Sept. 11 attacks left a lasting blow to liberty
Like most people who were alive when it happened, I will never forget where I was when the news broke of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center.
I was just getting ready to go to school and briefly was under the impression there had been a terrible accident.
It wasn't long before it became clear that nothing would ever be the same.
The loss of life and sheer brutality of the attacks was as shocking as it was tragic.
I still have strong memories of the sense of American unity after the Sept. 11 attacks.
I remember all the people driving around with American flags in Los Angeles not to signal their political inclinations, but their patriotism.
Little did I know that this intense period of national unity would be so ephemeral and that the decades to follow would consist of now only destructive responses to the attacks but also intensified polarization and disunity among the American people.
One of the early clues to me that the post 9/11 world would be an ugly place was when, within days of the attacks, there began a surge of hate crimes against Muslims or people thought to “look” Muslim or from the Middle East, including attacks on Sikhs.
Little did I realize at the time that two decades of often intense and irrational Islamophobia would follow.
This would take the form of grand narratives about an existential conflict between the West and Islam, as well as a “war on terror” which resulted in a “by-any-means-necessary” approach which resulted in many horrific outcomes.
It also resulted in the ceding of even more power by Congress to the executive branch. The blank check authorizations for use of military force remain on the books, freeing presidents to invoke them to engage in military activity virtually anywhere on the planet.
This dismantling of constitutional constraints on war powers yielded America two decades of perpetual war which became increasingly aimless over time. According to the Costs of War project out of Brown University, over 929,000 people died in America's post9/11 wars, including over 387,000 as a result of violent conflict. Additionally, over 38 million people would become displaced or forced to flee their countries as refugees.
Rationally speaking, does anyone believe those outcomes were justified or moral? I don't. I can't help but think those numbers went down easier for the American people because most of those lives destroyed and upended were Muslim lives.
Then there are all the other injustices against Muslims done in the post-9/11 world not because they had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, but because of false and hateful ideas spread about them.
In the name of fighting terrorism, Americans cheered the establishment of a national surveillance state and vast powers given to the government to violate the civil liberties of Americans. From torture to “black sites” to mass surveillance, civil liberties were a major victim of America's response to 9/11.
To take one example, starting in 2006, here in Southern California, the FBI ordered one of their agents to pose as a Muslim convert to spy at various mosques in Orange County, for example. The agent reportedly went around trying to stir up talk about violent jihad. For that sort of thing to happen in what's supposed to be a free country that celebrates religious freedom, that should never have happened, but it did thanks to the ridiculous post9/11 Islamophobia.
Over time, of course, the powers ceded to the government to engage in rampant spying would have ramifications for all Americans. While most Americans have seemed largely unconcerned about the surveillance state, the sort of mass, warrantless spying on Americans revealed by Edward Snowden is the sort of abuse of power that should concern all Americans. It shows just how far the government is willing to go and how little regard government has for constitutional and legal constraints. But the “war on terror” allowed government a pass to engage in such conduct and forever let government officials know that crises can easily be exploited to give them more power.
One other long-term casualty of the 9/11 attacks is American discourse.
In later years the Islamophobia prompted by the terrorist attacks would express itself in bizarre social media-spread panics about “Shariah law” taking over America or the widespread idea Barack Obama was a secret Muslim (and that if true that must've been a necessarily horrible thing). To the latter example, a 2015 poll by Public Policy Polling found that a majority of Republicans thought Obama was a Muslim. The post-9/11 mania turned the Republican Party into the party of wild conspiracy theorists.
None of these responses to 9/11 were healthy. The generalized Islamophobia made it easy for America to get itself into brutal wars and conflicts around the world, resulting in not only widespread human suffering but downstream effects (including the rise of ISIS and the refugee crises).
These wars not only proved costly in terms of human life, but in the squandering of trillions of dollars that could've gone to better uses. The Costs of War project estimates the total federal cost of America's post-9/11 wars at $8 trillion. Was that money well spent? Or did it merely enrich the military-industrial complex?
On multiple fronts, the Sept. 11 attacks forever altered America, for the worst. I can only hope that I'll live to see the harm undone, but I fear that'll never happen. It's not apparent to me that Americans learned any lasting lesson about how crises can be and will be taken advantage of by governments for more power and how crises can inspire unjustified panics that prompt overreactions.