January 20,

Ari Fleischer 2001

Scott July 15,

McClellan 2003

May 10,
Tony Snow
2006

On 11 September 2001, attacks in America killed nearly 3,000 people. Osama Bin
Laden, the head of Islamist terror group al-Qaeda, was quickly identified as the man
responsible.

The Taliban, radical Islamists who ran Afghanistan and protected Bin Laden, refused to
hand him over. So, a month after 9/11, the US launched air strikes against Afghanistan.

As other countries joined the war, the Taliban were quickly removed from power. But
they didn't just disappear - their influence grew back and they dug in.

Since then, the US and its allies have struggled to stop Afghanistan's government
collapsing, and to end deadly attacks by the Taliban.

"We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfil it," US President George W Bush said
when he announced the first air strikes against Afghanistan on 7 October, 2001. The
raids were in response to the 9/11 attacks, which killed 2,977 people in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania.

The mission, he said, was "to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of
operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime".

The first targets were military sites belonging to the hardline Taliban group who ruled
the country. Training camps for al-Qaeda, the terror group run by 9/11 plotter Osama
Bin Laden, were also hit.

But 18 years on, it's hard to argue the US mission has been fulfilled - the Taliban may
play a part in ruling Afghanistan again if peace talks do eventually succeed.

The Taliban first took control of the capital Kabul in 1996, and ruled most of the country
within two years. They followed a radical form of Islam and enforced punishments like
public executions.
Within two months of the US and its international and Afghan allies launching their
attacks, the Taliban regime collapsed and its fighters melted away into Pakistan.

A new US-backed government took over in 2004, but the Taliban still had a lot of
support in areas around the Pakistani border, and made hundreds of millions of dollars
a year from the drug trade, mining and taxes.

As the Taliban carried out more and more suicide attacks, international forces working
with Afghan troops struggled to counter the threat the re-energised group posed.

In 2014, at the end of what was the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since 2001, Nato's
international forces - wary of staying in Afghanistan indefinitely - ended their combat
mission, leaving it to the Afghan army to fight the Taliban.

But that gave the Taliban momentum, as they seized territory and detonated bombs
against government and civilian targets. Last year, the BBC found the Taliban was
openly active across 70% of Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda operatives hijack four commercial airliners, crashing them into the World Trade Center in
New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth plane crashes in a field in Shanksville,
Pennsylvania. Close to three thousand people die in the attacks. Although Afghanistan is the base
for al-Qaeda, none of the nineteen hijackers are Afghan nationals. Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian,
led the group, and fifteen of the hijackers originated from Saudi Arabia. President George W. Bush
vows to "win the war against terrorism," and later zeros in on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in
Afghanistan. Bush eventually calls on the Taliban regime to "deliver to the United States
authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land," or share in their fate.

September 18, 2001

A War Footing
President George W. Bush signs into law a joint resolution authorizing the use of force
against those responsible for attacking the United States on 9/11. This joint resolution will
later be cited by the Bush administration as legal rationale for its decision to take sweeping
measures to combat terrorism, from invading Afghanistan, to eavesdropping on U.S.
citizens without a court order, to standing up the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
October 7, 2001

The Opening Salvo

The U.S. military, with British support, begins a bombing campaign against Taliban forces,
officially launching Operation Enduring Freedom. Canada, Australia, Germany, and France
pledge future support. The war's early phase [PDF] mainly involves U.S. air strikes on al-
Qaeda and Taliban forces that are assisted by a partnership of about one thousand U.S.
special forces, the Northern Alliance, and ethnic Pashtun anti-Taliban forces. The first wave
of conventional ground forces arrives twelve days later. Most of the ground combat is
between the Taliban and its Afghan opponents.
The White House press secretary is a senior White House official whose primary responsibility is
to act as spokesperson for the executive branch of the United States government administration,
especially with regard to the president, senior aides and executives, as well as government policies.
These attacks can shake the foundations of our strongest buildings but they cannot touch the
foundation of America these acts shatter steel but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve

We are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world and no one can keep that light
from shining

Implementation of emergency response programs

Pray for the children whose worlds have been shattered for all whose sense of security and freedom ha
been threatened

Flight 93 is taken back from the terrorists who hijacked it and flown into the ground in Shanksville, PA by
its passengers. In giving up their lives, they prevented either the Capitol or the White House from being
destroyed.

