Tag: 9/11

The Next Wars Were Always Here

The first U.S. missiles that struck the boats in the Caribbean in early September 2025 were described by Washington as a “counter-narcotics operation,” a sterile phrase meant to dull the violence of incinerating human beings in an instant. Then came the second strike, this time on survivors already struggling to stay afloat. Once the details emerged, however, the official story began to fall apart.

Local fishermen contradicted U.S. claims. Relatives of those killed have said the men were not cartel operatives at all, but fishermen, divers, and small-scale couriers. Relatives in Trinidad and Venezuela told regional reporters their loved ones were unarmed and had no connection to Tren de Aragua, describing them instead as fathers and sons who worked the sea to support their families. Some called the U.S. narrative “impossible” and “a lie,” insisting the men were being demonized after their deaths. U.N. experts called the killings “extrajudicial.” Maritime workers noted what everyone in the region already knows: the route near Venezuela’s waters is not a fentanyl corridor into the United States. Yet the administration clung to its story, insisting these men were “narcoterrorists,” long after the facts had unraveled. Because in Washington’s post 9/11 playbook, fear is a tool. Fear is the architecture of modern American war.

The U.S. did not emerge from the Iraq War into peace or reflection. It emerged into normalization. The legal theories invented and abused after 9/11 – elastic self-defense, limitless definitions of terrorism, enemy combatants, global strike authority – did not fade. They became the backbone of a permanent war machine. These justifications supported drone wars in Pakistan, airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, the destruction of Libya, special operations in Syria, and yet another military return to Iraq. And behind every expansion of this global battlefield was a U.S. weapons industry that grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict. What we are seeing today in the Caribbean is not an isolated action; it is the extension of a militarized imperial model that treats entire regions as expendable.

The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of U.S. power.

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Zohran Mamdani branded a ‘liar’ over false claim his Muslim aunt was too scared to take the subway after 9/11

A hardline socialist who’s the favorite to be the next mayor of New York City has debunked his own story that claimed his Muslim aunt was too scared to ride the subway after 9/11.

Zohran Mamdani said Monday that he was actually referring to one of his father’s distant dead cousins, a woman he named only as Zehra. 

Mamdani, 33, made the revelation at a press conference as he sought to get ahead of the debacle ahead of the November 4 mayoral election. 

‘I was speaking about Zehra fuhi, my father’s cousin, who passed away a few years ago,’ he said. Fuhi stands for paternal aunt in Urdu and Hindi. 

Last week, Mamdani fought back tears as he told of how the September 2001 terror atrocity had left an aunt who wears a hijab too scared to use public transport in New York City. 

‘I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab,’ he said. 

But internet sleuths quickly discovered that Mamdani’s only living aunt, a woman called Masuma Mamdani, lived in Tanzania at the time of the September 2001 terror attacks.

An online photo further revealed that Masuma does not wear a headscarf. 

Relatives of 9/11 victims also criticized him over the comments, suggesting they were ‘insulting and insensitive’ and amounted to ‘lunacy.’ 

Terry Strada’s husband Tom, 41, a Cantor Fitzgerald bond broker, died after going to work on the 104th floor of the North Tower. The youngest of their three children was just four days old. 

She branded a Mamdani a ‘despicable liar’ after he changed his story on Monday.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘I find what he (Mamdani) had to say completely insulting to all of the people that suffered a horrible loss that day.

‘To compare an aunt being uncomfortable on the subway to all of these families that were murdered was just very insensitive and shows his true colors.

‘How dare he lie about 9/11 to invoke sympathy from Muslims. New York suffered horrible losses from a terrorist attack carried out by radical Islamists. He is a despicable liar and this should open everyone’s eyes to who he truly is.’

She said Mamdani should apologize, but didn’t think he would.

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How the CIA Deliberately Allowed Two 9/11 Hijackers Into the US

Tucker Carlson has a new series coming out called “The 9/11 Files”, the first episode of which I stumbled across today on Rumble. It covers how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was tracking two of the alleged hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane flown into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The CIA tracked Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar to a meeting of Al Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia, in early 2000 and knew they had visas to enter the US but “failed” to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI also “failed” to learn about the two operatives being in the country despite the pair renting a room in the home of an FBI informant.

The first episode of “The 9/11 Files”, published today, is titled “The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong“. Here’s the video description:

A former FBI agent who was embedded in the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, Mark Rossini, claims the CIA was fully aware that the 9/11 hijackers were in the United States planning an attack. Rather than inform the FBI, the CIA tried to recruit two of the hijackers for a “false-flag” operation, which quickly spiraled out of control. The failed mission raises urgent questions about government secrecy, intelligence failures, and what really happened before 9/11.

