Where are we now?

Commonweal, Sept 13, 2002

Where is the United States one year after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington? On September 11, 2002, observances throughout the country will pay sober and heartfelt homage to the thousands who died in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and to the passengers who prevented a fourth attack by crashing their plane into the Pennsylvania countryside. Here in New York, the tenor of September 11, 2001, and the weeks that followed were marked by an "unusual tenderness that enveloped the city" (see John Garvey's column, page 7). First-anniversary commemorations in churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples will try to evoke that tenderness and somber spirit, their very locations reminding us that at the World Trade Center death came to citizens not only of New York, but of the whole country and of many nations--of every religious tradition and none. The considerable achievement of this country in becoming a home to all peoples and beliefs is mirrored in those deaths, but refracted in what has followed. The war on terrorism has engulfed our country and its relations with the rest of the world.

The unwarranted and unjustified deaths of thousands of people by terrorists bent on doing what they could to destroy the United States required an emphatic and immediate response. It came in the American-led attack on Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban, who harbored Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. We believe this attack was justified, and the means used to defeat the Taliban and their terrorist associates proportionate. The outcome of this easy victory remains ambiguous, however, not only in Afghanistan itself, but in terms of the terrorist agenda. Certainly, the Al Qaeda network has been disrupted by the occupation of Afghanistan, by the interdiction of its funding sources, by the interception of its communications, and by the scrutiny of its modus operandi. But no one believes that the terrorist threat has passed, or is likely to pass soon. We cannot know the probability or the intensity of future terrorist attacks. A heightened level of security and intelligence gathering is very evidently necessary. But does the declaration by President George W. Bush of a war on terrorism now need greater scrutiny than it received immediately after September 11?

A year later, and many months after the defeat of the Taliban and disruption of Al Qaeda, the "war on terror" has come to mean--or at least to justify--war and war-time restrictions anywhere and everywhere, at home and abroad. This is not a war in any conventional sense of the term, but a metaphor that needs to be wrestled to the ground.

The "war on terror" has had an ubiquitous and baleful effect on U.S. foreign policy. It has been used to ratchet up the unilateralist rhetoric that Bush brought with him to office, and now indiscriminately applies to a range of foreign-policy issues from international treaties to our relations with Europe, to the war against "narco-terrorists" in Colombia. The "war on terror" is indiscriminate in allying the United States with other "wars on terror," some of them dubious--for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Chechnya. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has seized upon the idea in justifying the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, the ever-tighter embrace of the United States by Israel throttles our ability to serve as an honest broker with the Palestinians. And then there is the war against Iraq. A diplomat and member of the UN Security Council, put it starkly: "The issue is no longer how threatening is Saddam Hussein, but how dangerous for the rest of the world is what the United States is planning to do to Saddam Hussein" (New York Times, August 30). Rather than leading a coalition of the concerned ready to tackle both the proximate and remote causes of terrorism, which are real enough, the United States is steadily alienating friends and allies around the world.

On the domestic front, Attorney General John Ashcroft has deployed the "war on terror" as a warrant for the detention of hundreds of people in the United States, holding them without the right to legal counsel. Though the vast proportion may be illegal immigrants (we don't really even know that), the norm, until September 11, had been to provide immigration hearings and, if justified, deportation. Equally problematic is the continuing imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba of more than five hundred Islamic fighters captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their ambiguous status as "enemy combatants" held in an offshore prison means that neither the writ of U.S. nor international courts can adjudicate their cases. Are they to remain imprisoned indefinitely? Mr. Ashcroft is also claiming the right under the USA Patriot Act to break down the carefully constructed wall separating counterespionage wiretaps from those in criminal investigations, a law written in the 1970s to thwart the kind of spying carried out by the Nixon administration. And then there is the CIA. Should it be permitted once again, as it did in Central and South America in the 1970s and '80s, to put on its payroll, thugs, criminals, and other unscrupulous informants? Should the prohibition against its conducting domestic surveillance and investigations be lifted? These are issues that need scrutiny, and serious debate.