Patrick Comerford
The events of ‘9/11’ 25 years ago, on 11 September 2001, are seared into my mind, my memory and my brain. It’s almost as if I can remember every moment of that dreadful, awful day.
At the time, I was the Foreign Desk Editor of The Irish Times, and had been since 1994. I was invited to lunch by some diplomats at the Korean Embassy in Dublin. On the surface I thought it was a follow-up to a short fellowship programme I had been on in Seoul a few years earlier, with the Korea Foundation and the Institute for Global Economics, in September 1997.
Over lunch, it became obvious those diplomats were working on behalf of the Korean CIA, seeking information on some marginal political figures who had allegedly visited North Korea that year.
I left lunch politely but briskly, leaving the two diplomats with the knowledge that I knew nothing that I could or would share with them. Moments later I was back in The Irish Times, where the News Room, the Foreign Desk and the Subs’ Desk shared the second floor.
It was eerie to walk into that atmosphere. Everyone was gathered around the television screens, watching as the horrors of the day unfolded before our very eyes. When the first plane hit the North Tower, everyone thought it was an accident or a plane crash. By the time the second tower was struck, we all knew the enormity of what was happening.
I was constantly on the phone with Conor O’Clery as he talked, watching the same scenes I was seeing on television, watching as people jumped from the Twin Towers, watching and knowing that this was human tragedy on a scale none of us had probably witnessed before.
He was then The Irish Times US correspondent, and was in Manhattan when the first plane hit the North Tower. I remember graphically how he told me he could see people hanging out of the windows beside and above where the fires were raging. He later wrote: ‘One man waved a white cloth as he clung to a window strut. Then a body fell from a window above him with arms and legs outstretched and plummeted some 100 storeys onto Vesey Street. Two other people fell in the succeeding minutes.’
The first identified Irish deaths that day were Ruth Clifford McCourt (44) from Cork and her four-year-old daughter Juliana who were on board the hijacked plane that hit the South Tower of the World Trade Centre.
I stayed at my desk into the early hours of the following morning as the news was updated constantly. I was one of the first people to hear that Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Wales, was safe in New York, and immediately phoned one of his close friends to let him know.
In all, 2,996 people died in the attacks – 2,977 in the attacks plus the 19 hijackers. At least 18 Irish people died in the 9/11 attacks, an estimated 1,000 victims had strong Irish-American heritage, including many police officers and firefighters.
Alongside Ruth and Juliana McCourt, the other Irish victims include Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan friar and FDNY chaplain who was officially designated as Victim 0001; Joanne Mary Cregan (32) from Dublin, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower; Patrick Joseph Currivan (52) from Dublin, a passenger on one of the planes; and Kieran Joseph Gorman (35) from Sligo, working in the South Tower.
Public grief in Ireland was expressed by the thousands if not tens of thousands of people who queued at the US embassy in Ballsbridge to sign the books of condolences. The board of The Irish Times decided not to published the newspaper on Friday 14 September to coincide with the national day of mourning. It was the first time since the Easter Rising in 1916 that The Irish Times was not published.
In the aftermath, neither I nor any of my colleagues were offered – nor did we expect – trauma counselling. We took it as being part of the daily life of working journalists, no matter how deep, searing or lasting the impact and memories of the events that day would be for the rest of our lives.
Today, I am sure, all journalists have been recalling where we were on ‘9/11’ 25 years ago, on 11 September 2001. We have been recalling what we saw before our very eyes, but also thinking of the dead, the maimed, the heroism of rescue teams and first responders, and the unspoken, unutterable impact those events continue to have on our friends and colleagues.
After living through the trauma of September 2001, none of us could or should be labelled as ‘anti-American’. But all this goes some way towards explaining why I am disgusted that the present petulant president of the US has decided not to attend today’s solemn commemorations at Ground Zero.
Many of those memories of 9/11, of terror in the skies and of war, were vivid earlier this year as I flew back through the Gulf after Trump embarked on an illegal war that has neither been sanctioned by Congress nor budgeted for. I was flying from Kuching and Kuala Lumpur, through Muscat on Oman Air to Heathrow.
