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As clear as that cloudless September morning, Jenna Jacobs McPartland remembers the moment everything changed. “I was cleaning the bathroom and watching the Today show in the background and nine months pregnant,” the 52-year-old recalls by phone. “I think they were showing ‘Today throws a wedding’ when the news broke in.”
A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. McPartland did not know that her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was attending a conference at its Windows on the World restaurant. “I called his office to say, ‘Hey, turn on the TV. Do you guys know what’s going on?’ His assistant said, ‘Oh my God, Jenna, he’s there.’ The whole world disappeared and there was this sort of hollow collapsing feeling.”
Ariel Jacobs did not live to see his son, Gabriel, born six days after September 11, 2001. McPartland, then living in Briarcliff Manor, New York, would marry twice more, set up a grief support charity, and become a chef and restaurateur. Each 9/11 anniversary, she has a picnic at the cemetery where a few pieces of bone from her late husband are buried.
Speaking from Fairfield, Connecticut, McPartland says: “Ari was an incredibly joyful person who cherished his life. I made a conscious choice to honour him by living as joyfully as I can. It’s not always easy. I still cry pretty frequently. If there’s a movie with a building getting blown up, or if I’m reading a book and they casually mention ‘post 9-11 this’ or whatever, it catches me off guard. The grief finds a place to live in the heart, and you visit it.”
McPartland and other victims’ families have learned to live with that grief over the past 25 years. But America writ large has struggled to carry the weight of the worst terrorist attack in its history. The world’s most powerful nation responded by inflicting terror of its own, betraying its history as a safe harbour for immigrants, and pitting Americans against one another. The initial heroism, goodwill and unity of 9/11 gave way to discord at home and diminished moral authority abroad.
McPartland adds: “It makes me incredibly sad and bordering on angry that the death of my husband has been invoked to cause more violence. It is the othering of people that got him killed in the first place and, when we Americans fail to learn that lesson and choose collectively as a nation to other people, whether it’s immigrants or other nations, that is a deepening of that tragedy that is sickening and unfathomable to me.”
Unspeakable loss
On September 10, 2001 George W Bush travelled to Florida to push education reform legislation. AOL was seeking a big stake in AT&T’s cable unit. Promising tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, 20, had just swept Pete Sampras aside to win the US Open.
America seemed unassailable. It had won the cold war and enjoyed a relatively peaceful 1990s as “the indispensable nation”, in secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s framing. From fiscal years 1998 to 2001, the federal government recorded four consecutive budget surpluses.
But what had been dubbed “the American century” came to an apocalyptic end on the next morning. Nearly 3,000 people were killed as 19 al-Qaida hijackers seized control of four airliners, slamming two of the planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth into a field in western Pennsylvania.
Among the most wrenching images were office workers leaping to their deaths from the burning twin towers. On the wall of the national September 11 museum in New York is a quotation from James Gilroy, a resident of lower Manhattan: “She had a business suit on, her hair was all askew … This woman stood there for what seemed like minutes, then she held down her skirt and then jumped off the ledge … I thought, how human, how modest, to hold down her skirt before she jumped.”
Unthinkably, both of the 110-storey towers collapsed, unleashing giant clouds of ash and dust on the streets of lower Manhattan as fragments of paper fluttered down like confetti. David Blight, a historian who advised the museum, which opened in 2014, said: “It’s the most visual event in history – so photographed, so much footage, so many documentaries. It is so shocking, so horrifying that you can’t watch it without a certain weeping. One of the things that should never stop about 9/11 is the essential grief of it. There is a sheer sense of unspeakable loss.”
At first the loss brought out America’s better angels. Firefighters and first responders displayed inspiring courage. Ordinary citizens queued to donate blood. The nation came together as rarely before and received global sympathy, with Russia pledging support, Iran holding candlelight vigils and Nato invoking Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Bush visited Ground Zero in New York and, wielding a megaphone, declared that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
They did. The US invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida and topple its Taliban protectors, a war that would drag on for a record 20 years only for the Taliban to return. Bush then attacked Iraq on the false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
The global war on terror expanded into a sprawling enterprise of military intervention, intelligence operations, detention and interrogation. Some suspects were tortured, including through waterboarding at CIA “black sites”.
A quarter of a century later, 100 million Americans are too young to remember 9/11 and only from this vantage point, perhaps, can the consequences be seen clearly.
