Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11. GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath, who was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, spoke with fellow journalist Charlie Sennott of the GroundTruth Project to discuss their personal experiences of that day, and to reflect on its legacy. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: Twenty years ago, I was in lower Manhattan in my office at WNYC, about six blocks from what would be called Ground Zero, just tying up some loose ends ahead of a planned drive out of New York City for a public radio conference. The next morning, Tuesday, September 11th, I got as far as picking up a rental car before hearing the news on WNYC of both towers being hit. I stayed home in Brooklyn. About 30 minutes after each tower fell, the smoke and debris blew over my neighborhood. I held on to the rental car for a while after that, because we thought that second wave might hit at any time. We all have our stories, and even those of us who were born after the attacks still feel the effects, twenty years later. To help us understand those effects and talk them through, we return to our regular guest, my friend and colleague Charlie Sennott of the GroundTruth Project. Charlie, welcome.
Charlie Sennott: Thanks, Arun. Good to be here. What a day for reflection and thought as we go into the weekend.
Rath: It gets more intense the more I reflect on it. Maybe that shouldn't be unexpected, but it kind of is. I was talking about my own 9/11 origin story, as it were. The event defined, in various ways, my adult life and career. I think for journalists of our era, this was the Kennedy assassination, right? Tell us, if you don't mind, about your personal side, what were you working on professionally at the time?
Sennott: Well, I was the Middle East correspondent for The Boston Globe in September 2001. The bus bombings in Jerusalem, where we were based, were getting really horrific. The Middle East felt like it was a tinderbox and it was exploding into The Intifada. My wife and I, we had three boys, and we were really busy as parents, and I was very busy as a correspondent covering all of that. But the bombings were getting closer and closer, and they got right near the school where our kids were going, and it was just getting scarier and scarier.
We basically were told by the Globe, maybe it made sense to pull out. I hated to do that. I loved my beat, I loved the Israelis and Palestinians. But I was really thinking, OK, I'll cover Europe. So I arrived in London on September 5th, 2001, and on the morning of September 11th, I was unloading the moving truck with our things. The radio was on. We didn't even have the TV's set up, and I heard it on the radio that there was one plane into the tower. I immediately thought of my old job at the New York Daily News, where I sat in the newsroom covering police. I thought about the famous photograph of a plane stuck in the Empire State Building. And I thought, wow. That was my first thought. Within minutes, the second plane [hit], and I thought [of] my experience as a police reporter in 1993 covering the first World Trade Center bombing. This is now eight years later, and my first thought was, they did it. They accomplished what they set out to do when I first started on this story as a police reporter in 1993.
In that moment in time, I said to my wife, Julie, "hey, I'm going to be covering this for pretty much the rest of my life." And, you know, who knows? I hope that's not true. I hope the world takes a turn. It's certainly been true from that moment to this that I've been covering this story and trying to answer a question the city editor of the Daily News asked me in '93. "Why would they want to blow up the World Trade Center?" I think it's still an operative question, and I think it's still my motivating force - to try to bring understanding, to try to explore this story, to stay with it, to think of its enormity, and to think how all of our lives changed on that day. Everything changed in America, and I think who we are as a country now really is defined by that moment. By both the solidarity we felt in response to it - you think about that amazing Frontline documentary this week that showed that beautiful moment on the Capitol steps of all Republicans and Democrats in unison, standing there in solidarity, singing God Bless America. You fast-forward to how fear set in, and how we began to think of ourselves in "us and them" terms. We became susceptible to fear, and we divided. Think about where we were on Jan. 6th, and how that journey has shaped us every year for twenty years.
Rath: Kind of skipping to the end of this a little bit - I think you would say that there were bad choices by leaders that set up the series of failures in Afghanistan ultimately, in Iraq over many years, and beyond. Do you think it's as simple to say that bad choices are what led us to exactly where we are today - so divided?
Sennott: Nothing about Afghanistan is ever simple, but it's certainly true that we seem to always go in the right direction and then take the wrong steps and get veered off in the wrong direction. Look, our country was attacked on September 11th by al-Qaeda, which was led by a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. But they were housed and welcomed into Afghanistan by the Taliban government. Going in to topple that government, to disrupt, degrade and try to destroy al-Qaeda, were worthy goals. I'm not a pacifist, so I'm not against the idea that we should respond to an attack on our country. But as I watched that story unfold, the first mistakes were, we let the Taliban cross over into Pakistan. That was a mistake. You could feel it in Tora Bora. Reporters were there, watching this in real time, thinking, why are you letting the bad guys get away?
The next series of mistakes were really, really clearly drawn, as I think we made the Taliban the enemy. Now, the Taliban government was responsible for welcoming bin Laden, but the people who supported the Taliban, we didn't need to view them as the enemy. I think that was a strategic mistake, followed by the worst mistake of all, which was the war in Iraq. Then we really lost the plot, and then we really started to go in the wrong direction.
I think one presidency after another, one year after another, one surge after the next, we made every mistake we could. I think certainly President Bush is responsible for that. So is President Obama. President Obama was wonderfully, spectacularly focused on the goal of bringing bin Laden to justice, and he did it, and that was a major accomplishment. But at that moment, he also could have said, now's the time to pull out. The mistakes are many. We certainly know President Trump had mistakes, and we know that President Biden, in this final exit, made mistakes. But there's a lot of mistakes to go around, and the point now is to go forward and to think really about where we're going to go as a country after this searing experience.