We will remember them

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil for you are with me

Invoke article 5 of NATO(allowing its members to respond collectively in self defense and on October 7th,
the US and allied military forces launched an attack

The North Atlantic Council – NATO’s principal political decision-making body –

agreed that if it determined that the attack was directed from abroad against
the United States, it would be regarded as an action covered by Article 5. On
2 October, once the Council had been briefed on the results of investigations
into the 9/11 attacks, it determined that they were regarded as an action
covered by Article 5.
Article 51
“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack
occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain
international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be
immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the
Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain
or restore international peace and security. ”
The FBI investigation into the attacks, codenamed operation PENTTBOM, was able to identify
the 19 hijackers within days, as they made little effort to conceal their names on flight, credit card,
and other records.[6] By checking flight manifests and comparing them with other information, like
watch lists, customs officials were able to find the names of all 19 hijackers quickly. box cutters

Examine the suitcases and put Taliban in SPECIALLY DESIGNATED NATIONALS AND BLOCKED
PERSONS
The essence of homeland security can be captured in three words: prevent, protect, and
respond. The ideal objective is to prevent terrorist attacks. It is also desirable that potential
targets of terrorism are not left completely vulnerable to attack, that protection is increased to the
extent possible. And if prevention fails, it will be important to be able to respond effectively to
terrorist attacks. It is now well understood that that so-called consequence management in the
aftermath of an attack can minimize adverse effects in many conceivable scenarios. Broadly
speaking, in other words, the homeland security initiatives of the Bush Administration seek to
reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks and to limit the impact of any attacks that occur. From
these broad objectives flow a plethora of specific policy initiatives.

In the area of prevention, the imperative is to identify and thwart potential attackers and to deny
them the means of attack. How can this be accomplished? A number of specific steps are being
contemplated, attempted, or undertaken.

Improve anti-terrorism intelligence. Preventing terrorist attacks depends almost entirely on

intelligence. Obviously, if the terrorists can keep themselves and their intentions hidden, it is
impossible to stop them. The nightmare for the United States or any other state threatened by
terrorism is a series of unpleasant terrorist surprises (of which 9/11 was a particularly vivid
example). Accordingly, the challenge of improving counter-terrorism intelligence is one of the
core concerns of homeland security.

This challenge, however, is daunting. Enormous amounts of raw intelligence were already being
collected. Presumably this has only increased after 9/11. But collection is only one step in the
process. Intelligence data must be analyzed, integrated with other intelligence and assessments,
and – very importantly – communicated to those in a position to make effective use of
it. Because the United States has multiple (often competing but always independent) agencies
engaged in various forms of intelligence activities, problems of coordination, integration, and
communication abound. Because some of these agencies – the FBI and the CIA, for example –
are themselves large bureaucracies, such problems arise within as well as between intelligence
agencies. Beyond this, there has long been a strict and legally mandated separation between
external intelligence operations (undertaken by the CIA and various Defense Department
intelligence services) and internal investigative efforts (which are the domain of the FBI). This –
and the habit of poor cooperation between the CIA and the FBI – has made it difficult for
external intelligence to feed into domestic investigations. The FBI, the most important domestic
investigative agency in the US federal government, is broadly oriented around solving crimes in
the United States and hunting down criminals; it is neither organized nor optimized for the anti-
terrorism mission. And once potential threats have been identified, this information needs to get
into the hands of the Immigration and Customs Service, the relevant police departments, and so
on, if it is to be truly useful in leading to the apprehension of potential terrorists.

The Bush Administration has identified intelligence and warning as an integral cornerstone of its
efforts to protect the United States from terrorism. It has launched initiatives to improve analytic
capabilities and to facilitate coordination of intelligence and intelligence agencies. It has given
explicit thought to the problem of converting intelligence into warning, and warning into
effective action. It has tried to map out a sensible and explicit allocation of responsibilities
among agencies.[ii] In the latest development, President Bush ordered the creation of a Terrorist
Threat Integration Center that would involve the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Department, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the Attorney General.[iii]

More extensive surveillance of suspicious groups or individuals: The individuals who

carried out the 9/11 attack had lived, traveled, and trained in the United States. Some of them
had even been identified as suspicious figures. This reality has made the American body politic
more tolerant of empowering the government to engage in more aggressive and more intrusive
surveillance of potentially threatening parties. There is a desire to keep closer tabs on visitors to
the United States, to monitor foreign students more closely, to infiltrate groups that may be
capable of or intent on violence. Modern information technology may be exploited to detect,
collect, and assess relevant information about individuals with suspicious associations or
activities. The ideal is to identify and thwart terrorists before they can strike.

