It is 25 years since two planes, sent by Osama bin Laden as the head of the terrorist organisation al-Qaida, flew into the North and South Towers that comprised the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 people and changing the world as we know it.
I’m old enough to remember the day itself – I was a trainee lawyer in London and we watched the news unfold on a conference room television – which means I am also old enough to remember the world before it. But a quarter of a century on, it is taught in schools as a historical event. Can you believe it? No, because if you experience such a convulsive moment – even at the distance of being a television viewer in a different country – time bends around it and normal chronology becomes meaningless ever after. But that is only our perspective.
The 90-minute documentary Turning Point: Generation 9/11 begins with the sights, sounds and some of the stories of that day, none of which have lost any of their power to shock or to harrow the soul. The beautiful, clear blue sky filling with smoke and fire. The 911 calls from people trapped in the burning buildings. “The only thing they can really say is, ‘Hang on – we’re coming for you,’” says the oral historian and curator of the museum that now houses those recordings. The photos of some of the people who tried and who died in the attempt. The memories of some who survived: “I heard ‘pop, pop, pop’. It was the sound of the floors pancaking.” Calls from those about to die to their families: “Mostly I just want to say I love you.” Recollections of the bereaved. “She worked on the 96th floor but I was hoping for the best.” “We talked about the happiness we shared during our lives together. He kept saying ‘I love you’. Then I heard a crack and a sound like an avalanche.”
The depth of the tragedy inescapably established, the film then moves on to the breadth of it, positing that the decisions made in the aftermath have inexorably shaped the US and helped to lead it into its current state of Trumpian chaos and division. The gamechanger, according to the film-makers with whom I suspect a lot of us will agree, was the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress a few days after the attack. It was ostensibly to allow the US to use all necessary force against anything or anyone linked to 9/11, but has since been used to justify just about any strike against any perceived threat anywhere since, especially in the Middle East.
Turning Point takes us through the invasion of Afghanistan, where Bin Laden and al-Qaida were known to be based, and where the citizens living under the tyranny of the Taliban-controlled government at first welcomed the US troops as liberators. Soldiers testify to the support they felt and their pride in the mission. An Afghan fighter pilot who had trained in the US and returned to fight the Taliban says they all felt like allies.
Back home, however, public feeling was turning against Muslim citizens. “All of a sudden I’m a foreigner,” remembers Brooklyn businessman Mohammad Razvi. “I’d never felt that.” The Italian owners of the shop next to his asked how his people could do this. “These are not my people,” he told them, a microcosm of the national and international conversation that would continue to grow in intensity and irrationality.
Soon Homeland Security and the “war on terror” emerge as concepts – nebulous concepts, but incredibly useful to the powers that be and in which you can see the seeds sown for the flourishing of ICE. The nascent internet supercharges the conspiracy theories and unites the theorists that terrible events always produce. It gives them unprecedented power that is harnessed and exploited by the people and institutions we once trusted to protect us from such misinformation. For others, trust in them would be further eroded by the mission creep that AUMF had enabled. Was the invasion of Iraq anything to do with 9/11? The drone strikes and assassinations under the Obama administration? How do we know that the aggression of Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria (to defeat Islamic State) and its ilk don’t entrench anti-US sentiment and create more terrorists than they kill, as one expert asks.
Turning Point avoids coming to any firm conclusions about what is next. On the one hand, it points to Trump’s US and all the potential for utter disaster it holds. The beneficiaries of the presidential freedoms and geopolitical divisions instigated by 9/11 appear few and dreadful. On the other, it points out that the old guard is – well, old. The people who have grown up distanced from events by time perhaps have a clearer, calmer view of what is needed now. And perhaps – perhaps – they will turn in the right direction.
