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The legacy of 9/11: reflections on a global tragedy.

(Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein)

Twenty years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the tragic consequences of that day continue to resonate across the world. On this somber anniversary, members of the Yale faculty reflect on the painful and complicated legacy of 9/11 and how the trauma of the event, which for a time created unity in the United States, has in the decades since led to a more divided nation and dangerous world.

Trauma, solidarity, and division

By Jeffrey Alexander Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Societies shift between experiences of division and moments of solidarity. It is collective trauma that often triggers such shifts.

When Osama Bin Laden organized acts of horrific mass murder against civilians on September 11, 2001, he declared that “the values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed” because “those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have… gone up in smoke.” What happened, instead, was that Americans recast the fearful destruction as an ennobling narrative that revealed not weakness, but the strength of the nation’s democratic core.

Before 9/11, American had been experiencing a moment of severe political and cultural division. In its immediate aftermath, the national community was united by feeling, marked by the loving kindness displayed among persons who once had been friends, and by the civility and solicitude among those who once had been strangers …

Read more from Jeffrey Alexander

No clean break

By Joanne Meyerowitz Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and professor of American studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, historians pointed to precedents: the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor, say, and terrorist attacks — domestic and foreign — that had targeted civilians. They soon moved on to warnings against unnecessary and prolonged wars, with frequent reference to Vietnam, and to placing the security state within the long history of domestic surveillance, racial profiling, and violations of civil liberties. The common thread was that Sept. 11 did not represent a clean break with the past. It was not “one of those moments,” as The New York Times had claimed, “in which history splits” in two …

Read more from Joanne Meyerowitz

An embrace of profiling

By Zareena Grewal Associate professor American studies; ethnicity, race, and migration; and religious studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

In 2001, the New York City Police Department established a secret surveillance program that mapped and monitored American Muslims’ lives throughout New York City, and in neighboring states, including Connecticut. In 2011, journalists leaked internal NYPD documents which led to an outcry from public officials, activists, and American Muslim leaders who protested that such racial and religious profiling was not only an example of ineffective policing and wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, but it collectively criminalized American Muslims. The leaked documents revealed that Yale’s Muslim Students Association was among the campus chapters targeted …

Read more from Zareena Grewal

A new outlet

By Paul Bracken Professor emeritus of management and political science, Yale School of Management

Following the Cold War, the U.S. foreign policy establishment was spoiling for another fight to overthrow tyranny. Yet there was no domestic support for such a war. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait led to the first Gulf War. But the failure to end his regime left a good part of the establishment with a sense of unfulfilled destiny. These were the trends underway before 9/11. But there was no outlet to give them voice.

By linking a war on terror with a projection of our idea of democracy onto the Middle East, the attack on 9/11 provided that outlet …

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A war game, gone terribly wrong

By Kishwar Rizvi Professor in the history of art, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

September 11, 2001, is a Tuesday. At 8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m., two hijacked planes fly into the towers of the World Trade Center. Six hours later, I give my first class of the year, in Street Hall. It is unclear how the afternoon will unfold, but as the class gathers, we find comfort in each other’s presence.

The unconditional empathy and bravery shown by my students that day 20 years ago is something I carry with me. It is a necessary requirement for studying and teaching about Islam today. Art and architecture, framed through social and political discourse, serve as important conduits for understanding the history and culture of the West and South Asia — the epicenter of the “War on Terror” launched soon after 9/11. I find clarity in the work of Shahzia Sikander and Lida Abdul, women artists from the region …

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For millions of refugees, the crisis continues

By Marcia C. Inhorn William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs; chair, Council on Middle East Studies

September 11 was a devastating event for the United States, causing the senseless deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans and the injury of more than 6,000 others. September 11 was also a tragedy for the Middle East, as the U.S. responded by initiating two wars, one in Afghanistan in 2001 and one in Iraq in 2003. These long-term and costly wars in the Middle Eastern region have killed thousands of innocent civilians and displaced millions of people.

Of the 26 million refugees and 80 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, the majority are from the Middle East, especially Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Indeed, we are now in the midst of an Afghan refugee crisis, the magnitude of which is yet to unfold …

Read more from Marcia C. Inhorn

The loss of history

By Eckart Frahm Professor of Near Eastern languages & civilizations, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

The events of 9/11 have led to actions on the part of the U.S. that have thoroughly transformed the Middle East. Unfortunately, despite an enormous investment of lives and money, the region remains deeply troubled. The world’s attention has been focused, for good reasons, on the political and humanitarian catastrophes that have befallen it. But for someone like me who is studying the civilizations of the ancient Near East, a particularly devastating aspect of the crisis has been its disastrous effect on the region’s cultural heritage …

Read more from Eckart Frahm

Tragedy for the world

By Samuel Moyn Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and professor of history, Yale Law School

September 11 was a tragedy for America, but it prompted an American response that has been a tragedy for the world. After two decades of war, every place American force has touched has been made worse, with the risk of terrorism often exacerbated, and at the price of millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

More than this, even though Joe Biden has followed his two predecessors in withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the authorities the American president has arrogated over two decades to send force abroad have not been reined in. Nor does the war on terror — as distinct from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that started it — seem likely to end in the foreseeable future …

Read more from Samuel Moyn

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What 9/11 Changed: Reflecting on the Cultural Legacy of the Attacks, 20 Years On

July 30, 2021 • By Caroline Newman, [email protected] Caroline Newman, [email protected]

• Caroline Newman, [email protected]

Even two decades later, the legacy of the attacks lingers not just in New York City, Washington D.C. or Pennsylvania, but around the world.

Sept. 11, 2001, is one of that those dates that divides history into a “before” and an “after.” The terrorist attacks that day tragically and permanently altered thousands of lives; they also changed the tenor of debate everywhere from the kitchen table to the halls of Congress.

Twenty years later, we asked experts from around the University of Virginia to comment on some of the biggest changes they saw, from foreign policy and immigration to literature and pop culture.

Their answers were especially interesting as the nation and the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic, which, though different from 9/11 in many ways, will undoubtedly be another before-and-after moment in the history books.

Here’s what they had to say.

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Remembering 9/11

American political culture and campaigns.

The 9/11 attacks generated a unique political unity that seems almost impossible today, said Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics.

“Less than a year before, George W. Bush had been elected despite losing the popular vote, a controversial election that became even more controversial with the recount [and Supreme Court decision],” Sabato said. “There were still a lot of hard feelings, but 9/11 in many ways reunited the American people.” Bush went from losing the popular vote to having a 91% approval rating, “almost unheard-of.” 

However, Sabato said, that image of unity in some ways masked discord we are still grappling with today.

President George W. Bush thanks a firefighter at Ground Zero in New York City. (Photo courtesy George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum)

“Despite Bush’s attempts to lower the temperature and direct Americans’ anger – understandable and righteous anger – toward those who actually committed the attacks, many completely innocent Muslim Americans were targeted and faced discrimination. Tragically, that is a part of human nature we are still struggling with,” Sabato said, noting the discrimination and violence Asian Americans have faced since the advent of COVID-19.

At the Center for Politics, Sabato and his team responded to 9/11 in part by increasing their global programming, eventually launching the Global Perspectives on Democracy program to host groups of all ages, from high school students to high-level government officials, for exchange programs and public events.

“We felt it was important to help Americans understand the world and the world to understand Americans and American democracy,” Sabato said. “I think that is one lasting lesson of 9/11: You cannot teach or practice American democracy in a vacuum.”

Literature & Culture

Associate professor of English Sandhya Shukla has taught her “Post 9/11 American Literature and Culture” course on and off since 2008. Immediately following the attacks, she said, many cultural representations of 9/11 focused on processing grief and trauma. But in time, the stories became more complicated, contending with all sorts of divides opened up by the events of that day.

“9/11 can be seen as both a radical rupture or shift in history, and also a flash point that really crystalized some long-held tensions in the U.S.’s relationship to the rest of the world, particularly in how we think about immigration, diasporas and religious fundamentalism,” Shukla said.

Among the materials she teaches are films like “United 93,” a documentary-style fiction about the passengers who crashed their hijacked plane into a Pennsylvania field, a sacrifice that likely prevented another attack on a U.S. landmark. Another film, “Man on Wire,” premiered in 2008, but focuses on Phillippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, an event also depicted in the 2009 novel “Let the Great World Spin.” Both of these pieces use Petit’s balancing act as an allegory, Shukla said, and help students understand what has been lost culturally and politically with the physical destruction of an already contested symbol.

She also highlights “Netherland,” a 2008 novel by Joseph O’Neill about a Dutch-British immigrant’s experience in New York, which then-President Barack Obama chose as one of his favorite books in 2009.

A memorial outside of the Pentagon after the attacks. (Photo by James Harden, Library of Congress)

“To me, that novel, and especially Obama’s choice to praise it, signaled a change in how at least certain leaders wanted to see America, after seven years deep suspicion about globality. It seemed to mark a turn toward new commitments to multicultural societies and new ways of being in the world,” she said. Other texts like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a 2007 novel by Mohsin Hamid about a Pakistani immigrant’s experience in post-9/11 New York and various sites of economic restructuring in Europe, Latin America and Asia, also added complexity to the cultural conversation around 9/11.

“The stories have gotten richer and more diverse in the years since the attacks, and we now have the benefit of history, seeing their longer-term effects of the attacks and America’s political responses to them play out,” she said.

Teaching the course in the fall of 2020, Shukla said she emphasized how students might think about 9/11 in relation to the pandemic and what COVID-19 has shown us about how connected we are, across all kinds of borders, but also how unequal, and the resulting opportunities and tensions.

“These two major events are not the same, obviously, but I do think 9/11 and the cultural responses to it can help us think about other crises of nationality and globality, like the one we are currently experiencing and will need to work through for many years to come,” she said.  

Foreign Policy

Clearly, the terrorist attacks “greatly reduced policymakers’ tolerance for risk,” said Eric Edelman, a practitioner senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center who retired from a U.S. Foreign Service career in 2009. Edelman held positions in the departments of State and Defense, as well as the White House, and served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2005 to 2009.

“The tolerance for risk went down significantly, certainly for the Bush administration and I would argue for subsequent administrations as well,” Edelman said. “It may be only now, with the Biden administration, that caution has to some degree come to an end, though that is debatable as well. But choosing 9/11 as their date for withdrawing from Afghanistan, and more totally withdrawing from Afghanistan, suggests a higher tolerance for risk.”

The risks posed by terrorism might have distracted politicians and the public from other risks, Edelman said, especially those posed by other superpowers like China and Russia.

“The focus on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, I think, may have diverted attention to some degree from China and the threat it represents,” he said. “That is now being remedied a bit, with more a focus on how the U.S. can remain competitive with China, but I do think 9/11 caused some delay in recognizing the risks posed by China and by Russia. That was an opportunity cost of the focus on counterterrorism.”

Domestic Policy

The attacks also significantly changed policymaking at home. Melody Barnes, executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA, was working in Congress on 9/11 as chief counsel to the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy for his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She and other staff began to flee the Senate office buildings as they realized what was happening. As they gathered outside, she remembers hearing a loud, far-off explosion, likely from the attack on the Pentagon at about 9:30 a.m.

“It was surreal,” Barnes recalled. “We had no idea if the Capitol would be next.”

Barnes and her staff went to a colleague’s Capitol Hill home, where they stayed the rest of the day watching news coverage. That night, she finally drove home to Northern Virginia. She could smell the acrid smoke still coming from the Pentagon.

Still, she went back to work the next day, joining in a show of strength from Congress. However, another threat, an unknown package outside the Senate chamber, forced Senate staff to evacuate again, this time very quickly.

Melody Barnes recalled seeing smoke from the Pentagon as she finally drove home from Congress after the attacks. (Photo courtesy FBI Vault)

“I saw senators just start to run out of the Senate chamber, and someone came over and told us about a suspicious package and said every exit is open – run,” she recalled. “I remember running down the hall, wondering how long I had, if I was about to die. Those are the kinds of memories I have.”

Twenty years later, those memories have stayed with Barnes, who went on to direct the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Barack Obama before coming to UVA. She also sees through-lines in many policy issues, from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 to ongoing debates about privacy.

“Creating a new government department is something that is often talked about, but rarely happens,” Barnes said. “9/11 was the forcing mechanism to create the DHS and when things happen quickly, all of the rough edges don’t get smoothed out. Working through some of those issues took many years.”

9/11 also focused attention on surveillance and interagency communication, especially how law enforcement agencies communicate with each other.

“The way we think about security – how we move through airports and public spaces, how we secure our public buildings – changed significantly,” she said. With that came new privacy concerns and worries about excessive government surveillance.

“We have only rarely been threatened on American soil, and 9/11 in many ways ended a sense of innocence and freedom of movement that many Americans had,” Barnes said. “It also shifted issues of privacy and animated a renewed and more intense debate about how we balance our liberties, including privacy, with threats to the U.S., and how we do that without profiling people and generating discrimination. Those debates have not gone away; they continue to be heated and fraught.” 

Those issues were particularly significant in the immigration debate, Barnes said.

Immigration Policy and Debate

On Sept. 6, 2001, Bush officials held publicized, orchestrated talks with Mexican President Vicente Fox, focused on a temporary worker visa program. Those talks, held just four days before the terrorist attacks, accurately reflect Bush’s initial stance on immigration, said David Leblang, the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics and professor of public policy.

