Campus experts had to exercise their vocabularies just to describe the enormity of the calculated terrorist attack on two U.S. cities Tuesday morning.
“This is a very, very dramatic escalation beyond anything we thought was possible,” said Mike Rip, MSU epidemiology director and War and Revolution instructor. “It’s in a completely different league. It’s almost like a Pearl Harbor event in that the country might never be the same.”
Rip’s sentiments were echoed throughout the MSU academic world Tuesday, as rescue workers half a country away scrambled to save the thousands injured in New York and Washington, D.C.
Criminal justice Professor David Carter also placed the events onto a separate pedestal in the history of terrorism.
“It’s one of the biggest things that’s ever happened to America, period,” Carter said. “The number of people who work (at the World Trade Center) alone is similar to the number of people killed in the whole Vietnam War.”
About 50,000 people work in the World Trade Center, and about 48,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam.
Previous attacks on American soil pale in comparison to the early casualty projections stemming from Tuesday’s tragedy.
The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, was previously considered the greatest act of terrorism on American soil. Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection for the crime in June.
In contrast, 266 people likely died aboard the four commercial airplanes used as projectile weapons Tuesday. According to news reports factoring deaths of those in and near the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon when the planes crashed, Tuesday’s death toll is expected to climb into the thousands.
MSU journalism Professor Bill McWhirter headed a team of reporters covering the Oklahoma City bombing, and he said the tragedy “still stays with me.”
“It’s very difficult for me to talk about it without being emotionally overwhelmed,” McWhirter said. “There’s a world of difference between being at one of those scenes and the feeling of helplessness watching as part of a national audience.
“The enormity and complexity of this attack has stopped all of us in our tracks. I don’t think we’re at war, but there are people that are at war with us and we have to find out why.”
Carter said the scale of the attack will stop immediate copycat attempts from the original terrorists or others.
“It’s just too phenomenal,” Carter said.
Rip agreed the attacks will have long-lasting repercussions on the United States.
“It shows a soft underbelly to our country,” Rip said. “Many people knew this type of attack is what we’re vulnerable to. McVeigh showed you can achieve spectacular results with very few people. We have the strongest military in the world, but no way to prevent something like this.
“How we respond to this will challenge our democracy. You don’t want to deprive people of their liberty to prevent terrorism, and you don’t want to become a war-mongering, revenge-seeking society. I hope we resolve this in a mature fashion and guard against the public outcry for immediate, massive retaliation.”
