SEOUL (Reuters) – A Dutch architectural firm has apologized for its design of twin skyscrapers in central Seoul which resemble the exploding World Trade Center towers in New York and have infuriated families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The blueprint for the luxury apartment buildings was released last week and shows a structure which juts out at the middle to accommodate pools, restaurants, cafes and a gym.

Relatives of victims of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States have expressed outrage, according to U.S. media reports, saying the designers have no respect for those that died and branding the design a cheap publicity stunt.

Designer MVRDV said it had not intended to create an image resembling the attacks, and it did not see the resemblance during the design process.

“We sincerely apologize to anyone whose feelings we have hurt. It was not our intention,” the company said on its website.

It did not indicate whether it would change the design.

“A real media storm has started and we receive threatening emails and calls of angry people calling us al Qaeda lovers or worse,” it said on its Facebook page.

The district developer is expected to decide on the final design plans by March.

Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) – American-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who preached terror as the public face of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed Friday in Yemen, the nation’s Defense Ministry said.

A Yemeni government official told CNN that an airstrike hit al-Awlaki’s motorcade but gave no details about the operation or who conducted it.

The United States regarded al-Awlaki as a terrorist who posed a major threat to American homeland security. Western intelligence officials believe al-Awlaki was a senior leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active al Qaeda affiliates that has been linked to the attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit in December 2009 and a cargo plane plot last year.

Al-Awlaki was killed about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the Yemeni town of Khashef, east of the capital, Sanaa, said Mohammed Basha, a Yemen Embassy spokesman in Washington. He said the operation was launched at 9:55 a.m.

A senior U.S. administration official confirmed al-Awlaki’s death. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to CNN because he was not authorized to release the information and did not provide any other information.

Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, al-Awlaki lived in the United States until the age of seven when his family returned to Yemen. Al-Awlaki returned to the United States in 1991 for college and remained until 2002.

It was during that time that as an imam in California and Virginia, al-Awlaki preached to and interacted with three of the September 11, 2001, hijackers, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. He publicly condemned the attack afterward.

Al-Awlaki spent 18 months in a Yemeni prison from 2006 to 2007 on kidnapping charges, but was released without going to trial. Al-Awlaki claimed that he was imprisoned and held at the request of the United States.

U.S. officials say al-Awlaki — often described as articulate with a good understanding of the Western mindset — helped recruit Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Nigerian man known as the underwear bomber who was charged with trying to blow up a transatlantic flight as it landed in Detroit on December 25, 2009.

The militant cleric is also said to have exchanged e-mails with accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hassan, who is accused of killing a dozen fellow soldiers and a civilian in a rampage at the Texas base.

Sajjan Gohel of the Asia Pacific Foundation called al-Awlaki’s death significant.

“If you put it into perspective, (Osama) bin Laden’s death had global ramifications for the transnational terror movement. Anwar Al-Awlaqi’s death will have equal implications for lone-wolf terrorism,” Gohel said.

That’s because al-Awlaki was articulate and he understood the Western mindset, Gohel said. He knew his way around the internet and was skilled in indoctrinating impressionable youth.

Early this year, a Yemeni court sentenced al-Awlaki in absentia to 10 years in prison for charges of inciting to kill foreigners.

Prosecutors charged al-Awlaki and two others with “forming an armed gang” to target foreign officers and law enforcement in November.

At a U.S. congressional hearing earlier this year, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said, “I actually consider al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, with al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization, as probably the most significant threat to the U.S.”

According to IntelCenter, which monitors jihadist propaganda, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who is responsible for expanding AQAP’s focus on U.S. attacks, remains in charge of the group and further attempts to conduct attacks are expected.

In support of that goal, al-Awlaki was due to release an article in the next issue of AQAP’s Inspire magazine on the justifications for attacking civilians in the West. The group announced the upcoming article — “Targeting Populations of Countries at War with Muslims” — this week but did not publish it in its latest edition.

Al-Awlaki narrowly survived a U.S. drone assault in May after he switched vehicles with a fellow jihadi, a senior security official told CNN.

Attorneys for al-Awlaki’s father, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, tried to persuade U.S. District Court Judge John Bates in Washington to issue an injunction last year preventing the government from the targeted killing of al-Awlaki in Yemen.

But Bates dismissed the case in December, ruling that Nasser al-Awlaki did not have standing to sue.

In a November hearing, lawyers for the U.S. government refused to confirm that the cleric was on a secret “kill list” or that such a list even exists.

Last year, YouTube removed a number of video clips featuring al-Awlaki that it found to be inciting violence.

Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called al-Awlaki’s death a “great success” in the fight against al Qaeda.

“For the past several years, al-Awlaki has been more dangerous even than Osama bin Laden had been. The killing of al-Awlaki is a tremendous tribute to President Obama and the men and women of our intelligence community.

“Despite this vital development today, we must remain as vigilant as ever, knowing that there are more Islamic terrorists who will gladly step forward to backfill this dangerous killer.”

Al-Awlaki is the latest in a string of losses for al Qaeda.

According to Michael Vickers, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for intelligence, eight of the terror network’s 20 key leaders have been eliminated this year. He cited the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, the death of al Qaeda second-in-command Atiya Abdul Rahman in August, and the capture of Younis Mauritani, a senior planner of operations, earlier this month.

Only al Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains active among those who were the top nine terrorists at the time of the 9/11 attacks against the United States in 2001.

But al Qaeda is far from dead, Vickers noted, and still poses a dangerous threat to the United States.

“It maintains a worldwide strength numbering in the low thousands, it has broadened its reach through affiliate organizations” in general, but in particular he mentioned al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which he said has been able to increase its operating space in Yemen.

CNN’s Mohammed Jamjoom and Diane Ruggiero and journalist Hakim Almasmari contributed to this report.

Ten years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the events of that day retain a powerful hold on the public’s collective consciousness. Virtually every American remembers what they were doing at the moment the attacks occurred. Substantial majorities say that 9/11 had a profound personal impact and that the attacks changed the country in a major way.

Yet the public continues to be divided over many of the anti-terrorism policies that arose in the wake of Sept. 11, and these differences extend to opinions about whether U.S. wrongdoing prior to 9/11 may have motivated the attacks: 43% say yes, while 45% disagree. In late September 2001, 33% said U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated the attacks, compared with 55% who said it did not.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Aug. 17-21 among 1,509 adults, finds that the public offers generally positive ratings of the government’s response to the terrorist threat. Yet when asked why there has not been another major attack on the U.S., 43% credit government policies while only somewhat fewer (35%) say it is because the country has been lucky so far.

Overall, most think terrorists have either the same (39%) or an even greater (23%) ability to launch another major attack on the U.S. today as they did ten years ago. Just 35% think it is harder for terrorists to reach us today. Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, as many say the U.S. has not captured or killed most of those responsible for the 9/11 attacks as say it has (47% vs. 45%).

Moreover, only about a quarter say the wars in Iraq (26%) and Afghanistan (25%) have lessened the chances of terrorist attacks in the United States. In both cases majorities say the wars either have increased the risk of terrorism in this country or made no difference.

A decade after 9/11, most Americans reject the argument that the attacks triggered a “clash of civilizations” between the West and the Muslim world. Nearly six-in-ten (57%) say the Sept. 11 attacks led to a conflict with a small, radical group, while 35% say they began a major conflict between people in the West and the people of Islam.

Yet Americans’ concerns about Islamic extremism, both in the United States and around the world, remain extensive. Two-thirds (67%) say they are very or somewhat concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in this country, while 73% are at least somewhat concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism around the world.

Notably, these concerns are generally shared by Muslim Americans. A comprehensive survey of U.S. Muslims, released Aug. 30, 2011, found that large majorities express concern about the possible rise of Islamic extremism here, and its rise around the world. However, the general public and Muslim Americans differ over the amount of support for extremism among Muslims in the U.S.: 40% of the public says there is a great deal or fair amount of support for extremism compared with just 21% of Muslim Americans. (For more, see “Muslim Americans: No Sign of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism.”)

Virtually every adult today remembers exactly where they were or what they were doing the moment they heard the news of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This recall is as high among those younger than 30 – who were only eight to 19 years old when the attacks occurred – as it is among older Americans.

Among eight other historic events tested, only one – the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 – is a vivid memory for virtually all of those old enough to remember the tragedy: 95% of Americans who were born in 1955 or earlier, and who would have been eight or older in 1963, say they can recall exactly where they were or what they were doing. That is virtually unchanged from 1999 (96%).

Both 9/11 and Kennedy’s assassination stand apart from other developments, including some recent events. For instance, 81% of adults recall where they were in May when
President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces.

The other national event that resonated as widely as 9/11 and Kennedy’s death among those old enough to recall is Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Pew Research Center’s 1999 study found that 89% of those who were eight or older at the time of Pearl Harbor were able to recall exactly where they were or what they were doing when they first heard of the attack.

The clear memories that nearly all Americans have of Sept. 11 reflects the emotional toll the events of that day took at the time. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted shortly after the attacks (Sept. 13-17, 2001), 71% said they felt depressed, 63% said they simply couldn’t stop watching news about the attacks, 49% said they had had difficulty concentrating, and a third reported having trouble sleeping in the days following the tragedy. (For more, see “American Psyche Reeling From Terror Attacks,” Sept. 19, 2001.)

Even today, 75% of Americans say the attacks affected them emotionally a great deal, and this feeling crosses regional, political and demographic lines, with one exception: 55% of those currently younger than 30 say the event moved them or affected them a great deal. That compares with 81% of people who are today ages 30 and older.

Six-in-ten (61%) Americans say the terrorist attacks changed life in America in a major way, while just one-in-ten (10%) say life in America is basically the same as it was before the attacks (28% say life changed “only a little bit”). Again, this impression spans all segments of the country, including both young and old.

When George W. Bush left office in Jan. 2009, his job approval rating stood at just 24%. But retrospective evaluations of how Bush dealt with the 9/11 attacks in the time right after 9/11 are generally positive: 56% today say they approve and 38% disapprove

Nonetheless, this is a substantially lower rating than Bush enjoyed at the time, when 86% approved of his job performance, including 96% of Republicans, 85% of independents, and 81% of Democrats.

n September 2001, a majority of Americans (55%) rejected the idea that there were things the U.S. did wrong in its dealings with other countries that might have motivated the terrorists to attack us, while 33% agreed with this idea. Public views are more evenly divided today: 43% say U.S. wrongdoing may have motivated the attacks while 45% say it did not.

Republicans overwhelmingly reject this idea (65%), just as they did ten years ago, but the views of Democrats and independents have shifted. In fact, today half of independents (50%) believe U.S. actions may have been a motivating factor in the attacks, up from 34% ten years ago.

