Columbia University and the Knight First Amendment Institute kicked off the first night of last week’s symposium on the War on Terror and free speech with a video. Opening with images of newspaper headlines boldly naming the attacks as acts of terror, the video acknowledged 9/11 as “the deadliest attack in United States history.”
But the video did not explicitly blame al-Qaeda for the attacks. That duty fell to President George W. Bush, who, in the video, tells a September 20, 2001, joint session of Congress that “our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.”
