Twenty-Five Years Later: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror

The Council on Foreign Relations invites you to a special offsite event in partnership with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. 

Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the aftershocks of that day continue to shape U.S. foreign policy, domestic security, and global affairs. Panelists examine the lasting implications of 9/11 and the national security challenges facing the United States today. Drawing on their extensive experience in government and policy, the speakers offer a historical perspective as we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. The program will be preceded by a private tour of the Museum exclusively for CFR members. 

This event is the inaugural meeting of a Council series acknowledging the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

HILLMAN: Good evening. I’m Beth Hillman, the president and CEO of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. And it’s a great honor to welcome you here tonight. Warm greetings, and I mean warm—(laughter)—to our museum members. Also special greetings to the esteemed members of the Council on Foreign Relations, who’ve joined us. And thank you too to everyone who’s tuning in via our live webstream. I want to give a special welcome to two people that the Council on Foreign Relations and the Memorial and Museum share. That’s our trustee Emily Rafferty and our trustee Secretary Jeh Charles Johnson. Thank you for your leadership.

This year marks a milestone, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A wide range of public programs here in the Memorial Museum this year will explore the effects of those attacks across generations, disciplines, and sectors of public and private life. Tonight’s program begins that exploration in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations, with a look at 9/11’s impact on U.S. foreign policy, domestic security, and global affairs, with Dr. Richard Haass and Ms. Frances Fragos Townsend. Thanks to Farah Pandith and Bruce Hoffman for conspiring to create tonight’s event, alongside our museum director and fellow CFR member Clifford Chanin. Farah is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the first ever Muhammad Ali Global Peace laureate. Bruce is CFR’s Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security. Please join me in welcoming Farrah Pandith to introduce our program. (Applause.)

PANDITH: Good evening. It’s an exceptional honor to be here at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. It’s hard to believe that a quarter of a century has passed since the horrid events of that day. We honor those who lost their lives, and are humbled to be in this sacred space together. The Council on Foreign Relations, where I work, together with my colleague Bruce Hoffman, is a place of inquiry and analysis. Bruce and I are focused on terrorism, extremism, and hate, a sobering issue set, especially in the world of 2026. The threat landscape today is far more dangerous than it was on 9/11. And with the rise of ideologies at home and abroad powered by technology and practiced recruitment, it is vital that we explore the reasons why, the consequences, and the possible solutions.

This is why the Council is kicking off a monthly series leading up to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, beginning with tonight’s special conversation. We thank the 9/11 Memorial and Museum for its partnership with the Council, and our distinguished panelists for their participation in this evening. I will not share full bios which are available online, but for the purpose of our conversation this evening we’ll focus on their roles preceding and during the aftermath of the attacks.

Richard Haass is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, after having served as CFR’s president for twenty years. Haass previously served in the Department of State under Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, at the White House under George H.W. Bush, and at the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter. He was the U.S. envoy to the Cyprus negotiations and the northern island peace process, and after 9/11 was the U.S. coordinator for the future of Afghanistan.

Francis Fragos Townsend served in senior national security roles under President George W. Bush, including assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, and as chair of the Homeland Security Council. She also served as deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism, and spent thirteen years as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice under multiple administrations. She is also a board member at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the International Republican Institute, and is a member of the Aspen Security Group.

Our moderator tonight is Clifford Chanin. He is the executive vice president and director of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, with responsibility for the museum’s exhibitions, collections, education, and public programs. A native of New York, he joined the original planning team for the museum in 2005. For ten years he was associate director of arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he developed programs on pluralism and development in the Muslim world. Previously he worked as a journalist and as a spokesman for the mayor of New York. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Cliff, over to you. Thank you, and good evening. (Applause.)

CHANIN: Thank you, Farah. I have to just take a moment to thank Farah and Bruce for their generous cooperation with us, reaching out to us. We all know this is a milestone year. You are here, in the place which was the center of this event. So it’s entirely appropriate that we begin our institutional reflection on these twenty-five years in conjunction with the Council’s reflection on these twenty-five years. This is the place that we all come back to those twenty-five years ago. I do want to welcome the Council members. I’m just curious, if you have not been here before, would you raise your hand? Welcome. And I want to welcome—I see a number of our members and regular visitors as well. And that’s a hint that, for those of you who are here for the first time, you might think of becoming members too at the museum. (Laughter.) OK, I’ve done my selling.

Thank you to both of you for taking the time in coming here. I do want to take us back to the day, and situate each of you in those moments, where you were, where you learned what was going on. You’ll tell us, of course, what you were doing at the time, and how it intersects with 9/11. But, Fran, let me start with you.

TOWNSEND: So mine is a sort of unique story. I had been—what is now the National Security Division at the Justice Department was really just a unit at the time. It was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And so I was responsible for the legal review of wiretaps related to national security issues. And at the time, they mostly focused on terrorist groups. And so I, and the intelligence community—there was a handful of people working the terrorism issue pre-9/11. On the day—two weeks before—not quite two weeks before 9/11, I gave birth to my second son. And so I was at home that morning doing a morning feeding. And had the news on. And I think, unlike most Americans, when I saw the plane go into the tower, the first plane, I knew no pilot, no matter what the problem—if a pilot had control of that, he would have put it in the Hudson River, the East River. There’s no pilot who would have deliberately flown it into a building.

