©2021 SARAH BECKER
A BIT OF HISTORY
S eptember 11, 2001 _
TWENTY YEARS LATER
_
I
n October 2001— twenty years ago in this column—I wrote: “On September 11 a group of hateful terrorists turned commercial airplanes into weapons and bombed The Pentagon and the World Trade Center. More than six thousand Americans are missing and the death toll continues to rise. The FBI has code named the egregious episode PENTBOM. Alexandrians are well aware of the disaster. Phone service was interrupted. F16s fly overhead, and the Coast Guard defends the Potomac River. The Capitol is vulnerable and so are we!” Although the day’s events are behind us still we remember those who died: at the Pentagon, in New York City, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I watched the Pentagon burn; from my front stoop. The smoke, the airborne particles darkened an otherwise blue sky. “The Arab perpetrators did not act on behalf of nationstates,” my 2001 column continued. “They are selfdetermined hijackers who belonged in terrorist cells in as many as 50 countries. Retaliation is inevitable and as Americans we must now ask ourselves, at what cost does good overcome evil?” On September 11, 2001, America seemed unassailable. The Soviet Union had fallen and the millennial mood was optimistic. President George W. Bush [R-TX] was settling into office. His arrival was
Old Town Crier
controversial, his focus mostly domestic. Bush considered treaties “as counter to U.S. self-interest.” “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom,” President Bush forewarned in his January 20, 2001, Inaugural Address. “We will defend…our interests. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve.” When President Bush first heard news of the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy his advisors assumed the crash was “a tragic accident.” When the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center 20 minutes later he got it. “Terrorism against our nation will not stand,” the President exclaimed. “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundation of our
biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America,” Bush said in his later 9/11 television address. “These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” Soon after, in the fall of 2001, the U.S. moved into Afghanistan and “crushed the Taliban government that had supported the al-Qaeda terrorist forces.” Many of the 9/11 hijackers were trained in Afghan camps. “In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon… captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression,” President Bush explained in his 2002 State of the Union message.
The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own. Our progress is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military… And tonight we are winning the war on terror. “States like North Korea, Iran and Iraq constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” Bush continued. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. America will work closely
with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction…[A] ll nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was founded on November 25, 2002 [Public Law 107-296]. A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 10
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