9/11 anniversary

Rosenzweig Center’s 9/11 Archive was one of the first of its kind

Colleen Rich — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 22:17:03 +0000

Rosenzweig Center’s 9/11 Archive was one of the first of its kind Colleen Rich Thu, 09/09/2021 - 18:17

The September 11 Digital Archive was one of the first digital archives of its kind, and it went on to become the Library of Congress's first digital acquisition in 2003.

Launched in January 2002, the digital archive gave people a collective way to upload their stories online.

And it was challenging at first to get people to tell their stories, and share their digital photos and emails, said T. Mills Kelly, director of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at ��ӽ紫ý, the original home of the archive, because it was not common at the time and social media platforms like Facebook did not exist.

“It was really difficult to get the first 300 stories,” said Kelly. “In keeping with Roy’s vision, the archive now has 72,000 stories, more than 6,000 digital images, a little over 900 audio files, which makes it the richest archive of people’s personal experience at that moment.”

He added, “It’s the story of how average people made sense of this moment.”

Kelly said the success of these archives depends on people participating, because historians and average people want to know how these events were experienced.

Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt were two of the founding members of the September 11 digital archive.

Cohen joined Mason in 2001, when the center received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for a digital history of science. He said the foundation asked if there anything the center was doing to record and remember the history of 9/11. The center also partnered with the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress.

“The project really took off and was featured on lots of newspaper sites, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and after a year or so, we ended up with 150,000 digital items, including tens of thousands of stories that people typed in,” said Cohen, who is currently at Northeastern University.

“On the first anniversary, Sept. 11, 2002, when things were still pretty raw, a lot of people came to the site and recording thousands of stories on that day.”

Cohen said 9/11 was for a brief window a unifying experience for people and part of the 20th anniversary is to memorialize the people who were lost.

“The biggest takeaway is this was the first major digital acquisition from the Library of Congress,” Cohen said, “and I think 20 years later it’s recognized as kind of pioneering project to use digital media and technology to record a really critical event in history as it happens.”

One individual contribution to the 9/11 digital archive that Schenfeldt recalls was a heart monitor log.

“A guy was wearing a heart monitor while out for a morning jog, running across the Brooklyn Bridge when the first plane hit the building right at 8:46 in the morning his heart-rate spikes,” said Scheinfeldt.

Other contributions to the archive included a collection of blogs, video games, animated GIFs, and a huge variety of file formats and technologies.

“What stands out the most is the 9/11 archive is an archive of ordinary experiences, made up mostly of the thoughts and feelings of ordinary Americans and people from around the world, who witnessed this event in real time on cable television and over the internet,” said Scheinfeldt.

He added, “It was the first global event of the internet age, and everyone was immediately touched by it.”

Sheila Brennan, who served as a co-director of the digital archive project team starting in 2009, said that the digital archive launched as an online collecting portal in the same year that Wikipedia launched.

“We’re building collections that don’t exist in physical museums,” said Brennan, who now works for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

James Sparrow, who served as associate director of the 9/11 digital archive, said the key to the archive’s success was its ability to engage a public audience for the task of preserving the memory of 9/11 before it faded or was lost to corrupted files, operating system upgrades or other changes. Sparrow is presently an associate professor at the University of Chicago.

“The 9/11 Digital Archive was a pioneering effort of university-based historians and digital producers to document the first world historical event that was fully captured and recorded in a range of digital formats,” said Stephen Brier, a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). “When the Library of Congress accessioned the 9/11 Digital Archive in 2003, it was the first fully digital collection of materials it had ever added to its collections.”

Along with Roy Rosenzweig, Josh Brown was co-principal investigator of The September 11 Digital Archive, which was a collaboration between Mason and the City University of New York Graduate Center’s American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning—for which Brown served as executive director from 1998 to 2019.

“Having collaborated on new media projects dating back to 1993, CHNM and ASHP decided to undertake this major archival project because we believed, as historians, that the digital materials related to the attacks would be central to any future understanding of Sept. 11th and the larger political, social, and economic meanings of that epochal historical moment,” said Brown, professor emeritus, CUNY.

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Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

9/11 anniversary

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Mason Nation shares their memories of 9/11

Colleen Rich — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 19:01:39 +0000

Mason Nation shares their memories of 9/11 Colleen Rich Thu, 09/09/2021 - 15:01

Each Sept. 11 the ��ӽ紫ý community comes together for a day of service. Here are students working on a service project in 2019. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

We put out a call on social media for ��ӽ紫ý faculty, staff, students and alumni to share their memories of Sept. 11, 2001. If you want to share yours, please access the form here.

