Twenty-three years after 9/11, Muslim victims of US violence deserve justice
On 31 July, three Guantanamo defendants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Bin' Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, signed a plea deal with the convening authority for military commissions, Brigadier General Susan Escallier.
Under the terms of the agreement, the defendants would plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks in exchange for removing the death penalty as a possible sentence.
Although the defendants would be facing life imprisonment, top government officials did not seem to think the punishment went far enough.
Two days later, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin issued a memo revoking the plea deal. He informed Escallier of her removal from the case and insisted that the decision "should rest with [him] as the superior convening authority".
Both US Democratic and Republican lawmakers criticised the plea deal, including Senator Richard Blumenthal, who stated that the Biden administration owed Americans "an explanation", and Senator Lindsey Graham, who claimed that the plea agreement "sends a horribly bad signal at a very dangerous time". Congressman Mike Rogers, who published an open letter to the Pentagon chief, also lamented the news as "a 'gut punch' to many of the victims' families".
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Still, a number of rights groups and even some of the families who lost loved ones in the 11 September 2001 attacks welcomed the plea deal, which came after 16 years of pre-trial proceedings with low prospects of a resolution to the case.
The American Civil Liberties Union described Austin's revocation of the agreement as a "rash act [that] also violates the law" and vowed to challenge it in court. Meanwhile, organisations like September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows issued a statement criticising the defence secretary's decision as a move that "ultimately betrays 9/11 family members".
The group echoed many families' frustration that the case has lingered for so long, emphasising that the deal would have "offered a path to finality and a modicum of justice and accountability for the crimes of 9/11" while blaming the government's torture of the accused men as the reason it was unable to prosecute the case.
The discourse on 'justice' that solely pertains to victims of the 9/11 attacks continues to serve as a critical linguistic frame that privileges one group of people over another
In one swift move, prosecutors' long-sought guilty verdicts were invalidated and reduced to a case study in the long-standing historical debate over capital punishment.
Senator Dick Durbin, who has long advocated for closing Guantanamo, joined in criticising Austin's decision to withdraw the plea deal. "We have a legal and moral obligation to deliver justice for these family members, rather than false promises that these commissions will ever deliver more", he wrote in a statement.
Twenty-three years after 9/11 and nearly 22 years after the opening of Guantanamo, the discourse on "justice" that solely pertains to victims of the attack continues to serve as a critical linguistic frame that has privileged one group of people over another.
Indeed, what Muslims have learned over the last two decades of the "war on terror" is that there is no mechanism of justice to address the violence inflicted on them, much less any narrative or rhetorical frame that meaningfully acknowledges their victimisation and suffering.
'Justice' for whom?
Nine days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, then-President George W Bush gave a speech to a joint session of Congress, announcing the launch of the war on terror.
He emphatically delivered his speech, asserting that "whether we bring our enemies to justice, or justice to our enemies, justice will be done". Careful to convey a narrative of the US as a blameless victim, Bush left the notion of "justice" undefined.
Despite the ambiguity and nonsensical declaration of a war on terror, legal scholar Frederic Megret notes that the concept has "provided a consistent discursive anchor for a range of violent practices across time and space". And instead of marking a specific period in history, it became "a way of understanding the world".
The world that Muslims have come to understand under the guise of the war on terror is one marked by unabated and unaccountable state violence propelled by entrenched and rampant Islamophobia.
The actions that the US took in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to "combat terrorism" - from legislating unfettered warfare across the globe through the Authorisation of the Use of Military Force joint resolution and passing the Patriot Act to giving broad surveillance powers to the government, launching a war on Afghanistan, and signing a military order that authorised military commissions with different standards of rules for those detained in brutal prisons from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites.
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These violent measures have only escalated in the last 23 years of the war on terror. From militarism and warfare to draconian immigration policies, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture, this war has almost exclusively targeted Muslims.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen - four Muslim-majority countries - the war on terror has led to a death toll of between 4.5 and 4.7 million people.
As horrifying as this level of violence has been, it doesn't even begin to account for the violence that has otherwise been buried deeper than the victims of the US empire.
The New Yorker's "In the Dark" podcast, for example, recently assembled a database of the largest known collection of war crimes investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 11 September 2001. The database includes nearly 800 incidents, with the reporting concluding that "the military delivers neither transparency nor justice".
No remedies
Unsurprisingly, the US government has offered no meaningful remedies to the catastrophic violence that Muslims have endured at its hands, nor put any systems or mechanisms of accountability in place to acknowledge and reckon with a war whose entire foundation was built on the demonisation and criminalisation of a religious community.
