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.”
I will never forget how stunned I was by that. While we were waiting for inspiration and asking what we could do for our country, the answer was: go shopping. Wtf.
I am so sick of the superficial coverage of 911. Why did they do it is a question sorely lacking. Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, to retaliate against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and to force the U.S. to stop supporting governments in the region. Osama bin Laden and other group leaders stated their primary motives in public messages and fatwas (religious rulings): U.S. Military Presence: They opposed U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (home to Islam's holiest sites) after the 1991 Gulf War.
Motives for the September 11 attacks: They protested strong U.S. military and financial backing of Israel, especially regarding the treatment of Palestinians. Middle Eastern Governments: They wanted to overthrow secular or royal governments in the Muslim world (such as Saudi Arabia) and viewed U.S. financial and military support as the main shield keeping those leaders in power. Sanctions and Interventions: They cited U.S. military actions and economic sanctions against Iraq, as well as interventions in places like Somalia.
Their Strategic Goal: Al-Qaeda believed that striking the United States on its own soil would cause the U.S. to withdraw its military forces and stop supporting Middle Eastern regimes. They hoped this would weaken those local governments and allow Al-Qaeda to establish strict fundamentalist rule across the region. Instead, the attacks led to the U.S. declaring a "Global War on Terrorism" and invading Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda was based.
• Some analysts distinguish between al-Qaeda's stated grievances (the ones you listed) and its deeper ideological goal of restoring a transnational caliphate — the political grievances were partly a recruitment and legitimacy tool layered on top of that broader aim
• The 1998 fatwa "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" (issued by bin Laden and allied figures) is usually treated as the clearest single statement of these combined grievances, framing attacks on Americans as a religious obligation
None of this was secret. Al-Qaeda often publicized this and previous attacks on USS Cole Occurring less than a year before the September 11 attacks, the bombing of the USS Cole is widely recognized as a major precursor and a stark warning of al-Qaeda's growing operational reach against U.S. military forces. Then A truck bomb explodes in the parking garage of the World Trade Center (WTC) killing six and injuring hundreds. Investigators discover the suspects have links to a network of Islamic extremists. Several people eventually convicted in the bombing are linked to the Office of Service's Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn; four of these men are connected to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who was the spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, is later convicted of conspiracy for his involvement in a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. He is sentenced to life in prison. Investigators charge Ramzi Yousef as the mastermind behind the WTC bombing and begin a worldwide manhunt. They discover immigration officials had already detained Ahmed Ajaj, a Yousef associate, when he entered the U.S. carrying terrorist training manuals. Osama bin Laden's name surfaces during the 1993 WTC investigation as a financier of the Office of Services. His name is also found on a list of individuals who was called from a safe house used by the conspirators. During the WTC bombing trial, bin Laden's name appears on a list of potential unindicted co-conspirators, but Al Qaeda is never mentioned.
However, rather than causing U.S. withdrawal, the attacks led to a much larger and longer U.S. military footprint in the region (Afghanistan for 20 years, plus the 2003 Iraq invasion), the opposite of al-Qaeda's stated strategic goal.
Not only did our intelligence agencies fail us in 9/11, it also failed the Israeli people because there is no fucking way in hell they did not know about the conversation between Netanyahu and Al Zayed. You’d have to be deaf dumb and blind to ever want either of these intelligence people to combine their resources. God knows the other shit they could get up to that we still don’t know what happened prior to 9/11. They are still looking for that scapegoat, apparently Libya is out of the question since “we came, we saw, he died.”
I am incensed by 9/11 memorializing, period. You know I don't mince words so here is a hurricane of them...
We were united in blindness, oblivious to all the death and destruction across the world that the US had been conducting with no consequences to the homeland from our devastating military and CIA activities overseas. For Americans, ignorant of all US foreign policy, it was just like Oct 7 when Israelis united believing themselves an innocent party assaulted by barbarians, forgetting the 75 years (now 78) of death, destruction and eviction of the Palestinians whose crime was to be present in a land desired by others, those others determined to take the land by any means necessary.
America and Israel had for decades prior to being attacked in a way that could not be hidden had been practicing a policy of might makes right, quite often together.
It is no accident that Netanyahu said he was glad 9/11 happened because it could be exploited by Israel to get Americans to believe the nonsense that Israelis have believed and still believe, the false narrative that has the IDF joyfully killing in Gaza and the settlers joyfully terrorizing the Palestinians in the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel.
America on 9/11 and Israel on Oct 7 were exactly alike in the respective countries in self-righteousness. About 3000 Americans died on 9/11, a small percentage of those killed in Central and South America and the Caribbean either from direct American intervention (send in the Marines!) where it had no business except to clear the way for business (look up Marine General Smedley Butler) or indirectly through the training and support of the militaries of foreign countries and the death squads of those militaries. Those deaths were in the Western Hemisphere only a part of American carnage across the globe.
