New York World Trade Center: End of an Era?

Yesterday a milestone took place in the construction of the building that is to replace the New York Twin Towers, destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001 by terrorist attacks planned and executed by the fundamentalist al-Qaida network, which left a toll of nearly 3,000 victims and toppled the sensation of invulnerability that had accompanied the superpower since its rise in addition to an emblematic structure of U.S. power. The new construction surpasses the Empire State Building and stands up, already, as the tallest in New York. According to the plans, it will be finished in 2014 and will be, from then on, the country’s tallest at a total height of 541 meters.

The record has been marked in the neighboring nation’s media, because the so-called Tower 1, completed yesterday and constructed on the same site that the Twin Towers occupied, hopes to symbolically restore the pride and confidence of New Yorkers and Americans in general and put an end to the terrible period that began, for their country and for the world, with the demolition of the headquarters of the World Trade Center.

Beyond the symbols, and no matter how much Washington seeks to overcome the material and psychological damage that the crash of fully-loaded airplanes left on the aforementioned New York buildings and the Pentagon (the headquarters of the Defense Department), the confrontation unleashed almost 11 years ago remains, in many senses, alive. In Afghanistan, the first objective of the United States’ vengeance, the war persists. Washington’s stagnation is evident and innocent Afghanis continue to die as an effect of Western intervention, in a volume much larger than that of those who fell in the attacks. Iraq was destroyed, the regime headed by Saddam Hussein was deposed and the delicate equilibrium in the Middle East ended up being shattered by Washington’s massive military presence in the region. Far from being eradicated, or at least debilitated, the most radical expressions of Islamic fundamentalism have spread out to new battlefields.

Far from his initial promises to distance himself from the foreign policy platform established in blood and fire by George W. Bush, President Barack Obama has remained tangled in the same warmongering interventionist logic as his predecessor. One could even think that the era of military interventionism inaugurated by the Texan politician is being continued by the black [president] in the Lybian and Syrian affairs, not to mention Washington’s unjustifiable hostility towards Iran.

Otherwise, the losses experienced throughout the world with regard to freedoms, rights and security are very far from having been recouped. Police paranoia has been codified into routine procedures for travelers. The ghost of terrorism continues being used to trample civil liberties, and massive human rights violations perpetrated in the context of the war on terrorism, including kidnappings, assassinations and torture remain, for the most part, unpunished.

In such circumstances, having raised the tallest building in New York above the rubble of the World Trade Center is an empty symbol. Beyond an engineering feat, the wounds of Sept. 11, 2001 remains open and possibly will continue to be so when, within three years, the building is declared completed.