On a Tuesday afternoon a quarter of a century ago, as the world entered its new era, I was at home catching up on sleep between nightshifts at BBC TV Centre. Downstairs, my wife's routine of watching an episode of Diagnosis Murder before the school pick-up was derailed by "Breaking News" on BBC1. Instead of Dick Van Dyke's cosy Californian crime capers, the channel cut to live footage of smoke billowing from the fractured upper floors of World Trade Center 1, the north tower. At 14:03, she watched in horror as an aircraft crashed into the south tower, confirming the awful but hard-to-fathom initial reports that building 1 had been struck by a passenger aircraft.
The two BBC News anchors were slower on the uptake. Just before the second strike, Valerie Sanderson was explaining what viewers were looking at on their screens from New York. The silhouette of another airliner appeared right-of-screen and disappeared behind the burning skyscraper, causing a huge fireball on the other side. "There we see a helicopter going by," the presenter says matter-of-factly, before letting out two strangled gasps as she processes what's happened. John Nicolson comes hesitantly: "There's a further dramatic explosion we're just witnessing there. We saw a plane, a small plane…" Sanderson interrupts, affirming her initial misapprehension. "A helicopter I think it was."
How ironic. At the very moment the world passed from its "pre-" to "post-9/11" eras, the BBC journalist narrating the action instructed her audience to disregard the evidence of their eyes – though you can sympathise with Sanderson's initial brain glitch, given the ghastly enormity of the pictures she was speaking to.
Back home, Mrs Asser decided it was time to wake her husband, despite my only having grabbed a couple of hours' sleep. "You'd better switch on the telly," she said. For the next five or six hours I sat glued to our bedroom TV until it was time to get ready for work. Sanderson and Nicolson's shellshocked commentary is preserved thanks to a video recording on YouTube. Rewatching the footage rekindles the shock, foreboding and morbid fascination I experienced as I mentally prepared to sit in the World Editor's chair of the BBC news website later that evening.
It was hard not to share the panic and confusion gripping the United States population, seeing their national symbols attacked so brutally and effectively. First the two WTC towers, then the Pentagon. More planes are reported missing. Another crash in Pennsylvania. False reports of a car-bomb at the State Department. The collapse of the Twin Towers one after the other – shockingly soon after the two plane crashes. WTC 7 falling hours later, in a baffling simulacrum of the collapse of buildings 1 and 2. Our typical overidentification with the US gave one a feeling of all humanity on the brink of catastrophe.
***
The YouTube recording replays the anguish in the anchors' voices, the usual measured pacing of their words abandoned as they experience events with us. Noticeably, their focus rarely touches upon the towers' collapse, betraying a reluctance to acknowledge the reality of what we'd all just witnessed. Their squeamishness is mirrored by the taped footage looping onscreen: the buildings still standing, one billowing smoke, then a glimpse of the twin-engine plane and a fireball bursting from the south tower, both towers now aflame, followed by the cascading debris of their successive collapses, before it all reboots and the towers are standing again. Interspersed live shots jerk us back to the new reality.
I remember attempting a sober journalist's estimate of how many hundreds, or thousands, might have been trapped in the 110-storey towers with no chance to escape. My guess of five-to-ten thousand dead proved an overcalculation. My mind also went to the unquantifiable numbers of people who would perish in the US's likely response. Alongside these dire assessments was the horror story of people jumping or falling to their deaths from the upper floors before the Twin Towers collapsed. Mrs Asser remembers seeing the first death plunges live. The networks then pulled back to wider shots, to shield us from the agonising human dramas on ledges hundreds of metres above ground.
Another more self-absorbed journalist's preoccupation came to my mind; as duty editor I'd been scratching around for a top story the previous night and had selected a run-of-the-mill update on the MV Tampa saga to be the last morning headline of the pre-9/11 era. Australia was appealing against an unfavourable court ruling in its continued attempts to deny admission of 400 Afghan asylum seekers rescued by a Norwegian freighter in the Indian Ocean. It was immediately obvious the WTC attacks would determine the news agenda not just for my coming shift, but would continue shaping it a long time thereafter. As it turned out, the fallout from 9/11 has been delivering top-story material to this day.
Reviewing the contemporary footage, it's remarkable how quick the assumptions of guilt were aired. "I suppose if it is terrorism, it's to do with the Middle East," one correspondent divulges less than 15 minutes after the second WTC strike. Speculation of Osama Bin Laden's involvement was aired on the BBC at 14:21. The early evening news bulletin devotes almost a whole package to him. Shamefully, the piece by diplomatic correspondent James Robbins opens with shots of a small crowd in Israeli-occupied Palestine displaying grim satisfaction at the attacks. "In the Arab quarter of Jerusalem they're celebrating the massacre and mayhem in the United States," Robbins narrates. "What's a disaster to much of the world is seen as a triumph by some. It's evidence of how much hatred has already been refuelled by this disaster." No mention of the hundreds of Palestinians massacred by Israel with full US support in the Second Intifada which began the previous September. I'm sure Robbins didn't intend it as such, but it's worth noting how context-free portrayals of Palestinian "hatred" have played a key part in the dehumanisation that has accompanied their slaughter since October 2023.
