Tag: 9/11

The Chief Legacy of 9/11

The chief legacy of 9/11 is as obvious as it is tragic: a state of permanent warfare in the United States, both abroad and in the “homeland” (a term not used in normal discourse before the 9/11 attacks), with millions dead and displaced for no defensible reason.

If you’re 25 years old or younger in America, you’ve never known a time when your country wasn’t at war. “Peace” is no longer seen as desirable, let alone possible. War is seen as America’s natural state; a land of warriors are we, imbued with a “warrior ethos” that applauds kicking other countries when their down and beating the snot out of them just because we can.

Meanwhile, in the “homeland,” surveillance grows ever more intrusive by the day as agents of ICE kick down doors and haul people away to detention centers that are being rapidly expanded. Personal privacy is increasingly a thing of the past as the government wraps itself in a shroud of secrecy that makes oversight and accountability well-nigh impossible.

The global war on terror has become a war of terror. War begets more war, with no end in sight.

Re-reading the Atlantic Monthly 150th anniversary issue from November 2007, I came across this gem of a quote from America’s 9/11 mayor, Rudolph Giuliani:

We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask… We’ve got to talk about Iran – Iran is more dangerous than Iraq – and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

That was Giuliani in July of 2007 when he ran as a Republican presidential candidate. In America, that’s how you get treated as a “serous” candidate for the presidency – by urging for war not just with Iraq and Afghanistan but with Pakistan and Iran as well. We can “multitask” our wars! Truly a sign of American greatness.

Well, Giuliani’s dream has come true – we are talking a lot about Iran today.

Keep reading

25 Years Ago, 9/11 Triggered a US Crusade of Torture

A quarter-century has passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite – and because of – their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the U.S. opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the U.S.’s ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the U.S. to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries… Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime – just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

  • “The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
  • “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
  • “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
  • “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating U.S. and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the U.S. were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”

Keep reading

New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

New York City has agreed to release new documents showing that officials lied about the air quality in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more than 170,000 pages of documents are being released by NYC in response to the transparency organization 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued to force their disclosure.

According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that higher-than-acceptable levels of asbestos and other contaminants were in the dust and air in other parts of Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

“An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal E.P.A. based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings,” the Times reported Monday.

“That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers’ footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks.”

Despite having information about the poor air quality, government officials, including then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

Whitman has since apologized for her misrepresentations.

The Times warned that the disclosures could reopen NYC to new litigation at a time when New Yorkers who were in the city at the time are dying of lung and blood cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

Denise Verzi, whose husband, Michael, was a firefighter who suffered from lymphoma after responding to the attack, criticized the city for its lack of transparency.

“I don’t understand hiding it to begin with,” Verzi told the Times. “That was horrific. But 25 years in, there’s people that are still getting sick.”

Keep reading

Trump lifts sanctions on top Al Qaeda recruiters, financiers days before 9/11 anniversary

As the US prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump has removed top Al Qaeda figures from the US list of designated terrorists. Among those he delisted was Abdullah Muhaysini, a Saudi cleric who recruited child fighters and teen suicide bombers to wreak havoc across Syria.

The administration of President Donald Trump has removed the names of some of the world’s most notorious commanders, recruiters and financiers for the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda from its list of specially designated terrorists. Among those relieved of US sanctions this August was Abdullah Muhaysini, a Salafi-jihadi cleric from Saudi Arabia who participated in videotaped massacres of captive soldiers and recruited droves of foreign youth to carry out suicide bombings throughout Syria over the past decade.

The delisting of the jihadist recruiters came as part of the Trump administration’s removal of the government of Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa as a State Sponsor of Terrorists. “These actions represent another historic step by President Trump to give the Syrian people a path to prosperity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared on August 24, 2026.

Formerly known as Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, Al-Sharaa is the co-founder of ISIS and founder of Jabhat Al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. Under the guidance of Western advisors, Al-Sharaa rebranded Al-Nusra as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, before he toppled the government of President Bashar Al-Assad in December 2024.

