Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed 2,977 victims in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four commercial airliners as part of Osama bin Laden’s militant jihad against the United States of America. The repercussions of the events of that day still affect our daily lives today.
In contrast with modern-day leftist propaganda and Vice President Kamala Harris’ remarks made only last night during the debate to the effect that the events of January 6, 2021, were worse than any other attack on America since the Civil War, the reality is that the September 11 attacks have had the greatest effect on the civil liberties of U.S. citizens.
After 23 years, with endless war, mass surveillance, censorship, and lawfare now daily realities, we should ask: Has the Constitution of our Republic been a victim of the terrorist attacks?
The late, great writer William Norman Grigg wrote the following a week after the attacks, warning that we would suffer losses even greater if we allowed the Constitution to become “collateral damage” in the aftermath of 9/11:
As America braces for a war of uncertain length against an unspecified enemy, many have embraced the ancient legal maxim inter arma, enim silent leges — “In time of war, the laws fall silent.” In a sense this is an understandable reaction to the depraved lawlessness displayed by the foreign enemies who killed several thousand Americans in the attacks of September 11th. While we certainly must track down and eradicate those directly responsible for that attack, we must also remember that our laws — the Constitution that frames our system of government, and the heritage of Christian laws that inspired our nation’s charter of government — define us as a people. If we allow those laws to become “collateral damage” in the “war on terrorism,” we will suffer losses even greater than those we endured on that terrible Tuesday morning.
