September 11th – living in the aftermath
Oct. 28th, 2025 09:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
angrysam_feedSeptember 11th, living in the aftermath
Twenty-four years after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, we are still living in the aftermath. Fully grown adults have lived their entire lives under the constructions of the War on Terror. ‘Freedom itself is under attack’[1], said George W. Bush, and he was not wrong. However, although the suicide bombers killed hundreds, it was state-administrations such as Bush’s who went after our freedoms. As the anniversary came again, I took a deep dive into texts written at or around the time, to give me some perspective on what happened, what alternatives there might have been and what we can do 24 years on.
Read more: September 11th – living in the aftermathWhy did it happen? Who was Bin Laden and Al Qaeda?
The story of what we now call ‘9-11’ often starts with the planes hitting the World Trade Centre (the Pentagon is rarely mentioned). But perhaps we should think of it more as part of an ongoing cycle of tit-for-tat, actions and consequences, imperialist intervention and blowback. We could start instead in 1998, with the suicide attacks outside the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, which killed hundreds and wounded thousands. Osama Bin Laden claimed responsibility. But we could go back further – to the US intervention in Somalia (‘Operation Restore Hope’), the alleged plan to partition Sudan (something which of course did happen in 2011) and the extradition and torture of four members of Islamic Jihad[2], all of which Bin Laden was reported as saying were the motivations for Al Qaeda’s massacres in East Africa.
September 11th should also not be mentioned without thinking about the Bill Clinton government’s appalling response to the embassy bombs, most notably blowing up the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Instead of being a secret Al Qaeda chemical weapon factory, as the bungling idiots of the CIA claimed, Al-Shifa was exactly what it looked like: a plant producing half of Sudan’s pharmaceuticals. A year on from this illegal attack, Jonathan Belke, regional program manager for the Near East Foundation, wrote in The Boston Globe. It is worth quoting him in full just to reflect on the severity of the consequences:
“without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced, Sudan’s death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise… Thus, tens of thousands of people – many of them children – have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases… [Al-Shifa] provided affordable medicine for humans and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It produced 90 percent of Sudan’s major pharmaceutical products… Sanctions against the Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant’s destruction… [T]he action taken by Washington on August 20, 1998, continues to deprive the people of Sudan of needed medicine. Millions must wonder how the International Court of Justice in The Hague will celebrate this anniversary”.
Twenty-seven years later, the event is almost entirely forgotten in the Western world.
It seems fitting that Bush was friends with the Bin Laden family because there was a dialectic of a mutually reinforcing fundamentalism between Al Qaeda and the US state: a mirroring of Manichean visions. You are with us or against us; holy or pagan. Some reached for Samuel Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis by way of explanation. It was nonsense, of course. Interviewed in Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) magazine of January 2002, A. Sivanandan saw it differently: “What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilisations but the imposition of one civilisation on another, and the resistance that follows from that.” That the resistance was taking the form of Islamist parties and militias, he explained as the filling of an ideological void: “Since the communist parties died, since the post-independence nationalist projects of autonomous development foundered, people have had no alternative value system to turn to, no political agency to organise them. Against the ideology of global capitalism is only the ideology of religion – Mammon versus Mohammed.” He was talking of the Global South, but a similar process was happening in the countries of the North as well, where socialism, too, was dead, and nationalism and flags are staging a comeback in their various stars and stripes. As for the discourse that it was ‘pre-modern’ Islam versus ‘modern’ rationality and secularism, Noam Chomsky pointed out,
“The U.S. in fact, is one of the most extreme religious fundamentalist cultures in the world; not the state, but the popular culture. In the Islamic world, the most extreme fundamentalist state, apart from the Taliban, is Saudi Arabia, a U.S. client state since its origins …. The West is quite ecumenical in its choice of enemies. The criteria are subordination and service to power, not religion.”
As for a starting point for Terror and the War thereon, we could go back even further, to the US proxy war against the socialists and Soviets in Afghanistan. Chomsky again:
“The CIA … in the 1980s … joined Pakistani intelligence and others (Saudi Arabia, Britain, etc.) in recruiting, training, and arming the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists it could find to fight a ‘Holy War’ against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan.”
