Leadership Quote by Paul Cellucci

Cellucci’s line is doing the blunt, muscular work of post-9/11 American politics: converting a shared visual trauma into permission for whatever comes next. “We saw” isn’t just a verb; it’s a claim of collective eyewitness authority, a reminder that the event lives not in policy memos but in televised memory. The collapse becomes an argument you don’t have to fully articulate, because the image already did the persuading. That’s the rhetorical move: substitute a picture for a premise.

The phrase “those World Trade towers” keeps it oddly conversational, almost folksy, as if the speaker is pointing out a landmark on a drive. That casualness matters. It normalizes a catastrophic reference and makes it available as a reusable token in debates about security, war, surveillance, and immigration. The towers become shorthand for a worldview: the enemy is irrational, the threat is absolute, and restraint is a luxury.

Subtext: you don’t need to be told the policy; you’re meant to feel it. “What these terrorists will do” shifts from past to future tense, turning a specific attack into an enduring forecast. It also flattens “terrorists” into an undifferentiated category, inviting guilt by association and discouraging distinctions between groups, motives, or theaters of conflict. In the early-2000s context, that elasticity was politically useful: it binds fear to urgency, and urgency to executive action. The line isn’t explaining 9/11 so much as keeping it on the table as a standing authorization.