The US, however, has not only forgotten the victims of its catastrophic state violence but swept them so far under the rug that there is almost no possibility of justice for Muslims
Last year, on the sixth annual International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, the State Department released a statement claiming that the US "stands with the global community of victims, families, survivors, and communities who have been impacted by the scourge of terrorism" and "will never forget the victims of terrorism or stop our pursuit of justice and peace".
The US, however, has not only forgotten the victims of its catastrophic and unabashed state violence but swept them so far under the rug that there is almost no possibility of justice for Muslims.
Where any remedies do exist - for example, if someone is killed by the US in a combat zone - US laws effectively preclude noncitizens from the eligibility to make a claim or receive any compensation for wrongful deaths that occur outside of the country.
In rare cases where the US military kills civilians, a commander can opt to pay what are called solatia or condolence payments. These payments are not only minuscule - ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars - but they are also expressly made without the military acknowledging any wrongdoing.
One exception to this rule was when the US killed an Afghan family of 10 members, including seven children. The Pentagon eventually issued an apology, with Austin insisting that "no military works harder than ours to avoid civilian casualties. When we have reason to believe we have taken innocent life, we investigate it and, if true, we admit it."
However, not only does the US - the military in this case - have limited accountability measures to address civilian deaths, but Austin's statement perpetuates the facade that there are mechanisms in place and that the killing of these Afghan civilians was an exception to otherwise careful military operations.
Moreover, what the war on terror has consistently demonstrated is that the US only acknowledges wrongdoing when it cannot plausibly deny its violence (the war crimes at Abu Ghraib are emblematic of this rule). While survivors among the Afghan family were relocated to the US, the government has yet to provide any monetary compensation despite pledging to.
In contrast, the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund provides monetary compensation to individuals with illnesses related to the attacks or a relative of an individual who died in the attacks.
The Fund was initially established in 2001 by Congress and was closed in 2004. It has since been reinstated, first through the Zadroga Act and then The Never Forget the Heroes: James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer, and Luis Alvarez Permanent Authorisation of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which extended claims to 2090.
Discursive battle
The exclusion of Muslims from any justice framework after 9/11 is a direct result of the US's unabashed commitment to state violence that has been justified through the criminalisation, demonisation, and dehumanisation of Muslims.
Constructions of Muslims as inherently predisposed to violence, irrationally angry, and barbaric, among others, have specifically served to position Muslims solely as perpetrators and never as victims deserving of any sympathy.
Coupled with these often harmful representations, another barrier to leveraging victim claims is the absence of a viable, legible, and rhetorical frame through which collective action to hold the state accountable and articulate a demand for justice can be mobilised.
As sociologists William K Carroll and Robert S Ratner write in their article "Master Frames and Counter-Hegemony: Political Sensibilities in Contemporary Social Movements", "Collective action frames form part of the discursive politics of any struggle against established hegemony.”
Part of this rhetorical frame involves a re-constitution of the collective memory of the war on terror as it has been waged thus far while centring the Muslims who have been victimized in its wake.
What exists now in the form of the collective memory of the war on terror has been driven by state narratives and complicit media entities that have not only justified the violence against Muslims by promoting singular interpretations but also erased their stories and relegated them to the history books, despite the ongoing brutality.
If there will ever be justice for Muslims, then their stories must become part of the collective memory. In their article on the power of collective memory, the two psychology scholars write that “Collective remembering implies that collective forgetting also occurs…" When it comes to the war on terror, however, collective forgetting is far from accidental and seeks to erase the violent targeting of Muslims from being consciously tied to the broader public's understanding of the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath.
To insist on a rhetorical frame that centres the memory of Muslims is central to the demand for justice.
Path towards justice
As we enter the 24th year of the war on terror, the concept of justice remains as nebulous as ever.
But if this war could be instructive on anything, it's that justice can be asserted without defining its terms while, at the same time, narrowly prescribing who is deserving of it.
But Muslims are deserving of justice, and the repeated attempts to exclude them from these calls must be challenged after decades of a war that has devastated Muslim lives domestically and across the world.
Any meaningful justice, however, necessitates accountability for the crimes committed against Muslims. This imperative will not come from the state, which is why we must insist on the stories of Muslims becoming a part of the collective history of the war on terror.
A clear rhetorical and discursive framework that directly confronts state violence, centres Muslim humanity and dignity and advocates categorical justice for Muslims must then be articulated and advanced.
After 23 years of collective blame and punishment, Muslims deserve nothing less.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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