Thread by @fahadansari

(Thread) This event last night helped put the #September11 attack into perspective, both in terms of the motives behind it & the brutal. It really highlighted just how much devastation has been inflicted on the Muslim world over the past 20 years and beyond.

History did not begin with the death of 2,996 people on 11 September 2001. That atrocity was a reaction to decades of direct and indirect oppression of Muslims by the USA.

This included unstinted political and military support for Israel in the exercise of its apartheid policies, illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, as well as propping up authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world that denied basic freedoms to their people.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the US imposed genocidal economic sanctions on Iraq that resulted in the deaths of half a million children from starvation and lack of access to basic medicines, a price they thought was worth it.

Religious scholars in Saudi Arabia who started the peaceful Sahwa (Awakening) movement demanding an independent judiciary, independent scholars and removal of US troops from the Arabian peninsula. They were brutally crushed, imprisoned and tortured by the US backed Saudi regime.

In 1992 in Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front were voted into power only to be overthrown in a military coup backed by the Saudis and the US, which led to a horrific decade long civil war in which about 150,000 people were killed.

Al-Qaeda’s declaration of war in 1996 needs to be seen within this context of US crimes in the Muslim world. For the racists reading this thread, identifying a motive for a crime is not the same as justifying it.

The US reaction to 9-11 (as backed by pretty much the whole world) has led to the deaths of possibly millions of people around the globe in the past 20 years and made the world a far more dangerous place.

We will never know how many people were killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because unlike the 2,996 people who died in 9-11, these people literally do not count. “We don’t do body counts” was a phrase used by Donald Rumsfeld in Afghanistan and General Tommy Franks in Iraq

Let’s not forget about the lasting legacy of the CIA policy of rendition and torture started in 2001 whereby suspects were kidnapped and abused in secret prisons around the world including Libya, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

One such person was Ibn Sheikh al Libbi, kidnapped in Pakistan, tortured in Afghanistan & Egypt whereupon he gave false information that al-Qaida was working with Saddam Hussain on obtaining chemical and biological weapons in order to kill Americans.

This intelligence was used by Colin Powell to argue the case for war on Iraq in the UN. And without a war on Iraq, we would have no Al Qaeda in Iraq, no Abu Ghraib, no Abu Bakr al Baghdadi being detained in Camp Bucca, and no ISIS.

An iconic image of the War on Terror was Aafia Siddiqui who was kidnapped with her children in Pakistan and detained with her children for years in Bagram. Currently serving an 86 yr sentence in one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of our time.

Of course one of the defining features of the War on Terror is Guantánamo Bay where hundreds of men (incl some geriatrics) and several children were detained without charge, tortured and kept outside the jurisdiction of any laws. 20 years on 39 men remain there.

17 of these men are deemed so dangerous they have been classified as “forever prisoners” although they have not been charged. China even persuaded the Americans to classify the Uighurs as terrorists, many of whom were detained in Guantanamo.

Obama came to power and said no more people would be detained without charge in Guantanamo. Instead, he introduced the more humane policy of executing people without charge through the drone policy which killed thousands in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Here in Britain, the soft War on Terror commenced with the detention without charge for 3 years of 17 men without charge in Belmarsh prison. When the House of Lords ruled this to be unlawful in 2004 as it only applied to foreign nationals, the govt was forced to release them.

Enter control orders - a regime of house arrest with restrictions on your and your family’s use of the internet, freedom of movement and association, any breach of with triggers a return to prison. Conscious of the previous legal defeat, this regime applies to Brits as well.

Many of those subjected to these control orders were accused of being involved in the ‘ricin plot’, peculiar because there was neither any ricin nor any plot. One wonders where the intel came from but it was also used by Colin Powell before the UN to make the case for war on Iraq

Others were arrested at the behest of dictators like Gaddhafi in Libya who demanded his political opponents, previously granted asylum by the UK, now be returned to Libya.

Brits like Babar Ahmad were also detained for years without trial awaiting extradition to the US for crimes allegedly committed in the UK without the need for the US to provide evidence.

Other aspects of the Guantanamo “punish without charge” mentality in the UK incl the Sch 7 powers given to officers at airports and ferry ports by which they could detain and question people without charge for up to 9 hours. By 2017, over half a million people had been stopped.

Add to that the Prevent duty by which health care professionals, firefighters, teachers, and civil servants became the eyes and ears of the State and you have an idea of how bad things have gotten.

Recent years have seen a huge increase in the imposition of civil sanctions such as deprivation of citizenship, passport confiscation and exclusion orders, all without charge or trial, based on secret evidence neither the individual nor his lawyers will ever see.

The rhetoric of the War on Terror has been used to repress the Uighur Muslims in China, the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, Kashmiri Muslims in India and Muslims in France and elsewhere.

There is so much more that can be said but for those of us who have lived and breathed the War on Terror for the past 20 years, today is significant because it became the justification to devastate the Muslim world and Muslim communities everywhere #NeverForget

While sitting with my mother in a park today, four police officers suddenly arrived in two cars looking for someone. Mum, bless her, thought it was because of this thread! 20 years on, her worries for me in the post 9-11 climate haven’t changed a bit.