Washington used 9/11 to build a permanent machine of suspicion
By Ruth Behrens · Reporting from Newell, Iowa ·
The early service at my church is in Spanish now, and most of those folks spend their weekdays on the Tyson line in Storm Lake.
# The Architecture of Suspicion
The early service at my church is in Spanish now, and most of those congregants spend their weekdays on the Tyson line in Storm Lake. They know the anxiety of a job where the rules change without notice and the boss doesn't know their names. For a quarter-century, Washington has run the American legal system the same way—treating the law like a corporate handbook that managers rewrite whenever quarterly projections look grim. As the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11 approaches, the federal government warns of new threats, not to protect liberties, but to justify the next expansion of a machine that has forgotten how to stop.
Can AI Justify More Surveillance?
The bulletins from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI read like science fiction. ABC News reports that the DHS warns of shifting terrorism threats, where ISIS and al-Qaeda use generative AI to scale propaganda and calculate explosive mixtures. Christopher Raia said drones now sit at the center of FBI priorities.
I support border security and vigilance. I know al-Qaeda and ISIS still want us dead. But a pattern is emerging that should make anyone who values their own porch and prayer book nervous. When the state claims a threat has "changed" or become "more dispersed," they are arguing that the old boundaries of the law no longer apply. They want the power to watch everyone because they cannot find the few. This logic drove the First Red Scare a century ago, when a real fear of anarchist bombings justified sweeping surveillance and the detention of anyone who read the wrong pamphlet. The mechanism remains the same: use a national crisis to build a permanent architecture of suspicion.
The Guantanamo Void
The most enduring monument to this era is not a granite wall in New York, but the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay. Al Jazeera reported that fewer than one in ten of the original 780 detainees remain in the camp. Among the 60 still held are men like Mansoor Adayfi, who spent nearly fifteen years without a charge, eating boxed meals scrawled with the words, “we will never forget, we will never forgive.” Dr. Ali al-Tamimi spent twenty years in confinement before a US appellate court finally overturned his detention.
These were not "mistakes." They were choices. The U.S. built the Guantanamo detention camp in 2002 to create a zone where no judge ruled and the Constitution did not reach. The government used the same strategy during the war in Afghanistan, employing military commissions to bypass the trials we promise the world. Even when President Obama ordered the camp closed in 2008, the bureaucracy refused to budge. Once the government builds a cage that exists outside the law, it finds the cage more useful than the law.
Security is Not a Surrender
George W. Bush called the war on terror a "generational conflict." Time Magazine noted that this conflict did more than topple the regimes in Baghdad, Tripoli, and Damascus; it reshaped American politics. It turned "emergency powers" into permanent fixtures of the state.
The argument for this approach is that the world moves too fast for the slow pace of due process. A DHS advocate would say that in an age of AI-driven biological agents and quadcopter swarms, waiting for a warrant costs lives. They argue that preventative detention and total surveillance are the only ways to stop a dispersed enemy.
But that is a lie told by people who have never met a payroll or a drought. Security bought by sacrificing the law is not security—it is a surrender. If the government can label a man an "enemy combatant" without a trial, then anyone who stands in the way of state interests becomes a target. The DHS now warns that "domestic terrorists" driven by "anti-government views" are a rising threat. When the state defines a protest sign or a dissenting opinion as terrorism, the void of Guantanamo is no longer a distant island in Cuba; it is a blueprint for the mainland.
The state never returns a power it seized during a panic. We are moving toward a future where AI surveillance and preventative arrests will destabilize any community that refuses to bend. If we trade our sovereignty for the illusion of safety, we will wake up in a country where the hardware store is shuttered, the church is quiet, and the government knows every secret of our lives while we know nothing of how we are governed.