“During and after the election, George W. Bush and other establishment Republicans tried to ‘rebrand’ the Republican Party as immigrant-friendly, and adopted several pro-immigration positions, especially focusing on labor and the economy,” he said.

Then, 9/11 happened and gave, as Leblang put it, “a tremendous amount of energy to border hawks,” with Americans understandably concerned about how the hijackers entered the country.

Twenty years later, Leblang said that rapid shift in sentiment has led to two lasting and influential changes. One is very concrete: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed control of immigration, including Customs and Border Control and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“Immigration was no longer a question about migration or who we are as a country or about labor market competition. It was a security issue; we saw the ‘securitization’ of immigration,” Leblang said. “That changed the nature of immigration enforcement quite dramatically.”

After the attacks, Bush, President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump deported record numbers of immigrants, going from about 18,000 criminal deportations in 2001 to 91,000 in 2012. That data does not include even more “voluntary departures,” when migrants are giving a choice between leaving and facing charges.

The second big change, Leblang said, came in public attitudes. “The attacks understandably injected terror into the immigration debate,” he said. “Pre-9/11, most of the conversation around immigration was about labor and the economy, not national security and terrorism. 9/11 gave energy to nativist and populist groups that did not want any immigration.”

The current wave of discrimination against Asian Americans in some ways resembles that post-9/11 shift, Leblang said, a jingoistic response to the threat of the coronavirus. 

“I don’t think all of the tensions we are seeing now can be traced back to 9/11, but it is hard to talk about immigration today without talking about 9/11 and how it influenced this posture of deterrence and securitization or militarization,” he said.

Religion and Civil Religion

A December 2001 Pew Research survey found that the 9/11 attacks increased the prominence of religion in the U.S. “to an extraordinary degree,” with 78% of respondents agreeing that religion’s role in American life is growing, as opposed to 37% eight months earlier.

Matthew Hedstrom, an associate professor of religious studies specializing in modern American religion, said that bump was “a temporary spike” amid a broader trend of Americans leaving organized religion, begun in the 1990s. However, he said we are still feeling the effects of another kind of religion that grew after the attacks – what he called “civil religion.”

Across the country, religious practice spiked somewhat after 9/11, a spike that Matthew Hedstrom called temporary. Civil religion, he said, grew and lingered much longer. (Photo by Margaret M. deNeergaard, Library of Congress)

Before 9/11, the war in Vietnam and other hardships had somewhat eroded American civil religion, but the attacks gave it “a shot in the arm,” Hedstrom said.

He cites religiously influenced symbols of patriotism, such as songs like “God Bless America” or rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance, as examples. Often, those symbols had a Christian bent, Hedstrom said, fueling another question that shapes public discourse today – a divide between “Americans who see America as a Christian country with a God-given mission in the world, and Americans who do not.”

“That fault line in our politics makes it hard to compromise and easier to see people who disagree with you politically not just as political opponents, but as evil,” he said. “That is obviously one of the big challenges we face as a country, and I think 9/11 is part of the story of how those cultural and religious divides grew.”

The 2001 Pew survey also showed that respondents had a more favorable view of Muslim Americans since the attacks, indicating that efforts by Bush and others to discourage discrimination were having some effect. Hedstrom said that effect continues today to some extent, but that discrimination and hate crimes against Muslim Americans remain troubling.

“We are still seeing examples of hate crimes and discrimination today, still living in that unfortunate reality,” he said “I do think there is increased visibility of the Muslim American community, and that perhaps the attacks created a certain amount of education about Muslim Americans and Islamic beliefs. Muslim Americans have been part of this country since the earliest settlements of people from Europe and Africa, but our education and beliefs about America have not always reflected that. So, though hate crimes and profiling have unfortunately continued, there has also been greater visibility, awareness and education.”

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Caroline Newman

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May 10, 2024

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In the days and weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, the Times ran dozens of analysis and opinion pieces examining how the events of that day might change the United States and the world. We asked some of the writers who contributed their thoughts after the tragedy to look back at what they wrote then and reflect on it from the vantage point of today.

Richard Rodriguez works at New America Media. His book on the influence of the desert on the Abrahmic religions will be published next year.

On the Sunday after 9/11, Rodriguez wrote eloquently that “it was a week when words failed us. We sensed ourselves entering some terrible epoch, but we did not have sufficient nouns and verbs.” Ten years later, the words are clearer, as is the extent of what was lost.

I believe the time has come to put away the ceremonies of 9/11—the politicians’ speeches at Ground Zero, the parade of children holding the photos of their dead fathers and mothers, the bag-pipes, the tolling bell, the roll call of the dead.

Those of us who were alive that day will always dread the annual alignment of those two numbers — nine, eleven -- the blue September sky; our thoughts will return to the ashes. Let that be the way of it. There is no moratorium on grief.

The dreadful mnemonic date has formed a seal over our minds. Something is wrong. It will not be fixed.

In generations past, America used wounds to form armies. Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt bore witness to December 7, “a date which will live in infamy.”

In the decade since the attacks of September 11th, Americans have turned inward. We have become a nation obsessed with guarding our borders, particularly the Mexican border, even as ghostly TSA images of our naked bodies reach upward, as though under arrest.

We eschew the international, except for the deserts from which the terrorists came. Under the banner of 9/11, President George W. Bush sent Americans to war against Iraq. We were crazed. Osama bin Laden was the leering genie within the explosions. We toppled Saddam Hussein. We ended up fighting Taliban tribesmen in Kandahar.

When American special forces killed Osama bin Laden in May (we do not remember the date), there was no pervading sense in America that the era of 9/11 was finished. Some Americans danced in the street, waved flags, honked their horns. The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan went on.

What is maddening us is that the wars of 9/11 can have no ending, because we have no clear purpose, because they have no clear adversary. We are not fighting nations; we are fighting peasants and mercenaries and religious ideologues and millionaires. In the war against terrorism, there will never be an “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”; it will always be 9/11.

But an America that only guards against a dangerous world diminishes its power in the world. In the last ten years, China has usurped the noun Americans thought we held the patent to—the “future.”

While we have deployed troops backward, into the Bible, China has built dams in Africa and made trade agreements with South America. The Chinese have welcomed young men and women from the Third World to Chinese universities. While U.S. troops are killed building roads between tribal villages in Afghanistan, the Chinese sign mineral contracts in Kabul.

The “Arab spring” that began in Tunisia and spread throughout the Middle East has toppled dictators with whom our government maintained “relationships.” We want to feel encouraged by the youthful rebellions. We want to conflate rebellion with American democracy in the designs of the crowd. All the while, we worry the stage is being set for a coming Islamist revival.

Some in our national media have advanced the hope that American technology is liberating the young of the Middle East. Are Apple, Facebook and Twitter democratizing the region? My suspicion is that Americans are confusing conveyance with content. We credit the iPhone with ideological apps that the rest of the world does not necessarily buy.

Hemmed in by an adversarial world, we turn on each other: President Bush was, in the eyes of his critics on the left, a fool wound up by big business. President Barack Obama, according to his critics on the right, is a socialist and a Muslim. Our Congress has become an international scandal. Conservatives versus progressives.

About the only thing that Washington and the nation can seem to manage these days are monuments—we are monument mad, anniversary obsessed. Which leads us to Ground Zero, the tenth anniversary.

This year, put your hand on your heart for all who were lost, for all we have lost, then turn from this place and look at it no more, and see what our nation has become.

Geraldine Brooks, former Mideast correspondent and author, most recently, of the novel Caleb’s Crossing.

In a December 2001 essay titled “ Iraqi people deserve to be liberated ,” Brooks wrote: “Iraq is a far richer country than Afghanistan, gifted with oil, water, good farmland, scenic beauty, rare antiquities. Were it were not for the bleak and terrible regime of Hussein, it could be the showplace of the region. Now is the time to make some belated amends for a tragic mistake. Some in the Bush Cabinet want to strike Iraq to safeguard the West from future terrorism. That is a reason. But there is an even better one. It should be done for the sake of the Iraqis.”

When I wrote those words, I thought I knew Iraq pretty much as well as any non-Iraqi at that time could know it. I’d traveled there many times, in war and peace, visited its cities under oppression and during their brief liberation, in 1980s prosperity and 1990s decline. I’d met with dissidents and torture victims in Europe, Australia and the Mideast. I had seen the effects of Saddam’s brutal terror, but I hadn’t understood that it also acted as a vise, holding that nation together.

It might be possible to plead that in the run up to the war none of us could foresee the depth of fecklessness of the Bush/Cheney administration, or know just how profoundly the plan for the peace had been neglected. So ideological blindness begat the grim fiesta of lawlessness and looting, squandered Iraqi trust, inspired and enabled insurgency.

But the truth and the lessons of Iraq are more compelling and far simpler. Augustine knew them when he set out the basis of just war theory in the fourth century: One should never resort to war unless the threat is existential and there is no other way to answer it; success should be likely and the suffering created less than the suffering averted. Neither of the first two criteria applied to the Iraq war, and the others remain debatable.

Iraqis have had to endure a decade of fear and continue to live with a ravaged infrastructure. The birth pains of their freedom have been unnecessarily agonizing and their future remains uncertain. For us, meanwhile, the costs of war are everywhere apparent: in the shattered bodies of soldiers, in a glinting prosperity dulled by crushing debt, and in a national psyche coarsened by a war whose unequal sacrifice has demanded so much from a few and little more than jingoistic platitudes from the rest.

Peter Tomsen, U.S. special envoy and ambassador on Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992 and author of the just-published “The Wars of Afghanistan.”

In his October 2001 essay “ Past Provides Lessons for Afghanistan’s Future ,” Tomsen warned that: “If the U.S. military offensive is drawn out, and Washington lacks an overarching strategic vision for the region, Pakistan could unravel. Islamic militants would take to the streets, the already wobbly economy could fall and the army splinter into rival factions.” Today Tomsen is still worried.

We entered Afghanistan with the best of intentions, but 10 years later, it is clear that American policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan has not succeeded.

There are those who will say we should have pressed the war harder, that we should have committed more forces. That was not the problem. Even 500,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan could not bring peace as long as Pakistan’s army and military intelligence service, the ISI, continue to foster sanctuaries for international terrorist groups inside Pakistan.

Today, American and Afghan troops are under constant attack from a variety of Pakistan-supported organizations, including the Afghan Taliban, the Afghan Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar networks, and three ISI-created Pakistani religio-terrorist organizations. Since 9/11, numerous international terrorists, including Faizal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, have been trained in Pakistani sanctuaries for extremists.

It is clear that Pakistan’s generals have no more intention of dismantling these safe havens now than they had before 9/11. If Washington does not finally deal with Pakistan’s duplicity, our stabilization efforts in Afghanistan will fail and the country will slip into yet another cycle of warfare.

American policy-makers must realize that the risk of taking a tougher approach to Pakistan is less, in the long run, than the risk of continuing the status quo. Ten years of inaction have not paid off. More troops and money are not the answer; nor is continuing to hope that Islamabad’s episodic cooperation with the CIA in eliminating specific terrorists will blossom into a productive working relationship. The United States needs an overarching, long-term policy toward Pakistan that would focus geo-strategic and bilateral pressure on Pakistan’s military leaders to end the Afghan war and stop international terrorism emanating from Pakistan. America and the international community could then focus on helping Afghanistan to once again become a neutral crossroads for Eurasian commerce rather than a proxy battlefield for predatory neighbors.

Naomi Klein, author most recently of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”

In a September 2001 essay titled “ Game Over: The End of Warfare as Play ,” Klein noted that the United States had fought a series of wars in which it had experienced few casualties. “This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate oxymoron: a safe war,” she wrote. The attacks of 9/11 would change that, she believed. “The illusion of war without casualties has been forever shattered.” Today, she’s not so sure.

I suppose it was wishful thinking. As I watched footage of New Yorkers fleeing from the attacks, their terrified faces covered in dust from the collapsing towers, I was overwhelmed by how different these images were from the people-free videogame wars that my friends and I had grown up watching on CNN. Now that we were finally getting an unsanitized look at what it meant to be attacked from the air, I was sure it would change our hearts forever.

But the Bush Administration was determined to tightly police what we saw of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, introducing “embedded” reporting, and banning photographs of returning caskets. They also let it be known that reporters who embedded themselves with local populations instead of with allied troops were acceptable military targets -- as attacks on Al Jazeera reporters in Afghanistan and Iraq made clear.

The wars being waged by our governments in our names are today more distant to us than ever before. . Some of the fighting is carried out by mercenaries, who die without so much as a mention in the papers. And drone attacks have ushered in something even more dangerous than the “safe war” -- the idea of “no touch” warfare. This sends a clear message to the civilians on the other side of our weapons that we consider our lives so much more valuable than theirs that we will no longer even bother showing up to kill them in person.

As we should have learned ten years ago, this is an extraordinarily dangerous message to send.

Doyle McManus, op-ed columnist

In March 2002, in a front page analysis piece titled “ U.S. Gets Back to Normal ,” McManus, then the paper’s Washington bureau chief, concluded that the news wasn’t how much the attacks had changed America, but how little.

