Twenty-five years after al Qaeda's attacks on the United States, Patrick
G. Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former senior
House staffer for then-New Jersey Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, published a
retrospective on Antiwar.com arguing that the attacks themselves did
not damage the American political system as much as the response to them
did. In the article, titled "9/11's Aftereffect: The Constitutional
Accountability Abyss," Eddington wrote that "9/11 didn't change us, we
allowed it to change us, and in doing so critically damaged our very own
political way of life."
Eddington, the author of "The Triumph of Fear," drew on his
experience serving on Capitol Hill during the final four years of
President George W. Bush's administration. He wrote that he witnessed
the post-9/11 era from the vantage point of a senior House staffer on
the Intelligence Committee, where Holt's efforts to halt the expansion
of surveillance programs frequently failed because colleagues refused to
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