After the initial unity internationally, 9/11 gave way to polarisation and paralysis in the US
IN A poll by Pew Research Center last year, 53 per cent of Americans said 9/11 was the most important event of the past decade; only 16 per cent cited the election of Barack Obama. If Republicans and Democrats agree on little else, they concur on the severity of the shock to a country that thought itself invulnerable.
“There was considerable trauma; physical and perhaps more important in the long run, psychic trauma,” says Richard Ben-Veniste, a Washington lawyer and prominent Democrat who was a member of the 10-person 9/11 Commission and now advises the interior secretary Janet Napolitano.
“The response was predictably an over-reaction,” Ben-Veniste continues. “We immediately began to detain individuals on the basis of their ethnicity . . .We launched a land war in Afghanistan, followed by a war against a non-threatening country, Iraq, on the basis of skewed information.”
Those wars have cost 6,100 American lives, and up to $3 trillion, aggravating the economic crisis that continues to blight the US.
Within months of 9/11, President George W Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, authorised the use of telephone and internet surveillance without warrants, approved kidnapping (“extraordinary rendition”) and the establishment of secret prisons abroad, urged lawyers at the justice department to draw up legal justifications for the use of water-boarding and other forms of torture, which were deemed legal as long as they did not lead to organ failure.
Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to “enemy combatants”.
9/11 spawned an unprecedented proliferation of intelligence services – the US now has 16 – and government security bureaucracy. The Washington Post’s 2010 investigation into “Top Secret America” counted 1,200 government organisations, 1,900 private companies and 854,000 people with top secret clearances engaged in the “war on terror”.
US counterterrorism strategy was transformed by 9/11. “In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was a profound aversion to what has been disdainfully described as the “law enforcement” approach to terrorism”, Prof Hoffman explains.
When the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, the perpetrators were caught, arrested, tried an imprisoned.
“After 9/11, we moved to this obsession with high-value targets, the idea that you could win a war on terrorism using decapitation, which has never succeeded in any context,” Hoffman continues.
In Guantánamo “we created for ourselves an insoluble situation, because you can’t bring them to court, so what do you do with them? “All these factors came together and the default was ‘It’s just simpler to kill them’. . . It’s become the over-riding strategy.”
“Speaking strictly for myself,” says Ben-Veniste, “There were those in the Bush administration who believed there was political advantage in the politics of fear.”
As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Ben-Veniste has exhorted Americans to adopt Britain’s second World War motto: Keep calm and carry on. “Part of what Americans can do to fight terrorism is not to be so terrorised,” he says.
Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador to Britain who is now the Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, says there are two Americas, before and after.
“The America we loved and looked up to was the America of JFK; Americans reaching for the moon; Martin Luther King fighting injustice; the America of Mohamed Ali, the world champion whose spirit will not be broken; a land of giants; a big country with a big spirit,” Prof Ahmed says.
“9/11 happens, and suddenly America is unsure of itself,” Ahmed continues. “The reaction was, ‘hatred propelled this violence; we will respond in anger’. President Bush constantly talked about his anger and the anger of the American people, ignoring the great Benjamin Franklin who said that what starts in anger ends in disaster, in defeat... Bush became the embodiment of angry America.”
Barack Obama was hailed as the post-9/11 president, but he has bitterly disappointed progressive Democrats who accuse him of continuing Bush’s policies. On January 22nd, 2009, the day after his inauguration, Obama promised to close Guantánamo within a year. But the Senate voted 90 to 6 not to grant the $80 million needed to shut down the prison. Obama refused to establish a commission of inquiry into torture under the Bush administration, or pursue the telecommunications companies that participated in illegal wire tapping.
In Cairo in June 2009, Obama promised to “seek a new beginning between the US and Muslims around the world”. Today, says a European diplomat, “the retreat from Cairo has been total”. The US has played little part in the Arab Spring that is transforming the Middle East, and the “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians has reached a dead end.
Just one year ago, Obama told the UN General Assembly that he wanted to see a Palestinian state by now. Yet his own ambassador to the UN is frantically attempting to dissuade Palestinians from fielding a resolution later this month that would recognise their statehood.
In Cairo, Obama asserted that “Islam is part of America”. But the US’s 2.8 million-strong Muslim community is regarded with suspicion.
The Irish-American representative Peter King, a Republican who is chairman of the House committee on homeland security, held a series of hearings on the “Extent of Radicalisation in the American Muslim Community” this year.
While testifying to King’s committee in March, Keith Ellison, one of two Muslim members of Congress, broke down in tears. There has been controversy over the construction of an Islamic community centre near Ground Zero, and threats by an evangelical pastor to burn Korans in Florida. Up to one-third of Americans wrongly believe that Obama is a Muslim.
King, who once defended violence on the part of the IRA, has claimed that up to 85 per cent of mosques in the US are “controlled by Islamic fundamentalists”. The Center for American Progress, a think tank that is close to the Obama administration, last month accused King and five other Republican representatives of fomenting Islamophobia.
In his own defence, King cites statements by the Obama administration that al-Qaeda is recruiting in the US. “When they were looking for Westies (Irish-American organised crime on the West side of Manhattan) the FBI went to Irish bars; they didn’t go to Ben’s Kosher deli,” King says.
“When they were talking about the Mafia, they went into the Italian-American community. Not all Italian-Americans are mobsters, but that’s where the mafia were coming from.
“Muslim terrorists are going to come from the Muslim-American community. That’s just the reality of it.”
Maj Nidal Hasan, an American of Palestinian origin, killed 13 people in a shooting rampage on a US army base in Fort Hood Texas in 2009. Several other plots have failed, through incompetence on the part of extremists as much as intervention by security forces.
Yet the fact that there has not been a major attack on US territory since 9/11 is billed as a major achievement on the part of US intelligence and law enforcement.
Nonetheless, 69 per cent of Americans polled last May by CBS News/New York Times said they expect another attack on the US mainland.
In Washington “You increasingly hear people who want to turn back the clock to September 10th, 2001, when our military wasn’t strung out across the world, when our economy was much better, when we felt safer and more secure,” says Prof Hoffman at Georgetown.
Fortress America is safer, Hoffman says, but it is more inward-looking, and ill-equipped to grapple with the complexities of the world outside.
There was an immense outpouring of solidarity with the victims of 9/11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, from a demonstration of sympathy in Tehran to Le Monde’s front page editorial declaring “We are all Americans”. That unity dissipated very quickly. Domestically, it gave way to polarisation and paralysis, while the Bush administration’s unilateral actions and disregard for law alienated international opinion.
In its guidelines for 9/11 commemorations, the White House has instructed diplomats to emphasise that peoples around the world – in Bali, London, Madrid and Mumbai – have also been the victims of terrorism.
The thousands of Arabs and Afghans killed in wars waged by the United States and Israel over the past decade have not been factored into the equation.
Only one of the people I interviewed for this series, the Irish writer Colum McCann, remembered them.
He felt immense sadness over the nearly 3,000 deaths of 9/11, McCann said.
“Then, in the name of 9/11, so much horrible stuff happened. Let us not forget what happened in Basra and Baghdad and Kabul. Depending on who you talk to, between 200,000 and 500,000 people died in Iraq in the name of 9/11. That’s the real story... Empathy should be ecumenical.
“If we learn anything from this, we have to try to consider what it means to be other.”