We Are No Safer 25 Years After 9/11

# Overview M.D. Kittle revisits the chain of events and policy outcomes since Sept. 11, 2001, arguing that the country is not safer today than it was the day before the attacks. Central to the piece is a concrete example: a Saudi national, Mohammad Ahmad al-Qahtani, was briefly detained in Orlando on Aug. 4, 2001. Authorities treated him as an ordinary migrant instead of as a counterterrorism lead. That encounter contained information that, if followed, might have disrupted the 9/11 plot.

# What happened in Orlando Officials fingerprinted and questioned al-Qahtani after his behavior drew suspicion. He carried prepaid calling cards and cash and arrived on a one-way ticket. Investigators later found those materials connected to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other 9/11 operatives. Michael Lebowitz, a former DOJ national security attorney and Guantánamo prosecutor interviewed in the piece, says the encounter "fell through the cracks." He contends a counterterrorism framing then could have altered the course of events.

# Institutional responses after 9/11 The federal response in the years that followed included the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Those institutions aimed to secure the homeland, coordinate intelligence, and restore public confidence in air travel. The article traces how those structural changes coexisted with a long, costly overseas counterterrorism footprint, including the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

# How the post-9/11 era unfolded

# Current sources of vulnerability The article names practical problems: intelligence gaps, complacency, flawed policy priorities, and a broken immigration system. It singles out political choices across administrations for failing to sustain stringent immigration enforcement measures Congress enacted after 9/11. It also highlights efforts to defund or dismantle agencies such as ICE and CBP as weakening frontline defenses.

# The social dimension Lebowitz and the author argue that the most consequential weakness is internal: deep political division, erosion of social institutions including faith and family, and a distracted public sphere. The piece claims those internal fractures reduce national resilience and increase exposure to external threats.

# Bottom line Kittle's piece presents a critique of both past operational failures and broader social and political trends. It uses the missed Orlando lead as a concrete illustration of how procedural and mindset failures can have catastrophic consequences, and it links institutional and societal changes since 2001 to the conclusion that the country is no safer now than it was before 9/11.