Forever War: How 9/11 Unleashed U.S. Violence on Civilians Abroad & Attacks on Rights at Home

September 11, 2026
We look at how post-9/11 policies and the so-called war on terror reshaped the country and the world with two Columbia faculty members who convened a two-day symposium on “The Forever War and the First Amendment.” The symposium brought together journalists, scholars, lawyers and activists to explore the legacy of the “war on terror,” specifically focused on the impact on democratic rights, including the freedoms of speech and the press.

First Amendment freedoms “were tested right away in the days and weeks after 9/11,” says Jameel Jaffer, legal expert and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “All of the surveillance authorities that were put in place after 9/11,” says Jaffer, “their use was initially justified by reference to foreign threats. And now, increasingly, we’re seeing the Trump administration use these things to suppress domestic dissent.”
“If you go back to that climate after 9/11 … newsrooms institute[d] shifts, so they started making beats for covering national security,” says Azmat Khan of the Columbia Journalism School, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the massive civilian death toll from U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. “Legacy news media in that time period was incredibly dependent on anonymous sources, sometimes unvetted intelligence, leaks to journalists that oftentimes came from an administration that was trying to lead the public to war.”
 
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
The legacy of September 11th shaped so much of the last 25 years, from the thousands who were killed on that day and the families who lost loved ones, to the first responders and volunteers who rushed toward danger only to later fall ill from exposure to toxic air, to the U.S. government’s response to 9/11, which reshaped our politics, institutions and culture. The reverberations to 9/11 changed the world and continue to impact people globally today.
Over the last several days, a symposium at Columbia University convened journalists, scholars, lawyers and activists to explore the legacies of the “war on terror,” specifically focused on the impact on democratic rights, including the freedoms of speech and the press. The symposium was hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism. This is a video produced for the event called “The Forever War and the First Amendment.”
 

AZMAT KHAN: On September 20th, 2001, nine days after the deadliest attack in United States history, President George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress and said:

Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.

AZMAT KHAN: It was the start of the forever war, a seemingly endless proliferation of open-ended conflicts waged against poorly defined enemies in North Africa, the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and even here inside the United States.

TREVOR McDONALD: Good evening. American and British forces have begun attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan tonight.

AZMAT KHAN: In October 2001, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan. A year and a half later, the Bush administration led the country to war in Iraq on the basis of false claims about weapons of mass destruction.

SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: We must to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Weapons of mass destruction.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

AZMAT KHAN: Vice President Cheney made clear the U.S. government was willing to disregard established legal rules in the prosecution of this new war.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We also have to work, though, sort of the — the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.

AZMAT KHAN: The CIA established black sites in Poland, Thailand and elsewhere, and subjected prisoners to interrogation methods the U.S. had previously prosecuted as war crimes. Prisoners were tortured in U.S. military facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Later, the CIA and military deployed armed drones to carry out hundreds of targeted killings, including in places far removed from actual battlefields. These policies all but abandoned the postwar human rights framework that the U.S. was largely responsible for building. The forever war reshaped American democracy and society, as well. Surveillance programs proliferated, from the NYPD’s targeting of New York’s Muslim communities to digital surveillance operations of unprecedented scope and reach.

GWEN IFILL: Today, the president signed a big new anti-terrorism bill that would expand the government’s ability to track down terrorists, but at some cost.

AZMAT KHAN: Anti-terrorism legislation criminalized forms of peaceful speech and association. National security was used as a justification for keeping the public in the dark about the most consequential questions. And secret evidence, secret hearings and even secret judicial opinions became normalized. The press struggled to fulfill its role, and when journalists did report on controversial and covert programs, they did so in the shadow of the Espionage Act, which the government deployed against journalists’ sources and threatened to deploy against journalists themselves.

Repressive policies imposed in the name of national security did not go unchallenged. Victims and targets of the government’s policies filed hundreds of cases in court, often with the help of human rights and civil liberties organizations. Communities that had been targeted unfairly built new organizations to advocate for fairness and defend themselves against discrimination. And a new generation of journalists founded new media institutions to report what legacy newsrooms had missed and ask questions they had failed to.

