To Remember September 11 Rightly: What We Owe the Dead and the Living

By Mathias Risse The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. For those of us who work in human rights, September 11, 2001, occupies a strange and difficult place in our professional and moral imagination. An Ordinary Tuesday Twenty-five years ago, nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded planes, or answered emergency calls on an ordinary Tuesday morning and did not come home. The images from that day—the towers falling, the Pentagon burning, the field in Shanksville—remain seared into the memory of anyone old enough to have watched them unfold in real time. On that ordinary Tuesday, I was doing something I had rarely done before, and have rarely done since, at that hour: driving and listening to the radio. I was teaching at Yale and on my way to the medical examination required for my green-card application. It had to be done in Cheshire, Connecticut, about a thirty-minute drive from New Haven. My appointment was at 9:30 a.m.; I left home at about 8:45. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03. The radio hosts struggled to make sense of what was happening. I remember one perplexed voice saying, “We just heard a plane hit the World Trade Center.” They seemed initially to assume that it had been a small Cessna. By the time I reached Cheshire, everyone in the doctor’s office was listening to the radio. As seen from Connecticut, New York is not just the metropolis everyone knows. It is the city on the other end of Metro North — the line that starts, or ends, in New Haven. This might have been the quickest medical examination in the history of the American green card. I was soon back on the road to New Haven. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59, the North Tower at 10:28. After the first collapse was announced on the radio, cars pulled to the side left and right. When people envisaged New York, they saw the Twin Towers. There was something apocalyptic about the news that this mighty building had come down. By 10:30, I was back in New Haven, and everyone I saw looked bewildered and overwhelmed. Nobody knew what would come next. I did not have a cable connection, and this was the pre-smartphone era. So that night I sat on my upstairs neighbor’s bed and watched the harrowing images of people jumping or falling from sky-high floors in both buildings. For those of us who work in human rights, September 11, 2001, occupies a strange and difficult place in our professional and moral imagination. It was, first and simply, a mass atrocity: an act of terrorism that violated the most basic human right of all, the right to life, on a scale and with a suddenness that shocked the world. Both American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 departed from Boston’s Logan Airport. I began teaching at Harvard Kennedy School in 2002, and there was deep pain in the Boston area about the losses incurred on that fateful day. United 175 departed from Gate 19 in Terminal C. The terminal has since been redesigned, but for years, whenever I passed through that area, I tried to put myself in the place of the people who had waited there to board on that ordinary Tuesday. Members of the Harvard Kennedy School community, too, lost people they loved that day—people who simply vanished as part of a heinous attack that made so many others vanish at the same moment. There was not even a body to mourn. They were just gone. September 11 was also a hinge point: a moment after which the United States, and much of the international community, made a series of choices about how to respond to atrocity—choices whose consequences for human rights and human dignity are still being tallied twenty-five years later. This anniversary calls for holding two truths together. The first is that September 11 was an act of grievous injustice. It inflicted incalculable suffering on individuals, families, and communities, and its victims deserve to be remembered with the full moral seriousness their loss demands. The second is that the response to that day—the wars, detention regimes, surveillance architecture, and normalization of practices once considered unthinkable in a liberal democracy—produced its own vast catalogue of human rights harms. Neither truth cancels the other. From the vantage point of a center devoted to human rights, this dual reckoning is what the anniversary demands. Some of the September 11 hijackers spent the night before the attacks in a hotel on Soldiers Field Road, just minutes from the Harvard Kennedy School campus. On that same campus, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights had been founded only a couple of years earlier, and its own trajectory would be decisively shaped by the aftermath of that day. The Center's first senior role to be filled was that of founding executive director, a position given to Samantha Power. Her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide appeared in February 2002. A study of major failures in American foreign policy, it attracted enormous attention across the country, partly because September 11 generated searching questions about American national identity and America's role in the world. Michael Ignatieff, the Center's founding faculty director, was focused on the place of human rights in American foreign policy before and after September 11. After his departure, Sarah Sewall took up questions of military ethics and the role of human rights in military training. Rory Stewart later served as faculty director of a program on Afghanistan and Pakistan, examining the consequences of the American invasion of Afghanistan. Doug Johnson led a program on the consequences of torture, in which Alberto Mora played a central role as a senior fellow; Mora had been inside the Pentagon when it was struck on September 11. And today, under my own directorship, a program on Democracy and Surveillance Capitalism