Younger Americans are also more likely to say U.S. actions might have motivated the attacks: 52% of 18 to 29 year-olds, and 47% of 30 to 49 year olds express this view. This compares with just 39% of 50 to 64 year olds and 20% of those 65 and older.

Three-quarters (76%) of Americans say the government is doing very (27%) or fairly (49%) well in reducing the threat of terrorism, and for most of the past ten years, at least two-thirds of the American public, including majorities across party lines, have offered this generally positive assessment.

The one notable exception was in January 2007, as George W. Bush announced his “surge” strategy for the war in Iraq. Positive assessments of government performance on terrorism fell to a ten-year low of 54%, due mostly to the negative assessments of Democrats.

While 2007 was an extreme, there has been a partisan divide in assessments of government performance on terrorism from the very beginning. The direction of this gap switched when Barack Obama took office. From 2001 through 2008 Democrats offered decidedly more critical views of government performance on terrorism. But by October 2010, Democrats expressed more positive views of the government’s anti-terrorism efforts than did Republicans.

When asked why the U.S. has not suffered another major attack since 9/11, fewer than half (43%) say the main reason is that the government is doing a good job protecting the country; 35% say America has been lucky so far, while 16% say the main reason is that America is a difficult target for terrorists.

Throughout much of the past decade, there has been substantial skepticism that the war in Iraq has improved America’s security.  Currently, 31% say U.S. involvement in Iraq increased the chances of another terrorist attack here, and 39% say it made no difference.  Just 26% say the war in Iraq has lessened the chances of another attack.

Evaluations of the war in Afghanistan are similar – 37% say it has increased chances of another terrorist attack in the U.S., 25% say it has lessened the chances of an attack, and 34% say it has not made a difference. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the war in Afghanistan has increased the chances of another attack on U.S. soil (42% vs. 29%). Independents tend to share the views of Democrats, with 41% saying the U.S. is more at risk because of the war in Afghanistan.

One of the largest gender gaps in the survey is over Afghanistan’s effect on our national security. Women are far more likely than men to say that the war in Afghanistan has increased the chances of another terrorist attack against the United States (47% vs. 28%). Men are far more likely than women to say it has made us more secure (32% vs. 18%).

As time has passed since 9/11, fewer Americans think it will be necessary to give up civil liberties in order to curb terrorism in this country. Currently, 40% say the average person will have to give up some civil liberties, compared with 43% five years ago, 49% one year after the attacks, and 55% in the weeks following the 2001 attacks.

And for the most part, there has been little change in the public’s view of specific policies and policy proposals. A 57% majority is in favor of requiring all citizens to carry a national identity card at all times to show to a police officer. Support for this idea was as high as 70% in the weeks following the attacks in 2001, but fell to 59% by August of 2002 and has remained steady since.  Just over half (53%) support allowing airport personnel to do extra checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent, while 43% are opposed to this. Again, the balance of opinion is largely unchanged.

Americans have more qualms about government monitoring and data collection efforts. More oppose (55%) than favor (42%) the U.S. government monitoring credit card purchases as a means of reducing the terrorist threat, and by an even larger 68% to 29% margin, most oppose the U.S. government monitoring personal telephone calls and emails.

There also has been little change over the years in opinions about the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Currently, a majority (53%) says the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can be often (19%) or sometimes (34%) justified; fewer say the use of torture under these circumstances can be rarely (18%) or never (24%) justified.

When the Pew Research Center first asked this question in July 2004, a majority (53%) said the use of torture could be only rarely or never justified. But in November 2009 and in the current survey, narrow majorities have said torture can at least sometimes be justified.

As in the past, there are wide partisan differences in views of whether torture can be justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. A substantial majority of Republicans (71%) say torture can be at least sometimes justified, compared with 51% of independents and 45% of Democrats.

Two-thirds of Americans (67%) say they are at least somewhat concerned about the possible rise of Islamic extremism in the U.S., with roughly half of those (36% overall) saying they are very concerned. Concerns about the possible rise of Islamic extremism have declined since April 2007. At that time, 78% were at least somewhat concerned, while 46% were very concerned.

Concerns about possible domestic Islamic extremism are particularly acute among Republicans 54% are very concerned about this, compared with 36% of independents and 24% of Democrats.

Republicans also are likely to say there is at least a fair amount of support for extremism among Muslims in the U.S., as well as to say that support for extremism is growing. Overall, the public is divided over how much support for extremism exists in the U.S. – 40% say there is a great deal or a fair amount, while 45% say there is little or none.

More than half of Republicans (55%) say there is a great deal or fair amount of support for extremism among Muslims in this country; that compares with 39% of independents and 33% of Democrats. And Republicans are also more likely to think Islamic extremism is already rising in this country – 35% are of this view, compared with 18% of Democrats and 25% of independents.

For the most part, the public does not see the Sept. 11 attacks as the start of a major conflict between the people of America and Europe, and the people of Islam. But more see such a major clash between Islam and the West than did so in October 2001, a month after the attacks.

Currently, 57% say the 9/11 attacks were the start of a conflict with a small, radical group while 35% think the attacks began a broader conflict between the people in the West and the people of Islam. In October 2001, Americans rejected, by a two-to-one margin (63% to 28%), the idea that the attacks signified the start of a major conflict between the people of the West and the people of Islam.

People who are currently younger than 30 are far less likely than older Americans to say that the Sept. 11 attacks affected them a great deal emotionally.

There also are large age differences in post-Sept. 11 attitudes related to Islam and Muslim Americans. Americans age 65 and older are about twice as likely as those under age 30 to say they are very concerned about Islamic extremism in the U.S. Conversely, the young are roughly twice as likely as seniors to be bothered by their belief that Muslims are singled out for increased government surveillance and monitoring. Younger Americans also are less supportive of extra airport checks on people who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent.

At the same time, younger Americans are the most concerned that the war in Afghanistan has increased the chance of another attack in the United States. And while about half of those younger than 30 and those 30 to 49 say there are things the U.S. did prior to 9/11 that may have motivated the attacks, far fewer older Americans express this view.

ABOUT THE SURVEYS

Most of the analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted August 17-21, 2011, among a national sample of 1,509 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (905 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 604 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 268 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting.

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

Additional analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted July 21-24, 2011, among a national sample of 999 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (602 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 397 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 169 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and population density to parameters from the March 2010 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status, based on extrapolations from the 2010 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting.

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

Bush and Obama, Shoulder to Shoulder

By MARK LANDLER and ERIC SCHMITT

On Sunday, for the first time, President Obama and former President George W. Bush stood together at the site of the Sept. 11 attacks, listening as family members read the names of lost love ones and bowing their heads in silence to mark the moments the planes hit.

In May, Mr. Bush declined Mr. Obama’s invitation to join him at ground zero after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But on this morning, they stood shoulder to shoulder — commanders in chief whose terms in office are bookends for exploring how the United States has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism.

The tableau was striking: the president who spent years hunting Bin Laden next to the one who finally got him. The president defined by his response to Sept. 11 standing alongside the one who has tried to take America beyond the lingering, complicated legacy of that day.

Mr. Obama read from Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength,” which an aide said he chose because it spoke of perseverance. Mr. Bush, the wartime leader, read a letter from Abraham Lincoln to a widow who lost sons in the Civil War.

Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush drew a cheer from those who remembered him shouting through a bullhorn atop the smoldering rubble. For Mr. Obama, Sept. 11 is perhaps a less wrenching experience, though it underpins what has become one of the great paradoxes of his presidency.

He is a Democratic leader who opposed the Iraq war and is pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan but has notched up a record as a lethal, relentless hunter of terrorists.

He is a president who banned torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists and pledged — unsuccessfully, so far — to close the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but carried out more drone strikes in Pakistan in his first year in office than Mr. Bush did in his eight years.

In the process, the White House said, it has killed more officials of Al Qaeda in the last two and a half years than were eliminated during the entire Bush administration. Among the big names: two top Qaeda managers, Sheik Saeed al-Masri and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, and one of its most feared field commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri.

“We have taken the fight to Al Qaeda like never before,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly address.

On Sunday, Mr. Obama moved quietly through the rituals of remembrance, laying a wreath at a memorial in Shanksville, Pa., where a United Airlines plane crashed after passengers fought with the hijackers, and later another wreath at the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon.

When the president finally spoke, at a concert in Washington on Sunday evening, he celebrated a nation that had not “succumbed to suspicion.” But he also signaled that the Sept. 11 decade — one of endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq — was drawing to a close.

“Our strength is not measured in our ability to stay in these places,” Mr. Obama declared. “It comes from our commitment to leave those lands to free people and sovereign states, and our desire to move from a decade of war to a future of peace.”

In counterterrorism, there is no question that in Mr. Obama’s intense use of drones and his laser focus on Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups was a departure from the Bush administration’s “global war on terrorism.”

But there has been as much continuity as change in the Obama method, according to terrorism experts. Mr. Obama, for example, has continued the full government response to terrorism that the Bush administration eventually adopted. This approach — with the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation working more collaboratively with agencies like the Treasury and State Departments, especially in the field — culminated in the raid that killed Bin Laden.

“What you’ve seen from the Obama administration is fundamental continuity in the counterterrorism policies handed over in 2009, while sharpening the campaign to eliminate core Al Qaeda leadership and disrupt safe havens in western Pakistan and Yemen,” said Juan Zarate, a top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush administration who has nevertheless criticized the Obama White House for its muddled detention policies.

To be sure, Mr. Obama made important refinements and changes. Most notably, he has significantly increased the use of covert and clandestine operations by C.I.A. paramilitary and Special Operations forces from the United States military.

In Mr. Obama’s first year in office, the C.I.A. carried out 53 drone strikes in Pakistan. The next year, it more than doubled that figure, to 117, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that follows the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pace is off a bit this year — 49 through late August — but the drone campaign is spreading to other countries.

The C.I.A. plans to carry out armed drone missions against Qaeda operatives in Yemen, and the military has conducted drone strikes to kill insurgents in Somalia. “Stepping up the drone strikes has been a game changer,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It is frustrating Al Qaeda’s movements enormously.”

Still, while Mr. Hoffman said that Al Qaeda’s core network had been crippled, its offshoots in Yemen and North Africa continued to put down roots, posing a potentially greater threat to the United States than Bin Laden’s surviving lieutenants.

“We can say we turned a corner with Al Qaeda,” he said, “but we can’t say we turned a corner in the war on terrorism.”

For all its achievements, the administration has also been lucky. A Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, almost blew up a Northwest Airlines jet on Dec. 25, 2009, with explosives sewn into his underwear. Six months later, a Pakistani-American, Faisal Shahzad, parked an S.U.V. loaded with a bomb that failed to detonate in Times Square.

