Today's D Brief: Sept. 11, at 20; 9/11, on film; Afghanistan’s last holdouts; Biden, Xi talk; And a bit more.
By Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston
September 10, 2021 10:45 AM ET
The D Brief
Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States remains in a state of “national emergency” because of those very attacks. That’s according to the letter every president has sent to the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president of the Senate every year since 2001, and now that includes 2021.
“The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues,” President Joe Biden said in his letter, which was released Thursday by the White House.
Americans are still assessing the consequences and the “far-reaching, controversial and even harmful decisions made in the aftermath of the attacks — the vast expansion of the surveillance state; covert operations to kill or capture suspected terrorists, and in some cases torture them; and the invasion first of Afghanistan, where the attacks were planned, and then Iraq, where they were not,” as Politico’s Bryan Bender and Daniel Lippman write.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/09/the-d-brief-september-10-2021/185269/