The era of America’s “war on terror” is ending after thirty years
USA, March 10, 2025 – The global war on terror was first proposed live on the morning of September 11 at 11:28 New York time, as a layer of dust from the freshly demolished towers settled over Manhattan and most of the world struggled to understand what was happening. BBC World News host Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister, spoke visionarily of the beginning of a new era of global terror: “From today on, the world will not be the same. This is an attack on our entire civilization. I don’t know who is responsible for this. I think we will find out within 12 hours. … I believe the time has come for a global, joint effort led by the United States, Britain, Europe and Russia against all sources of terror.”
By the end of the month, the public had heard so many authoritative statements about the “evidence” pointing to bin Laden’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks that few noticed that the US government had refused to release the promised official document outlining this evidence, allegedly because of the “lack of credible information” about the plot. The production of such evidence had been entrusted to Great Britain, and as a result, its government would release on October 4 the report “Responsibility for Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” which the press had promoted as “the clearest picture yet of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the September 11 attacks.” However, the document stated that its “objective is not to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.” And, most importantly, it stated that “there is evidence of a very specific nature relating to the guilt of bin Laden and his associates, but which is too sensitive to be made public.”
A few days before this publication, on October 1, 2001, US Ambassador Frank Taylor held a secret briefing at the North Atlantic Council in Europe, where he managed to get NATO to help the US invade Afghanistan as part of the war on terror. In 2018, Professor Niels Harrit wrote an article called “The Secret Report of Frank Taylor: The 9/11 Document That Launched the US and NATO War on Terror in the Middle East”, which is based on a cable leaked in 2009 titled “Secret Briefing for World Leaders After 9/11” (now no longer available), but dated October 1, 2001 and addressed to US embassies. The problem was that absolutely no evidence was presented in this briefing either.
The Official Start of the “War on Terror”
Nevertheless, in October 2001, bombs began to fall on Afghanistan, the war on terror officially began, and the public was told that one of the main goals of the war was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. One of the hallmarks of al-Qaeda throughout its history has been the incredible ability of its operatives to cross borders illegally, evade arrest, and slip through intelligence networks. This remarkable chain of events included such episodes as: the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman’s entry into the United States with CIA support and living there peacefully even after his green card was revoked; the entry of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef into the United States without proper documentation while working and living with a suspected terrorist group, being under FBI surveillance, and fleeing the country before he became a subject of the WTC investigation; And the icing on the cake is the work of al-Qaeda “triple agent” Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian army officer, CIA agent, trusted aide to al-Qaeda’s deputy leader al-Zawahiri, volunteer in Afghanistan, deep-cover FBI agent, Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, and instructor of many al-Qaeda terrorists in the 1990s. But all these stories pale in comparison to the story of Osama bin Laden’s “disappearance.” In fact, his whereabouts and actions on the night before 9/11 were well known in the United States, although this information was not revealed to the public until after his “escape.” A few weeks after the attacks, the Taliban offered to try bin Laden in Afghanistan or extradite him to a third country if the United States provided them with evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks. Bush rejected this offer. Then, in October, when the invasion of Afghanistan began, the Taliban tried again to turn bin Laden over, this time refusing to provide evidence of his guilt. But Bush refused again. And the image of a comic book supervillain commanding an army of terrorists from his cave fortress began to emerge. In early November, as American troops were concentrating on Kabul, bin Laden and all of his closest aides managed to leave for Jalalabad in a highly visible nighttime convoy. An eyewitness reported:
“We don’t understand how they didn’t kill them all the night before, because they came in a convoy of at least 1,000 cars and trucks. It was a very dark night, but the American pilots must have seen the lights of the convoy easily.”
While bin Laden was hiding in the Tora Bora caves, General James Mattis, the commander of the Marine Corps in Kandahar, told a reporter that his troops could blockade Tora Bora, but his superiors rejected the plan. Meanwhile, bin Laden and his top aides took the opportunity to simply leave Tora Bora and head for Pakistan. Bin Laden has appeared from time to time to alert the public to the origins of the war on terror. Most notably, in December 2001, the Pentagon released a poor-quality videotape in which bin Laden allegedly talks about his involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The German television channel Das Erste hired its own independent translators to verify the Pentagon’s transcription of the tape. It called the translation “very problematic,” saying that “in the most important places where it is presented as evidence of bin Laden’s guilt, it is not identical to the Arabic.”
Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered General Tommy Franks, who had led the invasion of Afghanistan, to redirect planning resources from Afghanistan to the Pentagon’s next target in the war on terror: Iraq. Public attention now turned to a new bogeyman: Saddam Hussein. In a memo dated September 11, 2001, at 2:40 p.m., Rumsfeld said he needed “the best information quickly so that we can strike Saddam Hussein simultaneously. Not just bin Laden,” and ordered staff to “act en masse” and “retaliate against everything,” including “related and unrelated things.”
