Lessons Learned and Changes Made 25 Years After 9/11

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0:17From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. America pauses to honor the victims and the heroes of September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon 25 years later. Hard to believe it's been 25 years for those of us who lived through it. It was the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, 2 ,977. People were murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists in New York and Washington. And what have we learned in the last 25 years about the U.S. response to that attack and what we used to call the war on terror? Can we call that a success now or not?

1:02Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of Wall Street Journal opinion. I'm Paul Gigo, and today I'm joined by two men who witnessed the events of that day firsthand, along with me, Dan Henninger, columnist of the Wall Street Journal, and Bill McGurn, editorial board member and columnist. Welcome, gentlemen. Dan, let's start with you. You were there. You saw the towers fall, and you wrote about it memorably. What do you recall specifically from that day? I certainly recall the shock of it all. It was the incongruence, really, of the day and the event. It was one of those September days that is about as most beautiful as you could describe.

1:45Mild temperatures in the 70s, clear blue sky, early morning, an absolutely beautiful day. And suddenly, I happened to, well, one's instinct as a New Yorker, because there's so many tall buildings, is to look up at the sky. You just glance up, you'd like to see it. And at the moment I glanced up, I was down on Vesey Street, down just about three blocks from the World Trade Center Towers. The moment I glanced up was the moment the first plane entered the tower. And you look down just sort of instinctively, and my thought was, what did I just see? At first, I thought a small plane may have gone in it.

2:29And then I realized it was an airliner. And when I looked back up, my next thought was, the plane is inside the building. There was no sign of the plane. There was just a slash on the side of the building. And it was just a kind of a sense of incomprehension. How could something like this possibly have happened? Well, then what came after that was the flames coming out of the building and the horror of it all and people moving back. And we know the rest of what happened. But it was just the overwhelming shock of the moment. And that shock Paul endured, I have to say, for the rest of the year. Certainly we can talk about the day and what happened after that.

3:12But we cannot overstate the extent to which all of us were simply stunned by what happened there at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. None of us had imagined that any such thing could happen in the United States, but it did and it has taken a long time to get over it. We've hit on something which is very important and which people who didn't live through it don't recall but it was the sense of uncertainty that morning. What was happening was the hardest thing to kind of get your head around. I had flown up from Washington that morning and I parked my bag and my PC in my office and that was the only time, first and only time I was ever in that office because I was changing jobs to come up here.

3:56It's supposed to start formally as editorial page editor on September 17th. This was September 11th. Dropped it off, went up. I had a meeting in the village. And like you, I was driving in a cab, backseat of a cab, and the plane went overhead and into the north face of the North Tower. But it was, what just happened? I mean, small plane, large plane? How could that happen? Sunny day. I remember thinking, I remember that plane that hit the Empire State Building, you know, at one point decades ago. And I thought, could that have happened? Well, no. So, and then you didn't know what was happening.

4:34Oh, there were rumors. Okay, the AT &T building had been attacked. The State Department had been attacked. What was happening? And it was just, it took a long time to get your head around it. And we really didn't know what was going on entirely for some time and even weeks after that because we feared another attack. I'll just add my personal experience standing there wondering. We knew in about five minutes because the other plane hit the South Tower. And as soon as that happened, I think everyone on the street understood what was happening. A fellow ran up the street and said we were having a terrorist attack.

5:11and at that point it was clear that something really awful was happening and all of us simply pushed back and away from it to try to get away from the burning towers i called bob bartley who was then our boss and he i said well what what are you going to do he said well we're going to put out the paper from here he was at home in brooklyn and he said well we got to get to south brunswick where we had alternative production facilities pcs i said i think i guess i better get to south Brunswick. He said, I guess you should. So I made my way up to the island. The bridges and tunnels were all closed.