 
AMY GOODMAN: That video produced for the symposium at Columbia University called “The Forever War and the First Amendment.” It was narrated by Azmat Khan, who joins us now, an investigative reporter for The New York Times Magazine, director of the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism at Columbia, where she’s also an assistant professor of journalism at the J-school there. Her multipart series, “The Civilian Casualty Files,” was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting.
And we’re joined by Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, previously deputy legal director at the ACLU, where he argued cases around issues like surveillance, censorship and other human rights and national security issues for many years, the author of The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law.
Jameel, talk about this two-day, that the two of you put on, symposium, “The Forever War and the First Amendment,” as we move today after this 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
 
JAMEEL JAFFER: Sure, yeah. Well, first, Amy, thanks so much for having me on again.
So, the symposium is about how the “war on terror” tested and transformed the First Amendment and the freedoms of speech and the press. And as you know, those freedoms were tested right away, you know, in the days and weeks after, after 9/11, with the closure of immigration hearings; the PATRIOT Act, which expanded government surveillance powers; eventually the expansion of the material support laws, which, you know, reached, for the first time, certain kinds of speech; the use of the Espionage Act against journalists’ sources. And, you know, you’ve covered all those, all those things, but those are all, in different ways, tests of the First Amendment.
And so, the symposium is — or, has been a kind of look back on all of those tests of the First Amendment to kind of evaluate: Did the First Amendment play the role that we needed it to? And then, also we were looking at the ways in which the decisions that collectively we made in the months and years after 9/11, how those decisions relate to the world we find ourselves living in now, because there’s so many — so many policies that the Trump administration has now put in place that are built on the legal arguments and the policies put in place, you know, over the course of successive administrations after 9/11.
 
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jameel, I’m wondering if you can talk especially about the policy that developed of extraordinary rendition, where, effectively, the government, in collusion with other governments around the world, kidnapped and disappeared people into black hole sites, and where that stands in terms of the legality as far as the Supreme Court is concerned.
 
JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, I mean, I think that that policy, the extraordinary rendition policy, is sort of emblematic about our collective decision to surrender the values that we thought we were supposed to defend. The rendition policy was one of the policies that the Bush administration put in place in the years immediately after 9/11. You know, obviously, we were — we also saw the adoption of torture policies by the CIA and the military. The CIA was torturing prisoners in CIA black sites around the world. Eventually, those torture policies found their way into places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. So this was a real departure, not just from U.S. law, but from the entire international human rights framework that the U.S. had a big hand in building after the Second World War.
And, you know, one of the really — you know, when we talk about the departure from those important norms and principles after 9/11, we often focus on the Bush administration, the decision of the Bush administration to, you know, depart from those norms, the decision of the Obama administration to normalize some of those departures. But I actually think that the biggest failure was not in the executive branch. The biggest failure was in the courts, because, Juan, you were asking about, you know, what’s the status of the — what’s the legal status of these policies. You know, almost without exception, the courts have refused to address the lawfulness of these policies.
You know, all sorts of cases were brought against national policy — national security policies put in place after 9/11. Almost all of those cases brought by human rights victims or by human rights organizations were thrown out on grounds other than the merits. They were thrown out because the plaintiffs were found to lack standing. They were thrown out because the questions were found to be political questions that are, you know, relegated to the political branches to decide. Or they were thrown out on immunity grounds. They were thrown out on all sorts of — all sorts of bases, but not on the merits. The courts just, almost without exception, refused to address the merits. And it’s a remarkable and, I think, really dispiriting thing that 25 years after 9/11, we have almost no law, certainly from the Supreme Court, almost no law on the legality of these really controversial policies that, you know, in some cases, were introduced by the Bush administration, and others, you know, introduced by later administrations. It’s a real failure on the part of the courts.
 
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the Department of Homeland Security? Most young people in the United States today don’t realize that that was created after 9/11. And it’s had such a big impact on law enforcement and other repression now across the country.
 
JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, I mean, I think that we are seeing this in a lot of ways. We’re seeing that the institutions and the authorities that were put in place after 9/11 now being repurposed by the Trump administration. And, you know, it’s shocking, but not entirely a surprise, because from the beginning, it was easy to see that these institutions could very readily be repurposed to suppress domestic dissent, not just the Department of Homeland Security, but, you know, all of the surveillance authorities that were put in place after 9/11, the material support laws, the Espionage Act. All of these things were initially justified, or their use was initially justified, by reference to foreign threats. And now, increasingly, we’re seeing the Trump administration use these things to suppress domestic dissent. Even, in fact, the arrests and the detentions and the threatened deportations of student protesters, you know, noncitizen student protesters, all of that is also built on authorities that the executive branch and the political branches put in place after 9/11.
 
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Azmat Khan into this conversation. You spent over five years researching the U.S. air wars. And as part of your reporting, you went to different bomb sites in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan. It was a remarkable series for which you won the Pulitzer Prize, among the pieces, “The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars.” That’s from 2021. I’m looking at a piece you wrote last year, “Hegseth Cuts Pentagon Work on Preventing Civilian Harm.” Follow the trajectory for us. What came out of your reporting? For example, under Austin, then the secretary of defense, what was put into place to more protect civilians? And what’s happened today?
 