“Obama is rightly proud of his counterterrorism record, but had Umar Abdulmutallab not lost his cool on that plane, he wouldn’t have had much of a record to point to,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former intelligence officer who has advised the White House. “His presidency would have been transformed that Christmas.”

Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting.

A possible Al Qaeda plot to launch an attack during the 10th anniversary weekend of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is “looking more and more like a goose chase,” a senior U.S. official told Fox News on Saturday.

Federal authorities have been questioning all day the credibility of a tip from a previously reliable source that that Al Qaeda had planned to attack Washington or New York, putting though both cities on high alert.

But authorities have not been able to corroborate any of the information from the source.

“The threat is looking less and less credible,” the official said, adding that the entire plot as outlined by the source “doesn’t seem feasible.”

“The time frame doesn’t make sense for when these operatives would have been moving into position,” the official said. “We are going back to the original source. The president will be briefed on it again in the morning, but people are questioning the credibility of this information at this time. Something is not adding up.”

But officials say they won’t rest until they review every last detail.

Word that Al Qaeda had ordered the mission reached U.S. officials midweek. A CIA informant who has proved reliable in the past approached intelligence officials overseas to say that three men of Arab descent — at least two of whom could be U.S. citizens — had been ordered by newly minted Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahri to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Sunday by doing harm on U.S. soil.

According to the intelligence, they were to detonate a car bomb in one of the cities. Should that mission prove impossible, the attackers have been told to simply cause as much destruction as they can.

It’s still unclear whether any such individuals even exist, according to U.S. officials.

“We don’t have a smoking gun yet,” Brenda Heck, a top counterterrorism official in the FBI’s Washington field office, told Fox News.”It is going to take a little bit to completely flush this out. We certainly — hour by hour — we are learning more.”

Earlier Saturday, the head of the FBI’s Washington field office, James McJunkin, said he doesn’t expect that there will be any problem “over the anniversary weekend.”

If the the tip had not come on the eve of the 9/11  anniversary, the intelligence community likely would not have acted and alerted the public to this degree, the senior official said.

“We couldn’t ignore it,” the official said. “But something doesn’t add up: the routing, the timing of the assets moving into position.”

Heck said it’s “absolutely possible” authorities will never know whether the alleged plot was in fact real.

In the meantime, extra security was put in place to protect the people in the two cities that took the brunt of the jetliner attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a decade ago. It was the worst terror assault in the nation’s history, and Al Qaeda has long dreamed of striking again to mark the anniversary. But it could be weeks before the intelligence community can say whether this particular threat is real.

The New York Police Department was paying special attention to the thefts of three vans Sunday, scrutinizing them them to eliminate the possibility of their being tied to a larger threat. One van was stolen from a Jersey City facility, while the other two were stolen last week from a company that does work at the World Trade Center site.

Also Sunday, an explosives detection K9 unit alarmed on a cargo pallet as it was being loaded onto a plane at Dulles International Airport. Authorities evacuated several gates as a precaution, but determined there was nothing harmful about the suspicious boxes.

Briefed on the threat Friday morning, President Obama instructed his security team to take “all necessary precautions,” the White House said. Obama still planned to travel to New York on Sunday to mark the 10th anniversary with stops that day at the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa.

Heck, the FBI counterterrorism official, said the government’s response to the latest threat “has been a little different” than at other times.

“We have been very open with the public on this,” she said. “I think there will be some debate about that after we get through this weekend. [But] I think there’s a very positive side to letting the public know a little bit more about what we are doing behind the scenes.”

In particular, she said, by letting the public know about a threat quickly, “They can help us with what’s going on out in the public areas so that we can respond if something is suspicious.”

In fact, Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said suspicious reporting has surged by as much as 30 percent, a change that she called “very reassuring.”

Fox News’ Mike Levine, Catherine Herridge, Jennifer Griffin and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

At the same time that the Twin Towers were falling, there were people having toothaches.

Friday, September 09, 2011 – 03:26 PM

By PJ Vogt

I’m not sure how I found it in the first place, but the image that I most often think about when I think about September 11^th was shot by a photographer named Melanie Einzig on the morning of the attacks. She didn’t publish it for years because she was worried it would offend people.

I wanted to get Melanie on the radio show this week, but we ended up too squeezed for time and it didn’t work out. However, when I spoke to her on the phone she mentioned that the writer Luc Sante had been moved by her photo as well, he’d even asked her for a print. I decided to call him to find out what it is about this picture, exactly.  

What drew you to the photo?

One of the things about it is that while it’s not like the Zelig figure exactly, it’s not unrelated to it. You have this historical moment occurring and there’s somebody in a corner of the picture who’s paying no attention whatsover. Looking at his watch as the zeppelin plows into the skyscraper. This postman going about his rounds completely unaware of the conflagration going on a few blocks down and above his head. It’s such an amazing picture – the fact that it exists, that that moment was recorded. It’s one for the ages.

When I spoke to Melanie, she said that she waited a few years after the attacks to release the photo, and even then, she published it in a quiet way. She said she was worried the photo could offend people, or that it would be misinterpreted. What do you think she meant?

I can understand her decision not to publish it right away. It would have been attacked as being insufficiently attentive to the enormity of the day. It would have seemed irreverent. When something of that magnitude happens, everything seems to be in service of awe, shock, reverence – reaffirming basic values, casting out demons. Something that includes such a violent contradiction within its depiction of the event – it just feels wrong. People wouldn’t have been able to take it in right away.

Melanie is such a quick visual thinker that her eye is operating as a remote sensor far away from her intellectual brain. But at the time it wouldn’t have made any sense. Everybody was reeling.

Minutes after that picture was taken, you had all those people on Church street with vast clouds of debris pursuing them like a movie monster. Melanie’s photo argues in favor of there being more than one truth. There is a way of seeing this event as occurring in the middle of an ordinary day. At the same time that the twin towers were falling, there were people having toothaches. At the time you couldn’t give that credence – the enormity, the magnitude of the catastrophe seemed to crowd everything but itself out of the picture of life. Here you have evidence of that very simultaneity.

I think that for a lot of people, there’s a kind of agreed upon series of pictures that represent September 11^th in their mind’s eye. Can you give me a quick run-down of what those images are?

You see the images of the planes approaching the towers,  the towers bursting into flames, the towers toppling, the clouds of debris and the people running, the hordes over the Brooklyn bridge. And then the soot-covered firefighters.

How is it that everyone agrees on a visual narrative so quickly, on pretty much the same set of images?

The thinking is done for us. The media processes these things. We come to recognize those images. On 9/11 itself, I was living in the country. I didn’t see TV until that evening. I went to a pizzeria to pick up a pizza, and just while I was waiting I saw the 5 or 6 images we’re talking about. It was literally the same strips of film being re-run again and again. I saw that series of pictures three dozen times in the time it took for my pizza to come out of the oven.

And that’s how it was for everyone, unless you were actually there, watching from a rooftop or across the river. Then you might’ve seen things that you know were different from what was retold by the media to the rest of the world. But if you were watching on TV or in newspapers – there wasn’t so much on the web back then – chances are you had your range of imagery preselected for you. So it would take quite an exercise of imagination for you to imagine any kind of alternative.

So besides the fact that it’s a photo that is memorable and isn’t one of those pre-selected images, what’s the value of Melanie’s photo?

The photo’s value isn’t news value. But we can be certain that it tells us something – it tells us that life went on,life took a minute before it noticed what was happening. It does tell us this. 

It also wasn’t a picture for the time. It’s a picture for reflection. The irony it contains (which is not irony ha-ha, it’s a deeper human reflective irony) is something that can only be contemplated at some remove. So I think that future generations will already be familiar with the major stock of images – the 5 or 6 that we talked about. They will have those just built into their mental archives, the way we have the Zapruder film or whatever, but that this is the picture that just puts an additional meditative layer upon all of that.

The American reaction to being attacked on Sept. 11 was in many ways an intellectual one. President George W. Bush tended to frame it that way: the attack was on our “values,” and the “war against terror” was a war of ideas meant to advance the idea of freedom. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the administration’s epistemologist, worrying over the question of knowability; Bernard Lewis was its historian, Paul Wolfowitz its moralist in arms. That America’s actions (as opposed to precautions) after 9/11 almost all took place far from home, with a professional army, strengthened this sense of abstraction. The possibility of anything like victory over our enemies was discounted early on (by Rumsfeld). Little wonder that, unlike in earlier wars, we have talked so much about what this conflict means, rather than simply working to end it as soon as possible.

This magazine participated from the beginning in debates on the meaning of 9/11 and its aftermath. For this 10th anniversary, we brought together some of the actors to discuss what has been learned and where our conclusions might take us. Michael Ignatieff wrote frequently for the magazine on terrorism and war before entering Canadian politics as a member of Parliament and then Liberal Party leader; he is now at the University of Toronto. David Rieff was a frequent contributor of essays short and long on American policy. James Traub anchored our foreign-policy reporting across this period while producing two books on the subject, “The Best Intentions” and “The Freedom Agenda.” Paul Berman’s March 2003 cover story on Sayyid Qutb, ‘‘The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,’’ was a seminal attempt to frame the conflict in terms of competing ideologies. Ian Buruma’s magazine articles focused more on contemporary Muslims, most notably Tariq Ramadan (in February 2007). We met virtually, on two separate occasions, with Ignatieff entering the fray late and Rieff exiting early. – SCOTT MALCOMSON

SCOTT MALCOMSON: I was looking over George Packer’s 2002 New York Times Magazine piece on war and liberalism and it occurred to me that the liberal-engagement debate really didn’t start until some months after 9/11. The Afghan action received relatively little higher thought, so to speak. It seemed a different sort of war than Iraq. Ten years later the differences seem much less great. We’re still tucked into both — and more so into Afghanistan. Does this imply that the debate should have begun on 9/12?

PAUL BERMAN: For me the debate did begin on 9/11. I wrote a little essay on 9/12, expanded it over the next few days, turned it in to the American Prospect on Sept. 16, and it ran in the next issue under the title “Terror and Liberalism.” The essay laid out an argument for interpreting al Qaeda as a kind of totalitarianism, that is, as a modern phenomenon, which ought to be opposed in a modern way and with modern hopes. I think that was the debate, and has remained the debate — at least, for me.

JAMES TRAUB: I think Paul’s point raises the question of what a “modern” or at least substantive response to terrorism would be. Many of us — all of us at this roundtable — criticized President Bush for his refusal to recognize the immense difficulty of bringing “modernity,” or something like democracy, to backward places like Afghanistan and Iraq. That was the argument then. But I think after 10 years the argument has much more to do with the capacity of outsiders — America above all — to shape meaningfully better outcomes in these places. That is, had we taken more seriously the difficulties of nation-building in Afghanistan or Iraq, would it have made a difference? Or have we run up against the limits of the possible?

DAVID RIEFF: I suppose my question would be why we ever thought we could do these things in the first place. Even empires, with all the means at their disposal (think of the British, or for that matter, the Soviets in Central Asia), failed at this. Yes, it could be argued we were successful in Germany and Japan, but that was because there was a different context (total victory on our side, parliamentary history on theirs).

MALCOMSON: David, do you recall now your own thinking on 9/12?

RIEFF: Well, my position then was that we had every right to go after those who had attacked us. (I never took seriously Mullah Omar’s so-called offer). But that such an expedition, to use the old imperial term, would have nothing to do with trying to bring a better future to the Afghan people.

MALCOMSON: Ian?

IAN BURUMA: Like David, I saw nothing wrong in striking back, but don’t think the Bush administration was ever remotely interested in building a nation in Afghanistan. Before going on, I think it would help the clarity of our discussion if we dispensed with the words “terror” and “terrorism,” as though they have an ideological meaning. Islamist extremism is one thing. Terrorism is a method. I did think something had to be done about Islamist extremism. The modernity of the response eludes me a little. If I read Paul Berman’s article right, he argued that liberals had to find a response that was as ‘deep’, as much to do with matters of life and death, with religion even, as Osama’s thought. This strikes me as neither very liberal, nor terribly modern.

MALCOMSON: I think we might go all right without too much reference to “terrorism” though I suspect it will come up. But what strikes me, Ian, in what you’ve said is the more complicated business of “ideological depth” — whether one’s assessment of Al Qaeda’s ideology as “profound” then requires some similarly “deep” response that, given AQ’s thinking, would almost have to be illiberal.

TRAUB: I will jump in for one moment. The deep response had to come from whom? Us? I think not. We gave much agonized thought to this question, as well as to the question, How can we provoke such a response from the Islamic world? And we couldn’t really — until it happened on its own. There was no meaningful response to the ideological threat until the Arab Spring — and now there is. That is why this remains the most hopeful event of at least the last 20 years, notwithstanding all the concerns.

MALCOMSON: Paul?

BERMAN:  I think that, during the last 80 or 90 years, we have seen a series of totalitarian ideologies spring up — communist, fascist in different versions, together with doctrines like Baathism and Islamism. I do not think these are anthropological developments, which could only be addressed by, say, Russians, or Germans, or people who consider themselves part of a Muslim ummah. The ideas are modern, and everyone is free to engage with them — obliged to engage with them, I would think. It was crucial, generations ago, to argue with the fascists, and some people did. Crucial to argue with the communists. And more recently crucial to argue with the Baathists (whose own doctrine has died, thankfully) and the Islamists. The Islamists do not come out of primitive caves; they come out of modern intellectual settings, out of universities and libraries. And everyone can argue with them. Even successfully!

I think the Arab Spring is a confirmation of this notion. The original notion was that, in a large part of the Arab world and some parts of the rest of the Muslim world, the pathologies of totalitarian movements had set in, and had to be opposed — by argument, above all. And the arguments have gone on. And guess what? A great many people in the Arab world — and in Iran, too — agree with the liberal and anti-dictatorial and anti-totalitarian arguments. This is indeed grand. And this is indeed the only way that a true solution of these various problems was ever going to be found.

MALCOMSON: I remember there were several surveys featured in the Arab Human Development Reports showing more enthusiasm for liberal democracy in Arab and other Muslim countries than in most developed countries, including the U.S. This was pretty consistent. It does seem as though the wars that sought to bring democracy to some of those countries were, at least as a form of liberalizing or modernizing argument, entirely ineffective and arguably counterproductive. Would you agree with that Paul? Or anyone?

BURUMA: I don’t think one can accurately describe the Arab Spring as an intellectual argument with Al Qaeda, or extreme Islamism. You cannot use “fascism”, “Islamism”, or “Communism” as abstractions, without historical context. Arguing, in libraries or universities, or even on Tahrir Square, with Al Qaeda believers seems pointless. They are in the business of violent revolution, not argument. So the answer to that is political, and sometimes the use of force, not intellectual.

BERMAN: I think the wars have been counterproductive in some respects — for a while they appeared to discredit the notion of liberal democracy altogether, which was dreadful. This, apart from the deaths and suffering. In other respects, the wars have accomplished a number of things. There is, in fact, a need for force in dealing with people like the Al Qaeda militants. This kind of war has gone on in Afghanistan, and likewise in Iraq, once Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had gotten a foothold. These were necessary wars, I’m afraid.

RIEFF: I find it extraordinary that Paul can say these wars were necessary! There was no Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia presence in Iraq when we overthrew Saddam Hussein — — this is pure Cheney, 1% solution stuff. They came AFTER we invaded. I have nothing against the use of force against Al Qaeda (say in the Sahel). But surely the costs of these wars vastly outweigh whatever benefits there are.

But the more important question is: Why we should be meddling in the first place? Is it our business to decide who rules in Afghanistan? Beyond that, if we are talking about the Arab Spring, I advise caution. It  may well be that the Muslim Brotherhood is the principal beneficiary of Tahrir Square, not the democrats. In any case, there are real economic issues that nothing in the Arab Spring addresses or promises to resolve.

BERMAN: Unfortunately, al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did get established after a while, and it was necessary to fight them. This was the meaning of the “surge.”

TRAUB: But I’m struck by the difference between “responding to the threat of Al Qaeda” and the vast enterprise we have been talking about here. What of our effort in Afghanistan today has to do with the original goal of stopping Al Qaeda? We are now fighting the Taliban. I agree that there was no al Qaeda threat in Iraq at first. In many ways, we have done a very effective job of fighting Al Qaeda. But that’s very little of what we have, in fact, been doing.

BERMAN: I think the crucial thing was to establish that 1) there were and are extremist ideologies that, if identified, can be argued with and opposed. And 2) to support the people who, for many years, had already been calling for some sort of regional revolution along liberal lines. The call was made. There seemed to be successes. There were setbacks and disasters. And now, suddenly, there is a regional revolution.

The Arab spring is not the end of things — it is the beginning. Now the real struggle begins. And of course it involves a struggle between Islamists and anti-Islamists, among other groups. In Tunisia people chanted, “Tunisia is the solution!” — meaning, they were arguing against the Islamists. This is the great thing, the hopeful thing, the thing we have been hoping and calling for.

RIEFF: I don’t know — I would like to know — who this all-encompassing “we” Paul speaks of is. But more importantly, these are anecdotes. Other people in Tunisia are saying different things. More to the point still, more Tunisians are voting with their feet, that is, trying to emigrate. The problem with posing the question as Paul does, in fundamentally “clash of ideas” terms, is that the economy and demography of the region gets lost. There is only democrat v. Islamist. The fact that, say, in both Pakistan and Yemen they have not yet STARTED the demographic transition gets totally lost on this analysis.

BURUMA: I would go further. It is a common habit of religious fanatics — people who have heard “the call” — to see every struggle in terms of good versus evil: Islamists versus anti-Islamists. This is not political. The Muslim Brothers in Egypt are certainly Islamists, but as long as they stick by democratic rules, they have a role to play. If we dismiss them as part of an evil totalitarian block that we must “argue” (how?) against, we could well impede the democratic progress we hope will come from the Arab Spring

TRAUB: I agree altogether with Ian.

MALCOMSON: As a number of you have shown in your work, the battles within Muslim countries between Islamists, anti-Islamists, part-time democrats and Friday believers all went on before 9/11, and they seem all to be going on now, perhaps for the better in these past few months. But 10 years of U.S. and NATO and some non-NATO involvement, at the usual costs we all know, seem to have affected this battle of ideas very little indeed, in the region itself.

TRAUB: But this is just my point. Whether or not we celebrate what is happening now in the Middle East, it is not we who caused it. I would say that we retarded it by providing an alternative narrative — Crusaders seeking to dominate Islam — which allowed autocrats to distract peoples’ attention. But it happened anyway. So it tells us something about the limits of our own abilities, and something else about the resilience of people Over There.

BERMAN: Did we retard these events, or advance them? I don’t know. We advanced the liberal cause for some people, certainly — e.g., the Kurds of Iraq. We — the United States and its allies- — at least raised the issue of liberal democracy.

RIEFF: Raised the issue? At the price of how many dead, including our own? This is not a high table debate, for God’s sake. Huge numbers of people have killed and been killed because of our decision to stay in Afghanistan after we had toppled the Taliban and our invasion of Iraq. All this to raise the issue of liberal democracy? My God, man!

BERMAN: As for the question of how does one argue, I think one argues in the usual way. The way that intellectuals do: by reading people, by writing criticisms, by writing essays. A lot of this has been going on. It is not restricted to the Arab world. It is a European debate. And it is an American debate. It is, if I may say so, the obligation of intellectuals to engage in these debates. And it is possible to win these debates.

A great deal of what was done militarily was catastrophic — that is beyond dispute. But it is also the case that Kurds have rights, Shiites can practice their religious rites in Iraq, etc., so there is a mixed reality. And now we are faced with the question of what to do now — which is, I think, to engage in the argument, above all, which is what we ought to have been doing all along. The Arab liberals need support — they have received some support in the past, in spite of everything — and there ought to be more. And there ought to be arguments on their behalf.

MALCOMSON: In terms of what should be done now, two questions: Do you (each) believe that the Western or American public, having financed and fought most of this since 9/11, is eager to engage in further advancement of liberal arguments? If not, does that matter? And relatedly, President Obama has to figure out what to do himself, pretty practically. (He makes little public reference to 9/11, interestingly.) Where do you see whatever lessons we might have learned in the past decade taking policies in the near future?

TRAUB: On the first question, this is what troubles me about David’s response. There is a big difference between humility and despair. I think we have learned a lot about limits. But I don’t think the lesson is: We can do nothing to shape better outcomes in the world; we only make things worse. I would say that the American people, far from being interventionist, as they were in the aftermath of 9/11, are now heavily isolationist. How does one find the language that justifies a significant and positive American role in the world? Obama is searching — not so successfully, right now.

BURUMA: One way is to be concrete. I really don’t know what “advancing the liberal argument” means, except that it is supposed to make us feel warm all over. Are we talking about U.S. government policies? Fine. Military intervention, to topple regimes, the Napoleonic enterprise of revolutionary war, is almost always a mistake. Humanitarian intervention is the way this is phrased these days, but in fact this is often not so different from the Napoleonic way. There are things a powerful government can do to help democrats and liberals in other countries short of military force. Sometimes it is better to do nothing much at all. I believe that Obama’s relative passivity vis a vis the Green Revolution in Iran, for example, actually helped. It gave room for people in the Middle East to find their own way, without fear of being seen as America’s boys.