All four living former presidents are attending the anniversary commemorations in New York, but it seems Trump has skipped the day, attending a smaller event at the Pentagon, seemingly because the organisers would not allow him to make a political speech.
Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton are there to commemorate the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, but Trump has not turned up, and instead the White House is represented by Vice-President JD Vance. Yet Trump likes to describe himself as a ‘proud New Yorker’ and claims he watched the events of 9/11 with horror.
The political writer and commentator Heather Delaney Reese pointed out earlier this week how often Trump has changed his own versions of where he was and what he did on 9/11.
Last Monday, he posted a video of himself with the words, ‘What Donald Trump saw at … Ground Zero hours after 9/11.’ The video was actually taken days later, on 13 September, when he was blocks away. In the video, he is wearing an immaculate black suit and a crisp white shirt as he told a German news reporter, ‘I have about 100 men working down here … and we have another 100 coming in a little while.’ He continued, ‘I was just down at Ground Zero. It’s a disaster, and I’ve never seen anything like this.’
Hours after he posted that video, he told Fox News a very different story, claiming: ‘I went down … like the following day. Very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard.’
Trump is not just saying he sent hundreds of workers to Ground Zero, which has never been proven after 25 years; he is now saying he himself ‘worked long and hard’ at Ground Zero, even though the video he posted this week shows him impeccably dressed without a speck of dust on him.
For 25 years, he peddled many different claims about how he experienced or responded to 9/11. His claim about sending his own workers to Ground Zero has never been verified. No-one has found evidence that Trump helped with the rescue efforts or that he arranged for his workers to join the rescue operation. A New York Newsday reporter spotted him on 13 September and described him wearing the exact same clothes, in the same condition as in the video he shared, down to the impeccably dressed black suit, pressed white shirt and red tie.
Trump has capitalised on the death and destruction that day to make it all about him.
In 2002, on the first anniversary, he said he ‘saw the whole thing’ from his apartment in Midtown Manhattan, four miles from the World Trade Centre, and that he had ‘two windows that are focused on the building’. once again placing himself inside the story of that day.
In 2015, Trump claimed he watched from Jersey City, New Jersey, as ‘thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.’ But, as Heather Delaney Reese points out, that too never happened. It was an invented story to vilify Muslim Americans and to fuel hatred.
In 2016, he claimed he ‘helped a little bit’ to clear rubble at Ground Zero and that year, he also claimed he lost ‘hundreds of friends’ on 9/11. It is simply not believable that his own friends account for 5 or 6% of the people who died that day, and he has never named one of all those supposed friends.
In 2019, Trump boasted: ‘I was down there also … I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there …’ He had a new and different story by the 20th anniversary in 2021, when he claimed he heard creaking at a building near Ground Zero and told first responders, ‘That building is coming down,’ before he was grabbed by ‘two big firemen’ who moved him to safety. Every year, his stories get bigger and more grandiose. Every year, he gets closer to the rubble, works harder, stays longer, and saves more people.
Yet his lies go on, and on, and on. He falsely claimed this week he was lifted out of the rubble on 9/11: ‘Two fireman, big strong guys, they grabbed me under the arms – ‘got to get our of here!’ – and they literally lifted me up, and they started running with me.’
The truth is that Trump capitalises on 9/11. When a $500 million programme was set up to help businesses in Lower Manhattan recover from the economic impact of the attacks, he applied for and got $150,000 from the fund, even though he told a German television reporter on 13 September that his property at 40 Wall Street was not affected. He pledged to donate $10,000 to the Twin Towers Fund, although there is no record of that donation ever being made.
It is reported that Trump initially planned to attend today’s events in Manhattan. But he changed his mind after memorial officials reminded his team that politicians do not make political speeches at the site to maintain its nonpartisan stance. Instead, Trump is attending his own service at the Pentagon with Melania Trump, where, no doubt, he will make a vain, rambling, self-glorifying but incoherent monologue.
When Trump’s petulant decision was first reported, he issued a furious denial (28 August), claiming Maggie Haberman of the New York Times had ‘made up the story’. Instead of apologising, he then tried to cover his tracks, claiming: ‘I would love not to speak, because I’m speaking all the time, and this is a day to remember the victims, and their beautiful family members.’
