Twenty-five years later, 9/11 anniversaries have devolved into a grotesque fundraising orgy for the security state.
The families commemorate their loved ones while the very security institutions that failed to prevent the attack in the first place tell triumphant war stories and warn that if we (the American people) let down our guard — by which they mean close our wallets to them — it will happen again.
“The 9/11 attack took place without warning,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio writes to his employees today, per a memo leaked to me. After opening with chest-beating (“We have hunted down the architects of the attack…”), practically all he can say is: don’t let your guard down.
When it comes to the 9/11 anniversary, fundraising has become more and more dominant. But it used to have a heart as well. In the days after the attacks, Union Square in New York disappeared under candles and handwritten notes. Flowers piled up outside firehouses that had lost entire crews. People waited in line for hours to give blood, even though, as it turned out, there would be almost no one to give it to.
The outpouring of sympathy was international, too. In Paris, Le Monde ran a front page declaring “Nous sommes tous Américains.” At Buckingham Palace, the band played the Star-Spangled Banner at the changing of the guard.
Now it’s just a naked cash grab by the national security world, who congratulate themselves for a job well done while angling for more money.
If this is all 9/11 remembrance is going to be, then I say: fuck 9/11.
Having no anniversary would be less offensive than what they’ve turned this day into.
The whole thing reminds me of those money booths on game shows, where a contestant stands inside a glass box while cash blows around them, grabbing at as many bills as they can before time runs out.
Then there’s the total lack of accountability from the security elite for what was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.
“Whether you like Dick Cheney or not, he was incredible on that day,” Matthew Waxman, a Bush National Security Council official at the time, said at a discussion panel about 9/11 at Columbia University this week.
Let’s assume that’s true. His job is to prevent attacks like these from happening in the first place!
“I think there were some things that we got wrong, but many things that we actually got quite right,” Waxman added.
Notice something about all these panels, interviews and anniversary addresses: The story always starts after the first plane hit. Never before. Nobody wants to talk about the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Or the FBI agent in Phoenix who warned about extremists training at American flight schools. Or the CIA knowing two of the future hijackers were in the country and not telling the FBI.
At that Columbia panel, Hillary Clinton recalled going to the Oval Office with Chuck Schumer two days after the attacks.
“I looked at President Bush, and I thought, you know, my gosh, my heart went out to him. I mean, just looking at his face, looking at his eyes, I thought, you know, he is now at a totally different level of responsibility for this country.”
Our political elites have turned 9/11 into an episode of The West Wing, starring themselves: the protagonists up on Mount Olympus, hitting their big cinematic moment. The families seldom figure into these stories. The nation, which has paid the greatest price in lost liberties, is not thanked or even addressed much at all.
Then she got to the money. By her account, she told Bush the first bill his team sent up had no money for New York. He asked what they needed. She said $20 billion. Bush’s answer: “You got it.”
What happened next is the part she seems to relish.
“As I was getting up to leave the Oval Office, John Warner, one of my absolutely favorite colleagues, a long-serving Republican senator who had chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, he touched me on the shoulder, and he goes, ‘Hillary, get him to say that in front of everybody again.’”
Here’s what didn’t make it into her story: Bush’s promise kicked off a fight in Washington, because the White House’s original $20 billion request was supposed to cover the entire federal response. Congress settled it by doubling the emergency package to $40 billion, with half set aside for recovery — and much of the rest flowing to the national security apparatus.
In other words, within days of the attacks, 9/11 was already a fundraising event.
These days, 9/11 anniversaries have about as much to do with the nearly 3,000 people who died as Christmas has to do with Christ.
Consider an anecdote from retired Navy Capt. Brian Cullen, who had just been posted to U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, when the planes hit.
As U.S. bases across Europe went into lockdown, Germany rallied behind America in a way that’s hard to imagine today. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pledged “unlimited solidarity.” Huge crowds filled the streets of Berlin. NATO invoked Article 5, its mutual-defense clause, for the first time in its history.
But what stuck with Cullen was closer to home: German neighbors, kids included, holding candlelight vigils outside the base gates — the same gates that usually drew anti-nuclear and anti-base protesters.
Then Washington pivoted to “you’re either with us or against us,” and the goodwill evaporated. The candles disappeared. The base walled itself off from the community around it. The alliance started to crack as the U.S. went it alone.
“Our base became a reflection of our nation: security at any cost,” Cullen writes.
That’s the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of the national security state’s soft coup over American politics, as my editor Bill Arkin laid out in his profound book American Coup.
We’ll know that coup has ended when we see flowers again.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Thank you for this. I cringe at the "Never Forget," as it seems to always be about holding a grudge/getting revenge. That's the outlook that perpetuates violence around the world.
The National Security State didn’t fail. It succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.
What sticks with me most, besides the chaos, besides the news stories that ran investigating the weird shit that happened in the weeks before and after, and the speed with which even stories in the NYTIMES were memory holed with mind bending speed was this…
The nation was traumatized, society was more cohesive than it ever had been. People wanted to help, to help each other, to do something.
Bush’s response? He told us to go shopping. “America. Open for Business.”