5:47But eventually at about kind of noonish or 1230, they opened up the Hudson and Harlem lines. So I took one of the trains up, went to Yonkers, thought, okay, I rent a car there. Well, that was stupid. There was no cars in Yonkers. Tried to get to the airport to get a car. Nope, not Westchester Airport. Then finally got the last rental car at the Westchester train station and went out to South Brunswick and the plant there. And who should I meet? Bill McGurn. Who was there? Bill, tell us about that experience. Oh, I had a similar experience to Dan's. I was commuting to work and I looked out the window on the right side of the train.

6:25We were pulling into Hoboken and I see the smoke coming out of one of the towers, you know, where the plane hit. And we didn't know what it was. Like you, I thought it might just be an airplane flying into the building or so forth. And also, I had lived in Hong Kong where I'd seen fires, very high levels of apartment buildings. So I wasn't unduly concerned. I got off. The ferries were stopped. I went to have a coffee. The woman from my town, we were walking around together because we were trying to figure out what to do. And then we just decided we better get back home because we're not going the other way across into New York.

7:07They're not going to let us. So we're going back home. Train's pulling out. And I remember Dan talks about all the uncertainty. And we hear an announcement the second tower had been hit or come down. I can't remember what it was like. I do remember thinking this is like Augustine hearing about the sack of Rome. You know, it just seemed that momentous and that scary. And I went home. My mind was racing because I had kids at home. And I'm thinking, is there going to be an attack on the water supply? Are there going to be more attacks from the air or something? So it was really confused. And I thought, well, we have a newspaper to get out.

7:46I hadn't talked to you or Bob or Dan. But, you know, I'm only about, I'm less than an hour drive from South Brunswick. So I thought, I better get down there because that at least is where we can put out the paper. And I did, and I found a huge staff there. I think you and Ken DeWitt. Yeah, it was the two of us and you, Bill. We were the editorial page staff that day. And we did get the page back. And amidst all that confusion, also adding to my concern, my brother worked in the first tower, and he was missing. We had heard from him at one point when he was coming down, but we hadn't heard from him.

8:25He ended up surviving. He and a coworker had helped a pregnant woman down the stairs to safety, but we hadn't heard from him in hours. And so most of the day, I was scared I was going to get bad news about him, but he survived. Yeah, that was amazing. So the three of us, Dan, you wrote your famous piece, editorial piece, and Bob wrote the lead editorial. I wrote the secondary editorial. We had columnists, a couple of Hellman Jenkins wrote a piece. We had some things. I remember something like 730, we discovered that we couldn't use some art that we had thought we'd run. So we had gotten an email from Jason Riley, who had wrote a column this week about his experience.

9:05He'd been caught under, I think, a van or something, surrounded, you know, covered in the dust. He wrote about an email to us, and we had this hold to fill, and I said, let's run Riley. So we ran the Riley email and put it in the paper, first person account of that. And Jason wrote this week, I was surprised to see it in the paper. Well, we were surprised we had a hold of Phil. And we finally did get the paper out that day, which that awful day, terrible for the country and the many victims. Well, I'll tell a quick story about a colleague of ours from the news side. You know, the journal did win the Pulitzer Prize for getting the paper out that year.

9:44You were part of that. and he told me we were at an award ceremony about a year or so later and he told me about his experience and they knew they were going to go down to South Brunswick so he went down to the Hudson River where the boats had pulled up to get people and take them to the other side and as he was getting into the boat a wave pushed it away from the wall and he fell into the Hudson River in his suit. And I said, well, what did you do? And he said, well, the boat pulled down the river a ways. I swam down towards it and they pulled me up into the boat. And then we got over to Hoboken.

10:21And I said, well, what did you do then? He said, well, I got on the train and went to South Brunswick to put out the newspaper. So there was a lot of bravery that day, not just by news people, God knows, but the first responders and the rest of it. But that's kind of a positive point, Paul, Well, as awful and as shocking as it was, everyone who responded had some sense of what they had to do. And what they had to do was going to, in some ways, be one of the most important events in their lives. And they did respond accordingly. Of course, the first and foremost were the first responders, firemen, police, and others who went into those towers and shepherded thousands out, saved their lives, but ended up, because the towers fell, sacrificing their own.