Historians and policy experts interviewed by the Guardian suggest that the reaction to 9/11 was a profound strategic miscalculation that distracted the US from the rise of China and sowed the seeds of its own decline.
Hunting for enemies
“9/11 is when things began to go wrong for the United States,” suggested Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton. “The United States was at the apogee of its post-cold war power on September 10 and then, through a series of missteps and misjudgments on both the foreign and domestic front, we have thrown away a great deal of not only our power but our credibility.
“In my judgment, 9/11 set off a quarter-century of misgovernment in the United States and we’ll pay the price for that for a very long time.”
Did Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader who masterminded the attacks, win after all? If the metric of victory is measured by Bin Laden’s immediate, messianic desire to establish a global caliphate and expel all western presence from the Middle East, he evidently failed. Al-Qaida was eventually hunted to near-extinction and Bin Laden himself killed in a Pakistani compound in 2011.
But if the terrorist’s success is measured by the magnitude of the self-inflicted wounds they provoke from their target, Bin Laden’s legacy is a slow, autoimmune decay within the US, it may have exceeded his darkest fantasies.
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, said: “Bin Laden in some ways failed in his intentions. He wanted the United States out of the Middle East. He wanted to topple certain governments in the Middle East. But in other ways 9/11 is the most successful terrorist attack in history insofar it prompted such an overreach from the United States that we hastened our own decline, division and betrayal of our own story.”
Like countless others, the course of Rhodes’ life was changed by 9/11. He was 23 and working on a city council election campaign at a polling site on the Brooklyn waterfront. He saw the second plane hit the twin towers and watched the rest of the carnage unfold. The event spurred him to move to Washington, and get involved in foreign policy.
He regards the cost of 25 years of “forever wars” as incalculable. They placed a huge burden on the Americans who fought them and had to deal with problems ranging from war wounds to the opioids crisis. They also contributed to the destruction of the rules-based order, paving the way for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and others to reject the rules and use the language of counterterrorism to justify stringent crackdowns.
Then, there is the domestic sphere. Rhodes says the typical Fox News viewer during the Bush years was promised great victories over foreign enemies. “When nations don’t keep those types of promises, when you unleash that kind of nationalism and xenophobia and you don’t succeed on the battlefield, history tells you that people start to look for enemies within to blame,” he explained.
“My experience in the Obama years is very much that ‘the other’ that had been constructed around terrorists morphed into the Black president or the immigrants crossing the southern border or LGBT people. The segments were the same but the enemy had changed to an enemy within.”
Living with the legacy
Donald Trump launched his first bid for the presidency, a decade ago, against the backdrop of this search for blame. Promoting the lie that Obama is a Muslim, demonising immigrants, and promising to build a border wall, he cut through by railing – in a clear break from Bush and Republican orthodoxy – against political elites for waging forever wars that he claimed he would stop (he has called the invasion of Iraq “the single worst decision ever made” in US history).
“You’d never have Donald Trump as president without 9/11 because he basically stepped into that slipstream of othering people and captured the ugly xenophobia and nationalism that had been unleashed and the anger that people, particularly on the right, felt at being gaslit by the Bush administration for eight years,” said Rhodes.
“It’s no coincidence that Trump’s ascent was marked by the destruction of Jeb Bush, who symbolised all those broken promises.”
Now, Rhodes argues, the war on terror has come home. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are “basically running counter-insurgency strategies in American cities, with the same military equipment that we used to fight wars now in the hands of law enforcement”, he said. “Some of the same people have signed up to do it, and the same surveillance technologies that we use against terrorists abroad are now used against Americans. We are now living in the theatre of the war on terror and it’s obviously a source of growing discomfort to many Americans.”
As the US overextended itself abroad, the machinery of endless war also boomeranged back onto the domestic front, eroding civil liberties and legal norms it claimed to defend. The Patriot Act, which dispensed with rules that prevented the state monitoring US citizens without “probable cause”, was passed just 45 days after the attacks, radically expanding the powers of law enforcement agencies.
Jameel Jaffer, who moved to New York just weeks after the attacks before spending 14 years litigating national-security cases for the American Civil Liberties Union, saw the transition from the ground level. His early volunteer work involved visiting immigration detention centres in New York and New Jersey, where hundreds of immigrants had been rounded up in the panic after September 11.