Karen T. Lee
Assistant Director, Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, and Research
I lived in Western Pennsylvania, at the time, not far from the Flight 93 crash site. The university where I worked closed early. Most of the shops and restaurants and the local mall were closed for the rest of the day. There were helicopters that night. I kept watching the news. I'm not sure why. It was hard to wrap my head around it all, the enormity of what had happened. Now I sometimes wonder how much is memory and how much is impressions.

Kathleen Summerfield
BS Social Work ’02
I am forever grateful to all those who lost their lives trying to save the victims that day; for the first responders still living with the damage; to all the people who lost those they love that day and days after; to all those who will forever remember how resilient the American people can be; and to all those who will continue to do what is right and selfless and courageous even when times are extremely dangerous, challenging and scary in order to protect the lives of the people of this country—forever grateful.

Stephanie Flores
HR Project Manager, College of Science
I was sitting in my 10^th-grade world geography class. Our teacher turned on the TV, and we saw that the twin towers had been hit. We thought it was a movie. Little did we know that history was being made. It wasn’t until we saw the report about the Pentagon being hit that reality really sunk in. My dad was at the Pentagon that day, but fortunately he was fine.

Anna Stolley Persky
Communications Officer, Office of Communications and Marketing
Graduate student, Creative Writing Program
I was a reporter for Bloomberg News, covering the Justice Department at the time of the attacks. I was running late to our offices, then in the National Press Building, when the first plane hit. When the second plane hit the second tower, I was watching it on TV. The bureau chief asked me to write the lead D.C. story about how we were in the middle of the largest terrorist attacks ever on U.S. soil. My then-boyfriend (now husband), called me from his apartment by the Pentagon because he heard the noise as the third plane hit the Pentagon, then saw the smoke and devastation. He reported it to me before our reporters did. The next hours are a haze—watching people jump and fall from the towers, watching the towers crumble, being told a plane was headed our way (near the White House) and that we had to leave the building, and then told that the plane was no longer headed our way, calling FBI sources who sounded as scared as I felt, and rushing the White House reporter over to the safe location in the FBI building. I finally called my mother, who was crying, and told me to leave the city immediately. I told her, "I have to stay. This is my job" even as part of me wondered why we weren't leaving the city with everyone else. D.C. took on an eerie emptiness as people fled. Reporters were crying off and on all day, especially when we learned of friends or sources who died or were missing from the planes, in the Twin Towers or in the Pentagon. I left my office very late at night, having written the most important story of my life. My then-boyfriend picked me up and drove me through the city, with armored vehicles on the corners and few people in sight. As I looked out the window, I thought we would never be safe, never be whole again.

David Manning
BA Communication ’04
I was the photo editor of Broadside, the student-run newspaper at the time. I was taking afternoon classes and working for a litigation support company in the mornings out next to Dulles Airport. We didn't have TV and radio was difficult to tune in at my job and only the team leads had internet. When i got to work shortly before 9, a coworker mentioned something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I assumed it was a Cessna or other small plane and thought nothing of it. An hour later, when I went to one of the team leads, I saw the photo on CNN's home page of the second plane hitting the south tower. Within minutes, we heard about the Pentagon. I went to use the communal break room phone and didn't get a dial tone. That’s when the entire staff took a break en masse to go outside and try and use a cell phone. We were a tad panicked as we couldn't get our cell phones to work.

Ten minutes later I made the conscious decision to leave work for the morning, and the bosses sent us home at the same time. I decided I needed to get to campus, to get a camera and document what was going on at the time. I took backroads from Chantilly to Mason, let WTOP fill me in on what all was happening and arrived quicker than I think I ever drove to find a stunned campus, students in the Johnson Center glued to the TVs. It was the first chance I'd gotten to see the video of what occurred.

I was asked if I wanted to go down to the law school as I was told that was being used as a staging area for the Pentagon. I politely declined as I thought I would get in the way, and there was no way I could get to the Pentagon from there. I did my best to document and photograph the reactions on campus. There were polite discussions amongst students in the JC, sometimes voices were raised. Everyone was at their wits end. I even came across students playing ping-pong in the SUB I basement as Peter Jennings recapped the days events on a nearby TV. I heard from acquaintances in Student Government that they were concerned about family or friends in the Pentagon as they were unable to reach them. I'd checked in with Campus Police as they were concerned about any hatred or violence toward our diverse student population, which thankfully never materialized.

