OPINION:
I remember the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, but perhaps you do not. So let me tell you what happened and what we should have learned.
It was a perfect late-summer morning in Washington, in the 70s, with low humidity. I was in my office, the television tuned to a news channel.
A little before 9 a.m., there were live reports that American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the World Trade Center in New York City minutes earlier. The plane had flown through a clear blue sky into the north tower. Flames and smoke were billowing from a hole between the 93rd and 99th floors.
My phone rang. “Accident or terrorism?” asked a friend and former Pentagon official. I said I hoped it was an accident.
Then, at 9:03, we watched in horror as United Airlines Flight 175 was used as a missile to strike the WTC’s south tower.
Now we knew.
On the floors above the impact, where the heat was extreme and the smoke poisonous, people began falling or jumping to certain death. Cameras caught this. That nightmare image is seared into my memory.
Then, at 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, just outside the nation’s capital. At 9:59, the south tower collapsed. The north tower would follow at 10:28.
At 10:37, CNN reported a fourth plane was down. This was United Airlines Flight 93, which had been headed for a target subsequently assessed to be the Capitol or the White House.
We would later learn that Todd Beamer, a 32-year-old account manager from New Jersey, had tried a seatback phone; a credit card problem misrouted his call to Lisa Jefferson, a customer service supervisor for the airphone company.
After a brief exchange about what was happening, the two strangers said the Lord’s Prayer together. He asked her to tell his wife, pregnant with their third child, that he loved her.
He left the line open, and she heard him say to other passengers: “Are you guys ready? OK. Let’s roll.” They fought their way to the cockpit, where Ziad Jarrah, a Lebanese al Qaeda member, was at the controls.
At 10:03, their plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The death toll for the day was just under 3,000, including 343 New York City firefighters. Nineteen al Qaeda members believed they died as martyrs waging jihad.
Two people I had known were murdered that morning. A woman I had been close to when I lived in Africa was on the 89th floor of the south tower, and Barbara Olson, a lawyer and commentator I had chatted with days earlier, was aboard Flight 77. She called her husband, then the U.S. solicitor general, from the plane.
In the days that followed, all commercial air traffic was grounded. Americans feared more attacks were coming.
On Sept. 16, from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden issued a statement on Qatar’s state-owned Al Jazeera network denying involvement in the attacks. However, in a video released a few weeks later, he said: “God has blessed a group of pioneering Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America.” In a video released three years later, he claimed responsibility outright.
A U.S. raid killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, died in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul in 2022.
Americans have not suffered another mass-casualty attack on the homeland directed from abroad. That is no small achievement.
Yet al Qaeda lives. Its richest wing is al-Shabab, based in Somalia and tactically allied with the Houthi rebels of Yemen, proxies of Iran, long designated by both Republican and Democratic administrations as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Today, al Qaeda’s de facto leader is Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian special forces officer last reported living in Tehran. As the conflict between Iran’s theocrats and the U.S. has escalated, he is rumored to have returned to Afghanistan, which President Biden handed back to the Taliban five years ago last month.
I find it astonishing that the current mayor of New York City, in seven years of 9/11 statements, has never said plainly who attacked us and why. Since 2019, Zohran Mamdani has marked almost every anniversary with a post on X in wording that barely changes. The 2023 version:
“Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11; 22 years later, the death hasn’t stopped. We mourn our neighbors who died that day. The hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed. The unknown millions injured & displaced. In their memory, we work toward a better world.”
Note: New Yorkers “died.” Not murdered. Missing entirely: al Qaeda jihadi perpetrators. He adds that a higher death toll followed, implying that the U.S. is to blame.
Mr. Mamdani sat for an interview with Hasan Piker, a streamer who in 2019 said that America deserved 9/11. For months, Mr. Mamdani would not condemn the remark. Pressed at a 2025 debate, he called it “objectionable and reprehensible.”
Faced with a July petition from some victims’ families asking him to stay away from the commemoration this year, Mr. Mamdani vowed to attend and called Sept. 11 a “horrific terror attack.” But by whom and for what goal?
In 1983, self-proclaimed jihadis attacked Americans in Beirut; in 1993, they attacked the World Trade Center for the first time; in 1996, Tehran’s proxies attacked Americans in Saudi Arabia; in 1998, al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa; in 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Yemen.
Despite all this and more, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Americans took a peace dividend and a holiday from history.
Ten years later, the attacks of 9/11 woke us. The challenge now is to stay awake and do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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