Reason Magazine: War on Terror turned 9/11 into permanently open wound
Editorial responsibility
- No named human review is recorded for this page.
- Source reporting is collected, normalized, translated or condensed automatically when needed.
- Automatically published source-backed update
In a 25th-anniversary opinion piece published on September 11, 2026, Reason Magazine argues that the U.S. government's response to the 9/11 attacks has prevented closure and justice. The author, who was three years old on 9/11, contends that instead of treating the attacks as a criminal matter, the Bush administration used them to expand government power, creating a permanent state of emergency and waging wars against targets with little connection to 9/11. The article criticizes the use of 'enemy combatant' designations, secret prisons, and torture, stating that these tactics scrambled innocence and guilt. It notes that admitted conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has gone decades without a trial, blocked by Congress from a civilian court, while innocent bystanders were imprisoned. The author claims the system was designed to confuse the public and that torture produced faulty intelligence, citing congressional investigators. The piece concludes that the lack of a 9/11 trial and the ongoing military authorizations keep the wound open.
Source report
The first murder I witnessed was at age 3, on September 11, 2001. Although I was too young to fully grasp what the burning towers across the Hudson River meant, I soon came to understand that many families around us had lost someone forever. (I later learned that, like many other New Yorkers, my aunt barely missed becoming one of the victims by being late to work.) And I heard that a stranger from a strange land named "Osama bin Laden" was responsible.
A little under a decade later, the U.S. government announced that it had killed bin Laden, to the jubilation of my middle school classmates. But the end of bin Laden did not bring the relief that Americans were hoping for. President Barack Obama was quick to warn the public that "his death does not mark the end of our effort." In fact, the worst of the war on terror was yet to come.
A Permanent State of Emergency
The U.S. military continues to use Congress' authorization for war on Al Qaeda to go after a dizzying array of enemies. Despite several accused perpetrators sitting in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, there has never been a "9/11 trial." A quarter century later, 9/11 still feels like an open, festering wound in American society, with neither closure nor justice served.
That is by design. Instead of treating the massacre of American civilians as a criminal matter, the U.S. government took it as an opportunity to radically expand its own power, imposing a permanent state of emergency at home and waging war to reshape the Middle East. Those wars were often against targets that had little or nothing to do with 9/11, requiring the government to confuse and misdirect the public.
The Legal and Moral Failures
For all the murderous sophistication of the plane hijackings, the network behind them was fairly easy to unmask and capture, partly because the U.S. government had already started to surveil Al Qaeda. But the administration of George W. Bush did not hand them over to law enforcement professionals who could secure swift convictions. Instead, the Bush administration:
- Experimented with new legal categories ("enemy combatants") to deprive the suspects of rights
- Built a new infrastructure of secret prisons to hide them from view
- Developed new torture tactics to test on them
The system scrambled innocence and guilt. While bystanders like Murat Kurnaz and Mohamedou Ould Slahi were disappeared and permanently scarred through no fault of their own, admitted 9/11 conspirators like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) have gone decades without being judged by a court.
The Blocked Path to Justice
When Obama tried in 2011 to put KSM before a civilian court near the scene of his crime—a process that might give New Yorkers some closure—hawks in Congress blocked the trial. Fifteen years later, the military tribunal trying KSM is still working to sort out genuine evidence from forced confessions under torture.
No wonder Obama's advisers worked from the assumption that they would kill, not capture, bin Laden. The raid on bin Laden was being planned at the same time as the legal headache around the planned KSM trial was unfolding, which clearly weighed on U.S. planners.
The Torture Debate
Sure, torture might have been incompatible with the peacetime justice system, proponents argue, but it was a necessary emergency measure to find further attackers. Congressional investigators with access to secret CIA records tested this argument and found that torture produced only "[faulty intelligence](https://...
Source
Reason MagazineWestern