The long shadow of terror: How fear reshaped democratic values
John Kiriakou remembers 9/11 like it was yesterday. It made no sense to the CIA counterterrorism officer that a plane would accidentally crash into the World Trade Center on such a sunny day. When the second plane hit, it was clear to everyone at the CIA that the U.S. was under attack.
There were roughly 600 people working at the CIA Counterterrorism Center that day. On 9/12 there were around 1,600, he says.
Shock quickly gave way to revenge.
“There were 3,000 Americans who died because we didn’t do our jobs,” Mr. Kiriakou says, recalling his stateside boss sending him off a few months later to chase Al Qaeda militants as CIA counterterrorism operations chief in Pakistan. “He said to me, ‘Kill them all.’”
Mr. Kiriakou – who went on to be the first whistleblower to confirm that waterboarding, a form of torture, was official U.S. policy – summed up the era in a Monitor interview this way: “9/11 was the watershed that permanently changed the American way of life. We’ll never, ever go back to our Sept. 10 country.”
It’s not only the American way of life that has changed. So has the American way of war. The U.S.-led “war on terror” transformed warfare, mobilizing harsh counter-terrorism tactics that shook
Counterterrorism in her own backyard Widespread values shift“We don’t want to be the bad guy”
