Is 9/11 still shaping America?

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0:57It's 25 years since an event that in so many ways shaped the modern world. The events of 9-11 had a massive impact, of course, in a sense on all of us, but particularly on the United States. And it is an effect that continues to this day. So over the course of the 25th anniversary commemorations, people will be thinking, and we're going to think now, about what the impact is, the continuing impact on the way that America is. There's also a row about whether the current mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, should himself attend the commemoration ceremonies. And that goes to the wider question of how progressive Americans and many young Americans should regard not only 9-11, but also the nation they live in.

1:46Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News.

1:53Marianna Spring:Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league. The tide is coming. and this time we intend to win it all. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. When I'm not around, you're going to be broke. There's not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

2:28Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England.

2:32Marianna Spring:And it is Marianna sitting next to Justin in the worldwide headquarters. And this is Sumi sitting all by her lonesome in Washington, D.C. And Sumi, you've been talking, haven't you? And we're going to hear your interview with Peter Bergen later on. And Peter Bergen is just, number one, he is a hugely influential author on all things to do with 9-11 and more widely, I suppose, national security. But number two, I remember back in the day, this is long before 9-11, he's actually met a Salman bin Laden, hasn't he? So someone with real credentials when it comes to studying al-Qaeda and knowing all about not only 9-11 and everything since, but actually everything that led up to it as well.

3:12Yeah, it was a fascinating discussion. I asked him precisely about that interview that he had, as you said, with Osama bin Laden in 1997. So before 9-11, he was on the tracks of Osama bin Laden. And we talked a bit about what happened since 9-11, the 25 years since then, how America has changed and what the lessons are that the country has and hasn't learned. So it was a really interesting conversation. We're going to talk quite a lot now about what 9-11 has and hasn't done to the United States. But I suppose we ought to start with the kind of up to the minute stuff, because it is quite a controversy, isn't it?

3:49So you've got some family members who lost loved ones in 9-11 trying to get the mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, of whom we talk often, not to go to, not to go to the 25th remembrance ceremony. Why? What's going on there? Yeah, some of the families are upset with the mayor's policies and also some of the people that the mayor has around him who we're going to talk about. But this petition that you mentioned, Justin, has over 100 ,000 signatures now. As you said, it's a group of families, some, not all of the families who lost relatives on 9-11. And they went to City Hall on Tuesday to deliver the petition to Mamdani himself.

4:27And this is what they said outside of City Hall.

4:29Marianna Spring:We are asking respectfully that he not show up, even though there is going to be other politicians there. These are the politicians that helped us, pushed beneficial laws through, and literally held our hand during that time. He wasn't even here. He was 10. He wasn't in this country. And I think he should really respect us as we're his constituents. I'm a native New Yorker, born and bred my whole life. And I think if someone says, just give us some 7 to 11, just let us have our peace at our memorial to really understand why we're here. We're honoring our loved ones. I want to make clear that our petition is not about Mayor Mamdami's religion or where he came from.

5:20Marianna Spring:It is strictly about the policies that he has today. Yes, he was a nine-year-old boy when 9-11 happened, but it is today that he stands with people like Hassan Piker. It is today that he hires people like Ramzi Qasim. It is today that he stands with an imam that was a co-conspirator of the 93 bombing. That is what we object to. OK, two names there, an important one. Hassan Paikar, who is someone who's certainly been very supportive of Mandani and other progressive left candidates as well on the Democratic side and is a Twitch streamer, which means that he basically streams his kind of entire life.

6:01And during the course of the conversations he has with people, he talks about politics and sometimes very aggressively and frankly, very unpleasantly as well in a kind of personal way. And he said some pretty unpleasant things about individuals, but he's also said, for instance, that America deserved 9-11, something that he's then rode back from. But nonetheless, he has said it. And there's this other guy as well, isn't there, Sumi, Ramzi Qasem. Who's he? Yeah, Ramzi Qasim is Mayor Mamdani's chief legal counsel. He's a lawyer. He is someone who has represented more than a dozen clients detained at Guantanamo Bay.

6:39And one of the big objections here that the critics of Zoran Mamdani in this case have is that Ramzi Qasim actually also represented Ahmed al-Darbi, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. And he had pleaded guilty to war crime charges tied to al-Qaeda plots. And actually, he was also the brother-in-law of one of the 9-11 hijackers. So there were people who say Ramzi Qasim, first of all, shouldn't be in Mayor Mamdani's office. He shouldn't be working with Mayor Mamdani. But then there was an event as well last Friday where the mayor signed an executive order, basically declaring 9-11 as a citywide day of remembrance.

