Send Airplanes, Phones, and Money: Cautionary Lessons For the Post-1/6 World From the Post-9/11 World

Send Airplanes, Phones, and Money: Cautionary

Lessons For the Post-1/6 World from the Post-9/11

World

Paul Rosenzweig*

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

I. CONFRONTING THE 9/11 TERROR NETWORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

II. CONFRONTING DOMESTIC TERRORISM TODAY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

INTRODUCTION

Twenty years ago, September 11, 2001 dawned clear and bright: a perfect fall

day in the District. I was a young-ish lawyer and spent the morning in a confer-

ence room—oddly enough with, among other people, John Roberts, who was

then an attorney in private practice—cut off from the events occurring outside.

Nobody came into the room to tell us that the world had changed, and yet it had.

When we emerged around noon into the light of day, legal specialties that until

that time were backwaters or afterthoughts of policy and law had become in an

instant the focus of intense concentration and scrutiny. For myself, I went from

being a criminal lawyer with limited experience in terrorism surveillance law to

embarking on a career path that led me to spend most of the past twenty years

thinking about homeland security and counterterrorism issues, along with their

related, near-cognates such as cyber and aviation security.

From the vantage point of twenty years onward, the confusion and palpable

concern—dare one say “fear”—coursing through our body politic at that time is

diff‌icult to remember, yet it strangely seems all too familiar today as our nation

faces a different sort of crisis. Our task in this series of commemorative essays is

to look at what worked and what didn’t work in the counterterrorism regime over

the past twenty years and to determine what that means for today and tomorrow.

For my part, that translates to the question, what—if anything—should the Biden

Administration’s leaders of homeland security take away from our experience of

the past two decades?

From a standing start, we learned much about how to combat foreign terrorism

that targeted its effects on American soil. Those lessons were hard won, yet of

real value. The challenge for the next twenty years will be translating those

* Professorial Lecturer in Law, George Washington University School of Law; former Deputy

Assistant Secretary for Policy, Department of Homeland Security (2005-09). The title of this article is an

homage to Warren Zevon, whose song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” captures some of the urgency in

the policy world in the immediate aftermath of September 11

th

and today. WARREN ZEVON, Lawyers,

Guns, and Money, on EXCITABLE BOY (Asylum 1977). © 2021, Paul Rosenzweig.

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