Next Sunday, Sept. 11, will mark the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attack known simply as 9/11. It wasn’t just one in a litany of attacks on America and the West, another in a long string of brutal, senseless assaults on innocent people carried out in the name of jihad. It was different — different in scope and different in kind and different in consequences.

This attack took 3,000 lives, far more than ever before or ever since in the U.S. It was carried out in the symbolic centers of our government and our economy: at the Pentagon, at the World Trade Center in the heart of New York City’s financial district, itself the heart of global finance, and, nearly, at the White House or the Capitol but for the bravery of passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, whose actions prevented the hijackers of that flight from reaching their intended target. Its consequences included a war and, many insist, the wrong war, one that birthed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Each year at this time, many of us mourn those who were lost, while some mourn their loss all year long. For though a lot of us remember that this worst terrorist incident in history involved 3,000 murders, few of us realize that those victims left their equal number in children. Those 3,000 children were left without a mom or dad — or, we believe quite strongly, the truth about why they grew up without their lost parents.

For almost the number of years that have passed since 9/11, the families of the victims — the families of these children — have been pressing their government for the truth.  They’ve been tirelessly pressing for the whole truth, nothing but the truth — in plain terms, not cleverly constructed report language, not redacted reports and not in the absence of all of the investigative files and reports that are nothing less than vital to our knowing what really happened on that day of carnage, a day that changed America and the world and ultimately orphaned who knows how many children in war and in now countless additional terrorist assaults.

Read more at The Hill

Image courtesy of Getty Images