“Six months after Sept. 11,” he wrote, “here’s what’s changed:

“The federal government, its budget and its public image. The focus of American foreign policy. Security measures at airports, seaports and border crossings. The nation’s sense of patriotism, cohesion and vulnerability. The lives of almost 1.4 million people in the armed services…. [and] the victims, their families and friends.

“Here’s what hasn’t changed much: Everything else.” Today, he says, that’s still mostly true.

Since Sept. 11, the federal government has continued to grow. Spending has mushroomed on war-fighting, intelligence-gathering and homeland security. Security measures at airports and seaports are even tighter than before – although the government promises we’ll be allowed to keep our shoes on some day.

But that hasn’t made us love the federal government more. In the frightened months after Sept. 11, polls found that Americans’ trust in the government’s ability to do the right thing soared; in the years since, that same measure has plummeted.

That’s largely because the issue that concerns Americans most is no longer terrorism, but economic stagnation – and the federal government hasn’t succeeded in overcoming that threat.

As for “the nation’s sense of patriotism [and] cohesion,” the patriotism is still there, but the cohesion we discovered in 2001 was evanescent. A divisive war in Iraq and a virtual civil war over fiscal policy quickly turned politics nasty again.

In 2002, I asked Harvard social scientist Robert D. Putnam if 9/11 could have a lasting positive effect on our sense of community, and he was skeptical – appropriately, as it turned out.

“After almost any crisis, calamity or natural disaster, there’s a sudden spike in community-mindedness, whether it’s an earthquake, a flood or a snowstorm in Buffalo,” he said. “But these spikes don’t last. Over time, the community feeling dissipates.”

The only exception, Putnam noted, was Pearl Harbor – because World War II called on every citizen to sacrifice. This time, only a few were called on; the rest of us were encouraged to go shopping.

The focus of American policy has shifted, too. Immediately after 9/11, it was stopping further terrorism; then it was managing the consequences of our Global War on Terror, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now the focus is broader – and, increasingly, economic. As the just-retired chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, often said, “The single biggest threat to our national security is our debt.”

The war on terror isn’t over, even though it’s no longer called by that name. There are still almost 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, almost 50,000 in Iraq. The real cost of those wars – more than 5000 killed in action, more than 45,000 injured – changed many lives irrevocably.

But for most Americans, the most striking fact remains not how much 9/11 changed, but how little.

Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of Defense.

In November 2001, Allison wrote that “After Sept. 11, a nuclear terrorist attack can no longer be dismissed as an analyst’s fantasy. … As the international noose tightens around Al Qaeda’s neck, the group will become more desperate and audacious.” Ten years later, he says we have made some progress in keeping nuclear weapons out of terrorist groups’ hands.

On 9/11, 19 terrorists killed more Americans than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If the terrorists had been in possession of a nuclear weapon, the attack might have killed 300,000.

Post 9/11, President Bush, and now President Obama, have declared nuclear terrorism the biggest threat to American national security.

The United States has taken the lead in investing more than $10 billion and countless hours in securing and eliminating nuclear weapons and material worldwide. President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit in 2010 focused exclusively on the threat. As a result of these efforts, thousands of weapons and material that could have produced thousands more weapons are better secured today than they were a decade ago. In Russia, which has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and material, hundreds of sensitive sites have been secured; 17 countries have eliminated their weapons-usable material stockpiles entirely.

But to prevent a nuclear 9/11, all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material everywhere must be secured to a “gold standard” — beyond the reach of terrorists or thieves.

On that agenda, much remains to be done. The ever-more fragile state of Pakistan has the world’s most rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal. North Korea today has enough material for about 10 nuclear bombs. And Iran now has enough low enriched uranium, if further processed, for four nuclear weapons. One of these weapons in the hands of terrorists could mean an “American Hiroshima”

The price of success in preventing a nuclear 9/11 remains eternal vigilance.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and an author.

In September 2001, Fallows wrote in his essay “ Step One: Station a Marshal Outside Every Cockpit Door ” that: “There may not be a next time, as everything involving air travel becomes more constrained. The tightening of security, while necessary, almost certainly will have aspects of fighting the last war. We may spend years refining passenger-screening processes, only to have the next terrorist explosive arrive by barge.

… Any system careful enough to eliminate sophisticated terrorists also would be cumbersome enough to negate the speed advantage of traveling by air.”

I wish my fears had had turned out to be wholly unfounded. And when it comes to the specific scenario of bombs aboard barges, I’m glad to say that they have been, at least so far.

Unfortunately, there was a much broader challenge that many people, including me, foresaw from the very beginning of the push toward a sweeping emphasis on “homeland security” and the “global war on terror.” This was the risk that, in the name of “protecting” ourselves against future threats, we might ultimately give up, distort or sacrifice the values that made a free society most worth defending. I am sorry to say that this fear has largely been realized.

We can’t be sure of much when it comes to future acts of terrorism, but one certainty is that there will never be “another 9/11.” That attack depended for its shocking success on people not imagining that airliners would be used as large-scale urban bombs. Everyone in the world now understands that possibility, which is why a “9/11-style” attack simply cannot be pulled off again. If the passengers and crew on a plane did not stop future hijackers from flying a fuel-laden plane into a city, the Air Force would.

We also know that our reflexive response to threats has given tremendous leverage to any handful of people who conceive of a new means of attack. Because of one foiled shoe-bombing attempt, hundreds of millions of air passengers worldwide continue removing their shoes before boarding planes. Osama bin Laden’s associates spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their attacks. America’s chosen response has cost the nation trillions of dollars in direct military and security expenditures, not to mention the other costs.

The long-standing truth about terrorism is that the worst damage it inflicts is not through the initial attack but rather through the self-defeating and extreme response it often evokes. It is past time for America to consider a security response that does more damage to potential attackers and less to ourselves.

Shireen T. Hunter is a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service .

In her September 2001 OpEd (“ Wake-Up Call for the Islamic World ”), Hunter argued that Muslims themselves have been the ones most adversely affected by the extremist ideas and groups that have sprung up amid them, “giving credence to the worst perceptions of Islam as a rigid, aggressive, reactionary and xenophobic creed.” She recommended that Muslim nations “stop using Islam as an instrument of foreign policy” and to “abandon outdated utopian and expansionist schemes.”

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, Muslim nations have continued this behavior. Thus, in their bids to expand their regional influence, countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan have stoked the fires of sectarianism in Iraq, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Saudi Arabia has even resorted to manipulating sectarian divisions in Lebanon and Syria in its attempt to eliminate the Iranian influence. Meanwhile, Iran has continued to support its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon.

The upshot of this situation is that in the Muslim world today, sectarian divisions and hatreds are even deeper. This seriously hampers the establishment of peace and even a modicum of stability, and dims the prospect of consensual politics. Instead, the manipulation of sectarian divides and rivalries for power and influence, notably between Iran and Saudi Arabia, has led to new tragedies such as that in Bahrain where the Shiite majority is being brutally repressed by the Sunni rulership.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda Inc. branches have sprung up in Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere, and remain strong, despite the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other top leaders; the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan; and the ultra-conservative Salafists have developed strong footholds in Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan.

All this time, the needs and aspirations of the people have been ignored, leading them to revolt as we have seen during the “Arab spring.” Yet revolts and revolutions seldom lead to democracy. Generally they result in politics of revenge, chaos and eventually another form of dictatorship. Muslim countries have missed an opportunity.

Alexander Cockburn coedits the CounterPunch website and writes for the Nation and other publications.

“The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant,” Cockburn wrote in September 2001 (“ The Next Casualty: Bill of Rights? ”). “The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects -- the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, who started off as creatures of U.S. intelligence. The target at home will be the Bill of Rights.”

It was maybe an hour after the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed that I heard the first of a thousand pundits that day saying that America might soon have to sacrifice “some of those freedoms we have taken for granted.” They said this with grave relish, as though the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution — was somehow responsible for the onslaught, and should join the rubble of the towers, carted off to New Jersey and exported to China for recycling into abutments for the Three Gorges Dam.

Of course it didn’t take 9/11 to give the Bill of Rights a battering. It is always under duress and erosion. Where there’s emergency, there’s opportunity for the enemies of freedom. The Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 and periodically renewed in most of its essentials in the Bush and Obama years, kicked new holes in at least six of our Bill of Rights protections.

The government can search and seize citizens’ papers and effects without probable cause, spy on their electronic communications, and has, amid ongoing court battles on the issue, eavesdropped on their conversations without a warrant. Goodbye to the right to a speedy public trial with assistance of counsel. Welcome indefinite incarceration without charges, denial of the assistance of legal counsel and of the right to confront witnesses or even have a trial. Until beaten back by the courts, the Patriot Act gave a sound whack at the 1st Amendment, too, since the government could now prosecute librarians or keepers of any records if they told anyone the government had subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.

Let’s not forget that a suspect may be in no position to do any confronting or waiting for trial since American citizens deemed a threat to their country can be extrajudicially and summarily executed by order of the president, with the reasons for the order shielded from the light of day as “state secrets”. That takes us back to the bills of attainder the Framers expressly banned in Article One of the U.S. Constitution, about as far from the Bill of Rights as you can get. We can thank the War on Terror, launched after 9/11, for it.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.

In his September 13 Op Ed (“ Cries of “war” stumble over the law ”), Turley warned against the government seeking “greater flexibility” in responding to terrorists by treating criminal attacks “as a matter of war.” “Our system,” he wrote, “requires that legal means be used to achieve legal ends. We decide those means and ends within the general confines of the Constitution.” How has the founding document fared?

As the smoke was still rising from the Pentagon and World Trade Center, it became quickly evident that some of the greatest damage from the September 11th attacks would not come from without but from within our nation.

There was an almost immediate effort by Bush officials to change the definition of war. Rather than declare war on Afghanistan (where Bin Laden was sheltered), President George W. Bush wanted to declare war on terrorism. It was no rhetorical triviality. Bush decided to invoke the heightened constitutional powers of a wartime president by declaring war on what was a category of crime. Because there could never be a total, final defeat of terrorism, this “war” would become permanent – as would the heightened powers of the president.

Ten years later, the country remains “at war,” with President Barack Obama expanding many of the national security powers of his predecessor and, in the Libyan war, claiming his own re-definition of war: “a time-limited, scope-limited military action.”

Of course, the ominous signs in 2001 were realized in a myriad of other ways, from the establishment of the first American torture program to the widespread use of targeted assassinations, including operations killing American citizens. Ironically, I wrote then of the possibility of a new law that could govern the use of assassination, one that would deny a president unilateral authority to kill individuals and would reduce the need to invoke war powers. Instead, the Bush administration claimed full wartime authority as well as radically expanding the use of assassination as an unchecked presidential power. The claim of unilateral presidential authority to kill even United States citizens has been embraced by Obama.

What ultimately fell on that terrible day proved to be some of our most important constitutional structures. Tragically, it is a degree of damage that cannot be claimed by Al Qaeda alone.

Laila Al-Marayati, Los Angeles physician

In a January 2002 essay titled “ An Identity Reduced to a Burka ,” Al-Marayati wrote: “It should be obvious that the critical element Muslim women need is freedom, especially the freedom to make choices that enable them to be independent agents of positive change.”

After the tragic events of 9/11, there were some genuine attempts to improve understanding and awareness between peoples. But that good will has given way in recent years to increased anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and around the world, prejudices that were reflected in a recent Gallup poll. Muslim women who choose to wear hijab take the brunt of the hostility. They are subject to verbal assault and to misdirected legal actions such as in the ban on the headscarf imposed in France. For centuries, Muslim women have been in the crosshairs of the supposed conflict between Islam and the West. Shortly before the invasion of Afghanistan, we saw images, almost daily, of burqa-clad women who had been suffering under the Taliban. But what most people forget is that they were suffering long before 9/11 and that they continue to experience hardship today in most parts of the country. In 2001, their plight was exploited for political expediency, to help drum up support among freedom-loving Americans for a war that has yet to make life better for the common Afghan woman. Over the past decade, Muslim women around the world have continued to demand their rights and claim their position alongside their Muslim brothers by advocating for changes in legal systems that discriminate against them, by educating their daughters, and by challenging harmful traditions that have no basis in Islam. Many of them are now engaged in the struggle of their lives to achieve the kind of freedom that Muslims living in the U.S. appreciate. It is too soon to predict the outcome, but we should have no doubt that women will be at the forefront of positive change. We should support their efforts, not for political expediency, but because it is the right thing to do.

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How 9/11 Changed the World

The World Trade Center buildings in New York City collapsed on September 11, 2001, after two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in a terrorist attack. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

BU faculty reflect on how that day’s events have reshaped our lives over the last 20 years

Bu today staff.

Saturday, September 11, 2021, marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the largest terrorist attack in history. On that Tuesday morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four American commercial flights destined for the West Coast and intentionally crashed them. Two planes—American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175—departed from Boston and Flight 11 struck New York City’s World Trade Center North Tower at 8:46 am and Flight 175 the South Tower at 9:03 am, resulting in the collapse of both towers. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, leaving from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 am, and the final plane, United Airlines Flight 93, departing from Newark, N.J., crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa., at 10:03 am, after passengers stormed the cockpit and tried to subdue the hijackers.

