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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Friday, September 11, 2026

What I'm Reading: 9/11

By Rich Kozlovich 

I started posting this at 7:30 AM with a number of linked articles.  I've continually updated this today to include a lot more linked articles.  All profound, provocative and factual, and an excellent resource for those who desire to be able to tell this story as it really happened, and will continue to happen until Western civilization accepts the world is in a one sided undeclared religious war, and it's losing.  

We’re Just Seeing This Now? 25 Years Later?… CIA Declassifies Historic Document Warning George W. Bush That Bin Laden Was “Determined to Strike in US” — Clinton Learned of Airplane Plot Three Years Earlier -  On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released 71 President’s Daily Brief documents spanning from February 1998 through the morning of September 12, 2001. This is the largest public dump of 9/11-related presidential intelligence the Agency has ever made.  The collection, which includes more than 100 pages of heavily redacted documents, was framed by Ratcliffe as “an act of exceptional transparency” and “consistent with President Donald Trump’s historic transparency initiative.”.........

9/11 Was The Beginning Of A Religious War That We Lost - Twenty-five years ago this week I listened to the late historian Stephen Ambrose deliver the opening remarks for a conference about World War Two at Hillsdale College. He had good news for us. The 21st century, Ambrose declared, would be an era of peace and progress. He said the major conflicts of the 20th century, the two world wars and the Cold War that followed, were fundamentally disputes within the West over competing visions for our civilization. The whole century had in a sense been a long civil war, and now the war was over.......

Two days later the planes hit the towers. Today, it’s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose’s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional........

 https://media.townhall.com/cdn/hodl/2026/244/32d43a46-b9fc-4145-81b5-eccf65a25676-1052x615.jpg

America’s Greatest Danger Has Been Post-9/11: We’re Doing to Ourselves What the Terrorists Could Not - The only thing more cataclysmic to America than the 9/11 attacks has been the stunning erosion of patriotism and kinship we’ve seen in the quarter-century since the mournful cleanup. While foreign flags fly proudly in street protests, the American flag has made some feel “ Meanwhile, the New York mayor’s actions and associations rightly “Some people did something,” is how Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minnesota, remembered the attacks.  There for a while, hating on America was shockingly in vogue:............ The terrorists of 9/11 brought down New York’s Twin Towers, along with four airliners packed with innocents. But only we stand capable of flying planes into our most fundamental beliefs, traditions and institutions...........

25 Years of Denial - The West saw the threat on 9/11 – then it spent a quarter century pretending not to see it.  Today marks a quarter century since 9/11. What’s left to say about that day and its long, dark aftermath? I’ve probably written a dozen or so of these anniversary pieces, and at this point I feel like an old preacher trying to come up with a fresh angle for a sermon about the good Samaritan. But there is no fresh angle: the lesson of 9/11 is a singular one, and a simple one. 

It was there before our eyes on that very morning– if we knew a few basic facts and dared to add them up – and it hasn’t changed at all. The only thing that has changed is the extent of the damage that has resulted from the continued refusal of our leaders, our media, and our educators to speak that simple truth.

It’s still astonishing to ponder the scale of the impact that one person can have in human history. Days after the Twin Towers fell, George W. Bush, speaking in a cathedral with an imam at his side, assured us that the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon had nothing to do with Islam. Islam, he maintained, was a religion of peace.   It was a lie. It was a colossally dangerous lie. And he knew it.......

Schools Discussing 9/11 by Teaching About ‘Islamophobia,’ Downplaying al-Qaeda, and Even Assigning bin Laden’s Manifesto - A quarter century after 19 al-Qaeda hijackers murdered 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field, new leftist universities, unions, and advocacy groups are teaching American students that the story of September 11 is mainly what happened to Muslims afterward........Additionally, Pittsburgh’s Voices Ethnic Studies materials tell students the attacks produced “increased experiences with racism and Islamophobia” and skip who died and who did it.......

School district's stunner: Don't associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims - Guide to educators tells them to 'disrupt' students guilty of 'Islamophobic rhetoric. A school district just outside of Washington, D.C., where one of the four jets hijacked and crashed by radical Muslims in pursuit of their Islamic ideologies on 9/11 crashed into the Pentagon, has told teachers not to "associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims." "You mean, like, the MUSLIM TERRORISTS ACTING EXPLICITLY IN OBEDIENCE TO ISLAMIC THEOLOGY ABOUT WAGING WAR ON UNBELIEVERS, AS DEMONSTRATED ACROSS 1,400 YEARS OF WORLD HISTORY??" suggested a commentary at Not the Bee...........

Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, PA. - The row of colored flags eked, creaked, and fluttered in a gusting, biting wind that swept across the hill. The guide raised her voice above the shrill as the people drew closer so they wouldn't miss a word, wiped their eyes, and bent their heads. It was Shanksville, PA, September 2007, and it was like no other I had ever heard. It was an American tragedy, and it occurred on 9/11/01.......

 When Leftists Pounced on the Unity of 9/11 -  Not every American president has sounded the right notes for our national pain after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Twelve days after Hamas unleashed its mass murder in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, President Joe Biden suggested that 9/11 was all about the Arabs and the Muslims.  "I know many of you in the Muslim American community or the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community, and so many others are outraged and hurting, saying to yourselves, 'Here we go again,' with Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11," Biden declared. He said after 9/11, America "sought and got justice," but "we made mistakes, so I cautioned the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.".......

Two Anniversaries, One Warning: What America Must Remember - This week, America marks two solemn anniversaries on consecutive days. September 10 marks one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated while engaging students in public debate at Utah Valley University. September 11 marks 25 years since terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on American soil......

 Dartmouth’s 9/11 - Following 9/11 the New York Times ran Portraits of Grief profiling many of those lost in the 9/11 attacks. The Times attributes authorship of these artful profiles collectively to Kirk Johnson, N.R. Kleinfeld, David Barstow, Barbara Stewart, Jane Gross, Neela Banerjee, Constance L. Hays, Lynette Holloway, Janny Scott, and Somini Sengupta. We can’t capture the magnitude of the loss, or the meaning of who and what we lost, but the Times’s focus on individuals made a contribution to our understanding. Taking just one small slice, I wanted to retrieve from the series the Times’s portraits of Dartmouth alumni who were murdered on 9/11. With the death of each of these men, a world was lost. We remember:

EXCLUSIVE — 9/11 Victim’s Daughter Tells Mamdani to Stay Away from 25th Anniversary — ‘Don’t Come. We Don’t Want You There’ - Jeannette Puccio-Pick, who was nine years old when her father was killed in the September 11 attacks, is calling on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stay away from Friday’s 25th-anniversary commemoration, joining more than 110,000 signatories in opposing his attendance as she accuses the democratic socialist mayor of affiliating himself “politically, personally and professionally” with people she says have “minimized and justified the murdering of my father.”......

Watch: 9/11 Victims’ Families Speak at Ground Zero Memorial in NYC Widow Slams Saudi Arabia - Family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks speak at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City........

 It’s Not Over -  On September 11, some of us opened our eyes. Others closed them as hard as they could.   In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate,” a terrorist declares on the Flight 93 cockpit recording. That’s followed by the sounds of the terrorists assaulting a passenger.  “Please don’t hurt me,” he pleads. “Oh God.”  As the passengers rush the cabin, a Muslim terrorist proclaims, “In the name of Allah.”  As New York firefighters struggle up the South Tower with 100 pounds of equipment on their backs trying to save lives until the very last moment, the Flight 93 passengers push toward the cockpit. The Islamic hijackers call out, “Allahu Akbar.”...........

On John F. Kennedy Boulevard, in Jersey City, across the river from Manhattan, crowds of Muslim settlers celebrated the slaughter of Americans. “Some men were dancing, some held kids on their shoulders,” a retired Jersey City cop described the scene. “The women were shouting in Arabic.”.............

Our enemies wake up every day wondering how to destroy us. Their methods, from demographic invasion to WMDs, from political subversion to random stabbings, are many........

Dem El-Sayed Whines Republican Mike Rogers Is Making Leftist Ally Hasan Piker’s ‘America Deserved 9/11’ Comments an Issue…Then Complains People Don’t Denounce Violent Rhetoric! - On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed responded to his Republican opponent Mike Rogers criticizing him for campaigning with Hasan Piker given Piker’s remarks on America deserving 9/11 by saying that it’s “sad” that Rogers “thinks that the issue is a streamer in California,” but then said that what has “become normal in our politics” is “literally calls to violence, and the inability for anybody to actually call it out” in response to what someone at the Republican Convention said about him...........

