Waking Up from America’s Post-9/11 Nightmare w/ Medea Benjamin - Ep 182

this is Fortress On A Hill, with Henri, Danny, Kaygan, Jo

vonni, Shiloh, Monisha , and Mike

Welcome everyone to Fortress On A Hill, a podcast about US

foreign policy, anti-imperialism, skepticism, and American way of war.

I'm Jovanni, your host.

Thank you for being with us today.

Today is September 11, 2026.

25 years ago, Americans suffered the most drastic and

terrifying events in generation.

The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon by commercial

airliners commandeered by 19 hijackers.

The events of 9/11 had a profound and far-reaching impact on the

American psyche and on the course of history, as the United States went

into hyperaggression, impacting the lives of millions across the world.

The Bush administration at the time declared a global war on

terror and vowed to destroy the terrorists wherever they are found.

10 years earlier, the Soviet Union had dissolved.

The United States, in its hubris and its influence under tri-triumphalism, declared

a new global order under its leadership.

The attacks of 9/11 came as a direct challenge to that

order by non-state actors.

The response to 9/11 resulted in profound controversy and massive suffering.

Rather than being a clear-cut mission against those responsible for the attacks,

American policies evolved into a complex and bloody chapter in history as the

country attempted to reshape an entire region to its liking and terrorize the

world into submission with a display of its raw and awesome military power.

And the justification to maintain this war path also evolved over

time, with one pretext of, after another thrown in to justify

never-ending violence and forever wars.

The United States justified its military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and

beyond as the part of the war on terror.

However, these actions have been counterproductive, and instead have

resulted in countless deaths, tens of millions of people displaced,

destabilized regions, proliferated paramilitary non-state actors

across continents, and turned once prosperous states into failed states.

The toll of lives taken by this post-9/11 American belligerence is

estimated in the millions, and wanton destruction left in its path will surely

be scarred for millions of people for generations to come As we reflect on

the war on terror, it is clear that the consequences have been far-reaching,

and millions of people continue to endure the repercussion of this event.

Innocent people continue to die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere while

the war industry continues to profit big.

Our speaker is a returning guest, a woman who needs no introduction, and yet the

media landscape that routinely ignores the voices of peace, she deserves one anyway.

Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CodePINK and a veteran

of the antiwar movement.

For decades she has put her body on the line in the tradition of nonviolence

resistance, sitting at congressional hearings confronting policymakers, getting

arrested in protests, and showing up in war zones from Iraq to Gaza to Ukraine.

she's a author of The Drone Warfare, King of the Unjust, and Inside Iran.

Her most recent book, co-authored with Nicholas J.S. Davis, is War in Ukraine:

Making Sense of the Senseless Conflict.

Please welcome Medea Benjamin.

Medea, how are you doing today?

Hey, Jovanni.

Good to be on with you.

Thank you for returning to the show.

I'm truly honored that you're here with us today.

great seeing you.

So let's get to it.

So you authored the an article says, "How can America wake up from its post-9/11

nightmare?" And in it you stated that the US response to 9/11 was corrupted

by toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic

brainwashing, sheer s- stupidity.

Walk us through how you interpreted the events of 9/11 at the time and now.

At the time of 9/11, the country was in deep mourning.

But while many of us were in that state, others were looking at how can we not

only use this to go after Osama bin Laden, but how can we use this to do

other things, go into Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, even though Iraq was…

had nothing to do with 9/11.

And also to impose draconian measures here in the United States, like the Patriot Act

and the Department of Homeland Security.

And we saw the infiltration of all kinds of groups by US agents.

And we also saw the capturing of, quote, "enemy combatants"

… In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries.

Taking people, grabbing them, and putting them into the prison in

Guantanamo without any kind of charges, many of whom were there for

decades without any kind of trial.

And we saw the use of torture and the normalization of drone strikes- … which

were used to just wipe out anybody who our leader in power, and at the time

that it really increased was under Obama- of any male of military age

was a considered a legitimate target.

So we really saw the whole scale violation of international law, of US

law, and a kind of revenge that went beyond going after anybody who had

anything to do- … with 9/11 to be pri- part of a broader geopolitical scheme

for increasing US and Israeli control.

Indeed.

I was still in active duty at the time.

And I couldn't make a lot of sense of what was going on at the time with everything,

all the commotion and everything.

But then after sitting down and thinking about it, I saw that the Afghans

were made secondary victims of 9/11.

