Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich marked the 25th year since the September 11 attacks with a reflection on the wars, detentions, and domestic surveillance that followed, arguing that Americans have a duty not only to remember, but to "acknowledge and repudiate the brutality it summoned in America."

Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an essay published by Alternet that none of the customary words — anniversary, commemoration, eulogy, remembrance, memorial, or tribute — felt right to him, because none convey "the trauma and horror." He settled on "the 25th year of observance."

He recalled walking in silence with his family to a Friends meetinghouse a few blocks from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They had never been there before, he wrote, but "it seemed fitting and necessary. We needed to sit in silence with others." That morning, Reich had been scheduled to fly from Boston to San Francisco. The flight was canceled because of the attacks, and he remembered feeling "momentarily irked" — a reaction, he suggested, that allowed him to pretend the world could go on as before, and that he could not have been on one of the planes that went down.

Reich then traced the government's response. President George W. Bush was rushed away from a photo opportunity and onto a plane that took a secret flight path. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he wrote, began plotting a fight that would claim the lives of some 4,500 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and would lead to the detention of 119 Muslim men in a network of overseas prisons known as "black sites," at least 39 of whom were tortured. About 15 of them remain at the Guantánamo Bay military prison to this day, according to Reich.

He wrote that nativism and Islamophobia soared in the United States in the aftermath. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established on November 15, 2002, when Bush signed the Homeland Security Act into law, designed to fight terrorism; it officially began operations on March 1, 2003. ICE was created in 2003 and placed within DHS, and fighting terrorism quickly became the framework through which the agency approached immigration.

That legacy, Reich argued, extends to what he described as President Trump's "police state": ICE agents deployed across the country, detention centers now imprisoning 65,765 people, mass deportations, and surveillance technology — including some 120,000 Flock cameras in 49 states that capture 20 billion license plates a month, along with dents, bumper stickers, and other identifying features.

For the past quarter century, Reich wrote, opportunistic politicians and pundits — "not the least, Trump" — have encouraged Americans to fear Muslims and Islam, a religion practiced by 1.6 billion people around the world.

"It is our solemn duty not just to remember what happened 25 years ago but to acknowledge and repudiate the brutality it summoned in America," Reich wrote.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and a former US secretary of labor. His writings can be found at .