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How Tyranny Becomes Entrenched: 9/11 and the Police State’s Endless Power Grabs

hey said it was for safety. They said it was for order. They said it was for the good of the nation.

They always say it’s for something good… until it isn’t.

Nearly a quarter-century after 9/11, we are still living with the consequences of fear-driven government power grabs. What began as “temporary” measures for our security have hardened into a permanent architecture of control.

The bipartisan police-state architecture that began with 9/11 has been passed from president to president and party to party, each recycling the same justifications—safety, security, patriotism—to expand its powers at the expense of the citizenry.

So they locked down the country “for our safety.”
They expanded surveillance “for our security.”
They rounded up anyone who challenged the narrative “for the common good.”
They erased names, ideas, and histories “to prevent offense.”
They forced schools to teach only what was politically correct “for the children.”
They censored speech “for our protection.”
They targeted dissenters “to preserve peace.”
They militarized the streets and called it “law and order.”

These very abuses—once denounced when carried out by the Left—are now cheered, defended, and excused when carried out by the Right.

People who once spoke passionately about truth, freedom, and faith have now fallen silent in the face of injustice, or worse, convinced themselves that nothing is wrong. The very voices that should be warning against tyranny are instead excusing it or looking away.

This is the danger of double standards in politics: every tyranny is rationalized in the moment by its chorus of defenders.

But history teaches that what goes around comes around. If you justify it now, you’ll have no defense when the tables turn.

And yet, time and again, the lies we tell ourselves make it possible. The cult of personality. The blind loyalty to party. The belief that “our side” can’t be the villain.

It never ceases to amaze how far people will go to excuse the actions of their favorite tyrant, even when those actions are the very things they once swore to oppose.

The pattern of justifying tyranny is as old as power itself. Every abuse comes wrapped in the same excuse: we had to do it.

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US Mourns The Victims of 9/11, But What Of The Victims Of The “War On Terror”?

In a video reportedly from 2006, a young Iraqi child was captured asking a U.S. soldier why America killed his dad. The soldier being questioned responds that it wasn’t him who killed the young boy’s father. When the child continues his line of questioning, the soldier turns the question around, asking him “do you hate Americans?” and “do you want to shoot me?” Elsewhere, graffiti on a wall in Sanaa, Yemen, depicts a U.S. drone and text written in Arabic and English by a child that says “why did you kill my family.”

Thousands of miles away, Hussein Al-Marfadi, one of many Muslim men who were incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay without charge, was transferred after 12 years in detention to Slovakia — a country where he had no roots. Lamenting his predicament, he said the Americans “killed our youth in Guantánamo and then they tossed us away like garbage.”

At another notorious prison, Abu Ghraib, a prison that the U.S. took over after it destroyed and occupied the country in 2003, Iraqis were subjected to the most egregious torture at the hands of Americans. Commenting on how his experience at the prison impacted him, Talib al-Majli — an Iraqi man who was incarcerated there for 16 months and never charged with anything — stated that “To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me … The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.”

Amid the violence of the U.S.’s war on terror, these stories, and hundreds of thousands more like them, are a reminder that Muslim people and communities have been rendered disposable as a means to the U.S.’s national security ends.

Unfortunately, the violence of the war on terror, which has been marked by militarism, draconian immigration policies, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, detention, and torture has, thus far, continued unbated. This has resulted in the ongoing targeting and victimization of Muslim and other marginalized communities. Moreover, since Donald Trump began his second tenure as president, he has executed the “war on terror” with even greater fervor — expanding the post 9/11 “forever wars” and constructing new “security threats.”

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The Roots Of Trump’s Continued Wars On Terror Trace Back To 9/11

The U.S. military recently launched a plainly illegal strike on a small civilian Venezuelan boat that President Trump claims was a successful hit on “narcoterrorists.” Vice President JD Vance responded to allegations that the strike was a war crime by saying, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” insisting this was the “highest and best use of the military.”

This is only the latest troubling development in the Trump administration’s attempt to repurpose “War on Terror” mechanisms to use the military against cartels and to expedite his much vaunted mass deportation campaign, which he says is necessary because of an “invasion” at the border.

Unfortunately, more than two decades of widely-accepted, bipartisan laws and norms first laid the groundwork for this to occur.

After 9/11, the Bush administration created the Specially Designated Global Terrorists list, and Congress expanded the pre-existing Foreign Terrorist Organization list. These lists allow the executive branch, at its sole discretion, to add and remove individuals and groups to standing lists of “terrorists,” a term that is defined broadly.

