Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban.
I was living near the Twin Towers on 9/11, so I saw the attacks, and I had friends who were killed in the attacks.
I think the key that happened on 9/11 is we went from considering terrorist attacks as a law enforcement problem to considering terrorist attacks, especially on the scale we have on 9/11, as being an act of war.
When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on.
The near-term attacks ... will either rival or exceed the 9/11 attacks... And it's pretty clear that the nation's capital and New York city would be on any list.
Less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaida attacks were continuing: the firebombing of a synagogue in Tunisia in April, a bomb outside the U.S. Consulate in Karachi in June.
One of the reasons the deficit got as big as it did, frankly, was because of the economic slowdown, the fall-off in deficits, the terrorist attacks. A significant chunk was taken out of the economy by what happened after the attacks of 9/11.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as more recent attacks in Madrid, Spain, and London, England, showed in a very tragic way just how vulnerable many areas of the world are to these sorts of actions.
There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.
If the United States had maintained its spending under Ronald Reagan, it is possible that the attacks of 9/11 - presaged by Islamic terror attacks on multiple American targets beginning with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - would have been stopped.
Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.
I left my husband a year after 9/11. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion, nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other. But before we separated, we visited N.Y.C. one more time together for a friend's engagement, and we went to pay our respects at the site of the attacks.
I was 11 or 12 years old when I first saw 'Reservoir Dogs.' I remember after I saw that film, I kept renting it from the video store because I wanted all of my friends to see it.
I started getting these attacks in 2009, just as my music career was taking off. I'd be doing photo-shoots and started to feel like I was having heart attacks. Increasingly I found it difficult to step outside my flat. Things started to get better after I saw a therapist, who told me I needed to make peace with my panic attacks.
We're here so that Afghanistan does not once again become a sanctuary for transnational extremists the way it was when al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks in the Kandahar area, conducted the initial training for the attackers in training camps in Afghanistan before they moved on to Germany and then to U.S. flight schools.
9/11 was a gamechanger in so many terrible ways, not just for the United States and for our own national security apparatus but for the whole world. And those attacks blew apart any notion of separation between foreign and domestic threats, any notion that such attacks only happen to other people in other countries.