9/11 Legacy: The Next Quarter Century

For anyone my age, twenty-five years is not so long a time. For my granddaughter, born in December after 9/11, it is more than her entire life.

As usual, the nation has been pausing these last several days, appropriately remembering that horrible day, offering prayers for the fallen, thanksgiving for the rescuers, reconnecting with the salvific moments when we were for one brief moment in the darkness more United than the United States had been in a long while, and far more than we have become since the shining Twin Towers became rubble.

I’m struck by the number of voices that have considered aloud what we might have done differently.

What might have happened had political leadership, which had a phenomenal percentage of Americans supporting the President and his administration, chosen not to lead the country into wars with Iraq and Afghanistan?

What might have happened had we, on a national level, taken a very different approach to shoring up and supporting quality education for local police rather than militarizing them?

What might have happened had the Christian leaders holding sway over the opinions of millions been more outspoken about the clear mandates of respecting the dignity of every human being?

The “what-ifs” and “what-might-have-beens” are little more than depression generators..

It’s easier to survey the actual results of 9-11.

A plethora of actions did ensue.

One was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, folding 22 pre-existing federal agencies and functions into a single cabinet-level department—the largest federal reorganization since the National Security Act of 1947.

This massive department contains all these:

· ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement

· TSA, the Transportation Security Administration

· FEMA, The Federal Emergency Management Agency

· The Coast Guard (USCG), moved from the Department of Transportation

· The Secret Service (USSS), moved from the Treasury Department

· U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), formed by merging parts of the U.S. Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and Border Patrol which manages border entry and security

· U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), created to handle lawful immigration applications separately from enforcement agencies (ICE/CBP)

· The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) formed in 2018 to protect critical physical and digital infrastructure

Assessments of DHS’s effectiveness vary widely. For the last 25 years, its counter-terrorism mission appears to have been successful. Critics of DHS generally complain of systemic inefficiency and bureaucratic bloat. I’m in no position to argue either of these judgments.

What is abundantly apparent from 2025 and 2026 is that DHS has been haywire. I won’t spend the space and time to dissect and evaluate that statement. I simply point out that FEMA, for example, over which Donald Trump complained loudly in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in 2024, is now being criticized heavily for its failure to assist in recuperation efforts in States affected. And a large percentage of the public is outraged by the failure of ICE to respect the core principle of due process under the law. Those are just symptoms aside from a raft of scandals arising from DHS.

We have watched —and reacted—in the last twenty months as ICE has been weaponized to go far beyond its previous scope. ICE was no box of kittens during the Bush and Obama years. I lived and worked then in Washington, DC, where many immigrant families lived on pins and needles, in constant fear of being raided by ICE officers. Long-time US residents who had immigrated were in danger of being deported, sometimes regardless of their record of employment or lack of convictions for felonies. So the xenophobia and animus towards immigrants didn’t originate with the second Trump administration. Rather, it took on draconian proportions.

Of course, the Department of Homeland Security is not the only place that policies affecting world stability, health, and security have either originated or have been executed. Those defending agencies like ICE and CBP are quick to point out that the legislation creating DHS grants broad jurisdiction regarding public safety, transnational crime, and border security. Supporters argue these agencies are not acting "outside authorized purview," but rather exercising executive discretion within statutory limits set by Congress.

To the extent that that assessment is correct, then a lasting change in the direction of the way these agencies interpret their mission is in the hands of Congress. That, of course, means they remains in the hands of us, the electorate. If the electorate remains as divided as it has now been for a generation, hardly any change of course can be reasonably expected unless there is a massive build-up of public pressure.

It seems obvious to me that on the list of Americans’ priorities these days are the economy, affordability, the so-called “kitchen table” issues. Although totally understandable, that fact does not bode well for public pressure to reach the point where systemic change in DHS and other entities is likely.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, an arm of ICE) spends substantial resources fighting child exploitation, cybercrime, weapons smuggling, and fentanyl trafficking. Proponents argue these functions are essential national security measures rather than expanded political control. Does that mean we are to take that as a given? Does that really answer any question about the course the nation is taking for its own security in the next quarter century and beyond?

