#THE WORLD AFTER US SERIES#

#THE WORLD AFTER US SERIES#

I’ve spent much of this year working on a podcast series about the lingering questions from the attacks. Two of my other books chronicle how that day changed the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts and the government’s doomsday plans. I am the author of an oral history of 9/11. George Packer: 9/11 was a warning of what was to come government, and even changing the feel of daily life, as security checkpoints and magnetometers proliferated inside buildings and protective bollards sprouted like kudzu along America’s streets.

The events of September 11, 2001, became the hinge on which all of recent American history would turn, rewriting global alliances, reorganizing the U.S. response to the 2001 terrorist attacks over the next two decades, as the United States embraced the “dark side” to fight what was soon dubbed the “Global War on Terror” (the “GWOT” in gov-speak)-an all-encompassing, no-stone-unturned, whole-of-society, and whole-of-government fight against one of history’s great evils. In retrospect, Cheney’s comment that morning came to define the U.S. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.” He added, “That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.” “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” he told the host, Tim Russert. At a prayer service later that day, he outlined the clear objective of the task ahead: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”Īppearing on NBC’s Meet the Press two days later, Vice President Dick Cheney offered his own vengeful promise. “The whole world hears you, and when we find these people who knocked these buildings down, they’ll hear all of us soon.” Everybody roared. After rescue workers shouted that they couldn’t hear him as he spoke to them through a bullhorn, he turned toward them and ad-libbed.

Bush visited the New York City site that the world would come to know as Ground Zero. O n the Friday after 9/11, President George W.

The world after us