These ‘Afghanis’ (not actually from Afghanistan) began to believe they could establish an ideal Islamic state, particularly in those Muslim countries where American-allied regimes were in fact jahili (pagan). Bin Laden is quoted as saying Afghanistan was “the only Muslim country in the world”. My personal theory on him starts from the idea that he was a younger son of a rich, powerful family, meaning he had money but no power. Thus, he sets up his own non-state militia and would have loved to have taken over Saudi Arabia, purifying the holy sites with his brand of Islam, and settling some personal scores in the process. Eventually, once he sits at the top of a state with vast oil wealth, he can be accepted into the ‘international community’. If the latter was his plan, it was not so far-fetched – witness Gaddafi’s journey of redemption from world’s most wanted to recipient of a warm embrace from Tony Blair. Instead Bin Laden was shot dead in Pakistan and Gaddafi overthrown by his own people in another potential revolution gone horribly wrong that the West made worse with their interference.
But in the early years of the War on Terror we were more or less banned from speaking about motivations. The official story was that, “they hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” The quote is from a George Bush address to the nation, and variations on this theme about ‘them’, ‘hating our way of life’, was repeated ad nauseam by broadsheet and tabloid newspaper alike.
Many of us didn’t buy it. Chomsky was a prominent voice in the wilderness of ‘public intellectuals’ and media commentators. As he pointed out, “it is entirely typical for the major media, and the intellectual classes generally, to line up in support of power at a time of crises and try to mobilize the population for the same cause.” Arun Kundnani, writing a little later in 2007, observed that this hegemonic discourse reduces the causes of terrorism “to a specifically Islamic failure to adapt to modern values”, a “problem of Muslim backwardness”. He quotes Tony Blair from 2005, claiming in a typically post-truth way, that “Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can’t be moderated”. There could be no history, no politics, just an Islamic cultural deficit and a giant double standard. Quickly the attack on the Pentagon (a potentially justifiable target) was forgotten and everything came to be about the Twin Towers and the smouldering ground zero with the ‘American way of life’ as the greatest victim. ‘Terror’ became the justification for authoritarianism at home and imperialism abroad: the right for governments to deprive people of rights. In the UK they started immediately with asylum seekers. “Asylum seekers” was a relatively new term, and most people didn’t know what the word meant, with their only association being ‘insane asylums’. Refugees they sympathised with. Asylum seekers they feared.
The Blair government exploited this. On the first anniversary of the attacks, Amnesty International published a report, called ‘Rights Denied: the UK’s response to 11 September 2001’[3]. In December 2001 the UK government had passed the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act (ATCSA). This allows the Home Secretary to certify someone as an ‘international terrorist’, if the Home Sec ‘believes’ or ‘suspects’ that the person is a terrorist, while Part 4 of ATCSA removed the right to refugee protection for refugees or asylum seekers certified as being ‘suspected international terrorists’. By the time of the Amnesty report, 11 people had been detained and only one named. All were non-UK nationals, most ‘if not all’ asylum-seekers or previously recognised as refugees. Two had ‘voluntarily’ left the UK, eight remained in detention either at Belmarsh or HMP Woodhill, and one, Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a 31 year old Palestinian refugee and torture victim had been moved, against all medical advice, to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, because he had been self-harming and become suicidal in Belmarsh. One wonders why they decided to link asylum with terrorism when Al Qaeda operatives were hardly going to be coming into Britain in the back of a truck, but the legacy is painfully obvious. Few politicians make history. They are swept along by its trends, by the class forces to which their party political allegiance commits them. The modern state has always longed for panoptic omniscience, so New Labour’s ripping up of a few obstructions to the realisation of that dream was sailing with the wind behind them. In any case, government has less to do than ever. There are no industries to run, just public contracts to funnel into private hands. Ideas are generated by think tanks, speeches are written for them by researchers and consultants. The main skill MPs seem to need now is to be able to attend multiple dinner parties. But one job remains for the state to do in the neoliberal era, and that is control: policing, incarceration, surveillance, proscription. With private companies running the show, government is concerned with disciplining a population so that capital can continue to make profit. Thus, whatever the individual motivations, the Blair government succeeded in cementing the idea in the British psyche that all refugees are potential terrorists.