7:15And after he signs these executive orders, he then hands his pen to Jessica Tisch, this pen that has been used to sign it. Jessica Tisch is the New York police commissioner, and he asks her to then hand this pen over to Ramzi Qasim. And there were plenty of Mayor Mamdani's critics who saw this as a real offense, that someone who they see with ties to what happened on 9-11, of course, Ramzi Qasim would say that is not at all the case. He did represent some detainees at Guantanamo Bay, but had no ties to what happened on 9-11. Nonetheless, there are those who say this is a sign once again that Mayor Mandani is turning his nose at how 9-11 should be remembered in this city.

7:58And we don't think he should attend the ceremony because he has people like Ramzi Qasem around him.

8:04Marianna Spring:We should say as well, when it comes to Hassan Paikah, we do know that Hassan Paikah was a big supporter of Zohar Mandani when he was running to be mayor. And that also, you know, in lots of ways, the social media strategy that Mandami is sort of known for this very effective social media strategy when he was campaigning. And you could see how a streamer like Hassan Paik is hugely beneficial to him during that time. But they've also both been critical of one another. And back in 2025, Mandami said that he found the comments that Hassan Paik had made about 9-11 to be, quote, objectionable and reprehensible.

8:35Marianna Spring:And I think it's worth us saying because we've spoken about, for example, Donald Trump's relationship with all kinds of influencers, activists, streamers, some of whom have said really shocking and outrageous things. And Donald Trump's general approach is to kind of say, well, this is just the world we frequent now online. Like this is, you know, just because I appear on this podcast or I pop up on this live stream doesn't mean I agree with every single thing that person says. And in the past, when Mandami's been criticised over remarks that people in his life have made and his personal life have made, he's essentially made the same point.

9:08Marianna Spring:Like, I'm not accountable for everyone around me's views. And talking about the world that we're in now, it really brings us back, doesn't it, Sumi, to the world that was then and to America's mayor, as he was known, because he's also been weighing in. That's right. Rudy Giuliani is back on the scene because he was sitting down for an interview. Of course, he was the mayor when 9-11 happened, as many of us remember. And he was sitting down for an interview with Newsmax. And he said that he believes Zoran Mamdani should not be at the 9-11 ceremony. He's, as we heard from the petition we were discussing earlier, not the only one who thinks that.

9:42But he said explicitly that he doesn't think Mamdani belongs to be there. He then went on kind of a long rant about Islam and making Islamophobic comments. But here's a clip of what he said.

9:54Marianna Spring:The reality is this ceremony is for the families and for America to remember historically. And frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America. One that is in terms of a war or effort continuing today and maybe even worse today. So having lost friends there and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming. So it's important to say that Zoran Mamdani never said what Rudy Giuliani is claiming there. But this is how he responded when he was asked about Rudy Giuliani's comments. I love this city.

10:41Marianna Spring:I love this country. And what I want this week to be a focus on is on the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11th. And a focus also on the first responders who gave everything they could to this city and to the people who came together to try and help their fellow New Yorkers. And so in the days to come, my focus will be on attending events that memorializes that incredible courage. And I will be there on Friday. One of the things that's interesting at play here is if you look at how 9-11 is perceived by younger people, so if we fast forward to now, you can see how, for example, we've seen on social media how quite a lot of people who are very critical of the war in Gaza have then used that to suggest, well, hang on, why do we give some events where lots of people are killed more attention than others and why have we focused on 9-11 in that way?

11:29Marianna Spring:And a lot of the people who express those views online are the kinds of people that have been supportive of Mandani. And it feels to me like Mandani is trying to tread a very sensitive and careful line, which is that the view of 9-11 is evolving and splitting in some ways as time goes on. But also he is the mayor of a city and he does understand the deep feeling about it. Is it fading, Sumi, as a sort of totemic event in American history? I think not for those in the generation who lived through it, but certainly for young people. I have, you know, young colleagues who didn't live through 9-11 who have asked me what the atmosphere was like in the country afterwards.