And so I immediately knew we had a problem. I knew this was a terrorist attack. And I reached out to the man, a good friend, a good partner, had just retired from the FBI, John O’Neill had, three or four weeks prior, taken over is the chief of security of the World Trade Center. And my first thing was to text him to say, are you OK? He texted me back right away. He was OK. And so I then literally hand the baby off and begin to work, talking to other folks, trying to get an agent—agents up to New York. I obviously then check on John later in the day, over and over and over. Don’t get any response. And come to find much later that he was in the stairwell of the North Tower when it collapsed.

CHANIN: Richard, where were you?

HAASS: So let me situate myself. I had two hats at the time. I was the head of the policy planning staff at the State Department under Colin Powell and I was also the U.S. envoy for the Northern Ireland peace process. Well, that day I was wearing my—began the day wearing my second hat. And I was literally in the office of the Taoiseach, the prime minister of Ireland. And he and I were having one of our regular meetings, I traveled over there several times a year, when the security person, I think it was—there was a phone call. The security person rushed in and said the first plane had hit the tower. So he and I put on the television, the prime minister and I put on the television in his office. And we literally saw the second plane hit the tower. And we just looked at each other, stunned. And the topic of our meeting, which was how to promote the Northern Ireland peace process, seemed about as far from priority as you could get. So we talked between us for a few minutes about what it might mean. We went out. We had a large press contingent following him and me. And we did an impromptu press conference.

I then called back to Washington to find out if I should go back. And the answer was I couldn’t go back because the airspace was closed down. So there I was, and speaking to my staff. And I spoke to Secretary Powell. And he basically said, just stay where you are. I could work out of our embassy. And he said, you know, give me your thoughts. So basically, I did two things. One is I traveled, of all places, to Belfast by train. And the irony of it was powerful, because what was Belfast? Belfast was a small city which, in some ways, was synonymous with the word “terrorism.” And I was meeting with the leaders of Northern Ireland that night. This is still—or, that afternoon. And I remember telling them, things have changed in the United States. And our tolerance and willingness to look the other way at terrorism has just evaporated.

And up to then, people in Northern Ireland had often raised money in the United States to carry out terrorist acts. And I said, those days are over once and for all. So in an odd sort of way, this gave me an unexpected piece of leverage and talking point. And the other thing I did, I couldn’t sleep, and I wrote one of the longest memos I’ve ever written to Secretary Powell about how—this is putting on my policy planning hat—about how we should respond. And here are the different components of a policy. Here’s what we need to think about with terrorism. A big part of it was how to deal with Pakistan, and so forth. And basically in the next few days, I worked out of—after I finished in Northern Ireland—I worked out of London, essentially speaking to the secretary and speaking to my staff about, essentially, putting into place the components of our—of our post-9/11 policy.

CHANIN: So where did terrorism fit into the threat hierarchy that the U.S. government was dealing with at that point? I’ll ask Richard first, because, Fran, I want to come back to you at a different, more granular level, where you were working.

HAASS: To be perfectly honest, it barely fit at all. My office was tasked with writing the National Security Strategy. Every president is tasked by law. It’s supposed to be an annual thing. So we had worked on it. We were working on the first draft at that point. And terrorism was a minor, minor bit of it. The big questions after—if you think about 2001, it was about a decade after the end of the Cold War. And the big issues at the time were a lot of the big issues what to do about the former Soviet Union, about Russia, China, Middle East, what have you. It was the stuff of foreign policy. And terrorism didn’t figure centrally.

You know, after 9/11 we went and redid the draft. And that’s another story, because there was a big split within the U.S. government about how much it should drive American foreign policy. And that, in some ways, was the precursor, or the first phase, of the debate about what became Iraq in 2003. But let me just make a confession here. You know, I’m a, I guess you’d say, a meat and potatoes foreign policy guy. I was lucky enough to lead the Council on Foreign Relations for two decades. That’s about as foreign policy establishment as you get. And for people such as myself, terrorism was not what we did. There were experts, you know, Fran, Farah, Bruce, and others who did terrorism. But that was almost a compartment. And people who did foreign policy were either functionalists or regionalists, great-power people.

So when a lot of the postmortems were written about 9/11, a lot of it focused on how the quote/unquote “dots weren’t connected.” The FBI wasn’t talking to the CIA wasn’t talking to this—you know, the intelligence wasn’t reported or connected. And, you know, we put together afterwards a lot of data, or a lot of intel, that, if it had been put together beforehand, we might have had a better picture of what could happen, and we might have taken certain steps to prevent it. That’s a kind of tactical take on things. What I’m trying to say is strategically, for people such as myself—here I was, the head of the policy planning staff—this was not high on the charts. When I went to work in the morning, this wasn’t what I was thinking about. And you can say that’s a blind spot, what have you, but I think it was just sort of a fact of almost everybody who was working in the national security establishment, be they at State, the Pentagon, the White House. This was just not front and center at the time.

CHANIN: So, Fran, you were on the other side of that. You were in that compartmented area. And we’ve spoken over the years to others who were your colleagues at that time. And, as you said, it was a small group. And yet, quoting Richard Clarke from the time, you know, my hair was on fire. And yet, you didn’t seem to be able to get to the policy level with your concerns. Were you as worried before 9/11 as you needed to be? And was it frustrating for you all that whatever warnings you might want to offer were not really getting you the attention you thought you needed?

