Today marks the 24th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that shook the nation and changed the world. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives that day in New York City, Arlington County, Virginia and Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania. All of us who were alive that day no doubt remember the intense national unity Americans felt for a brief period of time.
This period of national unity, is no doubt looked back on as a contrast to the incessant bickering of national politics today.
But that period of national unity also blinded Americans to the vast and sweeping powers assumed by the federal government.
“The temptation U.S. leaders will struggle with in the next day or so is to respond intelligently and in a measured fashion rather than blindly and disproportionately,” wrote the late Orange County Register editorial writer Alan Bock in his Sept. 12, 2001 column published by Antiwar.com.
As the days, months and years that followed demonstrate, politicians opted for the blind and disproportionate route.
They passed the so-called Patriot Act, which dramatically expanded the surveillance powers of the federal government. It empowered the federal government with indefinite detention powers. It even gave the government excuses to poke around the library records of Americans.
Even today, Congress continues to allow federal agents to collect communications information on American citizens without a warrant under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
This attack on the privacy and civil liberties of the American people is only one of the lingering consequences of the 9/11 attacks.
Amid the feelings of national unity after the 9/11 attacks, the federal government rushed to approve an Authorization for Use of Military Force so broad and so vague that it essentially empowers the president of the United States to wage limitless war around the world without congressional checks and balances.
Only one representative, Barbara Lee of Oakland, was brave and perceptive enough to vote against this blank check to the executive branch.
Presidents of both parties have invoked the 2001 AUMF to justify bombings in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as “support” for counterterrorism operations in countries ranging from Cameroon to Kosovo to the Philippines.
Unfortunately, one long-term consequence of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 is that the United States has remained embroiled for decades in endless war, often with little-to-no meaningful congressional oversight.
These post-Sept. 11 conflicts resulted in the deaths of over 940,000 people directly due to war violence, according to the Costs of War project, and millions more indirectly. Millions of people became refugees due to these wars and American taxpayers are at least $8 trillion in the hole for all of it.
The human and fiscal toll will be with us for as long as we all live. Have we as a nation learned from this period?
A version of this editorial was first published in 2023.
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