Not in Our Name: A Victim’s Family Speaks Out
University of Missouri
October 26, 2001
By Ryan Amundson

I am not an expert on middle-eastern affairs. I know little about foreign relations. I’m also not a politician. I don’t claim to have a final solution, like many of our leaders claim to have. I don’t have much to offer from that end.

What I do have to offer is my perspective as someone personally affected by the September 11 attack. My brother, the father of two young children, died that day inside the Pentagon. My life, and my family, is changed forever.

Since that day, many have tried to speak on behalf of the victims’ families. When some people talk in opposition to the violent response of the U.S., these self-proclaimed spokespeople shout, “try to tell that to the families of the victims,” as if they are certain we all support their viewpoint.

Well, I am here to tell you how I feel. I don’t claim to speak for all the families affected, but I do speak for my family, and I speak for many other families I have met who share our sentiments.

We don’t want revenge. We don’t want war. We don’t want to see any more violence. We saw enough on September 11.

So, every time anyone uses this rhetoric about how nonviolence is insulting to victims, they should exclude the Amundson family, the Rodriguez family, and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, like us. We don’t want people advocating violence in our name or the name of our lost loved one.

What we do want is time to mourn. Time to grieve. Time to remember. Then we want justice.

To me, finding justice means striving for a better world in which this kind of crime will never happen again.

The question is, are we as a nation on the right path to finding this justice? First, I’ll talk about the punishment for the crime, then I’d like talk about reconciliation.

On the day of the national memorial at the Pentagon one month after Sept. 11, President Bush said little about remembering those who died. Mostly, he assured us that the “evildoers” would be eliminated, “smoked out of their holes” as he said. Many stood and cheered at his words, but on television you couldn’t hear or see the others, silent, sitting, looking at their feet, uncomforted by his angry rhetoric.

I’m not really sure what “evildoers” means to George W. Bush. What it means to me is the people who knowingly contributed to making the crime of Sept. 11 possible. They are evildoers, because they use fear and violence as a tool to impose their beliefs. They should be put in jail forever.

But apparently, the Administration’s definition of “evildoer” is broader than mine. Are we punishing just the perpetrators of the attack, or an entire swath of people hoping to catch the guilty ones in our path of destruction? Unfortunately, it is the latter case. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people have already died. Humanitarian workers have been hit. Taliban soldiers, many of whom are forced to fight, are slaughtered by our bombs. American troops lives are put at risk. Hundreds of thousands risk starvation.

Is this justice? Is this punishment for the guilty only? Or is it an escalation of the violence?

By killing farmers with AK-47’s, can we be even reasonably certain that we will catch those who may have conspired with a small group of sophisticated Saudi born college students? Just blowing up everything in Afghanistan is not likely to catch anyone in particular, we are simply punishing an entire nation, killing innocent people just like my brother and the rest of the people that died on Sept. 11.

We are promised by our leaders that this is only the beginning.

How many peasants and villagers are we gong to kill before we decide enough is enough? How many American soldiers will we see come home in body bags before this is over? Standing on the rubble, our nation will be no closer to justice, and no safer than the day of the attack.

For my family and I, my brother’s death as a justification for the violent death of more innocent people and more American troops is an indignity. We don’t want to see more widowed mothers like my sister-in-law, or more little kids without a dad like my niece and nephew, or more moms and dads outliving their son like my parents, or more brothers losing brothers like me.

Now that I have made it clear that my family does not want to see any more innocent people die in the name of justice, I would like to speak about the opportunity the United States has to make the world a better place.

At a press conference on Oct. 11, President Bush told reporters that we should remind our children that there is a lot of love in this world, but there are also evil people.

"Evildoers" are not born evil, despite what Bush implies. Poverty, oppression, and violence itself can lay the foundation of hate necessary for such horrendous acts of terrorism as experienced on September 11. This is what makes people mad, but I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the United States should try to examine economic, military, and political policies to understand how they bring about anti-American sentiment. The U.S. should change these policies in order to ensure peace and justice for Americans and the citizens of the world.