Although judicial review continues to function to ensure that guardrails are in place, restraining all such federal agencies from acting outside the law, judicial review cannot address whether the laws are in fact workable, reasonable, and just. Nor does it do any good for lower courts to rein in the actions of an agency like ICE if the Supreme Court ultimately acts a tool of an administration determined to use those agencies according to its will and not the law.

Constitutional Rights have not fared well in the wake of 9/11. The Patriot Act expanded bulk electronic surveillance and warrantless data collection, apparently in contradiction of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against illegal searches and seizures. FISA court reports and transparency logs document the vast increase of warrantless device searches at ports of entry along the 100-mile “Border Search Exception.”

First Amendment rights, which Americans have historically considered sacrosanct even among other rights, have not fared better. Expansion of FBI and DHS intelligence fusion centers monitoring political protests, environmental groups, and civil movements. “Threat monitoring” might sound realistic to whatever groups or individuals are not themselves being surveilled as “threats.” It is, however, a tool ready-made to be co-opted by a police state.

Due process guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments has been abrogated as well. Expansion of mandatory detention, expedited removal processes without judicial hearings, and the No Fly List have all developed after 9/11. Thousands of individuals have been placed on federal watchlist databases without formal notice, representation, or an immediate path to appeal (leading to multiple federal court rulings ordering DHS to establish redress mechanisms like TRIP).

Do we want to continue down this path? If so, where does the path lead? Or if we don’t, how then do we change course, and to what end?

A part of me stands amazed that so few international terrorist incidents have happened since 9/11. Those that have happened have generally been serious.

· The 2006 Transatlantic Aircraft Plot in which DHS and CBP worked with international partners and prevented a plot to detonate liquid explosives on multiple flights bound from the UK to the US (leading directly to current liquid restrictions).

· In 2010 CBP's National Targeting Center identified Times Square Bomber, Faisal Shahzad, on a flight attempting to flee out of JFK airport, pulling him off the aircraft minutes before departure.

Meanwhile, critics have observed the DHS has been so oriented towards addressing international terrorist threats that it has been slow to recognize and adapt towards the increase in incidents of domestic terrorism. It seems to me that a fair amount of energy on the part of DHS and the

FBI needs to focus on random shootings in the US more than appears to be the case. Is there any doubt that that is the most prevalent form of terror the populace is constantly facing?

On the international level, I question what it would take to make the next quarter century different from the last 25 years post-9/11.

Given the ongoing and apparently endless war now waged against Iran, not to mention tensions with our other international adversaries—Russia, North Korea, and China (of whom China seems to be the only reasonable party)—the country and the world are, if anything, less secure than at any time since 2001. Shall we simply sigh and say nothing can be done?

There are enough defeatists in the world. I refuse to increase their number by one. We have a massive job ahead of us. There is no end in sight because there is no end. It will take renewed determination every day, every year, every decade, every election to chart a course that addresses the deadly cat-and-mouse game of life against death that possesses the world and its creatures. Climate change; the AI crisis; the assault on democracy; political instability, economic realities and the resulting mass migrations: all amount to massive conditions that will take all the talent, all the will, all the courage in the world to address.

No indeed. There is no end. There’s only the need for a new beginning.

Exactly 25 years ago on Sunday, September 16, I was invited to join several other clergy and civic leaders to speak to a large gathering in Bedford, Virginia, where a prominent D-Day Memorial commemorates the many men in Bedford who died on D-Day, 1944.

The program that day was part tension, part inspiration, part unifying, and part scary. I suspect people came because everybody needed something positive to do to express grief, rage, concern, and connection.

Some speakers and (as I recall) a handful of local entertainers openly voiced the foregone conclusion that we were headed to war. Nobody five days after 9/11 knew what was in store, but all of us knew there would be some kind of national response. There had to be.

Here’s what I said then to the assembled crowd:

I speak in the name of God, the Creator of all, the Redeemer of all, the Sanctifier of all.

When the nation was clamoring for revenge and retaliation for civilian American lives tragically slaughtered by the enemy, and every avenue to avert war had been exhausted, the President of the United States signed the Declaration of War. Then he put his head down on the cabinet table and wept.

The President was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1917. And the day was Good Friday.

