The FBI moves in, makes the arrests, and the conversation changes.
It’s way too early to reach any conclusions about Najibullah Zazi — he apparently is not being accused of terrorism, but rather of lying to the government — but not too early to think about what the arrest might mean.
We used to talk a lot about terrorism. Now we talk about a war on terror, which isn’t nearly the same thing, if we talk about terror at all.
The color coding, warning of terrorist-inspired danger, is a relic of the Dick Cheney era. For most of us, terrorism means taking off your shoes when going through security at the airport and not much more.
The anniversary of 9/11 came and went. I know I didn’t spend much time that day thinking about the explosion next time.
And yet, I know about terrorism. I know too much about it. I was in New York, at ground zero, the first day the planes left Denver after 9/11. I remember still the nearly empty flight, and the guy across the aisle from me and the look on his face. I remember the call I made to my wife just before we took off, assuring her the flight would be safe.
I know about terrorism. But I’ll confess that I still can’t quite fathom it.
After I saw Zazi on his way to be interviewed by the FBI, people asked me what he looked like up close, when I looked him in the eye. They asked — mostly, in jest — because what does an alleged, would-be terrorist look like?
How do you imagine, looking at a person, that he might have been plotting to kill innocent people?
I’ve interviewed people I knew were closely allied to terrorists. They denied it, of course, if you asked them. And even though I doubted their stories, I couldn’t quite put a real person — one you were talking to — there in the moment, plotting the worst.
We can assume that the FBI was looking for a way to hold Zazi, who had stopped talking to them Saturday morning after 28 hours of interrogation.
There had been elaborate leaks, certainly coming with the approval of the FBI, suggesting that Zazi had admitted he was involved in helping to plan an al-Qaeda attack.
Zazi called the allegations “nonsense” in an interview with The Denver Post. And The New York Times reported that Zazi had admitted only that he made unwitting contact with al-Qaeda on trips to visit his wife in Pakistan.
But how could the FBI leave him out on the streets of greater Aurora after that? If he were truly a potential terrorist, he was certainly too dangerous not to be charged with something.
As Zazi had said of the leaks, “If it was true, they wouldn’t allow me to leave. I don’t think the FBI or the police would allow anyone who admits being a terrorist to go free for one minute.”
The arrests were inevitable, although we have no good idea of what the evidence holds or whether Zazi is guilty of anything. But it’s also inevitable that his arrest takes us back eight years to 9/11.
If you were there, you remember the firefighters’ funerals, and the fathers and the sons, the cousins and the nephews and nieces, the mothers and daughters. I think often of one young man I met, who was putting up a poster of his father at the New York Armory, asking for help in finding him. The young man was the same age as my daughter. I interviewed him, and we cried together. And I called my daughter, and we cried together.
Later, I would go down in the big hole, a mask on my face, remembering the awful smell of the burnt wires and of the lost hope, and thinking of the times I’d been inside the World Trade Center and trying to imagine those people who didn’t live past that day.
I know about it. I know too much. I was in London to cover the 7/7 bombings. I went to Leeds to interview people who knew the killers and who said they couldn’t see the people they knew, the one who played soccer, as bringing bombs onto London subway trains. I saw the Queen in a parade through the middle of town a few days later, and the British proudly displaying that British grit as she rode by in an open car.
On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, they had put up a museum — a makeshift museum at the time — across the street from ground zero. And the man, a firefighter, who was showing people around, said to imagine it was your hometown, to imagine — he said to two visitors from Denver — that it was Denver. He said you had to be able to imagine it was Denver to hope to understand what had happened in New York.
And so, I look at Zazi and wonder if he could actually have been plotting terror while living in our midst.
Of course, the plot — if it existed — was about potential terrorism in New York, not in Colorado. But the idea of terror had come here in full force.
Najibullah Zazi, the 24-year-old airport shuttle-bus driver, and his father, Mohammed Zazi, were led away in handcuffs from an Aurora apartment, as part of an investigation that leads halfway around the world. The story is hardly over — and who can even guess how it will end. But, whatever happens, it is part of our story now.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.