Perhaps the most famous conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report is that America’s inability to prevent the September 11 attacks resulted from a “failure of imagination.” With respect to the 9/11 Commission, that is not quite right.
Long before September 11, members of the U.S. intelligence community understood the awful scale of Osama bin Laden’s ambitions. The presidential daily brief on August 6, 2001, included an item titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” which even referenced al-Qaeda’s desire to hijack an American aircraft. This was just one of 36 articles in presidential briefings that year that mentioned bin Laden or al-Qaeda.
As an FBI special agent, I participated in investigations of al-Qaeda both before and after 9/11. Based on my experience, the main reason the U.S. didn’t stop 9/11 was not a failure of imagination but a failure of trust. America’s intelligence institutions lacked confidence in one another. In fact, they hid intelligence from their peers. This particular problem has improved since the attacks, but new, even graver, failures of trust have emerged.
As 9/11 and its aftermath have shown, American security depends on many kinds of faith. Allies must trust U.S. leadership. Citizens must have confidence in their government. Policy makers must believe in America’s deepest norms and values. Over the past 25 years, the U.S. has frayed each of these bonds of trust.
This is exactly what bin Laden sought to achieve. He often referred to a text called “Management of Savagery,” dubbed the “al-Qaeda manual,” which recalled the collapse of the Roman empire in the face of sustained pressure from small frontier tribes. The jihadist mission was to subject the U.S. to the same fate—turning its allies into enemies by eradicating the world’s trust in American power and ideals.
The 9/11 attacks alone did not accomplish that goal. But 25 years later, America’s own mistakes have brought it closer to fulfillment than bin Laden ever could.
Several weeks before 9/11, the FBI sent me to Sanaa, Yemen, to join an interagency team investigating al-Qaeda’s murder of 17 U.S. sailors. Al-Qaeda had bombed USS Cole in October 2000 as the ship lay at anchor in a Yemeni port. We soon learned the first of a series of details about the attack that have played in my mind ever since.
In January 2000, when planning for the bombing was well under way, two al-Qaeda operatives left Yemen for Thailand with $36,000 in cash. Both would participate in the eventual attack. A few days later, a third, more senior al-Qaeda operative known as Khallad flew from Malaysia to Thailand and collected the money.
[Hillary Rodham Clinton: What the aftermath of 9/11 taught me]
We knew that al-Qaeda had been plotting to attack a U.S. warship in Yemen. So why would the group move two operatives and a large amount of cash out of the country? We sought answers from our partners across the U.S. intelligence community. Each time, the response was the same: No one knew anything that could help our investigation.
I was still in Sanaa on September 11. From thousands of miles away, I saw images of smoke billowing from the Pentagon, twin fireballs bringing down the World Trade Center, and wreckage lying strewn across a field in my home state of Pennsylvania. Along with the rest of the Cole team, I was ordered to evacuate Yemen.
The next day, when I was already at the airport, I got a call: Someone had information to share about the attacks. Instead of boarding my flight, I raced to the U.S. embassy, where a CIA officer handed me a file with the answers my team had been seeking.
The $36,000 hadn’t been meant for Khallad, as we’d thought. Apparently it had paid for two other al-Qaeda members, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, to travel to the United States. The purpose of their trip had just been revealed: Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were two of the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
The pair had been in the United States for months, and had left a significant paper trail. As both the CIA inspector general and the 9/11 Commission would conclude years later, the two hijackers could have been tracked down and arrested if this information had been shared with the Cole team. The “planes operation,” as al-Qaeda called it, might have been stopped.
All at once, I realized that we could have saved thousands of lives if only we’d had the relevant intelligence. I have yet to overcome the horror of that discovery. I suspect I never will.
After the attacks, the intelligence community and law enforcement worked together on a sweeping investigation to track down those responsible and prepare the government to retaliate. In Yemen, a colleague and I questioned Abu Jandal, a suspect in the Cole investigation, gleaning crucial information from him about al-Qaeda and bin Laden. In keeping with traditional American interrogation methods, we pretended that we were his friends and made him believe that we already knew the information we needed.
These techniques worked, as they usually did. Jandal identified several of the 9/11 hijackers as al-Qaeda members. This information allowed President George W. Bush to inform the American people that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. It was also instrumental in persuading several leaders in the Muslim world, most notably Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, to acquiesce to the invasion of Afghanistan.
