The legacy of 9/11

It's Monday September 10, 2001. President George W. Bush is in Jacksonville, Florida. There's too many of our kids in America who can't read today. Maybe not in this school, but around the nation there's just too many. And now it's time to wage war on illiteracy for the young and to whip this problem early. He's there promoting early childhood education. One of his key campaign issues when he ran for president in 2000. Afterward, he goes to Sarasota, Florida, on the state's Gulf Coast. The next morning, he's at Booker Elementary School for another education roundtable. He's in a class with students as they're going through a reading lesson. That morning, there are reports of some kind of plane crash in New York City, but details are pretty scarce. Then, White House chief of staff Andrew Card comes over and whispers something in the president's ear. Camera shutters catch for the moment. Give you breaking news from New York City where planes, two planes, have hit both towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The upper floors of the World Trade Center, 110 stories high each tower. Bush leaves the classroom, goes to the school library and gives a brief statement. Today, we've had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. Two other hijack planes would crash that day. One into the Pentagon, just outside Washington, DC, and one in the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Bush talked to the nation that night with more reflections from the day, but he also made a promise. The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. What exactly that meant, though, was an open question. This broad notion of fighting terrorists, fighting those who harbor them, and fighting really anyone who threatens the United States to find much of the American foreign and domestic policy sense. It's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Greg Meiery. I cover National Security. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And today, I'm sure I am not alone. It's basically the first thing I thought of this morning was just kind of remembering where I was 25 years ago, also remembering all the people who lost their lives, people whose lives were forever changed by that day. But it's also just a day, guys, that still reverberates almost every day, all of us covering politics in this country. Starting with the sea change, Greg, of going from fighting a traditional war against one country or against a couple countries towards this more nebulous thing, fighting a terrorist people associated with terrorists. Is that a fair characterization? Oh, absolutely, Miles. I mean, there had never been an attack like this. And it pre-saged a war that the U.S. had never fought before. I mean, some people compare it a little bit to the shock of the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941 that brought the U.S. into World War II. But you knew who was responsible. And we just heard President Bush say we're going to find out who did this. They didn't know, for sure. They suspected Al Qaeda, but didn't know. And you're not, you're fighting a group, not a country. It's led by Osama bin Laden, who's from Saudi Arabia, but his group was primarily based in Afghanistan. They didn't have a fixed army. They were being hosted by the Taliban. You know, so it was just, it was just completely different from anything we had seen before. And we knew it was monumental. We knew there would be lots to follow, but it was an uncharted course. And I also say that the way that this came to be known is the global war on terror. It almost would have been simpler if we had made clear that it was against terrorists, specific terrorists from a specific terrorist group, as opposed to this nebulous term that it came to be used as this war on terror. Because terror can be all sorts of things in all sorts of places. It can be everywhere at once. And we saw how what began as an effort to root out Al Qaeda and hunt down Osama bin Laden. Really did metastasize into conflicts that went on for two decades plus. Well, and so we saw, I mean, obviously, the intelligence community immediately mobilized to try to figure out where this came from and what happened. We can talk about that. But there was a pretty swift foreign policy response. Soon after 9/11, Congress passed the AUMF, which is the authorization for use of military force, passed almost unanimously. Great. Can you tell us a little bit about what that law did? Yeah. So in its most basic format, it gave the president the right to use necessary and appropriate force against anyone deemed who have planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. It was approved by Congress on September 14th. There's three days after the attacks. Bush signed it on September 18th. And then off the US went, some CIA forces were in Afghanistan within about two weeks or so after September 11th. The US began a bombing campaign about a month later in early October. And so we knew the focus would be Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it clearly was very broad and offered the possibility of going far beyond that. And indeed, that would prove to be the case. The US found that Al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They were in Afghanistan. Afghanistan at the time was controlled by the Taliban. They were kind of there under their protection, Al Qaeda was. And after the US found that Al Qaeda was indeed responsible for the 9/11 attacks, that's why the United States went into Afghanistan was to initially to get Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Can you tell me a little bit more about, I know you were in the Middle East in the beginning of the war. Tell me a little bit about how this actually played out on the ground. Yeah, I was in Jerusalem on 9/11. And then within days, I was sent to Pakistan and was near the border. We couldn't get into Afghanistan. And then the US began its bombing campaign and drove the Taliban from power around the end of November. So inside of two and a half months, let's say, the Taliban were out of power. Al Qaeda was fleeing. The US and its allies had taken over. And as soon as the Taliban fled Kabul, we were able to get in. I drove in very harrowing drive, very redded roads from the Pakistan border to Kabul. Along the way, we were several journalists in the eastern city of Jalalabad. And they wanted to get out and meet some colleagues. We talked with them. They decided to stay. We decided to drive on to Kabul. It was very harrowing. We saw one journalist being walked off the side of the road by gunman, Taliban gunman, who were just apparently in the car ahead of us. We made it to Kabul safely. The next day, the journalist we had been with drove to Kabul. They got pulled out of their car and five of them were executed on the side of the road. So it was still a very chaotic time. And we knew the Taliban were out there and still armed. They had just fled Kabul in other places. They hadn't surrendered. And again, this just spoke to the nature of this war. You weren't dealing with, I mean, the Taliban were running Afghanistan, but you weren't dealing with a government that you were going to sit down with and have a surrender or a peace ceremony or an end of war ceremony. And you knew it was chaotic. And Afghanistan at that time just, it felt frozen in several centuries in the past. It had nothing. So just phones, transportation, schools, hospitals. Everything just was lacking or in total disrepair. And you were just wondering, how do you build a new country out of these ruins? And again, we would learn in a very painful way how difficult that was just to build that country, especially while fighting was still carrying on. Did you get a sense early in the war that this was not going to be a short interaction? I mean, obviously it went on for years and years and years. But was that apparent as somebody who was covering it, was seeing on the ground what was going on? Not entirely, Miles. It was, you know, you really don't know. Yeah, you knew the Taliban and Al Qaeda were committed fighters. They were probably not going to surrender. But how much firepower could they generate? You didn't know what they could do. And the US had all of these new and powerful weapons, drones, and all kinds of surveillance, the power of its air force, to track down the Taliban. So you thought maybe, maybe it could be suppressed to the level where Afghanistan can largely be peaceful and stable. That certainly seemed a realistic possibility, knowing that the Taliban might continue to fight. And you didn't know what Al Qaeda would be able to regroup. Had they been able to flee or they disperse enough that they could carry out attacks? I just think there were a lot of unknowns. So yeah, one possibility was Afghanistan would calm down and stabilize. Another was that we would see conflict, not only there, but spread elsewhere. I'll also say that initially there was a lot of reluctance on the part of the United States and the Bush administration. to undertake the sort of nation-building that was needed to stabilize a place like Afghanistan. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Donald Russell, didn't want to get engaged in that business. And so there was a plan for step one of routing the Taliban and getting Al Qaeda, but what came after that there was just a lack of planning and a lack of interest in trying to sort that out, which I think we've been dealing with the aftermath of that decision ever since. I mean, one of the things that was very clear is, you know, US forces wanted to hunt down Osama bin Laden. That's what they felt they were therefore. They didn't want to help build an Afghan army and train troops and teach them how to march. Now, eventually, they were ordered to do that, and of course, they did that. But their heart was not in that. It was certainly to go hunt Al Qaeda and hunt the Taliban and kill the terrorists. You mentioned the broad nature of the AUMF and how that gave the US government sort of a wide range of options when it came to military action. If we seen that play out outside of that immediate post-9/11 period, now looking at the last two decades, there's Yemen, there's Somalia, there is Nigeria, there is Libya, Philippines, under all these different presidents, basically, have kind of found different ways to use this legislation in different places that were not related to the left specific place and the specific time. And part of this speaks to how the international Islamic terrorism changed over the past two decades. Initially, you had main al-Qaeda, which was based in Afghanistan, and then you had these franchises emerge in different parts of the world. You had al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was the franchise in Yemen. You had al-Shabaab, which is in Somalia. You have folks in Nigeria, in North Africa, in the Philippines. You have these various groups that emerged that were tied to al-Qaeda, not to mention the Islamic State. Certainly, don't want to forget them. And so, what we saw administration after administration do is stretch this AUMF, this authorization for the use of military force past just days after 9/11 to use military force against these other groups around the world. And it really becomes a complicated issue. I mean, it was invoked by Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, again, for all of these various military operations. And to do it in a traditional way of getting Congress to declare war, of working with allies abroad, to get the American public onsite, that's a very difficult process. I mean, war is not meant to be an easy process. It's meant to be difficult for those reasons. But if you're the president of the United States and you feel that there is an extremist group that is either al-Qaeda or maybe linked to al-Qaeda, you often feel, these presidents have all felt the need to act quickly. And they say, "Ah, I'm going to invoke the AUMF to carry out this force." And a lot of these operations were not full-scale wars. They were airstrikes here. They are capturing particular individuals. So, yes, it was absolutely a departure from going through a big formal process. But often, because of this new nature of the warfare, you weren't waging a new war in another country. You were going after a specific target or even a specific individual. And one of the things that made this possible is the massive change in warfare technology that we've seen over the past 25 years. And that's drones. The United States first used armed drones. After 9/11, they have now evolved. I mean, part of what made the ability to target certain folks in Yemen or in Somalia or in Syria was the fact that you could use a drone. You wouldn't be putting US troops in harm's way necessarily. And you could take that military action without all the risks that traditionally would have accompanied such action. And so we've seen the rise of how drones have been used over the past 20 years. And then we've seen the shift in drone warfare in the past five, six years or so in Ukraine, in the Ukraine-Russia war, and then of course now in the US and Israeli conflict with Iran. And just the final note on that, that President Trump has carried out nine military operations so far in his second term and has not gotten a congressional declaration for any of them. The bombing of Iran last year, the current war, Venezuela, the attacks on the suspected drug boats. There's four of them, but there's many more as well. So you can see how easily it is now for a US president to carry out military action and not feel the need to get any kind of authorization. How did the US military broadly change Greg as a result of 9/11? Because I do remember I was in school in the attacks happen. I remember all around me in my community, friends, parents of friends. I mean, people were rushing to enlist or to find something that they could do. Did that have an impact on the US military or what legacy has this all had on the US military? Yeah, Miles 9/11 just led to this surge in patriotism and a lot of young people joining the military. And it's really important, I think, to understand the contrast of the quarter century before 9/11 and this quarter century since 9/11. You know, the Vietnam War ended in 1975. And so from 1975 to 2001, 26 year period, the US really only fought one very brief war. And that was in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991, the first Gulf War to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. It went very well as a military campaign. The Iraqis were driven out. And so you had this 26 year period where you didn't have a lot of war here. Now we've seen 25 years of almost non-stop US military involvement in overseas wars. There was the surge initially. But then a lot of people went through multiple deployments, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, many casualties around 7,000 Americans killed. Tens of thousands wounded. Lots of PTSD cases. And as this dragged on, you began to see a disenchantment among the American public, certainly at the length of these wars. But also a lot of people in the military saying, what are we doing now? We've been there for 10, 15, 20 years and we don't really see the end in sight. And what you did come up with is a generation in many ways represented by someone like Pete Hegseth, who were very critical of the way those wars were run. They want to sweep out the old guard in the military. And Hegseth is criticized on many, many fronts. But there are many his age groups, say in their 40s, who fought and served and came away pretty disenchanted with the way the military was being run. Some of that disenchantment, I think, stems from the justification for, in particular, the Iraq war and the drive for weapons of mass destruction that Saddam's regime, the American public was told by the Bush administration possessed, and then later it was abundantly clear that he did not have WMD and so that