[ September 12, 2026 ]
A Washington Post column marking the 25th anniversary of September 11 carries a remarkable subhead:
“There wasn’t another major attack in the U.S. But there wasn’t the reckoning that was needed either.”
Indeed. There was no reckoning. And 25 years later, there still hasn’t been one.
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But the Washington Post ought to examine its own role in that failure.
For decades, much of the establishment media has treated serious examination of the ideology, doctrines and objectives animating jihadist movements as something indecent to discuss. Those who insisted that the religious and political ideas invoked by the perpetrators themselves mattered were routinely dismissed as bigots, “racists” or “Islamophobes.”
The result was extraordinary: America spent trillions fighting jihadist organizations abroad while making an honest discussion of jihadist ideology increasingly taboo at home.
And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed understood that vulnerability.
According to CIA contract psychologist James Mitchell, who spent extensive time interrogating the architect of the September 11 attacks, KSM believed America did not have to be defeated militarily.
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The longer game, he said, would take place inside America itself.
KSM predicted that “jihadi-minded brothers” would immigrate to the United States, exploit the country’s institutions while spreading their message, and then “wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws for protection” while increasing acceptance of Sharia.
His description went further. The account attributed to KSM said they would wait until they were sufficiently powerful and then seek to impose Sharia from within.
This was considered significant enough to be read into the Congressional Record in 2016.
And there was another element to KSM’s strategy that deserves far more attention: exhaustion.
He reportedly believed jihadists did not have to defeat the United States on a conventional battlefield. They merely had to continue fighting until Americans became sufficiently tired, frightened and weary of conflict that they wanted it to end.
In other words, KSM understood something America’s political class still struggles to understand: the battlefield was not only physical. It was political, cultural and psychological.
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He reportedly told Mitchell that America might not consider itself engaged in a religious war, but jihadists considered themselves at war with America — and would continue until the world lived under Sharia.
That distinction is crucial. Refusing to acknowledge an enemy’s stated ideology does not make that ideology disappear.
And here we are, a quarter-century after 9/11.
Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered in a meticulously planned jihadist attack. Yet the man who acknowledged being al-Qaeda’s operational director for the planning and execution of September 11 still has not faced final justice. In a 2007 military proceeding, KSM himself admitted his central role in organizing the attack.
Meanwhile, Americans are continually instructed that discussing the political and legal doctrines associated with Sharia is somehow an attack on Muslims themselves.
It is not.
Muslim Americans possess precisely the same constitutional rights as every other American, including the right to worship, speak, vote and seek public office. The issue is not whether a candidate is Muslim.
The issue is whether any candidate for public office — Muslim, Christian, Jewish or otherwise — believes a religious legal system, religious authority or any other ideology takes precedence over the United States Constitution.
That is not religious bigotry. It is a fundamental question of constitutional government.
And when an elected official advocates policies rooted in Sharia or any other system incompatible with constitutional liberties, Americans have every right to examine those views, debate them and demand answers.
The grotesque irony is that the very accusation of “Islamophobia” can be used to prevent that examination — turning America’s admirable commitment to religious tolerance into a prohibition against discussing political ideology.
KSM reportedly anticipated precisely this larger vulnerability: use America’s freedoms, laws and institutions as protection while pursuing objectives hostile to those very institutions.
America’s Constitution protects religious liberty. It protects Muslims. It protects Christians, Jews, atheists and everyone else.
But the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and religious liberty does not require Americans to pretend that every religiously inspired political doctrine is compatible with constitutional government.
That was the reckoning America should have had after September 11.
Instead, we fought terrorists while refusing to conduct the larger ideological debate.
Twenty-five years later, the Washington Post complains that the reckoning never came.
On that, at least, they’re right.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Jihadis will ‘wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws’ and work to impose Sharia
By Robert Spencer, September 12, 2026:
This Washington Post article bears this subhead: “There wasn’t another major attack in the U.S. But there wasn’t the reckoning that was needed either.”
That’s true, and there still hasn’t been such a reckoning, and that is due in no small part because of the efforts of the Washington Post to obscure the ideological roots, motives, and goals of the 9/11 hijackers and plotters, and to defame and smear those who called attention to those ideological roots, motives and goals as “racists” and “Islamophobes.”
Meanwhile, as increasing numbers of Muslims are elected to offices at all levels of government, and some of them are openly Sharia-adherent, there should be a national conversation regarding these officials’ loyalty to the United States and its laws in comparison to their loyalty to Sharia. But such a suggestion, when not ignored entirely, will be batted down as “Islamophobic.”
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed“I was at the Pentagon on 9/11. Here’s what surprises me 25 years later.” By Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, September 10, 2026:
There wasn’t another major attack in the U.S. But there wasn’t the reckoning that was needed either….
With his disastrous and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden fulfilled KSM’s prophecy when he told James E. Mitchell, his CIA interrogator: “We will win because Americans don’t realize … we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.”…
KSM had another prophecy: According to Mitchell, he said that “jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States” and “wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws” until they were strong enough to rise up and attack us. Mitchell said that KSM explained to him that “he and his brothers will not stop until the entire world lives under Sharia law.”…
The Truth Must be Told
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