9/11 Redux: Will the Israel-Hamas Conflict Lead to a Renewed War on Terror?
Have we learned from the failures and abuses of the so-called war on terror? We're about to find out.
“While embers were still burning at the World Trade Center, decisions were made that altered the course of history.”
In the weeks and months after the horrific Sept. 11 attacks, the neocons inside the Bush administration were eager for a multi-pronged war: one abroad that would begin in Afghanistan and spread throughout the region, and another to cripple the institutions and the system of checks and balances at home, with the precise goal of systematically re-imagining the powers of the executive branch, giving it far-reaching war-making authority.
Torture, extrajudicial killings (including of U.S. citizens), rendition, mass surveillance (also of U.S. citizens), and indefinite detention of supposed “suspects” at Guantanamo Bay—none of it mattered. They’d find a way to make it work within the confines of their malleable and unchallenged authority. (We have a feckless U.S. Congress, which abdicated its constitutional responsibilities, to thank for that.)
As the veteran investigative journalist and Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill wrote in his 2013 book “Dirty Wars,” the extremists inside the Bush administration were of the mindset that everything was fair game.
“For decades, [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld had been key leaders of a militant movement outside of government and, during Republican administrations, from within the White House itself,” explained Scahill. “Its mission was to give the executive branch of the U.S. government unprecedented powers to wage secret wars, conduct covert operations with no oversight and to spy on U.S. citizens. In their view, Congress had no business overseeing such operations but should only fund the agencies that would carry them out. To them, the presidency was to be a national security dictatorship, accountable only to its own concepts of what was best for the country.”
According to Scahill, a U.S. official involved in the government’s then-secret rendition program summed up the White House’s view this way: “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”
He also quotes the former CIA official and Blackwater executive Cofer Black as saying: “There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off.”
Given the United States’ past abuses abroad and history of destabilizing coups and imperialistic misadventures, it’s difficult to imagine these proverbial gloves existed in the first place. Now that the people previously dismissed as radicals were dispensing with that illusion, nothing was holding the U.S. war machine back—not even the Constitution.
No gloves. No red lines. Just a blank check for war and unlimited death certificates to hand out.
Why We Covered This Topic
It’s impossible not to recall the abuses, war crimes, lies, and propaganda stemming from 9/11 as the world confronts another conflict in the Middle East. One month into Israel’s war with Hamas, which came in response to the horrific Oct. 7 attacks that left a reported 1,400 dead and several hundred kidnapped, there’s growing concern that the lessons of 9/11 will serve as a blueprint for the ensuing campaign, rather than a deterrent.
Already, Israeli officials have invoked past U.S. actions that led to significant casualties in response to criticisms of the incomprehensible (and ever-mounting) civilian death toll in Gaza.
Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even borrowed Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” tagline in comments about the war. Going further than Bush, who in public tried to tamp down anti-Muslim rhetoric, Netanyahu gave a speech in which he recalled violent biblical passages and likened Hamas to "Amaleks.”
Here’s how Mother Jones explained it:
As others quickly pointed out, God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
To date, more than 10,000 people, nearly half of them children, have already been killed by a seemingly unending onslaught of Israeli missile strikes, according to reports. The Israeli siege on Gaza has left the already poor and struggling population there without water, food, fuel, power—basic necessities. Desperate people are drinking saltwater to survive, which only brings on more diseases and suffering. There have been more than 100 attacks on healthcare services, including a recent strike on a convoy of ambulances. As of Nov. 6, the UN said only 19 of the 35 hospitals in Gaza remain operational.
Children are emerging from the rubble dead, their skulls cracked open, bloodied, charred, and disfigured in other ways. Those who survive look dazed and in complete shock. Half of Gaza’s population are children—meaning many more will be maimed, killed, and forever traumatized.
“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
As we watch what’s been occurring in Gaza, it’s clear to us that this conflict can easily spiral out of control. The so-called war on terror has been a defining event in our lifetime, and the terror attacks of Oct. 7 and the ensuing Israeli bombardment, which many experts and governments are condemning as war crimes, have the potential to drive us into a renewed war on terror—or something far worse if other countries, notably Iran, get involved.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
Rather than breaking down every element of this conflict, we wanted to highlight some of the horrific abuses of the U.S.-led, so-called war on terror. Anyone who watched as the Bush administration ran roughshod over the legal system and Congress in the early days of 9/11 should be very, very worried about how the explosion of violence today can quickly escalate out of control.