TOWNSEND: So, again, to provide a little context, the NSC has sort of a working group level, a deputy’s committee level, and a principal’s level. The principal is the Cabinet, deputies are the deputy secretaries, and then there’s a lower group. And Dick Clarke, Richard Clarke, chaired the policy—the sort of working level expert group on counterterrorism. And so we would all trudge over to the White House Situation Room. And we would discuss the rising threat in great detail, and talk to him about operations, and what we were seeing, what we were collecting. And so it was a little—at that time, I was not yet a policymaker. But the whole purpose of briefing at the White House is for that information to get shared up. Now I can’t speak for Richard, but certainly I, John O’Neill, the others who were trekking over to brief him, assumed that information was going up and that there would be deputies and principals-level meetings to discuss what we were seeing. That clearly didn’t happen, which, post 9/11, you might imagine, I found quite shocking.

CHANIN: Yeah. And you move into a more senior level a couple of years later. By then, we are at war. The threat has made itself very clear. But talk about how the priorities did change, not just because of fighting wars but because the threat had manifested itself. And there was the fear of WMD at the time, and we’ll get to that. But how did the government actually change in those initial years of the imminent crisis?

TOWNSEND: So, as in most things, I think, we went—we went from a place where the policymaker was not so focused on it to it captured every single day.

HAASS: Remember the threat matrix?

TOWNSEND: That’s exactly where I’m going. Every single day the president got what was called the threat matrix at the time. And when I came into my job at the White House, I was given this thing. It was updated every day. But it was like this—you know, two inches thick. And I was, like, that’s going into the president’s daily briefing book. And I was furious, because I thought this is—having been at a lower level—this is the bureaucrats trying to cover themselves. So if any one of those things goes wrong they can say, well, we told the president. (Laughter.) The answer is, that’s ridiculous. And it’s unfair to the president. So literally the first thing I did when I went into the Oval Office was to say to the president, I’m going to take that away. And they were all, like, you’re going to what? And I said, listen, let me create a better product for you that’s actually more useful to you. And you know what? If you don’t get what you need, if something critical is left off that, you can fire me. But this shouldn’t be your responsibility.

And so he got a briefing on counterterrorism every single day. And he took it quite seriously. So much so—this now links up to something Richard said—by the second term—the president’s second term, you’re now talking 2004, there’s a discussion at the White House about—and there’s very strong feelings—we cannot continue to let counterterrorism run our foreign policy, because, lo and behold, I’ve now—I’ve gone from the counterterrorism remit—I am now become a foreign policy expert. I’m flying all over the world, meeting with heads of state to get cooperation. And we realize we’ve taken—while we have to devote substantial resources and time and policy to this issue, it can’t be to the exclusion of other national interests. And so the second term is really about, can we get this balance better?

CHANIN: Richard, was the balance properly reset over the course of the wars? Which were themselves an enormous burden on the policymaking apparatus.

HAASS: In the short run, no. One would have to say that—I think when historians write about them—I guess they already have. One of them sitting up here. (Laughter.) When one looks at Afghanistan and Iraq, I would say what we did initially in Afghanistan was totally warranted. We gave the Taliban, who had been harboring al-Qaida, a choice, essentially, stop allowing your territory to be used, hand them over so they could face justice. Taliban refused. We went in. We basically, to use a phrase that’s very much in the news today, working with the northern alliance, succeeded in a regime ouster. Then we convened a diplomatic process in Bonn, if I have my cities right. And we helped cobble together—no pun intended, but not a bad pun—a successor government for Afghanistan. And then I would say, you could argue, somewhere along the way we may have lost our way in terms of what was our definition of success.

I think the Iraq lead up, and if you go from 9/11, which was 2001, we went in—eighteen months later we were at war in Iraq, if my calendar memory is correct. I would say that was an overreaction. I called it an unwarranted war of choice then. I still see it that way. And I think it was an overreaction to what had happened. So, yeah, I’d say it’s probably—you know, pendulums—the nature of pendulum swings is they tend to overreact, whether you’re talking about financial markets, intellectual, political markets. And I think it was true here. And what Fran and I would probably agree on was a certain underappreciation, if you will, of terrorism pre 9/11, then probably went into something of a distortion, too much of an emphasis, both in the narrow, but also what it meant for other things being pushed away. And I think Iraq was probably the zenith, if you will, of that.

And I think the question over the years has been to find, if you will, the right balance. And my guess is we’re probably closer to it now, because we’ve institutionalized certain things. We did not go back to the status quo ante before 9/11, where it was really kind of off the policymakers’ charts. On the other hand, we’re not—the threat matrix and some of these ambitious wars of choice I think have been pushed aside. And if you think about, you know, the big issues now, we’ve got, if you will, traditional aggression in Europe, thanks to Mr. Putin. We’ve got concerns about the rise of China, Taiwan. We’ve got things in the Middle East. Whatever global issues you want, Western Hemisphere and all that. So if you will, traditional foreign policy concerns have come to the fore.

I think the challenge going forward, and I’d be really interested what Fran has to say, is how do we make sure we—again—well, first of all, what is the right focus, emphasis, intellectually? And the second is, how do we make sure then we institutionalize it in the policymaking process? How do we avoid too much and too little focus? What’s the Goldilocks answer, if you will, on that? And it’s—like everything else, it’s a judgment call. And I’d curious as to whether you think we’ve got it about right now. I’ve been out of government for twenty-plus years, so I’m probably not the best person to ask. And if there were to be, God forbid, a major terrorist attack again, whether that would be evidence that we underestimated it, and that’s how to see it, or whether simply that terrorists can also be fairly capable if they put their minds to it.

