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Can you even imagine a world where the response of President George W. Bush to al-Qaeda's acts of horror in September 2001 wasn't the launching of "the Global War on Terror" which, from Afghanistan and Iraq across the Middle East and deep into Africa, became a global set of disastrous conflicts that might, in truth, have been al-Qaeda's dream? Well, dream on.
And while you're at it, keep in mind that, according to the remarkable Costs of War Project, this country ended up spending at least $8 trillion on those wars. (Imagine how that money might have been used to help rather than hurt people globally!) According to that project, an estimated 940,000 people died directly thanks to America's war on terror (almost half of them civilians) and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirectly in its war zones, bringing the total to nearly five million dead. Meanwhile, that group has estimated that 38 million other human beings were displaced from their homes, lives, and often worlds.
And if that isn't the definition of a nightmare, I'm not sure what is. As it happens, TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg has followed that "war" (those wars? Those armed disasters?) all too grimly and strikingly for years now, while focusing particularly on the issues of torture and imprisonment. Yes, this country proved all too quick to begin torturing its war on terror prisoners -- though the term the Bush administration preferred to use was "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- while creating a series of strikingly grim offshore sites of imprisonment beyond the rule of American or any other law, particularly -- and on this subject Greenberg has made herself a leading expert -- the prison the Bush administration set up at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba.
Today, while thinking about all those years in which she covered the horrors of those ongoing wars, Greenberg wonders whether it is indeed finally, in some sense, all over. Let her explain. Tom
Will the Forever Wars Ever End?
The War on Terror 23 Years Later
September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda's 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I've been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I've explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.
Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?
Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11th, sought to take the country down the path to what he called "the dark side" and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration's grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those "enhanced interrogation techniques.") He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.
Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama's December 2011 authorization for the "final" withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment. As reported in the Department of Homeland Security's 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, "Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization" such as al-Qaeda or ISIS.
Terrorism Prosecutions
Notably, prosecutions of alleged international terrorists have declined precipitously since the Bush administration years (and some of the convictions then have been reversed or altered). In a 2009 report, the Justice Department stated that, "since September 11, 2001, the Department has charged 512 individuals with terrorism or terrorism-related crimes and convicted or obtained guilty pleas in 319 terrorism-related and anti-terrorism cases." Soon after that, however, the decline began. TRAC, a database that monitors such cases, reported that, in October 2014, "[t]here were no prosecutions recorded that involved international terrorism." By 2022, TRAC was reporting that the number of domestic terrorism prosecutions far outnumbered international terrorism cases, due in large part to the charges leveled against those involved in the January 6th insurrection. And that trend has only continued. This year, as TRAC indicated, "Overall, the data show that convictions of this type are down 28.6 percent from levels reported in 2019."
And when it comes to terrorism prosecutions, something unthinkable not so long ago has now happened. Several judges have recently given early release or simply overturned cases involving individuals convicted and sentenced in jihadi-inspired terrorism cases during the first decade of the war on terror. In July 2024, Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema threw out three of 10 charges against and overturned a conviction carrying a life sentence for Ali Al-Timimi, a U.S.-born computational biology scholar sentenced in 2004 for soliciting treason by inspiring his followers to commit acts of violence abroad to defend Islam. Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term "crime of violence" to be "unconstitutionally vague." Al-Timimi's fate on the other counts is now on appeal. Having been released to home confinement after the onset of the Covid pandemic, he now no longer faces a life sentence, though, as the Associated Press reports, he could potentially see "decades of prison time beyond the 15 years he already served."
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