Within weeks and months of 9/11, the U.S. government rapidly introduced and authorized a series of expansive national security measures in the name of terror prevention.  Chief among these new security implements were the USA PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The USA PATRIOT Act, a 300+ page document¹, which was passed unanimously by Congress just 46 days after the attacks, served to significantly broaden the U.S. government’s search and seizure prerogatives with pervasive privacy abrogations² that have raised serious questions about the legality of the act’s provisions under the U.S. Constitution’s First and Fourth Amendments³.  Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2002 in response to 9/11 as a means “to safeguard the country against terrorism.”  The ever-expanding DHS is now the third largest Federal department, composed of over 240,000 employees, and as of 2017, is allotted a taxpayer-funded $40.6 billion net discretionary budget.  DHS program objectives are broad, and include among other initiatives; airport security, border security, chemical facility inspection, and cybersecurity⁴.  Some scholars consider DHS operations to be a public privacy concern⁵.

Outside of intrusive post-9/11 domestic enactments, the Bush administration authorized U.S. intelligence organizations to employ ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that are often regarded as torture⁶.  Stress positions, strikes to the body, hypothermia, and waterboarding were some of the techniques U.S. intelligence personnel used to extract information from detainees in the years immediately following 9/11⁷.  The humiliating and abusive treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was perhaps the most publicized and shocking example of post-9/11 enhanced interrogation war crimes.  Bush administration officials painted Abu Ghraib as an aberration, and culpability for the crimes was primarily pinned on low-ranking military personnel⁸; however, research suggests that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were authorized at the highest levels of U.S. military and civilian leadership.  In fact, reportedly unhappy with the intelligence yield in Baghdad, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, gave oral orders to his commander in Guantanamo, Geoffrey Miller, to “Gitmoize” intelligence procurement in Baghdad⁹.  However, as was the case with key high-ranking U.S. officials who failed their posts on 9/11, many senior officials in the Abu Ghraib prison chain-of-command were promoted rather than being reprimanded or demoted¹⁰.  Other known cases of authorized prisoner abuse occurred at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, the aforementioned Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and as a means to acquire evidence linking Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and al-Qaeda¹¹.  One of the most harrowing instances of enhanced interrogation was the questioning of convicted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Mohammed confessed to CIA interrogators only after being repeatedly slapped, sleep deprived, rectally rehydrated, and waterboarded a staggering 183 times.  Given the psychological trauma that would certainly accompany such an interrogation, the veracity of Mohammed’s confession has been understandably called into question¹².  Mohammed and the four other men charged with planning the 9/11 attacks have recently received a trial date of January 11, 2021; nearly 20 years after the men’s initial incarceration¹³.

In light of the dramatic changes for civil liberties that have occurred during the 9/11 global ‘War on Terror’, the working group will seek to foster scholarly research into a number of important areas including for example: the ways in which civil liberties have been impacted by legislative changes; the ways in which these developments have shaped conduct and ‘managed’ dissent in Western democracies; the broader impact of these developments upon democratic politics and the ethical/legal efficacy and legitimacy of these developments and the ways in which civil liberty restrictions form part of broader propaganda strategies aimed at enabling the global ‘War on Terror’.