TOWNSEND: You know, as I prepared to for tonight I went back and I thought to myself, twenty-five years ago what would I have thought if you said to me: Twenty-five years hence the Taliban will be thoroughly entrenched running Afghanistan again, you’ll have an ISIS leader running Syria. We thought Assad was bad. And I say to myself, I would have thought you were gaslighting me. On the other hand, I would not have anticipated Iran being so weakened as it is, that Hezbollah and Hamas are back on their heels. And so it’s interesting. I was reminded of that when Richard talked about the pendulum swinging.

Look, I worry—you talk to high school students, and they’ll tell you—I asked one of them, are you taught in your history class about 9/11? The answer is no. And so I’m going to take one minute to say how sacred to me and to the country the museum is, because it forces a memory of the people who both we lost and the people who have ever since, over that twenty-five years, spent a lot of time and effort to keep us safe. And so it makes—the museum is now more important than I think it was twenty-five years ago. And I think it will—its importance will continue over time.

In terms of the balance, look, I worry. Because the other thing I wouldn’t have imagined twenty-five years ago, if you said twenty-five years from now you’re not—we’re not going to be as worried or as focused on foreign terrorism, but the real focus of the effort and the resources is going to be domestic terrorism. Again, you would have gotten what I call the dumb dog look. You know, like, what? But that’s the fact. And so the balance I worry about, Richard, is I’m not saying—we have—there’s a domestic terrorism issue we have to spend time, resources, and treasure against. But that doesn’t mean that the foreign threat has gone away. And so I worry that, again, the pendulum has swung a little too far to the domestic terrorism side, and at the expense of—now, you can do both. But the resources, as we know, people make choices. And there have been resources pulled from foreign terrorism investigations and intelligence operations, and there are now a greater focus on domestic. And I think we’re going to—I think it that’s a risk that we may live to regret.

HAASS: Don’t disagree with that, particularly when one marries up modern technology, both its availability and its potential lethality. And we have—I’m not the right person to have a conversation about potential uses of AI and other technologies, but I would think that the capacity in biotech and other areas is great to cause harm. So, you know, when I think about—coming back to the balance question—we’ve got to, if you will, do both. It’s not an either/or. We’ve got to do, if you will, the traditional stuff of foreign policy. Worry about great powers and strong states. Worry about weak states. Worry about global issues. But we’ve also—we’ve got to also worry about terrorism. And particularly since what we used to—we used to make a distinction between retail and wholesale, or traditional terrorism and grand terrorism. And the potential for grand terrorism, I think, is real.

And we don’t have the luxury, if you will, of only thinking about traditional foreign policy or national security. It seems to me that would be irresponsible. And, again, it’s getting—again, you can’t focus exclusively on it. We got to worry about what Mr. Putin is doing, what Mr. Xi might do, but we’ve all—but there’s got to be the scope to—if you will, to deal with traditional as well as, if you will, nontraditional threats. That seems to me just—that’s reality.

TOWNSEND: And Richard’s mention of AI, you know, somebody who worked in the counterterrorism world, here’s what I worry about, right? We know that for AI it requires a lot of energy and computing. And so we’ve seen, understandably so, the reopening of the discussion on nuclear power. Don’t have a problem with that. But with nuclear power comes the security of nuclear materials. Nobody’s talking about that. And if I were—I used to—I always say, if I were a bad guy, that’s where I’d be focused, because we’re in such a hurry, understandably, to get the energy we need to feed the compute for AI, who is thinking about the security of those facilities?

CHANIN: So let me come back a little bit, because everything that happened over these twenty-five years somehow fit under this rubric which was created for it, of the Global War on Terror. And at the time and ever since, there’s been this discussion of, well, how do you have a war on a tactic rather than a place or a specific enemy? And, you know, it raises the question of the nature of radicalization, and how do you get at that? Because, if anything, that’s the source of the terrorism. Do we understand radicalization well enough? Are we in a position to arrest it, stop it? AI doesn’t seem to encourage that thought, but I want to put it out there. I mean, how do you have a war over an idea? Because it’s a question that’s been asked before but hasn’t got an answer. So we need to figure something out about that.

HAASS: You start.

TOWNSEND: OK. So, I mean, the phrase was well established by the time I arrived at the White House. And there was actually a discussion, this very discussion, in the Situation Room, which was quickly dismissed as, the American people know what we’re talking about when we talk about the war on terror. They understand the linkage to 9/11. We’re not—we have bigger fish to fry than to be changing the name. So the name, I think, was not great, but it served a certain purpose.

Nobody’s done more work on the sort of idea about radicalism than Farah so I am hesitant to speak, but I’ll say this. I think we’re seeing radicalization still, but not just around the world. We’re seeing a form of radicalization here in this country that not in a million years, forget twenty-five, would I have anticipated and started to think about, how could I deal with that. But I think we have to. And I think we have to understand all the very same tactics and principles that we saw in terms of the global war on terror and foreign terrorists, the radicalization, the recruitment, we see again. Their tactics haven’t changed. The place has changed. And I think it’s a much more difficult concept, because of our Constitution, because of people’s right and freedoms of speech. It’s a much more difficult issue to deal with here domestically than it was overseas.

HAASS: I truly dislike the phrase “war on terrorism” because it suggests that the principal instruments are military. And on occasion they may be the principal instrument, but on most occasions they won’t be. It also tends to be too reactive. What you really want to do is think about a menu of responses. The best thing is to prevent radicalism from arising and emerging. And that could be everything from an educational issue, to what people who have influenced influence in a society—what norms they promote, what religious teachings are taught. Could have to do as much with an economic policy, if people are not—if they feel economically marginalized, they feel hopeless, they might be slightly more prone to certain types of radical behavior.

