On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial flights flying from the East Coast of the United States. Two of the flights hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and one flight flew into the U.S. Department of Defense headquarters at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The passengers on the fourth flight fought the hijackers and crashed the plane in a field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, before it could be used as another weapon. 2,977 people were killed, including 441 first responders. The attack was the largest act of terrorism by foreign operatives within the United States in U.S. history.
Twenty-five years later, SFS Professors Bruce Hoffman and Daniel Byman reflect on the impact of 9/11 and the state of terrorism and counterterrorism efforts today.
Q: Where were you when the first tower was hit on September 11, 2001? What was your reaction when you heard the news, and what are your strongest memories of that day?
Hoffman: I was at the RAND Corporation’s Washington office, which is located in Pentagon City–just across 395 and overlooking the Pentagon. Someone came running into my office and told me that a plane had crashed into the North Tower. Like everyone else, I thought it must be an accident—such as when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. I was watching live coverage on a television in a colleague’s office, when the second plane hit the South Tower and then it became clear this was no accident and was most likely a coordinated terrorist strike. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden immediately came to mind. Then, about 40 minutes later, American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. My office was in the middle of the building, overlooking South Hayes Street, so I faced the river entrance to the Pentagon—where AA 77 was supposed to crash. The terrorist pilot, Hani Hanjour, however, missed it on the first pass (I heard this terrible, high-pitched whine because the plane was flying so low) and instead crashed into the Pentagon’s southwest side. There was a loud explosion, and the entire building shook—as if we were in an earthquake.
I ran from my office down the hall toward the north side of the building overlooking the southern part of the Pentagon. I passed a woman who I worked with running in the opposite direction—away from that side of the building—and she was in a daze, crying and repeating that she had just seen an American Airlines plane crash into the Pentagon. I looked out on the Pentagon and saw black smoke pouring out of the building.
We were forced to evacuate our offices, and when I got downstairs to the street, there was pure pandemonium. The federal government had shut down, which meant that every business in the District and Northern Virginia had followed suit. The line to the Pentagon City Metro stop was up the escalator and down the block and not moving. Gridlock paralyzed every nearby intersection as people ignored traffic signals and tried to escape the Pentagon City environs.
I remember clearly two thoughts that came to mind as I observed all this. First; that World War III had started. Second; that we’d never become complacent about the threat of terrorism again. I was wrong about both.
Byman: On September 11, I was at my office near the Pentagon—the DC offices at RAND, where Bruce also worked. I was meeting with a group of colleagues for a terrorism study. At the time, few people outside government studied terrorism, and under Bruce’s leadership, many of the best were at RAND. As we were meeting, we heard a VERY loud sound —it was American Airlines 77 passing low as it was about to hit the Pentagon. Like many other people, I was shocked by 9/11. I knew of al-Qaeda from the 1998 Embassy bombings and other attacks, but I thought the next big attack would be overseas, not in the United States. I also thought “big” meant hundreds, not thousands. The death toll for 9/11 was off the charts, and at the time and for weeks after, we thought far more than 3,000 people had died.
Q: Looking back over the last 25 years, do you believe that counterterrorism efforts that arose post-September 11 in the United States have been successful? What surprises you about the aftermath of 9/11?
Hoffman: To an extent. The preeminent metric with which success in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has been measured is keeping the homeland safe from another major terrorist attack—and that has indisputably been the case. There has been only one successful foreign-directed and organized terrorist plot in the United States since 9/11 and that was the tragic shooting at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, in 2019 by an al-Qaeda sleeper agent that left three persons dead and eight wounded. But, as effective as we have been in keeping the homeland safe to date from terrorist attack, we have been completely unsuccessful in countering the ideology or the narrative that motivated the attacks. And this is what surprises me. Twenty-five years ago, I would have thought—like everyone else—that another attack was imminent. It never materialized. But I also thought that al-Qaeda would be completely eliminated within a matter of years after the 9/11 attacks. Yet, not only did al-Qaeda recently celebrate its 38th anniversary, but it has now spawned at least two dozen franchises spread from North Africa to Southeast Asia and an even more violent off-shoot, ISIS, with a similar number of global branches.
Byman: The U.S. record on counterterrorism is mixed. On the one hand, the death toll from jihadist terrorism in the U.S. homeland has been far less than many people feared. Too many innocent people have died, but predictions at the time suggested 9/11 was a harbinger of more attacks. At the same time, the United States engaged in costly wars overseas, some of which—notably Iraq—made the terrorism problem worse. In hindsight, many post-9/11 security measures were not necessary. In addition, jihadist terrorism has spread to parts of Africa where it was weak before 9/11, contributing to civil wars and other horrible suffering.
Q: Tell us about your experience as a commissioner and lead author of the 9/11 Review Commission to the Director of the FBI report. What was most challenging about the commission? What are you most proud of?
Hoffman: The inter-personnel dynamics and challenges of managing a diverse staff with different capabilities and expertise is always the most difficult dimension of any commission’s operations. Having previously been the executive director of a commission, I was hoping that it would be easier being a commissioner. It wasn’t. Fortunately, the Review Commission was much smaller than the ten-member 9/11 Commission. We were only three commissioners, so reaching consensus was easier. But we were also operating under an extraordinarily tight deadline. We did not really begin work until March 2014, and our report was due exactly a year later. We were thus under enormous time pressure. I am proudest of the fact that we delivered a report on time that both thoroughly and systematically assessed the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts and made informed, constructive recommendations for improvement. The then-FBI director, James Comey, publicly stated that he agreed with all but one of our eleven major findings and recommendations. The only one he disagreed with did not pertain to needed reform but involved shifting responsibility from the FBI for a specific mission to another agency.
Q: Tell us about your experience as a professional staff member on the 9/11 Commission. What was most challenging about the task for the commission? What are you most proud of?
Byman: The 9/11 Commission had multiple tasks — explaining the “why” of 9/11, assessing government agencies for accountability, and offering recommendations for preventing similar attacks in the future. The Commission tried to carry out these tasks in a bipartisan way. This at times meant softening some of the report to reflect disagreements among the commissioners, but I think they did an excellent job balancing different concerns while still producing a substantive report. Importantly, it was well written (I take no credit for this;I did not hold the lead pen) —and that made it far more accessible.
Q: As you look at recent assessments of terror threats in the United States, what do you expect the practice of counterterrorism to look like in the near and longer term future?
Hoffman: The United States counterterrorism structure is fraying. As I wrote in my testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last May, this is mainly because of the exodus over the past 18 months— — whether voluntary or otherwise—–of highly knowledgeable, experienced analysts and operatives from the intelligence community and federal law enforcement. This has deprived us of the institutional memory and expertise needed to safeguard the country from future terrorist threats. Counterterrorism today is not the priority it once was—–and is more highly politicized than ever. And, unlike the case 25 years ago, the United States now faces serious domestic terrorism threats alongside expanded foreign ones. To my mind, people don’t join terrorist groups to sit on their hands, and terrorist groups don’t exist not to attack. Al-Qaeda’s stubborn resilience and ISIS’s ability to mount international terrorist attacks despite the dismantling of its caliphate means that we must assume that they are both still plotting and planning new attacks.
Byman: The United States is using the terrorism label in bigger and bigger ways even as it downplays longstanding dangers like right-wing terrorism. The Trump administration is using it for drug cartels, and at times it is using the label against peaceful organizations (leftist, Islamist, etc.,) that it opposes. I worry that the powerful counterterrorism instruments will be used in ways that infringe on civil liberties even as major threats go unaddressed.