And pr- in my opinion, the ultimate victims of 9/11 were the Iraqis.

The country was defamed and falsely accused of participating in 9/11.

And when it had nothing to do with that, and then went on to be

destroyed in the process, yeah, what are, your thoughts on those?

You already mentioned your thoughts on those, but you know what?

Th- this just, this seems to be just a page, page that just went by.

Radicalized a lot of people, a lot of veterans, the whole Iraq War, because

it was clearly seen that was unjust, and yet a page seemed to have just passed by

and nothing have, have come out of it.

What are your thoughts on that?

There were documents that show that the US wanted to invade and get rid of

Saddam Hussein before 9/11 happened.

And then when 9/11 happened, it was literally after about five hours after

the Twin Towers were hit that Donald Rumsfeld convened his staff and said

"Sweep up any information you can."

He wanted to justify not going after just Osama bin Laden- … but Saddam

Hussein, and said "Make it broad, those directly involved and those not." So

we know that the, this was a pretext for expanding US hegemony in Iraq.

And we also know that i- Israel played a major part- … in pushing the

United States to go to war in Iraq.

And I know from having been there right before the US invaded that the

inspectors were telling us that there were no weapons of mass destruction-

… and that everybody knew there were no weapons of mass destruction.

And it was certainly a blight on the total career of Secretary of State Colin Powell

that he went before the United Nations and the world community to say there

were weapons of mass destruction when there weren't and when he knew better.

But that was a trigger for allowing the US to go to war.

Now, there were many countries at the time that were against- … the US decision.

That's why they couldn't get it through the United Nations, and

they couldn't even get all of the NATO countries to agree on it.

And the sympathy towards the United States that existed post-9/11 was

really dissipated by going into Iraq.

There was still some sympathy about Afghanistan, although I would say

that was a wrong move to do as well, that 9/11 should have been treated

as a crime against humanity, go after the individuals who attacked

us- … and not the whole country.

And of course, if you look back at the consequences of going into Afghanistan,

it's horrific to see all the lives lost for nothing- with that country

back in the hands of the Taliban.

Absolutely.

Indeed.

The you mentioned the involvement of the Is- Israelis.

There was a report back ABC which has resurfaced and talked about the, the

five dancing Israelis who were caught filming the 9/11 attacks by onlookers.

The police got involved.

FBI got involved.

Apparently two or three of them they were, the five men were arrested.

Two or three of them were said to have, be at the service of the Israeli state.

What, you know- Then suddenly nothing else was talked about that.

What do you make of that event?

I know that Netanyahu was later quoted at a university, I believe,

in 2008 saying that the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and

the war in Iraq, benefited Israel.

We've seen in real time today with the, with what's happening in Gaza and the

West Bank and everything like that.

So what do you think of all, all that, I just said right there?

I think there is so much that we still don't know 25 years later.

There was a 9/11 commission that went on for quite a long time and

never released all the materials.

In fact, there were lawsuits by the 9/11 family members to try to get

all of those documents released, and they never succeeded in that.

We don't know to this day what happened, but we do know that Israel

wanted the US to invade Iraq, that Israel pushed the US to invade Iraq.

We also know that the information about the hijackers, a lot of

it was known before about these people studying in the US schools.

It reminds me today about the recent report that came out of Haaretz saying

that Netanyahu knew that the October 7th attack by Hamas was going to happen

and didn't do anything to stop it.

So I think, people have really legitimate questions about all of this.

They've had them for the last 25 years, and we still have them.

But we see the consequences are, as you said Benjamin Netanyahu

saying that the US benefit… that Israel benefited from this.

But we see that we the American people, and especially you as veterans were

victims of this, as were so many of the Iraqi citizens victims of this.

And to this day, Iraq has never really recovered, and in fact, you could say

that Iraq is worse off than it was under a dictator of Saddam Hussein.

You could also say that Iraq is actually closer to Iran, which was at one

point its mortal enemy in that very vicious war between 1980 and 1988.

So US intervention, whether we're talking about Afghanistan or Iraq, has

made those countries worse off and has robbed trillions of dollars from our

budget that should've been used to make people's lives better here at home.

And as there are so many veterans that went to these wars that were

forced to go into these wars and have, as a result, both health

problems as well as mental problems and have been suffering ever since

Indeed.

