Commentary: The Day Terror Changed Us and a Virginia Governor Stepped Up to Lead and Restore Confidence

There are times when I sit alone and think back — trying to unearth details best left buried — and it all still feels like a nightmare, one that hasn’t softened even through the gauzy filter of 25 years gone by.

It’s not just in the reliving of the undiluted horror from that cool, clear second Tuesday morning of September in 2001. Not since Pearl Harbor had murder at such a mass scale touched our shores, and we didn’t know how to handle that.

It’s not just the lives that vanished from our midst in a twinkling, leaving an unfillable void where love and warmth and laughter and family once were. Two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seven innocent people perished that day in fire and torn, twisted steel. More have died since from its injuries and effects.

It’s not just the freedoms that we as a society willingly forfeited in the name of security after 9/11 — everyday liberties we treated as a birthright then but are hard to fathom in today’s paranoid surveillance state.

It’s all of it. Combined and compounded over time. On its silver anniversary, it washes over us, stirring old memories and fresh fears; reopening wounds still unhealed.

Each person of sufficient age and awareness on that day has those memories, unique to individual perceptions, locations, and feelings. Those close enough to witness those strikes — who felt impact concussions and the searing heat of the flames, who heard the screams, who smelled death up close — are haunted by an experience they will take to their graves.

We have no words or comforts to assuage the still-raw grief of those who lost loved ones to those unholy attacks. The pain the rest of us feel is puny in comparison.

To those of us in Virginia’s Capitol that morning, it began as a routine day with an odd twist.

We had heard fragmentary reports of a small plane that may have flown into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. It occurred to me that a terrorist bomb in the underground parking deck of that complex in 1993 had killed six people and injured more than 1,000, but I dismissed the thought.

We were in the Capitol to cover a news conference that could roil that year’s statewide Democratic Party ticket in a gubernatorial election year. To the Democrats’ advantage, the news conference disintegrated halfway through when a Capitol correspondent at the event learned from her editors that a passenger jetliner had slammed into the Pentagon.

Whatever was happening, it was just a two-hour drive north of us on Interstate 95 in Virginia. On a television in the press office of Gov. Jim Gilmore on the third floor of the Capitol, I watched as the first of the twin towers collapsed in Lower Manhattan. On the same screen, I could see orange balls of burning jet fuel leaping from the destroyed western face of the Pentagon, staining the deep blue sky of a perfect autumn day.

We were a nation instantly at war and gripped by terror. And in that terror, there was word that another hijacked jetliner was bound for Richmond with either our state Capitol or the Federal Reserve Bank as its target.

People of differing stations and functions — janitors, office workers, a legislator and the press corps among them — left the Capitol and gathered outside as word spread. I was among them, wondering if we were far enough from the Capitol should a plane strike it.

It was a false alarm. It evidently arose from the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 over the Midwest that was turned around and aimed at the U.S. Capitol. Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board, after passengers, selfless and patriotic beyond comprehension, overpowered al-Qaeda terrorists who had taken control.

In those few dreadful hours as the unthinkable became lived experience, I was keenly aware as a journalist that rumors were not immediately distinguishable from facts, and each briefly had the same currency. The scared and uninformed were leading the scared and uninformed.

That’s when Gilmore stepped into the moment he was made for and calmly, confidently led Virginia. Our darkest day was his finest.

“I wasn’t really afraid. I was aware that maybe there would be some further attacks that we didn’t know about. There was some uncertainty,” Gilmore told me last week.

“We didn’t know the parameters of the plot. We knew there had been a strike at the World Trade Center, that there had been a strike in Virginia at the Pentagon, but we didn’t know what else was going on. The goal was to take charge of the situation and do the best we could,” he said.

He activated the state Emergency Operations Center in Richmond and instructed police statewide to directly report episodes of gunfire to officials there during the crisis.

The key was sound information communicated promptly. To that end, our 68th governor updated the media from his office conference room almost hourly through the day, and then addressed the commonwealth on live television that night.

“There is a public role to an officeholder, and it’s an opportunity — a duty — to communicate,” Gilmore said. “People sometimes think that talk is nothing, but actually talk — communicating to the citizens of Virginia — is everything, and that’s calming.”

Plus, he knew what he was talking about.

Jim Gilmore – Official portrait, 2019

Gilmore served in U.S. Army intelligence, posted in Germany during the Cold War. He had been commonwealth’s attorney for Henrico County and state attorney general before becoming governor, so he was hardwired into statewide conduits of official information.

Most importantly, however, for three years before 9/11, he had headed the Gilmore Commission, a federally chartered panel that examined the nation’s exposure to terrorism and recommended ways to deal with it. His deputy on the commission was James Clapper, who served as the Director of National Intelligence.

That day changed us. Until 9/11, it was common to prop open the ground floor east and west doors to the state Capitol on beautiful spring and fall days, and anyone could amble inside without being stopped or questioned. That ended forever on Sept. 12.

Gilmore detests the Orwellian legacy of 9/11 and the toll it still takes on our freedoms and privacy.

“The lesson of ‘1984’ was that you never knew whether you were being watched by the authorities or not,” he said.

“The 9/11 attacks were a watershed. I’m not sure whether the public demanded it, whether the insurance industry demanded it, or whether the police demanded it, … but it’s transformed us into a security society, a society that is now being watched. I absolutely deplore this,” he said.

But hope abides, he said, noting public outrage that has forced numerous jurisdictions and agencies to suspend or cancel their use of automated license plate reading technology by Flock and other providers.

“I am frankly surprised and pleased that the Flock camera thing is being pushed back on by individual citizens,” Gilmore said. “People are saying, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want to be watched all the time.’ And artificial intelligence, as it develops, will supercharge this problem.”

And when it comes to security, the man knows what he’s talking about.

By Bob Lewis, Virginia Mercury

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