Israel likewise went on a rampage after Oct 7 not only killing 73000 Palestinians and counting but killing Lebanese, Syrians and anyone else in a "7 front war" that has delighted Netanyahu with the great majority of Israelis behind him. After Oct 7, not a word was said about the prior "mowing the grass" operations of all out attack on Gaza by Israel that started at the end of 2009 and killed Palestinians far beyond the number of Israelis who died on Oct. 7.
America learned nothing from 9/11 just as Israel learned nothing from Oct 7. Both reacted the same way with the blood lust that GW Bush said he felt after the towers fell. Since then add in the thousands of dead Afghans pointlessly killed in pursuit of one man who left the country to be found in Pakistan years later, the dead Iraqis pointlessly killed in pursuit of one man who was no threat to the US, and now in progress the dead Iranians killed by America and Israel in service to the dream of Netanyahu who outrageously preached to Congress against Obama's peaceful JCPOA that Trump tore up in favor of letting blood flow in a pointless and expensive war he started.
Both 9/11 and Oct 7 were defensive, desperate acts that screamed, "STOP WHAT YOU HAVE DONE AND ARE DOING!" The ongoing Israeli slaughter has opened American eyes to the foundation of Israel in ethnic superiority and cleansing, its borders not formally declared to this day as it expands in an ocean of blood with the outrageously hypocritical support of the land of liberty and justice for all headed by a war criminal president.
The grip of Zionism on the US that was strengthened by Israel leveraging 9/11 is being broken. The "Special Consensus" of a bought US Congress is gone. The Democratic Party is hopelessly trying to defend Israel as the American people revolt in the name of LJ4A. AIPAC is pouring unlimited wealth into our corrupt political campaign system to shore up support for Isreal, hiding behind multiple PACs that are no sooner created than outed by diligent Americans seeking freedom from Israel's grip. Larry Ellison, the Zionist who has reaped astounding wealth under LJ4A has bought CBS News to protect ethnic cleansing Israel. He has his eyes on CNN.
Will Palestine ever be free for anyone who wants to live there? It looks very uncertain as Zionism is fanaticism and will do anything to protect ethnic supremacy regardless of American Jews being free, equal, respected and protected in the US. Remember that the Confederacy, another fanaticism, went to civil war to protect slavery.
Will the US return to upholding LJ4A, escaping its current place in the sewer with Israel? The outlook for that is good and you, reader, can help it progress this November.
“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.” – Hillary Clinton, Sept. 13, 2001, at the Oval Office
“The Devil came here yesterday, right here. It still smells of sulphur today. Yesterday on this rostrum the President of the United States, whom I refer to as the Devil, talked as if he owned the world. It would be appropriate to have a psychiatrist analyse yesterday’s address by the President of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism he came to share his prescriptions for preserving the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I would even propose a title: ‘The Devil’s Recipe.’
“As Chomsky says here clearly and in depth, American imperialism is doing all it can to consolidate its hegemonistic system of domination. We cannot allow it to do that. We cannot allow the establishment and consolidation of world dictatorship. The address of the world tyrant, cynical and full of hypocrisy, shows the imperialists’ intention to control everything. They say that they want to impose a democratic model, but it is the democratic model of their own conception: the false democracy of elites, and furthermore an original democratic model imposed by bombs, bombardments and invasions. What a strange democracy! It would be necessary to revise the ideas of Aristotle and the other Greek pioneers of democracy in the face of this model, imposed by marines, invasions, aggression and bombs.” – Hugo Chavez, Sept. 20, 2006, before the UN General Assembly
*****************************************
“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.
“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.”
Stuttgart is in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg, bordering France and Switzerland. What is a United States Navy officer doing there? Why does the United States have a European Command?
**************************************
This country suffered on the order of 3,000 dead on 9/11, and more than a further 9,000 for related illnesses as of 2026. The reasons given by Ben Laden for the attacks were U.S. military presence on Muslim land, repression of Muslim populations by regimes supported by the United States, and United States support for Israel.
Credible estimates of Palestinians directly killed by Israel are in the range of 10-000 to 15,000 for the period 1947-49, the Nakba, and 1,100 1987-1993, the First Intifada. Figures for those who died as a result of poor nutrition, illness, lack of medical care, torture, and murder are not included, nor similarly for the numbers of Lebanese, Syrians, and others for those periods.
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.
Bravo! And fuck Hillary Clinton too!(maybe not)
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.”
I will never forget how stunned I was by that. While we were waiting for inspiration and asking what we could do for our country, the answer was: go shopping. Wtf.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/previously-classified-911-documents-released-cia-25th-anniversary-atta-rcna597262.
