nuclear-news

9/11 and the War on Terror’s Darkest Paradox

“Never Forget” has become a national ritual. But remembering the tragedy without confronting the deeper story is its own kind of forgetting.

Amber Yang, Sep 12, 2026, https://wtkconsciousmedia.substack.com/p/911-and-the-war-on-terrors-darkest?utm_source=aweber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9-11-and-the-war-on-terror-s-darkest-paradox

Twenty-five years ago on 9/11, a vast machine of perpetual war, intrusive surveillance, high-tech human rights abuses, and unaccountable power was born in the ashes of our civil liberties.

The 9/11 Commission was given a $15 million budget to investigate the attacks. This might sound like a lot, but by comparison, the sprawling investigation of Bill Clinton’s scandals (which included the Monica Lewinsky affair) consumed at least $30 million. What does that say about the priority placed on finding out the deeper forces behind one of the greatest tragedies in American history?

WantToKnow.info has been investigating the unanswered questions surrounding 9/11 since our founding in 2003. Our comprehensive 9/11 Information Center includes detailed timelines tracing relevant events back to the 1980s, concise investigative summaries, documentaries and major-media reporting, along with collections of media statements from senior military, intelligence and government officials who have publicly questioned important aspects of the official account. The late theologian and prolific 9/11 researcher Dr. David Ray Griffin once wrote:

WantToKnow.info is a great source of information. I myself first learned about the problems in the official account of 9/11 from this website early in 2003. It has continued since that time to provide exactly what it says: ‘reliable, verifiable information on major cover-ups.’ WantToKnow.info is eminently worthy of support.

Below is a brief overview of some of the key facts, unanswered questions, evidence of concealment and obstruction surrounding the 9/11 investigation, and the far-reaching consequences of the War on Terror that followed. The post 9/11 realities we also explore presents a disturbing paradox; our response did not make us safer. Below, we bring together rarely connected evidence showing how the machinery built to fight terrorism has repeatedly fueled the very violence, terrorism, and extremism we’re told to fear—from FBI operations manufacturing terrorist plots at home, American military prisons serving as incubators for terrorist networks, brutal drone warfare creating new generations of extremists, to a War on Drugs that failed to stop the drug trade while enriching warlords and drug traffickers. In fact, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich recently pointed to the ultimate irony: forces descending from al-Qaeda went from being America’s defining enemy after 9/11 to emerging victorious in Syria after years of US-backed regime change efforts.

When it comes to the evidence of a 9/11 cover-up, here is what has held up after 25 years:

• One year before 9/11, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential Washington think tank, wrote that global US military dominance would likely be slow without a “catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” Several figures associated with PNAC went on to serve in the Bush administration. Around September 20th, four-star General Wesley Clark was informed by a senior Pentagon general that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made, and when Clark returned a few weeks later, the same general told him about a classified memo describing plans to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with Iraq and including Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

• 
  Could 9/11 have been prevented? The CIA and FBI almost certainly received and discarded warnings about the attack. The US military’s advanced technology systems were capable of stopping the planes before they struck the buildings but chose not to do so. No adequate explanation for these failures has ever been presented to the public. Even stranger, stock market bets were made against the airlines that were involved by a firm formerly headed by CIA director “Buzzy” Krongard; the profits were never claimed. And more than two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were allowed to leave the United States on specially arranged charter flights shortly after 9/11.

• 
  Three skyscrapers collapsed on 9/11, but only two were hit by airplanes. The 47-story World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7) was never struck by an airplane, yet later that afternoon roughly 26,000 tons of structural steel came down in a sudden, remarkably vertical collapse within seconds. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first known building taller than 15 stories to collapse primarily because of fire. Yet if fires really caused such an unprecedented collapse, why hasn’t WTC 7 become one of the most important case studies in high-rise firefighting history? Retired Seattle Fire Captain Raul Angulo is an internationally recognized firefighting instructor and author of a major firefighting textbook published in conjunction with the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). In a 2024 article in the International Fire & Safety Journal, Angulo points out that fire-resistant high-rises are specifically designed to withstand severe fires without completely collapsing. He contrasts WTC 7 with other major high-rise fires that burned for many hours without producing total collapse. A later three-year University of Alaska Fairbanks structural study went further, concluding that fire could not have caused WTC 7’s observed collapse.

• 
  Were the buildings brought down through controlled demolition, the deliberate use of explosives and/or incendiaries to destroy a building from within? Countless testimonies including more than 150 firefighters and other first responders described explosions or explosion-like events at the World Trade Center. Particularly notable are accounts from two New York City officials Barry Jennings and Michael Hess who reported a major explosion while evacuating WTC 7 before either of the Twin Towers had collapsed.
• Yet how do you seriously investigate controlled demolition when critical physical evidence was either already gone or never tested for it? Much of the WTC steel was rapidly removed and recycled from crash sites. In Angulo’s 2025 article in the International Fire & Safety Journal, he writes that the NIST even admitted that less than 1% of the steel from the Twin Towers was preserved, and next to none from WTC7. NIST never tested recovered Twin Towers steel for explosive or thermite residues despite physical evidence and witness testimony suggesting that explosives and/or incendiaries were involved in the collapse of the towers. And its computer modeling stopped short of explaining the Towers’ complete destruction, later acknowledging it was “unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.”
• John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, later described a government “culture of concealment” and wrote that the story presented to the public was “almost entirely, and fundamentally, untrue.” Critical records were withheld, difficult to obtain, or destroyed. FAA recordings were deliberately destroyed. CIA interrogation tapes sought by the Commission were withheld and later destroyed, and key government accounts of the military response on 9/11 turned out to be false. In fact, the collective voices of over 100 respected professors along with over 50 senior government officials, over 250 pilots and aviation professionals, and over 3,000 architects and engineers give credibility to the claim that the 9/11 Commission Report was tragically flawed.