In the space of less than 90 minutes on a late summer morning, the world changed. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day and the United States soon found itself mired in what would become the longest war in its history, a war that cost an estimated $8 trillion . The events of 9/11 not only reshaped the global response to terrorism, but raised new and troubling questions about security, privacy, and treatment of prisoners. It reshaped US immigration policies and led to a surge in discrimination, racial profiling, and hate crimes.

In observance of the anniversary, BU Today reached out to faculty across Boston University—experts in international relations, international security,  immigration law, global health, terrorism, and ethics—and asked each to address this question: “How has the world changed as a result of 9/11?”

Find a list of all those with ties to the BU community killed on 9/11 here.

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Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 43 comments on How 9/11 Changed the World

this is very scary to me.

Yes this is very scary

This was a very sad moment in time but we need to remember the people that sacrificed themselves to save us and the people that died during this event. It was sad but at least it brought us closer together. I wonder what the world would be like if 9/11 never happened?..

Yes that is a good thing to rember…

We will all remember 9/11, a very important moment in our life, and we honor the ones who sacrificed their lives to save others in there.

It changed the world forever, it is infact a painful memory to remember

I feel bad for all the families that had family and friends die.

i feel bad for all the people and their family and friends that died

9/11 is tragic and it will always be remembered though I have to say that saying 9/11 changed the word is quite an overstatement. More like how it changes America in certain ways and the ones responsible for it but saying something like what you said makes it sound like it was Armageddon or something.

Whether or not those of us in other countries like it, for the last several decades and certainly still in the current time, when something changes the USA in significant ways that impact policy, legislation, education, the economy, health care, etc. (not to mention the ways in which public opinion drives the American political machine), the US’s presence on the international stage means those changes ripple outward through their foreign policy, treatment of both residents/citizens of the USA and local people where the USA has a military, economic and/or other presence around the world.

The complex web of international agreements, alliances, organizational memberships, and financial interdependency means that events that happen locally often have both direct and indirect implications, short and long term, around the world, for individuals and for entire segments of society.

As for the direct results of 20 years of military response to 9/11 on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, it certainly changed their world.

The original BU 9/11 Memorial webpage is still up: https://www.bu.edu/remember/index.html

Reading through the remembrances from that day onward …

Omg scary .

I honor them all.

I wonder how much time people had to get out before the building collapsed

the south tower collapsed in 10 seconds.

Yes but it didnt colapse untill 56 minutes after it was hit

Shall all the people who risked their lives, never be forgotten.

am i blind or was there no mention of how it actually affected the world afterwards??

I know right?

My dad died in 9/11, He was a great pilot

Wow. I’m really sorry for your loss I hope you can still go far in life even without your dad. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut and let them go.

i dont really think you understood that comment

i just read the story and im so sade for the dad that died . If i was there i wouls of creiyed and i saw someone in the chare that someone dad died and i felt so bad when i saw the comment but i dont know if that is real but if it is i feal bad for you if my dad died or my mom i woulld been so sade i would never get over it but this story changed my life when i read it.Also 1 thing i hoop not to any dads diead because i feel bad fo thos kids.

yo all the dads and moms died all of them will never get forgoten every single one of them

Never forget, always remember

everyone is talking about the twin towers but what about the pentagon.

I know, right?

it is super scary

Sorry for all the people who Lost their family

Thanks for helping me with this report, and yes so sorry for all yall who lost family

So, so sorry to all y’all who lost family

I am deeply sorry for anyone who lost family, friends, co workers, or anybody you once knew. This really was a tragedy to so many.

my dad almost died from the tower

very scary but needs too be remembered!

I have to say this is most definitely a U.S. American write up. Saying the word is an overstatement in many ways. It would be more better if you were to specifically point out you mean the US and those others involved with the attacks. Overall if we are going to be completely factual “people/individuals” are the ones who change things depending on whatever. The world changes every day since the start of time.

While I agree with your first point, I would say that the attacks did in fact change the world. At the very least, they changed the way airline security is done everywhere.

great article,

I believe that the people, who sacrificed their lives in flight 93, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, resonated the most with me, as it could have gone anywhere, and they sacrificed themselves to save more. I am deeply sorry for all losses, but I hope we remember this crucial moment in history to learn from our mistakes in global affairs, but also honor those who sacrificed themselves in all the attacks.

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Reflections on 9/11 Twenty Years After

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We all have our own memories associated with the tragedy of 9/11. In my case I can remember going to Ground Zero shortly after the attacks and noticing that awful, pungent smell of the place, as if the terrorists had opened up some special, sulfurous path to hell. Later, directing the commission investigating what happened, I have vivid memories of tramping through the Tarnak Farms camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had once had a headquarters. Or there we were in a Washington office, leaning toward a loudspeaker to listen one more time to the cockpit voice recording recovered from United Flight 93, matched up with our reconstruction of the behavior of the aircraft, painstakingly trying to reconstruct moments of agony and astonishing courage.

We all have a need to construct meaning from occasions like these. In the rare cases when a historical event, especially a traumatic event, stirs emotions on a massive scale, touching many millions of people, it enters popular culture. Great numbers of people soon form beliefs about what happened and why. People usually try to make sense of events in ways that fit their prior understanding of how the world works. But sometimes a catalytic event opens their mind to new possibilities — in this case the scale of danger that might be posed by an organization of zealots based on the other side of the planet in one of the most primitive countries on earth.

At its core, though, the 9/11 operation was an effort to deform the actual nature of the struggle going on within the Muslim world. These extremists, relatively powerless within their world, sought to elevate themselves by waging war against the United States, launching an attack that Americans could not ignore. In that sense, they were successful. That success was meant to elevate their faction of violent Islamists in their local struggles for cultural power. But every characterization of this war that reinforces a “United States versus Islamists” picture can divert and distract from the main story.

Consider the faces that the Muslim world has presented to the world. During the 1990s and culminating on 9/11, some Islamist extremists preferred to place the root of their troubles elsewhere, in America or Europe. This agenda was sometimes attractive to clusters of alienated expatriates living overseas and others whose restless energy is displaced onto a distant, enemy abstraction. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , for instance, was truly a man without a country. On 9/11 the world was introduced to one face of this struggle: a set of fanatical mass killers. That image lingers.

But flash forward ten years later, to September 2011, when for six months the world watched Syrians protest against their tyranny. These unarmed men and women gathering in the streets faced every horror that a clever, malignant regime and its creatures could devise. They suffered the deaths and terrifying disappearances of family members and friends, a toll then numbered in the thousands. Then — against all odds — they turned out again the next Friday, and the next. For this American, raised to black-and-white television images of civil rights protesters facing their oppressors, the smuggled, fragmentary images of what the Syrian protesters endured, week after week, month after month, presented as astonishing and heroic a display of raw, sustained civic courage as I have ever seen, anywhere in the world. This image should linger too.

Flash forward again, ten years after that, to September 2021. Amid the recent chaos in Afghanistan, a global view of the continuing civil conflicts wracking the Muslim world, from Niger to Indonesia , invites a broader historical perspective. My lifetime has coincided with a generational struggle in the Muslim world about how to cope with modernity and globalization. The contemporary and most violent phase of this struggle began in 1979, with revolts and revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. These immediately ignited major wars and defined often violent contests for leadership in the Muslim world.

Over the past 42 years these struggles have flamed or merely smoldered — they never ended. As a historian, I am reminded of the struggles — internal and transnational — that wracked the Christian world for more than a hundred years across the 16th and 17th centuries, or the long 19th and 20th century struggles about how to organize modern industrial societies. It took a long time for those struggles to subside. The Muslim world has not yet found the ingredients of civilizational peace.

The United States was always secondary to this primary struggle in the Muslim world.  The main participants sought America as villain or as ally. For a time, reacting understandably to the 9/11 attacks but then adding the catastrophically misjudged invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States seemed to place itself at the center of this struggle. But now, as the United States has receded from such a central place in the Muslim struggles, there are fresh opportunities to reassess whether, where, and how the United States and other outsiders can play some constructive role in helping the Muslim world find that civilizational peace.

A terrible crisis is also an occasion for discovering more about ourselves, about the worst and the best that it brings out in our society. We saw that Americans can produce the war crimes symbolized by the 2003 abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib . And Americans produced the daring professionalism displayed by an “ Abbottabad ,” the May 2011 operation that killed bin Laden. Thus we can use the anniversary of 9/11 to reflect once again on who we are, about who we can be, when our society confronts violent extremism.

Before the 9/11 attack there was a classic paradox in thinking about the terrorist danger, a paradox of prevention. As the 9/11 Commission observed in its 2004 report : “It is hardest to mount a major effort while a problem still seems minor. Once the danger has fully materialized, evident to all, mobilizing action is easier — but it then may be too late.” Al-Qaeda was most vulnerable in the years before 9/11. But before the catastrophic scale of the potential threat was manifest, massive action to counter it — like serious U.S. military efforts against the Afghan sanctuary — seemed so disproportionate as to be inconceivable. This was a genuine paradox. It did not have an easy or obvious solution.

That pre-9/11 paradox of prevention about the Islamist danger is long gone. (It now applies to other problems, like the global response to the pandemic danger.) A different kind of paradox has now taken its place: a paradox of adjustment.

The danger of global Islamist terrorism is greatly reduced from what it was on 9/11. An attack could still happen at any time. A really large-scale gun massacre — like that in Mumbai in 2008 or in Norway in 2011 or Paris in 2015 — is another obvious danger. Any attack will be publicized sensationally.

Thus any president who downplays the danger, trying to right-size the enemy and put the danger into a more normal proportion, invites humiliation if there is an attack. If there is no attack, public acts of reassurance invite an unwanted dulling of concern.

For both these reasons, the cultural momentum of 9/11 rolls forward. The result in 2021 is the public image of the enemy that the commission described in 2004: “Al Qaeda and its affiliates are popularly described as being all over the world, adaptable, resilient, needing little higher-level organization, and capable of anything.  The American people are thus given the picture of an omnipotent, unslayable hydra of destruction.” The paradox of adjustment is that efforts to right-size, to normalize, a reduced risk seem … too risky.

Yet the reality is that the most serious threats are posed by a relatively tiny number of people, fewer in number and less well-organized than the production crew of any one of Hollywood’s larger films. A handful of deluded people derive most of their power not from their strength or the power of their ideals. They get their power from us — from our society and our culture.

This paradox of adjustment also is genuinely tough to solve. If there is a way out, it may just be a gradual process of the kind that has slowly unfolded during the last ten years. A catalytic event noticed by many millions, like the death of bin Laden, helped politicians to turn the page.

Contemporary societies will remain vulnerable to the abilities of even a few people to do terribly disruptive things. As the Jan. 6 assault by American extremists on the U.S. Capitol illustrated so well, that feature of our age is not unique to the danger posed by Islamist fanatics. A principal function of 21st century government will be to manage a process of healthy adjustment to the kinds of risks that are endemic to this generation, developing more systemic and transnational defenses to more systemic and transnational threats, which include other kinds of transnational criminal organizations.

At the cultural level, a process of adjustment includes adjustment to failures. For there will be failures. The supreme measure of a mature, professional institution — or government — is how it handles failure: its capacity for honest self-examination and thoughtful accountability. This is one reason why my commission colleagues and I took a hard view of the poor quality of work exhibited by parts of the government in their initial reconstructions of what happened on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. This dimension of institutional integrity is, in the long run, vital to the country’s well-being.

In air travel, for example, where societies have adjusted to constant risks of catastrophic failures, maybe the greatest virtues of America’s National Transportation Safety Board are cultural and political. Aside from the particular talents of its employees, the board represents a habit of thought and earned trust. Something goes horribly wrong, and many people lose their lives. A respected institution will examine what happened professionally, rigorously. It will explain to the community what it learned. The community will further reduce the risks. And millions of people will board airplanes each day. They go on with their lives.

Philip Zelikow, a dean and historian at the University of Virginia, was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. 

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I saw chaos and confusion with bumper-to-bumper cars and people frantically walking or running to get anywhere else but Capitol Hill.

Sept. 7, 2021

Opinion: Two decades after 9/11, many questions are left unanswered

Moral panics leave a trail of catastrophic results.

Opinion: In school, they teach us about the time before 9/11. What about the time after?

Hopefully, when the time comes, we will be able to tell them that we made a better America.

Opinion: After 9/11, something inside me changed. I knew I wanted to serve in the Armed Forces.

My story is not dissimilar from many of my friends who joined the Marine Corps post-9/11.

Opinion: We need to consider Muslim students when teaching 9/11 in the classroom

Muslim students attending public school are targets of social and school community stereotypes.

Sept. 8, 2021

Opinion: Forgetting the ‘war on terror’ makes us susceptible to repeating history

In the end, the war on terror wasted more than $2 trillion of public money while the U.S. is unable to provide for so many people.

Opinion: The longest U.S. war ended amid feelings of confusion and fright

America’s system of justice and Congress failed to hold accountable the sordid civilians who instigated an illegal war and blundered the war on terror.

Opinion: Instagram posts and donations are great, but we must do more for Afghan refugees

If we ever want to be trusted by the rest of the world again, we have to bring home all of our allies.

Sept. 2, 2021

Opinion: California lawmakers erase Arab American issues. We want to be acknowledged.