America entered a war that had begun with a terrorist act: an organized assassination. It was the cruelest and ghastliest of all wars this planet had ever known. You can read the Books of Remembrance in British churches and see page after page of names of young men who were slaughtered in the trenches of France. Literally a generation of the young was wiped out in the horror that ensued.

I don’t know why the President wept on that Good Friday afternoon. Did he weep for himself? Did he weep for America? Maybe it was because he knew, as he told a veteran news correspondent and editor, “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance….” Or was it because he sensed the deep irony that on that very day when the Christian world was remembering the death of Jesus, he was signing the death warrant for Christ to die all over again in young doughboys who would lie beneath crosses in places like Flanders Field?

We meet today at the monument of the turning point of another great war. We meet in a town where an incredible number of young lives were wiped out in an invasion that ultimately would mean liberation from a regime of unprecedented horror and evil. America entered that war only when, on a quiet sunny morning, enemy bombs had made mincemeat of The United States fleet. President Roosevelt was outraged. The country was shocked. December 7, 1941, is still a day that lives in infamy.

Today we are faced with another momentous occasion. This time, another sneak attack. This time, an act of obscene hatred and violence carried out again against unarmed citizens. But this time, a complicated enemy hard to detect, difficult to pin down, capable of cloning its own violence hundreds of times. And an enemy convinced in righteous indignation that it has God on its side; that its acts of terror and destruction are not only justified but also holy; that its program of retaliation is compelling enough for its warriors gladly to yield their lives to fiery deaths, so right they are.

I talk today about history because human history is exactly what the Judeo-Christian tradition understands to be the sphere of God’s activity. And if we are going to speak about God, we have to look at history, God’s lesson book.

What have we learned? One lesson that we have learned is that violence breeds more violence, and terror begets more terror. We cannot play into that! If, in the best judgment of our leaders, this nation must engage in military action, no doubt the country will support them—no doubt at all. But do not be deluded into believing that that violence will not come at great cost! Far more than the lives we will lose in any one military action, the cost will spiral into an ever-broadening wildfire of hatred and revenge. Through our cries for retaliation and revenge, in so many throats this week, we need to hear and heed the words of Gandhi. He said, “If we live by the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be both blind and toothless.” Pour out instead your prayers for peace and healing as you have never done before. Envision a world wrapped in its Mother’s arms. If this dreadful attack is a wake-up call, let it rouse us to double our efforts for peace: peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our nation, peace for our planet.

What have we learned? We have learned that religious intolerance and hatred, no matter of what stripe, are tools of evil. Hear me carefully. I speak in the name of the Prince of Peace. If we, individually and as a nation, turn against one another in disrespect and outright hatred, we are replicating the same bigotry and self-righteousness of the terrorists themselves. There is no difference between Islamic fanaticism and Jewish fanaticism and Christian fanaticism except the labels. All are life denying and peace shattering. God calls all people of this world into unity with God and one another. Let there be no place in this society, under attack in part because of our openness and acceptance, for finger pointing and blame laying and scapegoating. Reach out in support to Arab Americans. Join with Muslims as with all others in the family of religions and assure them of your good will. Live with courage the words of the hymn, “Who loves the Father as his child is surely kin to me.”

What have we learned? We have learned that God shows up at the least likely of times and in the worst stenches imaginable. Julia Ward Howe wrote that we have seen God in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. Well, this week we have seen the face of God: in exhausted firefighters, in strangers reaching out to hold the grieving, in physicians and nurses and technicians aiding the wounded, in hands digging down into the rubble to clear a path for life where there is life. “Where charity and love dwell, God is truly there.” In the Persian Gulf War, when some Iraqi soldiers finally came out of their bunkers expecting to be killed by Americans, they found themselves instead washed and fed and treated humanely. That is the spirit of Christ. That is the face of God.

What we have yet to learn is that Jesus was not joking when he said, “Love your enemies.” “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you.” That is the lesson that the world needs to hear, and that is the way to the healing that we so deeply seek.

Whatever the reason, President Wilson was right to weep, just as he was right to sign the Declaration of War. Sometimes we have to do what we most fear. But, in the end, if we are as open, as humble, as loving as we can be, then, in the long march of history the world will become as God created it to be: free, and whole.

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