I am so sick of the superficial coverage of 911. Why did they do it is a question sorely lacking. Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, to retaliate against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and to force the U.S. to stop supporting governments in the region. Osama bin Laden and other group leaders stated their primary motives in public messages and fatwas (religious rulings): U.S. Military Presence: They opposed U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (home to Islam's holiest sites) after the 1991 Gulf War.
Motives for the September 11 attacks: They protested strong U.S. military and financial backing of Israel, especially regarding the treatment of Palestinians. Middle Eastern Governments: They wanted to overthrow secular or royal governments in the Muslim world (such as Saudi Arabia) and viewed U.S. financial and military support as the main shield keeping those leaders in power. Sanctions and Interventions: They cited U.S. military actions and economic sanctions against Iraq, as well as interventions in places like Somalia.
Their Strategic Goal: Al-Qaeda believed that striking the United States on its own soil would cause the U.S. to withdraw its military forces and stop supporting Middle Eastern regimes. They hoped this would weaken those local governments and allow Al-Qaeda to establish strict fundamentalist rule across the region. Instead, the attacks led to the U.S. declaring a "Global War on Terrorism" and invading Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda was based.
• Some analysts distinguish between al-Qaeda's stated grievances (the ones you listed) and its deeper ideological goal of restoring a transnational caliphate — the political grievances were partly a recruitment and legitimacy tool layered on top of that broader aim
• The 1998 fatwa "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" (issued by bin Laden and allied figures) is usually treated as the clearest single statement of these combined grievances, framing attacks on Americans as a religious obligation
None of this was secret. Al-Qaeda often publicized this and previous attacks on USS Cole Occurring less than a year before the September 11 attacks, the bombing of the USS Cole is widely recognized as a major precursor and a stark warning of al-Qaeda's growing operational reach against U.S. military forces. Then A truck bomb explodes in the parking garage of the World Trade Center (WTC) killing six and injuring hundreds. Investigators discover the suspects have links to a network of Islamic extremists. Several people eventually convicted in the bombing are linked to the Office of Service's Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn; four of these men are connected to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who was the spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, is later convicted of conspiracy for his involvement in a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. He is sentenced to life in prison. Investigators charge Ramzi Yousef as the mastermind behind the WTC bombing and begin a worldwide manhunt. They discover immigration officials had already detained Ahmed Ajaj, a Yousef associate, when he entered the U.S. carrying terrorist training manuals. Osama bin Laden's name surfaces during the 1993 WTC investigation as a financier of the Office of Services. His name is also found on a list of individuals who was called from a safe house used by the conspirators. During the WTC bombing trial, bin Laden's name appears on a list of potential unindicted co-conspirators, but Al Qaeda is never mentioned.
However, rather than causing U.S. withdrawal, the attacks led to a much larger and longer U.S. military footprint in the region (Afghanistan for 20 years, plus the 2003 Iraq invasion), the opposite of al-Qaeda's stated strategic goal.
jesus, ken...
?
Don't miss Robert Reich's post today, with the video of Russ Feingold's speech on Oct 25, 2001.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-lone-vote-against-the-patriot
Bush managed to mix cowardice and incompetence into a stew unseen since trump rode the meal truck
Not only did our intelligence agencies fail us in 9/11, it also failed the Israeli people because there is no fucking way in hell they did not know about the conversation between Netanyahu and Al Zayed. You’d have to be deaf dumb and blind to ever want either of these intelligence people to combine their resources. God knows the other shit they could get up to that we still don’t know what happened prior to 9/11. They are still looking for that scapegoat, apparently Libya is out of the question since “we came, we saw, he died.”
Fuck them all.
A good essay, Ken, as usual.
I am incensed by 9/11 memorializing, period. You know I don't mince words so here is a hurricane of them...
We were united in blindness, oblivious to all the death and destruction across the world that the US had been conducting with no consequences to the homeland from our devastating military and CIA activities overseas. For Americans, ignorant of all US foreign policy, it was just like Oct 7 when Israelis united believing themselves an innocent party assaulted by barbarians, forgetting the 75 years (now 78) of death, destruction and eviction of the Palestinians whose crime was to be present in a land desired by others, those others determined to take the land by any means necessary.
America and Israel had for decades prior to being attacked in a way that could not be hidden had been practicing a policy of might makes right, quite often together.
It is no accident that Netanyahu said he was glad 9/11 happened because it could be exploited by Israel to get Americans to believe the nonsense that Israelis have believed and still believe, the false narrative that has the IDF joyfully killing in Gaza and the settlers joyfully terrorizing the Palestinians in the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel.
