Surveillance expansion, foreign wars and ICE operations traced to post-9/11 policies
The Guardian’s retrospective, published on the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, drew on interviews with historians, former national security officials, civil liberties litigators and Jenna Jacobs McPartland, whose husband Ariel Jacobs was killed at the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center’s north tower. McPartland told the Guardian: “It makes me incredibly sad and bordering on angry that the death of my husband has been invoked to cause more violence.”
The piece situated the attacks in the context of September 10, 2001, when the federal government had recorded four consecutive budget surpluses. The following morning, hijackers seized four airliners. In the days after the attacks, Russia pledged support, Iran held candlelight vigils and NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history, the Guardian reported.
The United States responded with two wars. The US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 to destroy al-Qaida and topple its Taliban protectors, a war the Guardian reported lasted 20 years and ended with the Taliban’s return to power. The US then invaded Iraq in 2003 on what the Guardian reported was the false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Guardian wrote that the wars cost “hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Historians and former officials interviewed by the Guardian characterized the response as a strategic overreach. Galston, the former Clinton policy adviser, said the United States “was at the apogee of its post-cold war power on September 10 and then, through a series of missteps and misjudgments on both the foreign and domestic front, we have thrown away a great deal of not only our power but our credibility.” Galston described what he called “a quarter-century of misgovernment in the United States.”
Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, told the Guardian that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden “in some ways failed in his intentions” — including his stated goal of expelling the United States from the Middle East — but that “in other ways 9/11 is the most successful terrorist attack in history insofar it prompted such an overreach from the United States that we hastened our own decline, division and betrayal of our own story.”
The retrospective traced the post-9/11 expansion of government surveillance and its domestic application. The Patriot Act, passed 45 days after the attacks, dispensed with rules requiring probable cause for the state to monitor US citizens, the Guardian reported. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told the Guardian that “so much of what’s going on now is traceable to the institutions and authorities that were created after 9/11 and that the courts failed to limit.”
Jaffer specifically cited “the use of the material support laws to prosecute anti-ICE protesters in Texas,” “the use of the Espionage Act to threaten and intimidate journalists who are writing about issues that the public needs to know about” and “the arrests and detentions and threatened deportation of students for protesting on university campuses.” Jaffer said those policies are “built on deference that the courts extended to the executive branch 25 years after 9/11.”
Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School and a leading member of Witness Against Torture, told the Guardian that “the United States committed to a programme and policy of torture, violating international law and its own laws, and an element of gratuitous cruelty and even sadism became operationally part of the war on terror.” Varon linked the post-9/11 expansion of executive power to the contemporary Trump administration, saying “the lawlessness of Trump is an utterly predictable consequence of the contempt for the rule of law, oversight, checks and balances that the Bush administration displayed.”
The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has held 780 men and boys since 9/11, the Guardian reported. President Obama attempted and failed to close the facility. President Trump has faced criticism for transferring immigrants there.
Rhodes argued that “you’d never have Donald Trump as president without 9/11 because he basically stepped into that slipstream of othering people and captured the ugly xenophobia and nationalism that had been unleashed and the anger that people, particularly on the right, felt at being gaslit by the Bush administration for eight years.” Rhodes said ICE agents are “basically running counter-insurgency strategies in American cities, with the same military equipment that we used to fight wars now in the hands of law enforcement.”
The Guardian reported last week that Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11, to search voter rolls for noncitizens over several weeks. The Guardian described the move as one characterized by watchdogs as an intimidation effort ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The retrospective noted that 100 million Americans are too young to remember 9/11. Trump was scheduled to attend a commemoration at the Pentagon on Friday, with Vice President JD Vance attending the national September 11 memorial in New York.
The Guardian’s reporting closed with Rhodes on opportunity cost. “Consider what we didn’t do. I sometimes am haunted by this. The trillions of dollars spent on a forever war: what could that have been spent on? Climate change, universal healthcare, public education. There’s a real opportunity cost to how we chose to spend our time and resources,” Rhodes said.