Finally, a few of the contributions are, simply put, a bit bizarre. In The Age of Terror, Charles Hill, a former aide to Secretaries of State Kissinger, Haig and Shultz, writes, as if to shake his head at misguided priorities, "In the aftermath of the September 11 mass murders, many Americans admirably rushed to recommit themselves to civil liberties and respect for the rights of individuals who share the appearance, ethnicity or faith of the terrorist enemies of the U.S." On this planet? In the country I'm living in, the Attorney General rushed to apprehend thousands of immigrants without charges or access to public counsel, sent FBI agents to question 5,000 more and impugned the patriotism of those who dared to challenge his policies. The President rushed to set up military tribunals, akin to those we have condemned when used by Peru or Turkey, to try suspected terrorists. Hill goes on: "Over the past few decades, Americans have begun to fall prey to an inverse version of the conspiracy-theory mentality: that virtually every problem in the world can be attributed to some fault of ours." Not that I've noticed. Maybe he's been spending too much time reading September 11 and the U.S. War.

Harold Hongju Koh, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, is virtually alone in both of the mainstream volumes in raising the alarm about the serious challenges to civil liberties and human rights brought on by the US response to September 11. Aside from Michael Mandelbaum's essay in How Did This Happen?, only Koh seems concerned about the US tendency to overlook the human rights abuses of "friendly" states, from our allies in the cold war to those in the campaign against terrorism. And only he condemns the rapid resort to "crisis restrictions" on civil liberties and the "oppressive orthodoxy" of "patriotic correctness"--a nice turn of phrase that I hope catches on--that swept the country in the weeks and months following the attacks.

Yet even Koh, in his eagerness to demonstrate that it's possible to combat terrorism and protect civil liberties, overstates the experience of "our fellow democracies like Britain and Israel...in balancing a crisis atmosphere, a forceful response, and strenuous efforts to increase homeland security, with a sustained commitment to domestic civil liberties." For a different view, the latest issue of Index on Censorship, the London-based human rights magazine, reports the testimony of the British rights organization Liberty before Parliament's Home Affairs Committee that twenty-five years of antiterrorism laws in Britain have led to "appalling human rights abuses and miscarriages of justice, and the unnecessary detention of thousands of innocent, mostly Irish, people."

Civil liberties are under greater strain in the United States than at any time in recent memory; the Taliban are nearly routed in Afghanistan. That much is clear at this writing. Beyond that, it's almost impossible to predict the longer-term impact of the World Trade Center attacks. In fact, what's remarkable to me about some cataclysmic political events of the past few years, which totally absorbed public and media attention for months on end and which were widely assumed to have altered the political equation in fundamental ways, even calling into question the legitimacy of all three branches of government (I'm thinking here about the impeachment and trial of President Clinton and the crisis over the 2000 presidential election, finally resolved by a highly suspect ruling of the Supreme Court) is not how much they changed American life and politics but how quickly they faded from consciousness, and how little enduring impact they seem to have had. September 11, we are endlessly told, transformed George W. Bush into a leader and erased any lingering doubts about his legitimacy. But in fact, for most Americans, whatever they thought of his competence or policies, doubts about his right to be there had virtually evaporated by the time of the inauguration, and only weeks into Bush's presidency it was quite easy to forget the extraordinary means by which he had reached it.

President Clinton was supposed to be fatally wounded, first by Kenneth Starr's disclosure of what he did with Monica Lewinsky--few public figures aside from Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee have had to endure such a detailed public account of their sexual activities--and then by having to stand in the dock for it. There is no doubt that Clinton's energies and attention were diverted by the trials visited upon him by the independent prosecutor and the Republican-controlled House and Senate. But life went on, and it's hard to see any enduring damage to the political system. Monica Lewinsky is a minor celebrity, popping up on HBO and Larry King Live, and Hillary Clinton chums it up in the Senate with dozens of colleagues who voted to oust her husband from office.

A historian might say it is too soon to assess the impact of either the impeachment or the election, and some may think it trivializes the crimes of September 11 to discuss them in the same breath with the perfidies of Kenneth Starr and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Perhaps it does, and I recognize that the events of September 11 sent waves far beyond the shores of US politics and culture. But it is possible to think that the political and diplomatic consequences of September 11--not the personal trauma of thousands of lives forever disrupted by murder, or the psychic scars borne by millions from the violence witnessed and spawned that day--may be far less significant than the conventional wisdom now allows, or at least that it is too soon to tell.

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