11th September 2021
The general lot of law and policy in the last twenty years has not been a happy one.
Torture used and regularised; an invasion and occupation that not only had no legal basis but also greatly discredited politics itself; the growth of the surveillance state; and the general illiberal turn to nationalistic populist authoritarianism.
All this followed the terrorist attack twenty years ago today.
That these things followed that attack cannot be disputed, as a matter of chronology.
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But what about causation?
Did 9/11 cause the illiberal turn?
Anyone with an interest in the subject will have a view.
But I am afraid I think the illiberal turn would have happened anyway.
There was never any rational connection between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion – and so there would have just been another pretext instead of the ‘war on terror’.
Those with power will torture if they can get away with it – and how the United Kingdom so readily participated in torture would not surprise anyone with knowledge of what the British did in Kenya and Northern Ireland in the post-war period alone.
Those with power did not need a reason to use and regularise torture: they just need an excuse.
And the developments in computer and communications technology since 2001 would have meant the state seeking more surveillance powers, regardless of the attack on the twin towers.
So in essence: it is plausible that all the bad things in law and policy that have happened since 9/11 would have happened anyway.
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I’m not sure that I fully buy into “Those with power will torture if they can get away with it” – although I think that many who crave power may use it gladly. It may be the motive for gaining power that is crucial.
As politicians seem more focused on simply gaining power rather than having a clear manifesto, any form of power may fit the bill. The other factor – for me – is the binary nature of politics. We deal with black and white rather than unlimited shades of grey, and so if something is either clearly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, then anything different must be the opposite.
There is (perhaps) a point in time (say c1971, when Herbert Franks gave the first indication I’ve seen that the executive regarded information given in performance of a citizens responsibility to state as other than confidential). The rest of the 70’s was spent (using the IRA campaign) employing the Ratchet Effect to give voice to that belief… a few principled lawyers highlighting it’s extent of state surveillance in eye-opening trials (see ABC trial etc) stood out against this data enslavement but failed to stop our enslavement. Your blog’s correct – but the start (Franks was former US Ambassador) was not 9/11 it was earlier – a lot earlier.
“So in essence: it is plausible that all the bad things in law and policy that have happened since 9/11 would have happened anyway.”, you (correctly) say.
It means, I suppose, that the unchallenged self-referential power of present-day politics consists in anyone’s right to manifest their own irrelevance.
I think it started in the 19th century with the British empire striding across the globe, and other nation states jumping on the bandwagon. The Netflix programme suggests the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This was certainly the trigger for Al-Qaeda ably supported by Reagan’s funding and resourcing the Mujahideen (later to become the Taliban) to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan.
I don’t entirely agree with the premise that “those with power will torture if they can get away with it”.
I agree that people will construct post hoc arguments to justify inhumane acts once they have already been committed.
But I believe that the inhumane acts in question (mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan followed by a bloody and mismanaged occupation which involved torture) were driven by fear, and the desire to create a scaffold of faux control to compensate for that fear, which snowballed into a kind of katamari of bad foreign policy decisions.
I recently watched the BBC’s “9/11: Inside the President’s War Room”. It’s a fascinating document and should be shown in schools as an example of how not to do leadership in a crisis.
Bush, Cheney and their colleagues all work very hard to tell a story about how they showed strong leadership in the face of terrorism. However it is clear that they themselves were moving at an unusually fast pace because they were badly scared by the attacks on the WTC and US government buildings.
There’s a moment when one staffer talks about the speech which laid out the Bush Doctrine and how they would normally take weeks to write a Presidential address of that magnitude. It was thrown together in a matter of hours, and it was an enormous political commitment driven both by a desire for revenge and a lack of information about what had happened.
When a head of state vows revenge both on real enemies and anyone else who gets in the way, I think that is a major cause of violence. Every idealist who believes the head of state, and every sadist looking for an excuse, has license to commit acts of violence from that moment on. There are plenty of idealists and too many sadists who work in government.
I think the fear caused by 9/11 was a strong driver of the ugliness of the last 20 years of state violence and surveillance, and I’m not at all convinced it would have happened without the attacks.
I don’t really believe in historical inevitabilities – I think the scarier truth is that individual decisions have enormous consequences, and they can’t be undone.
I was quite active on the nascent commercial Internet at the time and even worked for one of the first major ‘free’ dial-up ISPs. I can vividly remember early arguments about privacy intrusions, about Google tracking and data collection. I’m sure there was a row about autocompleting searches. It’s remarkable how quickly such things became utterly mundane and, presumably, part of a routine CIA/MI5 system. Probably has a special API for it.
I know Google isn’t, in itself, a state instrument but the lack of state curtailment certainly hints at surveillance-oriented Governments seeing it as something they can usefully exploit.
(same goes Facebook and numerous others)
Wish I could remember the specific Google tech example that caused such a stink amongst the early privacy people. There’s probably a load of mentions in NTK newsletters.
