Twenty-five years ago, nearly three-thousand Americans were murdered by terrorist hijackers. The national security apparatus I helped build in the aftermath is now being used to spy on, harass, and intimidate Americans instead of protect them.
Every year around this anniversary, I make my way to Ground Zero if I can. If I cannot, I watch the Today Show coverage of the attack from that morning. It’s playing in the background right now as I write this. I do that ritual because I made a vow — like millions and millions of Americans — to “never forget.” And on this 25th Anniversary, that vow is more important than it’s ever been.
Last year I wrote that the remembrance felt different because the gravest threat to America was no longer coming from abroad. It was coming from within. I didn’t expect that just one year later I’d be writing something darker than that. The threat is now coming from the very institutions that we built to stop the next attack.
I was a teenager in Indiana when the Twin Towers fell, and like so many in my generation, that morning changed my life for good. I came to Washington in the years afterward on a quest to do whatever I could to stop such a day form happening again. I worked on Capitol Hill, walking marble hallways where gas masks were stashed in cabinets across the complex in case of attack. I worked at the Pentagon and the White House and contributed to the newborn Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which I eventually helped run. For two decades, in one way or another, I helped build, fund, and operate America’s counterterrorism machine.
We promised Americans that these extraordinary new powers would point outward. We told the country that the secret terror watchlists included the names of would-be suicide bombers. We assured worried Americans that the NSA surveillance was meant to disrupt cells plotting in Germany or Syria, or for homegrown extremists already planning violence on our shores. We sent murderous jihadists into shadowy detention facilities. We distributed billions in grants to help states and cities repel future attacks and protect their people. And the gravest power of all, the power to kill, was reserved for wartime enemies on declared battlefields.
On this anniversary, I must admit the promise has been broken. Those powers have been turned against the American people themselves. I want you to understand that this isn’t incidental. It’s intentional and systematic.
We’ve gone from infiltrating al Qaeda cells to infiltrating church basements in Minnesota, where undercover DHS agents recently recorded the license plates of teachers, veterans, and union members at protest trainings and compiled what they called “intel work-ups” on each one. Their targets’ weapons of choice? Pots and pans to make noise at protests. The government’s internal documents justified the investigations on grounds of “domestic terrorism.” In other words, NO KINGS protesters are being treated like al Qaeda operatives.
We’ve gone from watchlisting murderous jihadists to a presidential directive, NSPM-7, that primes federal agencies to treat Americans as terrorism suspects for holding “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” or “anti-Christian” views. The screening databases that I helped design to track Osama bin Laden’s agents can now be fed with the names of anti-Trump demonstrators. Evidently, that’s all being done without a warrant and most definitely without their knowledge. It may be years before we know the full scope of the abuse.
We’ve gone from naming al Qaeda and ISIS as enemies of the state to our president declaring antifa his top anti-terror priority, even though it has no headquarters, no membership rolls, and no known leaders. When Congress asked a senior FBI official under oath where the nation’s “most immediate” domestic threat is headquartered and how many members it has, he couldn’t answer, because the threat as described does not exist. The vagueness is what my former boss, Donald Trump, desires. Indeed, an enemy without any real definition can be expanded to include pretty much anyone, and the administration is already doing that by quietly adding obscure foreign groups labeled “antifa” to the terrorist list so that “material support” charges can one day by brought against American activists and the nonprofits that even have the vaguest tie to overseas leftists.
As I wrote last month, the Treasury Secretary said the quiet part out loud when he promised to aim “the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad” at threats “here at home.”
We’ve gone from secret facilities for detaining the world’s most dangerous terrorists to a $38 billion DHS plan for a shadow network of detention warehouses in American towns, sized to rival the entire federal prison system and filled overwhelmingly with people who are neither violent nor criminal. Towns like Social Circle, Georgia, learned about their new 10,000-bed facility from the newspaper. More than 16,000 times in the past year federal judges have ruled that the Trump administration illegally detained people and held them in custody. Not ten illegal detentions or a hundred, which would be bad enough. Sixteen thousand.
We’ve gone from telling Americans “if you see something, say something” about a bomb in a backpack to Trump’s Justice Department ordering every state in America to turn its teachers, nurses, and DMV clerks into deportation informants. In fact, they’ve said that any state which refuses to become a snitch for the feds will lose its food assistance for poor families and children. The federal government is threatening to hold hungry kids hostage if state employees don’t start tipping off the feds about suspected migrants.
