When the attacks of September 11, 2001, stunned America 25 years ago, the Prospecthad just moved to Washington and brought on a new executive editor in Harold Meyerson. In about a week, we managed to assign and edit an issue that was one of our best ever. The cover line was “Defending an Open Society.”
The articles in that issue challenged the widespread assumption that we were now in a new normal, in which the vulnerability of an open society had been horribly revealed. Painful as it might be, America supposedly had to sacrifice some liberty to regain some security.
Then as now, that premise was disastrously wrong. But over 25 years, America ended up needlessly sacrificing both.
At the time, it seemed that the ability of a cell of terrorists to pass unnoticed, and to seize and weaponize not one but four jetliners almost simultaneously, demonstrated the pathetic vulnerability of the United States. But as testimony to the 9/11 Commission later revealed, American counterintelligence knew everything it needed to know in 2000 and 2001 to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The problem was that the White House under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was obsessively focused on Saddam Hussein and didn’t want to know about al-Qaeda in the U.S.
Richard Clarke, director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council, had urgently requested a meeting of NSC principals on January 25, 2021, in a memo during Bush’s first week in office, to develop a comprehensive strategy against jihadists in America. He was rebuffed. Over the next several months, Clarke’s team assembled evidence of a planned attack, pilots being trained, and sleeper cells, but the White House kept fending him off.
Had the Supreme Court not intervened to steal the election for Bush, and had Al Gore been president, Clarke’s urgent warning would almost surely have been taken seriously and 9/11 never would have occurred. We had all the counterintelligence surveillance we needed. We just didn’t have a president who was paying attention.
In the panic that followed the attacks, a wish list of every previously rejected bad idea for warrantless surveillance and spying on Americans was hastily assembled. This became the USA PATRIOT Act. It was rushed through Congress in a fervor of misplaced patriotism and signed on October 26. It passed the House 357-66, and the Senate 98-1. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the lone Senate dissenter, warned in a powerful floor speech, “Preserving our freedom is one of the main reasons that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.”
Among other odious items in the administration’s anti-terrorism bill, as Georgetown Law professor David Cole wrote in the Prospect’s 9/11 issue, were provisions to make aliens “deportable not for terrorist activity but for peaceful and nonviolent associational activity … It would authorize the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain immigrants indefinitely on the attorney general’s say-so, even when they have a legal right to live here permanently and cannot be deported. And it would resurrect the doctrine of ideological exclusion by allowing aliens to be denied entry for their speech.”
All of this, of course, prefigured President Trump’s grotesque anti-immigrant measures. | 
