By John Pickard
Like most people, I remember exactly where I was when the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre were attacked twenty years ago today. I was at the house of a fellow-teacher that early September evening and we were watching events unfold live on TV. As his teenage son came into the room, I told him to watch. “Welcome to the rest of your life,” I said, “because nothing will ever be the same after this.” At least in the world of politics nothing has been the same.
The entirety of US foreign policy since that date, and most for the UK too, has been concerned with the so-called ‘war on terror’. The events of that day have overshadowed much of domestic US and UK policy too. No-one can justify the attack on the World Trade Centre and the loss of thousands of innocent lives, but the definition of what is and is not ‘terrorism’ has been utterly unbalanced and one-sided since that time.
In reality there has been no ‘war on terror’, because the US and UK war machines have since 9/11 visited state ‘terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan on a much larger scale than was witnessed that day in New York. The allies of the US/UK in the Middle East regularly rain down death and destruction – ‘terror’ in the real meaning of the word – on innocent and unarmed civilians in Gaza and Yemen, to name but two places.
Laws steamrolled through Congress
Having watched the horror of the Twin Towers attack live on their televisions, the big majority of Americans supported the administration of George W Bush in steamrolling laws through Congress that would later be used to facilitate wars, mass population surveillance and government secrecy on a hitherto unprecedented scale, all in the name of the fight against terrorism.
Which American workers would not have been moved by the scenes in New York? Of desperate people jumping to their deaths, of the collapse of the towers and the suffocating clouds of fine ash that dramatically affected the whole of the surrounding area?
The horror of 9/11 went on for weeks afterwards, as stories emerged about firefighters who died trying to save the lives of those trapped in the buildings. We heard the last messages to their loved ones sent by the passengers on doomed, hi-jacked aircraft. While all flights across the USA and internationally were completely grounded, no-one noticed that those flights taking out the families of Saudi officials and diplomats were the only ones allowed to leave the USA.
Given the febrile atmosphere in the USA, it was hardly surprising when a week after 9/11 Congress passed the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), with only a single member of Congress voting against. In the last twenty years the AUMF has been used forty times to justify military action in a dozen and half countries none of which had any connection to 9/11.
Hot on the heels of the AUMF, Bush bulldozed the Patriot Act through Congress, giving the state, including its new Department of Homeland Security sweeping powers of mass surveillance of the phones, e-mails and texts of all US citizens and many abroad. The British government, too, passed its own ‘anti-terror’ legislation, in the form of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001.
British ‘anti-terror’ legislation misused ever since
This Act contained elements that had previously been rejected from a similar act of parliament a year previously, as being too extreme. But in the new atmosphere of 9/11, ‘Labour’ Prime Minister Tony Blair asked for and was granted far stronger powers for the state. This ‘anti-terror’ legislation, including its subsequent up-dates, has been used in cases completely unrelated to terrorism or anything like it, such as against environmental campaigners.
What followed in the years after 9/11 were the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq, wars sold to the Congress and UK parliament on entirely false premises. As it turns out, both wars, at an incredible cost in lives – many, many times the three thousand who died in New York that day – as well as astronomic economic damage, achieved nothing except the transfer of trillions of dollars from the pockets of American and British taxpayers into the profits of the big arms manufactures.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan new puppet ‘democratic’ governments were set up; regimes that stank in cesspits of corruption and sectarianism. In Afghanistan, after twenty years, we are back to Square One, with the Taliban in power and all the repression of women’s rights and democratic norms that goes with the Taliban. The collapse of the recent Afghanistan government is largely due to the corruption and inefficiency of the US/UK sponsored government in Kabul.
Corruption of US client state brough Taliban back to power
In Thieves of State, a former US adviser in Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes, described the intelligence the US gleaned from the questioning of Taliban prisoners. “At the top of the list of reasons cited by prisoners for joining the Taliban was not ethnic bias, or disrespect of Islam, or concern that the US forces might stay in the country forever, or even civilian casualties. At the top of the list was the perception that the Afghan government was ‘irrevocably’ corrupt.”
Along with these two bloody wars which cost hundreds of thousands of lives – and is still costing – we have had Guantanamo Bay and legalized torture. The US naval base at Guantanamo, leased ‘in perpetuity’ to the USA by a tame Cuban government in 1903, became the site of the special prison where inmates could be held indefinitely and outside of any normal judicial process. Some ‘terrorist suspects’ have been held here for nearly twenty years, since it opened in 2002, without any recourse to a trial or normal procedures. Others were released, and some are now members of the new Taliban government in Kabul.
US ‘outsourced’ torture of regimes like Syria
Alongside Guantanamo Bay, we also had ‘extraordinary rendition’, whereby the US security services – with the connivance and support of British ‘Labour’ ministers, who allowed landing and refueling facilities – flew prisoners to other countries to have their torture ‘outsourced’, as it were. In the likes of Uzbekistan and Assad’s Syria, agents of the US government were able to make use of torture facilities that would have been forbidden by laws in their home country.
The bloodiest wars in modern history, trillions of dollars spent in arms and weaponry, draconian legislation supposedly aimed at ‘terrorism’ but deployed against any dissident political voices, mass surveillance – all of these are the legacy of 9/11.
In an era when the inadequacies of capitalism are becoming increasingly apparent to hundreds of millions of people, these repressive powers have been and will be deployed against anyone who offers a threat to the system. From the point of view of capitalism, anti-democratic powers are a necessity and if 9/11 had not happened, some other pretext would have had to be found.
Biden told, ‘stay away’ from remembrance service
Today in the US the focus of most of the press and TV will be on the victims of the 9/11 attack itself. They will relive and review almost exclusively the experiences in New York on that day. There will be a special service of remembrance, organised by the families of the victims.
But the doubts of many Americans, about whether their government was telling them everything then and since, are still there. Joe Biden has been told to stay away from the memorial service because the FBI, with his backing, are still refusing to release (or claim to have lost) files they have on 9/11, including those that might show the complicity of officials of the Saudi Arabian government.
Much will be the same for the press coverage in the UK. For socialists and the labour movement, we should remember the deaths of the more than three thousand workers in the US who were killed needlessly while they were just going about their daily lives. But we will not forget either, the way the event was cynically exploited to wreak death and havoc on millions more innocent lives elsewhere. It should also spur us into discussing what ‘terrorism’ really means and how we should distinguish between the blind and inchoate lashing out of oppressed peoples from high-tech state terrorism, which in the final analysis is far more deadly.