Improve monitoring of points of entry. Vast numbers of people and vast quantities of material
pour into the United States on a daily basis. There is every prospect that, as in the past, terrorists
could enter the United States in an open and completely legal way. But since 9/11, the process
for obtaining US visas has tightened (producing long delays that have been experienced by many
foreigners). There is greater scrutiny of foreign visitors at passport control. There is much
greater suspicion of incoming visitors who match certain worrying profiles. The nineteen
perpetrators of the 9/11 attack had all passed routinely into the United States. Perhaps a more
effective and more vigilant control of passage into the United States can stop terrorists at the
border. Similarly, there is every reason to fear that terrorists could ship implements of violence
by normal commercial means. There is a particular fear that weapons of mass destruction might
enter the United States in this fashion. Before 9/11, only a tiny percentage of goods and
containers entering US territory were ever inspected, and there was little focus on finding
weapons of mass destruction. The volume of trade flows makes this an enormous, perhaps
intractable challenge. But there is now great interest in improving port security, in imposing
more serious monitoring and verification of goods being shipped, of using modern technology
(bar coding and other tracking technologies) to follow shipments from source to recipient, and of
providing at least some technical and organizational means for detecting WMD or other weapons
that might be used in terrorist attacks. Analogous concerns arise, of course, with land ports of
entry. It is not physically or economically feasible to inspect carefully every large truck that
enters the United States. But there is more extensive checking of vehicles that pass through
border crossings (again, with the cost of considerable delay) and exploration of technologies that
might improve the ability to monitor this traffic. The ideal is to prevent terrorists and their
weapons from getting into the United States.

Make US borders less porous. Illegal entry into the United States of people and goods is
possibly even more worrying. With its long, remote borders and lengthy coastlines, the United
States faces a massive challenge in trying to prevent illicit border crossings. Serious efforts have
been made over many years, in connection with drug trafficking and illegal immigration, to
strengthen border patrols, to make it more difficult and risky to enter the United States in this
way. While some progress seems to have been made along the US-Mexico border, no one seems
to think that protection of borders is anywhere near good enough when evaluated in the context
of the terrorism threat.
Enhance transportation security. The character of the 9/11 attacks – essentially the use of
commercial airliners as large cruise missiles and their fuel tanks as high explosives – made it
clear that the various modes of mechanized transportation on which modern society ubiquitously
depends could with some imagination be transformed into weapons in the hands of
terrorists. This was most clearly true of aircraft, of course, but it is not at all difficult to conceive
of attacks that utilize boats or trains or large trucks. Here are means that give terrorists the
potential for further spectacular attacks. Another basic preventive measure is therefore to deny
these means to terrorists, and transportation security is accordingly another basic element in the
Bush Administration homeland security strategy. Anyone who has been inconvenienced by new
security measures in an airport has felt the effect of this concern.

This collection of priorities and initiatives is derived from the desire to prevent terrorist
attacks. Alongside prevention is a parallel concern with protection – to reduce America’s
vulnerability to terrorist attack. A profound dilemma immediately arises: any building or facility
anywhere in the United States could become a target of terrorist attack. Before 9/11, the largest
terrorist attack in American history was the destruction of a federal office building in Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. There is no obvious reason why that building should have stood out as a
target. But it is perfectly clear that in a world of finite resources and potentially infinite threats
and targets, it is impossible to protect everything.

Over the long run, if sensitivity to terrorism remains high, concern about reducing vulnerability
to terrorism could have some remarkably wide and socially significant effects. It could influence
the way buildings are designed and constructed. Buildings with positive pressure air handling
systems and good air filtration will be significantly less vulnerable to chemical and biological
attacks, for example. The 9/11 attacks have dampened the enthusiasm of many people for living
and working in skyscrapers (and the newspapers regularly report on the relocation of businesses
from Manhattan to New Jersey, or North Carolina, or New Hampshire). And concerns about
vulnerability to terrorism could have major consequences for the way in which cities are
developed in the future – for better or ill in terms of the vitality and livability of
cities.[iv] (Simply put, densely populated urban areas – represented in the extreme by New
York’s World Trade Center – are good terrorist targets.)

But whatever the long term impact of the threat of terrorism, the immediate issue is what to try to
protect now, given that it is impossible to protect everything. This has involved identifying
potential terrorist targets of particular importance to the functioning of American society and the
American economy and of potential attacks whose impact can be minimized by advance
preparations.

Protecting against chemical or biological attack. Just as some potential targets are singled
out for special protective measures, so some potential terrorist attacks can be minimized by
taking protective measures in advance. Among the nightmare scenarios that deprive homeland
security officials of sleep are attacks that involve the use of chemical or biological weapons
(CBW). Unlike nuclear weapons, CBW are more accessible, cheaper, and extremely difficult to
detect or find. Among the world’s terrorists, there seems to be growing interest in such
weapons. Fortunately, CBW are not inherently weapons of mass destruction (a decisive
difference from nuclear weapons) and they can be neutralized with appropriate defensive
steps. A major emphasis of the Bush administration has been a program to innoculate key health
and decisionmaking personnel, to stockpile vaccines, to heighten the awareness and capacity of
the US public health system, and other measure to provide some protection against this
particularly frightening form of attack.

Beyond prevention and protection lies consequence management. If a terrorist attack occurs on
American soil, the goal must be to respond effectively and to minimize adverse
consequences. This will likely be a complex operation involving multiple levels of government,
multiple chains of authority and command, and a number of different functional
specialists. Major homeland security initiatives in this area include:

Preparing first responders. The Bush strategy will invest considerable financial resources in
the preparation of local emergency personnel – the so-called first responders – to cope with
catastrophic terrorism. Some of this involves training and education; but it can also involve the
provision of specialized equipment as well.