The Trump administration has exercised this authority to formally designate transnational cartels as “terrorists” due in part to their role in the flow of people and drugs across the southern border into the United States. They have leveraged this designation to justify a range of actions, including deploying troops to Los Angeles and deporting immigrants to a brutal Salvadorean prison without due process.

Another post-9/11 legal invention that paved the way to what the Trump administration is doing today was the USA PATRIOT Act’s updates to immigration law that allowed deportation of not just those involved in actual violent acts of terrorism, but also those loosely associated with designated “terrorist groups,” even if those associations were peaceful and law-abiding or involuntary and a result of duress. People who have previously been excluded from the United States by these provisions include Iraqi interpreters for U.S. troops, victims of forced labor by violent armed groups in El Salvador, and even Nelson Mandela. These provisions mean that not just alleged members of cartels, but also cartel victims could be denied entry into the United States or deported if already here.

These same post-9/11 immigration law amendments also allow for revoking or denying immigration benefits to foreign nationals who “endorse or espouse” “terrorist activity,” defined broadly. The Trump administration has already revoked the visas of several immigrant students and scholars solely for their nonviolent activities criticizing the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza, as part of what they call a “zero-tolerance” policy for terrorism. The administration has primarily leaned on an older and more obscure provision of immigration law to carry out these attacks on immigrants’ free speech rights. But if current efforts are blocked by courts, or they wish to go further, post-9/11 immigration law may give them the tools to justify doing so.

The original decision to treat the 9/11 attacks not as crime but as warfare, and to launch a literal “war on terror” in response, remains the primary post-9/11 legal innovation on which so many abuses are made possible. Under this global war paradigm, the Obama administration carried out ruthless drone killings, including one that targeted a U.S. citizen, and justified the strikes with a mish-mash of legal standards that applied rules of war outside of actual war zones, and expansively interpreted what constitutes an “imminent threat” and resulting “self-defense” powers.

Every post-9/11 president has claimed wide authority to use military force so long as it serves a vague “national interest.” We can see echoes of this in the Trump administration’s insistence that the small Venezuelan boat blown up by the U.S. military posed an “immediate threat to the United States,” that the strike complied with the laws of war, and was “in defense of vital U.S. national interests.”

Commentators are entirely correct to denounce these assertions of legal authority. But policymakers have spent more than two decades accepting a war paradigm against whomever presidents determine to be “terrorist,” making it politically and legally all the more difficult to push back against what the Trump administration is doing now.

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Newly Declassified FBI/CIA Files Reveal Two Saudi Government Operatives “May Have Served as an Advance Team” for 9/11 Hijackers — Official Narrative in Tatters as Timeline Shifts Back to 1998

For over two decades, the American people have been told a carefully curated story about the September 11th attacks.

Now, newly declassified FBI and CIA records are shredding the “official narrative,” revealing that Saudi government operatives may have been on U.S. soil as early as December 1998, three years before nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered.

Exclusive reporting from veteran national security journalist Catherine Herridge exposes that two Saudi government employees, Mutaeb al-Sudairy and Adel al-Sadhan, were not mere tourists.

Instead, they were caught on video in 1999 surveying Washington, D.C. landmarks later listed as potential al-Qaeda targets, including the White House and Capitol.

The Gateway Pundit reported in 2024 that in the CBS video, Omar al-Bayoumi, who the FBI says was a Saudi operative, was seen casing the US Capitol in Washington, DC, the likely target of the Flight 93 operation that was thwarted that day by American passengers and heroes.

The video was found by British police during a raid on Bayoumi’s UK apartment days after the 9/11 attacks.

According to ProPublica, Bayoumi was joined on the trip by two Saudi clerics, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy.

They were so-called propagators, emissaries of the Islamic Affairs Ministry sent to proselytize abroad. U.S. investigators later linked them to a handful of Islamist militants.

Former FBI veteran and Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, William R. Evanina, confirmed to Herridge that the two were here in the US for a reason.

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Mamdani for years used July 4 to promote self-styled ‘Taliban’ rapper who ‘worshipped’ 9/11 hijacker

New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani for years marked the Fourth of July by sharing a photo of a rap group that is infamous for its glorification of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and for its praise for one of the 9/11 hijackers.

Mamdani wished his social media followers a “Happy 4th” on Independence Day in 2021, 2023, and 2024 — less than one year before the failed rapper and socialist activist became the Democratic Party’s nominee — in tweets accompanied by a picture from a music video of the two lead singers of the controversial rap group called The Diplomats (also known as Dipset), who were famous — and infamous — for some of their pro-terrorism-tinged lyrics.