12:06And it boggles my mind to be able to have to explain it because to me it was such a shift in not only American politics, but society and culture and how America saw its place in the world. But, of course, as all, you know, big events in history, it does fade a bit. And I think what I have noticed as well is just how kind of some of the rhetoric after 9-11 and some of the coming together around Muslim Americans who were worried about how they might be treated. Of course, many of them did face extensive racism and a horrible backlash in this country, but how that rhetoric has changed today as well.

12:45I think that is where I feel most like the memory of 9-11 in that sense has faded. And if you just look at kind of how deeply divided we keep saying it and polarize and politicize everything is, it feels like a different atmosphere now than it did certainly after 9-11. Yeah. So if we talk about the atmosphere then for a second, the most striking thing to me or one of the most striking things to me is what George W. Bush did when it came to trying to bring the nation together. And my goodness, he had his faults as president, according to many Americans. Let's just put it like that. But one of the things he unquestionably did, he was aware, wasn't he, Sumi, in the immediate aftermath that he wanted the nation to come together.

13:27He genuinely did. And he wanted all Americans, including Muslim Americans, to be part of that. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. when we think of islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world billions of people find comfort and solace and peace and that's made brothers and sisters out of every race out of every race and he went to quite a lot of effort to do it and there were um one or two quite high profile attacks i remember a a Sikh person was killed i think um in in the immediate aftermath i'm thinking of the sort of week or so um and i think there were a couple of other really serious attacks too but generally to me one of the things that really struck me at the time was how bush wanted and knew that he wanted right from the get-go the response at least initially to be of the nation coming together and that I mean to be honest that is just pretty unimaginable isn't it as you were saying in the modern era don't you

14:43Marianna Spring:think that one of the reasons why it was possible for George Bush to call for collective unity in that way was because everyone was universally very very shocked I think one of the things that's tricky now is that those images from 9-11 were so stark but now you see this kinds of stuff all the time on social media feeds. And I think of the anniversary of Charlie Kirk being killed is the day before 9-11. And that imagery was so stark as well. And you're actually seeing a lot of Gen Z social media users who are almost kind of taking the mick out of 9-11 ceremonies in commemoration with the Charlie Kirk stuff.

15:19Marianna Spring:There's all sorts of absurd memes, which we've chatted about on the Top Comment episode that we've done this week, about the way that he's become this absurd meme character following his death. But I think that tells you that there's this sort of inability to pull people together in the way that there was because they're not as shocked by the whole thing as maybe would have been before you could see this stuff so regularly, like a desensitization perhaps to violence in that way that is actually probably broadly quite disturbing. Yeah, we're so saturated with those images. That's such an interesting point, Marianne, I agree.

15:53It was also that you saw such a massive attack on the US. I mean, I was in the state of New York, not New York City when 9-11 happened. And there was just this incredible visceral fear. You know, you came off those roaring 90s where the economy was surging and American soft power was at its height and American pop culture was everywhere. Michael Jordan was everywhere. And of course, there were obviously terrible signs of some of the cracks of the American economy in the 90s with manufacturing moving out, the Rodney King beatings in the 90s as well. Not that the 90s were an unproblematic place in the US, but there was this kind of giddiness of the 90s that carried over into the early 2000s.

16:36And then 9-11 happened and this sense of invincibility that many Americans had was completely and forever changed. And I remember myself, I had a very privileged upbringing, but for the first time really realizing what it was to be a brown person in America. And I was thankful that I didn't go to a school where I experienced racism or otherness. But at that moment, it really made me rethink where I stand in American society. And I think that was an experience that many minorities in the US felt. To your point about the different world that there was before 9-11, I applied to the BBC to go to work in America before 9-11.

17:16And the person who was then the foreign editor said, why would you want to go there? Nothing happens. Wow. It's just, it's not that interesting news-wise. I mean, he was making a serious point. He said, and he made the point, and I remember this so well. So this is the summer, Sumi, before 9-11, the July and August. The biggest story in America was shark attacks off the coast of Florida or the potential for them. That was the biggest thing. And I can remember still the conversation I had with the foreign editor where he said, yeah, you don't do stuff about preachers, which was a big thing at the time, who are getting into trouble because they're being a bit hypocritical about the things they preached about and then done, etc.

17:57So all those sort of classic and there was a bit of gun violence, of course, but actually because of that, that moment of enormous American power and then suddenly in that one day for it to go, that's the shock of it, isn't it? And also, it was, to Marianna's point about everything being memeable now and people seeing all sorts of horrible things online and all the rest of it, we were not much online. So, you know, when it happened, people were, I had friends who'd been in the White House during that time, on that day. I remember them saying, we had pages and the pages didn't work and they had the odd phone, but it was just a phone.

