America After 9/11: 25 Years of Fear, War, Surveillance, and Permanent Emergency
“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in – and the West in general – into an unbearable hell and a choking life.” – Osama bin Laden (October 2001)
“GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.” – President Donald Trump (September 2026)
Days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump flooded his Truth Social account with AI-generated fantasies of himself commanding armies of giant, red-eyed robots.
In one, Trump strides through a darkened Washington surrounded by robotic soldiers beneath the words, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another declares, “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.” A third depicts Trump seated on a mechanical throne, surrounded by an army of robots and the presidential seal, beneath the warning: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”
Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?
For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.
That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.
Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.
The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.
Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president – especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state – is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.
That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.
On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.
On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.
America began by rebelling against a king.
Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.
And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?
To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.
That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.
A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.
Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.
Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.
This is the bitter irony of America at 250.
We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.
Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.
What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?
Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.
Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.
And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.
That is the trap.
Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended – it became the government.
The USA Patriot Act, rushed through Congress just 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights. It dramatically expanded the government’s powers, weakened safeguards against government overreach, and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance of the American people.
What was sold to us as a temporary response to terrorism became the foundation for something much larger.
The lesson we still haven’t learned: mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer.
Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.
George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention and preemptive war. Barack Obama expanded the drone wars, normalized targeted killings and presided over an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus. Successive administrations embraced secret watchlists, warrantless data collection and sweeping executive authority.
Donald Trump did not create this machinery.
He inherited it.
What makes this moment so dangerous is his willingness to use that machinery aggressively, openly and with little patience for the constitutional restraints that are supposed to prevent presidents from becoming kings.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.
Not content to wage war against Afghanistan after 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq under a preemptive war doctrine that embraced striking threats before they were fully formed.
The consequences were catastrophic: lives lost, trillions squandered, regions destabilized, terrorist movements radicalized, and the constitutional power to decide when the nation goes to war steadily transferred from Congress to the president.
Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.
The circle is complete.
9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.
The lesson we still haven’t learned: preemptive strikes do not make us safer. They create more enemies, more instability and more blowback.
War has become the permanent business of the American empire.
The military-industrial complex profits. Defense contractors prosper. Politicians posture. Presidents accumulate power.
The American people get the bill.
The post-9/11 wars have cost trillions, killed or displaced millions, and scarred generations of servicemen and women. Every new conflict creates the justification for still more military spending, secrecy, emergency powers and government control.
War abroad has a way of coming home.
After 9/11, the government embraced torture in the name of national security. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what happens when human beings are reduced to enemy combatants and government agents are told the normal rules no longer apply.
That battlefield mindset did not remain overseas.
Local police departments acquired armored vehicles, military weapons, tactical gear and battlefield training. SWAT teams became routine instruments of law enforcement. Military surveillance tools became tools for monitoring ordinary Americans.
Today, ICE increasingly operates like a domestic paramilitary force, carrying out raids, detentions and enforcement operations under a cloak of secrecy and impunity while being equipped with ever more aggressive technologies, from robot dogs to electric shock weapons.
National Guard troops are being normalized as a domestic law-enforcement presence, further eroding the barrier between military and civilian government that laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act were intended to preserve.
The language changed, too.
Citizens became “suspects.” Communities became “threat environments.” Protesters became potential extremists. The homeland became a battlefield.
The lesson we still haven’t learned: the tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home.
This is precisely what the Founders feared. James Madison warned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
We ignored him.
The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.
The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.
The Patriot Act normalized mass surveillance. Technology has since made the machinery exponentially more powerful.
Today, government agencies no longer need someone following you in an unmarked car to create detailed records of where Americans travel, whom they visit and how they live. Your phone tells them. Your car tells them. FLOCK license plate readers tell them. Facial recognition cameras tell them. Your purchases, internet searches, social-media activity, location history and digital communications fill in the rest.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not eliminate terrorism. It will create a watched, tracked and increasingly submissive society.
Yet the deeper problem is that we stopped insisting that government obey the same laws it imposes on us. Once “national security” became an acceptable excuse for warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, secret courts and undeclared wars, the exception began swallowing the rule.
