UPDATED: Sept. 15 at 11:01 a.m.

On Sept. 11, 2001, William Snyder was awaiting a sentencing hearing in the United States Courthouse for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Suddenly, as Snyder recalled in a recent interview with The Daily Orange, the court clerk announced, “The Pentagon’s just been bombed, we’re at war.”

At the time of the 9/11 attacks Snyder, currently a visiting assistant professor of law at Syracuse University’s College of Law, was the assistant United States district attorney in the Western District of Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, both Article III federal judicial district courts.

United Airlines Flight 93, the only one of the four hijacked aircraft to not reach its target during the attacks, fell in Snyder’s Western District of Pennsylvania in the small, rural Stonycreek Township.

In the following interview with The Daily Orange, Snyder recalls the sudden confusion and chaos in the weeks following 9/11, as multiple investigations began in the hope of pursuing a prosecution for the attacks, while also discussing 9/11’s impact on law, judicial precedent and counterterrorism policy in the United States.

The Daily Orange: In your 2011 lecture (detailing your experiences on 9/11), you discuss the immediate confusion in gathering evidence and building a case in an attempt to prosecute the 9/11 attackers. Is there a more centralized structure for investigations now, post-9/11, for the investigation and prosecution?

William Snyder: Absolutely. That chaos was almost unforgiveable. And, it’s been largely corrected.

We had an investigation going because we had a plane down and people murdered in our district. But so did each of the other districts where the other attacks were, and so did the District of Massachusetts, where some of the people got on the planes, for example. And the first week to 10 days (following the attacks) was a tremendous amount of duplication and lack of coordination. …

At the time, the FBI’s SIOC, which is their Strategic Information & Operations Center, was just a big conference table, with a bunch of chairs around it. And just about every chair had a telephone in front of it. And that’s it. … Now today, you can go online and see pictures of SIOC, and it looks like what you would expect: big plasma screens, communication, I mean, it looks like a big command center.

Also, there is the NCTC, which is the National Counterterrorism Center in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., which … brings federal, state and local (agencies), as well as law enforcement, military and intelligence all together in one space, with all real-time screens, and supervisors and audio.

The D.O.: Do you believe the changes in laws, and the new laws created following 9/11, ultimately have helped prevent other acts of terrorism?

W.S.: Yeah, the laws have evolved based on lessons learned. … Of more interest is the material support statute, or the material statutes I should say, plural, there’s two of them, which were originally created in 1996, were amended in 2001 by the USA Patriot Act but have been amended several times since then. And, in many cases, a court would strike down a part of the statute and Congress would amend it. So, the laws have gotten more effective. But it was really policy, not the laws, that made the difference.

Because what happened in October of 2001 was the federal government made this fundamental shift, in law enforcement, from prosecuting traditional crimes that had already happened. … So, the policy shift to using the entire code, rather than focusing on individual terrorism statutes is what made the big difference. It’s kind of like, they never got Al Capone for murder or racketeering. They got him for tax evasion.

The D.O.: Has that policy shift had any negative impacts?

W.S.: It has, it has. And it’s controversial, because it means that similarly-situated people get treated differently.  That is somebody from another place, who was not suspected of links for terrorism, might not get prosecuted for overstaying their visa, or excluded from the country for overstaying their visa, whereas a person that, you can’t prove in court but you have intelligence, is tied to a terrorist organization, is excluded or prosecuted.

And, because that intelligence that the person’s tied to a terrorist organization probably isn’t going to be made public, the public has to wonder whether to trust the judgement of the prosecutors and the agents.

… It’s not that anybody got prosecuted for a crime they didn’t commit. It’s that you can’t prosecute everybody for every violation, nor would you want to. I mean, I think probably everyone commits a federal offense every day, frankly. But that you’re targeting the prosecution to have the biggest impact on terrorism.

The D.O.: You didn’t see any racial or ethnic profiling?

W.S.: No, I didn’t, I didn’t. But, you know, can I prove that to you? Can I come up with the stats? Because the ties to terrorism that led us to investigate people are classified information that the public’s not gonna see. No, I can’t prove that.

The D.O.: For attorneys in 2051, the 50th anniversary of 9/11, what judicial precedent will immediately come to mind when discussing the attacks in September of 2001?

W.S.: So far, I would have to say that it is a precedent of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, that held that this sharing of information between law enforcement and intelligence agencies was constitutional, was consistent with the intent of Congress and could go forward.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, where William Snyder was on Sept. 11, 2001 was misstated. Snyder was awaiting a sentencing hearing in the United States Courthouse for the Western District of Pennsylvania, not at the Alleghany County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Daily Orange regrets this error. 

Published on September 14, 2016 at 10:43 pm

Contact Sam: sfogozal@syr.edu | @SamOgozalek