11:05and we honor them in particular today. We are going to take a break and we come back. We'll have more with Bill McGurn and Dan Henninger recalling the lessons of 9-11. Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades. Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. This is Matthew Hennessey. the editor of Free Expression. I want to personally invite you to come check out what we're doing. Signing up for the newsletter couldn't be easier. Just go to our homepage. Directly below the Wall Street Journal logo, you'll find the magic words, Free Expression, wedged between opinion and arts.

11:53There's an option to sign up for the newsletter right at the top of our section. Just hit that button, and you'll start getting the world's hardest working newsletter delivered directly to your inbox Monday through Friday. If you aren't a journal subscriber, the newsletter is free, but we are going to need your email address. There's a lot of fun stuff in the newsletter that you can only read in the newsletter, and I don't want you to miss any of it. Sign up for free expression today. We'll see you in your inbox. I'm Paul Gigo here on Potomac Watch with my colleagues Dan Henninger and Bill McCurney.

12:26Let's step back a little bit. Bill, what do you think of the U.S. response to that day? Looking back in retrospect, all the things that we put together for the so-called war on terror, was it largely the right response? I think so. There was so much that was changed that you have to really focus on which pieces you're talking about. But overall, the change was in thinking. Before 9-11, we responded to it the way the cops respond to a robbery in progress call. You go out, try to catch bad guys, law enforcement operation. In this case, you call the FBI. I think over time, you look at this, there's a good article at the Hudson Institute by Bill Lutie, who was working for the administration then, about the change in philosophy.

13:16Bush used to talk a lot about pre-9-11 thinking and post-9-11 thinking. Post-9-11, simply put, we took the war to them. mobilize our intelligence agents. Remember, there were a lot of obstacles. Remember the wall between the intelligence operations and the criminal operations that prevented one side of the government from knowing what the other side knew? There was a lot of things that didn't. But basically, we finally recognized that we were at war. That sounds obvious, but it wasn't obvious because Al-Qaeda was at war with us a long time before we ever were at war with them. The coal, all sorts of things are firing on.

13:58And some of these efforts, when they were put into practice, were more successful than others. Still a lot of mistakes. I think politically, we appease the Sunnis far too long in Iraq. But overall, the architecture that was put in place and the change in thinking, I think has served us well, even though there's been some aberrations. and a lot of mistakes along the way. Dan, along the lines of Bill's point about the change in mindset, a couple of principles really did shift there. One, we went after the terrorists overseas, so we didn't have to fight them here playing defense. That was one of the fundamental shifts that took place, and I think successful, whether we're bombing in Yemen or Somalia or where it might be.

14:41We take the fight to the terrorists. And then holding state sponsors of terrorism responsible for their support. That was part of the Bush response. And I think you can argue it went too far, perhaps, in some instances, Iraq, if you can argue that. I don't want to relitigate Iraq here. But in the case of Saudi Arabia, for example, Saudi Arabia had been the home of the terrorists and financed the ones who the hijackers and Osama bin Laden. And yet now, and they realize, oh, after 9-11, sorry, we can't do that. And they put down their own jihadists. Yes, and that's right. And I think, by and large, you have to regard the national security and intelligence community's response to 9-11 as a success.

15:31Because as Bill suggested, before that, they weren't communicating with one another. They understood they had to share information. Always a problem with bureaucracies about sharing information. But this was information that was going to have an effect on people's lives. And one of the primary things I recall is how New York City, victim of so much of this, created its own intelligence agency after 9-11. And to this day has a very significant intelligence operation. and both they, the FBI, the CIA, our military special operations have been pretty successful in identifying and thwarting a lot of terrorist attacks since to the point where now a lot of people don't think about that sort of thing very much.