And speaking of which, you took American families who lost loved ones

through the attack of 9/11 back in 2002 to meet Afghan families who had

lost loved ones to the bombing and the war-making of the United States.

Can you share a little bit about that interaction?

Yeah.

That was a very profound visit because four of us, all women, had

gone to Afghanistan just a couple of weeks after the US invaded to see

were civilians being hit, and we saw that indeed there were many of them.

And yet when we came back to the US, we found the media really didn't

believe us or want to talk to us.

So we thought maybe if we take family members whose loved ones had been

killed on 9/11, the media would be more interested in their stories,

and indeed, that was the case.

We took them, and the media was just swarmed us while we were

there and when they came back.

And we were not only able to tell the stories about the innocent people

being killed in Afghanistan, but we were able to pressure for $20

million from Congress to be able to compensate some of those families.

We also did something very unique in the case of Iraq.

I don't know if you remember, Jovanni, but we went twice.

We took family members, parents- … of service people who were serving

in Iraq to try to see what were the conditions under which their

sons and daughters were serving.

And that was something that the Pentagon had never seen before and

didn't know what to do- when we showed up in i- in Iraq and asked them

could they go visit their loved ones.

They said no, and we went anyway.

We went to the base into Crete.

We went to a couple of the other bases, and actually, after

sitting there and demanding, got to see their sons and daughters.

We also went back after w- with Fernando Suarez, who- had lost his son in Iraq,

because he wanted to go to the place where his son had been killed and perform

a, a ceremony in remembrance of his son.

So we did that as well, and I feel that those kinds of trips that we took

were examples of trying to humanize the victims, both the victims in terms

of US service people as well as the Iraqis and Afghans- who were killed.

Indeed.

Let's shift regions real quick, and this is another, in my mind,

another unintended consequences of 9/11, which is Latin America, right?

Because of the pouring of resources of wars in West Asia it left an opening

for popular governments to rise in Latin America at a time where neoliberalism was

pretty much the order of the land there.

So these popular governments, they challenged neo-liberalism

and started under Bush and Obama.

And, as for they challenged neoliberalism, they asserted their sovereignty, they

used the resources to reduce poverty and advance regional integration.

But a renewed focus recently, and I think it started from Obama onward,

a renewed focus of this hemisphere is seeing a rollback of all, of those

popular government, and it's putting back these neoliberal right-wing buffoonish

governments subservient to Washington.

Was the pink tide, what was called the pink tide only

possible because of Washington was distracted in the war on terror?

And so what does that tell you about the durability of

sovereignty in the hemisphere today?

I think it played a big role because you see now when the US has decided because

of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to put a major focus back on Latin America, we

see this terrible rollback happening.

It's not exclusively the US interference, but that is a large part of it.

I think that we are seeing US interference in the elections, US using

carrots and sticks, for example, in the case of Argentina saying, "We'll

give you loans if Milei wins." Eh, we see the sticks in terms of saying

"We'll impose tariffs on your goods."

And then there's all these bots and social media kind of

interference that we're seeing.

And it's part of the puzzle in Latin America turning, as you said,

to these right-wing dictatorships or authoritarian leaders.

We see Trump openly embracing Milei in Argentina.

We see him supporting the candidacy of Javier Bolsonaro's son, Flavio Bolsonaro.

And we see now Marco Rubio taking a trip to Latin America and going to

visit these right-wing governments to shore up US support for them.

At the same time, of course, we see the US kidnapping of Maduro and his wife and the

takeover of the resources of Venezuela and we see the just brutal kind of crackdown

and blockade in Cuba that is affecting the lives of over 10 million people.

So yes the US has openly said in its own strategic review that it

was going to come back to Latin America, openly embracing the Monroe

Doctrine or the Don Roe Doctrine.

And unlike in the past when a lot of the US actions were

covert these are overt now.

And let's not forget the blowing up of all of these boats in the

Caribbean with over 200 people killed without any kind of due process no

proof that these are drug dealers.

That's part of the equation.

And then I think when as Marco Rubio is traveling around to countries

like Ecuador right now he is making deals for the US military to be

coming in and getting involved internally, … in these countries.

So I think it's very worrisome.

We have the elections in Brazil coming up in October, and I was just recently

there, and people are extremely worried about- uS interference and

what looks like a very close election between Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro.

Yeah, you have also Costa Rica, a country that doesn't have any military.

Their right-wing Madame President is inviting American military

there to be their military there.