Since 9/11, Arab Americans have been whitewashed from America’s collective consciousness, only existing when the topic is terrorism.

Opinion: How 9/11 led to the largest pro bono program in the history of American law

San Diego had the largest number of volunteer lawyers outside of New York City.

Opinion: I escaped the Taliban in Afghanistan, but my thoughts are with those I left behind

I kept looking for the American troops to get help. But they were nowhere to be found.

Opinion: In post-9/11 America, my ethnicity and religious identity are political

Why am I, as a woman, a Muslim, and an Arab, still radioactive in “neutral” environments?

Opinion: As a deaf person traveling on 9/11, I was the last to know what was going on

Twenty years later, I’m still haunted every time I fly and wonder if tragedy will strike.

Opinion: Two decades after 9/11, it’s not any better for Arabs and Muslims

Now is the time, 20 years later, to finally step into learning about everyone

Opinion: Being in New York City on 9/11 taught me about the power of community

Sometimes great adversity brings out our better selves.

Opinion: As a Vietnamese refugee, the crisis in Kabul reminds me of the Fall of Saigon

And I am hopeful for the people who were evacuated from Afghanistan and might arrive in San Diego

Opinion: I was babysitting my friend’s children on 9/11. I never asked them what they recall until now.

Eventually, I picked up the boys from school. I was an emotional wreck inside.

Opinion: ‘If they could hit the U.S., then they could target any city or country’

All day in Tijuana you could feel the city brace for the possibility of an attack.

Opinion: We donated blood on 9/11, but it would not be needed. There were few survivors.

Twenty years ago, our nation came together as a unified country.

Opinion: The Government’s Mistreatment of Americans Who Practice Islam Has Never Stopped

The jailed men I visited all had come here seeking a better life for themselves and their families. But after 9/11, none of that mattered. Their race and religion made them suspicious.

Opinion: As an Afghan interpreter, I cannot tell you the exact number of people I lost in the war

The country is facing a rapid brain drain, with thousands of experts fleeing a reactionary government that restricts nearly every aspect of Afghan life.

Opinion: The guilt I carry over 9/11 drives me to help others

Anticipating death was just a condition of living.

Opinion: Shortly after 9/11, I found myself with badge, a squad car and a gun

It was mostly millennials who stepped up to self-activate to help in Afghanistan.

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• 20 years later: Reflections and lessons from 9/11

If you were in your late teens or older than 20 on Sept. 11, 2001 – the day terrorists attacked America – your memories are likely vivid of that day 20 years ago. But today’s generation of college students is too young to remember or not yet born. Their knowledge is limited to the lessons learned in school, on the internet and through personal anecdotes. 

It’s a situation of real vs. textbooks.

A current student’s big questions

It can be tough to view past events through current eyes, to be impacted by an event you didn’t really experience. Most of the learning has occurred in school or from stories told by parents and teachers. 

But senior Bernae DySart has an understanding of the legacy of Sept. 11. “I always understood that it was an act of terror,” she says. Through her elementary and middle school years, she was exposed to more and more details by listening to the voicemails of the victims and watching news reports. Her understanding deepened. It also provoked big questions.

“It’s not enough to know the details but to also be aware of how other people were affected and the lasting impact on American society,” Bern says.

As a history and political science major, she’s had opportunities to expand her understanding even further at Heidelberg. She wonders about the justification for the attack. As the anniversary approaches, she wonders most about justice. What is it? How does it happen? What should it look like? Should it happen at all?

Bern says, “I cannot give a definitive answer. As I acknowledge the losses people have suffered and the tragedy that occurred 20 years ago, I can only sit back and think about our healing and how we help one another. How do we contribute to collective healing and what does that look like?”

When sophomore Wednesday Conley thinks about the 20th anniversary, she’s struck by the fact that there hasn’t been a terrorist attack of this magnitude on American soil since 9/11. And she hopes that continues. “Hopefully one day, we will have a clear history of everything that happened that day,” she says.

In their own words

Meet six people who graciously shared their recollections of 9/11 and the days, weeks, months and years that followed. We’re grateful for their willingness to speak from diverse perspectives about how they were affected, sometimes in deeply personal ways, about the cultural impact, and what they would like Generation Z to understand about the day that changed the world.

Debbie Bonaminio , a ’95 ‘Berg alumna who was caught in the aftermath of 9/11 while in Manhattan that day “What did I see that day? I saw the face of pure, unadulterated evil. I saw death and destruction. … I saw fear and anguish, but I also saw kindness – strangers helping one another with a hug, reaching out a hand, sharing mobile phones as the unimaginable played out, restaurants and stores handing out water and inviting us in, as we thousands, covered in ash and debris, dazed and in shock, made our way from lower Manhattan to wherever we could get to.”

Col. Chad Breeden , ’88, U.S. Marines (retired), current ‘Berg Alumni Council President “The attacks of 9/11 caused the single biggest change to our daily lives in my lifetime. There was a palpable sense of fear of the unknown in the immediate aftermath even overseas. I was able to see firsthand the importance of our allies. … Although it was America that was attacked, it was clear early on that we were not in this fight alone.”

Jeff Garvin , ’04, interim Athletic Director and a sophomore on campus on 9/11, living in Brown Hall “When I look back, I really think about the kind of misinformation and disinformation (surrounding the attacks). At the time, I feel like we believed everything we saw and heard. I was inspired by the campus community and the way we came together. There were a lot of caring people … a lot of 19- and 20-year-olds being consoled.”

Capt. Dave Krebs , ’87, U.S. Marines (retired) “Watching the attacks unfold from my U.S. Marine squadron ready room, we all understood immediately this was our generation’s Pearl Harbor. We all had friends working in the Pentagon and prayed for their safety and for their families. We all went home that day knowing we would soon be called upon to respond.”

Dr. Sarah Lazzari , assistant professor of criminology and sociology who was 22 and living on the West Coast, visiting her family in California, on 9/11 “I was preparing to fly home to Washington that evening. I had walked over to my grandpa’s house and was watching TV. … As I sat there flipping through the channels, I came upon what I thought was a movie. …  I grabbed the TV Guide and was expecting to find a ‘Die Hard’ movie or an action film. … My grandpa, who was a World War II veteran, came over and sat down with me. I have no memory of what we discussed. I wish I had talked with him about how these images made him feel.”

Dr. Marc O’Reilly , professor of political science who was in his very first semester teaching at Heidelberg “That day and the days that followed were terrifying. As a professor of Global Politics, I did not know if the attacks were a single occurrence or presaged many future attacks. … As the recent, controversial U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan likely ended the post-9/11 era, the legacy of those two decades will be fiercely contested in the coming months and years.”

Varied responses

Chad : “I remember thinking there would be retribution for the attacks, that whoever did it would pay a steep price. I did not think I would find myself planning for my unit’s participation in the military operations in Afghanistan, let alone deploying to Kandahar Air Base a little over six months later. Or, that I would later deploy to Iraq twice to visit the Marines and sailors in my unit.”

Sarah : “There was this sense of incredible pride in America, and people were able to come together in celebration of our great nation. However, this pride was not extended to people of Middle Eastern descent. I remember hearing about the ways in which they were treated, and I remember hearing the idea that they were perceived as a threat. But I was 22. I was still very caught up in my own reality. My world view had not expanded.”

Debbie : “On Sept. 12, we as a country were unified as never before. Everyone put out flags. Strangers made food, volunteered, checked on neighbors. … Some were spurred on to join the military or to pursue that childhood dream of being a firefighter or police officer.”

Reshaping our society

Marc : “Air travel, for one, evolved dramatically. Airport check-ins became complicated, time-consuming and stressful. You felt vulnerable, a new feeling for many of us. … Americans became more suspicious of one another.”

Dave : “Our society transformed. Barricades and increased security were everywhere. Armed soldiers were at the airports. We created the Department of Homeland Security, a massive undertaking to synergize multiple competing entities into a cohesive effort.”

Regrets, we’ve had a few

Debbie : “That moment, ever too brief, of a country united has long since evaporated. That is a legacy of 9/11 I wish we could get back – of caring for others regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, religion, religion or political party. We are a more divided nation than ever before. But on one of America’s worst days, we were united as one."

Jeff : “The ways that many of us felt toward people of Arab descent is pretty shameful. I look back and wonder … were there things I said or wrote that may have hurt someone?”

Sarah : “I wish I had spent the time talking with my grandpa about his experiences in World War II. I wonder what he thought when those planes crashed into the towers. … I wonder what he thought when my sister went to West Point and then to Afghanistan. I am sorry that they had to bond over tragedy, loss and death. I wish I could take away the pain that has forever changed my sister.”

‘Kindness will always overcome hatred’

Debbie : “I looked up and saw the South Tower begin to fall and a wall of debris headed toward me. … The days after were a blur, as if I was living outside of myself. The grief was suffocating.”  

A few months later, Debbie started to develop respiratory symptoms and was diagnosed with the “9/11 cough” and several years later, with PTSD and anxiety. But those are the negative outcomes. Over time, she has become more optimistic, more empathetic, more patient and more understanding.

“I make sure I hold a door open for someone, say please and thank you, show kindness and a smile to a stranger, embrace the differences in others rather than take offense, and I try to treat others as they deserve to be treated – with dignity and respect – because on a day that had both evil and kindness, kindness did and will always overcome hatred.”

Recommendations to ‘never forget’

Dave : “I highly recommend touring NYC’s Ground Zero, the Pentagon Memorial and the Flight 93 Memorial in Somerset, Pennsylvania, then take a quiet walk through the newest section of Arlington National Cemetery to reflect on the true cost of freedom subsequent to the attack on our great nation.”

Jeff : “Have the conversation that points out some of the parallels between 9/11 and the COVID pandemic and how both affected everyone. Think of the way the world flipped upside down in 2020, certainly for our seniors.”

Chad : “As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. I think it is not only important to watch the images from that day but to also continue the traditions established in the aftermath, like naming 9/11 Patriot Day. … Even during the fear and vulnerability of that day, and in the days after, our great country came together to support each other and our troops.”

Marc : “Watch the 20th anniversary coverage on CNN and other news stations.”

Debbie : “Start by watching some documentaries – not fictional movies. Hear the voices of those who were there. … Take the time to understand what America and the world were like then. Read newspaper articles from that time, find videos of old newscasts and see how things unfolded after 9/11 until today. … Much of what was seen then and captured on film was sanitized compare to what I saw that day with my own eyes. Be glad for that.”  

• Reflections on 9/11
• All of Philip’s Books
•  Books by Cover
• About Philip
• Questions on Writing
• Writing Career
• The Writer as Artist
• The Writer as Journalist
• The Writer as Psychotic
• Recommended Reading
• Faith and Doubt
• Homosexuality
• Living Christianity
• Personal Matters
• Who Are Evangelicals?
• A Brush With Death
• Climbing 14ers

Aftershocks

I learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center when my brother called me on the morning of an ordinary work day.  “Turn on your television,” he said.  “We’re under attack.”

I have never been especially patriotic.  I’ve traveled too much overseas, I suppose, and have seen from afar the arrogance and insensitivity of the United States.  Sometimes I envy my friends who travel with a Canadian, rather than American, passport.  Our military, our Olympic athletes, even our tourists walk with a swagger.  I remember being in the Philippines at the time of the Sydney Olympics and asking my host if his country had ever won a medal.  He hung his head, “We almost did once.  And we have a chance for a bronze in boxing at this one.”  A nation of 90 million people had never won a gold medal.  Meanwhile, the Americans were furious if they didn’t take home at least half the golds in swimming and track-and-field, and our winners strutted irreverently on the platform as an Australian band played our national anthem.

I think of my own life.  I grew up in a cloistered, fundamentalist environment in a South of legislated Jim Crow racism.  Now I live 1500 miles away in Colorado, a place of exquisite beauty, and can make a living reflecting in words on what matters most to me, rewarded and not punished for honesty and growth.  Few countries in the world would allow for that kind of progression and mobility.  For all its faults, the United States remains the land of promise and potential.

The phones started ringing at our house on the day of the attack.  I got calls from England, Holland, and Australia, as well as from the U.S. media.  “You’ve written about the problem of pain.  What do you have to say about the tragedy?”  In truth, I had nothing to say.  The facts were so overpowering, so incomprehensible, that I was stunned into silence.  Anything I could think of saying—“Horrible.  Don’t blame God.  The face of evil.”—sounded like a jejune cliche.  In every case, I declined to respond.  Like most Americans, I felt unbearably helpless, and wounded, and deeply sad.

On September 12, the day after the attacks, it dawned on me that I had already written much of what I believe about the problem of pain.   I wrote  Where Is God When It Hurts  in 1977, as a 28-year-old who had no right to tackle questions of theodicy—and also no ability to resist, for there is no more urgent question facing those of us who identify ourselves as Christian.  In 1990 I revised the book, adding about 100 pages and the perspective of middle age.

That night I e-mailed a proposal to my publisher, Zondervan, suggesting that we find a way to get that book out as cheaply as possible to as many people as possible.  I could forego all royalties, and they could forego all profits as our contribution to a grieving nation.  They jumped on the idea with amazing speed.  Already they had been discussing “instant books” and other publishing responses.  Instead, they decided to put their full resources into getting  Where Is God  into as many hands as possible.  They called the next morning, just two days after the tragedy, to say they were mobilizing for a special edition.

