At the 9/11 museum, America remembers only its own

At the 9/11 museum, America remembers only its own Submitted by Azad Essa on Sat, 09/05/2026 - 13:23 New York City's 9/11 museum preserves American trauma while obscuring the attacks’ political context and the millions abroad subjected to the so-called global 'war on terror' The rubble of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 in New York.

11 September 2026 will mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania (Alexandre Fuchs/AFP) Off The 9/11 Memorial & Museum has preserved almost everything.

Seventy feet beneath Ground Zero are burnt-out fire trucks, mangled steel beams, firefighters’ helmets, survivors’ watches, and the final messages left by passengers aboard the hijacked planes.

Visitors can watch the towers being struck from several angles and listen to the voices of those on the hijacked planes who knew they were unlikely to make it out alive.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which killed 2,977 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, I visited the museum to examine the story it tells of that day - and what it omits.

Even the most carefully managed narratives can contain details that quietly subvert it. I was looking forward to being surprised, given that 9/11 is among the most consequential events of the 21st century.

I spent close to three hours inside, circling the exhibits several times. I watched as visitors sighed, gasped, and covered their mouths upon encountering the images and videos from that shocking day.

I eavesdropped on conversations, closely read the captions accompanying the artefacts on display, and sat down to absorb the scale of the event in all our lives. The surprise, however, would never arrive.

Relentless collection The 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened in May 2014.

The massive museum - covering 110,000 square feet of exhibition space - is built into the structure of the original complex, with an exposed underground retaining wall built in the 1960s to keep water from the Hudson River out.

Half of Americans think post-9/11 wars were worth it, poll shows Read More » The museum holds more than 83,000 artefacts from the destruction on that day.

Voice recordings and transcripts from flight staff, final voice messages from husbands on board the flights to their wives, shocking footage of people jumping out of the windows of the towers, the planes hitting the World Trade Center (WTC) towers from different angles, and smoke billowing over the New York skyline make for a relentless replaying of that day.

In the main hall, there are mini-exhibits spread throughout.

An area focused on the unifying symbolism of the American flag; a set of touch-screens where visitors are encouraged to sign messages of love and support; a separate glass exhibit containing a miniature model of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad.

Even more curious is another cabinet that holds a single brick ostensibly from the compound itself, following the US Navy Seal raid in May 2011.

The code name used for bin Laden during the operation in which he was killed, the museum reminds us, was "Geronimo". Visitors are sent into an endless loop of reliving that day's trauma.

And it was often not presented in a fully chronological order. In the "Historical Exhibition", perhaps the core exhibit, visitors experience the trauma multiple times.

The repetition makes the event feel as if it is live, happening at that precise moment. The exhibit is suffocating; the corners of the passageway are tight, and one feels bombarded by the sounds and images.

"The shock of 9/11 becomes eternally present.

And as we are invited to share the perspective of that day, we become as ignorant as those whom we observe dying or surviving, doing their best to help or simply to escape," Ross Poole writes.

The museum isn't merely about the events of 11 September, but also recounts the 1993 attack on the WTC, underlining the towers' status as being among the great symbols of American power, prized by the US public, and therefore ultimately razed by their enemies.

The retainer wall inside the 9/11 museum (MEE) But the historical context and global consequences of what transpired that day are in short supply.

Those who may have come to the museum to understand why such an incident would occur in the first place are likely to leave with a very truncated and dubious version of history and the present day.

Funding 'terrorists' In its narration of the attacks of 11 September 2001, the museum says that these were carried out by "al-Qaeda - an international Islamist extremist terrorist network" founded in the 1980s whose aims include wanting to "overthrow governments in the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, which do not strictly enforce a religiously sanctioned political and social order".

"Attacks against the United States were intended to reduce American support for many of these governments; US support was viewed by al-Qaeda as a major obstacle to creating a global order under Islamic authority," the museum says.

Unlike the exhaustive reconstruction of 9/11, these details are sparse and intentionally obtuse.

"As part of the Cold War - the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States - the US supported the Afghan rebellion by funnelling money and arms through Pakistan.

The CIA provided money to recruit Afghans but did not directly fund foreign militants," one of the captions at the museum reads. This description is evasive.

Washington deliberately channelled funds via Pakistan as a means to preserve plausible deniability. Instead of explaining the statecraft, it became part of it.

A brick from Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (MEE) Whereas the museum had the opportunity to examine how the US-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan helped create the infrastructure and conditions from which al-Qaeda emerged, it chose to foreground al-Qaeda’s religious ideology as a principal explanation for its militancy.

