Since that tragic day of 9/11/2001, Patriot Day occurs each year on September 11th in remembrance of the most vicious attack on American freedom in history by Islamic terrorists killing over 3,000 Americans. While we can lower the flag to half-staff and take a moment of silence, the best way to commemorate 911 is exercising our freedoms in action and deed. No other country in the world provides the freedom and opportunities of the United States of America, yet we must always be vigilant or lose our freedom forever.
The arrogance and foolish pride of intellectuals has always been the biggest weakness of America. However, increasingly and especially on 9/11, cybersecurity is our biggest risk. Social media and e-mail activity will be especially high and everyone should be cautious of scams and emotional content. All organizations should brief their people and conduct a cybersecurity drill. Much of the world plans to kill more Americans or take away our freedoms on this day, while celebrating their past victory of hate and death.
Remembering 911
On 9/11/2001, I was driving to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Muskogee, Oklahoma to setup a terminal server farm. While calling the office to check-in, I was told the first tower had fallen in New York City. Like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, this couldn’t be happening in America. By the time I reached the VA, the second tower had fallen, all other vendors and non-essential staff were sent home, and my mission was still to harden security and complete the project.
It wasn’t a privilege or honor. The looped video coverage of planes crashing into the buildings that eventually fell was horrifying. More staff began leaving, getting gas and bread on the way home to get their guns. I still remember the phone conversation with my mother in Saugerties, NY that evening. All these years later, portraits of the Twin Towers still hang in my office. Despite the painful memories, they are a constant reminder of the freedoms we have lost and that the rest of world largely exists to destroy our way of life.
Holy War Against America
Never forget that America was primarily founded on religious freedom with the pilgrims coming to the new world to escape persecution in 1620. Four hundred years later, Christians are the most oppressed people in the world, yet no word has been invented for Christian hate. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden signed a fatwā as head of al-Qaeda and soon after released a video declaring war on the West, United States, and Israel.
“The people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Jewish-Christian alliance and their collaborators,” he wrote. In 2004, bin Laden released a video that compared the costs of the 9/11 attacks to al-Qaeda versus the United States: “Al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost—according to the lowest estimate—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars.” Muslims, he wrote, should abandon their petty local fights and unite to drive the Americans out: “destroying, fighting and killing the enemy until, by the Grace of Allah, it is completely defeated.”
911 Attack
On September 11 or 9/11, there were a series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks committed in 2001 by 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda against the World Trade Center Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Some 2,750 people were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania (where one of the hijacked planes crashed after the passengers attempted to retake the plane); all 19 terrorists died. Police and fire departments in New York were especially hard-hit: hundreds had rushed to the scene of the attacks, and more than 400 police officers and firefighters were killed.
Osama bin Laden believed that the United States was a “paper tiger” and tasked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with dreaming up the tactical innovation of using hijacked planes to attack the United States. The September 11 plot demonstrated that al-Qaeda was an organization of global reach. The plot played out across the globe with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, Germany, money transfers from Dubai, and recruitment of suicide operatives from countries around the Middle East—all activities that were ultimately overseen by al-Qaeda’s leaders in Afghanistan.
War On Terror
The war on terrorism was a multidimensional campaign of almost limitless scope. It involved military wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, covert operations in Yemen and elsewhere, large-scale military-assistance programs for cooperative regimes, and major increases in military spending. At the same time, intelligence funding increased comprising: considerable increases in America’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, a global program of capturing terrorist suspects and interning them at Guantanamo Bay, expanded cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, and the tracking and interception of terrorist financing.
The diplomatic front included continuing efforts to construct and maintain a global coalition of partner states and organizations and an extensive public diplomacy campaign to counter anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Finally, the domestic dimension of the U.S. war on terrorism entailed new antiterrorism legislation, such as the USA PATRIOT Act; new security institutions, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the preventive detainment of thousands of suspects; surveillance and intelligence-gathering programs by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and local authorities; the strengthening of emergency-response procedures; and increased security measures for airports, borders, and public events.
Conspiracy Theories
Released on April 13, 2005, by Dylan Avery, a 21-year-old amateur filmmaker, Loose Change was a “documentary” that posited a radical thesis:
What if September 11th—the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the tragedy that precipitated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, costing the world trillions of dollars in military spending and tens of thousands of innocent deaths—was not the work of 19 jihadi terrorists? What if the American government knew about the attacks ahead of time and allowed them to occur or, even worse, helped execute them?
In the quest for greed and fame, two more versions were released and after selling his soul for profit on the tragedy of others he is largely unknown with meager net worth of $200K. Other conspiracy theories included:
- Cover for a robbery since $850M was stored in basement vaults by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
- President George W. Bush was responsible for the attack for political gain.
- Mossad was responsible for the attack to compel the United States to defend Israel and attack her enemies.
All of these theories have been thoroughly debunked, yet they are often touted by our enemies and even taught as history by radical liberal progressives worldwide.
Important Lessons
In military history, it’s often cited that Afghanistan has never truly been conquered and often the eventual demise of many empires. Bill Clinton could have killed Bin Laden but didn’t want to destroy Kandahar (over 300K people and 100 square miles in 1999) and kill 300 people? In reaction to fear, we empowered our government to constantly surveil, search, and investigate our private lives.
The Afghanistan Withdrawal will also be recorded as one of the worst military operations in history. Like supposedly winning the cold war with Russia when the Berlin Wall fell, we are very complacent and today communism and socialism now called progressivism is stronger than ever. There is no Geneva Convention in cyberspace and our government has little means and no worldwide jurisdiction to protect citizens. While we argue about contrived political issues complacent in our sophistication, our enemies are poised to strike in cyberspace poisoning our minds and spirit, along with destroying our technical advantage and prosperous way of life.
Patriot Day Challenge
The challenge today for all Americans is to remember those who were killed that day and all those who died in the aftermath since, as well as demonstrating our will to protect our freedom.
Share the memories of where you were and those lost. Be grateful for what we have, what we’ve endured, and what we continue to accomplish no matter the human struggle. However, be vigilant in all things digital as there will be a tremendous number of scams and propaganda via every type of media preying on our emotions.