By the time he seized power, Al-Sharaa had been groomed by his NATO handlers as a reliable local enforcer. When Trump hosted Al-Sharaa in the Oval Office in November 2025, playfully misting him with Trump Cologne and asking how many wives he had, it was clear the US was ready to lift the sanctions that had devastated Syria’s economy. Two months later, Trump pitched a half-baked plan for the Syrian military to attack Iran. Washington had finally found its man in Damascus.

This August, the Trump administration went a step further, lifting sanctions on Al Qaeda propagandists, funders and fighters responsible for gruesome atrocities during the dirty war on Syria. These figures include Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, a top Al Qaeda recruiter in Australia who fled to Syria; Shafi Sultan Mohammed al-Ajmi, a major Kuwaiti financier of Al-Nusra; and Abdul Samrez Jashari, an Albanian foreign fighter who has taken on a senior role in Syria’s military under Al-Sharaa.

Perhaps none of the Al Qaeda bandits who received sanctions relief from the Trump administration oversaw as many acts of sadistic violence as the Saudi-born, Turkish-backed cleric Abdullah Muhaysini.

Keep reading

9/11 Cancer Rates Have Ballooned Over 4,000 Percent – Survivors Now Account for More Cases Than First Responders

The towers are gone in all but memory, but the death brought to New York City 25 years ago on 9/11 continues to impact the city, leaving a trail of victims.

As the nation prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack, cancer deaths linked to the attack on New York City’s World Trade Center have risen 1,680 percent in a decade.

Cancer certifications among Manhattan workers and residents who were not among the decimated ranks of first responders soared from 3,204 in 2015 to 57,044 this year, the World Trade Center Health Program said, according to the New York Post.

“Sadly, we lose roughly two clients a day and see a new cancer certification every 50 minutes,” lawyer Michael Barasch, whose firm represents thousands of people enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, said.

Keep reading

Judge Throws Out 9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Confession Days Before 25th Anniversary of September 11 Terror Attacks

A judge threw out a key confession made by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohmmed just two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.

This is the latest blow to the federal government.

Recall that in July 2024, under the Biden Regime, three September 11 masterminds reached plea deals with the US government, the Department of Defense said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his co-conspirators Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawhi will avoid the death penalty in a pre-trial plea deal reached.

An appeals court later canceled that agreement, so the death penalty is back on the table.

3,000 Americans were killed in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon, and a downed plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

On Friday, the New York Post reported that a military judge tossed out a confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Keep reading

Canadian Broadcasting Corp Tells Staff Not to Refer to 9/11 as ‘Terrorist Attack’

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) sent a memo to its reporters and editors this week instructing them not to refer to the September 11, 2001, attack on America as a “terrorist attack.”

The memo, first reported by an astonished Warren Kinsella at the Toronto Sun, used boldface type to emphasize the directive to CBC employees.

“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks,” the memo said bluntly.

“The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center was destroyed,” the memo continued, by way of explaining why the atrocity seen by most of the world as the textbook example of a “terrorist attack” should not be described as such.

According to Kinsella, the memo originated with Basem Boshra, the Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News.

Kinsella reached out to CBC to ask for further insights on why “hijackings” that “led to passenger jet crashes” should not be treated as terrorism.

The response, from CBC spokeswoman Kerry Kelly, was this:

CBC’s longstanding language guidance regarding the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ is a preference for the use of these words with attribution, a practice shared by many of the world’s top journalistic organizations. Our general manager and editor in chief has written publicly in the past on the subject.

In other words, CBC claimed it was following in the footsteps of news organizations that have invented lively euphemisms for terrorists, such as “activists” or “militants.” The CBC guide also seemed to be using a dash of passive voice to whitewash the horror of 9/11, as if those passenger jet crashes were a force of nature, or an unexpected consequence of the crazy hijinks of the hijackers.

Kelly tried again when the New York Post (NYP) came calling on Thursday, and arguably dug the CBC’s hole even deeper:

Our focus is to report the facts of such atrocities with accuracy, clarity and detail; to convey the scale and scope of violent acts wherever they occur; to quote the people affected, and to convey the views of officials and experts on these events. We bear witness.

But CBC News does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism, regardless of the region or the events, because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism.

The NYP pointed out that even Osama bin Laden referred to the 9/11 attack as an act of “blessed terror,” which really ought to be good enough for the CBC.