18:41You could make and receive a call in certain circumstances, but you couldn't tell where anyone was from or any of that kind of thing. And computers were basically not much more than a desktop, even if they were that. And so there were people from the White House wandering around the center of Washington looking for somewhere to kind of sort of set up shop because they're all brought out of the White House because they thought the White House was going to come under attack. It really was another world, wasn't it, Sue? Another world intellectually, another world in terms of our imagination about things that could possibly go wrong in America, and another world technologically as well.

19:19It was. And I think something I talk about with Peter Bergen is just how the shadow of 9-11 seems to hang over everything in American politics and American life still today. You really can still feel the remnants of so many things. I mean, even airport security has fundamentally changed after 9-11. of course, and that's something we still remember, you know, and taking off her shoes and, and all of that. But you, you know, that that sense of never being fully safe, again, I think, is one of the most fundamental changes that I noticed after 9-11. And it's something many Americans know. Okay, well, that's a good moment of which we should turn to your interview with Peter Bergen, because he is, as I said, right at the beginning, a fascinating guy and a guy who certainly knows his stuff on all of this.

20:01And you've been talking to him. Peter, it is great to have you, especially on this anniversary, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And you are donating your archive containing 150 ,000 documents to Georgetown University. You've built us up over your career. These documents show the rise of Al-Qaeda, which is the terrorist group that carried out 9-11. Can you tell us a bit more about what is in this archive and why you decided to donate it now? Well, I had written a book called The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, and it was going to be the last book I was ever going to write about bin Laden or Al-Qaeda.

20:36And I kind of organized things pretty carefully for writing that particular book. I am a bit of a pack rat, and I've been collecting things for a long time, including in the pre-digital era. And, you know, I was sitting not far from in the BBC studio in New York, not far from where the Trade Center. And of course, the Trade Center was attacked in 1993 for the first time by a group of people who trained in Afghanistan. And that's when I first got involved in the story. I went to Afghanistan during the Civil War there. And then I heard about Bin Laden. We interviewed Bin Laden in 97. I thought he might be behind the first Trade Center attack.

21:12Didn't turn to be out. That was not quite accurate, but close enough. But the point is, as I started collecting materials going back until 1993, and one of the more rare elements of the collection is a fatwa from Sheikh Omar Abdullah Rachman, who was serving life term in an American prison, who gave the religious authorization for 9-11. Of course, 99.9 % of Muslim clerics would not countenance attacks on American civilians. But Rachman issued this fatwa basically authorizing al-Qaeda to carry out attacks on American civilian targets, which bin Laden really needed because bin Laden had no religious training and nor did any of the leaders of al-Qaeda.

21:54So in their own minds, they needed some kind of religious authorization for the attacks they knew were coming. Peter, it's fascinating, the documents that you were able to gather. You were hot on the trail, essentially, years before 9-11. So what drew you to this group, to Osama bin Laden, to all of these documents and the people behind them? Well, I think, you know, people underestimate the role that luck plays in their lives. And sometimes luck works for you and sometimes luck works against you. I got involved in covering the first Trade Center attack, which happened on February 26, 1993. And the guys who drove a van into the Trade Center, into the parking garage there, planned to bring down both towers of the Trade Center.

22:37Luckily, they didn't succeed that time. They killed six people. But, you know, this was intriguing. You know, the Cold War had finished and jihadist terrorism, I wasn't thinking quite like this, But as I look back on it, the Cold War had finished, so what was the next story, in a sense? And jihadist terrorism seemed to be one of them. And I had made a documentary with two friends of mine when I was at university about the Afghan refugees that had flooded into Pakistan as a result of the Soviet invasion. So that was in 1983. So I was very interested in the Pakistan-Afghanistan story. It was a very interesting place to be as a quite young man.

23:17And so with that background, I was able to kind of ask my bosses at CNN to go and do a documentary. I went there with Peter Arnett, who at the time was the world's most famous foreign correspondent. And 93 in Afghanistan, there really was a very intense civil war going on. I went with a British cameraman, Peter Juvenile, who'd spent a great deal of the anti-Soviet jihad going in and out of Afghanistan. So I went with people who knew what they were doing. It's the first time I'd ever been to a war zone. It was pretty active. So that's kind of how I got introduced to it. And I think of myself as an historian.