25 years after 9/11 through the forever wars to Trump presidency, has

this era accelerated the decline of American, hegemony, or has it simply

transformed it in your opinion?

I think it's accelerated the decline because I think so many countries around

the world right now are seeing that the United States is a rogue nation,

that we don't respect international law that especially under Trump with

his threats of tariff this, tariff that, tariff here, tariff there.

And the ridiculousness of him claiming property in countries that don't

belong to us from Greenland to the Gulf of America to to Panama Canal.

All of these things has really left a, a very unpleasant taste towards the United

States, and we see that in public opinion polls where the the polls show that so

many people in countries around the world are dislike the United States- … and

have a more favorable opinion of China than they do of the United States.

We also see a speed-up in the efforts to be able to get off the

dollar as the international form of currency, and try to create not

only swaps between two different countries, but using other currencies.

And I think that will only speed up now as well.

The BRICS nations have been inviting other countries to join

them, so that is getting stronger.

I think the erratic nature of Donald Trump and US policy has really accelerated the

decline of the United States globally.

Indeed.

Finally what has the peace movement learned is, these past

25 years and what has it lost?

We've learned that the military industrial complex is even stronger than we had

ever imagined because we thought we were gonna be able to get a peace dividend

and see- the Pentagon budget go down.

But now the very president who campaigned as being a peace president, Donald Trump,

is calling for this enormous increase in the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion.

I think we've learned that we can't have any really strong movements in

this country for the kind of healthcare system we need, or addressing the climate

crisis, or affordable housing unless we address this issue of the $1.5 trillion

Pentagon budget and the endless wars.

We have made some inroads in the case of AIPAC and the kind of

attitudes that people have now towards Palestine, which are more favorable

than they have towards Israel.

We've made inroads in candidates not wanting to be seen as taking

money from the foreign lobby group, AIPAC but we still see

that AIPAC has a lot of strength.

Israel has a lot of influence in US policy.

I think that is changing, but way too slowly.

My concern is that this other massive lobby group, which is the military

industrial complex that has its tentacles in so many areas and is now- … eh,

involved in the AI technologies that are being used to target now in Iran

thousands of targets at once that this has gone beyond control, and that the

global community has to come together and put some controls on AI, on autonomous

weapons- and to try to get the help of the global community in reining in the

United States and reining in Israel.

We're seeing some positive steps most recently by the UK to stop

the trade in settlement products, which is something that's happening

in many countries in Europe.

We need that to happen here in the United States.

So I would say we have a lot of work to do to try to cut that Pentagon budget, to

stop the war in Iran, to stop US support for Israel, and those should be tied into

the issues of affordability that people are so concerned about in their day-to-day

lives here in the United States.

Thank you, Medea.

Thank you for your thoughts.

It's always great speaking with you.

A wonderful conversation.

You're very, your insights is very is amazing.

Any final comments before we go?

I would say at a time when people are very concerned about crackdowns by the

government a lot of people living in fear, whether they're students who have been

repressed after the beautiful encampments that they set up- or teachers who have

lost their jobs because they tweeted something people who are afraid of their

careers the immigrant community that fears being out in public because of the

ICE Gestapos the Muslim community that has never been really embraced since-

… the time of 9/11 and even before that.

There's a lot of fear in our community, and I think we have to recognize that

and try to push forward those of us who have less to lose those of us

who are older and don't have to worry about our careers or- … people who

are in the white community and have a, have more privilege in this country.

We have to be active.

We have to- … be involved.

We have to get involved in our local communities.

These elections coming up who knows whether they'll even happen, and

if they do happen, who knows if they, the results will be accepted.

So I think we have to be very vigilant, very organized and be

fighting back against the repression that is hurting our brothers and

sisters here in the United States, as well as hurting people overseas.

Said.

Medea, please tell us where we can find your work.

Yeah … what information to go to what actions should, sh- should we take.

We encourage people to join us at Code Pink.

You can go to the website codepink.org and sign up to get our alerts, which

all, we have all kinds of great campaigns that we are constantly coming up with.

We also have chapters around the country.

You can look and see if there's one in your community, or

we can help you start one.

And every week we have activities to do that will help to make- … our

world a better place to live in.

So we encourage you to join us at codepink.org.

We're also very visible in social media as Code Pink or myself, Medea Benjamin.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And all thank everybody for joining us today.

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