9/11 may not have been engineered by us, but the people in power certainly took advantage of it when it happened.
Thereby precipitating the most epic win imaginable against Western Democracy.
I honestly don't think they imagined the extent to which they would to undermine the society they were trying to shake. And if they did, that's truly scary.
That the 'authoritarians' (*cough* fascists *cough*) took advantage of that, we are not in disagreement about.
But either forcing them to, or giving them an excuse to, finally just fully take control ... I still say 9/11 was a game-changing event, because everybody immediately rushed to build the "at any means" surveillance society in the open.
These guys almost have express written permission for these kinds of abuses. The exact same abuses people were warning would happen while they were being passed. The PATRIOT Act had stuff in it which people said would lead to this kind of crap while it was being passed, because it was a knee-jerk response.
I argue that Western society post 9/11 is overtly different than it was pre 9/11. Some of the rot may have been there already, but it's come into the full light of day since.