By the end of that day Zondervan had sold 300,000 copies of a one-time-only edition with all proceeds directed to the American Red Cross.  By the end of the next day, Friday, they had sold 750,000 copies.  In short, they sold more copies in 24 hours than they had sold in 24 years.  WalMart ordered 125,000; airport bookstores ordered scores of thousands.  It seems that retailers, too, felt helpless, and grasped at a chance to offer a book that might give perspective on questions their customers were consumed with.

My wife and I had originally planned to spend the week of September 17 on vacation, on a houseboat on Lake Powell with three couples from Illinois.  When their flights got canceled, those plans changed.  Instead, we took a three-day trip to Telluride, Colorado.  We had already climbed seven “14ers” (14,000-foot mountains) this summer, and we attempted an eighth the week after WTC.  Wilson Peak is rated most difficult, and in the end we had to turn back because of a September snowstorm.  Yet the interlude pulled us away from nonstop television and gave an important reminder of the goodness and grace that exists in this world alongside the ugliness and evil.  I have never seen the aspen trees so beautiful.  They shone as gold, cascading down the sides of dark evergreen mountains like rivers of amber light.  We took walks among them, stepping on a carpet of gold and listening to their papery rattle in the breeze.  Fresh snow coated the mountain ranges, the pure white snow of early fall.  And when we pulled into our driveway three days later, a bull elk was herding his harem of twenty cows across our property.  He bugled warnings and they jostled into formation as I ran around snapping pictures.

I returned home to find an extraordinary journal e-mailed from Gordon MacDonald, a pastor and author who is also a friend.  Gordon, who had once served as pastor to a church in Manhattan, cleared his schedule when he first heard about the bombings and volunteered as a chaplain with the Salvation Army.  Each night, after a grueling day near Ground Zero, he recorded the sights and sounds and, yes, the smells, he and his wife Gail had encountered that day.

I called Gordon to tell him how deeply his journal had affected me, and when he learned I would soon spend a day in New York City, he insisted that I visit Ground Zero for myself.  Five minutes later he called back to say he had made the arrangements with top officials at the Salvation Army.

I was traveling to Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago under the sponsorship of another publisher, Doubleday, which had just released my new book  Soul Survivor: How my Faith Survived the Church .  An agency had worked very hard to set up a media tour, only to find the publicity and travel worlds in complete chaos in the wake of the terrorism.  Many television and radio programs had temporarily gone off the air, and those still broadcasting wanted to talk about one thing only, regardless of a book’s content.  Moreover, the person in charge of publicity for my books had lost her best childhood friend and former roommate in the buildings.  For a week she and her friend’s fiancé walked around with pictures of the missing young woman until finally they realized all hope was lost.  The fiancé had watched out a window as the plane hit, and was still watching when the building containing his future wife collapsed.

Not until the day before I left did we have any assurance that the media appointments would happen at all.  Some did, some didn’t.  As it turned out, the special edition of  Where Is God When It Hurts  gave immediate entree for the interviewers, who found it difficult to talk about anything other than the bombings.  Although I had only one appointment in New York, an interview with Gustav Niebuhr of  The Times , the publisher felt a stop there would be worthwhile.

A driver named Eddie met me at LaGuardia in New York.  Mayor Giuliani had ordered checkpoints at every tunnel, and vehicle searches were causing huge traffic backups, he told me.  Eddie knew a back route through Queens, and drove us through neighborhoods unaccustomed to limousines driving by.  I told him my destination, the Salvation Army center near Ground Zero, and he said he knew it well.  Eddie, a young Puerto Rican with a clean-shaved head, was impeccably dressed in a starched white shirt and tie, wearing gold bracelets and a diamond-studded ring.  He had a perfect Brooklyn accent.

“Where were you on September 11?” I asked Eddie, making conversation.  “Were you working?”  He paused at least 10 seconds before answering, no doubt weighing whether he wanted to tell the story again, to a stranger.

“Actually, Mr. Yancey, I was parked just across from the World Trade Center.”

“No!  Tell me about it.”

“I had picked up a ride at the airport, Mr. Firestone, and dropped him at the Millennium Hotel.  I remember his name because I asked him if he owned the tire company, but he laughed and said no.  He had a meeting scheduled at the WTC, and I planned to stay with the car and wait for him.  I was sitting in this car, reading the paper, when I heard a roar like the sound jet engines make when the planes warm up.  I live near LaGuardia, so I hear that roar every morning.  Then the ground shook, the car shook, and I heard the explosion.  What in the world?  I jumped outside of the car and saw people running everywhere.

“I was standing by my car when the second plane hit a few minutes later.  My God, I’ve never seen a fireball like that.  I knew I should get in the car and leave, but something glued me there.  It’s like when you see an accident, and you know you should drive past without looking, but you can’t.

“You wouldn’t believe the noise.  Car horns were going off all over the place.  Police, ambulance, and fire truck sirens were coming closer.  I quick called my wife in Brooklyn and told her, ‘Honey, something big has happened down here.  Turn on the news.  I’m right in front of the twin towers, but I’m OK.’

“And then the people started streaming out.  Thousands of people.  Some screaming, some holding handkerchiefs over their faces, some covered with blood.  I stood by the car as they ran past.  I looked in the air and, oh my God, I saw little specks—people jumping.  A man in a white shirt.  A woman with her skirt flying up.  A couple holding hands.  A man trying to use his sports coat as a parachute.  People would look up, try to figure where they’d land, and dodge the bodies as they hit the sidewalk.  I’ll never forget that sight as long as I live.

“There was paper and debris and stuff flying everywhere, like a blizzard.  I saw a boy, maybe 14,  on the sidewalk doubled up, coughing, and when I went over to him he pointed to his pocket.  He couldn’t speak.  I reached in and pulled out an asthma pump, and he sprayed it and got his breath back.

“I was there forty-five minutes, I guess—I couldn’t tell how long, but that’s what they say now, when the first tower collapsed.  A woman had fallen down on the sidewalk, an elderly woman.  Everybody was running past her, not stepping on her or anything, but running right past her.  I waited for a break in the people and went to her.  ‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ I asked.  ‘I have some water in my car.  Can I get you some?’  She said she’d made it down something like 58 floors, and I told her she was safe now.

“I could tell she was upset, so I asked if I could say a prayer for her.  I’m Catholic, you know.  It just seemed the thing to do.  She looked relieved, and while I was kneeling there on the sidewalk holding her hand, I heard a noise louder than I thought possible.  The entire giant building just collapsed, all 110 stories.  And I swear to God, Mr. Yancey, while I’m kneeling there holding that woman’s hand, something falls from the sky—a piece of a computer or something—and hits that woman and she slumps over dead.  Imagine—escaping from 58 stories and then getting killed like that.

“I look behind me and see a cloud dark as night rushing right towards me.  I let go her hand and take off running.  It’s like a cops-and-robbers cartoon.  The faster I run, the closer the cloud gets.  I realize I got no chance.  I duck into a little space between two buildings to wait it out.  When the cloud hits, it’s darker than I knew dark could be.  At night, even a cloudy night, at least you got space around you, air to breathe.  This cloud was, like, solid.  You couldn’t see anything.  You couldn’t breathe.  You were surrounded by dark you could feel.”

Eventually, Eddie told me, he found his way back to his car.  Police had already sealed off the area, but he wanted to get his limo out.  It was covered with dust like volcanic ash, and he took off his white shirt and wiped the windshield until he could see out.  He opened the doors and yelled, “Anybody want a ride outta here?”  Eight people, strangers, piled in.  He headed for the nearest bridge off Manhattan, crossing over just before the mayor ordered all bridges and tunnels closed.

When he finally got home, four hours after the attack, he found his wife hysterical, his two children huddled in a corner watching Mommy sob.  After his phone call, she had stood at her window in Brooklyn and watched the World Trade Center disintegrate, certain that her husband had been killed in the explosion and fire.  Phone service was down, and she had not heard from him in four hours.

Eddie was so shaken that the next day he accepted a job to drive someone to Detroit.  Airplanes were grounded, people were desperate to get home, and he wanted to get as far away from New York as he could.  He drove straight through, took a two-hour nap in the car, and drove fourteen hours back to Brooklyn.

“Everything’s different now, Mr. Yancey,” Eddie said.  “I go to my brother’s house every night.  We sit around, watch TV, play with the kids, play games.  Stuff I never used to do.  Family stuff.  And I haven’t missed Mass yet.  I’ll never be the same.”

Salvation Army personnel, bless their hearts, are not the most publicity-savvy people in the world.  Gordon MacDonald told me that certain other groups always made sure media interviews were conducted with a van and prominent logo in the background, for the TV cameras.  Such a thought would never occur to an organization with a name like “Salvation Army.”  Wearing uniforms that haven’t changed much in a century, they roll up their sleeves and serve at the most basic human level, the first line of defense at every emergency.  On a very tight time schedule, I had arranged to take a tour of Ground Zero with the Salvation Army’s Commissioner of Australia, but we sat around for two hours before S.A. personnel figured out the logistics and the paperwork required to get us through security checkpoints.

While sitting around sipping coffee, I met Major Carl Ruthberg, a Salvationist normally stationed at Times Square.  Since the tragedy he has worked mainly at the Medical Examiner’s Office, the place where they bring bodies and body parts to be identified.  The morgue is equipped with high-tech refrigerator trucks lined with steel shelving, and body bags stacked by the thousands.  More than two weeks after the event, only five percent of the bodies had been found.  One group was found intact, holding hands, but they were a rarity.  The rest lay buried under tons of rubble, or they simply vaporized in the heat.

The Jewish rabbi assigned to the morgue said his tradition had not prepared him for the task.  Jews have a practice of staying with a body from death to burial, which is why they arrange funerals within 24 hours.  At Ground Zero, there were few bodies to stay with.  And when I visited, not only 24 hours but two weeks had passed with thousands of bodies still missing.

Major Ruthberg told me of the rescue dogs who got so discouraged that their handlers had to play games with them, hiding under blankets to be found.  The dogs searched all day and found maybe a piece of clothing or an elbow or scrap of skin.  They cut their paws on the sharp edges of steel, and whined in frustration because, like the human rescuers, they had so little to show for their efforts.

He also told of what happened when evidence of a fireman or policeman was found—maybe a badge, or patch of clothing, or piece of a boot.  All machinery was turned off, Ground Zero fell silent, and all firemen on the scene formed two lines and stood at attention.  The rescuers retrieved the clothing or body part and walked in silence between the lines of saluting firemen to the morgue.  Then they wrapped the body bag in an American flag and placed it in an ambulance, which would drive through another line of saluting firemen, accompanied by a motorcycle escort, lights flashing but still in silence.

“I work side by side with heroes,” the Major said.  “And I tell you, they love God.  They may be hard-nosed New York detectives, or FBI officers, but at the morgue the softness comes out.  I feel privileged to be there, and offer just a calming word, a touch.  We have so few survival stories down here, but we tell them over and over.  I keep reminding the guys of all the thousands of people who escaped, partly through their efforts, after the blasts.  We lost several thousand, but it could have been ten times that number.  We’ve got to have that balance, a reminder that some did survive.”

Gordon MacDonald tells of visiting a former cocktail lounge near Ground Zero, all its windows broken so that you could see the bar inside, and behind it all the liquor bottles and the drinking glasses as they’d been lined up the day of the explosion.  Tables and chairs were overturned, and thick dust and pulverized concrete covered every surface.  On the mirror above the bar someone had written the name and number of his fire brigade and then added the words, “Others run out; we run in!”

Outside the Salvation Army Center a tractor-trailer truck was parked.  It came packed with supplies—blankets, food, clothing—from the state of Washington, clear across the continent from New York.  When Salvationists opened the truck to unload it, they found inside a 40-foot banner which they unfurled and tacked to the side of the truck.  It was covered with thousands of messages hand-written in grease pencil or permanent marker, and I stood and read them for probably ten minutes.  Most were one sentence long.  “You’re in our hearts.”  “We’re alongside you.”  “We love you.”  “You’re our heroes.”  “You’re our brothers and sisters.”  Some of the writers had drawn hearts, or angels, or other signs of companionship and hope.  Third-graders had sent along homemade cookies in hand-decorated bags.

When we finally did get the clearance to drive through the checkpoints, the street was lined with New Yorkers—New Yorkers!—who cheered and waved banners with similar messages.  We love you.  You’re our heroes.  God bless you.  Thank you.  In the early days crowds ten deep lined these streets at midnight, cheering every rescue vehicle that came by.  The workers ran on that support as their vehicles ran on fuel.  They had so little good news.   Daily they faced a mountainously depressing task of removing tons and tons of twisted steel, compacted dirt, smashed equipment, broken glass.  Yet every time they drove past the barricades, they faced a line of fans cheering them on, like the tunnel of cheerleaders football players run through, reminding them that an entire nation appreciates their service.  In a Salvation Army van with lights flashing, we attracted some of the loudest cheers of all.

Moises, the Salvation Army officer leading us, was Incident Director for the city.  He had been on the job barely a month when the planes hit.  He worked 36 straight hours and slept four, 40 hours and slept six, 40 more hours and slept six.  Then he took a day off.  His assistant had an emotional breakdown early on, in the same van I was riding in, and may never recover.

