U.S. Camp Phoenix in Kabul, Afghanistan after a ceremony marking the 7th anniverisary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Peter Bergen & Katherine Tiedemann Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and Katherine Tiedemann is a program associate there. Peter Bergen is also an AC360° Contributor and CNN National Security Analyst

Editor’s Note:

This week, as we remember the nearly 3,000 American citizens who died in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or in a remote field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, we also should think about the civilians who are still dying in Afghanistan.

Consider, for instance, the recent American airstrikes on Azizabad, a village in western Afghanistan, on Aug. 22. The United Nations, Afghan government officials and independent witnesses all say that the United States killed about 90 civilians in these strikes, most of them women and children. Cellphone videos of the scene show motionless children lying under checkered shawls and veiled women shrieking alongside them.

According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, dozens of freshly dug graves are scattered in the village’s cemeteries, some so small they could fit only children. The U.S. initially said that many fewer civilians had died, but it has now promised a thorough investigation.

It’s a grisly story but hardly an isolated one. The month before the Azizabad incident, Afghan officials say that American airstrikes near Kabul killed 27 civilians at a wedding party — including the bride. In another incident, on March 4, 2007, nine civilians died when their mud home north of Kabul was hit by two 2,000-pound bombs dropped by U.S. aircraft. American officials said they were aiming for two insurgents seen entering the house after firing a rocket at a U.S. military outpost, according to Human Rights Watch.

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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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New Yorkers gather to hold a vigil to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Gary Tuchman | Bio
AC360° Correspondent

For seven years, I have marveled at the utter cowardice of the 9/11 hijackers. Could there be anything lower than knowing you’re going to die, and deciding that you want to take as many innocent human beings who have families, hopes and dreams with you? It also astounds me so many people did and still do consider Osama Bin Laden a hero.

Certainly, it’s a terrible disappointment the guy hasn’t been brought to justice. But really; if he is still alive, he’s too afraid to stick his face out in public. It’s all part of the cowardly terrorist tradition.

Now, let’s talk about the courageous. . I started meeting them seven years ago, when I watched rescuers search for survivors at the World Trade Center site as fires raged and tons of metal from the ruined complex hung precariously.

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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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Memorial today at the World Trade Center towers site.

Jonathan Wald
CNN Producer

I was about to go to bed after pulling an all-nighter. I had just put the finishing touches to my project - the final requirement of a postgraduate journalism degree - when my brother called me from London and told me to turn on the television. I sat in front of the television with my grandmother, both of us transfixed by the unfolding events.

I struggled to comprehend what I had just seen. Any tiredness was replaced by agitation. Struck by an overpowering sense of helplessness I left the apartment block. I tried to give blood but hospitals turned me away, as they were afraid I might be incubating mad cows disease, having lived in the United Kingdom during the late 80’s. I tried to act as a volunteer but volunteer groups turned me away, as they already had enough people to fulfill their needs.

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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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Watch Deborah Feyerick's report on the verdict of eight men who changed the way we fly.

I boarded a plane this morning in Des Moines, Iowa. The sun was barely up. For a split second I wondered whether I should fly today. It is, after all, September 11th. Seven years later. I wonder whether Al Qaeda might use today as a day to show the world they can still strike. I wonder if somehow flying today is disrespectful to the people who died seven years ago — people who started the day just like I did, wheeling a small suitcase through the airport just before dawn to get someplace else — people with plans on an ordinary day.

The security line is longer than I expect. TSA agents have created a window-box display showing items you can carry on and items you can’t– like full size shampoo, and Scope, and lotion — fixed behind glass like a piece of modern art. “Oh, I like that shampoo,” says the woman in front of me who then tosses a 20oz Pepsi into the gray, plastic bin and sends it through X-ray where it is promptly confiscated by a TSA agent wearing the new royal-blue TSA shirt.

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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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2006 Memorial in Jersey City, NJ for victims of the September 11 attacks, looking out at the NYC skyline.

Cate Vojdik
AC360° Writer

Seven years ago this morning a ringing phone woke me. I glanced at the clock; it was sometime after 9 a.m. I picked up and heard my friend Catherine asking with urgency, “Are you watching this? Is your television on?” It wasn’t. A storm the previous night had knocked out the satellite dish at the cabin north of Manhattan where I’d been spending weekends.

Sept. 11, 2001 fell on a weekend for me. At the time I was a news writer at a weekend broadcast at another network and Monday and Tuesday were my days off.

“Two planes crashed into the twin towers,” Catherine continued. It took a moment for her words to sink in. After shaking the sleep from my brain, I thanked her for the heads up and flipped on the radio in time to hear that a plane had hit the Pentagon. I began tossing my clothes into my duffle bag. Before I’d finished packing up, the World Trade Center’s south tower fell. I wouldn’t see the images until much later that day. The radio channel with the best reception at the cabin was broadcasting Dan Rather’s reporting. Listening to him describe the tower as it crumbled, my mind’s eye filled in the horrifying blanks.

