On September 11, 2001, 19 Islamic terrorists snuffed out the lives of 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. 

They did so by turning four commercial jetliners into fuel-bombs—and crashing them into, respectively, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C.; and—unintentionally—a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

(Its destination had been the White House or the Capitol Building. But its passengers, alerted by radio broadcasts of the doom awaiting them, resolved to take over the plane instead. The hijackers slammed the jet into the ground to avoid capture.)

World Trade Center – September 11, 2001

But within less than a month, American warplanes began carpet-bombing Afghanistan, whose rogue Islamic “government” refused to surrender Osama bin Laden, the had of Al-Qaeda who had masterminded the attacks.

By December, 2001, the power of the Taliban was broken—and bin Laden was driven into hiding in Pakistan.

For more than 16 years, the United States—through its global military and espionage networks—relentlessly hunted down most of those responsible for that September carnage.

On May 1, 2011, U.S. Navy SEALS invaded bin Laden’s fortified mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and shot him dead.

U.S. Navy SEALs

OSAMA BIN LADEN’S BOASTING

On December 13, 2001, the Pentagon released a videotape of Osama bin Laden discussing the attacks in Arabic with another man who appears to be a cleric.

The videotape had been discovered by American forces in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. 

On the tape, bin Laden says he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of destruction caused at the World Trade Center. He had only expected the top portion of the Twin Towers to collapse:

“We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.

“Due to my experience in this field [he had graduated from King Abdul Aziz University with a civil engineering degree in 1979] I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only.

“This is all that we had hoped for.”

Osama bin Laden

9/11 VS. COVID-19

Now, consider this:

It’s September 11, 2020. Nineteen years to the day since the United States suffered its worst terrorist attack in history—a loss of 3,000 Americans.

And, in less than a year, the United States is nearing a death-toll of 200,000 from an enemy just as deadly and unrelenting as Al Qaeda.

That enemy is Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. 

The September 11 attacks jolted Americans out of their complacency toward Islamic terrorism. Since the 1980s, the United States had responded to terrorism via its legal system. After 9/11, Americans opted for a military response against Middle Eastern terror cells.

For months afterward, America feared the worst—that other cities would soon become targets for massive terror attacks. But, for all the death and destruction wrought that day, this didn’t happen.

There were two major reasons for this:

First, under its new director, Robert Mueller, the FBI completely refocused its mission from investigating crimes to preventing them. This resulted in a proactive rather than reactive mindset and approach. Even terrorists who felt safe abroad found themselves arrested by FBI agents employing the sort of techniques previously used against foreign spies.

Second, the attacks led to the creation of a huge new agency—the Department of Homeland Security. Massive sums of money were doled out to local police departments across the country, arming them with new hires and more sophisticated anti-crime technologies.

And for the first time since the dawning of the age of flight, the Federal Government took responsibility for preventing airline terrorism. Previously, this had fallen to individual airlines—which, seeing it as a financial drain, had assigned it a low priority.

The attacks also led to a complete restructuring of the United States military.

In the past, Americans had excelled in set-piece battles and wars. But when fighting enemies where guerrilla warfare negated overwhelming military power, the United States had done poorly—first in Korea (1950-1953) and then in Vietnam (1960-1975). 

As a result, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield reorganized the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, assigning highest priority to building unconventional military units such as the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, and the Navy’s SEALs. 

These were all major changes resulting from the 9/11 attacks. They cost billions of dollars and got huge publicity. But they didn’t affect the lives of everyday Americans as intimately as has the advent of COVID-19, also known as Coronavirus. 

Coronavirus

The 9/11 terror attacks frightened Americans more than any event since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.. But they slaughtered only a fraction of Americans, as compared with the 194,000 who have died from COVID-19, in less than a year..

Osama bin Laden deservedly gained infamy for plotting 9/11. But Donald Trump, who repeatedly lied about the dangers of COVID-19, remains beloved by about 40% of Americans.