Since 9/11, it’s been said that Americans can be divided into two groups depending on whether they’ve learned any lessons from 9/11 — 9/10 Americans or 9/12 Americans.

Michelle Malkin claims the wrong lessons are being taught, and the right lessons haven’t been learned:

“Know your enemy, name your enemy” is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it’s too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term “Islamic extremism” was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.

Similarly, too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren’t ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism. …

A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to “avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction” wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students’ attention on broadly defined “intolerance” and “hurtful words.”

No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar” and “Behead all those who insult Islam” are not among the “hurtful words” studied.

The Wall Street Journal conducted a “symposium” asking the provocative question of whether the U.S. overreacted, or mis-reacted, to the attacks.

Former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfewicz, a favorite 2000s target of Democrats and anti-Semites, made the parallel between 9/11 and World War II:

Preventing further attacks required the U.S. to drop its law-enforcement approach to terrorism and recognize that we were at war. Consider the difference between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the mastermind of 9/11 who told us much of what we now know about al Qaeda—and his nephew Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center who can’t be questioned (even most courteously) without his lawyer present and has told us nothing of significance. Or consider the difference between the ineffective retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan in 1998 and the 2001 response that brought down the Taliban regime.

We went to war with Germany in 1941 not because it had attacked Pearl Harbor but because it was dangerous. After 9/11, we had to do more to deal with state sponsors of terrorism than simply place them on a prohibited list, especially if they had connections to biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein—who was defying numerous United Nations resolutions and was the only head of a government to praise 9/11, warning that Americans should “suffer” so they will “find the right path”—presented such a danger.

That we made mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq does not prove that we overreacted. (Costly mistakes were also made in World War II: sending poorly prepared troops to North Africa, failing to plan for the hedgerows beyond the beaches at Normandy, failing to anticipate the German counterattack in Belgium.) The real question is whether a significantly different response would have produced a better result.

Author Mark Helprin advocated for a significantly more severe response:

We underreacted in failing to declare war and put the nation on a war footing, and thus overreacted in trumpeting hollow resolution. We underreacted in attempting quickly to subdue and pacify, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers, 50 million famously recalcitrant people in notoriously difficult terrain halfway around the world. We are left with 10,000 American dead here and abroad, a bitterly divided polity, a broken alliance structure, emboldened rivals abroad, and two fractious nations hostile to American interests with little changed from what they were before.

We overreacted by attempting to revolutionize the political culture—and therefore the religious laws with which it is inextricably bound—of a billion people who exist as if in another age. The “Arab Spring” is less a confirmation of this illusion than its continuance. If you think not, just wait. …

Rather than embarking upon the reformation of the Arab world, we should have fully geared up, sacrificed for, and resolved upon war. Then struck hard and brought down the regimes sheltering our enemies, set up strongmen, charged them with extirpating terrorists, and withdrawn from their midst to hover north of Riyadh in the network of bases the Saudis have built within striking distance of Baghdad and Damascus. There we might have watched our new clients do the work that since 9/11 we have only partially accomplished, and at a cost in lives, treasure, and heartbreak far greater than necessary.

Helprin seems to be channeling his inner George Patton, who said, “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who supported then opposed the Iraq War, does an interesting zig-zag:

I was deceived in my support of the Iraq war, but I rejoice in the dictator’s destruction, and in the stirrings of Iraqi democracy despite the best efforts of Islamists and Iranians to thwart it. Good outcomes may come of bad origins.

On another website I wrote: “Since 9/11, I don’t think we’re more safe, but we are less free,” without spelling out how or why. David McElroy does:

Americans are demonstrably less free today than we were 10 years ago this morning. It’s easier for our masters to wiretap us, demand private information about us without warrants and to monitor what we’re doing in our financial transactions. We have police who think it’s a crime to take photos of public buildings from public property — and police officials who think it’s a reasonable policy to violate the rights of peaceful Americans just for taking pictures. We are subjected to treatment at airports that we wouldn’t have put up with 10 years ago. Even with all of this, a determined and decently financed group could easily still pull off a credible attack that would terrify everyone.