To help explain how a war on a single terror group can metastasize into a wider regional quagmire, we enlisted the help of Mark Fallon, a former Department of Defense official, who explains how the United States “lost its way” after 9/11. “While embers were still burning at the World Trade Center, decisions were made that altered the course of history,” he told us.
Fallon cites the decision to bring terror suspects to Guantanamo rather than try them within the federal court system, which has jurisdiction and the means to effectively prosecute such cases.
As Fallon notes, we’re no better off than we were before 9/11. At the time of the attacks, there were only a few hundred members of al Qaeda. Not only did that group grow substantially, but our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq led to a surge of other terror groups, including al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and perhaps most notably, ISIS. Oh, and the Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan.
Using recent history as a guide, Fallon says: “You cannot kill your way out of this. It has to be met with a strategy.” In the context of what Israel is doing in Gaza, there’s no clear strategy for eliminating Hamas or filling the vacuum if the group is pushed out completely, which experts say may be impossible.
We also do a deep dive into the idea of “terrorism”—specifically, what it means, how countries have historically addressed it, and whether war is even the appropriate solution. (Hint: Tons of research says it’s not.)
Our other guest, Jenni Walkup-Jayes, the author behind the influential paper “Beyond the War Paradigm,” published by Brown University’s Cost of War Project, underscores the dangers of trying to eliminate terrorism in the traditional sense of war. “Terrorism is a tactic. It's a tactic that anyone can use,” she says. “Any person, any group can pick up this tactic and use it, which makes it impossible to eliminate because anyone could start doing it. It doesn't matter if you destroy this group or that group. As long as people have motivation to use that tactic, it's likely to come back.”
Walkup-Jayes finds parallels in the rhetoric about the war on terror and today’s war between Israel and Hamas, in which large swaths of the population in Gaza are being likened to “animals” and labeled terrorists. “Similar to what was happening there, a lot of the more staid voices that urged caution, that urged carefulness, that said, ‘Hey, we should be concerned about civilian deaths,’ are painted as extremists who support terror.”
Who We Interviewed & What They Said
Mark Fallon is a former U.S. Department of Defense official and Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) Special Agent. He was the lead investigator on the Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) at Guantanamo Bay Naval Camp in Cuba, which was charged with investigating terror suspects rendered to the camp following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Fallon is the author of “Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and U.S. Government Conspired to Torture.” He’s also the co-author of a new book, “Interviewing and Interrogation: A Review of Research and Practice Since World War II.”
“We learned some hard lessons, hopefully, in Afghanistan, where we went in there for revenge. We said we went in there for justice and we turned a populace against us. Our actions when we invaded Afghanistan, I believe, were righteous. We went to take out the element which was operating in Afghanistan, that attacked us. We lost our way after that. Because after [Osama] bin Laden escaped Tora Bora, we were left not fighting al Qaeda, but a new enemy emerged.”
Jenni Walkup-Jayes is an independent scholar, anthropologist, and author of the paper “Beyond the War Paradigm: What History Tells Us About How Terror Campaigns End.”
“It's really important to understand that the way that the Bush administration handled terrorism following 9/11 was a complete departure from how it had been handled previously by countries around the world, including the U.S. Before that moment, the primary paradigm for thinking about terrorism, for combating terrorism, was to think of it as a crime.”
Additional Resources
We just linked to it above, but definitely read Walkup-Jayes’ “Beyond the War Paradigm” paper. Not only is it critical because it provides important context about the history of terror and how to combat it, but the paper itself is a literature review based upon mounds of other research, including a report by the RAND Corporation that was provided to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
We’ve been re-reading or reading for the first time books about the United States’ response to 9/11. Among them: Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield,” and “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State,” by Karen Greenberg.
We play a clip from this Democracy Now! interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates at the of the episode. It’s worth checking out in its entirety:
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Audio Editor/Sound Designer/Producer/Host: Manny Faces
Editor-In-Chief/Producer: Christopher Twarowski
Managing Editor/Producer: Rashed Mian
Episode Art: Jon Chim