11 SEP 26 SITREP

• Today marked 25 years since Al-Qaeda hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people including 343 FDNY firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, and 37 Port Authority police officers. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attended the Pentagon ceremony alongside former President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
• Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed when Al-Qaeda flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center, delivered an unscripted speech at today's commemoration declaring that courts have now proven Saudi Arabia deliberately fomented anti-American terrorism around the world and dispatched its own agents to support the hijackers. She said that presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden all withheld evidence, vetoed justice, and broke promises to the families because they chose to protect the Saudi government instead.
• Bypassing the former presidents entirely, Terry Strada directed her appeal to Vice President JD Vance, asking him to bring a single message back to President Trump: force Saudi Arabia to stop lying and stand with the families. The crowd of victims' families erupted in cheers, with Matt Boyle of Breitbart News saying the moment captured exactly why real Americans see Trump and Vance as a genuine break from every administration that failed them before.
• Andrew Giuliani, son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who led the city through the September 11 attacks, reflected on the anniversary at ground zero and pointed to the spontaneous boatlift of Lower Manhattan where over 150 civilian ships evacuated tens of thousands of people without any official order as the clearest expression of the American spirit born that day, while warning that over 40% of the country was either not alive or carries no personal memory of the attacks.

• Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the strategic Red Sea port of Moka in Yemen, pushing Houthi-controlled territory closer to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the most heavily trafficked commercial shipping lanes on earth and a chokepoint sitting on the opposite side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Strait of Hormuz.
• The war involving Iran had already been disrupting oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz before the Moka seizure, meaning Houthi forces pressing toward the Bab el-Mandeb now places both of the Arabian Peninsula's critical maritime passages under simultaneous threat for the first time.
• U.S. forces struck and destroyed 5 oil tankers in the Middle East in direct response to an Iranian-backed attempt to attack American warships in the region, marking a significant escalation in active military engagement against Iranian aggression.
• The average price of diesel in the United States surpassed $6 per gallon for the first time ever, with Triple A confirming prices are running approximately 63% higher than one year ago, with the compounding military instability across the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz identified as a direct and growing threat to global energy supply chains.

• The night before the anniversary, former President George W. Bush appeared alongside former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and repeated the claim he has made for 25 years: that Islam is a religion of peace and that the Al-Qaeda hijackers had simply subverted their religion. Matt Boyle of Breitbart News argued this was never an honest mistake but a deliberate lie that both parties used to justify open immigration from the Middle East, dependence on Saudi oil, and a nation-building strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan that produced nothing.
• The 9/11 Commission's own recommendations for biometric entry-exit systems at U.S. borders were identified and then never implemented, a failure attributed to political pressure, while student visas used by individuals connected to the attacks were flagged as a specific and unaddressed vulnerability. Stephen Miller has repeatedly argued that a straightforward look at how the hijackers actually entered the United States exposes the full scale of the institutional failure.
• Author Joshua Lisec, co-author of Unhumans, argued that cultural Marxism has spent approximately 70 years embedding the oppressor-versus-oppressed framework across American institutions to the point where September 11 is now interpreted by a coalition he called the red-green-brown alliance, made up of American progressives, pro-terrorist organizations, and democratic socialist actors, not as mass murder but as a justified strike against white Western power.
• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were photographed laughing together during the reading of the names of September 11 victims at the New York City ceremony today, while the New York Times and NPR both led their anniversary coverage with stories framed around Islamophobia rather than the victims or the attack itself, behavior that Lisec described as the oppressor-oppressed framework operating exactly as designed.