How the World Changed | How 9/11 Will Be Remembered | What Difference Did 9/11 Make?, and more
What Difference Did 9/11 Make? (Joseph S. Nye Jr., Project Syndicate)
When the next terrorist attacks come, will US presidents be able to channel public demand for revenge by precise targeting, explaining the trap that terrorists set, and focusing on creating resilience in US responses? That is the question Americans should be asking, and that their leaders should be addressing.
9/11: The Way We Thought Then (Robert D. Kaplan, National Interest)
In grand historical terms, 9/11 might be considered a head-fake, representing a mere interregnum between one period of great-power conflict and another. But in the literal heat of the burning towers, it seemed real enough.
After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong (Garrett M. Graff, The Atlantic)
A mission to rid the world of “terror” and “evil” led America in tragic directions.
The 9/11 Effect and the Transformation of Global Security (John B. Bellinger III, Rohan Gunaratna, Anne Koch, Patrycja Sasnal and Wesley Wark via Council of Councils, Council on Foreign Relations)
How did the 2001 attacks change counterterrorism, human rights, surveillance, international law, and border security? Five experts from around the world reflect.
How Has the Terrorism Threat Changed Twenty Years After 9/11? (Bruce Hoffman, CFR)
The U.S. counterterrorism response to the September 11, 2001, attacks yielded some remarkable successes and disastrous failures in hunting al-Qaeda. The top terrorist threat today, though, is domestic rather than foreign.
Seven Resources Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (James M. Lindsay and Anna Shortridge, CFR)
With the twentieth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks approaching, we recommend sources for better understanding 9/11 and its aftermath. This week: seven resources that debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories.
The Business of Homeland Security Thrives in the Two Decades Since 9/11 (Byron Tau, Wall Street Journal)
After the attacks, federal policies swelled a defense sector that has reshaped U.S. surveillance as well as northern Virginia’s suburbs.
How 9/11 Changed Travel Forever (Maureen O’Hare, CNN)
It had been nearly 30 years since Palestinian terrorist attacks at Rome airport in 1973, which killed 34 people and demonstrated that air travel was vulnerable to international terrorism. “That seemed to have changed the whole security structure in Europe and in the Middle East in a way that didn’t really penetrate the American psyche,” said Sean O’Keefe, now a professor at Syracuse University and former chair of aerospace and defense company Airbus. “It’s this typical American mindset; we have to experience it to believe it.”
Then on the morning of September 11, 2001, a team of 19 hijackers was able to board four different domestic flights in the northeastern US in a series of coordinated terror attacks that would claim 3,000 lives. Flying in America, and the rest of the world, would never be the same again.
What Structural Engineers Learned from 9/11 (Donald Dusenberry, Scientific American)
Members of the profession study such tragic events to try and ensure that something similar won’t happen again.
The Collapse of the WTC Twin Towers Heralded a Wave of Reforms to Building Codes (Niall Patrick Walsh, Archinect)
It is now almost 20 years since the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York were destroyed during a terrorist attack, killing 2,606 people within the two buildings. As is often the case following both natural and human-made disasters, the collapse of the Twin Towers prompted sweeping regulatory changes in how tall buildings are designed, constructed, and operated.
9/11’s Legacy of Drone Warfare Has Changed How We View the Military (Vicky Karyoti, The Conversation)
In October 2001, nearly one month after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, a US Air Force pilot made history as the first person to conduct a lethal strike with a modern drone – the Predator.
In the months and years following that first strike, the drone – or remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), as it is referred to by military professionals – has become the “weapon of choice” for the states who can afford them.
How 9/11 Changed Members of Congress (Rhonda Colvin, Washington Post)
Twenty years later, members of Congress reflect on how the attack changed their course and shapes the decisions they make today
How 9/11 Changed Cinema (Maria Flood and Michael C. Frank, The Conversation)
One of the most common responses to the events of September 11 2001, both among witnesses on the scene and more distant commentators, was that the destruction of the World Trade Center was like something only seen in the movies. This famously prompted veteran director Robert Altman to declare that 9/11 was an instance of life imitating art: “The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied the movies.”
If the terrorist attacks had appeared like a movie, then the immediate response of Hollywood was that films released in the aftermath of the event should not be too much like 9/11.
How Technology and the World Have Changed Since 9/11 (Darrell M. West and Nicol Turner Lee, Brookings)
Substantial alterations in news transmission, technology innovation, telecommunications networks, disaster preparedness, personal privacy, digital inequity, and security levels arose after the tragic events of this day. From a virtual standpoint, so many things have shifted over the last two decades that it is hard to imagine the world as it existed in 2001.
The Forgotten Biological Terror of 9/11 (Laurie Garrett, Foreign Policy)
A new type of fear gripped the United States 20 years ago—and never stopped spreading.
Reflections on 9/11 Twenty Years Later (Philip Zelikow, War on the Rocks)
We all have our own memories associated with the tragedy of 9/11. In my case I can remember going to Ground Zero shortly after the attacks and noticing that awful, pungent smell of the place, as if the terrorists had opened up some special, sulfurous path to hell. Later, directing the commission investigating what happened, I have vivid memories of tramping through the Tarnak Farms camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had once had a headquarters. Or there we were in a Washington office, leaning toward a loudspeaker to listen one more time to the cockpit voice recording recovered from United Flight 93, matched up with our reconstruction of the behavior of the aircraft, painstakingly trying to reconstruct moments of agony and astonishing courage.
We all have a need to construct meaning from occasions like these. In the rare cases when a historical event, especially a traumatic event, stirs emotions on a massive scale, touching many millions of people, it enters popular culture. Great numbers of people soon form beliefs about what happened and why. People usually try to make sense of events in ways that fit their prior understanding of how the world works. But sometimes a catalytic event opens their mind to new possibilities — in this case the scale of danger that might be posed by an organization of zealots based on the other side of the planet in one of the most primitive countries on earth.