In a fragrant garden near San Francisco, Hamid Hayat, 43, tells his story over a coldening frittata. He is a thin man in jeans, a T-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys cap. Almost every sentence begins with the same two words: “Honestly speaking.” The phrase appears to have become a habit of caution for a man whose own words once helped send him to prison for years.
Hayat was an American citizen when he was arrested in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Like many Muslims in the United States, he became caught in a climate of diffuse suspicion surrounding terrorism. He had boasted about jihadist ideas, but the story that eventually became the basis of his conviction was, he says, one he invented under interrogation.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, Hayat remains marked by the experience. He says he still suffers anxiety attacks, particularly as the anniversary of his release approaches. He believes the FBI continues to monitor him. When he travels by air, he says, he faces heightened scrutiny and repeatedly answers questions about where he is going, why, how long he will stay and with whom. He has been told he is “on the list”, although he does not know which one.
His case is presented by DER SPIEGEL as part of a broader examination of the enduring consequences of 9/11. The magazine’s account, published for the 25th anniversary, follows not only Hayat but journalists, lawyers, historians and relatives of the victims as they assess what happened to the United States after that September morning.
The attacks killed 2,977 people after 19 members of Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaida organisation hijacked four passenger aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, one into the Pentagon near Washington, while the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted the hijackers.
A generation later, the physical site of the attacks has been transformed. The area around Ground Zero has been rebuilt, tourists take photographs at the memorial and more than a third of Americans were either born after 9/11 or were too young to remember it. Yet, according to the DER SPIEGEL account, the political consequences of the attacks remain embedded in the American state.
On 14 September 2001, Congress passed a 60-word authorisation allowing the president to use military force against those involved in the attacks or those who had harboured them. The authorisation remains in force. The Brown University Costs of War project cited by DER SPIEGEL estimates that roughly 940,000 people have died in wars since then, with the associated costs reaching about $8 trillion.
Inside the United States, the government expanded its surveillance and security powers. Six weeks after the attacks came the Patriot Act, which substantially broadened government surveillance authorities. The Department of Homeland Security was created, eventually employing around 260,000 people. Security agencies examined telephone connections involving millions of Americans. At Guantanamo Bay, nearly 800 men and juveniles were imprisoned at various times, while the CIA operated secret detention sites where prisoners were tortured.
Much of that machinery was subsequently ended or restricted. But the institutions and extraordinary powers created during the emergency survived.
Journalist Spencer Ackerman, who was 21 and studying philosophy at Rutgers University when the attacks occurred, has spent much of his career examining that legacy. He has written for The New Republic, Wired and The Guardian, and his 2021 book Reign of Terror is described in the DER SPIEGEL report as a standard work on the war on terror.
Ackerman argues that the war against terrorism was never confined to Afghanistan and Iraq. In his view, it also transformed American domestic life. He compares the process to an epidemic that broke through the “protective walls” of Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequently became a permanent part of public life in the United States.
Hayat experienced that transformation personally.
He was 19 when the attacks occurred. Six days later, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington and said that Islam stood for peace and that Muslims loved America. But Hayat soon encountered a very different reality.
In 2002, a man named Naseem Khan moved to Lodi, California. Khan, who was older and appeared wealthy, became a figure Hayat admired. Hayat says he boasted to him about his supposed enthusiasm for jihad and even pretended to welcome the killing of US journalist Daniel Pearl by terrorists in Pakistan. He now describes himself as uneducated at the time and says he regrets what he said.
Khan was an FBI informant. He recorded their conversations using a hidden microphone and encouraged Hayat to make further incriminating statements. After Hayat returned from Pakistan, where he had travelled between 2003 and 2005 to arrange a marriage, the FBI arrested him.
He was interrogated for more than 14 hours without a lawyer in a windowless room in Sacramento. Hayat says that he initially denied ever having attended an al-Qaida training camp. His lawyer, Layli Shirani, says those denials were not recorded. The recording began only after Hayat, exhausted, confessed.
The confession became central to the prosecution. Hayat was accused of supporting a terrorist organisation, training in a jihadist camp and preparing to commit an attack in the United States. In 2007, on his 25th birthday, he was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
His conviction was eventually overturned in July 2019 after his legal team successfully argued that his first lawyer had provided inadequate representation. In February 2020, prosecutors dropped all charges. There had never been a terrorist cell in Lodi.
But the end of the legal case did not erase its consequences.
DER SPIEGEL places Hayat’s experience alongside the cases of others caught up in the post-9/11 security apparatus. The US Justice Department said in 2003 that more than 1,200 people had been detained for questioning during the first two months after the attacks, most of them Muslims from the Arab world, with only a fraction facing a concrete terrorism suspicion. The FBI recorded 481 anti-Islamic hate crimes in 2001, compared with 28 the previous year.
The expansion did not disappear under Barack Obama. Guantanamo remained open, surveillance continued, drone warfare expanded and many emergency rules survived. According to Ackerman, measures introduced as exceptional responses under George W. Bush became part of ordinary government under Obama.
That continuity, the DER SPIEGEL account argues, is central to understanding the present. Donald Trump did not create the post-9/11 security apparatus, but he inherited it and has used its institutions and language against new targets.
John Sandweg, who held senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security between 2009 and 2014, including serving as acting director of ICE, says the creation of DHS was not inherently mistaken. The problem, he argues, was how it was constructed. Trump, he says, transformed ICE into a paramilitary force focused on mass deportation.
The scale of the agency expanded dramatically during Trump’s second term. In July 2025, Congress approved an additional $75 billion for ICE through 2029, including funding for new detention facilities and 10,000 positions. In June and July this year, 43,000 and 49,000 people respectively were arrested.
For Hayat, the connection between the past and present is deeply personal. He now works for Uber and Lyft and is training to become a lorry driver. In 2023, he travelled to New York, visiting the Statue of Liberty and the Ground Zero memorial. He says the journey was his idea.
He has been free for more than seven years. Yet sometimes he wakes during the night and wonders whether he is outside prison or still inside it.
Why tell the story again, a quarter-century after 9/11?
His answer is simple: “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
