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How The Nation Covered 9/11

Our phone lines were down. People were weeping. But we got an issue out the door with morality, justice, and nuance.

Smoke from the burning World Trade Center towers fills up the downtown Manhattan skyline after both buildings were attacked by airplanes on September 11, 2001, in New York City.

“On Tuesday morning, a piece was torn out of our world. A patch of blue sky that should not have been there opened up in the New York skyline…. the heavens were raining human beings. Our city was changed forever. Our country was changed forever. Our world was changed forever.” So wrote Jonathan Schell in the first issue of The Nation following September 11. 

At The Nation’s office, in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers, like everyone else in America, we watched television horrified, saddened, and angry. People wept, and at the same time took notes and got on the phones. We had an issue closing the next day. We quickly learned that our communications links to the outer world were severed; our phone lines had run under World Trade Center 7. So, in those first days, we had no incoming calls and the office computer links to the internet were down. The facts were sketchy and causes of the attack shrouded in a pall of uncertainty thick as the smoke rising from the demolished World Trade Center. The issue that we assembled and put to bed the next day, Wednesday, September 12, struck a tone and purpose that the magazine has striven to maintain in the weeks since. 

Paying respect to the human reactions of anger, hurt, and grief, our editorials in that first week, and in the ones that followed, have made the case for an effective and just response to the horrific terrorist acts. We argued that such a response may include discriminate use of military force, but that the most promising and effective way to halt terrorism lies in bringing those responsible to justice through non-military actions in cooperation with the global community and within a framework of domestic and international law. 

As Richard Falk warned in his indispensable essay “A Just Response,” the “justice of the cause” would be “negated by the injustice of improper means and excessive ends.” As the US military response unfolded in the ensuing days, there seemed to be more questions than answers: Who is Osama bin Laden? What is the involvement of the Taliban? What are we doing in Afghanistan anyway? Did US foreign policy create........

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