 Autism article image

The 9/11 Miniseries the Left Wouldn’t Let You SeeMark Tapson And still won’t.  I was glad to see that journalist John Miller published a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this week reminding Americans of a miniseries that “some want us to forget,” as he put it. That show was the extraordinary and controversial The Path to 9/11, an ABC miniseries written and produced by writer/director Cyrus Nowrasteh*.  

Aired across the nights of September 10th and 11th in 2006, and featuring stars like Harvey Keitel, Patricia Heaton, Amy Madigan, and Donnie Wahlberg, The Path to 9/11 dramatized the historical thread connecting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the ‘90s, and the terrorism of that fateful morning in 2001. The miniseries connected the dots for audiences more thoroughly and accurately than any Hollywood project before or since. .........

Why the Democrat panic and threats? Because Clinton administration alumni feared the historically accurate docudrama would highlight their flaccid response to the growing threat of Islamic extremism in the ‘90s, tarnish their political legacy, and surface as an embarrassment to Hillary Clinton as she eyed the presidency herself........ 

A place to see ABC’s memory-holed ‘The Path to 9/11’ - Remember the movie that exposed how we could have prevented 9/11 were it not for the inept and corrupt Clinton Administration?  Both the Wall Street Journal and National Review wrote pieces on September 8th about ABC’s two-part, $40M production, “The Path to 9/11,” which aired once and only once 20 years ago on September 10/11, 2006, then all but disappeared.

Why did it air only once?

Democrats went all Tony Soprano on ABC, intimidating them with the fury and force of the federal government.  (Cute little network you got there.  Shame if something happened to it….)  And why did they do it?  It made Bill Clinton look bad.  It made members of the Clinton Administration look bad.  Those portrayed negatively objected.  Bill Clinton himself objected.  Some Democrats on the Hill wrote letters to then-president of ABC Bob Iger to stop it from airing at all.

Team Clinton even bullied the actors themselves..........ABC aired it anyway, but just that once, then they never licensed it out for distribution in any way, shape, or form.  The only way to see it now is via private citizens who recorded it and uploaded it to the internet.  I found one.  I was surprised at how little effort it took.  I’m frankly shocked it’s still there, as the copy I found has been up for a year.  (So I’d watch it quickly before it’s taken down.)  It was the best copy of about a half dozen I could find.  They all look to have been recorded via VCR, so the screen quality is, to our 2026 eyes, notably lacking, but the copy below is acceptable.  Part One, Part Two

What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us on 9/11 - The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for......

 It’s Time to Recognize Iran’s Complicity in the 9/11 Attacks - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said recently that Iranian assets seized by the U.S. Treasury could be held for the Iranian people or be distributed to victims of Iranian state terrorism. He mentioned specifically the families of those killed on the USS Cole in 2000. In previous statements, he has mentioned families of those killed by Iran in the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut in April 1983 and those of sailors killed in recent attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz. 

But he has never referred to the families of those who perished in the September 11, 2001, attacks, even though they account for a majority of claimants to the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund (USVSST), which was established by Congress in 2015. The 9/11 Commission documented Iranian assistance to al-Qaeda on pages 240-241 of its final report, based on information it uncovered at the eleventh hour before publication......... 

What we have forgotten about 9/11 - Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Islamist war against the liberal, democratic West still shapes our daily lives. Most Americans recognize that certain people and groups around the world want to destroy us—sometimes for reasons we can comprehend, sometimes not. Remembering 9/11 stands, in part, for the proposition that we will not allow the terrorists to win. Our laws, at least as written, have codified that remembrance. They reflect our national conclusion that foreign terrorist organizations are among the most depraved criminal enterprises imaginable. It was once commonplace to hear President George W. Bush declare that you were either part of the free world or aligned with the terrorists. Yet 25 years later, that ultimatum seems far less self-evident...... 

25 Years After 9/11, Osama bin Laden Is Winning - The ideology of Salafism, originalist or fundamentalist Islam, is largely unknown to the average westerner. Without diving into a exegesis on the writings of Abdullah Azzam (who extolled the critical centrality of jihad for Muslims) and Hasan al Banna (the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), the abbreviated history of the last quarter century in America since the attacks of 9/11 would please them no end...... 

