Karen Rubin, Columnist

Sept. 11, 2001. It’s 22 years since that horrendous day. Still too soon to tell you what I really think.

Except for this: the 343 firefighters, including Great Neck’s own Jon Ielpi, were true heroes of the highest magnitude. The 40 passengers and crew aboard Flight 43 who made a decision to bring down the plane in a field in Pennsylvania in order to protect the Capitol as a likely target were bona fide heroes. And the hundreds of first responders who rushed in to save, and then to recover, so many who have suffered and died from the cancers they contracted at Ground Zero from their heroic effort, among them Kenneth Bleck and Ray Plakstis Jr.

The 3,000 who died in the Twin Towers (including 500 from Long Island) and at the Pentagon were not heroes. They were victims. No different than the 3,000 people who die each and every month by America’s senseless gun violence. No doubt there are true heroes among them who do their best to bring down the perpetrator, but most were just living when their lives were snuffed out.

Within days of 9/11, Congress passed the Patriot Act, giving the government the right to monitor anyone deemed suspicious, like checking which library books you consulted without the librarian being able to let you know you are being investigated.

Within days of 9/11, anybody traveling on an airplane had to take off their shoes, go through X-ray machines to expose their underwear, get patted down because one wannabe terrorist had a match in his shoe and another wore an explosive in his underpants.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, over 800,000 have been killed with guns in America, compared to the 15,000 American soldiers and contractors who died in 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq to avenge 9/11. Gun violence has become the No. 1  killer of children, taking the lives of 12 each day. The USA is the only country in the world where this happens and the only country in the world where guns outnumber people.

Does the government react as it did after Sept. 11 to protect Americans from this domestic, home-grown, daily threat of terrorism? To the contrary, the Supreme Court extremists have actually weakened the ability of states to protect their residents from gun violence; other courts have declared unconstitutional Red Flag laws that bar abusers and those in mental distress from possessing a gun. Congress created a “no-fly” list, but terrorists on the list can still freely purchase a gun.

The Sept. 11 anniversary follows soon after the first days of school. Now our children have to go through the trauma of “active shooter” drills and hundreds of thousands of children have lived through the real thing, some even multiple times.

Schools now spend $2.7 billion on security each year, turning buildings into prisons instead of centers for learning.

Maybe instead of once again spending hours at the Sept. 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan reciting each and every one of the 3,000-plus names murdered 22 years ago (hundreds more from illnesses contracted), we should recite the 48,000 names of people who died by guns just this past year.

And maybe in 22 more years, I will feel free enough to tell you what I really think of why we have turned Sept. 11 into a sainted day, and the site of the Twin Towers hallowed ground.

But it has to do with the fact that 9/11 was the greatest failure of government in history – far greater than Pearl Harbor given the sophisticated intelligence gathering they had in 2001. After the dust of 9/11 had settled, they found the National Security Agency had intercepted a trove of messages from Sept 8-10, detailing plans for the attack that had not been translated.

Is it possible the Bush-Cheney administration was that inept? But what if the Sept. 11 attacks were not the “Who could have imagined?” surprise they made it out to be.

Sept. 11 proved convenient to fulfill the neocon “Project for the New American Century” plan, which sought a Pearl Harbor-like tragedy to unite support and quash dissent or questioning – evident by the implausible 80% “approval” ratings for George W. Bush after his bullhorn moment on a fire truck at Ground Zero.

Bush used 9/11 – the collective victimization and mass desire for vengeance – as an excuse to invade Iraq, actually diverting resources from Afghanistan, the HQ for the 9/11 attack, using the lie that Saddam Hussein had aided the attack (not Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Ladin and 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers hailed from).

It was another stunning example of useful ineptitude that fit into the objective of taking over a major oil supplier and providing the U.S. a base to control the Middle East, while shutting down any domestic opposition as unpatriotic. And it achieved the objective: Bush, now a wartime president, was re-elected, this time, with a majority of the popular vote.

In the 20-year period since Sept. 11, 2001, through 2021, the United States spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance and repression,” a study by the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies calculated. https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militarization-since-9-11/

“Twenty years after 9/11, the war on terror has remade the U.S. into a far more militarized actor, both around the world and at home,” according to the National Priorities Project. “The human costs of this evolution are many — including mass incarceration, widespread surveillance, the violent repression of immigrant communities, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost to war and violence.”

Some 500,000 Iraqis were killed during the Iraq War between 2003-11, according to studies by four universities including Washington University. (https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/10/15/study-nearly-500000-perished-in-iraq-war/)

The $21 trillion spent on the security state “have shown us that the U.S. has the capacity and political will to invest in our biggest priorities. But the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, wildfires raging in the West, and even the fall of Afghanistan have shown us that these investments cannot buy us safety. The next 20 years present an opportunity to reconsider where we need to reinvest for a better future.”

But you aren’t allowed to question whether Sept. 11, 2001, should have happened at all. . And that is why we still recite the names of 3,000 people every Sept. 11.