16:20And we don't hear about some of the efforts and conspiracies that they managed to identify and stop. But by and large, I think what George George Bush and indeed Dick Janey as vice president put in place. It wasn't perfect by any means, but by and large, over time, it has proved successful in protecting the American people. Well, take an example. Remember the brawl over so-called warrantless wiretaps of overseas sources? The New York Times broke this story, which unfortunately uncovered this. I say unfortunately because it was an extremely useful tool. And it included eavesdropping on terrorists overseas, which isn't illegal, but sometimes it captured American that they would contact.

17:06Well, why is that important? Because we didn't want terrorists overseas giving a green light to their conspirators here. That was a huge fight, but it was ultimately codified with all kinds of protocols for its use in something called Section 702, which is utterly crucial to intelligence gathering. And intelligence gathering bill being one of our asymmetrical advantages over the terrorists. We don't have many because all they have to do, and this is a cliche now, but all they have to do is succeed once. We have to succeed every time to prevent these attacks. That and interrogation of terrorists we capture, which of course was also terribly controversial, but was crucial to capturing the original 9-11 terrorists.

17:52Yeah, my colleague at the White House, Mark Thiessen, wrote a book on the enhanced interrogations, which caused most of the stir. And I think he makes a pretty good case. They weren't as abusive as people claim. They provide a lot of good intelligence. Look, in the beginning, we were all united. Everyone's let's go get the enemy and so forth. But as usual, within like two years, it all started changing. And Butch was fighting the terrorists abroad. And he's fighting a lot of opposition at home to his war effort. And it really hurt at times for this. We were not unified by the end of the war. And I think that took a toll.

18:34But as Dan pointed out, if you had said on that afternoon, when I was going back to New Jersey from trying to get into work and my mind was racing, if you told me we wouldn't be attacked again in the next, the remaining years, Bush and Bush too. I would have said you were crazy. There's no way we could have done that. A lot of people did their jobs and that kept us safer and really made a difference for people. I don't think we still realize, and I don't think people realize what a change it was. The surge was only part of that that came later in Iraq. It was a surge in Iraq, yeah. In Iraq, came later.

19:13And most people think of that as we threw more troops in there. And that's not true. What we did is totally change the strategy just as we totally changed the military, political intelligence architecture to make us more subtle, more flexible, and going after the bad guys. I don't think people realize just how much our infrastructure has changed to meet the new threat. Not just the no attacks through the Bush two terms, Bill, But the last 25 years, Dan, we've not had an attack of that magnitude. We've had the so-called lone wolf attacks of people, some homegrown jihadists who were radicalized by contact with people overseas, some just radicalized by events here somehow.

20:03But nothing at all like the attack on 9-11. And if you had asked me 25 years ago if we would have avoided that over a quarter century, I would have said, I doubt it. Well, look, let's just mention one example that every one of us is aware of, and that's the security checks. When we go to the airport, you're still going through those lines. And I had an experience with them this past April when I was on my way to London for an event, and we were asked to, we were on the plane, we were asked to get off, and we had to sit there for two hours. And the reason was they had found a small black bag on the plane that no one would claim.

20:44Ultimately, they brought out the sniffer dogs. I was watching them through the window. The dogs went in there, and they went through the whole plane, finally put us back on. Very inconvenient, unquestionably. But all of that activity at the airport, all those TSA workers are aimed at one thing, preventing what happened on 9-11. It is all about security. And so there is a mindset across the government that this is something we don't want to have happen again. And all those workers are doing those jobs, looking at those bags. That is the point of it all. We are going to take another break. When we come back, we'll talk about just how safe the country is now, the homeland is from foreign threats when we come back.

21:29Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades. Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. That is, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the Opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigo here on Potomac Watch with Dan Henninger and Bill McGurn. So the lessons for deterrence and whether and how safe we are now seems to be crucial.

22:19This change in mindset that we've been talking about. But I think undeniably, because of the structures put in place, some of the policies put in place, we are safer from the threats that existed then. But the question in my mind that I'm asking myself and ask it all the time is, what about the multiplying threats we face today? And they are multiplying. And there's cyber, for example, cyber attacks. There's our space vulnerability with the satellites and GPS. Soon there will be AI agents who can do harm for us from overseas. The water and electricity infrastructure seems to be vulnerable. Then there's the drones that we have been watching what Ukraine's been able to do in Russia.