The 9/11 investigation progressed in parallel with military action against al-Qaeda and its Taliban enablers. Interagency cooperation improved. More suspects were apprehended. At that moment, it was still possible to believe that America’s response to the attacks would be sober, measured, and led by sound intelligence. Within a few months, however, I would be disabused of that notion.
By the spring of 2002, I had joined another interagency team and began interrogating Abu Zubaydah, a fixer who often worked with al-Qaeda, though he wasn’t a member. Almost as soon as we sat down, he identified himself as “Daood.” I smiled. We had caught him in a lie.
“How about I call you Hani?” I said, using his childhood nickname. Zubaydah’s jaw dropped. He seemed to realize that we would know if he continued trying to deceive us, so he started cooperating. Within an hour, Zubaydah had divulged the details of a developing terrorist plot. We reported the information to Washington, and the attack was foiled. Zubaydah proceeded to tell us everything he knew about the “planes operation,” including the identity of its mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
After about 10 productive days, a team from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Mission Center arrived alongside an external contractor, who claimed that he could get even more information out of Zubaydah. He described a series of techniques that were designed to establish the interrogator in Zubaydah’s mind as “God.”
The contractor had Zubaydah stripped naked, pumped loud music into his cell, and deprived him of sleep. These were part of a set of methods that would come to be known euphemistically as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
It is important to recognize that these techniques did not reflect the CIA’s usual practice, or the painstaking work of most of its veteran officers. The agency’s traditional interrogation program, which combined lawful questioning with the exploitation of well-documented evidence, achieved great successes when it was not compromised by ineffective torture methods. Indeed, many of the 9/11 investigation’s early breakthroughs, including with Zubaydah, were achieved with the help of CIA officers. Their valuable work must not be confused with the torture program, which was largely designed and implemented by contractors.
Subjected to the new, unproven techniques, Zubaydah immediately clammed up. This was unsurprising: Most jihadist terrorists are trained to withstand even harsher methods, including ones involving physical and sexual violence. Eventually, the contractor was pulled back and the interagency team was allowed to interrogate Zubaydah once more. He started talking again, identifying additional al-Qaeda members and associates.
Still, the promoters of the new techniques were not satisfied. They insisted that Zubaydah was a top al-Qaeda official rather than an outside fixer, and turned the temperature in his cell as low as it would go. Once again Zubaydah stopped talking, until the interagency team was called back in. This back-and-forth continued until the contractor’s methods became so extreme and grotesque—one involved a custom-built coffin in which he planned to imprison Zubaydah—that FBI headquarters became unwilling to be associated with the techniques.
The torture program not only breached American norms and values; it yielded fake intelligence. Among other falsehoods, Zubaydah “confessed” under torture to being the third-ranking al-Qaeda official. He later told more conventional interrogators that he had said that only to make the torture stop.
These methods introduced violence into our intelligence gathering and ignored decades of accumulated wisdom about effective interrogation. They also alienated our allies. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the program “caused immeasurable damage to the United States’ public standing, as well as to the United States’ longstanding global leadership on human rights in general and the prevention of torture in particular.”
The interrogation program was just one example of a cardinal error that the U.S. government made after 9/11: It abandoned norms and values embodied in the Constitution; America’s commitment to human rights; and more practical guidelines, such as the Army Field Manuals, which enshrine the traditional, highly effective interrogation methods that my colleagues and I used on Jandal and Zubaydah. These were replaced with untested, ad hoc experiments that appeared to prioritize seeking vengeance over protecting American lives. The CIA inspector general did not identify a single imminent plot that the enhanced interrogation techniques had actually thwarted.
The program was finally outlawed by Congress in 2015, but it continues to undermine American security. Torture produced faulty intelligence that has shaped policy decisions whose effects still linger. Most notable, it contributed to arguably the United States’ worst misstep since 9/11: the decision to go to war in Iraq.
In the months following the attacks, many counterterrorism professionals came under pressure to find a link between al-Qaeda and Sadam Hussein’s government in Iraq. I was one of them. In addition to the intelligence and counterterrorism work I was doing during the day, I returned to my quarters every evening to a barrage of emails seeking proof of a connection that did not exist.