still carries forward the legacy of that ordinary Tuesday through its focus on surveillance. The Day Itself, and the Rights That Were Violated It is worth pausing, before anything else, on the most elemental human-rights violation of September 11: the deliberate killing of civilians. The right to life is the foundation on which the architecture of international human rights law is built; without it, no other right has meaning. The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 were acts of terrorism and mass murder: deliberate attacks on civilians that treated human beings not as ends in themselves, but as instruments in someone else’s political theater. We should resist the temptation, twenty-five years on, to let this fact become background noise to the more complicated story that follows. Voices have periodically argued that the attacks were an expression, however extreme, of legitimate grievances about American power and its exercise abroad. Even if one grants that such grievances existed and had merit (and I count myself among those who think many such grievances have real merit), that concession does nothing to justify what was done on September 11. There is no path from a grievance, however well-founded, to the deliberate and indiscriminate killing of whoever happened to be in those buildings, or on those planes, that morning. One major theme in debates about the morality of warfare has always been to keep the range of legitimate targets limited. People cannot be legitimately attacked just because they play some role in an oppressive system. Nearly 3,000 people from more than ninety countries died that day. Firefighters and police officers ran into buildings from which others were fleeing. Office workers, cooks, financial analysts, janitors, new immigrants in their first jobs in America, and executives at the peak of their careers were among the dead. Children lost parents; parents lost children; spouses spent that day and many days afterward searching hospital lists that never yielded the name they hoped to find. The human rights framework exists, ultimately, to protect exactly such people—ordinary individuals going about ordinary lives—from exactly this kind of violence. The Response: A Quarter Century of Consequence But human rights work also insists on asking what a state owes its own people and the world in the aftermath of atrocity, and whether its response honors or betrays the values it claims to defend. Here the record of the last twenty-five years is considerably more troubled, and more instructive. Within weeks of the attacks, the American government began constructing what would become a sprawling architecture of exception: legal theories, institutions, and practices premised on the view that ordinary domestic and international rules were inadequate to the threat at hand. The USA PATRIOT Act, signed into law on October 26, 2001, dramatically expanded surveillance and investigative authorities after exceptionally compressed legislative deliberation. The Authorization for Use of Military Force, enacted on September 18, 2001, became the legal foundation for military operations across multiple continents over the next two decades. It was repeatedly invoked in places and against groups far removed from the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. Guantánamo Bay opened in January 2002 as a detention facility designed to be beyond the ordinary reach of American courts and, its architects hoped, beyond the full constraints of the Geneva Conventions. Men were held there for years, and in some cases decades, without criminal charge or trial; documented cases included men who were later released without ever having been prosecuted. The facility became one of the world’s most potent symbols of a democracy suspending its moral and legal commitments in the name of security. Alongside indefinite detention came torture, euphemized as “enhanced interrogation”: waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other abusive practices. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 majority report concluded that the CIA’s detention and interrogation program had been more brutal and less effective than the government had represented. In some cases, the program was carried out with a degree of improvisation and incompetence that is startling to read about today, given the gravity of what was being done. The program of extraordinary rendition sent detainees to third countries where coercive interrogation, and sometimes worse, could be carried out with a thinner veil of deniability. The infrastructure and permission structures pioneered in the name of counterterrorism did not stay confined to counterterrorism. They became a template. The human rights community spent years documenting these abuses and seeking accountability for them, largely without success. No senior American official who authorized the CIA torture program has been criminally prosecuted in the United States. That impunity has become part of the legacy: an object lesson for other governments in how a powerful democracy can violate the prohibition on torture and suffer no legal consequence. The wars themselves—first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and eventually in a diffuse and often undeclared fashion across Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere—produced human costs that dwarf those of September 11 many times over. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people were killed directly by post-9/11 war violence in major war zones between 2001 and 2023, including more than 432,000 civilians. It estimates that 38 million people were displaced by post-9/11 wars. These are not abstractions. They are Afghan families killed in night raids based on faulty intelligence. They are Iraqi civilians caught in the chaos that followed an invasion premised on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. They are millions of people driven from their homes, often into conditions of prolonged insecurity, poverty, illness, and trauma. The drone program deserves particular attention from a human-rights perspective because it represents one of the most consequential transformations in the conduct of warfare during this period. Remote, low-risk to the operator, and often conducted in countries with which the United States was not formally at war, targeted killing by drone became a normalized instrument of policy across administrations of both parties. It raised lasting questions under international humanitarian law about distinction, proportionality, transparency, and accountability. And the precedent did not remain confined to the United States. Remote lethal force with limited public accountability is now a feature of conflicts far removed from the original “war on terror.” Legal and moral arguments developed to justify American drone strikes have been cited, adapted, and stretched by other states pursuing their own targeted-killing programs. The Surveillance State and the Shrinking of the Private Self If the wars were the most visible cost of the post-9/11 era, the transformation of domestic and global surveillance may prove among its most enduring legacies. Revelations about warrantless wiretapping in the mid-2000s, followed by Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013 concerning the scale of NSA collection, revealed a surveillance apparatus that would likely have been unimaginable to most Americans on September 10, 2001. Bulk telephone-metadata collection, PRISM, and access to communications traveling through undersea cables and the servers of major technology companies developed under the umbrella of counterterrorism, much of it outside meaningful public debate. The right to privacy is a human right, protected by Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It is not a lesser right, a luxury to be traded away for security. Yet that is often how it has been treated in the post-9/11 period. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded that the limited value provided by the NSA’s bulk telephone-records program could have been achieved without bulk collection. The USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 ended the Section 215 bulk telephone-records program and introduced additional safeguards, though it did not undo the broader expansion of surveillance capacity. What should concern anyone thinking about the next twenty-five years is that counterterrorism surveillance has merged with commercial data collection and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. Facial recognition, location tracking through commercial data brokers, predictive systems, and AI-enabled tools for monitoring speech create possibilities for surveillance and social control that may ultimately exceed the capacities built after September 11. The infrastructure and permission structures pioneered in the name of counterterrorism did not stay confined to counterterrorism. They became a template. Islamophobia, Profiling, and the Domestic Human Rights Cost It would be incomplete to discuss the domestic human-rights legacy of September 11 without considering what happened to Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities in the United States and across much of the Western world in the years that followed. Hate crimes against Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim surged after the attacks. Government programs and law-enforcement practices—including special registration requirements for men from predominantly Muslim-majority countries, expansive use of material-witness detention, and surveillance of mosques and Muslim student associations—too often treated whole communities as presumptive security threats rather than as citizens and residents entitled to equal protection. The NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program, for example, mapped Muslim communities and sent officers and informants into mosques, student associations, businesses, and community organizations without individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. Its legacy was not only a matter of privacy; it was also a matter of equal citizenship, religious freedom, and the chilling of civic participation. Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban was widely understood, in the United States and abroad, as an extension of the same post-9/11 logic: that the burdens of counterterrorism could be distributed according to religion and national origin. That this logic found renewed political life sixteen years after the attacks tells us something important about how durable and adaptable frameworks of suspicion become once they are established. What the Post-9/11 Framework Taught the World Human rights work is comparative and global. One of the most sobering aspects of the past quarter century has been watching the legal and rhetorical tools developed after September 11 travel abroad, often into the hands of governments with far less interest in restraining their own power. The phrase “war on terror” has proved among the most durable and abused phrases in modern political vocabulary. Governments around the world have invoked counterterrorism to justify restrictions on political opposition, journalism, religious practice, and civil society. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has repeatedly warned that excessively broad definitions of terrorism and extremism can facilitate the criminalization of peaceful expression and the profiling of ethnic and religious minorities. China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang offers a particularly grave example. United Nations bodies have raised serious concerns about arbitrary detention and the use of counterterrorism and “deradicalization” rhetoric to suppress religious and cultural life. None of this suggests a simple causal chain running from Guantánamo to Xinjiang. But it does suggest a broader permission structure: the idea that established human-rights and humanitarian-law commitments may be suspended whenever a government invokes terrorism, and that other democracies will tolerate such suspension in their allies and trading partners. In building and legitimating that permission structure, however unintentionally, the United States played a consequential role. This matters for how we understand the present moment. The erosion of the rules-based international order—visible in the inconsistent international response to atrocities in Sudan, Myanmar, Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere—has many causes. But it also reflects the accumulated cost of twenty-five years in which the world’s most powerful democracy repeatedly positioned itself as an exception to legal rules it otherwise urged others to follow. Twenty-Five Years On: Where We Stand It would be a mistake to tell this story as one of uninterrupted decline. There have been real accountability efforts and real reforms. In Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that detainees at Guantánamo had the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus. The Senate Intelligence Committee produced and partially declassified its landmark report on CIA detention and interrogation. The USA FREEDOM Act imposed some limits on bulk collection. Journalists, human-rights organizations, defense lawyers, whistleblowers, and public officials have forced disclosure and, occasionally, reform. To remember September 11 rightly, twenty-five years later, is to refuse the comforts of partial memory. The persistent work of organizations ranging from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as academic centers such as our own, has kept these issues from disappearing entirely from public consciousness. But the honest assessment is that much of the exceptional architecture built after September 11 has not been dismantled; it has been normalized. Indefinite detention without trial, once a scandal, has become a fact about Guantánamo that receives far too little public attention. Targeted killing by drone has become a routine instrument of state policy. Surveillance capacity has grown, driven now as much by commercial technology and artificial intelligence as by intelligence agencies. The language of “forever war,” once a critique, has become an apt description of the persistence and geographic reach of American counterterrorism operations. Brown’s Costs of War project found that, from 2021 to 2023 alone, the United States undertook activities it labeled counterterrorism in seventy-eight countries. What This Anniversary Asks of Us What, then, does a human-rights perspective on this anniversary demand, beyond a recitation of losses on one side and grievances on the other? First, it demands moral and legal consistency. Human rights are not conveniences to be invoked when they serve a preferred narrative and discarded when they become inconvenient. A government, institution, or individual that condemns torture and indefinite detention when practiced by adversaries while excusing them at home has abandoned a genuine commitment to human rights in favor of a selective imitation of it. Second, it demands a recognition that security and human rights are not opposites locked in perpetual tension. Torture did not make Americans safer; the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation concluded that the CIA program had not produced intelligence that prevented imminent attacks or saved lives. Indefinite detention without charge did not resolve terrorism. And the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the NSA bulk telephone-records program offered only limited value that could have been achieved without bulk collection. The lesson is decidedly not that rights must sometimes yield to security. It is that abandoning rights-respecting practices has repeatedly proved morally corrosive and strategically counterproductive. Third, the anniversary demands sustained attention to accountability, however unfashionable or inconvenient that may be. The absence of criminal accountability for those who authorized torture is not a closed chapter. It remains an open wound in the American legal and moral order—one that shapes how seriously American calls for accountability elsewhere are received. Finally, this anniversary demands a recommitment to the proposition that universal human rights are, in fact, universal. The dignity claimed by the victims of September 11 is the same dignity owed to an Afghan farmer killed in a mistaken strike; to a man held for years at Guantánamo without criminal charge; to a Uyghur detained under the rhetoric of counterterrorism; and to an immigrant subjected to suspicion because of the language he speaks or the mosque he attends. A human-rights framework that applies only to victims we find sympathetic, or only to violations committed by our adversaries, is not a human-rights framework at all. It is simply politics wearing a moral costume. Remembering Rightly On September 11, 2001, I drove back from Cheshire to New Haven as cars pulled to the side of the road and strangers listened together, trying to understand what had happened. What had happened was terrible: innocent people had been deliberately killed, families had been broken, and a sense of safety had been shattered. Nothing about the years that followed diminishes that truth. But neither does the horror of that day absolve us of responsibility for what was done afterward. To remember September 11 rightly, twenty-five years later, is to refuse the comforts of partial memory. It is to mourn those who died, to honor those who loved them, and to insist that the dignity violated that morning belongs equally to every person whose rights were later sacrificed in the name of preventing another such attack. That is what we owe the dead. And it is what we owe the living. Gagliari Photography | Canva