The dystopian legal architecture of the ‘war on terror’ must be dismantled
A quarter-century after 9/11, we are still living under the security order it unleashed.
A protest movement has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, thereby criminalising support for those enduring a genocide rather than any act of violence. Migrants are being held in detention facilities modelled on the very practices documented at Guantanamo Bay, and some are even being sent to the Cuban detention camp itself. Surveillance infrastructure once built to monitor “terrorism” has quietly been turned on Palestine solidarity protesters instead. None of this sits at the edges of the law, straining against it or slipping past its limits. It sits comfortably within laws written 25 years ago, doing precisely what they were written to do.
The legal architecture assembled after 9/11 was sold to the public as an emergency response to a single, unrepeatable day. A quarter of a century later, it has not been rolled back, nor even meaningfully questioned. It has simply become permanent, its reach extending steadily beyond anything its original architects would have needed to justify at the time.
It is worth resisting, too, the instinct to treat 9/11 as the origin of this story. The hostility that the “war on terror” eventually gave a name to was already established Western policy long before that morning arrived; 9/11 did not invent the idea that certain populations could be treated as a security problem before they were treated as human beings; it simply furnished that idea with a name, a legal framework, and a budget without limit. Read the last 25 years as a continuation of something older, rather than an aberration that began with a single attack, and the years since start to make a different kind of sense.
The case that shows this most starkly is not one of prosecution but of detention that never required one. Mansoor Adayfi was held at Guantanamo for nearly 15 years without ever being charged with a crime, and has written of treatment no human being should have to endure. In one of the camp’s more telling episodes, he opened a boxed meal to find the words “we will never forget, we will never forgive” scrawled on the inside of the box. When he wrote back demanding justice rather than vengeance, the camp administration answered with food punishment and solitary confinement, on the grounds that his message amounted to a death threat.