The enhanced interrogation techniques played an important role in the search for the longed-for link. The same contractor who had compromised Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation participated in the interrogation of Zubaydah’s partner, the al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. I wasn’t involved in al-Libi’s interrogation, but, like Zubaydah, he had reportedly been cooperating under the traditional approach.
After the contractor arrived, al-Libi was subjected to torture in a third country. As al-Libi later freely confessed, he “decided he would fabricate any information the interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over” to a foreign government. One such fabrication was the purported link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. This became a key piece of evidence used by policy makers seeking to justify war in Iraq.
[Tom Nichols: A quarter century of panic]
America’s leaders began the war in Afghanistan with clear mandates, limited goals, and broad coalitions. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, by contrast, featured vague, ambitious aims and took place over the objections of many U.S. allies. It looked more like a war of vendetta—or, worse, one of empire building. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that George W. Bush’s administration had “repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
The consequences have been devastating. When it became clear that the Iraq War had begun under false pretenses, American citizens’ faith in their government took a nosedive, and allies’ confidence was shaken. Moreover, the conflict played directly into al-Qaeda’s core narrative: the false idea that the West and its henchmen were waging an epochal war against Islam.
The invasion of Iraq, the torture program, the humiliating conditions at Guantánamo Bay and prisons such as Abu Ghraib, America’s apparent indifference to civilian casualties from air strikes—each became a powerful recruitment tool for terrorists. As of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda likely had only a few hundred members, most of them based in Afghanistan. Today, the U.S. intelligence community estimates that the group has 15,000 to 28,000 members worldwide.
Finally, by splitting its attention and resources across two wars, the United States doomed its fortunes in both. In 2011, the withdrawal from Iraq after eight grueling years paved the way for the Islamic State to take over much of the country. At the same time, U.S. objectives in Afghanistan crept further from the limited goals articulated in 2001. It became U.S. policy to attempt to shape Afghanistan into a Western-style, centralized republic, whether the Afghan people wanted that or not. Pursuing that doomed, messianic mission for 20 years ultimately cost the United States about $2.3 trillion; 2,219 American military members’ lives; and a great deal of trust around the world.
The eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan, shortly before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, seemed stage-managed to show just how steeply American power had declined over those two decades. The images of desperate Afghans clinging to departing aircraft became defining symbols of the end of America’s longest war. Much like the fall of Saigon and the evacuation of the U.S. embassy there in 1975, those scenes will continue to taint the world’s perceptions of American power, credibility, and commitment.
Even worse, the U.S. is repeating the same mistakes today.
In February, the United States began its war against Iran without broad support from its allies in the region. Soon the conflict unleashed significant political, military, and economic damage on many of those allies, prompting some of them to question the value of U.S. security guarantees.
Some American allies, previously content to rely on the U.S. security umbrella, have begun making alternative arrangements. In August, Turkey, a NATO member, entered into a mutual-defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s foreign minister, didn’t hide his country’s reasoning: “External hegemons coming into the region do not solve the problems; they make them more acute, and the cost becomes very high.”
America’s relationships with the Muslim world have suffered in other ways too. In March, as the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks escalated, the State Department ordered nonemergency embassy personnel to leave Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, operations at embassies in Iraq and Lebanon have been hampered for some time by threats and attacks from Iranian-backed militants. These disruptions have compounded a bigger problem: The U.S. has far fewer active embassies in the region today than it did before 9/11.
This will have significant long-term consequences. When diplomatic channels disappear, cooperation between militaries and law enforcement erodes, as do bilateral trade and investment. Intelligence agencies lose human eyes and ears on the ground. Peaceful relations become harder to maintain. Miscalculation grows likelier.
Even as it disengages from important relationships in the Middle East, the United States has introduced confusion into alliances elsewhere. In recent years, American policy makers have given Taiwan mixed messages, oscillating from staunch support to requests for the country to shoulder a greater security burden. The U.S. has called into question its formal security guarantee with Japan and, in the opening weeks of the Iran war, redeployed some 2,500 Marines that had previously been stationed there. Around the same time, Washington reportedly diverted missile-defense interceptors from South Korea to the Middle East. All of these moves threaten to diminish U.S. power in the Indo-Pacific at a time when Chinese influence is growing.