I stayed until President Bush spoke late that night, went back to our offices in SUB I and downloaded my photos and went home. The eerie calm and silence was the worst, as there was always an airplane going out of National or Dulles that was flying by campus.

The next few days passed as a blur. I'm not sure if I slept as everyone was waiting for the next attack to come. I photographed vigils, memorials, reactions. I remember dropping a memory card by the Mason Pond, which I never found—100 or so photos from the night lost.

Two decades later, the memories are as vivid as if they happened yesterday.

Scott Glaberman
Assistant Professor/Associate Chair for Research, Environmental Science and Policy
I was living in midtown New York at the time and my bedroom had a direct line of sight to the twin towers. I had just moved in on Sept. 5 to start a new job at the American Museum of Natural History. I remember my brother waking me up, and as I sat up in bed, I saw smoke billowing from one of the towers and was very confused. I went to turn on the television to find out what was happening and then heard my brother's partner scream from my bedroom when she saw the second plane hitting the tower. As the day unfolded there was a weird mix of panic and normalcy in the air, with some people continuing to go about their business. It was surreal as we saw the towers engulfed in flames and then eventually disappear. Within a few hours, a parade of people covered in soot and dust came marching up Third Avenue looking dazed. I grew up in New Jersey near the city and lived in New York City for a while longer. But that day changed things for me, and I can't really spend time in New York anymore. Too many memories.

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9/11 anniversary

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Faculty experts reflect on Sept. 11

Colleen Rich — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 18:00:30 +0000

Faculty experts reflect on Sept. 11 Colleen Rich Thu, 09/09/2021 - 14:00

To mark the 20^th anniversary of Sept. 11, we reached out to our colleagues at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security and the Schar School of Policy and Government for their remembrances. Many of them have worked in the intelligence and policy communities and each has a unique perspective on a day that changed our world.

Larry Pfeiffer
Director, The Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security
I remember driving down MD Route 32 on my way to work at the National Security Agency—it was a beautiful clear sunny day—when I heard the reporters on the radio talking about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. Odd, I thought. Moments later, they reported the second tower had been hit. With that, I knew the United States was under attack. I rushed to the office, where I helped manage the NSA’s relationships with foreign intelligence services. My chore that day was to get a message to all of our foreign partners that we were under attack and needed their help. At some point we sent everyone home, fearing an attack on our headquarters in Maryland. As I was completing the message to our partners, by myself in the office, a security guard came in waving her service revolver around asking why I was still there. I asked her to put the gun down and give me a few more minutes to finish what I was doing. The mission of the U.S. intelligence community changed dramatically on that day as we retooled to fight a global war on terrorism. I had the privilege of working alongside some incredible men and women through the rest of my career, doing what I could to avoid a repeat of 9/11 and to keep America safe.

Ronald Marks III
Former CIA case officer
Visiting term professor, Schar School of Policy and Government
On 9/11, I was about to leave home for a meeting at Army Intelligence when I saw on television the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Immediately, I called my wife who worked at CIA. I could not reach her. After a very long hour, she arrived home shaken, but safe. I hugged her for a long time. 9/11 destroyed the pretense any nation state had impermeable borders and boundaries in the 21st century. And that America, a 20^th-century nation, must quickly adjust to the new realities.

Ellen Beth Laipson
Director, Center for Security Policy Studies
The attacks of Sept. 11 transformed the national security priorities of the United States in fundamental ways. Defining terrorism as the greatest threat to our security led to many structural and legal changes. In hindsight, many of those actions appear to be an overreaction, or steps where the costs outweighed the benefits. Those costs are not just financial. They are human, in the war zones, and social, in the delicate balance in our system between basic rights and civil liberties and government's requirements to prevent terrorist attacks. This 9/11 anniversary is a sober one as we try to assess the long-term impact of our engagement in Afghanistan, and the residual threat that al-Qaeda may still pose to Americans at home and abroad.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. Photo by Getty Images

