The World Trade Center occupies a double place in Noam Chomsky’s account: it was a target of terrorist attacks in 1993 and on September 11, 2001, and it became a symbol around which explanations of political violence were contested. Chomsky treats the attacks as grave crimes, but argues that interpreting the building chiefly through globalization or cultural resentment obscures the political context and the consequences of the response to September 11.

A target and a disputed symbol

Chomsky distinguishes the attacks’ character from their scale. He describes the September 11 attacks as unprecedented for the United States because, since the War of 1812, the country’s national territory had not been attacked or even threatened in the same way. The World Trade Center, alongside the Pentagon, was among the targets that gave the attacks their symbolic force. In his account, that significance does not make the attacks less criminal; it makes the choice of targets part of the political question that needs explanation.

The 1993 bombing is central to his challenge to explanations based on globalization and cultural hegemony. If the World Trade Center’s symbolic association with those forces explained the later attack, he asks, would it also explain the earlier bombing of the same building? He presents the recurrence as a reason to look beyond fashionable abstractions and examine the political circumstances surrounding the attackers’ choices.

Terrorism and the problem of definition

Chomsky applies the official U.S. definition of terrorism as the calculated use or threat of violence to achieve political, religious, or ideological aims, including through intimidation, coercion, or fear. Under that definition, he says, the attacks on the United States were plainly terrorist crimes. He then distinguishes this literal definition from a propagandistic usage in which terrorism denotes violence by enemies against the United States or its allies, while comparable actions by powerful states receive different labels.

That distinction shapes his reading of the World Trade Center attacks. He calls the 1993 and September 11 assaults terrible crimes, but argues that their meaning cannot be separated from the broader political use of the word terrorism. He contends that the official definitions of terrorism closely resemble those used to describe U.S. low-intensity warfare, and that treating terrorism as exclusively the weapon of the weak conceals the role of state violence. The building is therefore not only a target in his discussion but a point from which he examines who gets to define violence and whose actions are named as terror.

The 1993 bombing and its aftermath

Chomsky cites John Cooley’s account that CIA agents had voluntarily helped the Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman enter the United States in 1990, although Egypt was already seeking him over terrorist acts. In 1993, Rahman was implicated in the World Trade Center bombing. Chomsky says the operation followed procedures taught in CIA manuals that were apparently supplied to the Afghan fighters during the war against Russia. The plan, as he describes it, also included the destruction of the United Nations building and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.

Rahman was tried for conspiracy and received a lengthy prison sentence. Chomsky presents the episode not as an exoneration of the bombing, but as evidence of a wider history in which militant forces, training, and methods cross political lines. That history, in his argument, complicates accounts that portray terrorism as an isolated expression of cultural hostility or as violence confined to non-state actors.

September 11 and the political response

Chomsky doubts that a much smaller death toll would have substantially changed the U.S. response to September 11. The crime would still have been terrible, he argues, while the Pentagon and the World Trade Center carried significance beyond their immediate physical damage. He rejects the idea that the attackers were principally motivated by opposition to globalization, economic imperialism, or Western cultural values, describing such explanations as poorly suited to the stated concerns of Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists.

He also places the World Trade Center’s destruction within a wider pattern of violence and suffering. In his account, the attacks’ consequences extended beyond the immediate victims: he points to Palestinians living under military occupation and to poor and oppressed populations in Muslim-majority societies and elsewhere, who had suffered from the attackers’ atrocities and faced renewed hardship after September 11. This contrast underlines his insistence that identifying the attackers’ political aims does not diminish the crimes or erase their victims.

Strategic consequences and significance

Chomsky connects the September 11 attacks and the ensuing war in Afghanistan to changes in the United States’ global military position. He argues that the war enabled the establishment of major U.S. military bases in Central Asia, where they could support influence over regional resources and complement a network positioned around the energy resources of the Persian Gulf. Before the war, he says, Diego Garcia was the most secure base in the system directed toward the Gulf; the new positioning made intervention easier if U.S. leaders chose to undertake it.

He further interprets the Afghanistan campaign as an opportunity to reinforce U.S. military dominance and warn other governments of the consequences of challenging U.S. power. As a comparison, he points to the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained in terms of maintaining NATO’s credibility. The World Trade Center’s role in his argument thus reaches beyond the attacks themselves: its destruction becomes part of a discussion of how terrorism is defined, how political violence is justified, and how a catastrophe can be used to advance military and domestic policies.