The law before and after 9/11
Michael Chertoff had a common reaction to the news of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. “Like many people at the time, I thought it was a pilot error,” the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security told a lunchtime crowd at Harvard Law School on Tuesday. But when he learned of a second plane doing likewise, Chertoff, who was then the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division at the Justice Department, knew the country was under attack. He spent the next agonizing hours at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s operations center trying to help predict when or where another plane might hit and how to bring it down. “The thoughts that go through your mind are, ‘there could be far worse,’” like biological or nuclear attacks, he recalled. During a discussion at Austin Hall, Chertoff outlined a paradigm shift...