Failures of the Imagination: Twenty-Five Years After 9/11

The trail of wholesale destruction and bloodshed for which the spectacular toppling of the Twin Towers in New York City twenty-five years ago serves as focal point—with a long before and a continuing after—is difficult to even encapsulate.

Dating the “before” is difficult enough. Like some versions of mainstream historical narratives commencing with October 7^th, blithely ignoring the Naksa and the Nakba, so too has “9/11” been made to loom over and obscure all its “befores” and “afters.” One could even go further back, to the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, or the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.

Yet, no matter where one starts, we still come up against the U.S. as the present imperial hegemon, with its breathtaking impunity. Since the collapse of the Twin Towers, with Israel and Zionism at the tip of its spear, the U.S. has exponentially accelerated death and destruction throughout West Asia, along with the decimation of the rule of law, the selective creation of further impunity, and the shredding of civil liberties at home and abroad.

Despite the formidable powers of past imperial hegemonies, the U.S. formula remains resilient. With its nuclear precedence, overwhelming air power, exceptionalist ideology, liberal monopoly (in the form of its political duopoly), currency leverage, and cradle-to-grave surround sound propaganda, the U.S. presents a model so deceptive that examining or even exposing some of its own crimes remains one of its strengths and escape valves.

But the way it does this can be confounding. In a crucial passage I’ve written about many times but never seen even mentioned elsewhere, the official 9/11 Commission Report found that the “attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.” It goes on to note: “Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalize imagination… It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of the imagination.”

The underlying assumption behind this, “that we couldn’t imagine planes would fly into buildings,” despite numerous pre-9/11 examples in video games, cartoons, movies, and advertisements, is meant to cause immediate cognitive dissonance.

Regardless of whether planes flew into the Towers, a more apt question should have been: does jet fuel from two planes have enough motive power to turn steel into molten lava (as described by firefighters), to pulverize 1.8 million tons of concrete, steel, glass, cars, trucks, buses, office furnishings, people, and everything else contained by the World Trade Center footprint into extremely fine dust in just 10-15 seconds, as actually happened on September 11, 2001?

While a grain of sand is 10 times the size of the mostly 1000 micron-size particles analyzed at the site, calculations have shown that anywhere between 24 and 106 times more energy than was available through gravitational fall would have been needed to turn the buildings and everything in them into dust particles of that size so quickly. Would this not have been worth exploring? But among so many unasked questions, such very obvious scientifically logical discrepancies were not of major concern to the Commission or its after-narrative.

Some of the most cogent and earliest refutations of the Commission’s findings and the official version were posed by David Chandler, retired from thirty-five years of teaching physics, math, and astronomy in high school and college. Chandler concluded that “NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] did not model the collapse of the towers… The scope of their investigation was artificially limited to what might have happened or could have happened to begin the collapse but [what] they explicitly did not take into account is what actually happened.”

Another key person removed from the “paid expert” or political appointee class was the late David Ray Griffin, a theologian known mostly for producing a critical edition of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929). Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor (2004)—a reference to a key phrase for what it would take to fully remilitarize the U.S., highlighted in the Project for the New American Century’s 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”—picked apart the official narrative through logic and deductive reasoning while opening the way for the architects and engineers to come on board with more and more questions.

A cursory web search will see Griffin and all the 3,661 licensed architects and engineers from around the world, active and retired, who have signed on for a new investigation into the “destruction of the 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11/2001,” referred to as “conspiracy theorists.”

The false separation of domestic and foreign policy, as well as the firewall preventing connections between scientific understanding and political events through the stark divisions of knowledge in the U.S., make it exceedingly difficult for U.S. citizens to challenge narratives that short-circuit rational thought.

From this vantage point, the ultimate goal of the U.S. has been to destroy civilizational sites and archetypes…

In one of the most insightful formulations of how U.S. ideology actually works, E. Martin Schotz, author of History Will Not Absolve Us, a book on the assassination of JFK, writes: “It is important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.”

Rather than being predictive of some Orwellian future, the 9/11 Commission’s passage about “bureaucratizing imagination” has always seemed descriptive, confirming what had already largely been put in place and would only entrench across all aspects of U.S. society, and then rigorously get exported—either through soft or brute power—as the “war on terror” proceeded apace.

The spectacular nature of the event—pitting the official account against the laws of physics—is, in itself, an act of mass collusion, perhaps best characterized by something Hannah Arendt once wrote: “…men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale…”

Architects of doom, like Richard Perle for example, whose 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was produced for Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly conjured up and imagined a new world order, while his ravings included: “No stages. This is total war… All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq… this is entirely the wrong way to go about it… if we just let our vision of the world go forth… wage total war… our children will sing great songs about us…”

Regardless of where one stands as to how the Towers came down and who, ultimately, was responsible, U.S. policies and actions that followed have been, and continue to be, crimes on a scale of enormity that clarifies the present end-game, from the genocide in Gaza and seizure of land in Palestine, to the scorched earth policy and wanton destruction of southern Lebanon, the restructuring of Syria, the attempt at regime change in Iran, the vassal status of Egypt and Jordan, and many other chapters in the U.S. effort to reorder the world according to its own dictates.

From this vantage point, the ultimate goal of the U.S. has been to destroy civilizational sites and archetypes, and bring the peoples of the region into the sphere of U.S. interests and consumer capitalism, in which a “Third Temple” in Jerusalem and a final solution to the question of Palestine would represent the full Disneyfication of the center of the ancient world. With unswerving clarity, it was Aimé Césaire who wrote: “American domination—the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.”

The scars are multiplying, but soon enough, bulldozers will cover the wounds. The only thing standing between a horror show whose magnitude we need to fully imagine and understand, and hope for the deeper continuity of steadfast civilizational structures in that part of the world is continued and active resistance to the U.S./Israeli/Zionist model by all possible means. While this resistance already finds its most potent and eloquent manifestations in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen, much deeper resolve and even bolder action is called for from people, organizations, and nations around the world to fully confront and subdue this monstrous machinery of death, whose accelerants can surely be found in the events that took place precisely twenty-five years ago, and whose perpetrators still remain unknown.

Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.

The art featured in this piece comes from Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine, a collaboration between poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay in New York and Palestinian artist and graphic designer Kholoud Hammad in Gaza. Drawn in a notebook small enough to fit in a displacement bag, with only a few pens at hand, Hammad’s miniature drawings are epic in proportion and intention, depicting horror, resistance, and beauty during the ongoing Israeli/U.S. perpetrated genocide. Alcalay’s acerbic and searing poems draw on an acute sense of history, as well as his experience, knowledge, outrage, and solidarity.  Accompanied by an interview with Hammad conducted by U.S. artist Tabitha Arnold, Alcalay’s “The Poetics of Geopolitics: A Word After,” and some of the poems translated into Arabic by Khaled al-Hilli, Sinan Antoon, and antón shammás, the book can be purchased here. All proceeds will be used to support Kholoud and her family, particularly her brother Ahmed, who was severely injured by shrapnel from an explosion.