9/11: Twenty-five years

Today was the 25th anniversary of the Islamic attacks on America. We pause to remember the husbands and wives, sons and daughters who died that day and in the years since in the pursuit of the evil ideology that inspired and motivated the attacks.

Tonight over dinner, I shared my memories of 9/11 with my younger two children, who are among the third of the American population today who are not old enough to have any memory of the events. I brought to the table a commemorative model of the World Trade Center that was given to our family as a memorial and a token of appreciation from the family of Jayesh Shah. Jay Shah was a Memorial High School and University of Tulsa alumnus who had only earlier that year moved from Houston to New York City to take the post as vice president for technology for Cantor Fitzgerald's eSpeed division in the upper floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Please take a moment to say a prayer for Jay's family, who still deeply miss their brother, son, husband, and father. About 30 members of the Shah family returned to the National 9/11 Memorial, participating once again in the reading of the names of the dead. In 2022, Jay's daughter Nikita told the Associated Press that the family comes back for the annual commemorations to be "around people who kind of experienced the same type of grief and the same feelings after 9/11." The town of Edgewater, New Jersey, where the Shah family lived in 2001, was to hold a 25th anniversary commemoration in memory of Jay and two other Edgewater residents who perished in the attack.

This 2002 story from the Houston Chronicle tells about Jay's family and their desperate search through the streets of New York for hopeful news that never came. In 2006, the Shah family presented a memorial flag, made up of the names of those who died, to the children's elementary school in Katy, Texas. In 2016, Jay's daughter Sonia, then a senior at Baylor University, spoke to the Associated Press about how the death of her father has motivated her to serve refugees.

I've come across many thoughtful essays and remembrances this past week:

Julie Neidlinger boarded a westbound train on September 10, 2001, and she ponders the contrast between all the good of the day before and the day of the disaster.

The tenth is always good. It is the day before. The day before someone you loved died. The day before you lost your job. The day before the accident. The day before the assault. The day before you get the diagnosis. The day before the bad news, the truth revealed, the hopes crushed. The day before your entire life collapses.

The tenth was good, but I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know the eleventh was coming, so I wasted the value of the tenth. The tenth is worth more than all the gold in the world once you find yourself in the eleventh.

But, Julie notes, the eleventh is not the end of the story, just as Good Friday was not the end of that story.

Mary Katherine Ham remembers the children on the planes who died on 9/11, including preschoolers heading to Disneyland and three eleven-year-olds who had won a trip with National Geographic to the National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara. She writes:

The hijackers of both planes would have seen these children in the waiting area and in their seats. Neither flight was full and it would have been obvious. But to them, the sacrifice of toddlers was part of a pious religious observance, by which they would go to paradise for the punch they landed against Western Civilization by blowing up children going to Disneyland. In a final act of anti-Western, anti-Semitic, Islamist fanaticism, they bathed ritually, read the Qur'an, prayed together, and murdered these babies.

(Thread captured here.)

She also calls attention to comments made by Ramzi Kassem, blaming American foreign policy for the attack less than a week after it happened. Today Kassem is chief counsel to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Ham comments:

The intellectual father of radical Islam and [Al-Qaeda] was inspired by what he considered the grotesque green lawns, attractive women, and "tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists" of the scandalous sock hops of Greeley, CO in 1949, but go on, counselor.

She quotes Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian who called for violent jihad against modernity and the West. Qutb was a graduate student in the United States in the 1940s. He was scandalized by a sock hop at a church in Greeley, Colorado:

The dance floor was lit with red and yellow and blue lights, and with a few white lamps. And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.

David von Drehle, writing in the Smithsonian magazine, traces the influence of Qutb on Osama bin Laden.

Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept, has published a "9/11 Conspiracy Debunker's Guide," in which he summarizes the evidence rebutting the various claims that 9/11 was a false flag attack, that the World Trade Center was felled by a controlled demolition, that the Pentagon wasn't hit by an aircraft, that Jews were warned to stay away from the World Trade Center, among other claims.

So here is the short pocket guide I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time. It is not a comprehensive long-form refutation of each theory and nuance raised in the past quarter century but is instead a primer that will hopefully serve as a starting point for rational debate about what happened on 9/11. Also, it is not a defense of the government's account. I have spent a career criticizing that, and I'll get to where it fails later. First, however, I want to provide a method for sorting the claims.

If you'd prefer a video version, Posner was interviewed last week on PragerU's The Brief.

Posner also delves into the open questions concerning the involvement of Saudi royals in supporting the attacks.

There is a real, documented, evidentiary case about foreign government involvement in 9/11. It is not on YouTube. It is in a federal courthouse in Manhattan....

