On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was at my desk in the Pentagon’s E-Ring, where I worked as a speechwriter, when American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the building. The walls of my office violently shuddered and smoke filled the hallway — but no evacuation alarm ever sounded. Those of us blessed not to have been at the point of impact filed out onto the lawn and stared back in horror at the broken and burning building.
In the months that followed, alarms did go off in the Pentagon on multiple occasions, as false reports came in that other planes were headed our way. Each time, we evacuated and stood looking up at the sky — waiting for the next attack. It never came.
If you had told me that September morning that a quarter-century would pass without another catastrophic terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland, I might not have believed you. We all expected another 9/11.
And unbeknownst to us, the terrorists who struck New York and Washington had in fact set in motion plans for follow-on attacks at home and abroad — which ultimately included a plot to blow up the U.S. Marines at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti using explosive-laden water tankers; a plot to blow up the U.S. Consulate in Karachi using car bombs and motorcycle bombs; and a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.
The terrorists’ plans were foiled because we captured many of al-Qaeda’s top operatives — including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) — and got them to tell us what they were planning. Brave Americans broke up the cells they had assembled to strike us again, drove the terrorists from their sanctuaries and killed their top leaders. We owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be fully repaid.
But there are other developments over the past quarter-century since that clear September morning that have shocked and disappointed me.
If you had told me that 25 years after he murdered nearly 3,000 innocent Americans, KSM still would not have faced justice, I would have been appalled. In June 2008, Mohammed offered to plead guilty before a military commission and proceed straight to execution. KSM and his co-conspirators said they decided to offer their plea the day after Barack Obama — who opposed the military commissions and promised to shut down Guantanamo — was elected president.
Critics say that this is the price America pays for the use of enhanced interrogation. But there was no need for evidence from his CIA interrogations, as KSM voluntarily admitted to his crimes in open court. At a March 10, 2007, military commission hearing, he provided this confession: “I was the Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 Operation,” the transcript of the proceeding reads. He also confessed that he “was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center Operation” as well as “the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which was frequented by British and Australian nationals” and “for the Shoe Bomber Operation to down two American airplanes.” And, he told the court, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl.” The failure of the military commissions to deliver justice for his victims is a disgrace.
If you had told me that September morning that we would succeed in driving the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, only to watch a future president surrender the country back, I would never have believed it. With his disastrous and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden fulfilled KSM’s prophecy, when he told James E. Mitchell, his CIA interrogator: “We will win because Americans don’t realize … we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.” (But if you had told me Biden would be followed by an American president who would take the fight to the terrorist regime in Iran that trained al-Qaeda how to blow up buildings and helped it carry out the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as President Donald Trump has, I would have been gratified.)
And I would never have believed it if you had told me that September morning that on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 New York would have a Democratic mayor who had to be pressured to say that Hamas terrorists should lay down their arms. Or that across the river in New Jersey, Democrats would nominate a congressional candidate who testified on behalf of the “Blind Sheikh” in his trial for the first World Trade Center bombing and later volunteered with an al-Qaeda-linked group in Bosnia that was shut down for providing logistical support to terrorists. Or that Michigan voters would nominate a Democratic Senate candidate who equated the victims of 9/11 to those killed in the U.S. military response and campaigned with Hasan Piker, a far-left activist who once declared that “America deserved 9/11.” I would have thought you were insane. The idea that, a quarter-century after Islamist radicals killed nearly 3,000 in our midst, Americans could elect such candidates to high office simply boggles the mind.
KSM had another prophecy: According to Mitchell, he said that “jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States” and “wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws” until they were strong enough to rise up and attack us. Mitchell said that KSM explained to him that “he and his brothers will not stop until the entire world lives under Sharia law.”
Whether that prophecy comes true is up to all of us.
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