It almost seems like yesterday

9/11 took thousands of lives from us - and ultimately much more

Twenty-five years ago this morning was as beautiful in central Arkansas as it was in New York. Sunny, cool, and crisp. On my daily commute from Conway to Little Rock, I usually had the radio tuned to NPR. But that morning I listened to music on my CD player and thought about my grandfather who had been gone for four years that month. The 10^th would have been his 80^th birthday. I was 29.

Before I could step off the elevator onto the second floor of my building, two coworkers got on with news that didn’t make much sense. One said a plane had struck a tower of the World Trade Center in New York and that it had knocked another, smaller plane into the other tower. That’s what I remember him saying. He probably didn’t say that exactly, but whatever was said, both of them were as confused as I was about what was happening.

They were headed up to the fourth floor to watch the news on several TVs mounted in a dining area overlooking the Arkansas River, and I decided to go with them. It was a beautiful stretch of the river where we regularly saw a resident bald eagle swoop down from the Emerald Park cliffs on the side opposite and snatch fish.

When we arrived, a small crowd had gathered. Peter Jennings of ABC News was speaking in that calm, Canadian-accented voice of his, but my mind couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. They were showing a replay of United 175’s terrifying 540-mile-per-hour flight directly into the face of the South Tower (the “second plane”), which had occurred a short time before, but I couldn’t process it. It looked like something from a movie. For the first few minutes I thought I was watching some computer-generated simulation.

United Airlines Flight 175 approaches WTC2, the South Tower, at 9:03 ET, as WTC1 smolders from the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 seventeen minutes earlier. (Robert Clark - INSTITUTE)

We were still there some time later, letting it sink in that this was an apparent terrorist attack, when first one tower, and then the next, collapsed into pulverized dust, the room silent except for a few gasps, and again I experienced the confusion of the unthinkable unfolding before my eyes. I knew I had just watched thousands die.

Millions have similar recollections. The Oklahoma City Bombing six years earlier had given us a taste of what this senseless depravity felt like, but this was my generation’s Pearl Harbor. Reporters called it that from Day One. You knew you’d remember where you were and what you were doing for the rest of your life.

The days that followed were a whirlwind of grief, anger, fear, and foreboding. I was numb and depressed remembering the scenes of people falling. It was hard to concentrate on anything productive. Everyone wondered where this was leading.

Gradually, these feelings began to be replaced by a collective mood of patriotism on a mass scale. Whereas before American flags had mostly flown atop public buildings or at the homes of military veterans, they now began to appear everywhere. People from the Deep South now looked upon New York as reverently as they would their own state capitals had the attacks occurred there. We were all in this together, and we would avenge the fallen whose heartbreaking stories were being recounted on TV almost hourly. Ours was a righteous anger.

But the good feelings of human compassion and shared patriotism that followed the initial shock and sadness slowly gave way to something darker. If there was any doubt 9/11 would become a pivot point in global history, those doubts were soon erased.

An infamous incident recounted by former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark revealed the Bush White House’s sweeping military plans already taking shape in the days following the attacks. A general that Clark visited at the Pentagon days after its partial destruction told him: “we’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” When asked why, the general said they didn’t know what to do about terrorists, but they did know how to topple governments: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.” Upon Clark’s return weeks later, it had expanded into a plan to “take out seven countries in five years”, namely Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

(Department of Defence/ Tech Sgt Cedric H. Rudisill)

Congress quickly passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) authorizing the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against nations, organizations, and persons that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11th attacks or harbored such organizations or persons. The AUMF, which is still in effect, has been used to authorize not only the fruitless 20-year Afghan War, where the Taliban is still in power, but also numerous other military campaigns in the Middle East that have destabilized that region for decades.

Barack Obama’s massive expansion of the global drone war and his dropping of 26,000 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries in 2016 alone, all after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, was the next shoe to fall and proved that the Democrats were also in the pocket of the National Security state (in case there had been any doubt). The CFOs of General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, and a dozen other arms makers could sleep soundly.

On the home front, an insidious piece of legislation already largely crafted by the Deep State’s drafters and ready to go before the first plane took off – the USA PATRIOT Act – was dusted off and presented to a meek Congress as early as September 19th. When a few stalwart legislators tried to slow things down, a new national scare in the form of an anthrax attack on Congressmen and media personalities arrived just in time and they fell in line. It was made to look like it was the work of Islamist terrorists even though the FBI later traced the material back to the U.S. military lab at Fort Detrick. The Patriot Act became law.

The new law’s excesses, and there were many, paved the way for the massive surveillance state exposed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden that targeted not only foreigners but also Americans at home. The tools they used hoovered up and stored massive amounts of data under the mantra: “Collect it all. Know it all. Exploit it all.” The legacy of this legislation is the ubiquitous level of surveillance that the global population is subjected to today from both government and commercial interests, and the public’s almost total apathy toward it.

Though the fear and insecurity of 9/11 slowly faded over a period of months, in the ensuing 25 years America has been hit by a series of new shocks and crises that have rocked our world, one after the other. Modern history is divided into two periods: before 9/11 and after, and the two worlds they represent couldn’t be more different. The serial crises that characterize the latter have normalized emergency politics and fear-based governance, while solidifying institutional distrust. They include:

The 2008 financial crisis, which felt like such an existential threat at the time but seems relatively trivial in comparison to subsequent events.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump and the manufactured Russiagate hysteria that followed.

The 2019-21 COVID pandemic and its dehumanizing global shutdowns and coercion tactics.

The contested 2020 election and its chaotic and polarizing aftermath.

The 2022-26 Ukraine War and its senseless destruction, still ongoing despite Trump’s promises, with roots going back to a U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014.

The 2023-26 Israeli siege of Gaza and the ongoing slaughter there.

The second Trump presidency that descends further into senility and absurdity by the day.

The misguided and arrogant 2025-26 U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and the subsequent, humiliating Iran War.

As a child of the 70s and 80s, and having come of age in the 90s, I can tell you, the world didn’t use to be like this. Something snapped on that painfully beautiful September morning and it wasn’t just the steel beams of the Twin Towers. History shifted into a new, dark phase where we’re being constantly manipulated into fear and loathing of one thing after another, one person after another. The subtext is that we need ever-increasing government control and censorship to protect us. Individual freedom and access to un-curated information are seen as threats.

I don’t pretend to know what it means or to what end it’s supposed to lead. Many sane people have disconnected and focused their attention on their own worlds of children and community. Maybe that disconnection, which often leads back to real connection, contains the seed of something that will grow and save us all.

But for today, our thoughts go back to that morning.

God bless the memories of the sons and daughters lost, and bring solace for the tragedy of the sons and daughters they never had. I pray those ultimately responsible will someday be brought to justice, even though I don’t expect they will. I pray the same justice for those who used their deaths to justify the deaths of a million more across the world. The time has come.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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