Behind the Scenes of the “War on Terror”
Incidentally, the plan for regime change in Iraq dates back to 1996, when a group of neoconservatives including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser wrote a report for then-Prime Minister Netanyahu called “Clean Break: A New Strategy for State Security,” which suggested that Israel “shape its strategic environment by weakening, containing, and even eliminating Syria,” which would require “focusing on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as a means of halting Syria’s regional ambitions.” The only problem was how to connect Iraq in the public consciousness with the war on terror. Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House to discuss the issue. In the now-infamous memorandum that documents the minutes of these meetings, Bush had already decided on military action, and the date for the bombing to begin on March 10 was “written in pencil.” Bush first suggested a way to provoke Iraq into aggressive action in order to gain UN approval for the invasion. According to the minutes, “the United States considered flying U2 reconnaissance planes over Iraq under the cover of fighter jets painted in UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be violating existing UN resolutions, thereby justifying military action against himself.” But the neoconservatives then came up with another strategy to sell the war to the public: the “weapons of mass destruction” narrative.
In any case, six months after the Iraq War began in March 2003, 82 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was “helping” Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and 69 percent believed that Saddam was personally involved in the September 11 attacks. The terrorist organization that was founded in Jordan in 1999 and became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq had originally had nothing to do with al-Qaeda itself or Iraq. Its future Founder Ahmed al-Chalaila was a Jordanian fighter whose goal was to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy. Like many figures in al-Qaeda’s history, al-Chalaila’s background did not meet the requirements of a devout Muslim, let alone a jihadist. A high school dropout, al-Chalaila was known for drunken brawls and drug dealing, and had been imprisoned for sex crimes before traveling to Afghanistan, where he joined the mujahideen in 1989. In 2003, he appeared in Baghdad under the alias Zarqawi, where he was catapulted by the US government. And in 2004, Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and was given the title “al-Qaeda.” Then he was repeatedly “killed,” “wounded,” “evacuated” ….
On April 9, 2006, The Washington Post published internal military documents – evidence that the US government was creating the myth of Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of a psychological operations campaign. Two months after these explosive revelations, Zarqawi was finally declared dead and written out of the script. Like Zarqawi, bin Laden died and rose from the dead many times, reappearing on television screens to remind a traumatized public of the importance of the ongoing war on terror. Meanwhile, the search began for a new country to invade.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose participation in Operation Cyclone launched the US intervention in Afghanistan, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007 that a military provocation or act of terrorism whose origins “would be very difficult to trace” could be staged and blamed on Tehran to justify US military action against Iran. By then, however, the neoconservatives’ approval ratings were plummeting and the American public was growing weary of the “existential threat”. So when Obama appeared on the horizon as a messiah in 2009, the public was so enthusiastic that they awarded him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything. Paradoxically, Obama outdid Bush and ended up waging a “war on terror” in seven countries. This time, the renewed war on terror has a new guise, in the form of a smiling, peaceful, and softer-spoken commander-in-chief. And the US was eventually drawn into the new show when the terrorist group it had nurtured led the war against the Islamic State.
This time, the US began what it called a “reorientation,” i.e., a change of sides. Now it needed to arm, finance, and support the same radicals it had just been fighting (it was supporting Sunni extremist groups sympathetic to al-Qaeda). This had to be sold to the public, which the Obama team, which won several awards for its “Hope and Change” PR campaign in 2008, did brilliantly when it staged another show called “taking out bin Laden” (for the ninth and final time). This is how you “kill off” a character on a TV series when the actor is tired of playing him. Like a Hollywood blockbuster, the story of the raid itself was fiction. There was no gunfight. Osama was not armed. He did not use his wife as a human shield. Burial at sea was not part of Islamic tradition. Even the famous situation room photo was a lie; there was no live video feed of the raid. Like the entire story of the decade-long hunt for Osama, which was staged in Oscar-winning films like Zero Dark Thirty and described in countless reports and books, this episode was a fake.
The renowned journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that while bin Laden was indeed killed in Abbottabad, he had actually been living in the compound for years as a prisoner of the ISI (in the custody of Pakistan’s intelligence agency). But again, there was no proof. All the files from the raid, including “copies of bin Laden’s death certificate and autopsy report, as well as the results of tests to identify the body,” were deleted from Pentagon computers and transferred to the CIA, where they are tightly guarded against Freedom of Information Act requests. Osama bin Laden had fulfilled his role as the villain in the history of the war on terror and was written out of the script.
That is why in 2015 Barack Mendelsohn, a political scientist and expert on “radical Islamist organizations,” published an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs titled “Embracing Al-Qaeda: An Enemy of the United States,” in which he argued that Washington must rethink its policy toward Al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, this “rethinking” led to the emergence of a new terrorist group: the Islamic State. The Islamic State, which arose from the ashes of the same Al-Qaeda in Iraq, gained international fame in 2014 when it seized Raqqa. The career of the group’s new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has followed the familiar pattern of a terrorist ghost. Like his predecessor Zarqawi, Baghdadi has been declared dead, alive, captured, dead, and alive again so often that reports of his activities have quickly become a farce.