Edward Rhodes
Professor, Government and International Affairs
I was blithely at home writing a lecture about American foreign policy when my sister-in-law emailed me. I turned on the television just in time to watch the first World Trade Center tower collapse, and then the second tower. l don’t remember how long after that it was before the screen shots came in from Arlington, showing a gaping void in the part of the E-ring of the Pentagon, where I had once worked. The next day, from my fifth-floor office windows, 30 miles from Manhattan, I watched the plume of smoke still rising from the spot on the horizon where I used to see the tops of the towers. All of these are unforgettable images, burned in my brain. But it’s this last image, of the plume of smoke, that is probably most telling. Metaphorically, for the last 20 years, we have all been watching that plume of smoke, unable to look away. Sadly, we’ve never succeeded in understanding the human fire that caused that smoke; as a nation, we’ve never really understood the fuel, the oxygen, or the matches that create these fires, and despite enormous effort, we’ve certainly not understood how to put them out or prevent them from starting. Perhaps now, though, with our withdrawal from Afghanistan we can complete our grieving process and put our anger behind us, and turn our attention to the collective, constructive tasks we are called upon to undertake, to come together as a diverse national society and to preserve a livable world.

Ming Wan
Professor, Government and Politics
Associate Dean, Schar School of Policy and Government
I remember 9/11 as if it were yesterday, in slow motion. I was working in the basement of my Fairfax home, when my elder brother called me from New York City to say he was okay. “Why should I think you are in danger working in Wall Street?” I asked. He replied, “Turn on the TV.” Shortly afterwards, my younger brother and sister-in-law knocked on the door. They were dropping by after seeing her parents off at Dulles Airport. They had been in the dark about the attacks. We found out together on CNN that the plane that had crashed into Pentagon was the one their parents were on. My wife, who worked in a building not far from the White House, was somewhere trying to reach home. A real estate agent called out of blue to see if we would be interested in selling our house. The houses in our neighborhood had apparently been selling like hotcakes. “Shame on you,” I yelled. I cancelled my class for the next day.

A. Trevor Thrall
Associate Professor, International Security
Twenty years ago, a small group of hijackers shocked the United States and taught Americans to fear terrorism. I will never forget how we saw the best in our country as people rallied together to recover. Sadly, however, the events of 9/11 also unleashed America’s violent side. Instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, the United States launched a global war on terror under the illusion that terrorism was something that could be defeated militarily—at a staggering cost in lives and national treasure. Now that American troops have come home from Afghanistan, the United States can honor the victims of terrorism while starting a new and more peaceful chapter of our history.

National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial, dedicated in 2008, honors 184 people killed at the Pentagon and on American Airlines flight 77 when the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Brien Aho

Colin Dueck
Professor, Government and Politics
In the years just before 9/11, I used to see the World Trade Center from my apartment window in Brooklyn. The events of that day were not only shocking, they reoriented U.S. foreign policy toward a new counterterrorism posture around the world. Over time, that posture involved many frustrations and mistakes. But we would do well to remember that Salafi-jihadist terrorists have not given up on their ideology or their ambitions. On the contrary, they see themselves as having succeeded in pushing America out of Afghanistan. The challenge for the United States will be to find a path moving forward that protects U.S. citizens and allies from terrorist attack, without exhausting the American public and its elected leaders.

Richard Kauzlarich
Distinguished Visiting Professor
U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
It is impossible to express my feelings of loss—for friends whose brother died in New York on 9/11, and people I do not know living that day over and over in their memories. In part, we saw the legacy of that day play out with the recent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. As a former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan and Bosnia and Herzegovina, I worry about how the rest of the world will see those two events impacting on the U.S. role in the world.

Mark N. Katz
Professor, Government and Politics
After I finished teaching my 9 a.m. class on Sept. 11, I walked across the Fairfax Campus to the Aquatics and Fitness Center on what I thought was an especially beautiful morning to do some exercise. There was a big screen television in the lobby with more than the usual number of people watching, but I didn't pay any attention to what was on. While riding an exercise bike, though, I could see in the lobby that more people had gathered to watch. I went to the lobby and learned the awful news. I walked back to my office with the sense that this was the beginning of a new, more ominous world. One of my students, an Army reservist, came by my office to say he expected to be called up and wanted to arrange to do his course work on an accelerated basis. I would also learn that one of my former students working in the Pentagon that day had survived. The sense of security that followed the collapse of communism in 1989-91 was gone.

Gen. Michael Hayden shared his thoughts on the Hayden Center website.

