A quarter-century after ۹/۱۱, we are still living under the security order it unleashed.
Published On ۱۱ Sep ۲۰۲۶
A protest movement has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, thereby criminalising support for those enduring a genocide rather than any act of violence. Migrants are being held in detention facilities modelled on the very practices documented at Guantanamo Bay, and some are even being sent to the Cuban detention camp itself. Surveillance infrastructure once built to monitor “terrorism” has quietly been turned on Palestine solidarity protesters instead. None of this sits at the edges of the law, straining against it or slipping past its limits. It sits comfortably within laws written ۲۵ years ago, doing precisely what they were written to do.
The legal architecture assembled after ۹/۱۱ was sold to the public as an emergency response to a single, unrepeatable day. A quarter of a century later, it has not been rolled back, nor even meaningfully questioned. It has simply become permanent, its reach extending steadily beyond anything its original architects would have needed to justify at the time.
It is worth resisting, too, the instinct to treat ۹/۱۱ as the origin of this story. The hostility that the “war on terror” eventually gave a name to was already established Western policy long before that morning arrived; ۹/۱۱ did not invent the idea that certain populations could be treated as a security problem before they were treated as human beings; it simply furnished that idea with a name, a legal framework, and a budget without limit. Read the last ۲۵ years as a continuation of something older, rather than an aberration that began with a single attack, and the years since start to make a different kind of sense.
Seen that way, the throughline is difficult to miss. What began as indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay has grown into the working infrastructure of a far broader security state. The same legal tools have been carried forward rather than retired, first used to justify holding men without charge, then to designate a protest movement a “terrorist” organisation for the positions it holds, and now to run immigration enforcement on a national security logic drawn directly from the “war on terror”. Each expansion has been presented, in turn, as a departure, a special case, an exception demanded by the moment. Yet this is what a permanent security architecture does once it is built: it merely shifts to its next target.
The case that shows this most starkly is not one of prosecution but of detention that never required one. Mansoor Adayfi was held at Guantanamo for nearly ۱۵ years without ever being charged with a crime, and has written of treatment no human being should have to endure. In one of the camp’s more telling episodes, he opened a boxed meal to find the words “we will never forget, we will never forgive” scrawled on the inside of the box. When he wrote back demanding justice rather than vengeance, the camp administration answered with food punishment and solitary confinement, on the grounds that his message amounted to a death threat.
Guantanamo never needed a conviction to hold him for a decade and a half. It needed only the architecture built after ۹/۱۱, and the presumption embedded within it that a man like him could be treated as a suspect indefinitely, without the state ever having to prove why. What Guantanamo demonstrated, in other words, was not simply a place but a method: that indefinite suspicion could be built into law and would hold, that a population could be designated a security risk and processed accordingly, with no charge required and no real accounting demanded. It is that method, not the camp itself, that has since travelled.
It is difficult to look at a proscribed protest movement or a migrant held in conditions that directly echo those at Guantanamo and not recognise the same architecture at work. The same presumption, applied differently, produced convictions elsewhere that later could not survive scrutiny: one that kept Hamid Hayat imprisoned for ۱۴ years, secured through coerced statements, and another that kept Dr Ali al-Tamimi imprisoned or confined for ۲۰ years, based entirely on protected speech and overturned by a US appellate court only this year. Guantanamo did not even need that pretence. It needed only the architecture itself.
Twenty-five years is long enough to know that these laws were never temporary, and long enough to know they were never going to correct themselves. The only response still worth taking seriously is to abolish them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