In the Middle East I came away—and I’ve been visiting and working on the Middle East for over fifty years now. To me, the most powerful motive in the Middle East is humiliation. And when people feel humiliated by their circumstances, there’s no necessary limit to what they might be prepared to do. So we ought to think hard. And given the current situation if you look at things like Gaza and the rest, you might want to say to yourself: Are we doing enough to address the humiliation that people there—people there feel, and people in the West Bank feel? And I would say maybe not. And we might want to think about addressing those motives.

The only other thing I would say—I was trying to figure out where to say it but I’ll just choose now, if I may. Which is, one of the few good things, though, about this business of terrorism and counterterrorism, is when you think about it the terrorists are good at one thing. They’re good at destroying. They’re good at killing. You know, we’re hopefully good at making it difficult for them to succeed. But what they’re not good at is creating or building. And that, to me, is an important—I find that, in some ways, a slightly comforting insight, because the last twenty-five years, thank God, were not defined by al-Qaida. That we were able to, if you will, meet the challenge, reduce our vulnerability to it. And we have to compete.

And I think to me part of this is then—that’s why, again, I don’t like the phrase “war on terrorism,” whether it’s ideas, or economic policy, or social policy, or making political systems responsive, or dealing with issues of war and peace, or development, so people don’t feel humiliated, that I think can—we have got to, if you will, out-create them and out-build them. And if we do that, then I think terrorists don’t—other than their ability to maim or kill—they don’t really bring much to the—to the day-to-day. So I think they are a serious threat, but also, in some ways, a limited threat. But it’s on us to make sure that we, if you will, take them on.

CHANIN: Let me ask, and this is a question that there’s no short answer to but I will ask for a relatively short answer. (Laughs.) We’re looking back twenty-five years. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? Fran.

TOWNSEND: So, look, I do think that we were able to, after a couple of fumbles, talk to the American people in a way that helped them to understand what we were trying to combat, what the vulnerabilities were, and how we needed their help. It was pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. There was no TSA on 9/11. And Americans, not happily but willingly, subject themselves to that. Nobody asked them. Nobody gave them a choice. If you wanted to get on a plane, this is how you were going to do it. Americans did that. 2007, we had the liquid bomb plots. One morning, people showed up to the airport thinking they were taking liquids on planes and were told they had to check their bags.

In that first forty-eight hours or so we didn’t let anything go on in the cabin. Americans stood on a line, put their stuff in plastic bags, and put it in their checked bags. It was pretty extraordinary. And that was this collective sense. The most important part here is Americas felt a response—a collective responsibility that, at the individual level, they could contribute to the national security. And that was galvanizing. It was also kind of the secret sauce in what bought us time to build the capabilities Richard was talking about to reduce the threat to us. And so that I’m quite proud—not of me—I’m quite proud of the American people and what the country did in terms of coming together. I think that was a good thing.

I think where we—where it goes a little sideways is, you know, we realized early on that all of a sudden there was this divide, that somehow some Americans viewed Muslims as responsible, as opposed to these individual hijackers. And the president was so concerned about that. It was never the intent. It was certainly not the policy. It wasn’t a fact. But somehow that had gotten—and we knew we had a responsibility to fix that. I was with the president. We visited mosques. We publicized that. The president spoke about it frequently. And so I think that went a little left.

The other mistake I would say, in looking back, there were a lot of decisions that got taken at the policy level that were classified at the time secret that we’d have been better off—and we knew it was going to be—you know, there was a discussion. It was going to be a problem when these things became public, if people—because they were going to become public long after they were necessary, or felt necessary. There were the—there was the financial surveillance program that came out. There was the enhanced interrogation techniques that came out. There was a reason why these things weren’t talked about. But again, if you’re not—people in policy positions work for an elected official. That elected official answers to the American people. And so if I had one thing I’d go back and try to do differently, it would be to find a way to be able to talk, even if it wasn’t in specific terms about those programs, about what the needs and requirements were of the U.S. government to be successful against the threat in a more transparent way. It was—we could have done that better.

CHANIN: Richard.

HAASS: Let me just build on what Fran said, because I thought what you said was really insightful. One is, I’m glad that we’ve gotten through this with our civil liberties more or less intact. That wasn’t a given. One could have imagined how we could have overreacted, which we were always on guard against because we thought, what better way to hand the terrorists a victory than to compromise too many fundamental dimensions of the American way of life? So I think we avoided a kind of hysteria, almost a terrorist version of McCarthyism. And I think that—and I thought when W—when 43, President Bush, visited the mosque, that was just a wonderful example of how a president could send a powerful message to a society. I thought it was one of his best moments as a president. And I think we also got better at learning some of the mistakes of pre-9/11 and fixing them. The ways in which we learned to get various law enforcement, intelligence, domestic, international focus, basically get them communicating to one another. And we broke down some of the walls. And I thought that was a good step.

Again, I think we overreacted in some cases, like Iraq is probably the principal overreaction. And that has had all sorts of unfortunate consequences. I also think recently we’re making some mistakes when I see things like abolishing, essentially, or rolling up AID. I think that’s the sort of policy that will have legacy consequences. And I don’t think we’re doing enough to address certain economic or political grievances, legitimate ones, in certain parts of the world. I already referred to the Middle East. I think that could be potentially short-sighted. I always think about my old friend Bob Gates, colleague, you don’t want to overuse the military instrument when it comes to national security. So the question is, are we doing enough with other forms of American influence and power? And I would say, maybe not. And I think, therefore, I can imagine sowing certain seeds which could sprout in the form of terrorism with all sorts of consequences.