In Why America Slept, the final chapter is about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be one of al-Qaeda's most senior figures. He was captured wounded in Faisalabad in March 2002, and I broke the story in my book about his questioning under a false-flag operation in which American personnel posed as Saudi security officers. Instead of being afraid of being in "Saudi" custody, he was relieved and asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. He gave them a private home number and a cell number from memory. That was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, King Fahd's nephew and the head of the Kingdom's largest media company. The telephone numbers were real. Pressed further, Zubaydah named two more Saudi princes and the chief of Pakistan's air force as his high-level contacts. He again gave their telephone numbers from memory and said that two of the men had known that a major operation was coming against America. One investigator told me that Zubaydah's monologue was the Rosetta Stone of 9/11.

Within roughly a year all four were dead....

Posner posted a clip from today's reading of the names of the dead. 9/11 widow Terry Strada "called out Saudi Arabia's role, the broken promises, and a string of administrations that protected the Kingdom instead of helping to deliver justice for the families."

Somewhat related, Steve Sailer posted excerpts from articles he wrote during the 2000 presidential election about pledges both George W. Bush and Al Gore made to eliminate ethnic profiling of air travelers, a gesture to appease Arab Americans who were, at that time, majority Christian. At 3 pm on 9/11/2001, President Bush was due to meet at the White House with representatives of Arab-American and Muslim organizations to discuss this and related policies involving deportation. Waller, who was working in an office sublet from Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, gives his eyewitness account that the meeting went ahead without Bush, who had taken refuge at Barksdale AFB. The meeting was moved to Grover Norquist's conference room, and attendees included members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sami al-Arian of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who "was later tried and convicted of terrorism-related charges, served some prison time, and was deported." Waller says that Norquist credited al-Arian for turning out the votes in Tampa's Muslim community to give Bush a narrow win in Florida.

The staff of Legal Insurrection remembers where they were on 9/11. Jane Coleman recalls a visit to the World Trade Center with her husband Ron Coleman and their sons just two months earlier, where she was haunted by fears of a recurrence of the 1993 attack.

Ron Coleman has re-posted on X his memories of being in midtown Manhattan during the attack, the confusion of the day, the parade of refugees walking north from the zone of destruction, and the journey to get back to his car, across the river in New Jersey, and atop the Palisades.

(Ten years ago Ron published his memories in five parts on his blog, Likelihood of Success. Part 1: When the planes hit; Part 2: The confusion of the day; Part 3: Starting the journey home; Part 4: The walk to the river and Part 5: The ferry, the stairs, and home.)

Some items from past anniversaries worth revisiting:

Jennifer Senior published a moving feature story in the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic: "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind." McIlvaine was her brother's roommate in college and apartment-mate on September 11, 2001. She traces the way his mother, father, brother, and fiancee have each dealt with their grief and with the notes and ephemera he left behind.

Tom Junod's story in Esquire from 2016 is worth re-reading: "The Falling Man: An unforgettable story." It is the story of the famous photograph of a man who has jumped or fallen from the World Trade Center, plunging headlong, vertically through the air, paralleling the vertical lines of the two towers. Junod pursues the photographer (who also photographed the dying Robert F. Kennedy, the photographs, and the mystery of the identity of the man in the photograph.

...the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky--falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame--the Falling Man--became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

Bookworm Room remembers Rick Rescorla, head of security of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who anticipated another attack after the 1993 bombing, relentlessly drilled employees in evacuation procedures, and on the day, guided the 2,700 workers to safety, losing only six, including himself and two members of his team, who went back in the building one last time to make sure they had everyone out. Powerline has a tribute to Rick Rescorla, with more about his earlier life as a soldier in Vietnam and links to other tributes. I learned today from Parker Thune that Rescorla, originally from Cornwall, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Oklahoma. A commenter said that Rescorla was in the Oklahoma National Guard and was a tough TAC officer when the commenter's father attended Officer Candidate School there. Does OU have any memorial honoring Rescorla?

In 2017, Yahya Cholil Staquf, the head of the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, the country with the largest population of Muslims, told an interviewer that the West needs to acknowledge the connection between orthodox Islam and violence:

Western politicians should stop pretending that extremism and terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There is a clear relationship between fundamentalism, terrorism, and the basic assumptions of Islamic orthodoxy. So long as we lack consensus regarding this matter, we cannot gain victory over fundamentalist violence within Islam.

Radical Islamic movements are nothing new. They've appeared again and again throughout our own history in Indonesia. The West must stop ascribing any and all discussion of these issues to "Islamophobia." Or do people want to accuse me -- an Islamic scholar -- of being an Islamophobe too?...

Too many Muslims view civilization, and the peaceful co-existence of people of different faiths, as something they must combat. Many Europeans can sense this attitude among Muslims.

There's a growing dissatisfaction in the West with respect to Muslim minorities, a growing fear of Islam. In this sense, some Western friends of mine are "Islamophobic." They're afraid of Islam. To be honest, I understand their fear ... The West cannot force Muslims to adopt a moderate interpretation of Islam. But Western politicians should stop telling us that fundamentalism and violence have nothing to do with traditional Islam. That is simply wrong.