9/11

Tuesday

Margaret Mitchell

Dick Cheney dies at 84

Former vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defense under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration. What is perhaps his most lasting legacy is the “Cheney Doctrine,” which influenced America’s decision to engage in wars in the Middle East. He campaigned for a military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which drove his conviction that any country, organization or individual that posed a threat to the US, or that might in the future, needed to be taken out.

Tuesday

Paul Wood

Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country? A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it. The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’ At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia.

9/11

Sunday

Isaac Schorr

Where is America’s 9/11 spirit?

Stark was the contrast between the selfless heroism and unity of purpose on and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the nation’s reaction to the events of September 10, 2025. In abundantly obvious respects, the two days differed. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, his wife, their two children, and the rest of his loved ones were the only immediate victims of his assassination on September 10. In contrast, Osama bin Laden’s hell-bound errand boys murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, saddled thousands more with diseases that later claimed their lives, and altered New York City’s skyline forever on September 11. America went to war afterwards.

Charlie Kirk

Saturday

Chris Mondics

When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits. But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B.

9/11 saudi
Joseph D'Hippolito 

Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Twenty-four years ago, Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians – the vast majority of them Americans – by hijacking three passenger aircraft and ramming them the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington, DC. But a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, failed to reach its target thanks to the bravery of the passengers and flight attendants, who sacrificed themselves to save who-knows-how many. Twenty-four years later, those heroes have yet to receive their country's highest civilian award. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, instituted by President John F.

Flight 93
terror
Daniel DePetris

The never-ending War on Terror

Twenty-two years ago today, the United States experienced its worst terrorist attack in history. It was a life-changing moment for tens of thousands of Americans, particularly those in the New York metropolitan area who saw two of the city’s most iconic buildings reduced to smoldering heaps of rubble and ash. The Pentagon, a stoic building across the Potomac River from our capital, saw one of its sides destroyed. About 166 miles to the northwest, another hijacked plane went down in rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania. By the time that horrible day was over, nearly 3,000 people had lost their lives. The country’s entire being was shaken to the core. Americans, particularly those in New York and Washington, DC, felt more vulnerable than they had in years. For President George W.

Daniel McCarthy

The War on Terror is a war of religion

From our UK edition

Compare the world 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to the world two decades after Pearl Harbour. World War Two was a vivid presence in popular culture and national memory in 1961, but America in the first year of John F. Kennedy’s administration was in no sense living in the shadow of Japan’s attack. That war had ended 15 years ago; Japan was now our ally in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Twenty years after 9/11, the US has only just ended its war in Afghanistan, and the result of that conflict, which lasted five times longer than the one with Imperial Japan (and Hitler’s Germany), was the immediate return to power of the regime we set out to depose at the start. After Afghanistan, the US is still fighting a War on Terror against al-Qaeda and similar groups.

William Cook

The very American heroism of Todd Beamer

From our UK edition

Twenty years ago today, on the morning of 11 September 2001, 32-year-old Todd Beamer boarded a United Airlines flight at Newark, New Jersey, bound for a business meeting in San Francisco. He was due to fly back that night, to rejoin his pregnant wife, Lisa, and their two young sons, Drew and David. Todd worked for a computer company, selling software. His job entailed lots of travelling. This was just another working day. Forty-six minutes after take-off, terrorists stormed the cockpit, seized the controls, and announced, ‘We have a bomb onboard.’ The plane changed course for Washington DC.

Wednesday

Nina Power

Sad but beautiful exhibition of Afghanistan’s war rugs

From our UK edition

Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. It is perhaps a source of regret for the group that the 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan are missing in action. They were blown up in 2001 either, depending on who you ask, because of Islam’s strict beliefs on anti-idolatry or to punish the West for offering money to preserve them rather than give aid to starving children. The war rugs, depicting camels and flowers alongside rocket launchers, are striking and jarring While the country continues to export fruit, nuts and insect resins – opium production was massively scaled back by the Taliban – Afghanistan is justly famous for its woven rugs.

Thursday

Christopher Bedford

‘Maybe I have the healing I need’: speaking to Father Paul Wierichs

It used to be you had to get in close to hear Father Paul Wierichs speak. For two years the former FBI chaplain couldn’t talk above a whisper. Now he is a little louder, but very hoarse; though he still struggles to swallow you can at least hear his voice. Bell’s Palsy keeps him from moving the left side of his face, and he has a difficult time seeing out of that eye. His scalp is bandaged where the doctors removed a growth. There’s cancer in his prostate, too. He’s still held onto a good amount of hair for his age and his troubles — but he expects to lose it to surgeries by the end of the month. “I wore my collar on 9/11,” Father Paul recalled on a frozen January morning in Queens. “I had to throw them out, because they were covered in dust.

Wierichs

Friday

Addison Del Mastro

Growing up with 9/11

Every writer from the New York area who lived through 9/11 has to write about it, right? Not long after the terrorist attacks — I was about eight years old, keep in mind — I came up with a game, which my mother indulged. I called it “Pilot.” I would approach my mother, and I might or might not have a little puzzle piece or something hidden in or under my clothes. My mother would then pat me down, trying to find it. If she found it, I would be “arrested.” If I hadn’t hidden it, I’d walk into the next room — “boarding the flight” — with no incident. But if I had hidden it and slipped it past security, I’d “board the flight” and then knock over a “skyscraper” I’d built out of wooden blocks. Yes, at age eight, I was pretending to be Osama bin Laden.