I’ll just also mention one other pet peeve of mine, which I understand but I think we’ve gone too far. I am really uncomfortable when I travel around the world and I see what’s happened to American embassies. And they’ve become fortresses in many cases, and no longer near the center of the countries or cities where they’re meant to be. And it just seems to me there’s got to be better ways to provide security than having, if you will, the literal manifestation of fortress America in many places around the world.

TOWNSEND: And that was—you talked about the pendulum swinging. What Richard’s describing about U.S. embassies was the result of the East Africa embassy bombings in ’98. You had two of them leveled. And, you know, as typical, the government said, we will never let that happen again. (Laughter.) And there you go.

HAASS: There you go.

CHANIN: We’re going to take some questions from the audience. I’m going to ask you to hang on until we get a microphone in front of you. The lights will come up. We can all see who’s who. Let’s start here with this gentleman right in front.

Q: Thank you all. Is this working?

CHANIN: Yeah.

Q: Thank you. I’m Sewell Chan. I’m a journalist. Thank you for these very interesting insights.

You know, to ask a kind of pessimistic question, and I’m aware I’m asking it on hallowed ground here, but if bin Laden had not been killed might he say that in some ways some of his horrible objectives twenty-five years ago have been achieved? In the sense of the following: A very deeply divided United States where there’s—often Americans can’t even agree on facts, much less what to do about them. Diminished American place in the world, in sense of our alliances. America presenting itself more to be feared than to be admired or copied. An erosion of rule of law and respect for it. One could go on. Disillusionment over the conduct of the wars, some of which were necessary. And, again, I make—this is a completely bipartisan question. The wars dragged over several administrations. And then, of course, the recent Islamophobia. And I guess I’m left with the question, had—I remember 9/11 vividly. I was a reporter that day. If a tragedy of that consequence were to have happened under the Biden or now Trump administrations, I’m not sure the U.S. could have rallied the sense of purpose that President Bush did experience because of his unifying words, at least in the immediate aftermath of that horrible day.

HAASS: Let me answer it. And one could go through your list, Sewell, and a longer list. But none of that was a direct or inevitable result of 9/11. All the things you mentioned may to some extent be true. None of them can be traced back to 9/11. So yes, if Osama—and, to me, by the way, Osama bin Laden’s—his end, if you will, was in some way—yes, it was satisfying. It had a degree of closure. But in another way, it was almost—it was slightly irrelevant. But all the things you mentioned, and we can have a big foreign policy conversation about the extent they’re true, but let’s posit they are. None of them can be directly linked to 9/11.

And I would say these are things that we own, because of what we’ve done domestically or internationally. And I would think that, at the risk of getting political, there are those who wish this country ill who derive satisfaction from them. And I think one of them sits in the Kremlin. And one of them may sit in Beijing. And one of them may sit in North Korea. You know, and so forth. And that’s then a larger conversation about what it is we’re doing in the world and how we’re—how we’re doing it. But I don’t think one can trace that in any way to terrorism or counterterrorism, or 9/11.

TOWNSEND: A thousand percent. I agree with Richard completely. And the one thing I would add, when you say that we wouldn’t enjoy the same cohesion, here’s where I think the difference lies. When it’s a foreign enemy the American people will lock arms. And they will unite themselves and put aside political domestic differences. It happened. But if it’s not—if it’s not, if it’s an internal debate or an internal division, this is what you’re—you know, what you’re talking about, right? You don’t—you’re not going to have that necessary cohesion if the threat and the thing that caused the harm is domestic.

HAASS: I think one other thing. I agree with that. We’re a more divided society. I also worry now, possibly because social media is far more pervasive now than it was twenty-five years ago, I think it’s not linked, by the way, to terrorism. I just think it’s a little bit harder to organize, build consensus in democratic societies today than it was a quarter of a century ago. The technology has had its effect. We’ve done some things to ourselves. Trust levels are lower. Conspiracy theories are more rampant. It might just be harder to galvanize a collective social and political response today. Which is something that should give us pause.

CHANIN: The gentleman right here in the front.

Q: Thanks very much. My name is Chris Isham. I’m with CT Group.

I have a question about where we are today in terms of our understanding of exactly what happened on 9/11. Do both of you think that we fully understand what actually happened? And by that I mean, do we know, for example, whether the hijackers actually had any help here? Do we know what the role was of countries like Iran, possibly Saudi Arabia? It seems to me there’s still some unanswered questions. And do you think there are unanswered questions? And if so, what are they?

HAASS: Well, one of my first laws of intelligence is you never know what you don’t know. (Laughter.) So I assume we have imperfect knowledge. I just assume that about this. There were so many players. Certain people are dead, certain people were spirited away. So I just assume some of what we think we know may not be right. And there’s probably spaces or areas where we simply have question marks, either because certain people haven’t made it available, or certain people have put forward stories that, shall we say, were at variance with the—with the truth. Certain people are dead. So, no.

My guess is—and I would say that, by the way, that’s not unique to this. That’s true of history. I don’t—you know, whether—if you’re looking at other dramatic events in history, I would say you don’t have perfect knowledge of those either, for the most case. And this one is probably maybe that times something, only because those who were involved have a sense of what the consequences would be if they were found out and held accountable. So my hunch is certain parties may have gone to great lengths to hide, quote/unquote, “the truth,” or their involvement. So, having said all that, I can’t pinpoint it, and I can’t—but my assumption is we have a(n) incomplete and imperfect knowledge of what happened.

