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How strange to be living through it a second time, however different the form.
I'm thinking, of course, about a devastating set of totally unexpected attacks on one's homeland. On September 11, 2001, it was the World Trade Center in downtown New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., with almost 3,000 people dying thanks to a modest number of al-Qaeda hijackers. On October 7, 2023, it was the Israeli borderlands, where Hamas struck devastatingly with 1,200 Israelis dying and 240 being kidnapped. And here's the unnerving thing: the responses of the administrations of George W. Bush in 2001 and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently were eerily similar.
The Bush administration promptly launched what it called a "Global War on Terror," promising to eradicate terrorism across significant parts of the planet. The disastrous and devastating invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 followed, along with conflicts across South Asia, the Greater Middle East, and Africa. Brown University's Costs of War Project estimates that almost a million people died in the carnage of those years, including more than 400,000 civilians, while that war on terror would also be responsible for an estimated 3.6 million or more "indirect deaths." In a similar fashion, Prime Minister Netanyahu and crew responded to the October 7th horror with the full-scale bombing, invasion, and devastation of the tiny Gaza Strip, the deaths (already) of significantly more than 20,000 Palestinians, the uprooting of most of that strip's two million-plus residents, and the wounding of so many more in an area that now essentially lacks all necessary supplies and resources, including hospitals. (The limbs of more than 1,000 wounded children have reportedly been amputated without anesthetics.)
And as with the Global War on Terror, if the Netanyahu crew continues on its path to hell, what's happened in Gaza so far is likely to be just the beginning of who knows what horrors in the Middle East (and even beyond). How that will, in the end, affect Israel we don't yet know, but today TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg explores some of the ways in which the effects of that all-American disaster, the Global War on Terror, launched 22 years ago, are still in some strange fashion with us. She offers a vivid look at what that disaster of a "war" changed here, even as U.S. military and intelligence outfits were devastating other parts of the planet. And while you read her account, try to imagine both where the Israeli version of such a war might all too devastatingly lead and how it might change the very essence of Israel, the Middle East, and even perhaps our world. Tom
Sunsetting the War on Terror -- Or Not
The Stubborn Legacy of America's Response to 9/11
This week marks the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the Guanta'namo Bay detention facility, the infamous prison on the island of Cuba designed to hold detainees from this country's Global War on Terror. It's an anniversary that's likely to go unnoticed, since these days you rarely hear about the war on terror -- and for good reason. After all, that response to al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks, as defined over the course of three presidential administrations, has officially ended in a cascade of silence. Yes, international terrorism and the threat of such groups persist, but the narrative of American policy as a response to 9/11 seems to have faded away. Two and a half years ago, the Biden administration's chaotic withdrawal from the 20-year-long Afghan War proved to be a last gasp (followed the next summer by the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, successor as al-Qaeda's leader after Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011).
But Guanta'namo, a prison that, from its founding, has violated U.S. codes of due process, fair treatment, and the promise of justice writ large isn't the only unnerving legacy of the "war" on terror that still persists. If indefinite detention at Guanta'namo was a key pillar of that war, defying longstanding American laws and norms, it was just one of the steps beyond those norms that still persist today.
In the days, weeks, and even years following the attacks of September 11th, the U.S. government took action to create new powers in the name of keeping the nation safe. Two of them, more than two decades after those attacks, are now rife with calls for change. Congress created the first just a week after 9/11 (with but a single no vote). It authorized unchecked and unending presidentially driven war powers that could be used without specified geographical limits -- and, strangely enough, that power still remains in place, despite recent congressional efforts to curtail its authority. The second, the expansive use of secret surveillance powers on Americans, is currently under heated debate.
War Powers
The very first new authority created in the name of the war on terror was the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress one week after the 9/11 attacks. It gave the president the power "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons."
Unlike past declarations of war or authorizations for war in American history, it was staggeringly vague. It named no actual enemy or geographical locations. It made no reference to what conditions would end the hostilities and the power of that authorization. It was in essence "a blank check" for presidential war powers, as Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), the single member of Congress to vote no on its passage, warned at the time and has reiterated over the years.
It was also a game-changing authorization. Not only did it lack specifics, but it stripped Congress of its constitutionally authorized power to declare war. In the war on terror, Congress would defer to the president who could decide on his own when and where to launch attacks.
Over the course of the last two-plus decades, that 2001 AUMF has been used repeatedly to do exactly what Barbara Lee feared -- namely, broaden the president's power to commit acts of war against not just the terrorist groups who conspired in the 9/11 attacks, but groups in countries far and wide. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute, as of 2021, it had been used in at least 22 countries, including Afghanistan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen.
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