174-The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: reflections on how they happened & lessons learned

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  9/11 turned the US into a security state that young people take for granted

  Wright says Americans in their 20s and even 30s don't remember a country where you could walk into an office building without ID or board a plane without a search. The country 'traded a lot of freedom for security' and became the one holding the handcuffs. He argues that people who talk a lot about freedom rarely appreciate this.

• 02

  Radical Islamism grew out of Egyptian politics

  Nasser took power in the 1952 officers' revolt. He was the first native Egyptian to rule Egypt in roughly 2,500 years and enormously popular across the Arab world. He tried to co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood, then crushed it, and in 1966 executed the ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Wright says that made Qutb a martyr, perhaps the worst thing Nasser could have done. Qutb had earlier spent time at a small college in Colorado, which shaped his disgust with American culture.

• 03

  Sadat's peace with Israel and his assassination radicalized a generation

  Sadat restored Egyptian pride by crossing the Suez Canal in the 1973 war, then made peace with Israel while regional rhetoric still called for its destruction. After his assassination in 1981, mass arrests and prison torture hardened militants like Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor. Egypt's desert and the military's grip on the Nile made guerrilla war impossible there, so Zawahiri left for Afghanistan.

• 04

  Bin Laden's celebrity came from his father's fame and the Afghan war

  Muhammad bin Laden built the road that unified the Saudi kingdom and became its most famous non-royal, with dozens of children (Osama had more than 50 siblings). Osama went to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Wright says he achieved little militarily and at great personal risk, but at home he was celebrated as a hero when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

• 05

  Kuwait 1990 was a hidden turning point

  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia with mujahideen and earth-moving equipment against a million-man Iraqi army. The kingdom invited American troops instead. Wright sees this, and bin Laden's reading of the Prophet's saying that only one religion should exist in Arabia, as one of the biggest factors leading to 9/11.

• 06

  Bin Laden attacked America because he felt the Islamic world was encircled

  Wright says bin Laden saw the US surrounding and threatening Muslim lands. Al-Qaeda was founded in May 1988 (its founding notes survive in the handwriting of the man who took them). In Sudan from 1992 to 1996 it was largely an agricultural operation, and bin Laden may have been the country's largest landowner. The embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole were steps toward drawing the US into a war, not the end goal.

• 07

  Warnings were ignored: the embassies and the Cole

  The August 1998 East Africa embassy bombings killed 224 people and blinded more than 100. The October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden came two weeks before an election. Neither became a campaign issue. The response was one failed 1998 strike at bin Laden.

• 08

  The CIA withheld what the FBI needed

  Two future hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, attended a Kuala Lumpur meeting with the Cole plotters and entered the US on January 15, 2000. The CIA knew but didn't tell the FBI, and obstructed Ali Soufan's Cole investigation. The NSA picked up calls between San Diego and an al-Qaeda house in Yemen 14 times, according to Wright. He says he doesn't blame the CIA for 9/11, but believes 9/11 would not have happened if it had worked openly with the FBI.

• 09

  Personal feuds helped open the door

  The rivalry between Michael Scheuer at the CIA's Alec Station and John O'Neill at the FBI's I-49 squad was bitter. Wright says both men were right about the threat, but their contempt for each other let it slip through. The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief warned that al-Qaeda was set to attack inside the US, five weeks ahead of time, yet Wright notes almost no one was held accountable.

• 10

  Terrorism has spread, and the pandemic was also an intelligence failure

  Al-Qaeda numbered perhaps 300–400 people on 9/11. Wright cites estimates of 30,000–40,000 members and affiliates today, from Morocco to southern China. He also points to domestic terror such as the 2019 El Paso massacre, in which 23 people were killed. He calls COVID, with more than 600,000 American deaths, a catastrophic intelligence failure, and thinks the US 'squandered 9/11 terribly.'