On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, coverage ranges from first-person accounts of that day to its effects on American military strategy. Never Forget.
Summary
Remembrance ceremonies in New York City, the Pentagon, and Shanksville are drawing former presidents and relatives of those lost on that day, all under what AP calls “the shadow of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
- The White House released a taped statement from Biden in lieu of him speaking at events he is visiting.
- In New York, with President Biden and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama looking on, the names of nearly 3,000 victims killed in New York were read.
- After twenty years, some argue the threat of terrorism has evolved and U.S. foreign policy is shifting “away from the war on terrorism toward so-called great power competition with Russia and China.”
- Politico interviewed more than a dozen high-profile figures from that era, such as retired General David Petraeus and Amb. Paul Bremer, discussing what the United States got right and what could have been done differently in the months and years immediately following 9/11.
- The New York Times reflected on the generational changes among Muslim-Americans in the years after 9/11.
- Vox interviewed author Spencer Ackerman, who wrote a book with the central premise that 9/11 “eroded the institutional armor of American democracy” and allowed the “pathologizing of Muslims” which the led to Donald Trump becoming president.
- Twenty years after radical Islamist terrorists brought down buildings and killed thousands, Huffington Post bemoaned the outrage of a proposed Muslim cultural center at Ground Zero.
- Sally Jenkins, a Washington Post columnist, detailed her story of trying to get to Ground Zero, and how, in the midst of the chaos, a bike shop loaned her a 25-year-old Schwinn bike to cover the biggest news story in her life.
- OANN provided a brief ode to the men and women lost that day, remembering also the military personnel who died in the Global War on Terror since 9/11.
- Fox News interviewed photographers who captured some of the iconic images of 9/11.
- The Daily Wire reported on a Maryland county government sponsoring a play that exposes “the racial and ethnic prejudices that secretly persist in even the most progressive cultural circles in a post-9/11 America.”
- RedState republished a first-hand account of that day originally written in 2003 by “Tilly” who worked at the World Trade Center and detailed her harrowing escape.
Author’s Take
Politics has no place on 9/11. The world changed, we changed. The debate of whether it was for the better is for the other 364 days of the year. Today, we just mourn and honor those lost.
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© Dallas Gerber, 2021
