TOMORROW is the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers.  We will be hearing a lot about the horrors of that day, when 2,977 people were killed because 19 terrorists flew planes into buildings.

It’s also 20 years since the US government decided to respond to the attacks by lashing out with a series of wild military adventures: US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld planned to “go massive” and attack targets he knew were completely unrelated to the terrorists — including Iraq — on the day the Twin Towers fell. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because the US government — with British support — decided to use the event to demonstrate Western military might, instead of seeking justice.

We know how Rumsfeld reacted to the fall of the Twin Towers because we have access to the handwritten notes of his orders on September 11 2001. The notes were kept by Rumsfeld’s aide Stephen Cambone, who wrote down his orders to his various officials. According to these notes, on the afternoon of September 11, about five hours after the first plane hit the Twin Towers, Rumsfeld said, “Near term target needs — go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.”

So Rumsfeld wanted a “massive” response to the attack, but one that swept in unrelated targets. Key among those unrelated targets  was Iraq.

The notes also record Rumsfeld said, “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough (to) hit S[addam] H[ussein] at same time — not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden].”

Rumsfeld wanted a simultaneous assault on Saddam’s Iraq, which he had long seen as a prime target for US attack. In the end Rumsfeld had to wait a couple of years for the US to manufacture some phoney “info” about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and “terrorist links” before that “massive” attack could be launched, as the existing “info” wasn’t quite good enough for war.

What Rumsfeld’s notes show is that the leadership in the US did not see the September 11 attacks as principally a crime — one where they needed to find the criminals. Instead, they saw the September 11 attacks as an act of war, which showed the US as weak — so the response was a show of strength.

There were two problems with this “sweeping up” of unrelated targets in a “massive” attack.

The first — and worst — is that they led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the bloody and disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second is that they did not ultimately show US strength. Instead, they showed both weakness and corruption.

The War on Terror was unsustainable. For all the munitions and lives it consumed, the US could not maintain foreign bases in the face of regional rebellions. The US finally had to withdraw its troops, in a “humiliation” for the US and nations like Britain that piggy-backed on them.

The War on Terror was also corrupting. Because the US decided to go to war against “terrorism” rather than try and pursue it as a crime, they used the methods of war — which in the US case meant giving the job to the CIA instead of the FBI.

The FBI has plenty of practice of railroading suspects, but that was just not vicious enough, so the US turned to the CIA to create  a network of “black sites” to torture suspects before dumping them in Guantanamo.

This degraded the torturers as well as brutalising the tortured. The use of “evidence” generated by torture means that even now Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, likely the planner of September 11, cannot be properly prosecuted. It covers the pain of those who lost lives in September 11 with the stain of vile behaviour, perverse torture and murder by US authorities.

One final point — we only know about Rumsfeld’s notes because Thad Anderson, then a Law Student in New York, applied for them via the US Freedom of Information Act and then published them on his blog in 2006.

This  crucial “smoking gun” memo, showing as it does that Rumsfeld shoe-horned an attack on Iraq into the 9/11 response and was happy for attacks on targets that were not related — was not revealed by journalism. There was good journalism in the War on Terror, but it was outweighed by much more bad journalism. The limited amount of good journalism had to be supplemented by the work of concerned citizens for us to get near the truth.