a turning point. It shook America into a sense of constant insecurity, polarizing its politics and scaring people out of their initial willingness to work together. In some ways, you could say we've never recovered. Research from today's podcast can be found in the podcast description. And a huge thank you to Toby Fox for supplying today's music. Thanks so much for listening. I wanted to give an extra special thanks to my dog and a helicopter flying over our house for eating two hours of my editing time. And a much more genuine thanks to my dad, Michael Aluzzi, my World Studies teachers, Ms. Mack and Mr. Judkins, and Ms. Cohen for coming in and teaching us about the podcast tool. An additional thank you to my mom for tolerating me bugging her in her office for an hour before telling her I didn't want to interview her. And finally, thank you for taking the time to listen to the podcast. If you liked the podcast, please consider sharing it or visiting its archive, the Living Memory Podcast Archive, to find more stories like this. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, please don't forget to vote this upcoming election and get involved with politics. Our presidents control our livelihoods, so they should hear all of our voices. That includes yours. Thank you.