Congress surrendered authority. Presidents seized it. Courts deferred. The public became accustomed to government officials acting first and answering questions later.
Now we see the consequences everywhere.
The Supreme Court increasingly arrives too late to stop executive abuses before the damage is done, if it intervenes at all. The president bulldozes through legal and constitutional restraints, creates a crisis or a spectacle, and leaves Congress, the courts and the American people to deal with the wreckage.
The lesson we still haven’t learned: if we stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it will respect will be the ones it can use against us.
This failure transcends political parties.
Republicans cheered executive power under Republican presidents. Democrats cheered it under Democratic presidents. Then both sides expressed shock when those powers were turned against them.
Powers do not remain partisan.
Surveillance powers created to catch terrorists are used against Americans. Emergency powers become tools of ordinary government. Military powers migrate into domestic policing. Executive powers tolerated under one president become precedents for the next.
And once government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.
Trump is merely the latest president to demonstrate the danger of giving any one person such enormous power. He has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 state and shown how readily it can be turned to the purposes of an increasingly imperial presidency.
We are not merely repeating the mistakes of the past 25 years. We have institutionalized them.
A national-security apparatus powerful enough to track a terrorist can track a political opponent. A president empowered to wage war without Congress can invoke “national security” to bypass constitutional limits at home. A military normalized on American streets can be turned against Americans.
The police state does not care which party controls it.
And therein lies the madness of giving any president such enormous power.
The Founders did not assume that every president would be wise, rational, restrained or benevolent. They divided power precisely because human beings cannot be trusted with too much of it.
A free people cannot make their liberties dependent upon the judgment, temperament or sanity of a single ruler.
Yet for 25 years, under presidents of both parties, we have systematically weakened those restraints while strengthening the presidency.
Now the reckoning has arrived.
Trump’s fitness to exercise the immense powers of his office cannot be separated from the larger question of why any president should possess so much unilateral power in the first place.
The lesson we still haven’t learned: the more power we give the presidency, the more dangerous the presidency becomes when the person occupying it proves unwilling – or unable – to exercise that power with restraint.
That brings us back to the nightmare.
Fear has always been the fuel of the police state.
Keep people frightened enough, divided enough and distrustful enough of one another, and they will beg the government to protect them – even when the price of that protection is their freedom.
That bargain has defined post-9/11 America.
Benjamin Franklin famously warned against trading essential liberty for temporary safety.
We made the trade anyway.
The government seized our freedoms, but the assurance of safety never materialized. Instead, the emergencies multiplied: Terrorism. War. Pandemic. Immigration. Crime. Civil unrest. Political extremism.
Each crisis becomes another justification for government power. Each new power establishes another precedent. Each precedent becomes another weapon waiting for the next president to wield it.
That is what makes the convergence of these two anniversaries so important.
The Declaration of Independence was an indictment of a despot who obstructed the laws, manipulated institutions, maintained standing armies among the people, placed military power above civilian authority and repeatedly violated the rights of those he governed.
Two hundred and fifty years later, those grievances sound uncomfortably familiar.
The uniforms have changed. The technology has changed. The vocabulary has changed. The greed for money and power have not.
Nor have the duties of the citizenry to oppose such tyranny.
If constitutional government is to survive, Congress must reclaim the powers it has surrendered. The courts must stop treating “national security” as a magic phrase capable of making constitutional violations disappear. The machinery of mass surveillance must be dismantled. Domestic militarization must be rolled back. Emergency powers must be temporary, narrow and subject to meaningful oversight.
And the American people must stop allowing fear to dictate the boundaries of their freedom.
Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.
We are doing that ourselves.
Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.
Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.
America has spent 250 years proclaiming its freedom and the past 25 years building the machinery with which to extinguish it.
Two anniversaries. One reckoning.
America must decide what it intends to be: a republic governed by the rule of law or an empire governed by permanent war, permanent surveillance and permanent emergency.
We cannot be both.
The choice we make will determine nothing less than the survival of the American experiment in freedom.
