By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Washington, D.C.
January 11, 2026

The Failure Everyone Was Supposed to Forget

The modern American intelligence state asks for trust it has never earned. The clearest proof is not secrecy or surveillance—it is failure without accountability. On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed on U.S. soil. The most sophisticated intelligence network in human history did not stop it. Worse, it later emerged that warnings existed, fragments were known, and signals were present. They were simply not acted upon.

No senior official was held accountable. No careers meaningfully ended. No institutional house-cleaning followed. Instead, the message was unmistakable: catastrophic failure would be absorbed, normalized, and bureaucratically buried.

Trust does not survive that kind of outcome.

“Nobody Saw It Coming” — Except They Did

The record is now beyond dispute. Multiple agencies had pieces of the puzzle. Intelligence reports warned of an imminent al-Qaeda attack inside the United States. Flight schools, visas, and communications were flagged. The problem was not ignorance—it was systemic disregard.

The official response amounted to a shrug dressed up as tragedy: mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and life would go on. But trust requires accountability, and accountability never arrived. When a system fails at its core mission—protecting lives—and then shields itself from consequence, it forfeits moral authority.

The Expansion That Followed the Collapse

Instead of reform, the United States chose expansion. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security folded dozens of agencies into a single internal-security apparatus with sweeping authority and minimal oversight. DHS was sold as protection. In practice, it became a domestic force multiplier.

Today, DHS and its components operate inside American communities with militarized posture, opaque rules of engagement, and legal insulation. Non-terrorists have been killed. Raids have been misrepresented. Video evidence has contradicted official statements. When discrepancies emerge, the response is denial—not transparency.

Law enforcement protects communities. Internal security controls them. DHS increasingly resembles the latter.

Surveillance Without Consent or Restraint

If DHS represents physical force, the National Security Agency represents invisible reach. After years of official denials, mass surveillance was confirmed as standard practice. Americans were told it was necessary. Non-Americans were told nothing at all.

The distinction matters less than advertised. Surveillance systems do not respect borders; they respect capability. Communications are collected first and justified later. Oversight exists largely on paper, and redress is nearly impossible. Once again, accountability is theoretical.

A system that monitors everyone but answers to almost no one cannot credibly ask for trust.

Foreign Intelligence, Domestic Consequences

The Central Intelligence Agency is legally barred from domestic operations. In reality, interagency cooperation, data sharing, and contracting have blurred those boundaries beyond recognition. Influence does not require arrest. It requires access, leverage, and silence.

For Americans and non-Americans alike, the result is the same: an intelligence ecosystem that operates globally, shields itself internally, and accepts no meaningful consequences when it gets things disastrously wrong.

One System, One Verdict

This is not about foreign distrust versus domestic trust. It is about universal distrust. When failure is rewarded with expansion, secrecy replaces accountability, and power grows without restraint, credibility collapses.

September 11 was not just an intelligence failure. It was the moment the United States chose institutional self-preservation over public trust. Everything that followed—DHS overreach, NSA surveillance, and normalized impunity—flows from that decision.

We are no longer debating whether the system works. We are living with proof that it does not—and that it will not correct itself.

Handled

With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, Americans were quietly reclassified—from citizens to a managed population.

Not suspects individually, but suspects collectively.
Not enemies explicitly, but risks by default.

That’s the shift the image captures.
That’s the shift most people feel but don’t quite name.

Once a government builds an internal security apparatus, it’s no longer asking how do we serve the public?
It’s asking how do we control outcomes inside our own borders?

And once that happens, the citizens of the United States aren’t just being protected.

They’re being handled.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References (APA)

9/11 Commission. (2004). The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Greenwald, G. (2014). No place to hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. surveillance state. Metropolitan Books.

American Civil Liberties Union. (2017). The surveillance-industrial complex. ACLU.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General. (Various years). Oversight and accountability reports. U.S. Government.

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