America on 9/11 and Israel on Oct 7 were exactly alike in the respective countries in self-righteousness. About 3000 Americans died on 9/11, a small percentage of those killed in Central and South America and the Caribbean either from direct American intervention (send in the Marines!) where it had no business except to clear the way for business (look up Marine General Smedley Butler) or indirectly through the training and support of the militaries of foreign countries and the death squads of those militaries. Those deaths were in the Western Hemisphere only a part of American carnage across the globe.
Israel likewise went on a rampage after Oct 7 not only killing 73000 Palestinians and counting but killing Lebanese, Syrians and anyone else in a "7 front war" that has delighted Netanyahu with the great majority of Israelis behind him. After Oct 7, not a word was said about the prior "mowing the grass" operations of all out attack on Gaza by Israel that started at the end of 2009 and killed Palestinians far beyond the number of Israelis who died on Oct. 7.
America learned nothing from 9/11 just as Israel learned nothing from Oct 7. Both reacted the same way with the blood lust that GW Bush said he felt after the towers fell. Since then add in the thousands of dead Afghans pointlessly killed in pursuit of one man who left the country to be found in Pakistan years later, the dead Iraqis pointlessly killed in pursuit of one man who was no threat to the US, and now in progress the dead Iranians killed by America and Israel in service to the dream of Netanyahu who outrageously preached to Congress against Obama's peaceful JCPOA that Trump tore up in favor of letting blood flow in a pointless and expensive war he started.
Both 9/11 and Oct 7 were defensive, desperate acts that screamed, "STOP WHAT YOU HAVE DONE AND ARE DOING!" The ongoing Israeli slaughter has opened American eyes to the foundation of Israel in ethnic superiority and cleansing, its borders not formally declared to this day as it expands in an ocean of blood with the outrageously hypocritical support of the land of liberty and justice for all headed by a war criminal president.
The grip of Zionism on the US that was strengthened by Israel leveraging 9/11 is being broken. The "Special Consensus" of a bought US Congress is gone. The Democratic Party is hopelessly trying to defend Israel as the American people revolt in the name of LJ4A. AIPAC is pouring unlimited wealth into our corrupt political campaign system to shore up support for Isreal, hiding behind multiple PACs that are no sooner created than outed by diligent Americans seeking freedom from Israel's grip. Larry Ellison, the Zionist who has reaped astounding wealth under LJ4A has bought CBS News to protect ethnic cleansing Israel. He has his eyes on CNN.
Will Palestine ever be free for anyone who wants to live there? It looks very uncertain as Zionism is fanaticism and will do anything to protect ethnic supremacy regardless of American Jews being free, equal, respected and protected in the US. Remember that the Confederacy, another fanaticism, went to civil war to protect slavery.
Will the US return to upholding LJ4A, escaping its current place in the sewer with Israel? The outlook for that is good and you, reader, can help it progress this November.
“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.” – Hillary Clinton, Sept. 13, 2001, at the Oval Office
“The Devil came here yesterday, right here. It still smells of sulphur today. Yesterday on this rostrum the President of the United States, whom I refer to as the Devil, talked as if he owned the world. It would be appropriate to have a psychiatrist analyse yesterday’s address by the President of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism he came to share his prescriptions for preserving the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I would even propose a title: ‘The Devil’s Recipe.’
“As Chomsky says here clearly and in depth, American imperialism is doing all it can to consolidate its hegemonistic system of domination. We cannot allow it to do that. We cannot allow the establishment and consolidation of world dictatorship. The address of the world tyrant, cynical and full of hypocrisy, shows the imperialists’ intention to control everything. They say that they want to impose a democratic model, but it is the democratic model of their own conception: the false democracy of elites, and furthermore an original democratic model imposed by bombs, bombardments and invasions. What a strange democracy! It would be necessary to revise the ideas of Aristotle and the other Greek pioneers of democracy in the face of this model, imposed by marines, invasions, aggression and bombs.” – Hugo Chavez, Sept. 20, 2006, before the UN General Assembly
*****************************************
“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.
“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.”
Stuttgart is in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg, bordering France and Switzerland. What is a United States Navy officer doing there? Why does the United States have a European Command?
**************************************
This country suffered on the order of 3,000 dead on 9/11, and more than a further 9,000 for related illnesses as of 2026. The reasons given by Ben Laden for the attacks were U.S. military presence on Muslim land, repression of Muslim populations by regimes supported by the United States, and United States support for Israel.
Credible estimates of Palestinians directly killed by Israel are in the range of 10-000 to 15,000 for the period 1947-49, the Nakba, and 1,100 1987-1993, the First Intifada. Figures for those who died as a result of poor nutrition, illness, lack of medical care, torture, and murder are not included, nor similarly for the numbers of Lebanese, Syrians, and others for those periods.