9/11’s Aftereffect: The Constitutional Accountability Abyss
Over the last several weeks in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., I’ve had American and foreign journalists ask me the same question: how did 9/11 change America?
My answer has generally been some version of this: 9/11 didn’t change us, we allowed it to change us, and in doing so critically damaged our very own political way of life.
We allowed our Arab American and Muslim American fellow citizens to become targets of federal surveillance and to be placed on secret government “watch lists” in the absence of any evidence they’d committed a crime.
We allowed the creation of the most sweeping and invasive surveillance dragnet in American history – first in secret via the National Security Agency’s (NSA) STELLAR WIND program and then openly through the passage of the PATRIOT Act just six weeks after the attacks.
We allowed a previous American president to lead our nation into a war against a country – Iraq – that had nothing to do with al Qaeda’s terrorist atrocities. The drama came complete with a televised presentation of “evidence” to the United Nations Security Council of the continuing threat Saddam Hussein allegedly posed to the region – evidence that turned out to be false.
We allowed those who opposed George W. Bush’s war of choice against Iraq to be targeted by the FBI with surveillance and informant penetration operations that mirrored some of the worst Cold War era tactics employed by J. Edgar Hoover and the organization he led.
We allowed our government to set up secret torture chambers around the world for captured Arab and Muslim men – the CIA’s “rendition, detention, and interrogation” (RDI) program (a.k.a., the torture program). Some, like Khalid Shaik Mohammad (KSM), were directly responsible for the attacks. Others not only had nothing to do with the attacks but no involvement with terrorism at all. And through it all, the U.S. abandoned the very principles of justice under law and due process that it had proclaimed to the world since the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after World War II. That torture program has already damaged the legal case against KSM.
And we allowed the president who authorized these things to get away with all of them and leave office legally unmolested.
I’ve used the phrase “we allowed” because we who are citizens of the Republic cannot escape our responsibility for what George W. Bush did, even if we voted for his opponents in 2000 and 2004.
Yes, there were those who went into the streets to protest the Iraq War and the creation of the Guantanamo prison and its dysfunctional, sham trial system. Those who risked police batons, tasers, and tear gas to raise their voices against unjust wars and the torture of those we captured deserve remembrance and praise. But they were too few in number to alter the course of events because too many of their fellow Americans did not join them when it mattered most.
I witnessed these events from a different angle, that of a senior House staffer working for then-New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt during the final four years of Bush’s presidency. Holt’s repeated efforts to stop runaway surveillance programs from his position on the House Intelligence Committee frequently came to naught because of the refusal of many of his colleagues to join his efforts.
Bush’s authorization of the secret STELLAR WIND mass electronic surveillance program after the 9/11 attacks was a direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. It literally represented an impeachable offense, as was his authorization of the CIA’s torture program. And even though multiple impeachment resolutions against Bush or then-Vice President Dick Cheney were introduced, they went nowhere – even though Democrats controlled the House during Bush’s last two years in office.
The fact that not a single House GOP member signed onto any of those resolutions no doubt contributed to the failure to hold Bush accountable for his misconduct in office. It was a posture that stood in stark contrast to the seven House Judiciary Committee Republicans who joined their Democrat colleagues in voting to impeach Richard Nixon for his crimes in office over 30 years earlier.
The degradation of the Congressional ethos of institutionalism and constitutional protection began before 9/11, but the attacks and how we responded to them accelerated the process of political and constitutional decline and the intensification partisan loyalty to the president. Donald Trump did not create this phenomenon, but he and his closest aides have exploited it and pushed it to new depths.
The brutalization of immigrants (legal or otherwise), the legal and political attacks on individuals or entities that oppose Trump’s policies, the expansion of mass surveillance programs, the initiation of multiple illegal military actions – all of this and more has come to pass because of a failure to hold accountable a prior president who engaged in almost identical misconduct in the years after 9/11. Whether that dynamic can be broken and reversed is up to each of us.
Cato senior fellow Patrick G. Eddington is the author of The Triumph of Fear.
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