But, perhaps, the real reason Trump is not in New York today is because he is due to travel to Ireland later today to attend the Irish Open at his golf club at his private golf club in Doonbeg, Co Clare, and it is easier and more convenient for him to leave from Andrews air base in Maryland than from New York or New Jersey, according to the New York Times.
America’s allies stood beside the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 – Canada, Germany, Denmark, France Spain, the UK … all 18 allies of the US responded when the US invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty. All that is now forgotten by Trump, who instead calls Vladimir Putin a friend and threatens to annex both Canada and Greenland, which is a sovereign part of Denmark.
Of the 19 men who carried out the 9/11 attacks, 15 were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, and there was one each from Egypt and Lebanon. None was from Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. But Trump is happily cosying up to the Saudi ruling royals and determined that the US should help Saudi Arabia developing its nuclear capabilities.
Putin has not just invaded Ukraine, without any repercussions in his relationship with Trump, but Russia is attacking the very allies who rallied beside the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Germany blames Russia for last month’s drone sabotage at Leipzig airport, calling it part of a ‘long series of attempts at destabilisation, disinformation, threats, sabotage and aggression directed at Europe.’
The Leipzig sabotage is not an isolated event on German soil. Europe has entered a new era of European security, and the Trump regime appears to be on the side of Russia rather on the side of Europe and closest allies, the countries that stood beside the US after 9/11 September, when the US was wounded and afraid and needed the world to stand with it.
The US president seems far more comfortable praising the man threatening NATO allies than standing beside the allies who stood beside the US for decades. Trump has not condemned what happened in Leipzig, he has not used the word sabotage, terrorism, or aggression. Instead, he sent the CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, to Moscow for secret talks with Russia’s intelligence chiefs, and Trump has said: ‘So far, I think Russia’s behaved quite well.’ This stands in sharp contrast to the way he speaks about Canada, Denmark, Spain, the UK and France, for example.
As Justine McCarthy wrote in The Irish Times last week, Trump is coming to Ireland not because he like Ireland’s 40 shades of green but because he likes golf. She described him as a ‘greasy-fingered sex-offender’.
She said the protesters who take to the streets in the coming days are on the side of the ‘75 million Americans who didn’t vote for him in 2024 and the masses joining them as he free-falls down the opinion polls may find succour in the sight of a picket. Ditto the Greenlanders he wants to rule; the Ukrainians he promised he’d save, within 24 hours, from Russia killing them; the Palestinians whose land he eyed up for a Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Med while Israel was slaughtering them with US weapons; the Spanish he called “hopeless, bad people”; the Canadians he aspires to turn into Americans; the Iranians on whom he has waged an unprovoked war; the Afghans, Haitians and Somalis whose countries he called “shitholes”; the Europeans whose countries he deems to be “decaying” and, as he says: “I know Europe better than anybody”; the women of the world whose bodies he feels entitled to grope, including E Jean Carroll whom he denied sexually assaulting because “she’s not my type”, but a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.’
She added: ‘If the killing of 120 children by a US strike on a school on day one of its war on Iran is insufficiently horrific to cool Ireland’s ardour for Trump, people of west Clare might consider the Cold War landscape that has emerged in their own backyard. Ships set sail from the Shannon estuary with produce from Aughinish Alumina that ends up being smelted in Russia, by companies which supply the Russian military industry. US warplanes stop over at Shannon Airport loaded with soldiers and – for all we know, because there are no inspections – their guns. And up the road in Doonbeg, their president swings a nine iron.’
This is not a state visit, or even an official one, she points out. It’s a jolly for a man whose idea of ‘fun’ is sinking ships. If Irish democracy is worth its salt, it will not hide the protesters away from view by blocking roads and erecting barriers to keep them out of sight, she said. Democracy demands that the people must not only have their say, but that what they say must be heard.
Donald Trump would rather miss the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero today than be late for the Irish Open at his private golf course in Co Clare this weekend. We know now what he thinks of the 9/11 dead, what he thinks of the allies who stood behind the US in the aftermath of 9/11, and he should hear loudly and clearly over the next few days what the Irish people think of him – that he is a felon, that he is a war-monger, that is an authoritarian misfit, and that he has no place in a civilised society other than in a jail.