The War on Terror we launched after 9/11 did not make us safer. In reality, the machinery built to fight terrorism fueled the very violence, terrorism, and extremism we were told to be afraid of.

Serious questions remain about how the post-9/11 terrorism threat has been measured and presented to the public. The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of violence. FBI operatives were found to have proposed terrorist plots, supplied money or weapons, coached vulnerable targets and then arrested them for participating. Human Rights Watch found that the majority of defendants in post-9/11 terrorist cases had no actual ties to terrorism or to terrorist organizations. The organization concluded that, “the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals.” National security expert Sahar Aziz put it best: “If there was a serious terrorist threat in America, the FBI would not be spending its time entrapping a mentally ill minor.”

The biggest Al Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no Al Qaeda. Instead, the vague, implausible threat by a group of construction workers in Florida to blow up U.S. buildings, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, was mostly the making of the FBI, whose undercover operatives sought out the men, promised them money, and coached them over months to implicate themselves in a conspiracy to commit violent acts they never actually intended or had the means to carry out. The “Liberty City Seven” case — known by its connection to the poor, violence-ridden Miami neighborhood where the men involved lived — was the most high-profile FBI investigation of a supposed terrorist cell after the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. The ordeal of the seven Black men, most of them Haitian American, who were manipulated by two paid FBI informants into pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda is recounted in a new Frontline documentary, “In the Shadow of 9/11.” The case set the stage for hundreds of FBI sting operations in the following years, as the bureau continued to frame individuals who were often poor, credulous, and had dubious ability to independently plan any attacks. Rather than abandoning stings as pointless and harmful … the FBI doubled down on them, in some cases even providing weapons to the individuals they set up.
— “The Most High-Profile Al Qaeda Plot Foiled After 9/11 Was an FBI Scam,” The Intercept

• 
  Many people imprisoned in the War on Terror were never terrorists, and senior Bush administration officials knew it. At the Abu Ghraib prison, the Red Cross estimated that 70–90% of Iraqi detainees had been arrested by mistake. CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, slammed into walls, confined in coffin-like boxes and subjected to “rectal rehydration.” The government initially portrayed him as a senior al-Qaeda figure, until CIA contractors realized they had the wrong man. The Senate Intelligence Committee ultimately concluded that the CIA’s torture program was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining detainee cooperation. Read more about the CIA’s torture program.
• Camp Bucca in Iraq, a US military detention center, came to be known widely as a “terrorist university“ that “absolutely radicalized young Iraqis” (quote from retired US Army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] Michael Flynn). In fact, 80% of prisoners released from Camp Bucca rejoined terrorists. One senior leader of ISIS told The Guardian, “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no [ISIS] now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”
• At least 20,000 innocent civilians have died as a result of US drone warfare and targeted killings since 9/11. Yet the CIA itself warned that these tactics could fuel the very extremism and terrorism they were intended to defeat. A secret 2009 CIA assessment warned that killing high-value targets could radicalize populations and even create openings for more radical groups, particularly when civilians are killed.
• Drone warfare has also inflicted severe psychological trauma and PTSD on US military personnel ordered to kill people thousands of miles away through high-resolution cameras. Air Force Captain Kevin Larson, who died by suicide in 2020, described a mission in which he was told to follow a target’s body to his funeral and kill those who attended. Former drone operator Brandon Bryant recounted an emotional experience of killing a child in Afghanistan that his superiors told him was a dog. Intelligence analyst Bennett Miller told about a time when his team killed a supposed high-level Taliban financier, only to see the same target’s name appear again a week later. “We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts.” Another drone operator Michael Haas once said that operators referred to children as fun-sized terrorists or TITS, terrorists in training.
• In our Substack, “A History of Militarized Policing in the US and the Suppression of Dissent Across the Political Spectrum,” we discuss how the militarization of domestic police was driven by the Pentagon supplying local police with military equipment after 9/11. Since then, the term terrorism has expanded to include any activist group across the spectrum not in favor of the political establishment.
• The War on Terror also deepened the War on Drugs as we document in our Substack, How the Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline. Despite a successful ban on opium cultivation by the Taliban in 2000, which drastically reduced production, Afghanistan again became the world’s largest source of heroin after the US invasion in 2001. By the end of the war, opium production, drug addiction, and the flow of drug money had reached unprecedented levels, despite costly and ineffective anti-drug efforts. In fact, an interview with one official estimated that 40% of US aid to Afghanistan during the War on Terror had been pocketed by officials, gangsters, warlords, drug lords and insurgents.

Based on all of our research, we believe that these facts about 9/11 are just the tip of the iceberg. We deserve better than leaders who lie to us, create the very enemies we’re told to be afraid of, and kill in our name with our taxpayer dollars.

We can’t shift the chaos we’re in until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us—in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. Challenging information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It is the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these challenges to light—fueling open dialogue and constructive action.

With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

September 15, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties