Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the darkest days in modern U.S. history. The world suddenly changed — the most powerful nation on the planet found itself vulnerable to mass casualty attacks from small groups of suicidal fanatics.
Despite warnings from the U.S. intelligence community that an attack was imminent, President George W. Bush was caught on his heels, shocked and embarrassed at the worst assault on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. The White House committed itself to ensuring a similar attack never happened again. The attacks thus led to an extraordinary expansion of the national security state.
On Oct. 4, three weeks after the hijackings, Bush signed a presidential action directing the National Security Agency to scoop up the metadata of domestic phone calls for the purposes of preventing further acts of terrorism. A separate judicial structure was established at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to house hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda suspects in a state of indefinite detention. The CIA, feeling immense pressure to snuff out any and all terrorist threat streams, would also establish a system of “black sites” to interrogate suspected terrorists captured on the battlefield — even if the techniques that were used amounted to torture.
Twenty years removed from that horrible day, these programs are either still with us, walloping in a state of inertia, or have been shut down. While those who were part of these initiatives insist lives were saved, others have vehemently disagreed.
The NSA bulk collection program known as Stellar Wind captured mountains of data from ordinary people. Numbers were then culled by the agency and sent to the FBI for further investigation. Most of that information, however, had nothing whatsoever to do with counterterrorism.
The Justice Department’s inspector general investigated the Stellar Winds program in 2009 and couldn’t determine whether the bulk collection of calls made any difference to the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts. According to the inspector general, the FBI conducted a statistical analysis of the program and calculated that 1.2% of the leads from Stellar Wind made “significant” contributions to FBI terrorism investigations. After modifying the program over concerns about infringing on the privacy protections of citizens, the NSA shut the thing down in 2019. A $100 million effort between 2015 and 2019 apparently led only to a single significant investigation.
The CIA’s enhanced interrogation regiment didn’t do much good either. The waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects alienated many allies. Those subjected to the techniques often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, including the false claim that Saddam Hussein was working with al Qaeda (former Secretary of State Colin Powell would present this assertion as evidence during his infamous February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council). After a yearslong exhaustive investigation on the CIA interrogation program set up in the wake of 9/11, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the techniques weren’t effective in eliciting reliable information from detainees, though it must be noted that the CIA and others disagreed with this assessment.
The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, meanwhile, lingers like a bad cold. What was supposed to be a temporary holding facility has turned into a permanent prison system, where a few dozen detainees remain locked up. They are unable to be charged due to a lack of evidence but are supposedly too dangerous to release. The military commissions meant to prosecute terrorists haven’t gone much better. The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, still hasn’t happened. The last pretrial hearing, the 42nd in this never-ending legal saga, was spent arguing over whether the presiding judge was qualified to hear the case.
That disturbing Tuesday morning was the genesis of a mushrooming national security apparatus. But we must now ask how much of that apparatus was actually necessary.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