Post 2001, the ‘terror alert’ emergency has never got below critical. Thus, extreme and extraordinary measures must be put in place to deal with extremism. In the process, the state has institutionalised Islamophobia as central to its functioning.
Blair’s ‘can’t-be-moderated’, cultural-deficiency discourse about Islam was mirrored by ‘analysts’ in our media, who continually overplayed the 72 houris (mistranslated as ‘virgins’) as a motivation for Muslim suicide bombers. Kundnani points out that suicide bombings are not unique to Muslims, and have been used as a tactic by many different people (including “women and secular groups”) against military occupations in many different places and times, without the motivation of a religious “belief” of sexual rewards in heaven.
The mainstream line was thus ahistorical and racist. Ordinary Muslim people had to bear the brunt. As a child, growing up in the 1990s, I don’t remember people being racialised as ‘Muslims’. Racists would call all South Asian people the ‘P’ word but this was no more or less applied whether you were Hindu, Sikh or Muslim. This new racism was one that singled out Islam and separated the ‘good’ brown people from the ‘bad’ ones. It excludes and others: locks up without trial; kidnaps and sends to Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or the ‘dark’ sites around the world; shoots dead in broad daylight; tars with the potential of being the ’enemy within’ as anyone who identifies, or might be identified as, Muslim, who went through secondary school or a Western airport in those years will be all too aware.
The utility of this new racism is sadly obvious. Yes, it is a distraction – encouraging people to ‘punch down’ as the saying goes – but I think it is more than that too. The attack on migration has been the single most successful political project in the last 25 years. Where in the world are there not political parties (from centre-left to far right) competing to tighten borders, target migrants and drape themselves in the most national flags? What are the conditions that are encouraging this? According to an economist I heard the other day, we are moving to a world of zero-growth capitalism. Growth is impossible when climate disasters keep pushing up the price of food and energy, and when too many people are unemployed or underpaid and so can’t be Fordist-style consumers. But this is not such a crisis for capital as it seems. The GDP may stagnate, but big monopoly mega-capitalists can make mega-bucks while small businesses and individuals struggle to survive. The economy pivots to information technology with data the new currency, automation the answer to falling profits, surplus populations the results. All this is compounded by war, climate change and the inequities of globalisation forcing people to leave their homes. If the future is mainly uninhabitable, those places which are not, close the borders and try to become national capital blocs, funnelling public money into ‘national’ businesses.
Migration is a challenge to the Global North in a number of ways. Maybe our leaders are (as individuals) racists, maybe they are not. Either way, they serve a state that is imperialistic, that, to quote Public Enemy, fears a black planet. Hence imperialist borders and hierarchies must be maintained.
Secondly, it may also be that their electoral success is threatened by the movement of global majority people to the ‘white’ countries. Our rulers may be utterly opposed to the interests of the majority of the population, but they are at least ‘our’ rulers, by virtue of their Whiteness or their Britishness. Will a non-White population feel the same allegiance to the White bourgeoisie? Perhaps not. It’s even better if those MPs whom we are voting for are not White, in a way. Patel, Javid, Sunak, Badenoch etc., can support White-first policies and mask the obvious racism with the cover of their skin colour. If they are Tories at least. We know where they stand if they join that gang. Asian and Black Labour MPs are more likely to provoke suspicion. They might believe in social justice.
Thirdly, by crossing the border between the 1st and 3rd world, these migrants are saying, we too deserve a chance at the good life. Their presence provokes questions. Why should they live in miserable, inhuman conditions? The racist answer is always to dehumanise them, so that they become associated with the conditions they are forced to live in. The state has denied asylum seekers access to work or benefits (another Blairite legacy). It has forced the relatively privileged, educated few who are able to pay enough to get to Europe and who are hardy enough to survive the journey, to accept the worst conditions: precariously employed, underpaid, doing dirty, boring or unpleasant work. Once disciplined in this way, they can become cheap enough labour for the employment agencies, distribution centres, supermarkets, abattoirs, packing factories, hedge-fund-funded delivery companies and taxi tech platforms to be near enough profitable enough to push up the share price. They can take the bad housing no one wants; or occupy hotel rooms in unfashionable places which would have been otherwise half-empty without the government-funded contracts. Hopefully, in the process they can prevent ‘wage inflation’ for the masses more generally, while figuring as a vote-winner for the politicians and an explanation for the low-wages of the low-waged. You have both the labour force for the economy and a viable scapegoat for politics. Importantly, though, racial capitalism has countered the idea of equality and internationalism which threatens to undermine its globalised system of labour exploitation.
