An excerpt from Ed Snowden's autobiography, Permanent Record; I happen to today be on the chapters called 9/11 and 9/12. In a classroom, I'd enforce this book as required reading.

9/11

....

I was speeding down Route 32 under a beautiful Microsoft-blue sky, trying not to get caught by any speed traps. With a little luck, I'd roll into Mae's sometime before 9:30, and -- with my window down and my hand riding the wind -- it felt like a lucky day. I had the talk radio cranked and was waiting for the news to switch to the traffic.

Just as I was about to take the Canine Road shortcut into Fort Meade, and update broke through about a plane crash in New York City.

Mae came to the door and I followed her up the stairs from the dim entryway to the cramped office next to her bedroom. There wasn't much to it: just our two desks side by side, a drawing table for her art, and a cage for her squirrels. Though I was slightly distracted by the news, we had work to do. I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. I was just opening the project's files in a simple text editor -- we wrote the code for websites by hand -- when the phone rang.

Mae picked up. "What? Really?"

Because we were sitting so close together, I could hear her husband's voice. And he was yelling.

Mae's expression turned to alarm, and she loaded a news site on her computer. The only TV was downstairs. I was reading the site's report about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, when Mae said, "Okay. Wow. Okay," and hung up.

She turned to me. "A second plane just hit the other tower."

Until that moment, I'd thought it had been an accident.

Mae said, "Norm thinks they're going to close the base."

"Like, the gates?" I said. "Seriously?" The scale of what had happened had yet to hit me. I was thinking about my commute.

"Norm said you should go home. He doesn't want you to get stuck."

I sighed, and saved the work I'd barely started. Just when I got up to leave, the phone rang again, and this time the conversation was even shorter. Mae was pale.

"You're not going to believe this."

Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. They both refer to a collapse of order and the panic that rushes in to fill the void. For as long as I live, I'll remember retracing my way up Canine Road -- the road past the NSA's headquarters -- after the Pentagon was attacked. Madness poured out of the agency's black glass towers, a tide of yelling, ringing cell phones, and cars revving up in the parking lots and fighting their way onto the stereet. At the moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the NSA -- the major signals intelligence agency of the American IC -- was abandoning its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.

NSA director Michael Hayden issueed the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Subsequently, the NSA and the CIA -- which also evacuated all but a skeleton crew from its own headquarters on 9/11 -- would explain their behavior by citing a concern that one of the agencies might potentially, possibly, perhaps be the target of the fourth and last hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, rather than, say, the White House or Capitol.

I sure as hell wasn't thinking about the next likeliest targets as I crawled through the gridlock, with everyone trying to get their cars out of the same parking lot simultaneously. I wasn't thinking about anything at all. What I was doing was obediently following along, in what today I recall as one totalizing moment -- a clamor of horns (I don't think I'd ever heard a car horn at an American military installation before) and out-of-phase radios shrieking the news of the South Tower's collapse while the drivers steered with their knees and feverishly pressed redial on their phones. I can still feel it -- the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell netowrk, and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver's seat, I was just a passenger.

The stoplights on Canine Road gave way to humans, as the NSA's special police went to work directing traffic. In the ensuing hours, days, and weeks they'd be joined by convoys of Humvees topped with machine guns, guarding new roadblocks and checkpoints. Many of these new security measures became permanent, supplemented by endless rolls of wire and massive installations of surveillance cameras. With all this security, it became difficult for me to get back on base and drive past the NSA -- until the day I was employed there.

These trapping sof what would be called the War on Terror weren't the only reason I gave up on Mae after 9/11, but they certainly played a part. The events of that day had left her shaken. In time, we stopped working together and grew distant. I'd chat her up occasionally, only to find that my feelings had changed and I'd changed, too. By the time Mae left Norm and moved to California, she felt like a stranger to me. She was too opposed to the war.

9/12

Try to remember the biggest family event you've ever been to -- maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? Maybe 30, 50? Though all of them together comprise your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know each and every individual member. Dunbar's number, the famous estimate f how many relationships you can meaningfully maintain in life, is just 150. Now think back to school. How many people were in your class in grade school, and in high school? How many of them were friends, and how many others did you just know as acquaintances, and how many still others did you simply recognize? If you wen to school in the Unisted States, let's say it's a thousand. It cerntainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all "your people," but you may still have felt a bond with them.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face -- and imagine they're gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.

Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America's response.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact -- whose very existence -- the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence cna inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America's allies as its enemies -- and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitute and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respoect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: "Stop resisting."

This is why whenever I try to understand how the last two decades happened, I return to that September -- to that ground-zero day and its immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against a truth darker than the lies that tied the Talliban to al-Qaeda and conjured up Saddam Hussein's illusory stockpile of WMDs. It means, ultimately, confronting the fact that the carnage and abuses that marked my young adulthood were born not only in the executive branch and the intelligence agencies, but also in the hearts and minds of all Americans, myself included.