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It's strange to think that it was almost a quarter of a century ago when Osama bin Laden and crew launched those attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Looking back, horrific as they were (almost 3,000 people died), it should still be startling what a series of disastrous wars, from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond -- the Global War on Terror, as it quickly came to be known -- bin Laden managed to get this country to launch. In some eerie sense, you might even say that we're still living with those 9/11 assaults. Yikes! In some no less eerie sense, you might even say that, without 9/11 and the full range of shock-and-awe events that followed, Donald Trump, as anything other than the host of The Apprentice and the owner of six companies that went bankrupt, might have been inconceivable.
Imagine that.
No such luck, of course, and so, in some strange way, we continue to live through the bin-Ladenification and now Trumpification of not just the United States or the planet but of our very lives. None of us, in some fashion, have been untouched by 9/11 and, for who knows how long, no one in this country will be able to say that he or she (or "they") will have been untouched by the Trump phenomenon either.
His presidency may, in some sense, be little short of a terror attack on this world of ours. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, who has been writing about 9/11 and its aftermath, including the ways in which the U.S. created an offshore prison system of torture and injustice, for TomDispatch for almost 20 years now, offer a little war-on-terror-style perspective on this strange moment of ours. Tom
The First 50 Days
"Perversifying" the Misdeeds of the Past
Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of "national security" in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done -- through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort -- left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law.
And -- lo and behold! -- now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we've witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as -- if you don't mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours -- the "perversification" of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy.
Racism
Among the numerous anti-democratic trends of this century, state-sponsored racism has been a constant concern. Of the many low points in the response to 9/11, the unleashing of government policies of racial and ethnic discrimination stands out. Fearing a follow-up attack, law enforcement targeted Muslim Americans, surveilling mosques and casting a startlingly wide net of suspicion with a sweeping disregard for civil liberties. That approach was only strengthened by the militarization of police forces nationwide in the name of targeting Arabs and Muslims. In 2002, the government even introduced the NSEERS program, a "Special Registration" requirement mandating that all males from a list of 24 Arab and Muslim countries (as well as North Korea) register and be fingerprinted. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, the program amounted to "a discriminatory policy that ran counter to the fundamental American values of fairness and equal protection."
A dangerous template for discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin was thereby set in place. In his first term in office, Donald Trump promptly doubled down on that Islamophobic trend, even though his predecessor, Barack Obama, had revoked the registration requirement. By Executive Order 13769, Trump authorized a ban on the entry into the U.S. of citizens from seven Muslim countries, an order that would be reined in somewhat by the courts and finally revoked by President Joe Biden.
Nor, in Trump's first term, was discrimination limited to those from Arab and Muslim countries. As the Costs of War project has pointed out, the Islamophobia of the war on terror years had set a racial-profiling precedent and example for the more broadly racist policies of the first Trump administration. "The exponential surveillance since 9/11 has also intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups" and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter." Yes, Trump did indeed go after Black Lives Matter protesters with a vengeance during his first term, even unleashing armed federal agents without insignia to tear gas, beat, and detain such protesters in Portland, Oregon.
While Obama would end the Special Registration program and Biden would revoke the Muslim ban, no preventive measures were undertaken to guard against future racist policies and, all too unfortunately, we see the results of that today.
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