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Schar School of Policy and Government

Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence Policy and International Security

9/11 anniversary

Schar School News September 2021

Michael Morell: A witness to history

Colleen Rich — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 16:59:25 +0000

Michael Morell: A witness to history Colleen Rich Thu, 09/09/2021 - 12:59

Michael Morell. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

Michael Morell is the only person who was with President George W. Bush on Sept. 11, 2001, when the 9/11 attacks occurred, and with President Barack Obama on May 2, 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed.

Morell, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at ��ӽ紫ý’s Schar School of Policy and Government, is still one of the country’s leading national security professionals.

During his 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as deputy director for three years and twice served as acting director.

He received the Presidential Rank Award for exceptional performance—the nation’s highest honor for civilian service. He also received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, CIA’s highest award, for his role in the bin Laden operation.

Today, he is a senior national security contributor for CBS News and hosts the popular CBS News podcast, “Intelligence Matters.”

His book, “The Great War of Our Time: An Insider’s Account of CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism—From al-Qaida to ISIS,” was published in 2015 and was a New York Times bestseller.

We are grateful to Morell for taking the time to share his memories and insights with The George.

Photo by Getty Images

Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, what sticks with you the most, both emotionally and visually?

There are a couple of moments that are etched in my memory. One is on Air Force One on Sept. 11, President Bush looking me in the eye and asking me, "Who did this?" I told him I thought that when we got to the end of the trail, we’d find al-Qaida and bin Laden. I told him I was so confident in that that I would bet my children’s future on it.

I also remember getting back to the CIA that night. I remember dozens and dozens and dozens of people at the gate. Some of them were current workers who had been sent home earlier in the day because George Tenet, then the director of Central Intelligence, had evacuated the building fearing a plane might hit it. And these current workers were saying, "Hey, we want to come back. We want to work. We want to help. We want to do anything we can.” And what was even more moving was former employees, people who had retired years earlier, standing at the gate saying, "I want to come back. I want to help. I’ll do anything."

Fast forward, I remember in August of 2010, when the head of our Counterterrorism Center said to [CIA Director Leon Panetta] and me, after a routine meeting, "I need to see the two of you alone." So we went back to the director’s office and he told us that “We found a guy that we call Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who we believe is a courier for bin Laden. And we found where he lives.” When you saw this place, with 12- to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire, and all sorts of other security features, and no television and no phone and no wi-fi, and families that don’t leave the compound, kids don’t go to school, they don’t put the trash out. I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up as the first real possibility that I had seen that maybe, just maybe, we had found bin Laden.

I remember the day that we got bin Laden. But I remember even more, to bring us full circle here, President Obama, knowing I was with President Bush on 9/11, asking me to go to Dallas after the bin Laden raid and brief President Bush on it. So I took with me the lead analyst to tell the intelligence story, and I took with me the lead military planner for the raid, to tell the raid story. We spent two and a half hours with President Bush, and he was like a kid in a candy store. He wanted to know every single detail. And at the end he got up and walked over to his desk and pulled out one of his challenge coins; the military has these challenge coins that they share with each other, different units. And he slapped it in my hand and shook my hand, and I could see closure in his eyes. And when I looked at the coin, it was his Commander in Chief challenge coin, which he had never given to me before.

You were part of an extraordinary event. How did you balance the intensity of doing your job with the surreal aspect of the moment?

The surreal is happening all around you, literally. I remember getting back to Air Force One from the school [in Sarasota, Florida, where President Bush had been speaking]. Air Force One was ringed with Secret Service officers with their weapons out. Not their handguns, but with their long guns. It looked like soldiers on a battlefield. I had never seen that before. Everybody’s bags were being searched. They searched my top-secret briefcase. I didn’t say a word.

As we were landing at Andrews [Air Force Base] that night, the president’s military aide was looking out the windows on the left side of the aircraft as we were approaching. He called me over and said to look out. There was a fighter jet on our wingtip. He said, “That’s an F-16, and there is another one on the other wing tip.” The F-16 was so close you could see the pilot. You could see the pilot’s facial features, and you could see the pilot looking at us, and in the distance, you could see the still-smoldering Pentagon. Then he said something to me that still sends shivers up my spine. He asked me if I knew what their mission was. He said their job is if someone fires a surface-to-air missile at us on final approach, their job is to put themselves between that missile and the president of the United States.

