25 years after 9/11, files reveal CIA prior warning - questions remains with “War on Terror” under question

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the Trump administration has released previously classified CIA files. The Agency’s Director John Ratcliffe called them “the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever”. Among other things, they show “clear warnings” about the coming attacks.

In parallel, New York City under the Mamdani administration has opened its own city records.

The material confirms CIA had extensive prior warning of certain operational details, partly corroborating persistent speculations about “foreknowledge” - a notion long denounced as “conspiracy theory”. Still, vast questions remain unanswered - particularly regarding possible Saudi connections, which remain carefully shielded, considering the close ties between American elites and Saudi oil. Donald Trump has promised to release more documents.

Selective disclosure, as I’ve been calling it, is the order of the day. The Trump administration has repeatedly used the controlled release of sensitive files - on JFK, Epstein, even so-called “UFOs”, Covid etc - as a political instrument in its struggle against portions of the permanent bureaucracy (“Deep State”). The goal is never pure transparency but leverage: generate public outrage, discredit predecessors and institutions, and reshape them, thereby expanding the personal authority of the presidency itself.

In any case, the occasion invites one to think about how the US and the world have changed September 11, 2001.

The deeper legacy of 9/11 lies in the so-called “War on Terror”. Declaring war on an abstract noun is of course an impossibility: what actually unfolded was a sustained campaign against militant Islamic groups of a Salafi-jihadist persuasion - later expanded into a convenient umbrella that could designate almost any adversary as an enemy of humankind - in ways that go even beyond the Carl Schmitt’s sense of the existential foe.

The logical domestic consequence of such reasoning has been the steady concentration of power in the Executive. The process did not quite begin in 2001: since at least the Vietnam era, American presidents (exploiting vague enough pieces of legislation like the War Powers Resolution) have functioned as temporary de facto dictators pertaining to foreign policy - launching military actions without formal congressional declarations of war.

The anti-terrorism Patriot Act, however, accelerated the transformation. Along with other executive measures, it normalized indefinite detention, torture, assassination rings, warrantless surveillance, and a legal culture of extraordinary measures that has never been rolled back.

Guantanamo and the CIA black-site network remain enduring monuments to that shift, which arguably has made the US a democracy in name only.

Trump is now extracting the full conclusions of that trajectory, further extending dictatorial powers into the domestic sphere. This much the “War on Terror” has accomplished.

The military results however have been far less triumphant, either in Iraq or in Afghanistan. In the latter, the United States was forced to withdraw after two decades, leaving the Taliban in control.

In Syria the same administration now ironically deals with President Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammed al-Julani), a veteran of ISIS/al-Qaeda terrorist networks, who until recently was a US-designated terrorist, and had a $10 million bounty on his head.

Foreign Affairs recently published a piece titled “How al-Qaeda Ended” (by Audrey Kurth Cronin) celebrating the defeat of ISIS - while omitting the decisive roles played by other regional actors, such as Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia.

The United States has in fact long been one of the principal sponsors of the very forces it claims to combat. It is a well known fact that Bin Laden and the Taliban themselves emerged from the Islamist ecosystem that Washington helped construct during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, channeling funds and weapons through Pakistan’s ISI.

Later interventions in Syria and Libya followed the same pattern: arms and training flowed to radical militias that later rebranded themselves or merged into larger terrorist formations.

American policy has repeatedly incubated the threats it then claims to eradicate: domestically the same apparatus has produced its own “terror factory”. Studies of post-9/11 prosecutions show that federal informants and undercover operations drove nearly half of the terror convictions, sometimes manufacturing plots that might never otherwise have existed.

The true legacy of the post-9/11 era is thus twofold: the continued willingness to support, directly or indirectly, fundamentalist jihadist networks when geopolitically useful, and the construction of an “anti-terror” architecture that has steadily endowed the American presidency with dictatorship-like powers. Twenty-five years on, those powers are being exercised more openly than ever.