Mamdani, a longtime rap aficionado who took a largely unsuccessful stab at being a rapper himself, has tweeted “Happy 4th” exactly four times — sharing the picture of the pro-terrorist Dipset rap group on the Fourth of July in 2021, 2023, and 2024 — and then, only after becoming the Democratic nominee, sent out a much more anodyne, standard-fare, politician-style tweet in 2025 wishing his followers “Happy 4th” featuring pictures from a Democratic Club BBQ held in Queens.

Rappers “worship” ringleader of 9/11 hijackings that murdered almost 3,000 people

The Harlem-based rap group’s own lyrics from the 2003 album that Mamdani repeatedly promoted describe the hip-hop collective as the “Dipset Taliban”, “Harlem’s own Taliban”, and “Harlem’s Al-Qaeda” and described the group’s songs as “9/11 music” — while one of the group’s main singers compared himself favorably to Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and declared in a song that “I worship the prophet” Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorist hijackers on 9/11 and who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

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Appeals Court Throws Out Plea Deal for 9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad

In 2024, The Gateway Pundit reported that then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the revocation of a plea deal previously reached with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, along with two of his co-conspirators, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.

This decision effectively reinstated the possibility of the death penalty for the trio.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that the plea deal, reached between the Convening Authority for Military Commissions and the defendants and signed by retired Brig. Gen. Susan K. Escallier, was intended to ‘mitigate’ the legal repercussions for the accused while allowing them to avoid capital punishment.

On Friday, a federal appeals court upheld Austin’s decision to undo the plea deal.

Fox News reports:

A divided federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Friday tossed out an agreement that would have allowed 9/11 terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to plead guilty in another failed effort to end a years-long legal saga surrounding the military prosecution of men held at Guantánamo Bay.

The 2-1 D.C. Circuit appeals court decision upheld then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to undo the plea deal approved by military lawyers and senior Pentagon staff.

The deal would have carried life without parole sentences for Mohammed and two co-defendants, potentially taking capital punishment off the table.

The original plea deal garnered outrage from various political factions and advocacy groups who argued that any leniency shown to those involved in the 9/11 attacks undermines justice for the nearly 3,000 victims and their families.

In making his decision, Austin wrote, “I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009.”

“Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself. Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-referenced case,” he added.

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Gavin Newsom Awards Antiterrorism Grant to Mosque Linked to 9/11 Hijackers, Pro-Hamas Cleric

California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) recently awarded taxpayer funds under a state antiterrorism program to a San Diego mosque that has been linked to 9/11 hijackers and whose imam defended the Hamas attack on Israel.

Newsom, considered a top 2028 presidential contender, awarded nearly $200,000 to the Islamic Center of San Diego in March as part of a program to help religious institutions and nonprofits beef up security to protect against potential terrorist attacks, according to state records.

“Today more than ever, our state stands together to support our communities. Californians deserve the right to worship, love, and gather safely, without fear of violence,” said Newsom, whose administration has given another $500,000 to the San Diego mosque in previous years.

The Islamic Center of San Diego, led by Imam Taha Hassane, has condoned anti-Israel violence over the years. Hassane, who joined the center in 2004, defended Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, saying in a sermon weeks later that “resistance [against Israel] is justified,” the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.

“We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist. The terrorist is the one who started the occupation, not the one who is defending himself,” said Hassane, whose remarks prompted his removal from San Diego’s Human Relations Commission.

Hassane’s wife, Lallia Allali, resigned from her job with the San Diego school district after she posted a cartoon following the Oct. 7 attacks that showed a Star of David beheading five children. She currently teaches courses on “Islamophobia” at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

The Islamic Center of San Diego gained notoriety in the wake of 9/11 after revelations that two of the al Qaeda operatives who flew the plane that hit the Pentagon—Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar—prayed regularly at the mosque. An official at the mosque also allegedly helped the terrorists receive a $5,000 wire transfer from the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. Other mosque leaders hosted a welcoming party for the hijackers when they arrived in San Diego in 2000, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

Newsom awarded the grant as California faces a steep budget shortfall. State leaders acknowledged in a press release regarding the antiterrorism program that it comes amid “significant budget challenges” for the state.

The office that oversees the grant program—the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services—is the same one that oversees the state’s wildfire mitigation program. Newsom faced criticism following a Free Beacon report that he shut down a highly trained volunteer firefighting force called Team Blaze a year before the Los Angeles wildfires devastated the city in January.

Newsom has awarded grants to other mosques that preach anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate, the Free Beacon previously reported.

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