James Jeffrey

The 9/11 anniversary marks a painful moment for squaddies

From our UK edition

The sweet salvation of the summer recess over, we returned to Sandhurst for our final term of officer training. It was 11 September, 2001 – a day that started with a hike in the sunshine and which came to define my time in the British Army. The events of 9/11 would lead to my own deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the loss of dear friends and comrades. Of course, on that September morning none of us knew how events 3,000 miles away – and the political decisions taken in the aftermath of those terrible attacks – would have such a momentous impact on our lives. After the buses dropped us off, the hike started jollily.

Monday

Daniel DePetris

One year later, Biden is right to have left Afghanistan

A year ago today, the Taliban captured the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, dealing the US-supported Afghan government an embarrassing blow and setting in motion a blitz across the country that would eventually send Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his closest aides into exile. A week later, Taliban fighters entered Kabul virtually unopposed. American forces would leave the country two weeks later, cutting the cord on a two-decade war that cost the US over $2 trillion and tens of thousands of casualties. "We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago,” President Biden said from the White House last August 31. "Then we stayed for another decade. It was time to end this war.” Much has changed since the troops left.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

Is this the end of Alex Jones?

Alex Jones looks unwell. He lost his bodybuilding figure decades ago but for years he was a veritable tank of a man. Now he looks swollen and exhausted — one piece of bad news away from his heart giving up. I say that with no relish. Jones is an extraordinary American character. America is like an enormous carnival and, for better or for worse, it is rich in charismatic mountebanks. You don’t have to like them but they are as American as pecan pie. Jones is an undeniably astonishing performer. His thunderous speech is often imitated, never equaled — a perversely captivating force of nature. His ability to switch tones in an instant — from cussing out the globalists to apologizing like an old Southern gentleman — is used with pinpoint comic timing.

Tuesday

Peter Van Buren

The DMV shows that COVID restrictions will never go away

Two weeks to flatten the curve became 18 months of mandates with no end in sight. Government seized new powers from the people to regulate their lives. Rules that make no sense dominate us, experiments in compliance not science. How do COVID restrictions end? They likely never will. I learned all that at the Department of Motor Vehicles . My reeducation started when I was told to prove as an American citizen in an American state that I am 'resident' here, not simply being an American in America. I'm a good sport and wanted to comply, just like I try to keep up with the latest rules and Purell my terrestrial hands 600 times a day against an airborne virus. Threats aren't inherently political, right? And you just can't be too careful.

Monday

Craig Trainor

Joe Biden cheapened 9/11

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 having come and gone, many have turned to reflection. Some meditate on the solidarity and sense of national purpose that act of terror engendered; others view it as a dramatic opening to our miserable 21st century. What comes to my mind are the images of our hasty retreat from Afghanistan over the last month. As is often the case, my best thinking has already been articulated by the late Charles Krauthammer. In the introduction of his best-selling collection of essays Things That Matter, Krauthammer explains his evolution from psychiatrist to public intellectual.

9/11

Thursday

Matt Purple

9/11 and the war on terror kiddie table

The thing about childhood is that eventually you're supposed to grow up. It's with this in mind that we turn to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who when he ran for president in 2016 polled so low that he was relegated to the so-called 'kiddie table' GOP primary debate. It had to chafe. Graham back then was a loud Trump critic, yet there was Trump eating off the fine china while Graham moodily stirred his wagon wheel mac and cheese around his Toy Story bowl. At one point, the ultra-hawkish Graham did try to get the grown-ups' attention. If you're tired of fighting wars, he declared on Fox News, 'don't vote for me!' Republicans stopped eating for a moment, then took him at his word. I thought of that today, perhaps because it's almost the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and I needed some levity.

lindsey graham earn
Peter Hitchens

How the left thought they were right to fight the war on terror

From our UK edition

Late one soft summer night in 1966, my brother Christopher slipped out of our north Oxford house and bicycled to the centre of the city. There he spent a worryingly long time with a spraypaint can, inscribing the words ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’ on a long builders’ hoarding outside Trinity College in Broad Street. You will have to work out for yourselves how I know this, but I do. The punctuation was perfect, and a handwriting expert could easily have told it was him. The slogan endured for months and even appeared in a TV drama filmed in the city some months later. This was how we felt then. There was no other cause so great. Even on its own terms, the Vietnam war was a terrible error and multitudes did indeed die for a mistake.

The Spectator

Has it really got harder to see a GP in person?

From our UK edition

Floating vote Voters in St Petersburg were presented with three candidates all calling themselves Boris Vishnevsky, with two believed to have changed name and appearance to draw votes from the other. It is not the first time voters have faced a confusing choice: — In a Moscow city election in 2019 voters had the option of voting for ‘Alexander Solovyov’ — though it turned out not to be the Alexander Solovyov who was in prison at the time and barred from standing. — In the 2017 local election in Ferguslie Park, Glasgow, Conservative John McIntyre was elected, with many speculating that voters had meant to opt for an independent candidate called John Goudie McIntyre.

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

After Afghanistan

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 will come in a matter of days. It will be marked by the victory of the Taliban in Kabul and the humiliation of America. The war in Afghanistan was one of the largest-ever undertakings of any major country, in any era. Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo Moon landing program cost the United States close to $300 billion. The Manhattan Project cost $30 billion. The Interstate Highway System, about $500 billion. Those three mammoth projects are dwarfed by the cost of 20 years fighting in Afghanistan, which will well exceed a trillion dollars when all is said and done. The amount spent on Afghan nation-building surpassed the cost of the Marshall Plan in 2014 and kept rising inexorably for seven years more.

9/11