The Wall Street Journal‘s unsigned-opinion-writers beg to differ:

According to Justice Department memos released in 2009 by the Obama Administration, “since March 2002, the intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the CTC’s [Counterterrorism Center’s] reporting on al Qaeda. . . . The substantial majority of this intelligence has come from detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques.” Our friends on the left often call these memos the “torture memos.” The real torture is what happens to maimed victims of terrorist atrocities that intelligence agencies were blind to prevent.

That’s a lesson the Obama Administration has taken to heart. Though the President came to office promising to undo his predecessor’s antiterror legacy, he has for the most part preserved it. That goes for re-authorizing key provisions of the Patriot Act (including that favorite ACLU bugaboo, the so-called library-records provision); moving forward with military tribunals for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees; keeping Guantanamo open (albeit grudgingly), and giving the CIA authority to dramatically increase the use of drones against terrorist leaders. As for some of Mr. Obama’s other promises, such as ending the use of enhanced interrogations or closing down the black sites, these were already accomplished facts well before George W. Bush left office.

Constrained interrogations excepted, these developments not only increase America’s margin of safety against another attack, but also put the Democratic Party’s visible imprimatur on the war on terror, much as Dwight Eisenhower’s foreign policy put the GOP stamp on Harry Truman’s containment policies.

They also expose the accusation that President Bush was trampling America’s civil liberties as a particularly vulgar partisan maneuver—one that magically disappeared the moment Mr. Obama came to office. We certainly don’t like removing our shoes at the airport, but the larger truth is that American civil liberties are as robust today as they were on the eve of 9/11. Then again, we shudder to think of the kinds of measures the American public would have demanded had there been further attacks on the scale of 9/11. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, it’s worth recalling, was mainly the doing of those two great civil libertarians Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren.

One does have to point out that nowhere in the Constitution do we have a right to air travel, let alone inconvenience-free air travel. (If that were the case, then we have an 18-year-old lawsuit to file against Northworst Airlines.) And it’s unclear to me why we are supposed to give constitutional rights to non-Americans, particularly those trying to kill us. To quote former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, one of the Nuremburg war trial prosecutors, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

One of the most interesting 9/11 viewpoints comes from author Christopher Hitchens, who was no one’s idea of a conservative before 9/11, but whose eyes opened:

The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce “complexity” into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.) …

To begin with, I found myself for the first time in my life sharing the outlook of soldiers and cops, or at least of those soldiers and cops who had not (like George Tenet and most of the CIA) left us defenseless under open skies while well-known “no fly” names were allowed to pay cash for one-way tickets after having done perfunctory training at flight schools. My sympathies were wholeheartedly and unironically (and, I claim, rationally) with the forces of law and order. Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. How much easier to maintain, as many did, that it was all an excuse to build a pipeline across Afghanistan (an option bizarrely neglected by American imperialism after the fall of communism in Kabul, when the wretched country could have been ours for the taking!). …

Ten years ago I wrote to a despairing friend that a time would come when al-Qaida had been penetrated, when its own paranoia would devour it, when it had tried every tactic and failed to repeat its 9/11 coup, when it would fall victim to its own deluded worldview and—because it has no means of generating self-criticism—would begin to implode. The trove recovered from Bin Laden’s rather dismal Abbottabad hideaway appears to confirm that this fate has indeed, with much labor on the part of unsung heroes, begun to engulf al-Qaida. I take this as a part vindication of the superiority of “our” civilization, which is at least so constituted as to be able to learn from past mistakes, rather than remain a prisoner of “faith.”

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

Finally, one of the fascinating things for media geeks is to watch coverage of breaking news such as 9/11. The Internet Archive has two pages — one that follows American media as the events occurred, and the other shows worldwide TV.

The Media Research Center, usually quite critical of the news media, reposted its 2002 tribute to 9/11 TV news coverage.

And finally, what Ground Zero looked like last night: