On 9/11's Actual 25th Anniversary, Bush-Era Officials and Global Analysts Reach Different Verdicts on What the War on Terror Proved

Nearly 3,000 people died when al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four commercial planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. What the country built afterward, and whether it built the right thing, splits the coverage on the actual 25th anniversary of September 11.

The officials who built the response defend it

NPR's Sources & Methods podcast convened four people who were in the room on September 11, 2001: Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security adviser; Jane Harman, then a Democratic member of Congress from California; John McLaughlin, then deputy director of the CIA; and Michael Morell, then President Bush's CIA briefer.

McLaughlin told the panel the CIA had been picking up a spike in terrorism reporting that summer, something the director at the time called "the lights were blinking red all summer." He said that after the second plane hit, there was no doubt left in the room. "I did write on my computer, 'Nothing will ever be the same,'" he said.

Hadley described the Situation Room deciding to stay and manage the crisis even as the White House evacuated, and recalled then-Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta grounding thousands of aircraft that morning. Their account, as carried by NPR, frames the post-9/11 security architecture, intelligence reform, and the creation of new agencies as a direct and largely necessary response to a genuine intelligence failure.

Global experts say the hard-power approach backfired in places

A different verdict comes from the Council on Foreign Relations, which gathered sixteen think tank experts from fifteen countries for its Council of Councils project. Their shared conclusion, as published by CFR, is that the U.S.-led "war on terror" treated violent extremism almost entirely as a military and security problem, and that this "heavy military action has often inadvertently played into the hands of recruiters" for groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab.

Regional contributors flagged specific failures: one essay argues Germany has become a new epicenter of jihadist terrorism in Europe, another says the fight continues unresolved in West Africa, and a third calls the initial post-9/11 response "a failure of imagination." None of the sixteen frame the last 25 years as a clean success. This differs materially from the institutional defense offered on NPR. The two sources were simply published for the same anniversary with opposite emphases.

The ideology argument, and its counterpoint

A more pointed critique comes from the Daily Signal, where columnist Kristen Ziccarelli argues that President Bush's September 17, 2001, statement at the Islamic Center of Washington, that "Islam is peace," set the country on a mistaken path by treating terrorism as a tactic disconnected from the ideology producing it. She points to Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" and ISIS's 2016 Dabiq essay "Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You" as evidence that jihadist groups themselves describe their violence as rooted in Islamic doctrine, not grievance politics.

There is a documented ideological throughline connecting al-Qaeda's stated justifications to ISIS's own propaganda, and Bush's framing was a deliberate political choice, not a neutral factual claim.

But none of the security officials on the NPR panel, and none of the sixteen CFR contributors, frame the fight as against Islam itself. The CFR's regional experts instead describe a more fragmented threat that has moved well beyond al-Qaeda's original structure into localized movements in the Sahel, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, with causes tied to state fragility and recruitment dynamics as much as theology. A separate excerpt from intelligence veteran Phil Gurski's new book, carried by the Epoch Times, traces jihadist terrorism to a 1979 starting point that includes Iran's revolution and Saudi-linked extremism. Whether "the ideology" or "state sponsorship and local grievance" better explains 25 years of jihadist violence remains an open dispute among the sources themselves.

Memory becoming history

Both Fox News and the Daily Wire published first-person essays today from writers who lived through the attacks as children or teenagers, both making the same underlying point: the generation with a personal memory of that morning is aging, and younger Americans increasingly encounter September 11 as a textbook entry rather than a memory.

None of today's retrospectives point to new legislation, new spending, or a new government commission. The unresolved question flagged in the CFR report is forward-looking rather than historical: its experts warn that artificial intelligence is already reshaping recruitment and attack planning, and that the counterterrorism architecture built in 2001 was never designed for that threat.