Robin Wright writes:

Twenty-five years ago, President George W. Bush made a sweeping pledge shortly after Al Qaeda’s airborne hijackers slaughtered almost three thousand people, from more than a hundred countries, at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001. “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he told a joint session of Congress, about the deadliest terrorist attack in history. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” He received rousing applause.

Since then, about seven thousand American service members—more than twice the number of people killed on 9/11—have died in U.S. campaigns against extremism, and almost a million people have been killed as a direct result of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen, roughly half of whom were civilians. Millions more have died from the by-products of those conflicts, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, on top of untold injuries. Then there are the trillions of dollars spent on those conflicts. And, this year, the U.S., alongside Israel, has launched another vaguely defined war in the Middle East, this time against Iran. The U.S. has spent nearly the entire twenty-first century in conflict with various—and now multiplying—forms of extremism. Yet the consensus among experts who have spent their professional lives dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 is that the “war on terror” was never winnable.

“We basically set ourselves up to fail by making the standard so impossible to achieve,” Colin Clarke, the executive director of the Soufan Center, in New York, and a fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, in The Hague, told me. “It also led to a never-ending war, because, when can you actually defeat ‘terrorism’? A war against al-Qaeda would have made a lot more sense, but in the US, we love to wage war on abstract concepts like drugs, poverty, and crime.” [Continue reading…]

Democracy Now!

We look at how post-9/11 policies and the so-called war on terror reshaped the country and the world with two Columbia faculty members who convened a two-day symposium on “The Forever War and the First Amendment.” The symposium brought together journalists, scholars, lawyers and activists to explore the legacy of the “war on terror,” specifically focused on the impact on democratic rights, including the freedoms of speech and the press.

First Amendment freedoms “were tested right away in the days and weeks after 9/11,” says Jameel Jaffer, legal expert and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “All of the surveillance authorities that were put in place after 9/11,” says Jaffer, “their use was initially justified by reference to foreign threats. And now, increasingly, we’re seeing the Trump administration use these things to suppress domestic dissent.”

“If you go back to that climate after 9/11 … newsrooms institute[d] shifts, so they started making beats for covering national security,” says Azmat Khan of the Columbia Journalism School, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the massive civilian death toll from U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. “Legacy news media in that time period was incredibly dependent on anonymous sources, sometimes unvetted intelligence, leaks to journalists that oftentimes came from an administration that was trying to lead the public to war.”