The political logic of this xeno-racist project against those considered ‘foreign’ or ‘illegal’ targets more than just the racialised other. Back in 2002, Blair told us who those terror laws were meant for, and it was not just the terrorists (for whose murderous actions enough laws existed anyway), and not just the migrants (although they were the easiest and first target of the post-emergency world). At his speech at the first Labour Party conference after the Al Qaeda attacks on USA, Blair does not just talk about terrorists. His new constituency is no longer the “working class” but the vaguer category of those who “play by the rules”. And who isn’t playing by the rules? Blair lists them: Terrorists – a threat to “our way of life”; asylum seekers who might be using the asylum system as a “front for terrorist entry”; benefit claimants, “who refuse to work”; “teenage muggers”; “parts of Islam” and “parts of Western society” who have a “prejudice against America”. They are reminiscent of Enoch Powell’s unholy triad of the “stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur”. Rhetorically, for Blair as for Powell, they merge into one category – those who don’t play by the rules. “All these policies”, he said, “are linked by a common thread of principle.” Those ‘others’ (be they Wahhabi jihadists, anti-globalisation anarchists, benefit claimants or juvenile delinquents) had chosen not to accept “our values”, which were the “right ones for this age”. The remedy was clear, as he said in a speech four years later, launching his unironically named “5 year plan”, aimed at forcing people on incapacity benefit into work: “those who don’t play by the rules should start playing by the rules”.[4] The results of that particular intervention speak for themselves. According to the DWP’s own figures, in just three years, 2,380 people died shortly after being forced back into work by the new Work Capability Assessment, which was administered by French multi-national company Atos at a cost of £100 million a year.[5] Like Joseph Stalin, he had achieved the aims of his five year plan in even less time than he had said he would.
By creating the figure of the ‘Terrorist’, states could institute new powers. Like Reagan and Thatcher before them, Bush and Blair led a global political counter-revolution. Almost everywhere followed suit. “Laws must be changed”, Blair said. The era’s domestic legacy is the proscription of peaceful protest groups, massively increased surveillance, a hollowed-out welfare state and an overflowing prison population, plus a resurgent far-right. The legacy abroad includes the reinstalment of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the emergence of Isis in Iraq, after nearly five million ‘excess deaths’ worldwide.
The Chickens Coming Home to Roost
After September 11th, the American way of life was allegedly under threat. It really didn’t look like that. A terrible act of senseless murder had been perpetrated. No sane person would celebrate that. Yet, in the aftermath, who was worse: the crowds waving American flags or the ones burning them? Chomsky is particularly good at cutting through the false binary of ‘terrorists’ and the ‘free world’, as shown by the way no one could actually define ‘terrorism’: “Western powers could never abide by their own official definitions of the term, as in the U.S. Code or Army manuals. To do so would at once reveal that the U.S. is a leading terrorist state, as are its clients.” Thus, one could hardly call it a ‘war on terror’, more like terror-on-terror crime. Even before September 11th, the US state was already spreading it. Chomsky is replete with examples: starving Iraqis with sanctions; supporting Suharto’s massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia (‘our kind of guy’ according to the Clinton administration.[6]); launching operations in central America that left “some 200,000 tortured and mutilated corpses, millions of orphans and refugees, and four countries devastated.” In fact, where in the world is there a place that the US has not terrorised?
It is this glaring blindspot that Chomsky wants us to keep paying attention to. For example:
““Everybody here was quite properly outraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days the headlines read, ‘Oklahoma City Looks Like Beirut.’ I didn’t see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut
Noam Chomsky
“Everybody here was quite properly outraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days the headlines read, ‘Oklahoma City Looks Like Beirut.’ I didn’t see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and part of the reason is that the Reagan administration had set off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed 80 and wounded 250, mostly women and children, according to the report in the Washington Post 3 years later. The terrorist bombing was aimed at a Muslim cleric whom they didn’t like and whom they missed. It was not very secret.”
