A protest movement has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, thereby criminalising support for those enduring a genocide rather than any act of violence. Migrants are being held in detention facilities modelled on the very practices documented at Guantanamo Bay, and some are even being sent to the Cuban detention camp itself. Surveillance infrastructure once built to monitor “terrorism” has quietly been turned on Palestine solidarity protesters instead. None of this sits at the edges of the law, straining against it or slipping past its limits. It sits comfortably within laws written 25 years ago, doing precisely what they were written to do.

The legal architecture assembled after 9/11 was sold to the public as an emergency response to a single, unrepeatable day. A quarter of a century later, it has not been rolled back, nor even meaningfully questioned. It has simply become permanent, its reach extending steadily beyond anything its original architects would have needed to justify at the time.

It is worth resisting, too, the instinct to treat 9/11 as the origin of this story. The hostility that the “war on terror”........

© Al Jazeera