What We Never Learned From 9/11 Now Jeopardizes Our Security Every Day
To contemplate the quarter-century that has passed since the 9/11 attacks, with all the momentous change that day wrought on our society, is to confront a disturbing fact: As a nation, we have learned almost nothing that episode should have taught us.
The consequence is that again we are facing extreme and even existential peril, stripped of the alliances, institutions, and experienced national security leadership that have long shielded us.
When we remember 9/11, it is imperative to honor those who died, as victims and heroes, both in the immediate conflagration of the Twin Towers and from the wave of deadly airborne carcinogens that followed their collapse. One of those heroes, a retired New York City fire captain, said on public radio that while the loss of 3,000 Americans is always noted, we rarely mention how many thousands of lives were saved that day by firefighters and other first responders who died by the hundreds. Recalling their courage and sacrifice is a sacred civic ritual.
But the interest of posterity also requires that we recall how poorly government performed at all levels before those tragic events unfolded, as well as in their aftermath.
George W. Bush, then president, did his best to rally the country and benefited mightily from that performance. He also tried to conceal the policy and intelligence blunders that probably insured the success of the attack, by resisting the 9/11 investigation and then by prevaricating in his administration’s responses. The facts were sufficiently complex to fill a bestselling book, but the underlying truth was starkly simple. He and his advisers, notably including Vice President Dick Cheney, had brushed aside loud and repeated warnings that Al Qaeda was preparing a terrorist assault on the homeland. Less than two years later they layered disaster upon disaster and lie upon lie with the invasion of Iraq.
The combination of rigid ideology, preening arrogance, and bonehead incompetence that proved disastrous then is even more evident in the Oval Office now.
The failures that resulted in catastrophe on 9/11 extended to Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York, who has so promiscuously squandered the reputation he won on that date. As the late great reporter Wayne Barrett revealed years later, Giuliani’s bungling leadership actually cost many lives of first responders – first by locating the city’s emergency response headquarters in World Trade Center 7, known to be the prime terror target since at least 1993, and by saddling cops and firefighters with radio equipment proven defective long before 9/11. He wasted money intended to improve 911 services and never updated the city’s disaster protocols, dooming hundreds as the towers collapsed.
Anyone who doubts these accusations can find the evidence in the Final Report of the National Commission on 9/11 and the 9/11 analysis prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The full indictment of Bush and Giuliani is yet to be written, with new counts continuing to be added. Just this week we learned that both federal and city officials concealed or minimized the mortal threat posed by the air around Ground Zero during the lengthy recovery and cleanup.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani released over 170,000 pages of post-9/11 documents, with internal notes and memos showing that officials knew of hazardous asbestos and cement dust levels, even as they reassured the public about the site’s safety. What those memos also reveal is a keen awareness of the potential legal liability incurred by those reiterated lies.
Aside from blaming the Bush Environmental Protection Agency, Giuliani had little to say in his defense – and has resorted to anti-Muslim bigotry instead, demanding Mamdani’s absence from 9/11 commemorations. He has disqualified himself from attending those solemn ceremonies.
Such recriminations are of limited value, unless they inform future thought and action. The election of buffoonish bankrupt businessman Donald Trump over a highly experienced and thoughtful Hillary Clinton showed how much we had forgotten about the Bush debacle only 15 years later. The reelection in 2024 of that same vacant demagogue, who knew very little and has learned nothing, displayed again the fatal amnesia that infects our national consciousness. His mad war on Iran is only the top line of his ruinous impact on American national security.
Except now the world’s perils have swollen, far beyond a cunning terrorist in the mountains of Afghanistan and his accomplices, with the development of technologies that could wipe out society – and a government that lacks any will to control them and any idea how to do so.
The angry clowns who now oversee the White House and Congress are worse than those who failed to protect us in 2001. Removing them from power is the first step toward renewed safety and survival.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is available wherever books are sold.