By contrast, the rolling coverage on BBC News 24 displays more editorial balance. It directly addressed the question, "Why do they hate us?" that became a major American talking point after the attacks. The first-hour contributions of diplomatic correspondent Brian Hanrahan and guest Abdel Bari Atwan stand out for dealing head-on with the harmful impact of US foreign policy in the Muslim world, especially in Palestine as well as the controversial presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia. One sees how far the BBC has retreated from the display of neutrality it showed on 9/11 when you consider the taboos operating in today's TV studios, where guests are asked to "condemn Hamas" and aren't allowed to mention genocide in Gaza, while every Israeli or US claim is given airtime despite the record of lying and deceit.
***
My 20:30-07:00 editing shift was less memorable than the preceding hours – time flew in my adrenalized, sleep-deprived state. It fell to me to publish the final update of the first 9/11 story, US rocked by terror attacks, a rare opportunity during my career to sign off on a proverbial "first draft of history". I can't call it a proud moment though. Using the word "terror" in the headline stuck in my craw, I recall, but I was overruled after venturing to suggest it wasn't phrasing the BBC would apply to settings outside the beloved US of A. I regret to admit the article includes a paragraph about those celebrating Palestinians. At least my text characterises the US as "seen as Israel's main sponsor" by way of explanation, rather than evoking innate Palestinian hatred as the trigger.
As the shift progressed, I remember getting emotionally buffeted by fresh footage from different angles of the WTC 2 strike on my desktop TV, either as rushes or on one of the networks. Then, on CNN I think it was, someone decided to cut the clips together as a multi-angle sequence, a distasteful snuff "sizzle reel" if you like. The effect was cinematic, and mind-boggling, weaving single perspectives into something more powerful than a Hollywood blockbuster. Those were human lives being taken as you watched, dumbfounded at the horrific precision of it all. (Before livestreaming on social media, you rarely saw broadcast representations of death, let alone so many deaths at the same time.) My guess is this composite edit was only ever played once or twice that night before someone intervened. Individual clips were more than adequate to convey the sense of the US under attack. The staggered nature of the double whammy had done its job. Everyone's attention and dozens of recording devices were focussed on building 1 when building 2 was hit, maximising the thumping blow to the American psyche – no need to turn it into even more of a spectacle.
Journalists risk becoming hardened to what I had spent all night watching, and when you’re focused on an onerous task you can enter a psychological bubble that shields you from the raw emotion you'd otherwise feel. After my shift, I drove home somewhat dazed, with all the horror I'd witnessed still bottled up. During my journey, the show Wake Up to Wogan began playing on my car radio. I focused on the warm, comforting voice of Britain's most listened-to broadcaster. "Good morning," Terry Wogan said, his soft Limerick accent striking a perfect balance of brightness and solemnity. "We're not going to talk about the obscenity that we all witnessed yesterday…" The words somehow uncorked the emotional response to everything I had seen and heard over the past 17 hours, and I began weeping uncontrollably.
***
My impulse to look back at 9/11 is not simply to record a personal perspective of events from the safety of my bedroom and an editor's chair in London. It's testimony to how our minds, as mainstream journalists, were warped by those scenes – scenes of American civilians being killed in large numbers, civilians not meant to be exposed to danger like that according to conventional newsroom thinking, in contrast to the colonized, dehumanized Wretched of the Earth whose deaths we reported on daily. How it warped our brains, and how that in turn determined the way we'd cover the next 25 years of news, creating the mood music through which geopolitical events and decisions have been understood and accepted by the public. It's not an excuse. It's a mea culpa that we didn't do more to push back against conditions imposed by an attack of that scale on US soil, and how nothing could be questioned from that moment on about how the US responded.
Starting with what the "obscenity" eclipsed, who remembers the last big story immediately before the tables turned on that fateful day? Not the MV Tampa, obviously, but rather a global event attended by more than 130 countries which exposed deep divisions between the Global South and North on the eve of 9/11. The World Conference Against Racism in Durban ending on 8 September 2001 turned out to be one of the most fractured and politically explosive international gatherings in the history of the United Nations. Anti-Zionist delegations had pushed for the condemnation of the racism inherent in Israel's policies and behaviour towards Palestinians – seemingly indisputable unless you sat in the Zionist camp – which triggered a US and Israeli walk-out and bitter recriminations. Fierce arguments also erupted over whether former colonial and slave-trading powers should apologise and pay reparations to African and Caribbean nations.
For a supporter of Palestine such as myself (though contractually obliged to show impartiality in my BBC work) the mood in Durban pointed to a hopeful shift in global opinion a year into the Second Intifada. It only lasted 72 hours or so, but one could envision a growing head of steam resulting in freedom and justice eventually being achieved for the Palestinians. Any such pressure dissipated in the first moments the US came under attack.