The Price of War Project’s report provides staggering estimates of the human and financial costs of the U.S. wars in the “war on terror” over the past 20 years. Of the roughly one million people killed, 387,000 were categorized as civilians (with the U.S. military labeling all of the men of military age killed as militants). Some 15,000 U.S. military and contractor personnel have died, as have a similar number of allied Western troops involved in the conflicts and several hundred journalists and aid workers. And the cost of the war has been $8 trillion.
The entire history of the “war on terror” is a case study in the war on terror against humanity. It is the story of the creation of an entire infrastructure of laws and extraordinary powers that have subtly changed the face of the so-called free world. The myth of terror has always served not only for foreign policy purposes but also as a tool of domestic control, as carte blanche to impose surveillance on one’s own population in the name of “security.” And the public, convinced of the need for such security by the myth of the war on terror, has obediently demanded increased state control.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose participation in Operation Cyclone launched the US intervention in Afghanistan, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007 that a military provocation or act of terrorism whose origins “would be very difficult to trace” could be staged and blamed on Tehran to justify US military action against Iran. By then, however, the neoconservatives’ approval ratings were plummeting and the American public was growing weary of the “existential threat”. So when Obama appeared on the horizon as a messiah in 2009, the public was so enthusiastic that they awarded him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything. Paradoxically, Obama outdid Bush and ended up waging a “war on terror” in seven countries. This time, the renewed war on terror has a new guise, in the form of a smiling, peaceful, and softer-spoken commander-in-chief. And the US was eventually drawn into the new show when the terrorist group it had nurtured led the war against the Islamic State.
This time, the US began what it called a “reorientation,” i.e., a change of sides. Now it needed to arm, finance, and support the same radicals it had just been fighting (it was supporting Sunni extremist groups sympathetic to al-Qaeda). This had to be sold to the public, which the Obama team, which won several awards for its “Hope and Change” PR campaign in 2008, did brilliantly when it staged another show called “taking out bin Laden” (for the ninth and final time). This is how you “kill off” a character on a TV series when the actor is tired of playing him. Like a Hollywood blockbuster, the story of the raid itself was fiction. There was no gunfight. Osama was not armed. He did not use his wife as a human shield. Burial at sea was not part of Islamic tradition. Even the famous situation room photo was a lie; there was no live video feed of the raid. Like the entire story of the decade-long hunt for Osama, which was staged in Oscar-winning films like Zero Dark Thirty and described in countless reports and books, this episode was a fake.
The renowned journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that while bin Laden was indeed killed in Abbottabad, he had actually been living in the compound for years as a prisoner of the ISI (in the custody of Pakistan’s intelligence agency). But again, there was no proof. All the files from the raid, including “copies of bin Laden’s death certificate and autopsy report, as well as the results of tests to identify the body,” were deleted from Pentagon computers and transferred to the CIA, where they are tightly guarded against Freedom of Information Act requests. Osama bin Laden had fulfilled his role as the villain in the history of the war on terror and was written out of the script.
That is why in 2015 Barack Mendelsohn, a political scientist and expert on “radical Islamist organizations,” published an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs titled “Embracing Al-Qaeda: An Enemy of the United States,” in which he argued that Washington must rethink its policy toward Al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, this “rethinking” led to the emergence of a new terrorist group: the Islamic State. The Islamic State, which arose from the ashes of the same Al-Qaeda in Iraq, gained international fame in 2014 when it seized Raqqa. The career of the group’s new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has followed the familiar pattern of a terrorist ghost. Like his predecessor Zarqawi, Baghdadi has been declared dead, alive, captured, dead, and alive again so often that reports of his activities have quickly become a farce.
The Price of War Project’s report provides staggering estimates of the human and financial costs of the U.S. wars in the “war on terror” over the past 20 years. Of the roughly one million people killed, 387,000 were categorized as civilians (with the U.S. military labeling all of the men of military age killed as militants). Some 15,000 U.S. military and contractor personnel have died, as have a similar number of allied Western troops involved in the conflicts and several hundred journalists and aid workers. And the cost of the war has been $8 trillion.
The entire history of the “war on terror” is a case study in the war on terror against humanity. It is the story of the creation of an entire infrastructure of laws and extraordinary powers that have subtly changed the face of the so-called free world. The myth of terror has always served not only for foreign policy purposes but also as a tool of domestic control, as carte blanche to impose surveillance on one’s own population in the name of “security.” And the public, convinced of the need for such security by the myth of the war on terror, has obediently demanded increased state control.
Max Bach