TOWNSEND: And because you mentioned it, Chris, I’ll just say the storyline, the narrative line about Saudi Arabia, that’s one I think we have put to rest. People come back to it. People have held on to it. I spent over the last twenty-five years a lot of time in the kingdom. And there were many weaknesses in their system. And we called them out on every one of them. Anti-money laundering, because we cared about money moving. Surveillance, counterterrorism operations. We trained them. We trained their intelligence services. They provided—during the course of my time at the White House, Saudi Arabia provided more counterterrorism leads, intelligence leads, than our partners in the U.K., with whom we have the closest intelligence relationship.

And so I think we put to rest pretty well that the government of Saudi Arabia, the kingdom, was not financing this. It was not some big plot. And in fact, when you ask about what bin Laden would take credit for, I think what he would take credit for was he drove a wedge in that bilateral relationship for years. It took us a decade to recover. And it caused us to spend a whole lot of money, blood, and treasure. But I think we put the Saudi one to rest.

HAASS: Can I just say twenty more seconds? Which is, it’s also really complicated. It’s a reminder that if—you want to use the chessboard image or cliché—that there’s pieces on the chess board that aren’t nation-states. There can be individuals. There could be groups. And I think one of the reasons it’s hard to get really confident that we’ve got a complete picture of what happened is because so many of the pieces on this particular board were not nation-states or governments.

CHANIN: Let’s see if we got someone in the back there.

Q: Hi. My name is J.R. Moustalicks (ph). I’m a Ph.D. student in international relations.

HAASS: What are you here for instead of finishing your dissertation? (Laughter.)

Q: Taking a break.

HAASS: OK. (Laughter.)

Q: Along those lines, this has been a great retrospective look back. What lessons and key takeaways can we take from the twenty-five years retrospective and apply it to foreign policy going forward?

HAASS: Well, I would say one or two things come to mind. One is to be really careful of assumptions. One of the lessons I took away from it, personally, I had certain assumptions before 9/11—it gets back to the conversation we were having twenty, twenty-five minutes ago—about the significance, the scale of terrorism. And that was an assumption that people like me, traditionalists, made. Turned out not to be so right. You think more recently about some of the Israeli assumptions about Hamas before October 7. Assumptions are dangerous things because, whether they affect—almost they provide a lens through which you see, or in some cases don’t correctly see, information that reaches you, or biases your response to it, and so forth. So one of them is—you know, I would say, is when it comes to foreign policy analysis is to be really, really mindful of—again, of the assumptions that affect how you see everything that reaches you.

I could probably think, if given more time, of ten other things. But, again, I’m struck by one other thing. Fran may disagree with this. Which is, as dramatic and as awful as 9/11 was, and here we are at—you know, this is hallowed ground. And I tried to refer to it a few minutes ago. I’m also struck how—that those who perpetrated that did not create an alternative. In that sense, they didn’t build. They didn’t come forward with something positive. They managed to kill. But so to me, part of the lesson of that is, yes, we want to reduce our vulnerability to something like this ever happening again, but also we don’t want it to become—if you will, we don’t want it to dominate us, because actually we retain the ability to build, and create, and to have something positive in terms of our societies, in terms of the world. So I also don’t want us to exaggerate what these people represent.

TOWNSEND: The thing—when I think about looking forward, the thing that came up again and again, including post-9/11—I’ll build on what Richard said—I don’t know what I don’t know—is information, I had to, when I was in the White House, work that issue every single day to pull things up into the policymaker, and get that data in there. And if there’s not somebody doing that, it does not happen. The president kindly once said to me, it might have been my greatest value, right? And I could do that because I had grown up as a career civil servant. I was never a political person. So I knew who to call at Justice or State, and I knew how to get it. But it can’t rely on an individual, right? As you—we built—we have built systems to institutionalize some of that. But I’ll tell you, I don’t trust it, having seen the horrible consequences the failure of information to come up. That’s got to get worked every single day. And the president of the United States has got to say this is a priority to his Cabinet members, and he will not tolerate the lack of sharing information. And if that’s not happening, that information is just not going to move.

CHANIN: I see a hand over there.

Q: I’m curious if you think—my name is Ginger Cutler. I’m a term member at CFR.

You’ve mentioned a bunch of different things, like the increasing growth of nuclear energy, as well as a lot of people in the Middle East who feel really humiliated, and a lack of efforts to mitigate that, as well as TSA and other measures that have been put in place to prevent terrorism. I’m curious if you think we are now more or less vulnerable to a foreign terrorist attack than we were twenty-five years ago.

TOWNSEND: I think I would say we identified—you know, there’s always this adage you can’t fight the last war. It’s just what we do, right? So we learn lessons about where our vulnerabilities are. The first order of business is to close those vulnerabilities. We did that in terms of airplanes. There’s things like open transportation systems—take the New York City Subway. You couldn’t turn that into a closed system because it would defeat the purpose of it. People would stop using it. It wouldn’t be convenient enough. And so we make choices about our security. I think we’ve done a lot to reduce our vulnerability to the foreign terrorism threat, as we understood it, coming out of 9/11. The idea must be that you have to continue—it’s an iterative process. You’re never done. You have to keep looking. You mentioned about some of the measures. I’ll tell you I, for better or worse, was responsible for that three-ounce rule. (Laughter.) And if you—

HAASS: You confess to that? (Laughter.)

CHANIN: I’ve been look for someone on that one.

HAASS: Wow. Whew. (Laughter.)