AZMAT KHAN: Right. I would say if we go — and thank you for having me.
If we go back five years, as we were drawing down from Afghanistan, there was a bit of a reckoning that seemed or appeared to be happening among the lessons learned from the forever wars. My own reporting, that first five years of it had just finished, and there was a really devastating civilian loss and a very apparent understanding that the U.S. government knew very little about how many civilians it was actually killing. You know, my own reporting years earlier had shown that the U.S. government thought that its air war in Iraq and Syria, for example, during the war against ISIS, had killed — maybe less than 1% of all of the strikes that they had done had resulted in civilian casualties. But the ground reporting that we had done systematically showed that the number was, in fact, 31 times higher.
So, the publication of that reporting, coupled with this broader investigation where I sued for the government’s records about what it claimed had happened, and went on the ground myself to go compare, by speaking to people on the ground, doing these things the military had not done in their investigations and assessments, it was very clear that there was systematic civilian loss, that this was routine, that there were recurring problems that were going — happening again and again and were going unaddressed. And I will say that, in that time period, that work landed in a way that led to, for example, Secretary Austin at the time overhauling civilian casualty policy, introducing a —
 
AMY GOODMAN: This is under Biden.
 
AZMAT KHAN: This is under the Biden administration. And, you know, I had my own doubts and concerns about whether that would be impactful, would they be investigating on the ground, these things that I think are necessary. But what we’ve seen under the Trump administration is a rolling back of all of those measures. Secretary Hegseth has cut that office. But I will say, regardless of administration —
 
AMY GOODMAN: And that office was called the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office.
 
AZMAT KHAN: Yes, yes, yeah, the Center of Excellence that they had created, as they dubbed it. And yeah, it has — many parts of it have been wound down. It is not entirely nonexistent today, but that policy, you know, there was a very immediate effort by the Trump administration to hamper down, as soon as they came into office, as many parts of that as they could. But I will also say that we have seen, over administrations, whether Democrat or Republican, not a great deal of focus on civilian harm. I mean, maybe this moment, that brief moment, was something different in the wake of the drawdown from Afghanistan. But over time, we’ve seen incredible civilian loss take place under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
 
AMY GOODMAN: And I’m looking at the piece you did, “Hegseth Cuts Pentagon Work on Preventing Civilian Harm,” was almost exactly a year before the first day of the U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran. That first day was the strike on Minab in southern Iran, the primary school where so many girls and some boys and their teachers, over 170 people, were killed. To this day, the Pentagon has not released a report on this, and President Trump now calls it fake news.
 
AZMAT KHAN: That is true. And on that same day, I’ve also done reporting that showed that there was another missile that hit a different school, along with a sports recreation center, along with my colleagues and the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times, that showed one of these same — this PrSM missile, they call it. They call it a precision strike missile. That these thousands of tungsten pellets killed 21 civilians, one of whom was just a toddler.
So, we’ve seen these patterns continue. And when I look at the causes — so, for example, you bring up the girls’ school in Minab, or you bring up some of these most latest strikes on a wedding convoy. When we start to examine what some of the early understandings of why they may have taken place, whether that’s outdated intelligence — you know, there was a belief among some that the military had relied on outdated intelligence, thinking that this school was in fact a military installation, or, for example, in this recent wedding convoy, there are early reports that suggest that they had mistaken it for something nearby. All of these causes are things that I regularly found in my reporting as leading causes for civilian casualties.
 
AMY GOODMAN: And by the way, JD Vance, who’s now being talked about because he headlined the Trump Republican midterm convention, has said in the last weeks, “You know, if we make a mistake, we admit it,” when it came, for example, to the bombing of the wedding convoy. But why would you believe that, if they haven’t even investigated Minab, or have investigated and decided they will not release the results?
 
AZMAT KHAN: Yeah. You know, I did file a FOIA request for that investigation, and I’ve been in back-and-forth with CENTCOM over the results of it. And it’s been, you know, an unpleasant experience. But my FOIA experience with CENTCOM and with the Defense Department has always been unpleasant. It’s meant that I’ve often had to sue, with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, with attorneys at the Times. This is a regular occurrence. So, yes, they’re being far less transparent.
But what I will say is that a lot of these causes that I’m seeing echo the causes I saw under repeated administrations. There are underlying issues that, apparently, that Office of Civilian Protection had not solved, or that the Defense Department maybe has fought in implementing maybe some of the lessons learned of that office or of others. But these are regular occurrences. They go unaddressed. And that human toll, these individual stories, it’s so much more than just the numbers that we hear of, you know, how many people, how many civilians have been killed. These are families and loved ones, and that’s important on a moral issue, but it’s also important when we understand our place in the world and the effect that we have and what’s enabled by what we do and also by what we fund. And I’m speaking specifically about weapon sales.
 
