“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “ Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan.
The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place. The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism. It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand. Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.
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Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades - the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror. Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. Looking back, it’s also among the most ignored. This affirmation of American idealism is one of the document’s more opinionated moments.
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