The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were unlike anything the world had seen before.

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For America, and the watching world, September 11 (or 9/11) seemed most like a Pearl Harbour moment - a devastating surprise attack by a distant enemy that demanded a response.

But here the distant enemy was not a nation state in the middle of war, it was a ragtag collection of rebels living in mountain hideouts, long underestimated and widely misunderstood.

It took Hollywood movies to convey the horror of Pearl Harbour. But hundreds of millions around the world watched, via live satellite TV feeds, in disbelieving horror as a fully laden commercial aircraft slammed into the first World Trade Centre tower in New York. Hundreds of millions more saw the second tower hit, then witnessed both massive skyscrapers collapsing faster and more completely than seemed possible.

At the time, this felt like a moment that changed everything - a hinge point in history on which so much would turn. Twenty-five years later, that devastating intuition has been confirmed through a cascading series of grim events and tragic mistakes.

Could the September 11 attacks have been prevented?

In September 2026 we live in a world of uncertainty and change. Geopolitics, technology and the physical world are experiencing rapid transformation that fascinates and terrifies in equal measure.

Much of this would have occurred without September 11, but there is a sense in which that day changed all these things.

The collapse of 80 years of global order cannot be said to have simply resulted from the world's biggest terror attack, but it certainly played a role in triggering a series of responses that has changed all the nations involved.

Could the September 11 attacks have been foreseen and prevented? Absolutely.

Counterterrorism intelligence has evolved massively over the past 25 years. But international terrorism was not new in 2001, nor was al-Qaeda - the terrorist group responsible - completely unknown and operating without scrutiny.

Well before the 9/11 Commission report was published, it was clear there were multiple "if only" moments that may have prevented the attack. If only those sounding the alarm had been listened to. If only the FBI and the CIA had put aside their rivalries to trust each other, fully share what they knew, and act on it. If only the threat posed by al-Qaeda was taken more seriously. At all of these points, the attacks could have been stopped.

The September 11 attacks were audaciously ambitious, involving global........

© Canberra Times