Book review: The world after September 11 by Mattias Svensson

When then-President George W. Bush asked for flexibility after the attacks on the Twin Towers 25 years ago, lawyers came back with fanciful examples of what they thought could be done within the law — like crushing a child's testicles to get the father's confession. The Americans never did that. But the United States held suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay - and other "black sites" in Europe, among others - without trial for years, and used methods such as waterboarding to get them to talk.

It is an era of wide-ranging state abuse that Mattias Svensson, daily editorial writer at Svenska Dagbladet, describes in his new book "The world after September 11". The war against terrorism quickly became a war "without limitations in time, space or choice of methods". The immediate consequences? In Iraq and Syria, IS emerged from al-Qaeda, innocents are killed in drone attacks that must be considered extrajudicial executions. Many countries were involved, and Sweden, among others, handed over suspected terrorists to the US's anti-terrorist program. And the result, like this 25 years later?

"A gigantic policy failure, which, at huge costs and government efforts, if anything, rather worsened than reduced the problem it was originally intended to fix." Terrorism remains. Islamist organizations such as IS grew in strength. The refugee flows to Europe can be partly traced to the actions of the United States in the Middle East.

One is supposed to be able to achieve almost any desirable goal by curtailing people's freedoms.

Despite this, much of the political backbone reaction to the attacks on September 11 remains, even in Sweden. During events described as crises - refugee flows, criminal gangs, Koran burnings, pandemics - power is often shifted to the government and democratic freedoms and rights are reduced with the goal of creating a safer society.

Svensson describes it as a balancing act, as if there were a switch where one chooses between freedom and rights and other values: "In the early 2000s, people's freedom and integrity were pitted against security from the threat of terrorists. During the pandemic, they were pitted against reduced spread of infection. The common starting point in this thinking has been that one can presumably achieve almost any desired goal by restricting people's freedoms."

In "The world after September 11", Mattias Svensson convincingly argues why the conclusions of the last quarter of a century should make us cautious about accepting that reasoning. Actually taking people's insecurities seriously doesn't always spell repression. People do not automatically become safer because freedoms and rights are reduced while the capacity of the state increases. Have we learned that yet?