BERMAN: I think that “advancing the liberal argument” has a simple meaning. We should try to demonstrate the falsity of horrendous ideas — e.g., the false nature of Islamism. Islamism is not “the solution,” as it claims to be. It is a compilation of modern and ancient ideas, admixed with a great many horrendous European ideas. We should try to expose the nature of these doctrines. Very important, for instance, is to put up an argument against anti-Semitism, a key element in totalitarian doctrines, sooner or later. Women’s rights: another big theme.

Do these arguments mean nothing? We know very well that, in Iran, the universities are a center of resistance. Do people in other parts of the world listen to our own arguments? They do. They argue back. Exchanges go on. This — THIS — is the actual solution: the advancing of lucidity. I wish Obama did a bit more of it, given that, unlike Bush, he has the talent to do so. But it is not ultimately for politicians to do. This is something that intellectuals, writers, artists, journalists can do — something that quite a few NGO’s have been doing, with success too, as we have lately learned.

BURUMA: If only everybody in the world would read The New Republic, the world would solve all its problems.

RIEFF: First, let me reply to James. I don’t think the choice is between despair and hope or anything of the sort. There are things that governments can do, that, as Paul says, NGOs can do, and, though I am more skeptical about their importance, intellectuals can do. But I would far prefer that  we despaired than that we went to war! After Iraq, it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that we had learned NOT to do that, and that those who supported that war — — maybe not the war Bush fought but the ideal human rights war they called on him to fight — — would have lost their faith in military interventions in the name of human rights. That they have clearly not, as this conversation makes clear, seems to me ample cause for despair. Until that happens, I would prefer, yes, that we stand down! And where I do agree with James is that I think more and more formerly hawkish, or, at least interventionist, Americans agree — — a great thing in my view.

PART TWO

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF:  Looking over the first discussion, which I missed, I thought I’d add my two cents worth before the next one starts.  The first point to make is that there hasn’t been a successful attack on the U.S. mainland since 9/11. This is a fact worth thinking about. The apocalypse did not happen. The dog did not bark. Remember that autumn of 2001? We feared attacks on nuclear installations would come next. We believed that the anthrax attacks belonged to a wider conspiracy. There was widespread anxiety that the Muslim minority in the US was infiltrated by terrorists or their sympathizers, and a commensurate anxiety that these minorities would be subject to revenge attacks. None of this occurred. The apocalypse has been deferred indefinitely.  

One obvious reason has been the ferocious counter-attack by US special forces, CIA, and other secret agencies. The most obvious consequence of 9/11 to me has been the creation of a new national security state, to rival the one created at the start of the Cold War. It is an archipelago beneath democratic scrutiny, and it has done liberal democracies real damage: rendition, torture, detention without trial, Guantánamo, military tribunals. Its justification is that it has prevented an attack on the homeland. But this is a strange kind of justification: the absence of apocalypse is held to justify a permanent state of emergency, extending indefinitely into the future.  So the first question might be, with Bin Laden dead, what dismantling of this apparatus becomes possible? What enhanced oversight becomes necessary if we are not to perpetuate a permanent emergency?

Another point to make is that apocalypse has been avoided in the homeland, but it has spread to Bali, Madrid, London and Mumbai. Anywhere is now a target and so it is not obvious who is the target and who is the perpetrator.  Low level anxiety, in every airport, in every large public space, is now the norm, and since the perpetrators that have been caught don’t fit any obvious demographic profile, it’s not clear who were are supposed to watch with a beady eye and report to police.  Here too, we have become used to a permanent emergency: the scans at every airport, the occasional sight of someone being removed from a plane, the security systems that scan our emails and data transfers, the sense that 9/11 has created a global security archipelago beyond oversight or control. And since it still makes mistakes — Norway, for example — its very mistakes justify further expansion of the apparatus.

I’d feel happier engaging in a strong liberal defense of democracy against Islamic fascism if I felt we had this archipelago under better control. It seems to me we have paid a price for defeating Bin Laden which Bin Laden himself might find ironic confirmation of his power.

A similar kind of thought occurs in relation to the fiscal cost of the US pursuit of terrorism world-wide: three wars and the imperial overstretch and fiscal crisis that have resulted. Who is the real beneficiary of 10 years of imperial overstretch?  China and the other BRICs. It’s impossible to look back over the last 10 years and not to wonder what long-term price the U.S. has paid for devoting itself so fully to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency while its economic rivals, chiefly China, were busy capturing cheap manufacturing and primary commodity production, together with influence in every developing economy. Who is buying up Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian bonds to keep these governments afloat? China. Who is investing in infrastructure throughout Africa? China.  Nobody anticipated this, least of all the fanatics in their caves, but it is surely one of the consequences of 9/11 that might please them.

MALCOMSON: I’d suggest we start round two by addressing Michael’s question of whether one effect of 9/11 is a permanent counterterror “archipelago” that, to state the obvious, is not a natural friend of liberal politics, democracy, or perhaps some other goals of the reaction to 9/11.

BURUMA: I think the problem is with the idea of “terror”. Since this is a method — propaganda by violent means — there will never be a total end to it. There might be an end to a more clearly defined danger, extreme Islamism for example. But that is not the same as an all-out war “against terror.”

TRAUB: Well, okay, but, to go to Michael’s question, is it time for a kind of post-Osama “peace dividend”? Do we need to spend well over $500 billion a year on defense when our own sense of the threat has diminished?  Do we need to retain the same restraints on visas issued for the Islamic world?

MALCOMSON: Michael?

IGNATIEFF: The issue to me is oversight, not just spending: How a liberal democracy manages to guard the guards. And here I think we’ve lost ground since 9/11.

MALCOMSON: I also draw attention to the remarkable enthusiasm now in many quarters for a foreign policy that is significantly dependent on assassinations (simply put).

TRAUB: I think that the dependence on assassinations, to use Scott’s term, is a sign of a wish to conduct foreign policy on the cheap. We’ve despaired of state-building, etc., as we discussed the other day. So instead we choose a kind of “stand-off” policy of killings from afar. Is there any way to remedy this policy without accepting the need for what Michael sometimes describes as the “imperial burden”? My fear is that it’s precisely the American public’s unwillingness to do so that leads to policy-by-drone.

BURUMA: The solution to conflicts in the end has to be political. Both sides must see an advantage in politics instead of violence. This was shown very clearly in the conflict in Ireland. British conservatives advocated for a long time that only more military force (including torture) would force the Irish Republican Army to its knees. In the end only negotiation with an IRA that saw its own advantage in politics worked. This means one has to negotiate often with nasty people. It is interesting to read in today’s NYT that the Taliban, or certain factions, are interested in negotiation.

MALCOMSON: My own sense is that policy-by-drone is also due to a lack of faith among those running states in state-based policies that can deal with non-state actors. After ten years of watching states like the U.S. try to deal with non-state disruptive forces, we’ve reached a point where shooting individuals from the sky looks very sensible. But it is also a change from the past. Michael, since you have the advantage among this group of actual governing experience, I’m wondering how you might see this shift from a state perspective?

IGNATIEFF: You flatter me. I have no experience whatever from a state perspective, and for what it’s worth, I’d say the move toward risk-averse military action has been going on for some time. I called Kosovo a “virtual war” precisely because we tried to protect civilians from the air, to eliminate risk to ground troops, and more importantly, to maintain domestic political support for an operation in a faraway place that was always shallow. I think this is a key consideration: no one wants to die for the sake of someone else’s real estate or security, if they can avoid it, and the new technologies — drones etc. — help to square the circle. They allow interventions on the cheap, which is all domestic political considerations will allow. The problem is if the risk to us is low, oversight will be similarly casual. We start killing lots of people rather casually, and lose whatever strategic purpose we were trying to achieve.

Which brings us back to oversight. Democratic consent has to be the key: if you can’t explain something to the people, in this case the American people, I wouldn’t try it overseas. The concern I have about the whole world opened up after 9/11 is this archipelago, not just of drones, but of communication intercepts, Internet monitoring, which preserves our security at the price of . . . what? We don’t even know. I’m relatively trusting, far from paranoid, but we do have a new institutional problem:  to subject special forces, cybercommand, the boys with the drones, to some form of democratic oversight and control, if we are to stay what we say we are.

BURUMA: I agree with Michael, but one reason Americans have allowed this to happen, I think, is that they bought into Dick Cheney’s paranoid world view, initially at least, the idea that we are in an existentialist war with terror, that Islamofascism, or whatever one wishes to call it, is a deadly threat to our existence. This is why it is so important to be clear and honest about our reasons to wage war. My opposition to the war in Iraq was not because I have a moral objection to taking out a tyrant. But the government was shifty, not clear about its reasons, and often lying about them. This damages our democracy. The same is true in Libya, I fear. Humanitarian intervention has become a fig leaf for revolutionary war, to topple a regime.

MALCOMSON: From a governing perspective, the appeal of drones and the rest of the archipelago is precisely that you can keep fighting without having to be clear and honest about anything. And that is also why it is so dangerous.

TRAUB: Can we go back to this question of democratic oversight and democratic consent? One problem is that, as Ian said, the American people have proved quite willing to grant their consent to torture, to harsh immigration policies, to the militarization of our judiciary. I actually don’t think that our worst fears over the throttling of domestic dissent have been realized — far from it, in fact. But we have acquiesced in a series of serious transformations of our policy, or rather of the face we turn to the world. I wish Obama had fought harder to keep KSM’s trial in civilian court, in New York. But once Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly, the police commissioner, turned against him, he began to look like a liberal softie. Until we lose this overwhelming sense of fear, democratic consent for change will be hard to come by.

BURUMA: Perhaps this fear is part of the ethos of the United States. It was founded on a sense of fear, fear of the bad Old World, from which people found refuge. It has long been relatively easy for the U.S. government to talk the people into a sense of fear of the wicked outside world.

MALCOMSON: The best book I have read about intellectuals and 9/11 is George Fredrickson’s “The Inner Civil War,” which is about Emerson, Whittier etc. reacting to the North-South crisis before and on into the Civil War. It is amazing how similar the debates and attitudes were. So I want to celebrate Ian’s turn to the American past, although for my money American attitudes are much more formed by the Western expansion than by fear of the Old World. But in any event, Paul, you are being silent. Part of the discussion here is about intellectual responses to 9/11, and in the context of U.S. history you might have something to say…

BERMAN: Let me return for a moment to Michael’s original point. I do think there is an enormous problem of oversight. It derives from a systematic mendacity, which got its start under Bush in regard to the Iraq War, but I’m afraid has not come to an end. So we find ourselves fighting in Libya, Yemen, in Pakistan, in Somalia — fighting in various ways — and there is very little public recognition or discussion of this. This is an immense problem: political and moral.  

