When I look back on the 9-11 attack and the various words that followed under the umbrella of the war on terror,

I think the one thing I recall most is the amount of unity that the United States had

and that Americans had in the wake of the 9-11 attacks and the intensity of the emotions

that attack provoked. As I've talked about before, I lived in Manhattan, I worked in Manhattan when 9-11 happened.

I remember like it was yesterday the sensations of watching those two buildings in southern Manhattan

crumble to the ground on top of 3,000 American citizens.

The Pentagon was attacked. For weeks in New York, you could smell the burning of the rubble, of the bodies, of the chemicals.

Everywhere you went on every corner, there were desperate signs filling every street corner,

every street lamp on every street corner from desperate families,

hoping against hope that

they're missing loved ones were somehow with amnesia or unconscious or in a hospital instead

of the horrible truth, which is that they were almost all dead.

In fact, all dead those missing were under the rubble in the World Trade Center.

And the emotions that everyone I knew felt that I thought as well was

extreme amounts of rage and shock and trauma and a desire for vengeance.

And so what ended up happening was that the government successfully exploited those emotions, those very real human emotions.

We all watched videos that were heavily provocative. successfully exploited those emotions, those very real human emotions.

We all watched videos that were heavily

provocative and inflammatory of our emotions.

Videos of people jumping out of the World Trade Center

as the only hope that they had

for escaping a fire that was consuming them

...