The Bitter Legacy of 9/11, on its 17th Anniversary: Endless War, Guantánamo, Brexit, Trump and the Paranoid Security State

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17 years ago today, on September 11, 2001, the world changed forever. In the wake of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan, decimating al-Qaeda and toppling the Taliban, but staying on to lose hearts and minds in an apparently unending occupation in which we are still mired.

Within three months, Tony Blair was imprisoning foreign-born “terror suspects” without charge or trial in the UK, and exactly four months after the attacks, the Bush administration opened Guantánamo, its showcase prison for what happens when a vengeful nation led by belligerent ideologues historically fixated with the exercise of unfettered executive power and disdain for domestic and international laws and treaties rounds people up without competent battlefield reviews, instigates torture and embraces indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial on an industrial scale.

Two and a half years after 9/11, the Bush administration’s ideological “crazies,” aided and abetted by Tony Blair, compounded the Afghan quagmire by invading Iraq on the basis of lies, endorsing regime change over the rights of sovereign nations not to be invaded without good reason, and confirming 9/11 as the conduit for endless war — a dream for the military-industrial complex’s bureaucrats and arms manufacturers, and the growing mercenary armies of the west, but a disaster for everyone else.

The state of endless war is a giant insatiable leech on America’s economy, and has turned the countries of the west into paranoid security states, obsessed with terrorist attacks, but never admitting, or, perhaps, even being able to comprehend, that it is our warmongering and the corporate exploitation of the rest of the world that caused this state of profound unease in the first place.

Very few people are actually killed by terrorists, but our governments and our media have whipped us into a permanent state of fear, as an easy way of holding on to power, savagely corroding our collective sense of well-being, achieved through a long struggle to establish generally safe civil societies through the establishment of a welfare state (a process that largely took place from the 1870s until the 1980s, and that was particularly powerful in the decades after the Second World War), and helping to turn us into isolated materialists, imprisoned as much as liberated by the great technological advancements of our times.

Surveillance is everywhere, via CCTV cameras in our streets, and, primarily, through our mobile phones and our computers, which have facilitated the endless digital hoovering up of information about all of us — where we are, and what we’re doing. Most of this is designed to help to sell us things we rarely need, but it has also removed much of the liberation of lives conducted without perpetual state scrutiny, and it is clear too that some unscrupulous operators on the right and the far right have been analyzing us on an unprecedented scale in order to manipulate us politically.

Our wars also have a darker undercurrent. Everywhere we go we have created refugees or desperate economic migrants — in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in Libya and Syria, the latest victims of our governments’ thirst for perpetual war. In 2015, a mass exodus of refugees and migrants to Europe (and, to a lesser extent, North America), unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, and driven in particular by the brutal destruction of Syria, was met not with sympathy or empathy, but with a growing hostility, fuelled by the right-wing media and by the Islamophobia fostered since 9/11, and stirred up relentlessly by those capitalizing on the state of fear that we are bombarded with on a permanent basis.

In the UK, the timing was disastrous, as the refugee crisis and Islamophobia, combined with perceptions of unfettered immigration from within the EU, helped to swing the EU referendum that David Cameron should never have called into a victory for bitter, backwards-looking isolationists, while in the US the same WASP hysteria led to the election of Donald Trump, an inarticulate white supremacist thug who, to tens of millions of Americans, was perceived as speaking their language. an absurdity matched in the UK by the personality cults of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson — privileged overlords one and all, whose perception as “men of the people” shows only how, in times of great uncertainty, people are susceptible to the allure of dangerous authoritarian figures.

Not all our woes, of course, stem from 9/11. The other pivotal event of the last 17 years was the global economic crash, whose trigger was the collapse of the criminal banking company Lehman Brothers almost exactly ten years ago, on September 15, 2008. In the fallout from that crash, triggered by complex financial transactions that very clearly ought to have been illegal, the full horror of the corruption and emptiness of the modern world, centred on turbo-charged profiteering and greed, was briefly glimpsed, but no revolution — velvet or otherwise — followed. Instead, the British government, under the Tories, pioneered a savage and unending age of austerity, an effort to exterminate public spending — the bedrock of civil society — that is heartbreakingly damaging to the lives of millions, but that, in a broken electoral system in which we can’t seem to get rid of the Tories, continues to make life harder and harder for all but the rich and, especially, the global super-rich.

I’ll be writing more about this in a few days, on the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, because, as much as 9/11 brought forth permanent war and permanent paranoia at home, it is the ghost of the 2008 crash that haunts us most powerfully.

After the 2008 crash, the banks, saved through the transfer of colossal amounts of money from taxpayers, via our obliging political masters, the financial world remade itself, a Frankenstein’s Monster that, in an effort to resume its insatiable greed, has now turned its attention to housing, cannibalistically devouring its own populations, as is happening in the UK with, on the one hand, a Blade Runner dystopia of endless but unaffordable tower blocks rising up everywhere, and, on the other, concerted efforts to destroy genuinely affordable rented housing — social housing — through the destruction of council estates, and the breathtakingly cynical re-classification of housing as “affordable” when it is fundamentally the very opposite.

We are Through the Looking Glass, my friends, in a world of greed, fear and ever-rising inequality, and it is up to us to come together to find new ways to challenge the bitter legacies of 9/11 and the global economic crash of 2008.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.