25 Years Later: The Warnings Still Remain  - Tomorrow marks 25 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001 shattered America's complacency and changed the course of the world. A quarter-century later, it is worth remembering that the warning signs were not invisible in the years — and even in the hours — before that day........ 

A 9/11 Conspiracy Debunker’s GuideI spent thirty-eight minutes last week debunking September 11 conspiracy theories one by one with Shabbos Kestenbaum on PragerU’s The Brief. Many of you are familiar with the most popular ones: Jet fuel cannot melt steel; WTC 7 was brought down by explosive charges; a missile struck the Pentagon; dancing Israelis are evidence the Mossad was behind the terror attack........ 

 ‘There was nothing we could do’: NYPD high rise rescue master recalls watching 9/11 helplessly unfold from the sky -  Donald LaSala was at work in Brooklyn, eating breakfast and watching the news, when he got the call to respond as a member of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit (ESU). He was being sent to the World Trade Center to perform a high-rise helicopter rescue on Sept. 11, 2001......  

Students with President George W. Bush on 9/11 reflect on the day: ‘You could see it on his face’ -Former Sarasota, Florida, second grade student Krystal Davis remembers a wave of confusion washing over her and her classmates on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after a suited man whispered into the ear of the president of the United States, who was seated just in front of the students......  

Never forget ‘I relive 9/11 every single day,’ hero custodian, the last man out of WTC’s North Tower, says - William Rodriguez never took a sick day in his nearly 20 years as a custodian at the North Tower of the World Trade Center. But he seriously considered it on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. “It was so beautiful outside, I thought, ‘I’m just gonna stay home and hang out,'” he told The Post. “I called my supervisor and said I wasn’t going to work.”  But his boss begged him to come in — a decision that would change the course of his life.......

 The Dirty Little Secret Behind Mamdani’s Attempt to Make the 9/11 Anniversary About Him - There is a strategic reason why controversy surrounds Zohran Mamdani during the week of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 radical Islamic terrorist attacks on America. It’s not just because he’s an attention-seeking, spoiled child of privilege with an ego bigger than Barack Hussein Obama’s. Though all of that is certainly true.......

 School district accused of scrubbing 9/11 as guide tells teachers to dodge Islam - 9/11 with radical Islam and to be sure to create "safe spaces" for Muslim students as the nation somberly marks the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The guardrails in a six-page instructional guide, "25th Anniversary and Commemoration of 9/11" and distributed to teachers, has prompted critics to accuse Fairfax County (Virginia) Public School's liberal leaders of coddling post-9/11 sensitivities rather than teaching history.

Drone show recreates Twin Towers, honors 2,977 victims ahead of 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks in New York - A drone show illuminated the skies over New York Harbor Wednesday night as part of a tribute marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The artwork, titled "2,977 Lights Over New York Harbor," featured 2,977 lights, one for each person killed in the 9/11 attacks. The lights rose over the harbor before assembling into the outline of the Twin Towers at full architectural scale.............

Shadows from 9/11 - There are moments when history does not merely happen around us; it enters the house and parks itself at the head of the table.  I grew up watching the World Trade Center rise, but us kids never called it that. To us, they were the Twin Towers. I watched them climb skyward in that burnt orange iron inner façade that defined a childhood, when New York felt endless and everything seemed constructed to last.

The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, ruled the cityscape as the world’s tallest building for four decades, however it was in 1973 the Towers redefined Manhattan’s imposing skyline. A friend’s dad was on the job helping build what would become the tallest buildings on Earth, and gave us boys hard hats with the tower’s logo front and center.  The Empire State Building symbolized the city’s early ambition; while the Towers were their contemporary stretch. Those Towers were not just modern architecture, they were identity. They were permanence.

Then, on a single morning, they were gone.......

Remembering September 11, 2001, through real-time video timelines - Viewing events as they happened 25 years ago—playing out in real time on the news—may be the best way to memorialize the day.  It’s been an almost surreal, PTSD-like experience researching and reviewing old videos of that “severe clear” Tuesday 25 years ago. Many media outlets eventually stopped routinely showing videos of that day's events, so the footage largely gets proper attention only on anniversaries.......

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