BURUMA: But surely intellectuals, including, if I may say so, Michael and yourself, are complicit in that government mendacity. You both took the view at the time that you disagreed with most of Bush’s policies, but you were in favor of the war in Iraq, whatever Bush’s reasons. This makes light of the government’s stated reasons for war. If we accept war, just because we might like some of the possible results from it, we end up encouraging, or at least condoning, mendacity.

IGNATIEFF: This is a discussion about what has happened to us — all of us — since 9/11, and I am putting the issue of oversight into the frame, because we have all learned a great deal about our obligations to keep ourselves honest, to refuse to condone mendacity, as you put it. Oversight in my idea of it involves us all. Congressional committees, a free press, intellectuals, academics: we all have some stake in making sure we keep each other honest. The problem I see is that we have allowed a huge apparatus to be created in our name to defend us and this apparatus is under very imperfect control. This is a consequence of 9/11 that concerns me. Of course, we have been here before. Scott referred to the Civil War. Of course societies usually go too far in the first shock of an emergency. Lincoln is widely criticized for suspending habeas corpus. But over time, we learn. It would be good to learn from the last decade. We can settle scores forever.

MALCOMSON: The genius of Fredrickson’s book is it shows intellectuals taking the Civil War as the content, so to speak, for their pre-existing ideas. Nathaniel Hawthorne was the one who resisted this; he reminds me rather of Rieff, which is a strange feeling.

But anyway, I would think another lesson from the past ten years is how hard it is to predict the results of our own violence. And I don’t want to lose track of Michael’s other point on BRICs and China, speaking of unintended consequences.

BERMAN: Mendacity was my own word, applied to Bush, back in 2003, and it was the right word. And his mendacity has had terrible consequences. But have we managed to avoid this now, to be more honest? I think we are in a situation where we have never had a proper public discussion of the whole problem. There are real things to fear, and false things to fear. I don’t think a trial of KSM in Manhattan was a good idea: there was reason to be frightened. Not every fear is a bogeyman. But how can we tell? By discussing the political issues, I would think. I think Ian is right to label the problem as a political one: Islamist extremism. And right to say there must be a political solutions. This doesn’t mean sharing the cake, though. There are movements that have to be transformed, or defeated. We should be open about this, but we are not.

Whether these issues should be traced into the American past- — I don’t know. I love Hawthorne. I am right now writing a book about him. But he was hugely wrong on the Civil War. He didn’t understand the main issue, which was slavery. To identify the big problem: this is essential.

TRAUB: The relevance of these historical examples has to do with what we did to ourselves in the face of war. But I don’t think the salient aspect of our reaction to 9/11 was a modern equivalent to the Alien and Sedition Acts, or the suspension of habeas corpus, or the Red Scare after WWI. It is not what we did to ourselves, but rather what we gave ourselves leave to do to others, that we now need to think about. To take a minor example: Americans now suffer a minor inconvenience getting on a plane, but non-Americans, and especially people from the Arab and Islamic world, can travel here at all only with great difficulty, and risk humiliating treatment once they arrive. Doesn’t that have to change?

MALCOMSON: I agree with Jim. The biggest flaw of US intellectuals’ response to the Civil War was that they always considered it as of importance only to white people (including when discussing slavery — very much including that). And much of the post-9/11 discussion was about us, ultimately, and not about the countries and people who we were, by far, the most affected.

BERMAN:  But Scott, isn’t this what we continue to do, to our shame? We are discussing our sins, our bogeymen, etc., and meanwhile somehow or another the fact that right now, as we speak, people are rising in rebellion against tyrants in Libya and Syria and other places goes barely mentioned, or unmentioned. And yet the United States and even the scribbling intellectuals and journalists might be able to do something about this. No, it’s not all about us. So, then, what about them? What are we doing for them? Or are we too self-absorbed, and too unwilling to pay taxes, and unwilling to take risks, to do anything for the people who are right now embodying a love of liberty?

MALCOMSON: I hate to demur but really want to hear Michael, Ian and Jim. I don’t disagree with you Paul, at least not at that level of generality.

IGNATIEFF: Two reactions, one to an earlier remark by Jim Traub to the effect that it’s not what we did to ourselves, it’s what we did to others that we should reflect upon. That’s true enough, and the humiliation of Muslims will have consequences that will be far-reaching both for our security and for the domestic peace of the country. But what we did to ourselves, or what liberal societies did to their domestic liberties after 9/11, is not negligible either. The new technologies of surveillance — those vast computers that sit there somewhere in Washington and elsewhere, mining telecommunications — the thousands of people in Washington and elsewhere with top-secret security clearance — I’m not sure these are passing phenomena, and I’m not sure they are easily dismantled or easily invigilated. I do want someone to be looking at all that traffic, sorting the signal of danger from the noise. But we need to keep the whole scene under control.

As for Paul’s remark about our congenital narcissism as intellectuals, ‘twas ever thus, but I would say that it pays to be a little circumspect about other people’s battles for liberty. It is their fight, not ours. We should let them know they are not alone, and we should do what we can to make sure they are not massacred, but I come away from all of this thinking it is a kind of respect to acknowledge how different their fight is, how specific it is to their situation, how little we are likely to understand their language of freedom, and how circumspect we should be about jumping in, especially with troops.

BURUMA: I’m with Michael. “Doing something”, however well intentioned, can make things much worse for the people we are supposed to help. U.S. intervention against the Nazis, after Hitler declared war, was certainly a good thing. The problem with learning lessons from the past, however, is that we tend to learn the wrong lessons. It is a terrible form of narcissism of many U.S. presidents to imagine they are Churchill, and see Hitlers behind every tinpot tyrant.

TRAUB: We have now come full circle to our central topic of last time: Can the U.S. shape better outcomes in the world? I do think this is the great question going forward, and I do think we’re all very much chastened, and I do think the American public is sick to death of the whole enterprise. But surely this is not a question with a yes or no answer. The real question is: Where, and how, can we matter? How can we do some good without being so blithe, and so self-righteous about it? I still find our role in Libya a positive example, though I recognize I may come to regret that view.

BURUMA: It helps in these matters to be an American client state. When South Koreans and Filipinos rebelled against their military dictators, the U.S. was able to put pressure on those governments, precisely they were dependent on the U.S. Alas, this was not the case with China, during Tiananmen Square. Indeed, it is rarely the case. When the U.S. cannot do anything much, it is often better for all concerned to acknowledge that and not either indulge in huffing and puffing, to no effect, or flail about like a well-meaning, but sometimes lethal, giant.

BERMAN: Can we do harm, or the wrong thing? U.S. history is full of examples. But the examples go both ways. At minimum we can speak up — the intellectuals especially. Here we have gone through ten years — since we are speaking on the occasion of an anniversary — in which I do not think we have done a whole lot to speak up for the liberals in tyrannical places.

IGNATIEFF: We can certainly shine a light on people in trouble. Pointing the spotlight of our attention can sometimes keep them out of jail, and knowing that they have international support can help them with their own tyrants.  But I would say we are in a different world than we were in 2001. A decade later, and our discussion now sounds Americanocentric. China, the BRICS, are increasingly determining what happens. I’m not a declinist, and I do think America and Americans will always have a special vocation for liberty, but the century ahead is not American. It’s not anybody else’s either. I see national communities becoming more salient than ever, as identities and languages take refuge from globalization and seek some way to protect economies and ways of life from the big economic forces. So freedom will be local, and that’s why people will fight and die for it. Those of us with the enormous good fortune to live in societies that have some control of their internal and external destinies need to help other peoples have what we have: elementary forms of self-determination so they can protect themselves. If self-determination is what we and they are after, then the rule is: stay out until they ask, and do what they ask us to do, and stay with it till it gets done.

BURUMA: The problem with helping liberals and dissidents in authoritarian countries is that they often end up as pawns in diplomatic games. Take China, for example. The only place where dissidents can make a difference is in China itself, at great personal risk. What the US and Western countries can do is put pressure on the Chinese government to release them from prison, sometimes, when it suits the Chinese. This means the Chinese government wins on two fronts: they get concessions from the US, and they are rid of a nuisance. Also, the state department is happy, because they can show that they “have done something.”

BERMAN: Michael says that freedom is local, and it is; but it is also global. If you are a small country, it is good to know that powerful organizations like NATO or the U.S. might come to your aid, and this is part of your freedom. If you are a lonely dissident, likewise. If you are a poor country in Africa, it is good (on balance) that the Chinese and other powerful economies are making investments.

MALCOMSON: Any final comments?

BURUMA: Just one, on Michael’s point about the BRICs, which we haven’t really addressed. I think this would have happened — the rise of China, India, etc. — with or without 9/11 or Bush’s blunders. But the Bush administration has perhaps sped up the decline of U.S. clout in the world, by doing great damage to the country’s good reputation. It is a terrible indictment of the Bush years that when people outside the US hear the word “democracy” in US foreign policy rhetoric, they won’t believe a word of it.

BERMAN: Maybe so, and yet, when the American ambassador arrived in Hama, Syria, to show his solidarity, people were heartened and they cheered. So maybe people do want our support. Maybe we do have something to offer. Whole crowds in the Middle East are right now asking for it.

BURUMA: Yes, and a fat lot of good it did for those crowds in Hama, once the tanks began to roll.

Unlike some other momentous events in our history — World War II, say, or the Vietnam War — the attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, have not particularly changed or enriched our vocabulary. Sometimes these things take a while. It wasn’t until the 1960s, for example, that the term “holocaust,” which used to mean any large-scale massacre, took on the specific connotations it has today. For now, though, you could argue that the events of 9/11 still seem so unfathomable that they have actually impoverished the language a little, leaving us with a vacuous phrase like war on terror, which manages to empty both “war” and “terror” of much their meaning, or the creepy, Nazi-sounding homeland, which seems a far less pleasant place to live than just plain America.

We do know a lot of words now that we probably should have known before, like jihad, Taliban, mujahedeen and Al Qaeda. And some that we’d just as soon forget, like T.S.A., security checkpoint, shoe bomber and progressive vertical collapse. A term like sleeper cell probably sticks in our heads because it contains a tiny hint of embedded poetry, and for the same reason it’s hard to forget those 72 black-eyed virgins whom the terrorists believed they were on their way to meet. The “black-eyed” bit is a brilliant touch, even if it’s probably a mistranslation.

