Aljazeera.com created an interactive chart titled “September 11: Counting the costs to America” online: “Debt: $983 billion
The US government is heavily in debt, meaning Washington has borrowed trillions of dollars to finance its spending on wars and homeland security.
This category accounts for the interest on those debts related to 9/11 – war and homeland security spending, in other words.
The treasury has already paid about $183 billion in interest on its debts, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. That figure will climb to nearly $1 trillion by the end of the decade, according to a study by Brown University.
Higher levels of public debt could also potentially mean higher interest rates for private and corporate borrowers in the United States, but those calculations are speculative and thus omitted here.”
– Gregg Carlstrom, “Interactive: How much did 9/11 cost the US? The attacks, which cost perhaps $400,000 to execute, will cost the United States more than $5 trillion.,” Aljazeera.com, Sept. 1, 2011