In so doing, it became another vessel of Islamophobia. The global 'war on terror' The museum also has very little to say about the so-called global "war on terror".

The attacks of 9/11 took place on the morning of a particular day in 2001, but the wars launched in response lasted more than 20 years.

They killed nearly a million people and led to the displacement of 37 million people across the globe.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 became the pretext for a vast expansion of surveillance across American society, directed particularly at Muslims.

There was the use of black sites for torture and documented abuse at detention facilities like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

In the US, the events of 9/11 were used to turn immigration into a matter of national security, leading to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Even entering the museum felt like a trip to the airport. On entering the lobby, I was directed to one of those large cylindrical booths that one typically encounters when travelling today.

I removed my belongings, including my belt, and raised my hands as the body scanner swung by. Still unconvinced, the security guard conducted a gentle frisk to see if I had concealed anything in my back pocket.

I should note that not everyone was asked to go through the cylindrical booths. Others were directed to general metal detectors.

In this way, the museum may not have needed to say much about the legacy of 9/11. It was a living example of its excesses.

And so while the museum meticulously gives names, faces and voices to those killed in America, those killed in America’s response remain nameless and faceless.

It was fitting that almost none of the visitors I saw were people of colour. A staff member told me he had reservations about the lack of any portrayal of the global war on terror.

He didn't want to say more. Among the museum's honorary trustees is former US President George W Bush, who presided over the beginning of that campaign.

The museum felt like a time capsule - with a $36 entry ticket - a place where an old story was still being sold to muster confusion and hatred, while above, an entirely new world was taking shape.

In the real world, the official story of 9/11 is now often treated by a younger public with derision, and in memes, and is seen as a pretext for war and global extraction.

As I walked through the museum and looked at the exhibit dignifying the lives of thousands of people who died that day, I thought about the nameless and faceless people who died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When I read about how dust storms from the collapse of the towers had infiltrated lungs and caused disease, I thought about the people of Gaza, who have endured around 78 percent of their homes and buildings being razed to the ground with US weaponry and political backing.

These were two large towers that collapsed to the ground in New York City. The city had to remove 1.8 million tonnes of debris.

In New York, more people subsequently died from related diseases, including blood and lung cancers, than the actual attacks themselves.

On 8 September, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records on air quality following the attack, showing New York City officials knew conditions around Ground Zero made it unsafe to breathe.

In the Gaza Strip, it is an entire 365-square-kilometre enclave covered in plumes of smoke and dust, with few medical supplies, clean water or aid.

The United Nations estimates that "more than 61 million tonnes of debris will require clearing" in Gaza.

In this aerial view, People walk amid the destruction in Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 11, 2025, a day after a ceasefire took effect (AFP) I thought about a US military judge ruling just days earlier who concluded that statements made to the FBI by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, could not be used at trial because they were tainted by the torture and abuse he had endured in CIA custody.

His trial is set to begin on 5 June 2028 - nearly 25 years after his arrest.

The museum's method of retelling the story of the attack and its failure over the past decade to include the so-called global war on terror in its curation made it feel like part of the larger enterprise of war-making in America.

The trauma had a purpose. It was to keep visitors numb, or busy shopping.

“Thank you for visiting the museum,” an usher says as visitors exit the escalator to the ground floor.

He reminded us all to visit the museum store, where patrons could buy 9/11 magnets, T-shirts, American flags, and “Never Forget” mugs made in Thailand.

'Reflecting absence' At ground level, alongside the museum, two giant square pools make up the 9/11 memorial.

On exiting the museum, I returned to the memorial, where hundreds continued to gather to reflect, take photos or just catch a glimpse of the historic site.

How the US revived ‘war on terror’ era surveillance to suppress pro-Palestine movement Read More » Here, water cascades down the sides of a wall before streaming and disappearing down another square deep in the pool.

Around the pools, the names of those who were killed on that day are cut into the wall. These two striking artworks, named 'Reflecting Absence ', were unveiled in 2011.

Michael Arad, the architect of the 9/11 memorial, said he imagined “two voids tearing open a surface of water and the river failing to fill it up".

This image, he added, captured “a sense of rupture and continued absence”. Water drips down the square and into another opening, as if entering a void.

The metaphor is powerful, but maybe not as the designers originally intended. It felt as if the memorial asked us not to forget the void.

The museum, however, appeared to pull us all further into it. 9/11 Attacks New York City News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0