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Azmat, I’m wondering if you could talk about, you know, the shifting legal landscape after 9/11, the secrecy, the expanded surveillance and persecution under the Espionage Act and beyond, how that affected the ability of journalists, especially in the mainstream or commercial media, to properly report on wars and federal policies, and what the impact has been of independent media and whistleblowers going to organizations like WikiLeaks to bring out stuff that was not previously being — had not previously been revealed.
 
AZMAT KHAN: If you go back to that climate after 9/11, Americans were shocked and devastated and heartbroken. And journalists were asking, “How did this happen? What intelligence did we miss? How did the U.S. government fail?” And their efforts were largely concentrated on answering these very important and fundamental questions.
But we also saw newsrooms institute shifts, so they started making beats for covering national security. There was a real reworking of what kinds of things legacy media was covering, and, you know, in many ways, that’s incredibly important. But it also meant that more and more journalists were dependent on the federal government for intelligence assessments, what they deemed incredibly important to understanding and answering those questions that felt so urgent at the time.
And what you wound up having is, you know, a broad understanding that legacy news media in that time period was incredibly dependent on anonymous sources, sometimes unvetted intelligence, leaks to journalists that oftentimes came from an administration that was trying to lead the public to war. And later on, you would see these sort of mea culpas in major news organizations about what they had gotten wrong and why. I think the most famous is the lead-up to the Iraq War. I think many people are familiar with the failures, the unvetted intelligence that made its way onto the very front pages of major newspapers.
But I think it was also something deeper. I think we saw a fundamental shift take place in the presumption of guilt or innocence. I think that the label of terrorism or the designation that an individual was associated with a group, just the mere allegation itself would be so damning. And so, we went from what would ordinarily be a presumption of innocence until somebody is proven guilty, to what I found in my reporting was often a presumption of guilt unless you can prove yourself innocent. And the bar for proving yourself innocent was so much higher than the bar for intelligence used to lethally target and kill someone in the first place, and that gap was enormous.
You know, you’ve had some of the guests from my own reporting on this show, a man named Basim Razzo, for example, whose homes were targeted in the middle of the night, of his and his brother. And Basim woke up one night to see the stars over Mosul, to find out that his wife, daughter, brother and nephew were killed. You know, the roof of his house was gone. He’s looking up. He learns his loved ones have been killed. He sets out on a quest for justice.
And he has one of the most rigorous cases I’ve ever seen. And he’s one of so many, like probably thousands at this point, civilians that I’ve spoken to and interviewed and whose stories that I’ve documented and told. But he had such a bulletproof case. And him proving his innocence to the U.S. government was so high and took so much labor. And yet, when I obtained the records about the intelligence used to target him, what I realized was that, you know, they provided lots of information about, “Well, this may have happened, that may have happened.” And a very — what they said in this document was that, “Actually, we may have confused his home for something else next door or nearby,” which, you know, I learned ISIS had previously occupied something down the street or down the block and had left weeks earlier. But when you looked at that intelligence, which was based on just a little bit of filming during the hottest hours of day and a lot of confirmation bias, what you saw was a real gap between what was used to lethally target somebody and then what it took to clear your name.
And that flipping — I just give this as an example — that flipping of a presumption of guilt versus innocence, that has taken place across the board. And I think media organizations have been very resistant to, you know, examining the complexity at times when somebody has been accused of some association. And I think it’s reflected more broadly in the public’s attention, too. Just that climate after 9/11 was very effective in rewiring our thinking about who is guilty, who’s innocent, and what presumptions there should be, and what the threshold of intelligence or assessment or what evidence we need to see should be.
 
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jameel, we only have about 30 seconds, but the Trump administration is now extending these terrorist designations to all of these gangs in South America, in Ecuador and Venezuela and other countries. Your assessment of that?
 
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I mean, I think that the boat strikes are plainly unlawful. I think that they’re murder. The ACLU has a great case that they brought against those, against those strikes. They’ve also sued to get the memo that purportedly justifies the strikes. Hopefully, the courts will be more aggressive here than they have been, you know, in — over the past 25 years.
 
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but this is something, of course, we will continue to cover. Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, previously deputy legal director of the ACLU, and Azmat Khan, director of the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.