The USA PATRIOT Act (officially the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) was quickly developed as
anti-terrorism legislation in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. The large and complex
law received little Congressional oversight and debate and was signed into law by President
George W. Bush on October 26, 2001.

PATRIOT gives sweeping search and surveillance to domestic law enforcement and foreign
intelligence agencies and eliminates checks and balances that previously gave courts the
opportunity to ensure that those powers were not abused. PATRIOT and follow-up legislation
now in development threaten the basic rights of millions of Americans.

carrying out chapter 449, relating to civil aviation

security, and related research and development activities; and
‘‘(2) security responsibilities over other modes of transportation
that are exercised by the Department of Transportation.
‘‘(e) SCREENING OPERATIONS.—The Under Secretary shall—
‘‘(1) be responsible for day-to-day Federal security screening
operations for passenger air transportation and intrastate air
transportation under sections 44901 and 44935;
49 USC 40101
note.
Aviation and
Transportation
Security Act.
Nov. 19, 2001
[S. 1447]
VerDate 11-MAY-2000 14:02 Dec 07, 2001 Jkt 099139 PO 00071 Frm 00001 Fmt 6580 Sfmt 6581 E:\PUBLAW\PUBL071.107 apps13 PsN: PUBL071
115 STAT. 598 PUBLIC LAW 107–71—NOV. 19, 2001
‘‘(2) develop standards for the hiring and retention of security
Screening personnel;
‘‘(3) train and test security screening personnel; and
‘‘(4) be responsible for hiring and training personnel to
provide security screening at all airports in the United States
where screening is required under section 44901, in consultation
with the Secretary of Transportation and the heads of
other appropriate Federal agencies and departments.
‘‘(f) ADDITIONAL DUTIES AND POWERS.—In addition to carrying
out the functions specified in subsections (d) and (e), the Under
Secretary shall—
‘‘(1) receive, assess, and distribute intelligence information
related to transportation security;
‘‘(2) assess threats to transportation;
‘‘(3) develop policies, strategies, and plans for dealing with
threats to transportation security;
‘‘(4) make other plans related to transportation security,
including coordinating countermeasures with appropriate
departments, agencies, and instrumentalities of the United
States Government;
‘‘(5) serve as the primary liaison for transportation security
to the intelligence and law enforcement communities;
‘‘(6) on a day-to-day basis, manage and provide operational
guidance to the field security resources of the Administration,
including Federal Security Managers as provided by section
44933;
‘‘(7) enforce security-related regulations and requirements;
‘‘(8) identify and undertake research and development
activities necessary to enhance transportation security;
‘‘(9) inspect, maintain, and test security facilities, equipment,
and systems;
‘‘(10) ensure the adequacy of security measures for the
transportation of cargo;
‘‘(11) oversee the implementation, and ensure the adequacy,
of security measures at airports and other transportation facilities;
‘‘(12) require background checks for airport security
screening personnel, individuals with access to secure areas
of airports, and other transportation security personnel;
‘‘(13) work in conjunction with the Administrator of the
Federal Aviation Administration with respect to any actions
or activities that may affect aviation safety or air carrier operations;
‘‘(14) work with the International Civil Aviation Organization
and appropriate aeronautic authorities of foreign governments
under section 44907 to address security concerns on
passenger flights by foreign air carriers in foreign air transportation;
and
‘‘(15) carry out such other duties, and exercise such other
powers, relating to transportation security as the Under Secretary
considers appropriate, to the extent authorized by law
the Transportation Security Oversight Board, the Under Secretary
shall—
‘‘(1) enter into memoranda of understanding with Federal
agencies or other entities to share or otherwise cross-check
as necessary data on individuals identified on Federal agency
databases who may pose a risk to transportation or national
security;
‘‘(2) establish procedures for notifying the Administrator
of the Federal Aviation Administration, appropriate State and
local law enforcement officials, and airport or airline security
officers of the identity of individuals known to pose, or suspected
of posing, a risk of air piracy or terrorism or a threat
to airline or passenger safety;
‘‘(3) in consultation with other appropriate Federal agencies
and air carriers, establish policies and procedures requiring
air carriers—
‘‘(A) to use information from government agencies to
identify individuals on passenger lists who may be a threat
to civil aviation or national security; and
‘‘(B) if such an individual is identified, notify appropriate
law enforcement agencies, prevent the individual
from boarding an aircraft, or take other appropriate action
with respect to that individual; and
‘‘(4) consider requiring passenger air carriers to share passenger
lists with appropriate Federal agencies for the purpose
of identifying individuals who may pose a threat to aviation
safety or national security