So the attacks themselves, launched by the people whom they had trained, were chickens coming home to roost. But the state response to September 11th had a further irony. The emergency legislation and the new imperialist foreign policy were designed, according to its architects, to ‘protect our way of life’ and Western democracy. What in fact it did was create the conditions that are now threatening to undermine the fundamental tenets of this supposed ‘democracy’. Habeas corpus disappeared in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Belmarsh, and ‘black sites’ across the American empire. Terror suspects could be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, because, the UK government claimed, they were facing a “public emergency threatening the life of the nation”. The terrorism laws were then applied to everyone from protestors to homeless people. If the War on Terror was meant to defend the values of rule of law, democracy, free speech etc. the biggest danger to those supposed values was in fact the state’s response.
This legacy of the conflation of the issue of asylum seekers with terrorism is seen today with far-right protests outside the hotels where our racist laws have left those migrants who are not rich enough or White enough to buy their way into the UK legally. New Labour politicians who later complained about Brexit and the ‘rise of the far right’ were in fact the very people who spuriously attached the issue of terrorism to the issue of asylum. In fact, the thing that is most likely to turn an innocent asylum seeker into a terrorist, are the tortuous conditions that those people must live under. Who can say they would not go out of their senses if forced to live, as the St Vincent de Paul Society put it, in “dreadful conditions that cause them distress, negatively impact their health, and violate their basic human rights”?[7] Given that many asylum seekers have already experienced traumatic experiences that forced them to leave their country in the first place, as well as having to go through horrendous journeys to get here, it is surprising that there are not more cases such as the one of the Libyan asylum seeker who went berserk in a park in Reading in 2020[8].
In the edition of CARF in which Sivanandan is interviewed, the editorial is prescient. They can see what is coming: “Just as the war in Afghanistan is not a limited and targeted intervention against a defined enemy, the domestic front of the ‘War Against Terrorism’ is similarly undefined. Heedless of ‘collateral damage’, the governments of the US and the UK trawl for suspects in ‘foreign’ communities”. They mention how the Terrorism Act 2000 had already introduced Proscribed Organisations Orders on the PKK and LTTE (Tamil Tigers), “tantamount to criminalising all Sri Lankan Tamils and all Turkish Kurds, who would all sympathise, in one way or another with the goals of the LTTE or the PKK”. Paving the way for the criminalisation of Palestine Action.
But post 2001, the ATCSA went further, with Blunkett “explicitly stating that as terrorists have, in the past, used the asylum system to gain entry to the UK, this justifies keeping all asylum seekers under a special surveillance regime.” It was not asylum seekers who hijacked planes in 2001, or detonated the 2005 bombs in London. In the case of the latter they were, in fact, born here. The murderers explained their reasons for their actions in a recorded video tape. It was not to do with hating democracy:
“You are directly responsible for the problems in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq to this day. You have openly declared war on Islam, and are the forerunners in the crusade against the Muslims. … What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq. And until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel.” (Wikipedia)
“Yet,” as CARF predicted, “it is precisely destitute asylum seekers arriving in the UK who will, in future, be targeted as suspected terrorists”, creating an “explicit linkage of a system of welfare to a system of surveillance” and, “a Soviet style police state for asylum seekers”. Blunkett “has further institutionalised xeno-racism against asylum seekers. Only this time foreign asylum seekers are not just economic scroungers and illegal immigrants, but, more threateningly, criminal conspirators and terrorists: the enemy within.”
