The 25th anniversary of 9/11 brought back a lot of memories – and anger at what followed.
I was working at Reuters News Service, which just four months earlier had moved our office 3½ miles uptown from a building several blocks from Ground Zero. Safe in Times Square that day, I couldn’t even smell the smoke from the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers.
Still, I can’t forget what I saw and heard.
Shortly before 10 a.m., one of our reporters called Cantor Fitzgerald’s trading floor near the top of the North Tower “We’re f—king dying!” said the person who answered.
The tower collapsed at 10:28.
On the front page of a New York tabloid, a frantic young woman held a flyer with a young man’s picture and the words: “Have you seen him?” Another woman interviewed on TV said she needed her missing partner beside her now.
Several years later, a woman told me that everyone on her floor at the World Trade Center had been killed. Oversleeping that day had saved her, but she’d isolate for days every year as Sept. 11 approached.
Important as it is to remember the deaths, injuries, heartbreak and trauma from the terrorist attack, we can’t afford to forget what our government later caused by exploiting it — and laying the groundwork for the destructive path we’re on now.
A license for presidential power grabs
Just six weeks after 9/11 and with overwhelming bipartisan support, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act to grant the administration a lot more power, ostensibly to prevent similar attacks.
Civil libertarians like Robert A. Levy of the Cato Institute were worried. “If you are concerned about Fifth Amendment protection of due process, and Fourth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures,” he wrote for Liberty magazine, “then you should be deeply troubled by the looming sacrifice of civil liberties at the altar of national security.”
Investigative journalist Radley Balko says we should have heeded those warnings.
The “diminishment of civil liberties came slowly and sometimes without much outcry” under George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. But now there’s Donald Trump 2.0.
Balko’s list of Trump’s abuses of 9/11 powers includes declaring “national emergencies where none exist,” “reckless, extrajudicial executions on the high seas,” persecuting immigrants and encouraging racial profiling and harassment of Americans by the Department of Homeland “Security.”
“In the name of national security, he conflates criticism with treason, protest with terrorism, dissent with sedition,” Balko added
Invading for no reason
I don’t think most Americans objected when the government vowed to hunt down the Al Qaeda terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, but to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with them and posed no threat to us, still sickens me.
What’s most infuriating is that during the Persian Gulf War a decade earlier, Dick Cheney, who was then W’s father’s defense secretary, had told PBS that an outright invasion of the country would be “a quagmire.”
But as W.’s vice president, he appointed himself warmonger in chief by falsely linking Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda and claiming – also falsely – that the country had weapons of mass destruction. W. backed him and other like-minded White House officials, saying at one point that Hussein had tried to kill the first President Bush.
Hussein eventually was killed, but like the 9/11 victims and their families, his subjects paid a terrible price simply for living where they did.
In his documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore shows a wedding celebration, children at play, smiling women out for a stroll, men relaxing in a café and other ordinary activities in Baghdad in the days before the bombing starts.
Then we see the explosions and the wreckage. Some U.S. soldiers are proud of the destruction, but the sight of rotting corpses and maimed civilians horrifies others.
“It’s a lot more gruesome than you think,” one soldier says.
In 2023, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimated the death toll of this unwarranted invasion of Iraq and later Syria at between 550,000 and 584,000, including 4,599 U.S. service members and as many as 348,985 civilians. And it put the U.S. pricetag at $2.9 trillion, including future disability payments and medical care for wounded veterans.
A precedent for more lies and bloodshed
I wonder now whether the falsehoods that triggered the Iraq War inspired Trump to take that route in declaring his own war of choice (and ever-changing rationales for it) in Iran. Well, why not, since he lies about everything else?
So far, 18 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 800 have been injured.
In its first five months, this regime’s Middle East “excursion” cost taxpayers $37.5 billion, according to Defense/”War” Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s asked for another $67 billion in emergency funding. And for fiscal 2027, he and Trump want $1.5 trillion, in part to replenish our dangerously low weapons arsenal.
When I first heard on the morning of 9/11 that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I hoped it was an accident.
When I learned it wasn’t, my first thought was that unscrupulous politicians would milk it for all it was worth. They did, but I never thought the world would be enduring the consequences of their actions a quarter-century later.
Photo: Michael Foran, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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