But the most resonant phrases that have taken residence in our consciousness since that September morning are ones imbued with what might be called antipoetry, a resistance to metaphor or to prettification. Ground zero, for example — a term that originated with the Manhattan Project and was originally used in connection with nuclear explosions — seems particularly apt in this new context, with its sense of absolute finality, of a point that is both an end and a beginning and to which everything else refers.

And even 9/11 itself has a kind of rightness. No one says “September 11th” anymore as shorthand for that awful day. (To do so, a friend once joked, would be “so September 10th.”) There’s a pleasing, no-nonsense simplicity and precision to the expression — the same effect created by “24/7,” only starker, and with none of the exaggeration. These four syllables are right at the end of language, where words turn into abstraction. Individually, they’re just random, empty numbers, but yoked by that fateful slash they contain volumes. 9/11 — everyone knows what that means, and to say any more would be pointless. Sometimes words fail.

VIDEO: Artists Reflect on Sept. 11 »

Remember?

Ten years ago Don DeLillo wrote that the attacks of Sept. 11 would change “the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years.” The historian Taylor Branch spoke of a possible “turning point against a generation of cynicism for all of us,” and Roger Rosenblatt argued in Time magazine that “one good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony.”

They were wrong, of course. We know now that the New Normal was very much like the Old Normal, at least in terms of the country’s arts and entertainment. Blockbuster video stores (yes, that’s how many of us watched movies back then) placed warnings on some films — “in light of the events of Sept. 11, please note that this product contains scenes that may be disturbing to some viewers” — but violent pictures continued to top most-rented lists. Despite rumors of their demise, black humor and satire, too, remained alive and well on “Saturday Night Live” and The Onion, which ran headlines like “Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York.”

Ten years later, it is even clearer that 9/11 has not provoked a seismic change in the arts. While there were shifts in the broader culture — like an increasingly toxic polarization in our politics, and an alarming impulse to privilege belief over facts — such developments have had less to do with 9/11 than with the ballooning of partisanship during the Bush and Obama administrations, and with unrelated forces like technology, which gave us the social media revolution of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and which magnified the forces of democratization, relativism and subjectivity.

Economic worries — sparked by 9/11 and amplified by the 2008 Wall Street meltdown — accelerated trends already in place, including the Internet’s undermining of old business models in music and publishing. Warier than ever of taking risks, Hollywood looked even harder for special-effects extravaganzas that could readily find a global audience, and Broadway doubled down on shows starring big-name celebrities that could guarantee advance box office.

In response to 9/11, the artistic community quickly mobilized. Jane Rosenthal, Craig Hatkoff and Robert De Niro put together the Tribeca Film Festival (which had its 10th anniversary this spring) to help revitalize a ravaged Lower Manhattan. And musicians including Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, the Who and Jay-Z did a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden.

There was also an outpouring of art, like Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising,” Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” and Anne Nelson’s earnest play “The Guys.” Such works served useful purposes — cathartic commemoration, therapeutic expression, public rallying — but in retrospect, many of them now feel sentimental or heavy-handed. Later on, anger over the war in Iraq and worries about the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush war on terror would produce a wave of politically engaged movies and plays — including Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and David Hare’s “Stuff Happens”; unfortunately, a lot of it turned out to be obvious or shrill. Terrorist plots popped up on TV shows like “Law & Order” and “CSI: NY,” while new counterterrorism-themed shows like “The Unit,” “Sleeper Cell” and the forthcoming “Homeland” proliferated.

Some eloquent or daring works of art about 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq eventually did emerge — most notably, Kathryn Bigelow’s harrowing film “The Hurt Locker,” about a bomb disposal squad in Iraq; Gregory Burke’s haunting play “Black Watch,” based on interviews with soldiers who served in Iraq with a Scottish regiment; Amy Waldman’s novel “The Submission,” which explored the fallout of 9/11 on American attitudes toward Muslims; Donald Margulies’s play “Time Stands Still,” about the Iraq war’s effects on two journalists and their relationship; and Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman,” a bronze sculpture commemorating those who fell or jumped to their deaths from the twin towers (it was removed from Rockefeller Center after complaints that it was too disturbing, too soon).

Compelling as such works are, however, none were really game-changing. None possess the vaulting ambition of, say, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now,” or the sweep of Mr. DeLillo’s “Underworld,” which captured the entire cold war era. Instead, these 9/11 works feel like blips on the cultural landscape — they neither represent a new paradigm nor suggest that the attacks were a cultural watershed. Perhaps this is because 9/11 did not really change daily life for much of the country. Perhaps it’s because our A.D.D. nation — after the assassinations of J.F.K., R.F.K. and M.L.K. in the ’60s, and decades of violence on 24-hour news — has become increasingly inured to shock.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Some critics have argued that not enough time has passed for artists to gain sufficient perspective on 9/11. Tolstoy, after all, wrote about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia more than 50 years later; in this respect, it may be decades before larger narratives (concerning American vulnerability and American decline) surface as animating ideas in ambitious works of art. Then again, Picasso created “Guernica” in 1937, only weeks after the savage bombing of that town during the Spanish Civil War.

In the meantime, a lot of post-9/11 culture seems like a cut-and-paste version of pre-9/11 culture — or a more extreme version of it. Indeed, pop culture has slid so far into the slough of celebrity worship and escapist fluff that the antics of the Kardashian sisters now pass as entertainment. Sensationalism continues its march, and so does the blurring between news and gossip. Reality shows, which took off in 2000 with “Survivor,” continued to snowball in popularity. James Patterson, Michael Crichton and John Grisham continued to dominate best-seller lists. Even things thought, after 9/11, to be verboten — like blowing up New York for a big-screen thrill — soon made a comeback: In “Cloverfield” (2008), the Statue of Liberty is decapitated as a monster trashes the city.

For that matter, the last decade often seemed to be all about recycling. Old television shows (“Get Smart,” “Miami Vice”) and comic books (“Spider-Man,” “X-Men”) were recycled into films. Old movies (“Arthur,” “The Karate Kid”) were remade. Jukebox musicals were assembled onstage from old pop songs (“Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages”), and vintage soul and roots rock enjoyed a revival.

“Instead of being the threshold to the future,” the critic Simon Reynolds writes in his astute new book, “Retromania,” the 2000s “were dominated by the ‘re-’ prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments.”

In fact, several prominent novels dealing with 9/11 drew heavily from earlier classics. Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” which captures the precariousness of post-9/11 daily life, reads like a contemporary variation on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” features a hero named Oskar, who resembles the hero of the same name in Gunter Grass’s “The Tin Drum.” And Mohsin Hamid’s chilling novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” — which recounts the effect 9/11 has on a successful Pakistani immigrant — borrowed the structure and central themes of Camus’s novel “The Fall.” Why this eagerness to pour new content into old vessels? In “Retromania,” Mr. Reynolds suggests technology in the 2000s contributed to a “fading of the artistic imperative to be original.” In the case of 9/11 novels, familiar forms may also provide narrative strategies for artists trying to subdue an event that seemed to defy representation — one that reminds us of Philip Roth’s 1961 observation that American reality stupefies and infuriates the writer because it is “continually outdoing our talents.”

No doubt this is why many powerful works to emerge about 9/11 and its aftermath have been documentary or fact-based. In the past, with traumatic subjects like Vietnam and AIDS, this has been the trajectory over time: News accounts and witness testimony give way to memoirs, which in turn give way to more metaphorical works of the imagination.

While writers struggled to find words to describe the unimaginable, photographers captured the devastation of 9/11 with visceral eloquence. “Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs,” a project that invited everyone from professional photographers to regular New Yorkers to share their images, created a choral portrait of the city through personal acts of bearing witness.

The Power of Bare Facts

In terms of narrative scope and harrowing drama, no novel has yet to match “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s nonfiction account of the events that led to 9/11. Terry McDermott’s book “Perfect Soldiers” drew a portrait of the real 9/11 hijackers that was far more compelling than the crude jihadi stereotype in John Updike’s novel “Terrorist.” Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side” similarly provided a more indelible portrait of the dark side of the war on terror than such fictional films as “Rendition” and “Redacted.” The straight-up documentary “9/11” (using video shot that day by Jules and Gedeon Naudet) possesses a raw power totally lacking in Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” which imposed a conventional Hollywood frame around the story of two survivors, trying to make a chaotic nightmare yield an inspirational story with the soothing illusion of closure.

In fact, 9/11 poses distinct challenges to the artist. As with Mr. Stone’s movie, there is the danger of trying to domesticate an overwhelming tragedy. There is also the question of presumption: How does one convey the enormity of the event without trivializing it? How does one bend art forms more often used for entertainment or artistic expression toward the capturing of history?

In “On the Transmigration of Souls,” the composer John Adams used taped sounds of New York to create what he called a “memory space” in which the audience could mourn. In his novel “The Zero,” Jess Walter used a Kafkaesque sense of the absurd to conjure the post-traumatic stress disorder the nation suffered. And in their TV series “Rescue Me,” Denis Leary and Peter Tolan looked directly at the post-9/11 lives of firefighters for whom “normal is dead and buried underneath ground zero.”

All too often, however, artworks keyed to 9/11 felt mercenary or narcissistic. Craig Wright’s play “Recent Tragic Events” was a slick romantic comedy about a blind date that takes place the day after 9/11, and Neil LaBute’s “The Mercy Seat,” also set on Sept. 12, used the attacks as an excuse for another of his cynical treatises on the venality of man. Novelists were equally solipsistic, using 9/11 as a plot point, as a mirror of their characters’ inner lives, or as a device to try to inject importance into otherwise slender stories. In Helen Schulman’s “A Day at the Beach,” 9/11 leads a hip downtown couple to reassess their marriage. And in Frédéric Beigbeder’s “Windows on the World,” a fictional storyline about a man and his sons caught in the World Trade Center on 9/11 is crassly intercut with the intellectual musings of a self-important narrator.

Fantasies and Forerunners

Sept. 11 and the emotions it generated — fear, anger, a desire for revenge — also fueled the success of several entertainment franchises. The hit counterterrorism show “24,” its co-creator Joel Surnow told the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, was “ripped out of the zeitgeist of what people’s fears are — their paranoia that we’re going to be attacked.” The series frequently used torture as a way of gathering intelligence; it depicted the fight against terrorism much as members of the Bush administration did: as a struggle for American survival that required all means necessary.

In the case of the Syfy Channel’s remake of “Battlestar Galactica” — which depicted some humans who survive an attack by enemy robots — its executive producer Ronald D. Moore noted that many plot elements were “informed by the 9/11 experience and the war on terrorism.” Fans of Microsoft’s hugely popular video game “Halo,” in which humans face off against an alliance of alien species bent on holy war, have also pointed to parallels between the aliens and Al Qaeda.

