Twenty-Five Years Later

Twenty-five years ago, America changed in the span of a few hours.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, 2,977 innocent people were murdered in the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. They were passengers and flight crews. Office workers. Firefighters. Police officers. Paramedics. Mothers and fathers. Sons and daughters. Friends and neighbors. They woke up on an ordinary Tuesday morning and went about their lives. Thousands never came home.

For those old enough to remember it, September 11 is one of those rare moments when history becomes personal. Nearly everyone remembers where they were when they first heard the news.

I was in middle school, in gym class.

At that age, I could understand that something terrible had happened, but I could not possibly comprehend its magnitude. I certainly could not understand how much the world I was growing up in had just changed.

Like millions of Americans, I watched the images that followed. Smoke pouring from the towers. The second plane. The collapse. The Pentagon burning. The wreckage in Pennsylvania. Firefighters and police officers running toward danger while everyone else desperately tried to escape it.

The passage of twenty-five years has made those images historical. It has not made them less horrifying.

We should remember the 2,977 people murdered that morning. We should remember the passengers of Flight 93, who learned what was happening elsewhere and chose to fight back. We should remember the first responders who climbed the stairs knowing that something terrible awaited them above. And we should remember the families for whom September 11 was never merely a national tragedy or an anniversary.

For them, it was an empty chair at the dinner table. A spouse who never came home. A parent who never watched a child grow up. A son or daughter whose future disappeared in a matter of minutes.

That loss deserves remembrance. So does what happened afterward.

A Generation Answered the Call

September 11 shaped an entire generation of Americans.

Some enlisted immediately. Others were still children when the attacks occurred but would come of age in the country the attacks left behind.

Over the next two decades, millions of Americans would serve in uniform during the wars that followed September 11. They came from communities across the country and left behind families, careers, and ordinary lives to answer their nation’s call.

Some returned with injuries they will carry forever. Some never returned at all.

Their service deserves our enduring gratitude.

Nothing about questioning the political decisions made during the decades after September 11 diminishes their sacrifice. If anything, those sacrifices should demand greater scrutiny of the decisions made by the political leaders who sent them into harm’s way.

Those willing to send Americans to war owe them something more substantial than slogans. They owe them clearly defined objectives, constitutional accountability, congressional responsibility, and honest answers to the most basic questions a republic should ask before sending its citizens into combat: Why are we fighting? What are we trying to accomplish? And how will we know when the mission is complete?

Those questions became increasingly difficult to answer as the years passed. That is part of the legacy of September 11, too.

Fear Is a Powerful Argument for Government Power

The terrorists who attacked America sought to kill Americans, spread fear, and strike at a free society.

They succeeded in murdering thousands. How America responded to that horror, however, was ultimately our choice. And in the frightened months and years that followed, Americans accepted extraordinary expansions of government power in exchange for the promise that those powers would keep us safe.

Just 45 days after the attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act became law, significantly expanding federal investigative and surveillance authorities.

Years later, Americans learned that Section 215 had been interpreted to permit the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata.

The bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board would ultimately conclude that the program lacked a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicated First and Fourth Amendment concerns, threatened privacy and civil liberties, and demonstrated only limited value.

Yet it existed because September 11 had fundamentally changed the political calculation surrounding government surveillance.

Fear made previously extraordinary powers seem reasonable. That pattern extended well beyond one surveillance program.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was established in November 2001.

The following year, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), reorganizing enormous portions of the federal government around the homeland-security mission.

And only days after September 11, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), empowering the President to use “necessary and appropriate force” against those determined to have planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attacks, or harbored those responsible.

What began as authority to respond to September 11 became the legal foundation for military operations extending across countries, presidential administrations, and decades.

Emergency authority has a remarkable tendency to outlive the emergency that produced it.

We Traded Liberty for the Promise of Security

The debate after September 11 was too often framed as a choice between security and liberty.

Give the government another surveillance authority. Accept another search. Create another database. Expand another executive power. Trust another secret process.

After all, Americans were repeatedly confronted with some variation of the same argument: If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear? But that turns the American understanding of government on its head. Free people are not supposed to justify their privacy to government. Government is supposed to justify its intrusion upon free people.

The Fourth Amendment was not written only for peaceful times when respecting constitutional limitations is convenient. The Bill of Rights does not contain an exception for moments when government officials are frightened.

Those are precisely the moments when constitutional restraints matter most.

It is easy to defend liberty when doing so costs nothing. The real test comes when we are afraid. After September 11, fear too often won.

This does not mean every security measure adopted after September 11 was unnecessary. The attacks exposed genuine vulnerabilities, and the government has a legitimate responsibility to protect the country from those who seek to harm it. But security and liberty are not mutually exclusive.

The question should never have been how much liberty Americans were willing to surrender in exchange for safety. The question should have been how America could confront a genuine threat while preserving the constitutional freedoms that made the country worth defending in the first place.

The Surveillance State Outlived September 11

Perhaps one of the most consequential legacies of the post-9/11 era was the normalization of mass surveillance.

