IP: excerpt from transcript of The National, CBC-TV, Sept 11, 2001

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:22:29 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "Mike O'Dell" <mo () ccr org>
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: excerpt from transcript of The National, CBC-TV, Sept 11, 2001
>
>
> MANSBRIDGE: Well on a day when the world seems very confusing, we
> count on one person to help bring a certain clarity. Here's Rex
> Murphy with is point of view.
>
> REX MURPHY: What started this morning at 8:45 New York time, on
> the first highjacked airplane, passengers on board was rammed into
> the first World Trade Tower, was the terrorist's 21st century
> version of Pearl Harbour. What we saw and what we've been seeing
> all day from the heart of New York and the power centre of Washington
> is a scene of deliberate carnage on a scale and visited with a
> suddenness that has produced an epidemic sense of shock all over
> North America. It wasn't just planes which were highjacked this
> morning, it was the idea that North America was a closed protected
> space was exempt from the dirty forces and staggering pain of
> present day history. We should pay some attention to the dreadfully
> perfect symbolism of the targets. The great towers of the World
> Trade Centre in the very heart of the financial capital of America
> and the Pentagon itself, the symbol of power in the capital of
> power.  The terrorist wanted to do much more than reign death on
> thousands of innocent ordinary people. They designed a series of
> actions as carefully as any playwright to carry an unequivocal
> message, through these symbols that their enemy is America, its
> system, its wealth, and its power. And to carry the further message
> that the hatred of America in their eyes is so utter and perfect
> that any manner of deed and any number of deaths have their demented
> justification.  Today's horrors had the added horror that they were
> contemplated a deeply thought about end.  They were designed and
> in that as well as in the nature of their targets, they were the
> terrorist equivalent of a declaration of war. These acts were new
> and singular. They were meant to establish a new threshold.  They
> have brutally expanded the boundaries of what we must now, as part
> of our every day psychology consider possible.  It was a serving
> of notice to this side of the world that this side of the world is
> no longer show master or spectator, that the brutalities and
> incitements and rancours of northern Ireland to Kosovo, from the
> middle east to Afghanistan, the stuff of our TV screens which always
> take place over there now have, in the rubble, blood and dust of
> downtown New York, a first world local address.  The curtain of
> our North American exemption from the actuality of the world's
> darker turnings has been breached in the first year of a new century.
> The truth of this could be seen even on the streets of Toronto and
> I'm sure every major Canadian city.  I say even because in this
> country we sometimes think next to the U.S.  that we are spectators
> too, not actors.  But here too, the violence today had its impact.
> People were absorbed and anxious in a manner I have not seen during
> any other time.  Who was responsible? What the U.S.  will do in
> retaliation, for retaliation there will be? Whether today was a
> complete event or the beginning of some even larger one, these are
> the awful particulars that each passing hour will ripen.  What is
> already complete is a change in the equation and the psychological
> and conventional assumptions under which we, here in the west, have
> carried out our business and gone about our lives.  We won't be
> talking about Gary Condit or the seating plan of the Alliance with
> quite the same fervor from here on in.  We are no longer exempt
> from the madness and evil of our always unhappily, sometimes fanatic
> planet.  September 11th, 2001, terrorism has gone global.  For The
> National, I'm Rex Murphy.



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