For that matter, fantasy epics — pitting good versus evil in stark Manichaean terms — dominated the box office in the last decade: among the top-grossing films were “Avatar,” two installments of “The Lord of the Rings,” three installments of “Harry Potter” and “The Dark Knight.” Superheroes like Spider-Man and Iron Man ruled, and so did vampires. There was a lot of intellectualizing about all this: arguments that the fantasy boom embodied Americans’ need for escapism after 9/11; that superhero sagas offered audiences a way to process the tragedy; that vampires, like terrorists, pose a deadly threat but often hide in plain sight. Steven Spielberg said his 2005 remake of “War of the Worlds” reflected post-9/11 anxiety. Time’s Richard Corliss described the Joker in “The Dark Knight” as “the terrorist as improv artist.” And bloggers compared Voldemort and his Death Eaters in “Harry Potter” to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

It’s too easy, however, to see every recent pop culture phenomenon as a metaphor for combating terrorism. Voldemort sprang from J. K. Rowling’s imagination well before 9/11. The Tolkien novels, like Batman, Spider-Man and many of their superhero brethren, predate 9/11 by decades, as do the first “Star Wars” movies. Curiously, the best-known terrorist-themed movies remain ones made before 9/11, including “Air Force One” (1997), “True Lies” (1994), “Patriot Games” (1992) and “Die Hard” (1988). Some of the works of art that would prove the most resonant in the post-9/11 world also turn out to have been written before the attacks. Tony Kushner began work on his play “Homebody/Kabul,” which unfolds into an examination of the West’s relationship with Afghanistan, back in 1997. And such early Don DeLillo novels as “Mao II” (1991) did a more prescient job of conjuring the post-9/11 era — in which terrorists have changed “the rules of what is thinkable” — than the flimsy novels he wrote after the attacks.

It is another measure of how resistant 9/11 remains to artistic treatment that several of the more memorable artworks that captured the city’s sense of loss did so by indirection. Colum McCann’s novel “Let the Great World Spin” focuses on New York City in 1974, when Philippe Petit walked between the twin towers on a tightrope. And Ric Burns’s documentary “The Center of the World” and Camilo José Vergara’s photographs on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York make us re-experience the loss of the World Trade Center by recounting its history.

At the same time, other artistic creations — unrelated to 9/11 — took on new depth or new meanings. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental project “The Gates,” conceived in 1979 and only realized in 2005 with the support of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, threaded Central Park with 7,500 gates wrapped in saffron fabric, turning that great communal space into a work of art that was at once visionary and interactive, ephemeral and enduring. The largest public art project in the city’s history, it became, for many New Yorkers, a symbol of hope, of transcendence, of healing after 9/11.

“It’s not that everything is different after 9/11; it’s more that we look at the same stuff through a different prism,” says Kate D. Levin, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner. In the case of “The Gates,” she adds, something that had “nothing to do with 9/11, something that was completely about aesthetics” became “that much more profound.”

There is a place for alarmism when threats to civil liberties are concerned. Too much worry about our freedoms is better than too little, particularly in the face of a government shrouded in wartime secrecy after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But there is also a place, a decade later, for sober reflection. By historic standards, the domestic legal response to 9/11 gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes. And even those changes were largely a result of reordered law enforcement priorities rather than fundamental shifts in the law.

Consider the USA Patriot Act, which was short for this Orwellian mouthful: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. The law, more than 300 pages long, sailed through Congress seven weeks after the attacks with scant dissent. It quickly became a sort of shorthand for government abuse and overreaching.

The Patriot Act undeniably expanded the government’s surveillance powers and the scope of some criminal laws. But this was, in truth, tinkering at the margins and nothing compared with the responses of other developed democracies, where preventive detention and limitations on subversive speech became commonplace.

“In comparative perspective, the Patriot Act appears mundane and mild,” Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto, writes in a new book, “The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism.”

The story is different as one moves beyond domestic criminal law. Detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions and brutal interrogations all tested the limits of the appropriate exercise of government power in wartime. The American government held people without charge for almost a decade, engaged in torture as that term is understood in international law, and sent people abroad for questioning to countries known to engage in what everyone must agree is torture.

But criminal law itself changed surprisingly little in the wake of the attacks. What did change was how law enforcement conceived its mission.

Almost immediately after the attacks, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft announced “a new paradigm.” Preventing terrorist acts, he said, was now more important than punishing crimes after the fact. There were echoes here of “Minority Report,” the 1956 Philip K. Dick story (and 2002 movie) that depicted a world in which the police catch criminals before they can act, based on their thoughts rather than their actions.

The new paradigm encouraged the arrests of people thought to be dangerous for, as Mr. Ashcroft put it, “spitting on the sidewalk,” or for immigration offenses, or as material witnesses. It increased surveillance of religious and dissident groups. It ramped up the use of a law barring even benign support for organizations said to engage in terrorism, putting pressure on activities long thought to be protected by the First Amendment. And it inserted informants into Muslim communities, giving rise to a culture of suspicion and charges of entrapment.

The number of people directly affected by these changes was, in the greater scheme of things, small. The indirect chilling effect on free speech, association rights and religious freedom was impossible to measure. But by the standards of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Palmer raids of 1920, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the McCarthy era, the contraction of domestic civil liberties in the last decade was minor.

Arrest Early, Charge Broadly

As they generally have in the past, the courts acquiesced in the government’s efforts to combat terrorism. True, the Supreme Court placed some limits on the executive branch’s ability to hold prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. But decisions in criminal and immigration cases tell a different story.

“The courts have been failing terribly,” said Susan N. Herman, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union and the author of “Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy,” which will be published in October.

The Supreme Court, she said, routinely refuses to hear cases in which lower courts uphold the government’s position in cases involving national security. “They’re not interested in civil liberties challenges,” she said of the justices. “They’re only interested when the government loses.”

The goal of stopping terrorism before it happens caused federal law enforcement officials to make early arrests and then to rely on charges that required little proof of concrete conduct. Prosecutors often charged defendants accused of involvement in terrorism with conspiracy or “material support” of groups said to engage in terrorism.

Those laws were already in place, said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas. “The difference is,” he said, “they just weren’t being used.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, things changed. In just the first five years, prosecutors charged more than 100 people with providing material support to terrorist groups. That support often took tangible form, like providing weapons, and it generally seemed directly linked to the advancement of violent ends.

But some prosecutions were based on sending money to groups that engaged in both humanitarian work and violence. And last year, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled that it could also be a serious felony merely to urge terrorist groups to use peaceful means to resolve disputes. Such speech, the court said, amounted to material support and could be made criminal notwithstanding the protections of the First Amendment.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, stressed that the material-support law applied only to speech directed by or coordinated with terrorist groups. People “may say anything they wish on any topic” without running afoul of the law, the chief justice said, so long as they are speaking independently.

Aggressive use of material support and similar laws, critics responded, chipped away at two principles that had been thought settled for about half a century. One was that mere membership in a subversive organization cannot be made a crime. The other is that the abstract advocacy of even the violent overthrow of the government must be tolerated under the First Amendment.

The Humanitarian Law Project decision “is akin to the kind of criminalization in the McCarthy era of speech and guilt by association,” said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown who represented the challengers in the Humanitarian Law Project case as a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

A second law already on the books, this one allowing the arrest and detention of material witnesses — people said to have evidence of others’ crimes — was misused, critics say, as a shadow preventive detention regime. Instead of using the law to make sure people with information about the wrongdoing of others would turn up to testify, these critics said, prosecutors used the law to hold people themselves suspected of links to terrorism.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Laws concerning immigration offenses were also used to detain people suspected of terrorism, according to a 2003 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general. The report said that the usual presumptions of the legal system were turned upside down after the attacks. People detained on immigration charges were considered guilty until proven innocent and were often held for months in harsh conditions after they were ordered released.

In decisions in 2009 and May of this year, the Supreme Court blocked two lawsuits seeking to hold Mr. Ashcroft accountable for what the plaintiffs said were abuses in the use of the material-witness and immigration laws.

“It should come as no surprise,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority in one of them, “that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks should produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.”

In the decade since the attacks, the government also became notably more aggressive in the use of informants and sting operations, sowing distrust in some parts of Muslim communities. In one such operation, an imam in Albany was ensnared in a fictitious plot involving shoulder-launched missiles and the assassination of a Pakistani diplomat in New York.

Defending the 15-year sentence meted out to the imam, Yassin M. Aref, prosecutors said the new paradigm of prevention justified the tactics. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has an obligation to use all available investigative tools,” prosecutors wrote in a 2007 appeals court brief, “including a sting operation, to remove those ready and willing to help terrorists from our streets.”

Protections ‘Seriously Diluted’

Not all new tactics in combating terrorism in the United States were based on existing laws. “In electronic surveillance, you did have a big change,” said John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who became known for his aggressive legal advice and expansive view of executive power as a Justice Department official in the Bush administration.

In 2002, for instance, a special federal appeals court, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, granted the Justice Department broad new powers to use wiretaps obtained for intelligence operations in criminal cases. “This revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts,” Mr. Ashcroft said at the time.

After revelations concerning the warrantless wiretapping of international communications, Congress largely endorsed the program. Those legal changes, joined with striking advances in technology, have allowed the government broad ability to gather information.

“The Fourth Amendment has been seriously diluted,” said Professor Herman, who teaches at Brooklyn Law School. She added that she was struck by “the amount of surveillance that’s been unleashed with less and less judicial review and less and less individualized suspicion.”

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have been criticized by liberals as employing excessive secrecy and, in particular, for invoking the state secrets privilege to shut down civil litigation challenging things like rendition and surveillance programs. By international standards, though, the public has learned a great deal about secret government activities.

“That so many of the abuses committed by the executive in the wake of 9/11 have come to light is another sign of American exceptionalism,” Professor Roach wrote, “as manifested by the activities of a free press that is unrestrained by official secrets acts found in most other democracies.”

Opinions vary about whether efforts to fight terrorism in the United States have inflicted collateral damage on political dissent, religious liberty and the freedom of association.

“If you look at it historically,” said Professor Yoo, “you might say, ‘I can’t believe we’re at war,’ when you see how much speech is going on. Civil liberties are far more protected than what we’ve seen in past wars.”

Professor Cole was less sanguine.

“Since 9/11, the criminal law has expanded, ensnaring as ‘terrorists’ people who have done no more than provide humanitarian aid to needy families, while privacy and political freedoms have contracted, especially for those in Muslim communities,” he said. “On the one hand, the past 10 years have shown that criminal law can be used effectively to fight terrorism; on the other, it has also demonstrated that the demand for prevention can all too quickly lead to the abuse of innocents.”