Kristen Breitweiser

And so it was a really scary time.

And then subsequent to that, when things started to maybe subside, where people sort of regained their sense of reality, we had the queue up to the war in Iraq.

And anyone who questioned anything about the attacks and how they could have happened and who could be behind them, you were silenced because we were a nation at war and it was unpatriotic.

to raise any questions, to question anything and to demand answers, certainly not allowed.

And so that sort of took, I think, quite a bit of years.

And now, believe it or not, I think for many of us, it's 25 years moving into the 25th year.

And I do not think that we've been told the truth.

I think as hard as we fought for a commission to try to learn the lessons, to try to understand better why and how the attacks happened, I think that commission was a whitewash.

I think it told a story, not the truth.

And there's a difference between a story and the truth.

And I think we're owed the truth as to what happened that day and why the country was attacked and why we did nothing in a defensive posture.

to even mitigate the damage on the day of 9-11.

It's bad enough when you look at the facts leading up to the day of 9-11 and you see the many instances of where things were sort of overlooked, facilitated in some situations,

But the day of 9-11 as well, there were failures, systemic failures that cost lives.

And so for me initially in the beginning, I was like, you know what, like we need to do better.

The country needs to learn lessons so that more lives could be saved if and when another terrorist attack happened.

And for whatever reason, President Bush wasn't interested in doing that, but he was interested in the war in Iraq.

And to me, 25 years looking back, 24 years looking back, I do wonder if the attacks were to serve as the premise to allow for preemptive war.

I think that when you do examine what had happened in the government since then, it certainly laid the groundwork for preemptive war.

I'm not a person who supports war.