***
It felt over the next weeks and months as though we were navigating a strange new post-9/11 landscape. In fact, as members of an influential news provider, we were unwittingly constructing that new landscape, and it's concerning how little space there was for discussion of our editorial choices. And as the official narrative was being cemented in the mainstream media, the 9/11 Truth movement started putting together its own version of events, but the two universes never intersected. Anyone on my side of the divide even entertaining questions raised by the "truthers" would be risking their standing, possibly their career.
Take for example the emergence in March 2002 of Pentagon CCTV clips purporting to show the American Airlines Flight 77 attack. I remember watching and rewatching one of the two leaked clips with alarm as there was no clear picture of a commercial airliner hitting the building before the explosion. I showed it to a senior colleague, whom one might describe as being more favourably disposed to official discourse than I, and watched his expression turn from disapproving scepticism about my inquiries to incredulity as he too couldn't vouch for the presence of a Boeing 757 airliner. Did we consider publishing it as a story? Of course we didn't; it would have looked like us aligning with those cranky conspiracy theorists questioning every aspect of 9/11.
The BBC did finally acknowledge the Pentagon footage, in March 2006 when it was officially released under an FOIA request. While there may be a valid explanation for the aircraft not appearing in the clips, low-res video with an electronic shutter speed unable to track a fast-moving aircraft, the article ignores the question entirely. "The US justice department has released the first video of the plane crashing into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001" it asserts, with Washington correspondent Adam Brookes saying "the footage serves as a graphic reminder of why the US launched its global 'war on terror' and is still fighting it". Five years and two wars on, instructions from some of my BBC colleagues for audience members to disregard the evidence of their own eyes were still very much a thing.
***
While asking private questions, one had to keep up a public demeanour at work that never seriously challenged the official narrative. Loose talk would have been dismissed as conspiracy mongering, a professional kiss of death. If anyone around me felt unease about how 9/11 and its aftermath were exempt from critical enquiry, they too kept quiet. I think the ease of burying doubts was aided by the indelible mental image that we had all formed when we saw that second plane crash into the second giant tower in New York. How many of us who watched those TV pictures spent the next months, years even, anxiously tracking the paths of distant aircraft approaching the outline of tower blocks on the horizon? The images of 9/11 became indelibly imprinted on our minds and were repeatedly used to jolt us into accepting the actions of an increasingly aggressive US government.
Within two months, the George W. Bush administration had invaded Afghanistan and overthrown the Taliban, beginning nearly 20 years of US control before it was chased out, by the same Taliban. This gung-ho approach had been unthinkable in the post-Vietnam era, as we'd noted with President Bill Clinton's reluctance to commit "boots on the ground" in Kosovo two years earlier. But the trauma of 9/11 that we'd all shared seemed to make the change in framing not just acceptable but inevitable. No one questioned the logic behind the Bush administration's launch of its "global war on terror", as opposed to a criminal investigation to bring surviving perpetrators to justice. I can't remember a single BBC colleague pointing out the impossibility of waging war against an abstract noun, terror. We adopted the phrase like obedient children.
When Washington, supported by my own government, started manoeuvring towards its next objective – regime change in Iraq – newsrooms like mine parroted official pronouncements with hardly a murmur about the absence of any link between al-Qaeda and the government of Saddam Hussein. It felt so obviously fake to my mind I was surprised in 2003 to encounter US troops in the streets of Baghdad after the fall of the Baathist government who looked me in the eye and said their motivation to fight was because America was attacked on 9/11. Nor did I buy the idea that Iraq had held onto or was reactivating a WMD programme, presented as the casus belli in the UK. Yet I was surrounded by colleagues at the BBC inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt. They wouldn't lie to us, surely?
I sometimes wonder how those still in the mainstream news business feel about reporting on the latest chapters of the US's post-9/11 rampages, giving credence to the claims and justifications of the likes of Trump and Hegseth, just as they did to those of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The scale of 9/11 could be used back then to win every argument. Look what they did to us on that day. "It was a declaration of war by religious fanatics who were prepared to wage that war without limit," Tony Blair told us in 2004, justifying his enthusiasm for war against Iraq. Were the Baathists in charge there "religious fanatics"? No, but who cares: 9/11. What are my former colleagues' explanations for accepting the contradictory narratives used today to justify the US-Israeli assault on Iran, for example?
I wonder to what extent the mindset we took on 25 years ago – shocked, accepting, unquestioning – developed and became hardwired over the ensuing years. The WTC attacks wiped all other newsroom perspectives from view and subsequent attempts to redress the imbalance were met with uncomprehending resistance. Anyone who voiced too much scepticism about US foreign policy goals, especially in West Asia, found themselves marginalised and passed over for promotion; some left, disillusioned by what they saw as a retreat from impartiality. I find it plausible the group-think we see at the BBC today tracks back to that period. It has now degenerated into a kind of parallel universe myopia in which one of its journalists can report from "the cockpit of [an] RAF tanker during [a] defensive mission against Iranian drones". A defensive mission. Who cares that Iran was attacked and was defending itself? I daresay such arrant nonsense could have slipped through in previous broadcasting eras, but it now seems like the norm in BBC reporting rather than the exception. I hold my own generation partly responsible, for not showing more resolve to challenge official narratives in the aftermath of 9/11.