New York City's 9/11 museum preserves American trauma while obscuring the attacks’ political context and the millions abroad subjected to the so-called global 'war on terror'

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened in May 2014.

The massive museum - covering 110,000 square feet of exhibition space - is built into the structure of the original complex, with an exposed underground retaining wall built in the 1960s to keep water from the Hudson River out.

The museum holds more than 83,000 artefacts from the destruction on that day.

Voice recordings and transcripts from flight staff, final voice messages from husbands on board the flights to their wives, shocking footage of people jumping out of the windows of the towers, the planes hitting the World Trade Center (WTC) towers from different angles, and smoke billowing over the New York skyline make for a relentless replaying of that day.

In the main hall, there are mini-exhibits spread throughout.

An area focused on the unifying symbolism of the American flag; a set of touch-screens where visitors are encouraged to sign messages of love and support; a separate glass exhibit containing a miniature model of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

Even more curious is another cabinet that holds a single brick ostensibly from the compound itself, following the US Navy Seal raid in May 2011.

In its narration of the attacks of 11 September 2001, the museum says that these were carried out by “al-Qaeda - an international Islamist extremist terrorist network” founded in the 1980s whose aims include wanting to “overthrow governments in the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, which do not strictly enforce a religiously sanctioned political and social order”.

“Attacks against the United States were intended to reduce American support for many of these governments; US support was viewed by al-Qaeda as a major obstacle to creating a global order under Islamic authority,” the museum says.

Unlike the exhaustive reconstruction of 9/11, these details are sparse and intentionally obtuse.

“As part of the Cold War - the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States - the US supported the Afghan rebellion by funnelling money and arms through Pakistan. The CIA provided money to recruit Afghans but did not directly fund foreign militants,” one of the captions at the museum reads.

This description is evasive. Washington deliberately channelled funds via Pakistan as a means to preserve plausible deniability.

Instead of explaining the statecraft, it became part of it.