After a few days the Salvation Army made a policy of accepting nothing but cash.  They had nowhere to put the donations of food, clothing, and equipment brought to them by thousands of New Yorkers and others from out of state.  Lines of people stretched around the block all day long, volunteers who wanted to help.  The writer Chris DeVinck tells of a couple in his town who drove to Home Depot, bought $700 worth of shovels, and hand-delivered them to New York.  Gordon MacDonald tells of fire fighters in Chicago who jumped in a car, headed east and got picked up going 108 m.p.h. in Indiana.  When they explained to the state trooper, he said, “Well, let’s try to keep it under 90,” and gave them a flashing-light escort to the border.

Many of the Salvationists I met hailed from Florida, the hurricane crews who keep fully stocked canteens and trucks full of basic supplies to send to cities and towns devastated by hurricanes.  When the Manhattan buildings fell, they mobilized all those trucks and drove them to New York.  The crew director told me, “To tell you the truth, I came up here expecting to deal with Yankees, if you know what I mean.  Instead, it’s all smiles and ‘Thank you.’”

The Salvation Army has learned to meet needs at the most basic human level.  They’ll certainly talk with you and pray with you if you want, and the Salvationists in the shiny red “Chaplain” jackets were in high demand.  Mainly, though, they were there to wash out eyes stinging from smoke, and provide Blistex for parched lips, and foot inserts for boots walking across hot metal.  They operated hydration stations, and snack canteens.  They offered a place to rest, and freshly cooked chicken courtesy of Tyson’s.  The day I arrived, they distributed 1500 phone cards for the workers to use in calling home.  Every day they served 7500 meals.  They offered an oasis of compassion in a wilderness of rubble.

We passed through five checkpoints, the last one, known as the Red Zone,  manned by soldiers in Army fatigues.  “Things have tightened up here,” our Salvationist guide shouted over the roar of machinery and generators.  “New York’s finest take training in public relations.  The U.S. Army doesn’t.”  As we approached Ground Zero, we traded in the van for an open golf-cart-like vehicle.  Soldiers wearing gas masks sprayed water and disinfectant on the tires: water to combat asbestos, disinfectant to fight the germs that flourish around a scene of death.  They scrutinized each person’s i.d. and waved us through.

America’s ability to respond to a crisis is amazing.  Two weeks after the tragedy, a rescue city had sprung up.  Portable kitchens and toilets, tents, pallets full of plywood, cranes 25 stories high, refrigeration trucks, generators, bulldozers—they lined the streets approaching Ground Zero.

I had studied the maps in the news magazines, but no two-dimensional representation could capture the scale of destruction.  For about eight square blocks, buildings were deserted, their windows broken, jagged pieces of steel jutting out from floors high above the street.  Thousands of offices equipped with faxes, phones, and computers, sat vacant, coated in debris. On September 11, people were sitting there punching keys, making phone calls, grabbing a cup of coffee to start the day, and suddenly it must have seemed like the world was coming to an end.

Part of the shock, I think, was that Americans were going about their daily routines, following baseball, watching the stock market, telling jokes about politics, and then innocent airplanes, the kind we ride on for trips to Disney World, morphed into agents of monstrous evil.  No one had declared war, or given any warning.  Afterwards, nothing will be ordinary in quite the same way again.

It was a sunny day, and as we got to Ground Zero everything about the landscape changed.  Sun was filtering down all the way to the sidewalks, no longer blocked by the towering buildings.  At a plaza just across from the rubble, mourners had placed teddy bears, hundreds of teddy bears, maybe thousands, with flowers now dried and coated with dust.  Occasionally I passed a wall plastered with photos of the missing, and poignant notes.  “Please, Marcia, call your sister.  I love you!”  “We haven’t given up hope, Sean.  You’ll always live in our hearts.”

The chaplains had warned me about the stench of death, but I mainly smelled the acrid aroma of rubble that had already been burning for two weeks.  The air was clear.  I was surprised that the streets and sidewalks were clean, not coated with dust.  The constant spraying, aided by a couple of rainstorms, had had an effect.

Just that morning the mayor had changed the mission away from rescue, in effect giving up hope that survivors would be found.  No more bucket brigades, with meticulous removal of debris by hand.  The big machines were moving in.  Measured by the buildings around it, the pile of rubble stood between ten and twelve stories tall.  In the Rockies, I have seen how avalanches sweep whole mountainsides of snow and compress it into a pile as hard as concrete at the bottom of the slope.  Still, I could not imagine that all the mass of 220 combined floors had compressed into this pile.  Bulldozers crawled across the ugly mountain.  Sparks shot up where welders worked to cut apart the girders.

Looking at Ground Zero, I thought of the garbage mountains outside Cairo and Manila, where armies of the poor make a living by combing through filth in search of neglected treasure—a plastic bag, a pencil, a piece of a telephone.  Here in the most technologically sophisticated city in the world, a different kind of army was using the very best equipment to comb through rubble in search of treasure, in this case evidence of human beings: hair, flesh, body parts.  Searchers sifted through the rubble before loading it on a dump truck, forensic specialists checked it on the truck, and others checked it again when it arrived in the Bronx.

I studied the faces of the workers, uniformly grim.  I didn’t see a single smile at Ground Zero.  How could you smile in such a place?  It had nothing to offer but death and destruction, a monument to the worst that human beings can do to each other.

I saw three booths set up in a vacant building across from the WTC site: Police Officers for Christ, Firemen for Christ, and Sanitation Workers for Christ.  (That last one is a charity I’d like to support!)  Salvation Army chaplains had told me that the police and fire personnel had asked for two prayer services a day, conducted on the site.

In Washington and Chicago, as I talked about the special edition of  Where Is God When It Hurts , inevitably the interviewer would turn the question back on me.  “Well, where is God at a time like this?”  Sometimes I countered some of the harmful things other Christian spokesmen had said, bringing guilt and judgment to a time that begged for comfort and grace.  I talked of Jesus’ response to tragedies, when he rebuked those who responded with judgment and not compassion.  And then I told of a man who came up to me one time with a question.

I had been signing books when he appeared at my elbow and said, “Sorry, I don’t have time to read your book.  Can you just answer that question for me in a sentence or two?”

I thought for a moment and said, “I guess the answer to that question is another question.  Where is the  church  when it hurts?  If the church is doing its job—binding wounds, comforting the grieving, offering food to the hungry—I don’t think people will wonder so much where God is when it hurts.  They’ll know where God is: in the presence of his people on earth.”

Gordon MacDonald had written this in his journal:

And more than once I asked myself—as everyone asks—is God here?  And I decided that He is closer to this place than any other place I’ve ever visited.  The strange irony is that, amidst this absolute catastrophe of unspeakable proportions, there is a beauty in the way human beings are acting that defines the imagination.  Everyone—underscore, everyone—is everyone else’s brother or sister.  There are no strangers among the thousands at the work site.  Everyone talks; everyone cooperates; everyone does the next thing that has to be done.  No job is too small, too humble, or, on the other hand, too large. Tears ran freely, affection was exchanged openly, exhaustion was defied.  We all stopped caring about ourselves.  The words ‘it’s not about me’ were never more true.

No church service; no church sanctuary; no religiously inspiring service has spoken so deeply into my soul and witnessed to the presence of God as those hours last night at the crash site.

In all my years of Christian ministry, I never felt more alive than I felt last night.  The only other time I can remember a similar feeling was the week that Gail & I worked on a Habitat for Humanity project in Hungary.  As much as I love preaching the Bible and all the other things that I have been privileged to do over the years, being on that street, giving cold water to workmen, praying and weeping with them, listening to their stories was the closest I have ever felt to God.  Even though it sounds melodramatic, I kept finding myself saying, “This is the place where Jesus most wants to  be.”

Two weeks on, New York was a different place than it was on September 10.  To anyone who has spent time there, I need only mention one observation to mark that change: in a full day in Manhattan, I heard one car horn.  “I don’t know how to drive anymore,” my driver Eddie said.  “I’m used to people honking at me, cutting me off, flipping me the bird.  Now, they’re so polite, I don’t know how to act.”

A massive shift in perspective happened to our country on September 11.  As Eddie put it, “Everything’s different now.”  For a time, at least, it made us look at our land, our society, and ourselves in a new way.  Professional sports canceled all contests; comedies went off the air.  We no longer saw ourselves as the lucky few on top of the world, but as a people vulnerable to hate and terror.  That three thousand people could go to work as part of their daily routine and never come home made us all aware of our fragile mortality.  Over the next months,  The New York Times  ran an obituary on every single person who died.  Like most people in history, but not most Americans, we began to live in conscious awareness of death.

I wonder how long it will last—for New York, for the nation, for me.  One day we faced what most of us spend a lifetime ignoring: that all of us will die, and that many of us fill our lives with trivialities in apparent defiance of that fact.  We learned, like Eddie, that playing games with kids may be more important than working late for overtime pay.  We learned that even in a city known for its crusty cynicism, heroes can emerge.  We learned that a Jay Leno comedy routine and major league sports, entertaining as they may be, are sometimes obscenely out of place.  We learned that love for country and even for strangers can surge up with no warning.  We learned that our nation, for all its flaws, has much worth preserving, and worth defending.  And we learned that at a time of crisis, we turn to our spiritual roots: the President quoting Psalm 23, the bagpiper piping “Amazing Grace,” the sanitation workers stopping by their makeshift chapel, the Salvation Army chaplains dispensing grace, the chaplains comforting the grieving loved ones.  Thanks to them, we know where God is when it hurts.

Eddie drove me to “The New York Times,” and we got caught in that most eerie situation: a silent Manhattan traffic jam.  It was two o’clock in the afternoon, I was late for perhaps the most important professional appointment in my life, and my churning stomach was reminding me that I had not eaten a thing all day.  At 2:07 I jumped out of the car to greet Eric Major, my Doubleday publisher, who was pacing outside.  “Bad news, I’m afraid,” he said.  “Gus Niebuhr got called away on an emergency.  The appointment is canceled.”  I hadn’t needed to stop in New York after all.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Terrorism & Political Violence — 9/11

Essays on 9/11

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The Impact of The 9/11 Tragedy on The Marketplace in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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September 11, 2001

New York City, New York, U.S.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, commonly known as the 9/11 attacks, involved a series of coordinated hijackings and deliberate suicide attacks carried out by 19 militants affiliated with the extremist Islamic group al-Qaeda. These attacks, which remain the deadliest acts of terrorism on American soil, targeted several locations in the United States. The hijackers were successful in crashing two planes into the iconic North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing their eventual collapse. Another plane struck the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane, intended for a federal government building in Washington, D.C., was heroically thwarted by passengers who revolted, resulting in its crash in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. These heinous acts had a profound impact on global security, reshaping the course of international relations and forever altering the lives of countless individuals affected by the tragedy.

The 9/11 attacks were a culmination of various historical factors and events that set the stage for this tragic event. The primary cause behind the attacks can be traced to the rise of Islamic extremism, particularly the extremist group al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. It emerged as a response to perceived injustices faced by Muslims, including the presence of American military forces in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policies in the region. The prerequisites leading to the attacks involved a combination of factors, such as ideological radicalization, recruitment efforts, and meticulous planning by the terrorists. These efforts aimed to exploit existing vulnerabilities within the aviation security system and target symbolic landmarks in the United States. Additionally, geopolitical conflicts, such as the Soviet-Afghan War and the Gulf War, played a role in shaping the ideological landscape and providing a breeding ground for extremist ideologies. The attacks were also facilitated by intelligence failures and a lack of coordination between various agencies responsible for counterterrorism efforts.

The effects of the 9/11 attacks were far-reaching and had a profound impact on various aspects of society. Primarily, the attacks resulted in the loss of thousands of innocent lives and caused immense physical destruction, particularly with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the damage to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The attacks had significant socio-political consequences. They led to a heightened sense of fear and insecurity within the United States and around the world. The incident prompted the implementation of stricter security measures, including enhanced airport screenings and increased surveillance efforts, to prevent future terrorist acts. Moreover, the attacks influenced U.S. foreign policy, leading to military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The attacks also had economic repercussions. The destruction of the World Trade Center had a severe impact on global financial markets and the economy, leading to a decline in stock markets and increased job losses. Additionally, the attacks had a lasting psychological impact, causing trauma and grief among survivors, families of the victims, and communities affected by the events.

The 9/11 attacks have had a significant impact on media and literature, with numerous works exploring the events, their aftermath, and their implications. Various forms of media, including films, documentaries, books, and poems, have depicted the 9/11 attacks and their consequences. One notable example is the film "United 93" (2006), directed by Paul Greengrass. The movie reconstructs the events aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to regain control from the hijackers. The film offers a gripping and emotional portrayal of the heroic actions taken by the passengers in the face of tragedy. Another prominent work is "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" (2005), a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book follows a young boy named Oskar Schell, who lost his father in the World Trade Center collapse. Through Oskar's perspective, the novel explores themes of grief, trauma, and the search for meaning in the aftermath of the attacks.

