Eric Snowden on his post-9/11 reaction

September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world.  In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity.  It could have treated terror not as the theological phenomenon it purported to be, but as the crime it was.  It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public. 

Instead, it went to war. 

The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision.  I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment.  I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it.  I wanted to be a liberator.  I wanted to free the oppressed.  I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my passion I confused with the good of the country.  It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance.  The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it. 

I wanted, I think, to be part of something.  Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring.  Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001.  In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies.  The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled.  There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online.  The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.

~ Eric Snowden, "9/12: The Greatest Regret of My Life," September 11, 2021