The ghostly silence and calm that settled over Washington, DC is what many in the city remember most about the aftermath of the 9/11 plane hijackings and ensuing destruction of the Twin Towers and a portion of the Pentagon.
City streets were emptied of traffic. The airports closed and most public transit came to a halt. Not since British troops burned the Capitol and the White House during the War of 1812 had there been an attack of that magnitude on mainland America.
The threat has not gone away. It has since morphed into smaller-scale events carried out by lone actors
Virtually all of the nation’s elected leaders and much of its bureaucratic workforce were evacuated. It was assumed there would be further violence, and for months afterward the nation’s policy and political establishment focused on ways to defend against more devastating assaults: a chemical weapons attack, a suitcase nuclear bomb, biological weapons, vulnerable city reservoirs that might be poisoned. Nightmare scenarios multiplied.
It was 25 years ago to the day that the towers fell, causing immeasurable changes to life in the US and in Europe. Two wars ensued, three if you count the “war on terror,” as well as the wholesale restructuring of airport security, intelligence gathering, law enforcement tactics, foreign policy and immigration law.
The idea of globalism as an unalloyed good – with the free flow of people and commerce across international borders – lost much of its cache.
Truth be told, much of the public and policy establishment has moved on. Polling shows Americans now are more concerned about great power conflicts as they play out in Europe and the Middle East. That shift is troubling in its own way, because it was complacency that made the US vulnerable in 2001. The 9/11 Commission’s authoritative and granular account of the attacks said it was a “failure of imagination” that caused intelligence and law enforcement agencies to miss signs of the impending menace.
With few exceptions, top policy makers hadn’t conceived of a plot on the scale of 9/11, which left 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured, nor had they understood the terrorists’ organizational and logistical capabilities. They also failed to grasp the depth of the Islamists’ religious fanaticism and their inexhaustible ambition to do harm to the US and the West.
Part of the reason Americans are less focused on international terrorism is that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies since 9/11 have been remarkably successful in heading off mass casualty events. But that doesn’t mean the threat has gone away. In both the US and Europe, the risk has since morphed into smaller-scale events carried out by lone actors drawing inspiration from jihadi websites, or who at times have coordinated directly with surviving remnants of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Although more limited in scope, these incidents have turned out to be destabilizing in their own way. The electoral surge of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties in the United Kingdom, Germany and France is partly to do with the very real fear that the arrival of hundreds of thousands of young, military-age males from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia pose a security risk.
Each jihadist stabbing, each car ramming of a Christmas market, each Islamist-inspired shootout is a searing reminder that the threat hasn’t gone away. Yet policy makers often seem to act as if it has.
Tom Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission and former two-term New Jersey governor, says he’s regularly surprised by how little the latest generation of congressional lawmakers knows about the 9/11 attacks and the vigilance needed to keep the country safe.
Kean notes there were important tells in advance of 9/11, but that they went unheeded because the nation had let its guard down. One FBI agent, in a report to Washington, DC headquarters known as the Phoenix Memo, wrote in July 2001 that there had been an unusual influx of Middle Eastern men applying for admission to flight training schools in Arizona. He theorized Osama bin Laden might be behind a plot to plant explosives on US commercial aircraft. There was no follow-up.
A few weeks later, in Minnesota, the FBI field office there probed a suspected al-Qaeda operative named Zacarias Moussaoui after he enrolled in a flight school and agents concluded he was part of a hijacking plot. They based their suspicions on his jihadist beliefs and the fact that he had a $32,000 bank account for which there was no plausible explanation.
They asked FBI headquarters for a warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop because they were “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center,” as one agent put it in a memo to higher-ups. In the weeks before the hijackings, then-CIA director George Tenet was even briefed about the case in a presentation titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” But the search warrant was denied and the investigation stalled. “There were failures up and down the line. We cannot let our guard down,” Kean told me. “The only solution is eternal vigilance.”
Kean can’t shake the memory of driving home in the days after the attack, past commuter parking lots filled with cars of people who would never return
It’s difficult to recall the enormous sense of trauma and astonishment that gripped the United States in the days after the attacks. On 9/11 itself, cellular communication shut down across the US as millions of cell phone users called friends and relatives to share information and commiserate. Commercial aircraft were grounded and major airports deserted, their cavernous ticketing, baggage claims and departure and arrival areas empty and silent. Kean says he can’t shake the memory of driving to his north Jersey home in the days after the attack, past commuter parking lots filled with cars of people who had worked at the World Trade Center and who would never return.
My editors sent me to New York to report on the aftermath of the hijackings. As a practical matter, that meant following the FBI from one bust of an al-Qaeda safe house to another. There was real fear in the air. Each morning, I stepped outside my hotel room in the Jersey Meadowlands and scanned the Manhattan skyline a few miles away.
Where the Twin Towers once stood was instead a spiral of smoke and debris that climbed thousands of feet above the rubble. The funeral pyre remained there for months. A friend of mine from the Long Island town of Oyster Bay says she most remembers the pealing of bells at the local Roman Catholic church for weeks afterward, marking the funerals of residents who had been lost when the towers came down.
That the nation has largely moved on from its 9/11 trauma might be taken as a sign of resilience. American history is replete with epoch-making events that first produced shock but then were followed by adjustment. This is normally a desirable response, but that dynamic doesn’t quite work with 9/11 style attacks. Conflicts with stateless terrorists are never resolved in the way that two countries that have gone to war with one another can call a ceasefire and meet at the bargaining table. There is no definable endpoint. No resolution. Islamist fighters may be defeated on the battlefield, but the ideology remains, as does the frustration and ill-will driving it.
There have, however, been troubling questions about the possibility of official Saudi involvement. For all of the depth and granularity of the 9/11 Commission report, still the most authoritative account of the attacks, the commission was equivocal on this issue.
Each jihadist stabbing, each car ramming of a Christmas market is a reminder that the threat hasn’t gone away
Within weeks of the attacks, FBI agents learned that two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi, received help from a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had settled in southern California. The two also had met with a radical cleric employed at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles named Fahad al-Thumairy.
Last summer, federal district court judge George Daniels found in a lawsuit by 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia that there was evidence Bayoumi and Thumairy provided assistance to the hijackers in their role as Saudi government employees and that the two likely had advance knowledge of the hijacking plot. The Saudis appealed, but if Daniels’s ruling is upheld there will be expanded discovery and the case could head to trial. A verdict against the Saudis, a strategic partner of the US, would upend American foreign policy in the Middle East.
The late Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis, in his prescient book What Went Wrong: Western Impact And Middle Eastern Response, wrote that only reforms enacted by Muslim nations themselves will work to defuse radical Islam.
In his book, which was in galleys at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Lewis describes how western ascendancy, and the failure of once-dominant Muslim lands to advance, fueled frustrations underlying the centuries-old conflict between Muslim nations and the West. Only by adopting western practices that emphasize individual freedom, women’s rights and strict separation of church and state will the Muslim world advance beyond its grievances.
“If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from the downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity,” Lewis wrote before the hijackings.
Internal cultural and political reforms hold more promise than bullets or bombs. But only Muslim leaders themselves can enact that kind of change.
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