Then there are the attacks on law firms that have opposed Trump. Recently, for instance, security clearances were removed for lawyers at the law firms of Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton's campaign in the 2016 election, and Covington Burleigh, which represented Jack Smith, who investigated Trump in the Biden years. Lawyers from those firms were also banned from federal buildings. And don't forget the all-out attempt to go after officials who investigated and prosecuted January 6th cases.
The idea of an independent Justice Department has been severely damaged, with the promise of so much more to come.
Evading Accountability
More often than not, the significant transformations of law and policy that grew out of the response to 9/11 were relegated to the pages of history with little or no accountability. The Senate, under Senator Diane Feinstein's leadership, did produce a report on the CIA's use of torture. It detailed despicable acts of cruelty and ultimately concluded that such techniques, decreed to be legal by the Department of Justice, were "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees." And immediately upon taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama issued an executive order officially ending the use of torture. But he was decidedly against holding any officials accountable for what had occurred, preferring, as he so memorably put it, to "look forward, not backward." In addition, Obama refused to call torture a "crime," labeling it a mistake instead.
Today, in more mundane matters, the distaste for accountability has been institutionalized throughout the government. In his first term in office, Donald Trump dismissed or replaced five inspectors general, officials assigned to departments throughout the executive branch of government to monitor waste, abuse, and fraud. Almost immediately upon taking office this time around, he dismissed "roughly 17" of them. For the moment, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which, from its creation, never included an inspector-general position, is now under review by the Department of Treasury's inspector general.
Trump's aversion to accountability clearly reflects a desire to protect his own efforts to totally control executive policy. It should, however, also serve as a striking reminder of the aversion to accountability that followed the legalization and uses of torture in the post-9/11 years, the fabricated decision to go to war in Iraq, the mass surveillance of Americans in that era, and so much more. All of this set in place a grim template for the second Trump era -- the notion that no one is ultimately accountable for abusing the law when their actions have been ordered (or simply approved) by the president.
Lessons (Un)learned
Given the magnitude of the most recent antidemocratic actions by Donald Trump and his team, blaming them on the slippery slope created during the war on terror years may seem like a distinct overreach. Yet, given the dangerous excesses we're now witnessing, it's worth remembering just how vulnerable the loss of certain norms of legality and accountability in those years left this country -- and how sadly little we seem to have learned from that era.
Racism, a lack of deference for the courts, the failure to hold individuals and organizations accountable for informally rewriting the nation's laws, the pervasive embrace of secrecy, and an unwillingness to erect strict guardrails to prevent the future manipulation of both laws and norms -- all those realities of the war on terror years created a distinctly undemocratic template, however different in scale, for this Trumpian moment of ours. An unwillingness to be accountable or to circumvent secrecy during the war on terror led the country straight into today's quagmire.
Today's horrific moment should, in fact, be considered -- to return to that word of mine one last time -- a true perversification of past misdeeds, made all too possible by a failure in the post-9/11 years to take measures to prevent their recurrence.
Copyright 2025 Karen J. Greenberg
Featured image: Albert V Bryan Federal District Courthouse - Alexandria Va - 0011 - 2012-03-10 by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr
Nikolas Oktaba contributed research for this article.
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