{"id":347600,"date":"2026-09-15T19:38:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T19:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/347600\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T19:38:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T19:38:22","slug":"blaming-america-in-the-shadow-of-9-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/347600\/","title":{"rendered":"Blaming America in the Shadow of 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"

Columbia University and the Knight First Amendment Institute kicked off the first night of last week\u2019s symposium<\/a> on the War on Terror and free speech with a video. Opening with images of newspaper headlines boldly naming the attacks as acts of terror, the video acknowledged 9\/11 as \u201cthe deadliest attack in United States history.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the video did not explicitly blame al-Qaeda for the attacks. That duty fell to President George W. Bush, who, in the video, tells a September 20, 2001, joint session of Congress that \u201cour war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The point of the symposium wasn\u2019t to assign blame to terrorist groups but to debate what organizers referred to as the \u201cForever War\u201d\u2014defined as \u201ca seemingly endless proliferation\u201d of military and security efforts against poorly defined enemies in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and inside the United States\u2014and to discuss whether the U.S. should now dismantle the surveillance and national-security infrastructure to which it gave rise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are people here with us today who lost loved ones on September 11. There are also people here who were affected profoundly by our government\u2019s response to the attacks,\u201d said Jameel Jaffer, a human rights attorney and director of the Knight Institute, in his introductory remarks.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven in that moment of intense fear and sadness and confusion, it was clear that collectively we faced a momentous choice: and what our attackers did next was probably going to be less important, less consequential than what we ourselves did,\u201d said Jaffer.<\/p>\n

The symposium focused on New York\u2019s Muslim communities, which were subjected to surveillance by law enforcement agencies including the NYPD and FBI, and on people whose family members, Jaffer said, \u201cwere made refugees by American wars or targeted by American weapons.\u201d It also included perspectives from veterans such as National Book Award winner and former Marine Phil Klay, who was part of the War on Terror\u2019s first wave.<\/p>\n

But throughout the two-day event, held on September 9 and 10, comparatively little attention was paid to the escalating terrorist threat in the years before 9\/11, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.<\/p>\n

Panelists argued that the security state, a byproduct of the war on terror, slowly contributed to the collapse of constitutional norms and American institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica is now leading this complete shift to destroy what is left from international law,\u201d said Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and author of Guantanamo Diary, who participated via teleconference.<\/p>\n

In one panel, \u201cThe Forever War\u2019s Long Shadow,\u201d hosted by New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen, the conversation focused in part on whether the 9\/11 attacks gave the FBI a green light to awaken the \u201czombie\u201d of J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s COINTELPRO surveillance program.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis infrastructure is just . . . lying in wait for certain geopolitical moments that come and reactivate it,\u201d said Assia Boundaoui, an Algerian-American investigative journalist and director of the 2018 documentary The Feeling of Being Watched.<\/p>\n

The surveillance of Muslim communities expanded then because of \u201csuspicions they might have connections to Palestinian militant groups or, definitely in the nineties, Hamas, for example,\u201d said Rozina Ali, a New York Times Magazine contributor and author of Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, when 9\/11 happened, we actually had a lot of that infrastructure in place, and a lot of law enforcement was already thinking about Islamic terrorism by the mid-nineties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Absent from the discussion was the fact that at that time, the FBI was also dealing with the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in which a group of terrorists led by Ramzi Yousef parked a truck packed with explosives in an underground garage. The bombing killed six people and wounded more than 1,000.<\/p>\n

Retired FBI special agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force member Harry Samit, who investigated and arrested the alleged \u201ctwentieth hijacker,\u201d French national Zacarias Moussaoui, in the weeks leading up to the 9\/11 attacks, disagreed with the symposium\u2019s suggestion that law enforcement engaged in mass surveillance of Muslim communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FBI can\u2019t by policy or by law just do mass surveillance,\u201d Samit said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were doing surveillance on lawfully predicated subjects that we had reason to believe were affiliated with Islamic extremist groups,\u201d said Samit, whose book<\/a> details his failed attempts to convince FBI leadership in Washington, D.C., to secure a search warrant to access Moussaoui\u2019s computer and belongings.<\/p>\n

Samit, who was then based out of the FBI\u2019s Minneapolis field office, also said that FBI leadership stymied his efforts to communicate with the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office. Weeks later, 19 hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Samit called the FBI\u2019s failure to act \u201cobstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism\u201d\u2014not adjectives that imply a program of mass surveillance.<\/p>\n

Panelists examined whether the government\u2019s response to terrorism in the post-9\/11 era created an unjustifiable security infrastructure. The symposium took up the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security as a prominent example. September 11 \u201cwas the moment when this country created a secret police, which is what the DHS was always designed to be,\u201d said M. Gessen, a Russian-American writer.<\/p>\n

Polgreen said she found the name, \u201cDepartment of Homeland Security,\u201d fundamentally \u201cun-American\u201d in its implications and objected to its \u201cclanky\u201d resonance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just has this sort of blood and soil, you know, resonance to it,\u201d she said. \u201cLet\u2019s just not abolish ICE but rename the entire enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several \u201cbig questions\u201d remained: How could the nation\u2019s post-9\/11 surveillance and national-security infrastructure be dismantled? Is now the time to do so?<\/p>\n

Speakers at Columbia\u2019s symposium offered a starkly different interpretation of the terrorist threats facing the United States than attendees of the Manhattan Institute and Community Security Initiative\u2019s Twenty-Five Years After 9\/11<\/a> forum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re no longer contending with a threat that\u2019s primarily driven by organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS, but now one that\u2019s increasingly animated in conspiracy theories or personal grievances,\u201d said Rebecca Weiner, NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, at the Manhattan Institute\/CSI event.<\/p>\n

The two symposiums offered decidedly different interpretations of national security and the various threat actors looking to compromise it. One side sees our counterterrorism infrastructure as the biggest threat to the American experiment. The other understands that the growing threat of extremist violence of any ideological persuasion makes counterterrorism more vital than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Columbia University and the Knight First Amendment Institute kicked off the first night of last week\u2019s symposium on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-347600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}