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Editor’s Note: We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world. Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst. He produced bin Laden’s first television interview which aired on CNN in 1997. He shares his thoughts below:
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Peter Bergen | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN National Security Analyst

Seven years after 9/11 the author of the largest mass murder in American history is free, almost certainly living in Pakistan, which is, at least nominally, a close ally in the US-led ‘war on terror’. As he no doubt savors the anniversary of his greatest “triumph” Osama bin Laden seems untroubled by serious kidney illness as was once rumored, nor does he appear to be troubled by American efforts to find him.

Since his disappearance at the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in mid- December 2001 US intelligence agencies have not had any definitive information about the al Qaeda’s leader’s whereabouts. While there are informed hypotheses that he is in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, on the Afghan border, perhaps in one of the more northerly areas such as Bajaur, these are simply hypotheses not actionable intelligence. In other words, American intelligence agencies have nothing of any substance on bin Laden. Given the hundreds of billions of dollars that the ‘war on terror’ has consumed the failure to capture or kill al Qaeda’s leader has been one of its signal failures.

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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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Erica Hill
AC360° Correspondent

This is my first 9/11 in New York. Everywhere I go today – the bank, the park, the subway – I can’t help but wonder what the people around me are feeling and thinking on this somber anniversary. Were they downtown that morning? Did they lose someone they loved on that terrible day? Are they also new to NY, scanning the faces of their neighbors, wondering what the protocol is?

On our family walk this morning, we witnessed something incredibly moving by chance…and feel lucky to have been a part of it. Making our way uptown, we noticed Riverside Drive was closed, and there were a number of firefighters on our path wearing their dress uniforms. Initially I figured they were coming from a memorial ceremony somewhere downtown. I’d forgotten about the beautiful monument in Riverside Park dedicated to New York’s Bravest: the Firefighters.

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Editor’s Note: We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world. Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of themuslimguy.com and Contributing Editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington DC.
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Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
Founder, themuslimguy.com

Mahatma Gandhi once said that, “I have nothing new to teach the world…Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills.” Since time immemorial, our human experiment has revolved around the enlightened advancement of collective human thought. Within the current ungodly global mix of perpetual war, everlasting human poverty, extremist terrorism and global racism; our human race has completely and utterly lost its collective mind. Since our world has gone completely bonkers, the unquenchable thirst for social justice of this young American Muslim human rights lawyer and public diplomat must be positively channeled at this juncture of infinite global sadness towards a purpose-driven life guided down an untaken road called Islamic Pacifism.

9/11 was ten days after my twenty-fourth birthday. As a second year law student at the time, even though I had already lived more than two decades; in many ways, my life only truly began at 8:46 am EST on September 11, 2001. Because as an American Muslim, that would be the day that my country was attacked by people who would also infamously hijack my religion.

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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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Reza Aslan | BIO
Author, “No god but God”Perhaps the most significant change to have occurred over the last seven years of fighting the War on Terror is that we are no longer battling a terrorist organization called al Qaeda. We are now fighting a global social movement called al Qaeda.

The truth is al Qaeda was never the coherent, global entity it is so often imagined to be – an organization with an easily identifiable leadership structure and a systematic ideology. That al Qaeda existed only in the imaginations of those of us desperate for the days when America’s enemies were nations that could be assuredly defined and armies that could be conventionally overcome. It is no wonder that word al Qaeda continues to be rendered into English as “the base.” A base implies something concrete and conquerable, something that can be defended or assailed.

But the word al Qaeda also means “the rules” or “the fundamentals,” and is used by Arabs most often to refer to the basic teachings or creed of Islam. In that light, it may be somewhat appropriate to consider al Qaeda an Islamic form of fundamentalism, in so far as that word implies puritanical adherence to the elemental doctrines of a religion. But it is imprecise, and even dangerous, to consider al Qaeda the operational seat of global Islamic extremism.
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Editor’s Note:
We are devoting many posts today to the anniversary of 9/11, with first-hand accounts, insight, and commentary dedicated to that day seven years ago that changed our world.
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Nic Robertson | BIO
Senior International Correspondent

It’s hard for me to see clearly what’s on the blurry cell phone video from Afghanistan.

Are there children and women under those blankets, were as many as 90 people killed in a US air strike as Afghan and UN officials suggest. The countries lawmakers believe so, they want strict controls put US troops. I just don’t know.

But what is painfully clear to me the strengths and weaknesses the coalition had in it’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks are not only unchanged after 7 years, but threaten to unravel the hunt of the worlds most wanted terrorist.

When bin Laden fled with hundreds of die-hard al Qaeda fighters to the mountains of Tora Bora in western Afghanistan for his last stand against the coalition, the coalition made a fatal mistake.

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