The St. Petersburg Times has two excellent stories regarding 9/11 in their Sunday editions; A front-pager from Leonora LaPeter Anton about the mission of one man bring a piece of the World Trade Center to Venice in Sarasota County, and Sherri Day's moving personal account of covering the fall of the Twin Towers as a New York Times reporter in Lower Manhattan that fateful day.
But the Tampa Tribune's Lindsey Peterson's recount of the Sami Al-Arian saga and what it did to the University of South Florida's Tampa campus brings home what was Tampa's biggest contribution to the national narrative of post 9-11 America.
The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq have been plotted from South Tampa, at U.S. Central Command at Mac Dill Air Force Base. But with the exception of a few news conferences that were open to the media, those operations have been performed out of the public eye, and thus are hard to categorize as being a "Tampa story," per se.
But the Al-Arian case was a Tampa story that went national just two weeks after 9/11 when the then USF professor appeared on Fox News' O'Reilly Factory, who rehashed some of the incidents that put him in the spotlight at USF in the mid 90's regarding his Islamic think tank called WISE (World and Islam Studies Enterprise). Just two days later, USF suspended him with pay after being besieged by angry phone calls and e-mails from people around the nation.
When people talk about America changing after 9/11, no story proved that truer than Al-Arian.
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2011.