the whole justification and push for that war in particular, which turned incredibly bloody. I think took a lot of wind out of the sales of the American public and also morale in the military as well. All right, let's see a quick break, more in just a moment. And we're back. So now I want to talk domestically, Ryan, about all the changes post-9/11 that happened within the country's intelligence agencies and the justice department. How did the attacks change everything going on in this country? Well, for people who are under the age of 25, probably don't realize that there was a time when there was no Department of Homeland Security. Yeah, good point. At the time of 9/11, there was no DHS. It was created after 9/11. It was November of 2002 that it was created by Congress, brought together more than 20 different departments and agencies into this one behemoth of a department, parts of what had been Treasury, Coast Guard, Transportation, all were brought under this umbrella. The idea, as the Bush administration put it forward, was to make the country safe or having this one department whose mission was to protect the United States, the homeland. There was also a major transformation of the FBI. And this is a huge thing. Right after 9/11, FBI director Robert Mueller, who had just come into the job, he shifted 2000 FBI agents onto counterterrorism work. There was a massive push, an immediate push to transform the FBI from a crime fighting organization, something that would collect evidence slowly over time, develop a case into what was an intelligence driven organization, one that put an emphasis on combating terrorism and the key here was preventing the next attack. They weren't going to wait until something happened and then try to find those responsible. They were working to prevent an attack from happening and for more Americans being killed. A very similar transformation took place in the the intelligence community. The CIA had always been focused heavily on the Soviet Union, and then when it collapsed in 1991, it was sort of fishing around for its next mission. And then 9/11 happens, and all of a sudden this is something it's not prepared for. It was not built or structured to hunt down terrorist networks. The CIA immediately needed to go out and recruit and train much larger groups of employees who could speak Arabic, who understood the Middle East, technology played a huge role. Some of it was developed by the CIA and the NSA and other intelligence organizations to help track individuals, terrorists that you're trying to find somewhere and creating networks and finding the linkages between different groups. So the CIA, the NSA, also underwent big transformations and it became hugely problematic in terms of the CIA also never held the prisoners before and interrogated them. The NSA found itself entangled in the records of Americans. So all of these other issues came into play as well with organizations that had always been outward looking at the rest of the world, but were now facing something that posed a domestic threat as well. And it's important to remind people who were not around at the time or were too young to remember the pervasive sense of fear in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and particularly if you talk to people who were in senior government positions at the time, concern of more attacks on the horizon of a second wave of attacks. In just December of 2001, there was a plot stopped on an airplane, Richard Reed, trying to detonate a shoe bomb on a plane flying from Paris to Miami. There were concerns about potential attacks on subway systems, on train system. People had to think about everything that was a soft target and how to try to protect that because there was concern that al-Qaeda was plotting to conduct more attacks. And we did see more attacks. There were attacks on the London Underground. There were attacks on trains in Madrid, but those attacks were overseas, and what people in the intelligence community and the FBI will say is that the steps that they took to try to protect the United States and the homeland were largely effective. Definitely, and I think that's why Americans broadly at that time were willing to give up some level of privacy for this sense of security, but I guess I wonder when that started to shift in terms of when people started to question the surveillance state apparatus that the United States kind of moved into, when did that start to become problematic? A couple of things here. One is there were laws that were passed by Congress in the weeks and months after 9/11. A big one being the Patriot Act which gave authorities new tools to the FBI and the IC kind of broadly speaking, including surveillance powers. Some of that stuff was known. What was not known were some of the secret programs that the Bush administration initiated of warrantless surveillance that were highly, highly classified. A very, very small number of people in the government knew about. Some of them only became public and some of what the administration was doing at that time in terms of bulk collection of telephone information until they were revealed by the intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. That's when we really saw the public become aware of what the government had been doing for the previous decade in terms