The 9/11 attacks had a profound impact on public opinion, eliciting a range of responses and shaping perceptions worldwide. In the immediate aftermath, people expressed feelings of anger towards the perpetrators and a desire for justice to be served. The attacks also sparked debates and discussions on various topics, including national security, terrorism, and foreign policy. Public opinion regarding the government's response to the attacks and the subsequent military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq varied, with some supporting the actions taken and others expressing concerns about civil liberties and the potential escalation of conflicts. Furthermore, the 9/11 attacks prompted increased awareness and scrutiny of issues related to religious tolerance, Islamophobia, and the treatment of Muslim communities. Public discourse on these topics became more prominent, reflecting a heightened focus on understanding and combating prejudice.

1. The collapse of the Twin Towers following the 9/11 attacks remains a striking fact. The South Tower (WTC 2) collapsed only 56 minutes after being hit by United Airlines Flight 175, while the North Tower (WTC 1) collapsed 102 minutes after being struck by American Airlines Flight 11. These unprecedented structural failures shocked the world and demonstrated the devastating impact of the attacks. 2. The 9/11 attacks resulted in a tragic loss of life. In total, 2,977 people from over 90 countries lost their lives in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93. Among the casualties were not only office workers and first responders but also individuals from diverse backgrounds, including tourists, airline passengers, and individuals attending business meetings. 3. Economic consequences: The attacks had a profound impact on the economy, not only in terms of immediate destruction but also long-term effects. It is estimated that the attacks caused a loss of $123 billion in economic output during the first two to four weeks. Additionally, sectors such as tourism, aviation, and finance experienced significant disruptions and faced substantial financial losses, leading to a ripple effect on employment and global markets.

The topic of the 9/11 attacks holds significant importance as it marks a pivotal moment in contemporary history that changed the global landscape in numerous ways. Understanding and exploring this event through an essay allows for a comprehensive examination of its profound impact on society, politics, security, and international relations. Firstly, the 9/11 attacks shattered the sense of security and invulnerability that many nations had previously enjoyed. It exposed vulnerabilities in security systems, leading to significant changes in counterterrorism measures and policies worldwide. Secondly, the attacks prompted a reevaluation of international relations and the United States' role in global affairs. It fueled the war on terror, leading to military interventions, the establishment of new alliances, and shifts in foreign policies. Furthermore, the 9/11 attacks raised important questions about religious extremism, ideological motivations, and the delicate balance between security and civil liberties. Examining these aspects in an essay fosters critical thinking and provides an opportunity to delve into the complexities surrounding terrorism and its aftermath.

1. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. (2004). The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. W. W. Norton & Company. 2. Summers, A., & Swan, R. (2011). The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden. Ballantine Books. 3. Jenkins, B. M. (2006). The 9/11 Wars. Hill and Wang. 4. Smith, M. L. (2011). Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. University of Chicago Press. 5. Bowden, M. (2006). Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. Grove Press. 6. Wright, L. (2006). The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Vintage. 7. Bamford, J. (2008). The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Anchor Books. 8. Thompson, W., & Thompson, S. (2011). The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press. 9. Boyle, M. (2007). Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us. Potomac Books. 10. Zelikow, P., & Shenon, P. (2021). The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Interlink Publishing Group.

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9/11: reflections and remembrances.

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September 11, 2001 —those who were there remember.

A Muslim Serves her Country "I feel the resiliency of my faith as the biggest strength in helping build bridges of understanding with my fellow Americans." -Lt. Col. Shareda Hosein, U.S. Army Reserves, Muslim chaplain Choosing Action in the Face of Evil "Tom was a hero on Flight 93. He and his fellow passengers were drafted unknowingly as the first citizen-soldiers in the war on terrorism." -Beverly and Thomas Burnett, Sr., parents of Tom Burnett

In this hell I found grace. -Fr. James Martin

One Firefighter Spared Twice That Day "I still try to figure out what God was thinking and why I deserved to be spared twice that day." -Kenneth Zaveckas, New York City firefighter Suffering, Death and Resurrection: a Pastor's Experience of 9/11 "The preciousness and also the precarious and vulnerable nature of the fundamental gift of life burned its way into the depth of our souls."  - Monsignor Anthony Sherman , Brooklyn pastor An Instrument of Peace at Ground Zero  "I did not see the devil's face at Ground Zero. I saw the face of God in the people working, caring, sweating, crying, rescuing, recovering and being very spiritual in their very humanness." -Franciscan Father Joseph Bayne , chief chaplain of New York's Erie County Emergency Services We Stood Together on September 11 "People came together in unity that day. We can all remember where we were on 9/11 because we were all together." -Paulist Father Paul Wierichs , a former chaplain to the Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Parable of Ground Zero "I thought 'what is God like? God is like the firefighter who rushes into a burning building to save someone. That's how much God loves us." -Jesuit Father James Martin, culture editor of America magazine A People Changed by 9/11 "The years have gone by, but the memories remain for all who were involved in that one single day and its aftermath that changed the lives of so many and of our nation." -Monsignor Robert J. Romano Experiencing 9/11 From Afar "I sat the whole day in front of the TV watching the video of the tragedy and listening to the commentary." -Deacon Tom Aumen  Minnesota Twins at a Ground Zero Hospital "What I learned about faith is that it is active." -Father Jeff Ethen, of the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minnesota Forgiveness and Unity at Ground Zero "How in awe I was seeing the crowds along the New York streets praying and saluting as we wheeled the American flag-draped bodies to the makeshift morgue." -Father Bruce Nieli, C.S.P. Remembering 9/11 "It was a time of great pain and great love. It was a time of testing and a time of faith. It was a time of endings and beginnings." -Father James E. Devlin, pastor of Good Shepherd Parish in the Diocese of Brooklyn A Memoir of 9/11 "We all thought it was a joke." -Meg C. DeBoe, resident of Annandale, Virginia

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Students Reflect on 9/11 in Essay Contest

First responders and supporters from the city of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. have once again sponsored an essay contest in which local students can reflect on their understanding of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

The second annual September 11th remembrance essay contest, which is open to Palm Beach Gardens residents and the dependents of city employees, requests that students in grades nine to 12 "reflect on how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 affected our nation and the future of the world."

Building on their successful 2015 contest , the contest is being sponsored by the Palm Beach Gardens Police Foundation, Fire Chief’s Association of Palm Beach County and Palm Beach Gardens Fire-Rescue, according to the Palm Beach Post .

Essay submissions should be between 500 to 700 words and applications are due Aug. 15, 2016. Three winners will be chosen. 

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9/11 Museum Honors Legacy of New York Yankees

With the Bronx Bombers opening their season yesterday at Yankee Stadium, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum honors the connection between the Yankees and legacy of Sept. 11.

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The World 9/11 Took From Us

I’m still mourning the life I lived before I learned that I was different.

By Omer Aziz

Mr. Aziz is a writer.

There is something almost magical about New York as summer turns to fall. The changing of the seasons brings a spirit of renewal. People hurry to school and work, propelled by dreams and ambitions. The leaves shift from green to orange. But this beauty is transient. In the evening, when I go on my walks, I look at the two blue lights beaming into the heavens from just south of the old World Trade Center and I try to hold my gaze there. I never last long.

When the Sept. 11 attacks happened, I was an 11-year-old Muslim boy suddenly confused about the world and unsure of my place in it.

I heard the news while I was on the basketball court at recess at my school. A white classmate rushed up to me. He said terrorists had hijacked airplanes and used them to bring down the twin towers. He said America was under attack, that the border was sealed. He said there were more planes in the sky.

Despite my general ignorance — I did not know what the words “hijacking” or “terrorist” meant — I still realized that this major attack had something to do with my people.

When I got home from school, I had questions for my parents: Why had this happened? Why were people looking at us differently? And did this mean that we were also bad people because we prayed to the same God as the attackers? Questions that no parent could adequately answer.

Close to three thousand people were killed that day. For those who lived through it as children, the carnage was inexplicable. The images from the attacks ran in a loop on our television screen, each new repetition hitting harder than the last. Language had always separated me from my parents, but in this horrific instance, their wordless terror was enough to tell me all I needed to know.

My life from that point forward was shaped by this great crime; I tried to distance myself from people who brought destruction to America’s cities, and came up against the twisted perceptions Americans had of brown people. Sept. 11 marked the loss of innocence, the abrupt recognition that I was different, would always be viewed as different, and that the stakes of this difference could be life and death.

At school, we had to write reflections on what we felt. What could a sixth grader say about Sept. 11? I wrote that I was angry that it happened — something generic and bland. I was called into the principal’s office to talk about my reflection. I thought maybe the teachers had discovered that my brother and I went to the mosque every day. But apparently the emotions I‘d expressed in my essay made my teachers concerned. This feeling of standing naked before power — the terror of being found out, even though I’d done nothing wrong — would stay with me.

In college, I quickly learned that this skin and Muslim name of mine required me to tread carefully. Any time the subjects of religion, terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and yes, Israel, came up, my peers’ questions felt like private interrogations. I had to learn how to navigate this, and how to survive a world darkened by Sept. 11. Every time I am detained at an airport now — it still happens — I silently curse the jihadists who brought down those towers, for the lives they took and for what they unleashed.

Any moment that shakes history is experienced first by the living, in deeply personal terms. The phone calls to relatives and breathless prayers; the panic, the chaos, the desperate hope that the worst is over. In the seconds and hours after impact — themselves entire lifetimes of anguish — there is only uncertainty and horror, in that order. Later, the pain will give way to anger, and public decisions will be made that will set the course of history.

I am part of that final sliver of my generation who will have any living memory of Sept. 11. The people who experienced the attacks as children are now in their mid-20s to early 30s. For those younger than that, what I am describing is an abstract historical fact, like Pearl Harbor or the Vietnam War.

Around my neighborhood in New York there are many such children who have started the new school year. I see them walking to school in the morning, hand-in-hand with their parents, chattering happily. They will not know what I know: that the world in which they are growing up is indelibly marked by this singular tragedy.

I sometimes wonder: What would I tell them if I could? They will only ever know the paranoid and terrorized world that the Sept. 11 attacks gave us. Only know getting onto an airplane as a hellish experience. The hyper-militarized borders and selective detentions and enhanced interrogations, all to be taken as ordinary. The constant surveillance of the national security state. The endless secret wars, waged in the cover of night, in distant places where the victims are invisible.

Because these children will hold blue passports, they may never fully understand the extent to which Sept. 11 further shackled the vast swaths of the world not so fortunate, people born to the wrong countries, who will be sent to the back of the line for as long as they live.

I might tell them a few things my parents were not able to tell me.

At first, there were unlawful detentions and deportations of undocumented people. Soon, a Republican president was deceiving the country and the world into war in Iraq that would lead directly to the chaos and racial hatreds we see today.

Grand proclamations about an “axis of evil”prefaced wars that killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs and brown people, human beings tabulated as mere casualties, the sanctity of their lives incinerated just like the twin towers. The government tortured people and held them in secret prisons.

And then, the double tragedy: young American soldiers — the Sept. 11 generation of heroes — were sent to their early deaths because the attacks on America were hijacked for political ends by people in Washington.

Violence was done not just to bodies, but to language as well, and the word “terrorism” became a catchall phrase used to indict individuals on accusations alone. You had to choose a side: Were you with us, or with the terrorists? The outright manipulation of the people — assisted at times by a credulous media — all coarsened the country, turning a once proud and optimistic nation into a cynical and polarized place. A spiritual pallor descended over America.

If the United States were to have deliberately tried to make the worst possible foreign policy choices in the wake of Sept. 11, the results would have been only a little more disastrous than what actually happened. America invaded one country that had nothing to do with the attacks, and was drawn into a conflict with a tribal-extremist group of another country that could go on in perpetuity.

We were told that America would make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbored them. But 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and there is credible evidence that at least parts of the Saudi government — business partners of both the Bush and Trump families — were aware of the coming attacks. Nothing but more business deals were done.

There was a hidden cost to all this enormous energy expended on war and bombings. Not just the refugees or the cages or the guarantee of tomorrow’s terrorists. Not just the racism and xenophobia internalized by brown-skinned children who became adults in the shadows of this mass tragedy. All the policy focus on war meant there was too little time spent on the cataclysmic challenges of the 21st century: climate change and wealth inequality, both of which will plague our generation long after the warmongers have disappeared.

This is not to exculpate the terrorists or their ideology. For them, I reserve a special fury, just as their actions induce in me a special shame. When I think of Islamists monopolizing and weaponizing a great religion, I am filled with rage — rage at the audacity to shout Allah’s name while sending innocent people to their deaths; rage at the perversion of so many minds by their religious leaders; rage at the reality of living in a brown body that is stereotyped, misperceived and disfigured beyond my recognition — and there is nothing I can do to save it. This is the world Sept. 11 gave us.

Anniversaries safeguard our memories, forcing us to reckon with a past quickly receding into history. Anniversaries also require us to tell stories — especially uncomfortable stories — so that the young ones know something of the world that made them. Years will go by. New memories will replace old ones. The wounds may fade, but their scars will deepen over time.

Those blue lights continue to shimmer in the darkness. New York shimmers. And 18 years later, I am still in mourning, and perhaps always will be, for the worlds that went up in smoke on that September day.

Omer Aziz ( @omeraziz12 ) is the author of the forthcoming book, “Brown Boy: A Story of Race, Religion, and Inheritance.”

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