Considering this point is NOT blaming the U.S. Blame would imply that the act of September 11 was not a crime, but a well-deserved punishment. But it was innocent people who were killed, nobody deserved to die that day. It was a crime against humanity, a crime I blame on the 19 suicide hijackers, and whoever else that may have conspired with them.

Instead of focusing so much on being "number one" and wiping out "evildoers" , the United States should be working to be more responsible as a member of the global community. With vast influence and resources, the United States has a responsibility to reasonably and lawfully cooperate to create a world free from hate and terror, to make the world a better place. This current band-aid approach will not do, and we will lose respect in the process.

Despite what some others might say, these views are not anti-American or unpatriotic. Patriotism involves care and concern for your country and its citizens, it does not mean dazzled loyalty to government or self-righteousness. Love for your country leaves room for constructive criticism, it does not shut out all opposition. If one of my family was going to do something that I thought was a mistake, I would try to stop it from happening. Being against the war is not being anti-American. Calling for recognition of past and present mistakes is not unpatriotic. It is actually showing your true love to your country.

When I see the American flag, that is what I see. I see the ideals, and I am reminded that we should always strive for those ideals, always seeking truth and freedom.

I also remember my brother when I see the flag. The American flag shrouded my brother’s coffin. My tears, and my family’s tears, fell all over it.

It’s an important symbol to me, and so I am saddened because lately, it seems like its meaning is changing. It is so often put in a context of war that for some, our flag itself has come to mean killing anyone who messes with us.

But it doesn’t have to mean that. Many have remarked that this tragedy could be regarded as an opportunity to make America a better place. Rarely does the entire world come together like it did after Sept. 11. This common bond of sorrow can bring about feelings of openness and cooperation, as my family has found. But it takes a commitment to deal with your grief in a healthy way. It will also take a commitment for America, and the wold, to deal with this in a healthy, constructive way.

Granted, working to prevent conditions which breed hate may be more complex than just dropping bombs, but the existence of “evil” probably doesn’t have an easy solution. I don’t know the complete solution, but I feel that we are headed too fast down the wrong path. Can’t we do something a little more creative than blowing up things?

To come closer to a just world free from hate and terror, only the guilty should be punished, and we should use our grief constructively to examine ourselves and our role in the world.

Punishment should involve only those that knowingly participated in the crime of 9-11. Victims’ families should have the right to see them found, charged, tried, and justly punished in a court of law. Catching them requires patience, reason, and meticulous planning under lawful guidelines.

In addition to finding and punishing those who are guilty, and only the guilty, the search for a world in which the violence of 9-11 will never happen again requires some thought and self-examination. I am not laying the blame on the United States. We should not punish ourselves. We should merely look at the situation in which this tragedy occured, and do our best to avoid it ever happening again.

The greatest honor to my brother’s life would be that his death would mark the end of a vicious cycle of violence. I hoped that something good could come from something so terrible.

This hope slowly disintegrated day by day as I heard the vengeful words of our leaders. When the bombs started falling, I felt like my brother would be just another casualty in the cycle of violence. I felt like the attackers got exactly what they wanted - a holy war with the creation of more violent extremists on both sides.

But I have realized that despite this, there is always some hope for change. That’s why you are here and that’s why I’m here. People I meet are usually eager to discuss different points of view that aren’t highlighted in mass media. When I watch TV, I think the world has gone insane, that there is no one questioning what is going on, but when I talk to people they usually seem to think about what is going on much more than the television reflects. I talked with some WWII veterans in an American Veterans club the other day, and before I said anything about my point of view, one of them said everything I wanted to say, that the war is wrong because we are killing innocent people, and that America should look inside itself. The others agreed. I was stunned. And filled with hope. These were the last people on Earth I thought would agree with me. So, we just have to hang in there, stay away from too much TV, and keep talking to people. Thanks for listening.

Sponsored by the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation, Students for Progressive Action, Peaceworks, St. Francis House Catholic Worker Community, Veterans for Peace and the Columbia Interfaith Peace Alliance

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