of surveillance. There was pushback, but what's interesting is if you look back at what officials who were involved in those discussions at the time, conversations that they had among themselves, they say that they knew when some of this stuff became public that the American public was not going to be happy about it and that there was going to be blowback. It was also this desire, as we talked about just a second ago, of there's concern about a second wave, there's concern about more attacks and officials were willing to take extraordinary measures, things that might trample on people's liberty in order to try to prevent those next attacks. Now, whether they struck the right balance is something that we're still debating, but that's where that debate comes from. I guess when I'm thinking about everything we've talked about today so far, one of the themes that keeps coming up is sort of honesty from the government. When we talk about the weapons of mass destruction, when we talk about what you're talking about with the Patriot Act and the surveillance of Americans, Guantanamo Bay, and things that have come out since about all the different ways that the CIA treated prisoners, I guess I wonder how much of a lot of this stuff has fed into a broader distrust of the American government in the last 25 years. I think a lot. I think a lot. I mean, if you go back and look at the mistakes that were made in not connecting the dots that the government had before 9/11 of a potential attack, so you have that failure, you have Guantanamo Bay being set up, you have the torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency. You have the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which put the US into a bloody horrific conflict there that killed thousands of American troops, as Greg said, wounded tens of thousands of more, let alone the tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died in that conflict. You have the surveillance powers that were being used to collect American citizens' information. I think all of that has certainly fed into the growing distrust for government, but I think you can also look at the media and the fact that perhaps the media was not a skeptical that should have been of the claims that the Bush administration was making in 2003 about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, and I think that that helped feed into distrust of the media. A lot of these kind of big issues that we're dealing with on a societal level now, not that the seed was 9/11, but certainly there was a lot of that we can trace back to 9/11 and decisions that were made in the aftermath. Are we safer as a country now than we were 25 years ago? I would say, yes, based on the evidence, we have not had a major attack anything comparable to 9/11 since then. Now you could argue that's because of security measures that have been taken, you could argue that we've been lucky, or that 9/11 was an outlier, it was just something that was not going to happen again. But I would say we have, for a couple of reasons, all of these measures we have taken have made it much, much harder to carry out a major attack. I mean, you just look at, I'll kind of carry out those attacks on 9/11, you can't do any of those things. So we've put an apparatus in place. Many of the things I'm sure we all get annoyed with, but we haven't had that level of attack. The technology makes it much, much harder to stay invisible now. The U.S. national security, community, and the intelligence agencies in particular could detect, I think, a lot more quickly than they could 25 years ago. And I think that the U.S. in any country is still vulnerable to individual attacks, even big individual attacks, it would be very, very difficult, I think, to have a sustained ongoing campaign just because the U.S. and its partners have great visibility all over the world. They could respond very quickly. So I think the individual attack is still very much a possibility, a big group forming and carrying out a sustained attack would be very hard to do or at least to go unnoticed. Well, part of this, I think, speaks to the change that we've seen in international terrorism over the past 25 years. If you look at 9/11, it was an attack where you had a headquarters, so to speak, in Afghanistan, they sent out cells across the world that they kept in contact with that were part of a highly directed attack that was coordinated and had specific targets. What we've seen because the U.S. got so good at intercepting communications between the headquarters, let's say, of a terrorist organization and people out in the field, that that model didn't work anymore. And so the shift that we saw by 2015 or so, even a little bit earlier, was a terrorist group like the Islamic State using social media to try to encourage people to conduct attacks where they were with what they had at hand, whether it be a gun, a knife, a car, we have seen attacks like that in Europe, certainly. We've also seen attacks like that in the United States, in New Orleans being a recent one down on Bourbon Street, and the U.S. has gotten better at dealing with those sorts of things as well, but those are really hard to stop because there's not a large group of people who have knowledge of it. And what the FBI calls from Flash to Bang, someone deciding that they want to conduct attack to actually conducting that attack can be almost nothing. Those are hard to stop and those are the sorts of like one-off attacks that Greg was talking about that we have seen. But that's part of this shift in how terrorist groups kind of approach this issue. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are still out there. They haven't gone away, they're number and certainly in the thousands. They're broken up into smaller groups I think North Africa, West Africa is where they're most active and are having the ability in some cases to destabilize governments there. But their activity is more local than active in the West. That's one of the distinctions I would make although Al-Qaeda's ambitions are still to go after Western targets but they haven't been able to do that in many years at this point. I mean now 25 years on, guys, how would you characterize post 9/11 America? I mean I think the through line for me over the past 25 years and it's not in everyday thing but kind of a through line would be two things, fear and anger. And I think that we can see that in separate ways, the kind of ripple effects and echoes of 9/11. You see it domestically in the militarization of police, the sort of equipment that police are using on American streets comes from the war on terror. You have changes in public architecture out of concerns of things being bombed. You have the changes in how we fly. You have concerns about what the government is vacuuming up in its warrantless surveillance programs. You have the distrust of the government that we talked about because of the Iraq war and the lies that the Bush administration told the public beforehand distrust in the press because of the press's failure to call out the administration on those to catch those. And from, you know, I spent nearly 15 years overseas, including right after 9/11, the knock on America's standing in the world is a real thing. People bring it up in conversations and that stems back to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It stems back to the torture of CIA prisoners and secret CIA prisons. You have drone strikes that, you know, we talked about how some in the national security community view those as very effective, but there are also a lot of civilians that were killed in those. And in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Libya, you've got people who are directly affected by that. And so you have the blowback to that. We haven't talked a whole lot about Guantanamo Bay. That remains an issue. Many people would say a stain on America's record. And so these things were done, perhaps some of them out of good faith. They were driven to a large extent, I think, by fear of another attack, by anger over the fact that the United States was attacked. And I think that, to an extent, the politics that we have today is arguably an outgrowth of that. Also, the Muslim community, right? I mean, fears at the time, right after 9/11, I think that was palpable in terms of the way Americans were turning on each other. And people felt very scared in that community. And I think that, to some extent, exists today when you see their strands of the Republican Party that are arguing that Muslims should be deported from the country. And you, of course, also have the FBI and the wake of 9/11, certainly turning its vast powers to a large extent on the Muslim community and the search of more potential hijackers, terrorists, or plots. And so it was a community that certainly felt that it was unfairly targeted. For me, it's the three wars that the US has been involved in the past quarter century and almost non-stop. If you had told me after 9/11, the US would be fighting three major wars over the next quarter century in three neighboring countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and that after that 25-year period, the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan, and that all three of those wars had failed to achieve the confident predictions that US presidents had made at the beginning of them, I would not have believed you. And the US has been stuck in this loop, essentially, for the past quarter century, of unleashing its formidable military power, making great military gains in the early weeks of these wars, and then thinking this will quickly and cleanly lead to a political settlement that the US wants. And it hasn't, in any of these cases. And so we're seeing, again, with the war in Iran, some real similarities to these earlier wars, where on day one, the Iranian leadership is knocked out, and yet six months on, we don't know where this is going, how it's going to end, again, hard to believe, this would last for another 20 years, but we certainly didn't think those other wars would be as long and as messy and as complicated, and yet here we are again, after 25 years, and still unable to figure out if we want to use this power, and how we want these conflicts to end. All right, a lot seems like a good place to leave it. Our executive producer is Mthonimateri, our producer is Bria Suggs, Casey Morrell, edits the podcast, special thanks to Dana Farrington. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting, I'm Greg Myrie, I cover national security, I'm Ryan Lucas, I cover the Justice Department, and thank you for listening to the MPR Politics podcast.