Over the next decade and a half, Jaffer litigated major constitutional battles involving warrantless wiretapping, secret detention and targeted killings. He watched as the National Security Agency developed an enormous surveillance apparatus, much of which became public through reporting and, later, Edward Snowden’s disclosures.
Jaffer, now executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, argues that many of the surveillance authorities created after 9/11 remain in place or have become even more sweeping. “So much of what’s going on now is traceable to the institutions and authorities that were created after 9/11 and that the courts failed to limit,” he said. “The use of the material support laws to prosecute anti-ICE protesters in Texas. The use of the Espionage Act to threaten and intimidate journalists who are writing about issues that the public needs to know about.
“Even the arrests and detentions and threatened deportation of students for protesting on university campuses: that policy is built on deference that the courts extended to the executive branch 25 years after 9/11. We are absolutely living with the legacy of these decisions made and policies instituted in the years after 9/11.”
A new era
Guantánamo Bay, where 780 men and boys have been imprisoned since 9/11, became one of the most visible symbols of the era. The Iraq war produced the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which US personnel and contractors subjected detainees to abuse, humiliation and torture.
Obama tried, and failed, to shut down Guantánamo. Trump has since faced intense criticism for sending immigrants to the prison.
Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York and leading member of Witness Against Torture, a group seeking to close Guantánamo, said: “The United States committed to a programme and policy of torture, violating international law and its own laws, and an element of gratuitous cruelty and even sadism became operationally part of the war on terror.
“People equated national strength and security with the ability to inflict harm on vulnerable others. The more violence we dish out, the stronger and the better and the safer we somehow are and a lot of that violence boomeranged and made new enemies.
“But beyond those it victimised, it destroyed any pretence that we’re a constitutional order that obeys the rule of law, that honours national treaties. It inaugurated an era of executive power operating with utter impunity and immunity. The lawlessness of Trump is an utterly predictable consequence of the contempt for the rule of law, oversight, checks and balances that the Bush administration displayed.”
For Varon, there is a clear connection between the brutal methods of the global war on terror and the excesses of ICE under Trump. He points to notorious detention centres in Texas and New Jersey where inmates routinely suffer medical neglect, and recent reports of harrowing deportation flights where migrants are flown to Africa in shackles.
“People report living in fear and filth and squalor without access to basic hygiene, to attorneys,” he said. “Families are broken up and there’s a level of the willful infliction of suffering that is staggering and wouldn’t seem to be even a necessary part of the broad immigration strategy.
“Again there’s this sick need that collectivities feel they have to dominate those that they perceive as lesser. Muslims and Arabs were the great community under suspicion and that’s been replaced to a large extent by brown-skinned migrants from other parts of the world. When you have a rhetoric that demonises people as criminal and subhuman, it invites their mistreatment.”
A different path
The collateral of this 25-year trajectory has been the evisceration of trust in US public institutions. Varon argues that this environment birthed a “post-truth condition” where empirical reality was abandoned and conspiracy theories thrive.
The official September 11 narrative was challenged by the “truther” movement, which suggested the attacks were an “inside job” orchestrated by the US government. The Bush administration’s false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction laid the groundwork for Trump’s cynical style, which relies on the public believing that everyone is lying so they might as well vote for a demagogue who is honest about it.
Only last week it was reported that Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, to burnish his false claims of election fraud by embarking on a weeks-long search for noncitizens on US voter rolls, a move seen by watchdogs as an intimidation effort ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The president will attend a commemoration at the Pentagon on Friday while JD Vance will be at the national 9/11 memorial in New York.
Once again crowds will pause to remember the workers desperately waving clothes, sheets and tablecloths from the doomed towers, the firefighters who climbed staircases and never returned, the airline passengers who stormed the cockpit to stop United Airlines Flight 93 reaching its target in Washington.
But will they weigh what came next, what it cost the US in blood and treasure and what might have happened if the country had chosen a different path?
“Consider what we didn’t do,” said Rhodes. “I sometimes am haunted by this. The trillions of dollars spent on a forever war: what could that have been spent on? Climate change, universal healthcare, public education. There’s a real opportunity cost to how we chose to spend our time and resources.
“If you came down to earth from another planet and you had to make sense of the fact that the United States spent several trillion dollars chasing a relatively small number of terrorists around a few countries, toppling governments and then fighting insurgencies, when it has huge problems with deindustrialisation, with its education system, with the onset of climate change, you would think this is a country that has gone insane.”
