Perhaps you, like me, have been reading the histories, reminiscences, and what-ifs of twenty-five years ago. Remembering when an act which seemed incomprehensible sliced like a polished knife through the time of our lives. Trauma arrives like that, driving at the brain stem and backbone, nearly cutting you in half with fear and awe, confusion. Why would anyone commit an atrocity like that? What does it mean? How could they? If ever there was a time for revenge, this is it!

Many of you, either not yet born or too young to remember, arrive at 9/11 through clips on social media or anecdote or history class. Or you see the films of the collapsed towers and smashed Pentagon with a horror and a disbelief that I had in, say 1955 or 1960, looking at the remains of Dresden or Hiroshima after World War II. How can we do these things? Is this the best (only?) way to solve the world’s problems?

But I am not writing this to examine, like an archeologist, the still smoldering remains of those barbarous acts and times. I’m not looking for historical artifacts or surviving DNA. I’m writing to encourage all of you to remember what happened next, how 9/11 was used and what that says about this country, our government. And, especially, what it means you have a right to demand as citizens.

The Americans Who Tell the Truth project did not exist on September 11, 2001. 9/11 called AWTT into being. With the smoke still rising from the destroyed towers, the Bush/Cheney administration began telling a series of disastrous lies that have shaped our history and killed more than a million people.

First, they said that the presumed mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was hiding in a cave in Afghanistan and we needed to attack the country to get him. In fact, the Afghan government offered to arrest him and hand him over. That would have averted the longest war in U.S. history, saved thousands of lives and immeasurable misery. But President Bush wanted to be a war president.

Second, Bush/Cheney then used 9/11 as a propaganda pretext for building the case for war against Iraq. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was planning to use them against the United States; Iraq was involved with the terrorist organization al Qaeda; Iraq had helped to plot 9/11. None of these things was true. But because of those lies over a million people have died, in numerous countries. The wars in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran are all spin-offs from those lies. Enormous fortunes have been reaped by the weapons makers in this country supplying all the bullets, missiles and bombs.

I am talking about war crimes and mass murder. No one was or is being held accountable for these crimes. What are we to make of that? What kind of government continues to perpetrate crimes like these and then both glorify and/or ignore them?

What does that truth demand of us as citizens?

The purpose of AWTT is to answer that question about the role of citizens and the truth.

AWTT provides hundreds of role models of people who have had the courage to confront lies and insist on social, political, racial, labor, gender, and environmental justice. Our corporations and politicians get rich supporting the lies—which means, simply, profiting from murder.

If you are a student reading this, I challenge you to ask questions in social studies and history classes about America’s wars: What really started them? Why are we not told the truth about them? Why is no one ever held accountable? Why is genocide the world’s greatest crime except when being committed by the “good guys?”