Pepperdine University professors reflect on the World Trade Center attacks and the future of American security. Widow of alumnus says she has ‘mixed emotions’ about Bin Laden’s death.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
President Obama’s stunning announcement Sunday evening that American forces had killed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden reverberated around the world. At Pepperdine University, which holds an annual ceremony to honor the victims of the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the news that the man behind those attacks had been killed prompted reflection on that day, as well as speculation about the future of American security in a post-Bin Laden world.
One victim of the attacks was Pepperdine alumnus Tom Burnett. Burnett was among the passengers who rushed the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field killing all aboard. Burnett left behind a wife and three young daughters.
Burnett’s widow Deena, now remarried and living in Little Rock, Arkansas, told Arkansas Business she had “a mix of emotions” after hearing of Bin Laden’s death.
“I don’t necessarily want to be glad that someone is dead, but I certainly find a sense of peace and closure that I didn’t expect to find,” she told the paper.
Thomas Stipanowich, who has served as academic director for Pepperdine’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution since 2006, was working in his midtown Manhattan office on the day of the attacks.
“The thing I remember most, I walked out on Fifth Avenue to get a better view and it was a staggering sight,” he said. “The column of smoke coming up from the Trade Center and then a vast crowd of people walking up Fifth Avenue, people as far as the eye could see from downtown to midtown. It was like a marathon except they weren’t running. They were conversing, many of them with stunned looks on their faces, just ready to get away.”
After that, more traumatic details began to emerge. Stipanowich said one of his employees knew a man who managed a building next to the towers. After the first tower was hit, the man went up on the roof of the building to get a better view of what had happened, only to be confronted with airplane parts and body parts strewn all over the roof.
Later that evening, Stipanowich caught a train from Manhattan to his home in southern Connecticut. At the first stop, he said, a line of ambulances and stretchers was waiting, apparently in the expectation that many of the passengers would need medical care. In the next few days Stipanowich and his wife began to hear about neighbors who had died in the disaster. Stipanowich said a number of his daughter’s friends lost fathers or mothers in the attack.
“The mood, not only in my office but in the entire city, was affected dramatically for a whole year. New York was like a ghost town,” Stipanowich said. “I remember traveling to Germany the following week and there were only three people on a jet going to Germany.”
What Bin Laden’s death means for the future has also been a subject of debate across the nation and the world. Gregory McNeal, a national security expert and professor at the Pepperdine University School of Law, said the death of Bin Laden would hinder, but not destroy, the terrorist network al Qaeda.
“In the short term, it’s definitely a significant blow to al Qaeda. In the longer term, it’s an open question about who will step up to fill Bin Laden’s shoes,” McNeal said. “The people who are committed to carrying out acts of terrorism are still out there and this isn’t going to change their minds. In fact if anything, it might embolden them.”
On Tuesday, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint bulletin warning of possible retaliation by terrorists in response to Bin Laden’s death. McNeal said the most likely scenario on American soil would be an isolated attack by “someone who sees this as their opportunity to hitch their fame to the Bin Laden killing.”
Although conspiracy theories questioning Bin Laden’s death are already proliferating on the Internet because of the U.S. government’s quick disposal of his body in the north Arabian Sea, McNeal said he didn’t think they would persist. “I don’t think so, because they videotaped the burial,” he said. “They thoroughly documented the body and so I think what will come out eventually is, because [the burial video will be] leaked, or … intentionally distributed, we’re going to see the film. We’re going to see the footage.”