Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In considering the legacy of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 for the United States, two facts stand out: first, to date there have been no subsequent terrorist attacks on US soil; second, there is absolutely no agreement as to why. Some assert that it has been the result of concrete US policies, while others claim it is more a matter of luck and that US actions have been irrelevant or counterproductive. The question is in itself unanswerable. Methodologically, it is all notoriously difficult to prove a negative - that is, to explain why something did not happen. Even to pose the question is to posit that a given event ought to have happened, which in turn presupposes a theory of history in which that event (or one very much like it) was teleologically necessary. That assumption in turn robs history of its contingent quality. These problems are exacerbated in the case of terrorism, where, for obvious reasons, the principle agents on all sides have every incentive to secrecy, making reliable evidence exceedingly hard to come by. The debate over why the US was not attacked again after 9/11 is therefore unlikely ever to be fully resolved.
As a symptom of the American present, though, the debate is highly revealing. The architects and advocates of the Bush administration's "war on terror" have been vocal in defending its efficacy, while critics (largely, but not exclusively, from the Left) have argued that the war on terror has in fact degraded American security, not least in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the absence of terrorist attacks on the American homeland has been either fortuitous or a tactical decision by al Qaeda unconnected to the war on terror itself. The two sides in this debate interpret the same fact - the lack of a terrorist attack on US soil - in radically different ways, in large part because they start with divergent views about the nature of international politics, the rule of law, and the character of human rights.
Shortly before leaving office, then Vice President Dick Cheney said,
I thought the legal opinions [concerning interrogation techniques] that were rendered were sound. I thought the techniques were reasonable in terms of what...