I’m not sure I agree entirely….the trends (towards a surveillance state and neoconservative policies of preemptive aggression) were there anyway but common sense surely tells us that they were given tremendous impetus by post 9/11 paranoia.
There may be no causal relationship, but it did provide an excuse.
Without that excuse, they would not have so easily imposed all these things.
An interesting symmetry between the US and the Taliban. They sort of deserve each other.
Not surprised OBL did not like the US – a spell working in an oil country revealed a very unappealing set of attitudes. Then post 9/11 some reprisals were understandable but bound not to find OBL or achieve anything much. A bit frustrating, the establishment looked weak. But as we Brits found in NI there were always those who would whisper – look the other way guv, we’ll sort this…
But would repressive legislation have happened anyway. Probably yes. NI was a fight over an asset that was no longer important – except to our establishment. A turning point in the early ’90s when Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) on home computers came along. The establishment went blind – for a while. The entire structure of the crypto market changed. The Computer Misuse act was followed by the internet going from a nerd’s toy to very big business. The misuse act did not figure large in things for baddies to worry about.
But by 2000 sweeping up information was a big deal for government – if only anything could be done with it. The establishment gradually regained its oversight ably assisted by 9/11 funding.
The US seems to have the habit of creating situations to justify wars if not presented with one. Just look at the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 4th August 1964 that lead to the overt involvement of the US in the Vietnam war. An incident that never happened.
Thanks David.. The deep shock and collective psychological impact of 9/11 is and remains profound and the consequences are unquantifiable but it would be surprising if the turning away from reasoned debate and departing from its role as cheer leader for Western liberal democracy had not been badly dented by what looks like an extended period of post traumatic stress syndrome
When I saw this paragraph, I had to wonder, are you talking about Northern Ireland?
“Torture used and regularised; an invasion and occupation that not only had no legal basis but also greatly discredited politics itself; the growth of the surveillance state; and the general illiberal turn to nationalistic populist authoritarianism.”
What you miss is that on 18 September America embraced a turn towards an imperial ethos presage by HMG. A government that polices its people as it has policed colonial people. In effect treating its residents not as scitizens but as subjects, subject to imperial power, an arbitrary power accountable to no sense of justice beyond what is efficacious.
America had been sipping at this cup for decades after 1945 but it was only with 9/11 that it could drink deeply of this imperial elixir and feel exhilarated that it could do as it wished while the weak suffered as they must. It now begins its first serious imperial delirium tremors despite having the hangover of Vietnam to warn it.
In this it follows the example provided by the UK which has enjoyed such luxuries and is now an imperial alcoholic only drinking of imperial glories to numb the pain instead of to feel the exhilarating rush, the delusional euphoria of an imperial civilisation, law and order brought to the uncivilised, that accompanied its imperial power.
The very obvious post-9/11 ratcheting up of the illiberal surveillance state in the West, most especially in the USA and its allies, has given free pass to the rulers of China, Russia, and much of the Middle East to do the same for the last 20-years. These very-obviously illiberal regimes have been able to build and reinforce their positions, free of any significant risk of challenge from outside, and able to crush any challenges from inside. Ironically 9/11 meant that the Arab Spring never really stood a chance, and the various Colour Revolutions have also largely failed.
I think the rise of populism as a means of waging politics in the West is linked to this. Absent an ethical basis for ruling, the political classes need to use other means to gain support, and populism is the most effective path to power, and one that is very hard to reverse.
Continuing increases in computing power and communications technologies mean that it is possible for (well run, technocrat-managed) centralised states and centrally-managed economies to perform extremely well and so perpetuate themselves. The significant underperformance of centrally-planned economies vs market-economies that became so evident in the 80s (leading to the fall of the USSR and Warpac/Comecon states) has consequently reduced or perhaps even disappeared completely in the last 20-years. It is quite possible that the window of opportunity for democracy to become entrenched in Russia, or to enter into China, has been lost during these 20-years.
Regrettably this is probably quite a stable state of affairs. It took several major wars (amongst them WW1, WW2, American Civil War, etc) to shake up the pre-existing stability long enough for the liberal democracies to emerge, and now they are largely reversed.
The pitchfork people really do believe that the torch people are agin them. How to reverse out of this is decidedly difficult.
https://ifunny.co/picture/oh-you-don-t-to-fight-them-you-just-need-jSespRNG8
This is what historians will ponder, in 100 years (if we still have historians then): the collapse of liberal democracy cannot have been due ‘just’ to Trump or Johnson, so what were is roots? My view: liberal democracy relied on the political equivalent of theatre relying on a ‘willing suspense of disbelief’. We were persuaded, mostly, that either we did not have feelings of hatred and intolerance within us, or that they were so socially unacceptable that we should not give way to them, still less express them. The Tea Party, Trump, Brexit told us: no, those are fine feelings, that’s the ‘true’ America, England. And the Beast was let loose. And cannot be re-caged
Is this supposed to mean that everybody has feelings of intolerance and hatred?
It sounds a bit of a stretch to me.
Although it might be interesting to think about what proportion of the population – across the political spectrum – is subject to those feelings.