23:07Who knows if there are drones planted here by some enemy that could be suddenly triggered to attack our planes or hit bases or, you know, even a terrorist attack on a big crowd at a huge event like a football stadium or something like that. The point is the homeland here is really vulnerable in a way that I don't think Americans fully appreciate. And I think we are vulnerable. We have to understand that. And that's the case 25 years after 9-11 for more vigilance and for enhancing deterrence by letting adversaries know that if they do attack us, they will be hit back very, very hard. and will not survive the experience, Bill.

23:56Yeah, I agree. Look, the other mix, one advantage we do have is that our citizens are not passive. You know, so many terrorist attacks are thwarted not by law enforcement or the military, but by ordinary citizens just stepping forward. And, you know, it started on 9-11. Some of the heroism we saw, the head of security for Morgan Stanley, Rick Escola, He led like 2 ,000 people to safety, and he was heard saying, it's a great day to be American. And he heard that, and a lot of people acted like he did. And the shoe bomber, the fellow passengers, they're not passive. Remember the attempted attack on a dam, probably remember, on a Parisian train a couple years ago, and two American passengers, they subdued the guy.

24:50They identified the threat and subdued them. I don't think we can underestimate that. We're not just going to sit back and passively rely on some super law enforcement or military to protect us. A lot of it begins with alertness among ourselves. And I think, fortunately, the resilience of the American people is a big asset we can count on. A crucial point, Bill. And of course, Rick Reswala went back into the tower and was killed when they fell. So, Dan, that's a very important point about an alert citizenry. Yeah, there's no question about it, but you need an informed citizenry as well. And there is a sense today that people's minds have drifted away from issues like this and overseas threats.

25:37You know, a lot of the commentary on 9-11 has been focusing on the, quote, unquote, forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as though that was the only result of 9-11. and it makes people want to pull back into what we call isolationism. And there is a kind of sense of isolationism growing on both the left and the right these days. That puts us at risk, I think, that kind of thinking, because it suggests that maybe not so much energy or even revenue has to be spent on deterrence, either domestic deterrence or overseas deterrence, which leads to the issue of political polarization in this country.

26:18amongst Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic Party over the years has become basically a party that does not want to spend money on defense or military matters because they're so committed to enlarging their domestic spending. And one of the unfortunate consequences of that is that a conversation among the political leadership in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, has declined on some of the issues you're raising, cybersecurity, nuclear security, infrastructure security. They just don't talk about it anymore. And that raises the risk that we can just kind of find ourselves stumbling towards a situation similar to what happened in 9-11, where we stop thinking about these threats.

27:06Yeah, you can easily slip into complacency when you haven't had an attack in a while. And the complacency that has struck Europe since the end of the Cold War, they slipped into this kind of comfort level, living in reasonable prosperity. The state takes care of them economically in many respects, but they haven't been able to, they didn't want to spend anything on defense. And then suddenly, boom, they find themselves vulnerable from a different sort of Russian leader. and now they're scrambling to defend themselves. You can see that complacency somewhat in the U.S. in the debate over Section 702, the intelligence authority to wiretap terrorists overseas.

27:50They've not been able to reach agreement on reauthorizing it. We've had Jim Himes, the Democratic ranking member on the Intelligence Committee in the House come in. He's for it, but a lot of his members aren't. Colleagues aren't, and the same, some libertarians on the right who say, ah, this is used to wiretap Americans. No, it's not. But that is the kind of disinformation that also spreads and can lead to a pre-9-1-1 mindset, to borrow Bill's phrase. All right, gentlemen, I want to thank you both for being here. It's quite remarkable to still be here 25 years later and thinking back to that momentous day.

28:29Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Dan. Thank you all for listening. We are here every day on Potomac Watch. Congress has talked about permitting reform for decades. Now it's time to actually do it and secure our affordable energy future. Pass permitting reform now. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.