When Al Qaeda militants crashed a pair of jet airplanes into the World Trade Center 25 years ago today, every paper in the city howled for war. When we came out with our first post-9/11 special edition two days later, the main story on Page 1 was headlined “How Should We Respond?” The article by Mike Burke quoted peace activists instead of retired generals working for military contractors and asked “Wouldn’t fighting terror with terror propel the nation, and indeed the world into a war where there may be no winners?”

Other articles in the issue included “Media Goes to War,” “We Need Real Security,” “Timeline of Lost Liberty” and “Rising Hatred,” about the backlash against Arab and Muslim-American immigrant communities. The back page featured original first-person stories from Ground Zero.

The Indypendent had just completed its first year of publishing. We were an all-volunteer collective working out of a donated loft space on East 29th Street in Manhattan. When the paper came back from the printer, we took bundles to Union Square to hand out to New Yorkers who had flocked there for vigils and for freewheeling discussions that tried to make sense of what had just happened.

In those four scrappy black-and-white pages, we demonstrated an awareness of the abyss that the US was about to plunge into that corporate media was incapable of until years later, if ever. We have returned repeatedly to those themes — the need for diplomacy over war, the loss of civil liberties, the dangers of a nativist backlash against vulnerable immigrant communities, the role of corporate media in creating a pro-war environment — in the quarter century since thanks to our government’s disastrous response to the events of 9/11.

We didn’t get the story right when so many other media outlets failed because we were soothsayers or had a magic ball. We simply understood the history of this country, its racism and its capacity for inflicting violence here at home and around the world. In the same vein, we knew how easily unscrupulous leaders could use the sense of fear and shock caused by the horrors of 9/11, and the corresponding surge in patriotism, to take this country to a very bad place.

Twenty five years later, it doesn’t appear we have learned much.Today’s official celebrations have focused almost exclusively on the pain and the loss New Yorkers experienced on 9/11. There have also been paeans to the surge in patriotism and national unity after 9/11. What we don’t acknowledge is the unimaginable pain and suffering that our government had inflicted on people all over the world in the decades preceding 9/11 and all the violence and chaos we have unleashed since. The Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, The Global War on Terror, drone strikes of weddings, a deeper commitment to Israel, ISIS, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE all exist downstream from how we as a nation responded to 9/11. An estimated 4.7 million people have directly or indirectly been killed by the War on Terror, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project. Trillions of dollars have been spent to accomplish worse than nothing.

Here at The Indy and at other scrappy outsider media outlets like Democracy Now!, we understood where the blind fear and desire for revenge was headed and how it would be manipulated. We couldn’t stop the violence that followed, but looking back it’s clear that 9/11 supercharged The Indy‘s presence in New York City. Our circulation doubled and turnout for our weekly meetings tripled. We began to hold monthly reporting workshops to even out the skills imbalance within our group and to get more people’s journalists into the streets. We also added a culture section, which offered another way to talk about what mattered to us without being tethered to the ebb and flow of events. Below are a few samples of our 9/11-related coverage in the years since.

Contested Ground: 9/11, Occupy Wall Street and the Future of America

By John Tarleton

Twenty Years Later: How the New World Center Became a Monument to Greed and Power

By Todd Fine

Re-examinging the Roots of Terror

By Nicholas Powers

9/11 Changed My Life: Here’s What We Still Have Not Learned

By Tanya Thurman

How the Twin Towers Transformed New York: An Interview with Eric Darton

By John Tarleton

Pataki’s Tunnel Vision

By Leigh Ann Caldwell

How 9/11 Kneecapped a Movement

By Rico Cleffi

Behold the Pale White Lie: Why Conspiracy Theories Are Patriotic

By Nicholas Powers

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