So the surreal is all around you, and it’s happening, and it feels surreal. But you have a job to do. I had multiple interactions with the president that day. And while you feel the surreal, I don’t think it in any way got in the middle of me doing my job. In some ways it motivated me even more.

Photo by Getty Images

The narrative was the CIA at that time was, and I know you’ve heard this phrase, “asleep at the switch” when it came to the attacks. Is that a fair assessment?

It’s not fair. The CIA was created to prevent strategic surprise. And I don’t think in its entire history that CIA has ever done a better job providing strategic warning than it did on al-Qaida and bin Laden prior to 9/11.

We first identified bin Laden in 1992 as a financier of terrorism. By 1996 we identified him not just as a financier, but as a terrorist himself, as the leader of this group called al-Qaida. We told people he wanted to drive the United States out of the Middle East. We told people he wanted to depose Sunni rulers he saw as puppets of the United States and replace them with Islamic leaders. We told people that his plan to accomplish all this was to attack us anywhere he could, in particular in the Homeland. And even as early as 1996 we told people he wanted to acquire weapons of mass destruction in order to do that. And those warnings just got louder and louder and louder.

So quite the contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think there’s ever been a time where CIA has spoken more loudly and more repeatedly about a threat than it did about al-Qaida and bin Laden prior to 9/11.

Where does the next great terrorist threat come from, a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or from domestic terrorists?

We are far safer today than we were on Sept. 10, 2001, from foreign terrorists. They have been degraded. We do a good job of watching them with precision intelligence, and when they start getting stronger, the United States has routinely acted militarily to keep them degraded. And we’re going to have to do this in Afghanistan going forward. So much safer today.

There are groups in the world I’m currently worried about. Al-Shabaab in Somalia, ISIS in West Africa, ISIS in Iraq, and Syria is starting to bounce back. And we’re going to have to watch al-Qaida in Afghanistan because the Taliban is going to give them safe haven, and they are going to try to reconstitute.

But the question about domestic terrorism is a great one. As we sit here right now, I’m more worried about a significant domestic terrorist attack similar to the Oklahoma City bombing than I am about a 9/11-style attack from foreign terrorists.

Photo by Getty Images

What do you believe will be the legacy of 9/11?

Every president believes that their fundamental job is to protect the American people, job No. 1. The gap between job one and job two is not even close. And so the fundamental goal of President Bush after 9/11 and President Obama and President Trump and President Biden was and is to protect the American people, and from that perspective, the legacy is that we were amazingly successful after 9/11.

Despite attempt after attempt after attempt by al-Qaida to conduct another attack in the Homeland, they failed to do so until only very recently, the attack in Pensacola by the Saudi Air Force pilot who was training there. We’ve had internal attacks of radicalized people, so-called lone wolf attacks, but from the outside that’s the first attack. So, again, we have been wildly successful ensuring that multiple presidents now have done their fundamental job.

But I think there is some truth to the idea that America is weaker today as a result of all of this. The Iraq war wasn’t necessary, and it really cost us. It divided America politically; it still divides America politically. And I think about a series of wrong policy choices in Afghanistan by multiple administrations and the trillions and trillions of dollars spent and a significant loss of credibility. We lost the war. We lost another war. And the way it ended, even more lost credibility. I think there’s some truth to the idea that what bin Laden did on 9/11 has damaged us.

And the other thing to think about is that for 20 years we were fighting counterterrorism and a related counterinsurgency wars, and we weren’t focused on our peer competitors, China and Russia. And during those 20 years, China was catching up economically, and both countries were catching up to us in terms of conventional military capabilities—so much so that the last National Defense Strategy Commission, on which I served, came to the conclusion that if we had to fight a war today against China or Russia in their backyard, that we would struggle to win and could well lose that war because of what’s happened the last 20 years.

So I think there is an argument to be made that we are weaker.

What gives you hope?

You know, we’re in a pretty dark place right now, specifically politically, we’re in a pretty dark place. Our democracy is not functioning, let’s not kid anybody here. That’s the bad news. The good news is that America has shown itself over and over and over again to be resilient. And I do two things today in my retired life that drive that home to me.

One is I spend a lot of time with startups, particularly high-tech startups that offer something to the national security community. And when you spend time with these startups you are blown away by the entrepreneurship, the innovation, the creativity, the success of these companies. There’s nobody else in the word that has this kind of entrepreneurial capability.