We’ve gone from sending American troops to Kandahar and Fallujah to hunt down terror plotters to a president ordering troops into Portland to confront “antifa and other domestic terrorists,” with “Full Force” authorized against his own citizens. The month it was renamed the “War Department,” the first threat the Pentagon put in its crosshairs was the City of Chicago. The president posted images of an imagined federal invasion of that city.
We’ve gone from targeted strikes against al Qaeda commanders on distant battlefields to the American military blowing up boats in our hemisphere, killing more than 220 people without arrest, charge, or trial, under classified kill orders, because the president claims they are “narco terrorists.” A sitting senator who examined the intelligence has warned that some of the dead had nothing to do with drug trafficking at all. The president and his team wanted to do this in the first term. At DHS, we told them it would be illegal. So they put in place a team that gave them a different answer.
We’ve gone from an intelligence community built to detect foreign threats to a Director of National Intelligence who helped seize Americans’ ballots. Indeed, Trump’s previous intel chief was caught standing inside a Georgia election office while agents took boxes and boxes of ballots from the 2020 election that Donald Trump swears he won, despite literally no evidence. She was there, in her own words, because her presence “was requested by the President,” who then mused on national television that they were going to “find out the true winner.”
And we’ve gone from DHS sending states money to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings to DHS withholding that money unless states surrender their voter rolls or align with the administration’s immigration policies. The White House is turning the government’s public safety money itself into a weapon, putting the gun to the head of governors, and telling them to stand with Trump. Or else. I spent many painstaking years helping to oversee and distribute those funds, and now I get to watch the president dangle the dollars to achieve gangster-like leverage for his personal agenda. He is — quite literally — threatening your lives if you don’t go along with his policies.
Whatever safeguards there were in place against all of this have failed. I will shoulder some of that blame. We built the post-9/11 state on an assumption about presidential character — assured people that we’d never see a despot in the Oval Office and that we didn’t need to worry about abuses of these powers — yet character is what the Constitution warned us never to count on. If men were angels, James Madison wrote, no government would be necessary. Well, we built an arsenal for angels and handed it to a man who once told me to my face that the most important lesson he ever learned in business is that “leverage” over other people is how you get what you want from them.
As I’m listening to the recording of Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, and Tom Brokaw responding in real-time to the 9/11 attacks, here’s what I keep coming back to. The men who attacked us twenty-five years ago believed that our freedom made us weak, and they hoped their violence would goad us into becoming a country that fears its own people. For most of a quarter century, we could say that those terrorists failed. The hijackers brought down planes and towers, but they could never do the one thing that would truly have finished the job, which is to turn the United States government against its people.
Only a president could do that. And one has.
That’s why 9/11 remembrance carries a new obligation this year. The truest way to honor the three-thousand dead Americans (and many more killed or wounded in combat in the wars that followed) is to refuse to let the machinery built in their name be used against the people it was built to defend. Earlier this year, I argued that when this nightmare ends, we must deconstruct DHS itself and rebuild it so that no future president — of any party — can wield it as a personal weapon. I helped build that department, and I say it again on our most solemn anniversary. A weapon that can be pointed at anyone eventually will be. We know that now with certainty, because we are living it.
But I won’t leave you in aimless despair today, because despair would dishonor the dead as much as amnesia would. The same country that ran into burning towers is still here. It’s in the towns that have beaten back secret detention warehouses, from Merrimack, New Hampshire to Social Circle, Georgia… it’s in the states, like Oregon, that sued rather than accept troops in their streets… it’s in the federal judges ruling again and again that protesting an ICE agent is not terrorism and that the president does not own our ballots… it’s in the prosecutors who resigned rather than manufacture terrorists out of their neighbors… it’s in the protesters who keep showing up, so effectively that the government has assigned undercover agents to the sound of their cookware… and I’d like to think it’s in the work we do every week at DEFIANCE to counter all of this corruption.
Twenty-five years ago, we made a promise. “Never forget.” Today, I hope you’ll quietly renew that vow to the dead — and for the sake of the living. In time, we’re going to take this machine back. We’re going to rebuild it so it can never be aimed inward at us again. The passengers who stormed the cockpit on Flight 93 didn’t die to invert democracy. They died to save it, and their mission is now ours.
Your friend, in defiance,
DEFIANCE DAILY
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