The 9/11 Decade - Editorial Wall Street Journal

The 9/11 Decade

The U.S. is safer and has not sacrificed its civil liberties.

Review and Outlook

The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2011

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the World-Wide column of The Wall Street Journal carried items on a suicide bombing in Istanbul that killed two policemen, fighting between Israelis and Palestinians and Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria. A longer front-page story warned of another menace: the increasingly violent tactics of anti-globalization activists. "In Europe," the Journal reported, "security forces see themselves as facing an urban-guerrilla movement, a view that justifies sterner means than might be acceptable in the U.S."

Would an early-morning reader of the Journal have been able to detect in these news flashes any hint of the furies that would burst upon America within hours? Probably not. As Roberta Wohlstetter noted in her classic study of why the U.S. was taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor, information that seems meaningful in retrospect tends, in real time, to be drowned out in a static roar of information, all of it contending for our attention. In September 2001, seers might as easily have predicted that the great global challenge of the next decade would have been containing the spread of the human variant of mad-cow disease (a case of which had just been found in Japan), rather than the threat of global Islamic terrorism.

Ten years on, nobody worries about a mad-cow pandemic, an excellent case study of how the West routinely talks itself into bogus panic. There is, however, plenty of talk about how the threat of terrorism has been overhyped, or how America's efforts against terrorists have been a costly distraction from the challenges of a rising China or the faltering economy or global warming or any other crisis, real or hypothetical, that supposedly demands our single-minded focus.

Yet there was nothing hypothetical about what happened in New York, Pennsylvania or at the Pentagon that day, nor anything bogus about the anthrax attacks, still not definitively solved in our view, later that month. The same can be said of subsequent atrocities in Karachi, Tel Aviv, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, Amman, Baghdad, Mumbai and Fort Hood, among many other places. And while the risk that terrorist groups could use weapons of mass destruction so far remains mostly speculative, there is little doubt that they will use them to kill unlimited numbers of people if only they can acquire them.

Put simply, by the evening of 9/11 it was clear that the threat of Islamic terrorism was real, urgent and growing, and that it would require from the Bush Administration a serious and sustained response, both on offense and defense. Few Members of either party doubted this when the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists passed the Senate 98-0 a week after 9/11, or when the Patriot Act passed in the Senate by a vote of 98-1 the following month, or when the authorization for the war in Iraq passed the Senate 77-23 a year later.

Nor were many doubts expressed by senior members of the House and Senate (including Nancy Pelosi) when they were repeatedly briefed by the Bush Administration on the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, including waterboarding, or on the warrantless wiretap surveillance program, or on the CIA's use of "black sites" to interrogate terrorist suspects. "We understood what the CIA was doing. . . . On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support to carry out its mission against al Qaeda," recalled Porter Goss, then the Chairman of House Intelligence Committee, in an April 2009 Washington Post op-ed.

The comity wouldn't last. Yet from the perspective of a decade, what's notable about the counter-terrorist architecture erected by the Bush Administration (with initial bipartisan support) is how effective it has been. On 9/12, few people would have dared venture the prediction that the U.S. would not suffer another major attack for at least a decade. But that's what happened—or, to put it more accurately, what has been achieved.

This has not been for lack of trying by terrorists. A list recently compiled by the Heritage Foundation records 40 foiled plots since 9/11. Some of these have been amateurish, and others were uncovered as a result of FBI sting operations in which there was no immediate risk to civilians. A few, like the near-misses of shoe-bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, were averted at the last instant thanks to the vigilance of watchful passengers.

But other, potentially more deadly, plots were detected and foiled thanks to the mandate and backing given the CIA and other agencies in the wake of 9/11. According to Justice Department memos released in 2009 by the Obama Administration, "since March 2002, the intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the CTC's [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda. . . . The substantial majority of this intelligence has come from detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques." Our friends on the left often call these memos the "torture memos." The real torture is what happens to maimed victims of terrorist atrocities that intelligence agencies were blind to prevent.

That's a lesson the Obama Administration has taken to heart. Though the President came to office promising to undo his predecessor's antiterror legacy, he has for the most part preserved it. That goes for re-authorizing key provisions of the Patriot Act (including that favorite ACLU bugaboo, the so-called library-records provision); moving forward with military tribunals for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees; keeping Guantanamo open (albeit grudgingly), and giving the CIA authority to dramatically increase the use of drones against terrorist leaders. As for some of Mr. Obama's other promises, such as ending the use of enhanced interrogations or closing down the black sites, these were already accomplished facts well before George W. Bush left office.

Constrained interrogations excepted, these developments not only increase America's margin of safety against another attack, but also put the Democratic Party's visible imprimatur on the war on terror, much as Dwight Eisenhower's foreign policy put the GOP stamp on Harry Truman's containment policies.

They also expose the accusation that President Bush was trampling America's civil liberties as a particularly vulgar partisan maneuver—one that magically disappeared the moment Mr. Obama came to office. We certainly don't like removing our shoes at the airport, but the larger truth is that American civil liberties are as robust today as they were on the eve of 9/11. Then again, we shudder to think of the kinds of measures the American public would have demanded had there been further attacks on the scale of 9/11. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, it's worth recalling, was mainly the doing of those two great civil libertarians Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren.

That point is also worth noting when considering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with operations the U.S. has conducted everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia. It is hard to see how the U.S. could have inflicted the hammer blows it has against al Qaeda—bringing it, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has argued, to the edge of "strategic defeat"—had it not confronted them directly in their own heartlands. Though the Iraq war had its own justifications, it remains the fact that al Qaeda sustained some of its hardest military reversals in the Sunni triangle north of Baghdad.

As for Afghanistan, it's worth asking whether Osama bin Laden would be dead today if President Obama had taken the advice of those who, from the moment he took office, wanted a full and immediate withdrawal from the country. We would add that not least among the reasons for the U.S. to remain militarily engaged in Afghanistan is to prove bin Laden's central contention—that Americans have no stomach for a long-term fight—wrong.

Weakness, Donald Rumsfeld once observed, is provocative. Taking care to avoid a perception of weakness ought to be a chief consideration of U.S. policy makers as they consider their next steps in the Middle East. The regime in Tehran, closer now than they ever have been to realizing their nuclear ambitions, is certainly watching.

This week reports surfaced of credible threats of a terrorist strike on tomorrow's anniversary. The war against Islamic militancy is far from over. But having waged a Cold War against the Soviet Union for 45 years, Americans are no strangers to long struggles in defense of freedom, our own as well as that of others. The course of the first 9/11 decade should, for all of the pain it has imposed, give us confidence that we can see the battle through. We only hope we won't need our enemies' reminding that there is no alternative.