From the World Trade Center to Guantánamo: Australian 9/11 Families' Questions 25 Years On

According to ABC News, on that cold September evening 25 years ago, Paul and Yvonne Gyulavary, in a Melbourne suburb, had just put their three young children to bed and were preparing for sleep themselves. When Yvonne stepped outside to fetch firewood, the air suddenly turned "terrible." She rushed back inside and locked the door — at that moment, on the television, thick smoke was pouring from the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

She thought her husband was watching "an end-of-the-world movie." Until the second plane hit.

"The first plane, you'd think it was an accident," she said. "The second one couldn't have been an accident."

The attacks killed 2,977 people, including 10 Australians. Paul's twin brother, Peter, was one of them. Peter had moved to New York in the mid-1980s and was obsessed with restoring a Victorian-era home — repainting everything from the roof tiles to the walls using original techniques, finishing with a single coat of bright yellow paint as "a tribute to home."

Three weeks after the attacks, the Gyulavary family confirmed that Peter had been in his office in the South Tower that day. Ten weeks later, on the eve of Thanksgiving, his remains were found. "I never thought we'd find his body," Paul said. "I thought he'd turn to ash and become part of the World Trade Center site. It felt like he died all over again."

At almost the same moment, on the 103rd floor of the North Tower, Andrew Knox and his colleagues rushed to the roof. They pressed together on a narrow ledge and were soon swallowed by acrid black smoke. Eight days later, thousands of kilometres away in Australia, his brother Stuart Knox stood before a group of journalists and read aloud an email from Andrew's New York supervisor — "We first heard Andrew on the speakerphone … and then we heard him shout, 'We're all going to die.'"

According to ABC News, that media appearance had been suggested by the Labor Party. But Stuart said: "Things snowballed out of control."

Twenty-five years on, Stuart has joined protest marches against the war on terror. "We know from history that wars take innocent lives," he said. "For our families, what has been done in the name of justice is the hardest part to bear."

The distance between two numbers

According to ABC News, citing estimates, since 9/11, approximately 4.5 to 4.7 million people have died in post-9/11 wars, violence and conflict — roughly 1,500 times the death toll of the attacks themselves.

The alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been charged by the United States with 2,977 counts of first-degree murder. After being held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba for nearly 20 years, a military judge only last month set his trial date for June 5, 2028, when he will be tried alongside three co-defendants.

Simon Kennedy's mother was a passenger aboard the American Airlines flight that struck the Pentagon. Years ago, he travelled to Guantánamo to come face to face with the man who had masterminded her killing.

"What I saw was just a sad husk of a person who had made terrible decisions," he said. "Those decisions did take my mother away from me, but hating that man isn't going to bring her back."

After the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, then-U.S. President Barack Obama's approval rating surged 11 percentage points. The White House celebrated through the night, and Obama declared that "justice had been done." But for Simon, it felt more like a political symbol than personal closure.

"What kind of justice is it," he said, "when the rules of justice are thrown aside, and a man sits in some nondescript prison in Cuba still waiting for trial? It's absurd."

The media's complicity

According to ABC News, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman has criticised post-9/11 news coverage for carrying a "fanatical paranoia": "[The media coverage] cultivated a sense that a 9/11-style attack could strike at any moment, carried out by the Muslim neighbour next door, out of some fanatical, entirely disconnected-from-reality ideological grievance."

Simon Kennedy broke nearly a decade of silence in 2011 to speak out publicly — in part out of concern for Muslim Australians. "I knew they had been living in an atmosphere of being looked at sideways since that day," he said. "I wanted to appeal for a bit of calm and a bit of respect."

Geoff Tompsett, the brother of fallen computer scientist Stephen Tompsett, recalled that on September 11, 2005, a tabloid reporter called him, "wanting me to express a negative view … just so they could have a hate-filled piece for their sleazy television show." He refused on the spot and rebuked the caller for "trying to stir up division and hatred against the Muslim community."

According to ABC News, many Australian families have noted that repeated footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Center is emotionally re-traumatising. Psychologist Paul Stevenson said five minutes of rolling coverage per hour "is enough to keep the public informed," but continuous live broadcasts "are exploitative — people are being re-traumatised over and over again."

David, the brother of Leanne Whiteside, who died in the North Tower, said: "What I've been worried about from the beginning is tolerance and understanding of others — hate — and then more hate — only begets more hate."

Today, Paul Gyulavary's home still has a September fire burning in the hearth. The clocks are still set to New York time. "I don't think about September 11," he said. "I think about the ordinary kids we grew up with, went to school with, lived next door to." And then, he laughed.