In Europe, the Iran conflict may have distracted attention and resources from the war in Ukraine. According to the Associated Press, a “sizable number” of Patriot missiles had been moved out of Europe, bound for the Middle East. Peace negotiations stalled, reportedly because U.S. attention suddenly pivoted toward Iran. Thanks to spiking energy prices, Russian oil revenues and tax receipts surged, leading one prominent think tank to characterize the war in Iran as “an economic gift for Putin.”
The conflict has also coincided with a decline in trust among America’s hitherto staunchest allies. In May, polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that only 11 percent of respondents across 15 European democracies still considered the United States an ally. As Europe and Asia drift further from America’s orbit, the U.S.-led international order comes closer to collapse, just as Osama bin Laden dreamed.
America’s own citizens are scarcely less skeptical than those of its allies. At the outset of hostilities with Iran, 62 percent said they had not been given a clear explanation of the reasons for war. It is not difficult to see why. As recently as June 2025, senior administration officials had claimed that the United States had “destroyed the Iranian nuclear program.” Less than nine months later, the same officials were citing the continued existence of that program as a casus belli.
The shifting official justifications have resembled the obfuscation and outright lies that underpinned America’s invasion of Iraq. But whereas the Iraq War was popular at the outset—about three-quarters of Americans favored military action—a majority of U.S. voters opposed the Iran conflict as soon as it started.
Americans have many reasons for opposing the war. But the profound skepticism with which so many U.S. citizens regard their government has clear roots in 9/11. The distrust has only grown since the attacks because of a systematic lack of accountability.
Families who lost spouses, partners, parents, and children in the 9/11 attacks have spent 25 years waiting for justice. Some have died before seeing those responsible enter a courtroom.
[Read: The anniversary I wish I didn’t share with my husband]
The U.S. government has denied accountability not only for the attackers but also for American officials who made significant mistakes. To use a personal example: The CIA inspector general recommended that an accountability board review the performance of the officials who failed to hand over information my team had asked for in Yemen. This recommendation was summarily rejected by the CIA director.
As recently as 2024, prosecutors reached plea deals with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other suspects, partly designed to induce them to give depositions in exchange for lifelong imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Yet the Department of Defense revoked those plea deals just two days later. Not all of the victims’ families supported them, but the deals would not have been necessary in the first place if the U.S. government had simply followed its own laws while interrogating suspects, rather than compromising evidence by obtaining it through torture.
Still, the families continue to fight, including Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center. “The question is whether the United States will stand with the victims of terrorism or with those who financed and enabled it,” Strada wrote in 2024. “Our grief has not faded. Neither has our determination. We will not accept selective memory or performative sympathy, and we will not be silent, because without accountability our national security is weakened, and our country is more vulnerable to a recurrence of past threats.”
In the years since 9/11, a lack of accountability has become endemic across the U.S. government. The enhanced-interrogation-techniques program is another example: Not a single official has been prosecuted, not even those who were connected to the two detainees who died in U.S. custody. Instead, the contractors who devised the program received indemnity and $81 million for their services.
As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, some agencies of the U.S. government obscured or misrepresented the truth about the techniques not only to the CIA inspector general but to Congress, the Department of Justice, and even the White House. It appears that nobody has been held accountable.
At the end of 1974, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the fallout from Watergate, the proportion of Americans who trusted their government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time” fell to what was then an unprecedented low of 36 percent. Faith in government later rebounded somewhat. On the eve of 9/11, it stood at 44 percent, then peaked at 55 percent as Americans rallied around their government in the month after the attacks. But by 2025, this trust had declined to 17 percent—less than half of its post-Watergate nadir.
Such low trust in the state degrades the social contract. It reduces support for everything the government does, including—and perhaps especially—national security. Faced with a redacted page or a whitewashed report, people will choose something else to believe in—in many cases something considerably darker than the truth. Conspiracy theories, amplified by social media, further erode the public’s confidence.
September 11, 2001, is a day that never really ended. Its consequences continue to be felt whenever America is tempted to risk the little trust that it still enjoys, whether by confusing vengeance with security, impunity with strength, or callousness with patriotism. The only way for the United States to rebuild its global leadership is by recommitting to the values our enemies hoped to make us abandon: truth, accountability, law, decency, and the protection of innocent life. Only then will we have escaped the long shadow of 9/11.
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