The other thing I do is I spend time in college classrooms, and I’m blown away by the students. I’m blown away by how smart they are. I’m blown away by their passion for the country. I’m blown away by their belief, which I want to feed, that they can make a difference.

Those two things give me hope. Those two things are examples of our resiliency. So do I think we’re doomed? No, I don’t. I think we’ll bounce back, but it’s going to have to be done by this new generation, and it’s going to have to be done consciously. It won’t happen any other way.

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Campus News

Schar School of Policy and Government

9/11 anniversary

Schar School News September 2021

Mason grad An Nguyen has persevered despite the loss of his father on 9/11

Melanie Balog — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 16:43:33 +0000

Mason grad An Nguyen has persevered despite the loss of his father on 9/11 Melanie Balog Thu, 09/09/2021 - 12:43

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America left an indelible mark on An Nguyen with the death of his father at the Pentagon, but the ��ӽ紫ý graduate student has overcome considerable hurdles to ensure that he honors his father every day by becoming the kind of young man his beloved father would have wanted.

His story has evolved to become less defined by the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11 and more by its remarkable abundance of resilience, hope, perseverance and a mother’s love.

Khang Nguyen was a 41-year-old electronics engineer working as a civilian contractor for the Navy when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 64 people aboard and 125 more inside the building.

An Nguyen at the Pentagon on Sept. 15, 2001. Photo provided

His mother, Tu HoNguyen, an engineer who was working at the time for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been slated to work at the Pentagon that day, but was sidelined at home by a car accident from a few days earlier, saving the family from further tragedy.

“I think it took me a few weeks to truly realize he was gone,” said An Nguyen, who completed his BS in information technology at Mason in 2019. “It just took a long time. I didn’t realize that he wasn’t coming back until seeing his casket on the day of his funeral. How do you explain that to a 4-year-old child? It’s heartbreaking.”

Processing such a traumatic event is often extremely difficult for adults, let alone a 4-year-old who had previously shown signs of autism prior to that fateful day.

Unable to express the depths of his grief, An essentially stopped speaking in the wake of the tragic events.

Now left to single-handedly raise her and her late husband’s only child, Tu HoNguyen saw to it that An received all the support he needed to work his way through such great loss. Her unwavering love and support—as well as that from her mother—proved invaluable when coupled with help from caring school guidance counselors and child psychologists.

“I had to overcome my sorrow,” said Tu HoNguyen, who is also a Mason alum graduating with a master’s degree in computer science in 1992. “I had to be strong.”

Her tireless efforts were rewarded when An, at age 7, emerged from the shell of sorts to which he’d retreated following his father’s death and immediately began thriving. He became very focused on excelling in his school work and began trying his hand at a number of different activities over the next few years such as swimming, tennis, basketball and martial arts in the hopes of becoming the kind of all-around young man that his father would have wanted him to be.

An had plenty of college options by the time he graduated from high school, but chose to attend Mason, following in the footsteps of his parents, two aunts and two uncles. Khang Nguyen was a few credits shy of earning his master’s degree from Mason at the time of his death. His parents had immigrated to the United States from their native Vietnam in the years following the Vietnam War.

An Nguyen graduated magna cum laude from Mason, and now works as a software engineer in Northern Virginia. He will receive his master’s degree in software engineering from Mason in December.

“It’s kind of a miracle,” Tu HoNguyen said. “He’s overcome so much. We are so blessed.

An Nguyen at the Pentagon memorial after he graduated in 2019. Photo provided

As he grew older, An began reading as much as he could about 9/11 and the U.S. “War on Terror” that began in its immediate aftermath in the hopes of making sense of the awful tragedy in some way.

Seeing other young kids grow up with their fathers was difficult because he could never experience the bond between father and son. An had to instead rely on his mother and the memories from other family members for their recollections of him.

“I had to basically form my identity without my father by my side,” he said.

An loved his father, who is remembered by those who knew him as being kind, smart and compassionate, and continues to treasure these qualities about him as he seeks every day to incorporate them into his own life. Khang Nguyen was also talented at playing the guitar, a skill that An also hopes to fully pick up in the future so he can play the same songs his father did when he was young.

Both An Nguyen and his mother will be at the Pentagon on Saturday.

“There are a lot of emotions and reflections in these past 20 years,” An Nguyen said. “Now…I hope to honor his legacy and promote a better and more just society.”

An Nguyen and his mother Tu HoNguyen. Photo by Chase Martin/Creative Services

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