Government increasingly embraced a dangerous premise: collecting enormous amounts of information about innocent people could be justified because somewhere within that information might be evidence concerning someone dangerous.

That reverses the traditional relationship between citizen and state.

Instead of government developing suspicion about an individual and then seeking authority to investigate, technology increasingly gave government the ability to collect information about vast numbers of people and search through it later.

Twenty-five years later, that principle matters even more than it did in 2001.

Our phones reveal our movements. Cameras can catalog our vehicles. Facial recognition can identify us. Digital records can reconstruct enormous portions of our lives. Artificial intelligence (AI) can analyze quantities of information that would have been unimaginable when the Twin Towers fell.

The technological capabilities of government surveillance have grown dramatically. The constitutional principles restraining government should grow stronger with them, not weaker.

Otherwise, powers created for extraordinary threats inevitably find new purposes.

The target changes. The machinery remains.

We Should Remember the Wars, Too

America had every right to pursue those responsible for September 11 and prevent them from attacking us again. But patriotism does not require pretending that every decision subsequently made under the banner of the War on Terror was wise, necessary, or constitutional.

Nor does questioning those decisions dishonor those who served. I say that as someone who did.

September 11 happened while I was still in middle school. As soon as I was able, I joined the military in March 2006. I eventually deployed twice to Iraq, serving during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn.

I remain proud that I served. I am proud of the people I served alongside, and I am grateful for those who sacrificed far more than I did. But nearly sixteen years after my last deployment, I can also admit something that is much harder to reconcile: I am not really sure what we accomplished.

That is not a criticism of those who wore the uniform. It is a question for the political leaders who sent us there.

Thousands of Americans gave years of their lives to those wars. Some gave their health. Some sacrificed relationships and time with their families that could never be recovered. Some gave everything.

They deserved more than an open-ended mission whose purpose became increasingly difficult to explain. And looking back, I think those of us who served have every right to ask what all of that sacrifice ultimately achieved.

Supporting those who serve and granting unquestioning deference to those who decide where, when, and why they serve are not the same thing.

If anything, the willingness of Americans to volunteer for military service imposes an even greater obligation on those entrusted with the power to send them into harm’s way.

A constitutional republic should be extraordinarily reluctant to wage war.

When it does, Congress should actually exercise its constitutional responsibilities rather than surrendering them to an increasingly powerful executive branch.

The objectives should be clear. The enemy should be identifiable. Victory should mean something. And emergency authorizations should not become blank checks handed from one President to another.

The willingness of Americans to serve should make policymakers more cautious about war, not less.

Remember What Was Worth Defending

There is another part of September 11 worth remembering.

Americans responded to unimaginable horror with extraordinary courage. Strangers helped strangers. Firefighters climbed stairwells while others fled downward. Police officers and paramedics ran toward devastation.

Ordinary Americans performed extraordinary acts.

And aboard Flight 93, passengers who understood enough about what was happening in New York and Washington decided that they would not simply surrender their fate to terrorists. They fought back.

For a brief period afterward, Americans also seemed to remember that whatever divided us politically, culturally, or geographically, we shared something larger. There is something worth recovering from that moment.

Not the fear. Not the demand for government to protect us from every conceivable danger. Not the willingness to surrender constitutional liberties for promises of safety.

The courage. The neighborliness. The gratitude. The sense of common purpose. And above all, the recognition that freedom is precious precisely because there are people in this world who despise it.

That is why the ultimate response to those who attack a free society cannot be to make that society less free.

What “Never Forget” Should Mean Twenty-Five Years Later

There is now an entire generation of Americans who have no memory of September 11. To them, the photographs and videos are history.

For those of us who remember that morning, they are something different.

But twenty-five years provides something that September 12, 2001 could not: Perspective.

We can honor the dead while examining what followed. We can honor those who served while questioning the wars they were sent to fight. We can recognize government’s responsibility to protect Americans while rejecting the idea that safety justifies limitless government power. We can condemn terrorism while condemning the abandonment of constitutional principles in its name.

Those ideas are not contradictory. They are ESSENTIAL to a free republic.

“Never Forget” should therefore mean more than remembering what happened to us on September 11. It should mean remembering how Americans responded, both at our very best and in the decisions we should now have the courage to reconsider.

Remember the 2,977. Remember the firefighters climbing the stairs. Remember the police officers and paramedics. Remember the passengers who fought back. Remember the families who still carry the loss. Remember the Americans who answered their country’s call and the sacrifices they and their families made.

But remember something else, too.

Fear is one of the oldest justifications for expanding government power. Emergency powers have a habit of surviving emergencies. Wars begun for one purpose can evolve into something very different. Surveillance powers created for extraordinary threats eventually become ordinary tools. And liberty surrendered during a crisis is rarely returned automatically when the crisis passes.

The lesson of September 11 should therefore be larger than “Never Forget.”

Never forget whom we lost. Never forget the courage we witnessed. Never forget those who answered the call. Never forget what we were attacked for. And never forget what was worth defending in the first place.

A nation can defend itself without surrendering itself.

Twenty-five years later, that may be one of September 11’s most important lessons.