An alternative missed
Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 911, opens with a shot of Bush’s inauguration, the president’s car pelted with eggs, as people protest the obviously corrupt election process. But as well as protesting the Florida election result debacle, you can also see slogans on placards about climate change and globalisation. Bush was not just a bumbling Texas idiot as the Democrat establishment spent the next few years trying to portray him. He also represented a type of politics: free trade agreements and the continued exploitation of fossil fuels in the reckless pursuit of profit over climate stability. ‘Globalisation’ is a word we rarely use now, but it was understood back then as the modus operandi of neo-imperialism, a way to “keep the Third World in a stagnant position / begging for monetary aid from IMF, / who don’t seem too keen to wipe off the third world debt”. It was in rap songs, like that just quoted from Roots Manuva. It was exposed in the protests at Genoa, Seattle, Birmingham etc. It even had Tony Blair pledging support for ‘Jubilee 2000’, declaring, with his usual insincerity, his personal commitment to ‘drop the debt’[9]. It was so much a topic that in 2001, people were seriously asking, did Bin Laden attack the WTC as a protest against globalisation? Anti-globalisation is now forgotten as an argument and there are few who seem to think that the financial debt owed by former colonies to their former colonisers is much of an issue anymore. Yet, at the time, Sivanandan pointed out in his interview with CARF, that all the tub-thumping of the war presidents and prime ministers should not make us lose sight of the real threat to freedom:
“The Third World is facing economic genocide in which its own governments are collaborators. Debt has forced these countries into a cycle of ever-increasing poverty. What they produce is barely sufficient to pay back the interest on their debt, let alone feed themselves, so the people are starved further. Debt kills off the present generation and the imposition of structural adjustment programmes that accompany IMF loans, kills off the future generation … economic genocide by stealth.”
In the West, our attention has been lost from the international issue. September 11th sped up the nativist turn in our politics. It is capitalism’s solution to resolving its crises and contradictions (with more crises and contradictions). It was a counter-revolution that has developed into a full on war against the so-called cultural Marxists, anti-semitic, lovers of migrants, supposedly controlling the media, forcing children to become trans and intent on ‘replacing’ the White race, bankrolled as we are by the evil George Soros. What is that conspiracy in form but classical 20th century anti-semitism repackaged? Thus the new anti-semitism no longer has Jewish people as its prime target, but is used against people of colour and the Left, which remains the only game in town which can save us from barbarism.
We, the disunited and differentially discriminated against, victims of this system, must find ways to unite. Perhaps the mass mobilisations around Palestine and the legacy of the pandemic may wake us up again to internationalism as a mindset and mutual aid as a method. As the 90s slogan went: Act local, think global. We can start at the point of need: the forever rising cost of living; and unite against the common enemy: the flag-wavers, the professional shit-stirrers and the police. In building the alternative we must be serious about swimming against the tide that is dragging us under. Withdraw from the networks of capital where we can. Boycott them where possible. Be neighbourly with neighbours. Make art, make love, build and repair. Ignore the phone. Read. Engage. Work to build movements and movements of movements.
The social democrats and the apolitical will come our way if we ever become a significant force. The is not the era for a single party. If there is to be a parliamentary party of the Left in the UK, as it appears that there might be, then we should give it our comradely, if cautious support. But such a party only seizes power when enough people are politically engaged enough to be immune to the rhetoric and mud-slinging that will be thrown their way, switched on enough not to be scared by made-up folk devils and victim-blaming, open enough to see there is another way. That way does not involve giving up our autonomy and freedom to support war-pigs and megalomaniacs because we are scared of terrorists.
References
- Amnesty Report
- Tony Blair speech to Labour Party Conference, October 2001
- CARF Dec 2001 / Jan 2002
- Noam Chomsky, 911 – was there an alternative? Open Media, November 2001
- Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance, Verso; 2007
- Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 911
[1] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1006205820963585440
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4224721.stm
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/27/atos-contract-end-relief-campaigners
[6] Incidentally, the Clintons were not great with their choice of friends. Eight years later, Hilary Clinton, infamously called Hosni Mubarak and his wife, “friends of my family.” See: https://washingtonindependent.org/105210/sec-clinton-interview-in-march-2009-marginalizes-human-rights-says-mubaraks-are-friends-of-the-family/
[7] https://svp.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-08/SVP%20Policy%20briefing%20-%20Asylum%20temporary%20accommodation%20-%20April%202024.pdf
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/11/reading-attacker-khairi-saadallah-given-whole-life-prison-sentence
[9] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/brown-will-cancel-third-world-debt-1133042.html
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