TOWNSEND: But I will tell you, if you asked me then when we put it in place, I thought that was temporary. I was quite sure the private sector would figure out how we could screen liquids so we could put stuff—my makeup back in my suitcase. (Laughter.) I was wrong. It didn’t happen. But we have to iterate, right? We can’t just rely on the measures that we put in place to fight the last threat.

HAASS: I would say, in answer to your question, it’s both. We’re both less vulnerable to certain things that we focused on—again, the airplane thing, or something like that. But in some ways we’re more vulnerable to other things, because we haven’t prepared for them or focused on them. The other is, and this I take from my Northern Ireland experience but also I remember living in Washington. For those of you who lived in Washington twenty-odd years ago there was this thing with his father and his son were shooting people when they were filling up their cars with gas. And suddenly, putting a—getting a tank of gas was a dangerous, courageous act. And it, to me, sent a powerful message, and I think it’s true, that in modern societies it doesn’t take a whole lot to be disruptive.

I mean, think about how life would change if IEDs, which were a dime a dozen in Iraq, became commonplace here. I just think we’re vulnerable, whether it’s domestic terrorism or, you know, international terrorism that visits here one way or another. I just think as a modern, relatively open society, we’re structurally, inherently, and unavoidably vulnerable. And so—and you can never have point defense everywhere. You can’t anticipate every point of which a terrorist might attack. So then you really want to think a lot about intelligence, to discover beforehand, resilience, recovery. You really want to think about the entire spectrum. And the measure of success is probably not the ability to anticipate and stop every attack. It’s more the ability to recover from it quickly and maintain as much, you know, functioning as you can and as much openness as you can. And that ought to be the way we—I would say we think about it.

TOWNSEND: You know who we should ask to answer that? You mentioned, and I know he’s here, Secretary Johnson.

HAASS: Jeh Johnson. Second row there.

TOWNSEND: There you are.

CHANIN: You’re being called on, Jeh. We got to get you a microphone.

TOWNSEND: No, well, the secretary of homeland security, and just a brilliant public servant. Would you give us your answer to that question about—(laughter)—

HAASS: And about how I got it wrong, Jeh? I think you should really focus on that.

Q: So my general observation is that I think we’re much better at detecting a foreign terrorist, large-scale plot. And I used to tell my people at DHS, don’t respond to the last attack. Respond to the next attack. And always think—try to think out of the box. And we talked earlier about how after 2001 the nation rallied together in response. I used to say it would take another crisis for the nation to rally together. But we did have another crisis, called COVID. And we were unable to rally together. We had fights over whether the mask worked. We had fights over the vaccine. Our nation is much more divided now than it was twenty-five years ago. And I think our biggest security threat is the current state of our democracy right now. (Applause.) I wasn’t intending for that to be an applause line. (Laughter.) But a lot’s happened. A lot’s happened in twenty-five years. Fran and I used to be assistant U.S. attorneys together in Manhattan thirty-five years ago.

TOWNSEND: You’re giving away my age. (Laughter.)

HAASS: You lost any sympathy by taking responsibility for the three ounces. You lost the audience on that. (Laughter.)

CHANIN: That is all we have time for in terms of the questions. And I do want to—before we turn it over to Bruce Hoffman for some final words—I do want to thank both Fran and Richard for launching the Council’s program here, for launching our own season of public programs here. We’re talking about doing some other things together. So stay tuned.

And to close, let me introduce Bruce Hoffman. Again, like Farah, a great friend of our museum, who’s the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Applause.)

HOFFMAN: Thank you. After this marvelous discussion there really isn’t very much to say. But I have to say, from the moment that Farah and I conceived this series of monthly events, both to commemorate and reflect on the consequences and lessons of the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror, we fastened on Fran and Richard as the two ideal persons, both to address these subjects and also inaugurate the series. I think you’ll all agree with me that Farah and I were precisely right in that assessment, and that they were indeed the two best persons. So thank you very much, Fran and Richard. (Applause.)

Thank you to Cliff and the 9/11 Museum for hosting this event. I think you’ll agree with me too, there could be no other venue than this sacred and hallowed ground to inaugurate this series, but also to begin this year of reflection on the events that really transformed the world, certainly the United States, twenty-five years ago. So thank you. Cliff. And thank you to the staff of the 9/11 Museum for working with us and for hosting this event. (Applause.) I’d be remiss—thank you. I would be completely remiss not to thank Farah and my colleagues at the Council on Foreign Relations, who worked tirelessly with the 9/11 Museum staff and with Cliff to hold this event. So thank you very much, friends and colleagues at 9/11. (Applause.) And, lastly, thanks to all of you for coming out on literally a frigid evening, and to make time for this event.

As we’ve said repeatedly, this is the first in a series of monthly events. Next month we will return to Washington, D.C., and to the CFR offices there, where on February 18 at noon our speaker will be the deputy national security advisor at the time of the 9/11 attacks and then the national security advisor afterwards, Stephen Hadley. Another event we’ll have in Washington in March, we’re still trying to lock in the date, is with Admiral William McRaven, in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command during a lot of the war on terror and, of course, the architect of the raid on Abbottabad on May 1, 2011, that brought some closure to the events of twenty-five years ago. We have other monthly events planned as well, so if you’re a CFR member please look at your inboxes for them. And I’ll look forward to seeing you with those. And we will be returning, of course, the 9/11 Museum for more events in this series. So thank you very much. (Applause.)

CHANIN: Just to let you know that when you go outside, the Council has extended its hospitality to the visitors. So thank you all. Please come back. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.