By the time Kelly got around to Canada’s National Post, she was engaging in Matrix-level reality distortions by claiming it was “wholly inaccurate to state our journalists have been urged to declare that this was not a terrorist act” – even though the memo said literally, exactly that, and in boldface type to boot. The CBC spokeswoman was effectively arguing there is a difference between refusing to call 9/11 a terrorist attack, and definitively stating that it was not one.

Kelly also tried to justify the memo by pointing out that CBC refused to call the October 7, 2023, atrocities perpetrated against Israel by Hamas “terrorism,” an argument that did not exactly provide the escalator ride out of the moral basement that she was hoping for.

The October 2023 blog post Kelly referred to, written by CBC News editor in chief Brodie Fenlon, offered a version of the hoary “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” canard – written after an earlier memo ordering CBC reporters not to call the Hamas attack “terrorism” was leaked to the public.

“CBC News is independent of any and all governments, yet we and other news organizations have been regularly lobbied over the years by many opposing groups to label certain people or acts of violence as terrorism – precisely because the word is so important to them and carries so much weight,” he wrote.

Fenlon quoted the relevant passage from the CBC style guide:

Exercise extreme caution before using the words terrorist and terrorism. While the language is not seriously disputed in some cases, it’s less clear if not highly contested at other times — which can lead to virtually endless questions about consistency and impartiality in our coverage of various attacks around the world.

Terrorism generally implies attacks against unarmed civilians for political, religious or some other ideological reason. But it’s a highly controversial term that can leave journalists taking sides in a conflict.

Outrage quickly boiled over on both sides of the border. Conservative MP Rachael Thomas pronounced the CBC memo “absolutely shameful,” and accused the outlet of “choosing to redefine terrorism in a way that downplays the atrocity of 9/11.”

Keep reading

Whistleblower Was Ignored After He Provided Information About 9/11 Attacks to CIA

In December 1998, Michael Riconosciuto was serving out a 26-year prison sentence at Allenwood Penitentiary in Pennsylvania on drug charges when he was given information by a rabbi close to his family about an al-Qaeda plot to hijack airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and U.S. military bases around the Washington, D.C., area.

Riconosciuto had been a scientist working for U.S. intelligence agencies and CIA consultant whose family had close ties with people working in Israeli intelligence and in high levels of the Israeli government.[1] Riconosciuto himself mowed CIA Director William Casey’s lawn as a child.

There is strong evidence that Riconosciuto had been set up on the drug charges because he knew too much about secret CIA operations, including the theft of computer software known as PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) from entrepreneur Bill Hamilton that was used by the CIA to facilitate illegal surveillance and money laundering.

Riconosciuto had helped modify the PROMIS software for the CIA and knew about all kinds of CIA criminal activity, including the CIA’s paying off drug lords with a vast secret cash supply.[2]

According to Daniel Sheehan, an investigator and attorney who interviewed Riconosciuto at length, the rabbi provided Riconosciuto with the information on the al-Qaeda terrorist plot drawn from Israeli intelligence with the hope that Riconosciuto could negotiate a reduction of his prison sentence after alerting federal authorities about it.

The plan did not work because when Riconosciuto reported his tip to agents from the CIA and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent, nothing was done. A presidential briefing from CIA Director George Tenet to Bill Clinton on December 4, 1998, did note Riconosciuto’s warnings about bin Laden preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft, though Clinton and the White House did not act on it.

In early 2001, Riconosciuto’s lawyer, Louis Buffardi, reached out to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as attorney Scott Lassar and Keith Cutri, an FBI Special Agent from the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, office, about the planned attacks involving hijacked planes but was ignored.

Sheehan spoke about all this on February 26 on the “Uncontrolled Opposition” radio program airing on WBAI and the Progressive Radio Network with Peter Osborne, a researcher close to Riconosciuto, whose software company was stolen by the CIA in the late 1990s and whose life was threatened by CIA agent Robert Booth Nichols.

Both Sheehan and Osborne are speaking out now because they want the public to be alerted to the failure of government authorities to act on Riconosciuto’s information and to investigate what happened. They want the public to demand a proper investigation, a real 9/11 commission, unlike the fraudulent official one that failed to investigate so many things.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading