“9/11 as a Structural Deep Event”
In the 25 years since the extraordinary event of 9/11, both the nation and the 911 truth movement have changed. My analysis of that day as a Structural Deep Event has also changed, but to a much lesser degree. Above all, I consider that my analysis of 9/11 as a Structural Deep Event — defined as an event “large enough to affect the whole fabric of society, with consequences that enlarge covert government, and subsequently covered up by systematic falsification in media and internal government records” is more securely corroborated than before.
All great social changes, like those on 9/11, have both good and bad consequences. I sincerely believe and shall argue here that the good results from 9/11 are both more significant than the bad and also more likely to endure in the long run. But the case that the US is now worse off, currently much more popular, needs to be considered, because it is also grounded in reality.
Early on the day of 9/11 Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, while George W. Bush was absent in Florida, implemented the elaborate rules of Continuity of Government (COG), once described in Congress without rebuttal as “a plan to suspend the American Constitution.” It was also a plan on which the same pair, Cheney and Rumsfeld, had been working on in secret for two decades – even when both men were outside government and heading important private corporations.
I wrote in 2014 that, with a few notable exceptions, there has thus far been scant interest in the media and the public in the extraordinary facts that Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to:
- help plan successfully for constitutional modifications, when they were not in government, and
- implement these same changes themselves when back in power.
The first of these facts gives us a glimpse of an ongoing power realm, or deep state, independent of the publicly acknowledged state. In the words of James Mann, “Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, …[1] A CNN Special Assignment assessment of the COG planners was even more dramatic: “In the United States of America there is a hidden government about which you know nothing.”[2] In 2017, in my Foreword to the French translation of The Road to 9/11, I acknowledged that the deep force I once called the “deep state”[3] was not confined to the US but international in scope. This was plain for all to see at the Trump inaugural of January 20, 2025, when 17 billionaires, worth together more than $1 trillion, gathered in Washington from all over the world.
It is even more extraordinary that in 2026 the media can still ignore this apparent coup d’etat that changed so much. Because on January 6, 2021, COG, and a COG plot, were implemented again. This is why Congressional leaders were transported on that day to Fort McNair, the COG Command Operations Center.[4] The ensuing delayed arrival of National Guard forces was preplanned, to allow pro-Trump rioters, some of them highly organized, to make themselves eligible for subsequent arrest and prosecution (for attempting to prevent the validation of Biden’s election), But the apparent chaos was in fact under control, because elite COG shock troops were on hand to make sure the pro-Trump plot would not succeed.
Because the media to this day do not generally acknowledge this account of it, Jan 6, like 9/11, qualifies as a deep event. Was it also a Structural Deep Event? The answer to that question remains to be settled in the future.
One might have expected Trump to terminate the COG “national emergency” that had covertly foiled his own covert plot. But in August 2025, like all previous presidents of this century, he renewed it.[5] And in September he renewed it again, this time quoting the open-ended limitless language of his last extension in his first term (“The actions of persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States”).
In other words, both political parties are now equally guilty of using the unrestricted powers of COG, the alternative government once described in Congress as “a plan to suspend the American Constitution.”
If we contemplate America’s current condition negatively, the state of this union indeed appears bleak. I am old enough to recall the same general depression among my friends in 1954, at the height of the Joe McCarthy era, when their consensus was that McCarthyism had so damaged the nation it would never again be the same. And then the McCarthy era was terminated by a single televised comment in a Congressional Hearing – “Have you no shame, Sir?”[6] The corrective changes that ensued strengthened civil rights. A landmark example was when the Supreme Court in 1957 issued several rulings limiting the McCarran Acts (the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952) during the Red Scare.
In the longer arc of American history, the emergent mindsets of McCarthy had veered too far away from the emergent mindsets of liberty under limited government (Magna Carta and Whiggery) embodied in John Adams, and of equality and radicalism (Rousseau) embodied in Thomas Jefferson. These mindsets prevailed in the American Civil War over a deeply rooted counter-tradition of violent racist intolerance, one now visibly abating, but very slowly.
Thinking positively, as William James once counseled us to do, I believe that someday it will be obvious to those looking back on the current emergent mindset of decency and mutual respect, that Trump veered too sharply back, like McCarthy before him, to the tradition of mindless autocracy embodied in our national celebration of the American Revolution by the image of “bad King George III.”[7]
In this double anniversary of both 9/11 and the American Revolution, the 9/11 Truth Movement can rejoice that it too is in a strand of the emergent prevailing mindset, that of speaking truth to power.[8] If we look back to pioneer figures before who used truth as a weapon to correct the abuses of a corrupt lying society, an obvious figure is Ida Tarbell. In a series of articles in McClure’s from 1902 to 1904, Tarbell exposed the murderous practices of the Rockefellers and Standard Oil. The articles, later republished as a book, “provided the political momentum and public outrage President Theodore Roosevelt needed to aggressively pursue his famous ‘trust-busting’ policies and enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act.”[9] It is generally accepted that the combined forces of Tarbell and a slightly recalcitrant Roosevelt effectively replaced America’s First Gilded Age with the Progressive Era.[10]
And before Tarbell was the heroic example of Ida B. Wells, who in the heyday of the murderous Ku Klux Klan “debunked the fallacy frequently voiced by whites at the time – that all Black lynching victims were guilty of crimes.”[11]
And at a deeper level, underlying the temporary Truth Movement is the age-old Truth-Force (Satyagraha) Movement, playing a central role in the formation of western culture since the invention of the alphabet, and exemplified by Socrates, Plato, and the prophets of the Old Testament.[12]
In short, the 9/11 Truth Movement can take heart from their being grounded in what Martin Luther King called “the arc of the moral universe.” (“The arc of the moral universe. is long, but it bends toward justice.”)[13] But they are not just transmitters of this noble tradition. they constitute a major and unprecedented new phase of it.
For the first time in US history, and perhaps anywhere, a truth movement has the strength and momentum to prevail, using objective facts, over the feeble and ineffective theories of a lying government. NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, speaking for the status quo, has been unable when challenged to explain how debris expelled laterally from the WTC towers, and causing only conventional damage to WTC Building 6, could reach beyond it to Building 7 and shatter it so completely that it fell into its own footprint.
Apart from two outliers, the Columbus Free Press (in 2004) and the Macomb County Legal News of Detroit (in 2011),[14] the mainstream media, an integral element of our deep political system, have been unable to handle this absurdity. But the American people have responded anyway.
Consider that, in 2002, the US peace movement, denouncing official lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, joined in the largest anti-war protests ever seen,[15] Yet when push came to shove, after the US declared war, seventy percent of Americans rallied as expected around the flag, and supported it.
In 2026, when Trump declared war on Iran, anti-war protests were negligible. Yet only forty percent of the American people, breaking with precedent, supported it. Why? The reasonable answer was that they knew better.
There will remain many aspects of 9/11 to be considered.[16] And the Truth Movement, to be sure, was itself only one small part of the flood of investigative exposures that quickly followed re-election in 2004 of Trump, by now more than before a blatant and reckless liar. But it was the 9/11 Truth Movement that first forced permanently open the rigid gates of the mass media to the practice of speaking truth to power, a practice that until quite recently had been restricted to small, often oppressed minorities.
Ultimately the Truth movement is grounded securely in what Hannah Arendt called democratic “persuasion through arguments,” a trend which, at a very slow speed, is striving to diminish (in hopes of someday replacing) top-down “coercion by force.”
References
- James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, (p. 145).
- CNN Special Assignment, November 17, 1991: Continuation of National Emergency Declared by Proc. No. 7463 Notice of President of the United States, dated Aug. 29, 2025, 90 F.R. 42695, provided:
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.
Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2025. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.
This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.
Donald J. Trump. - In my long poem “Deep Tide,” as yet unpublished, I refer to what “I mistakenly/called the deep state…/ having got it upside down,,, /Deep here is the thing/ state is the bad adjective.
- “CNN Exclusive: New footage shows congressional leadership at Fort McNair on January 6, scrambling to save the US Capitol,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/pelosi-jan-6-capitol-riot-video. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September 2, 2011, XXX.
- Continuation of National Emergency Declared by Proc. No. 7463 Notice of President of the United States, dated Aug. 29, 2025, 90 F.R. 42695, provided:
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.
Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2025. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.
This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.
Donald J. Trump. - AM Gemini: “That famous line belongs to attorney Joseph Welch, who famously asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” He directed this legendary rebuke at Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954, during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. Welch was responding to McCarthy’s relentless, unprovoked attempts to publicly smear a young lawyer who worked in Welch’s firm. The televised confrontation is widely credited with turning public opinion against McCarthy and ending his communist “witch hunts”.
- Tom Hanks, “An American Experiment,” Netflix docuseries.
- Wikipedia: “Speaking truth to power” is a non-violent political tactic, employed by dissidents against the received wisdom or propaganda of governments they regard as oppressive, authoritarian or an ideocracy. The phrase originated in 1942 with Bayard Rustin, an American civil rights activist, who later wrote a pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power: a Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, published by the American Friends Service Committee in 1955.” Rustin went on to play an important bridge role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, coordinating between the Movement and the white House. The American Quakerism in which his thinking was grounded dates back to the 1650s with missionaries facing harsh persecution in Puritan Massachusetts.
- AI Gemini:
Ida Tarbell was a pioneering investigative journalist whose explosive exposé of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly in McClure’s Magazine provided the political momentum and public outrage President Theodore Roosevelt needed to aggressively pursue his famous “trust-busting” policies and enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt famously branded Tarbell and her fellow crusading reporters as ‘muckrakers’. The label referenced a character from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who was so focused on raking up the “muck” of society that he couldn’t look upward. While Roosevelt utilized the public anger generated by Tarbell’s reporting to advance his own antitrust agenda, he also privately criticized her work. He felt some of her articles unfairly dragged down otherwise respectable business enterprises. Despite any personal tensions, Tarbell’s meticulously documented research into monopolistic practices directly forced a 1911 Supreme Court decision to break up the Standard Oil trust.
- E.g, Gilbert King, “The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 5, 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-woman-who-took-on-the-tycoon-651396/: “She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age, helping to usher in that age of political, economic and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era.
- Wikipedia:
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an American investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[1] Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially for women.Throughout the 1890s, Wells documented lynching of African-Americans in the United States in articles and through pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases and The Red Record, which debunked the fallacy frequently voiced by whites at the time – that all Black lynching victims were guilty of crimes. Wells exposed the brutality of lynching, and analyzed its sociology, arguing that whites used lynching to terrorize African Americans in the South because they represented economic and political competition—and thus a threat of loss of power—for whites. She aimed to demonstrate the truth about this violence and advocate for measures to stop it.
- Scott, Reading the Dream, 34-35, etc. Two prominent recent and very efficacious practitioners of satyagraha have been Martin Luther King and Daniel Ellsberg, who towards the end of his life defined satyagraha as “clinging to the truth with one’s entire weight” [Ellsberg Truth and Consequence 256]
- Erin Rushing, “The Arc of the Moral Universe,” Unbound [Smithsonian Libraries], quoting Martin Luther King, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31st, 1968, five days before his assassination.
- James R. Hanson, “The Strange Collapse Of Building Seven “ [Opinion],Columbus Free Press, February 24, 2004; Dr. John F. Sasewith Gerard J. Senick, “The Expert Witness,” Macomb County Legal News , April 20, 2011.
- “On February 15, 2003, an estimated two million people marched in London, making it the largest political demonstration in British history. It was part of a coordinated global day of action where an estimated six to eleven million people protested across 600+ cities to oppose the impending invasion of Iraq.” (AI Gemini)
- For example: in 1998, the artist Michael Richards created a sculpture which showed planes apparently used as weapons, flying toward a target on the ground. On 9/11, he died when a plane used as a weapon flew into the WTC North Tower, where he had his studio.
