Happy anniversary: ten years of the US Security State

The national security state that succeeded Truman's gift to the United States has been so pervasive it has even stirred the pot of conspiracy, both in the US and globally. In such a hot house of speculation, the synapses rarely meet.

In France, Thierry Meyssan rushed to the publishers with L'Effroyable imposture, translated as 9/11: The Big Lie, and sold 200 thousand copies in a year. Conspiracy titillates - Oscar winning French actress Marion Cotillard more than flirted with the idea herself.

In Germany Andreas von Bülow, formally a cabinet minister and member of the Social Democrats, scribbled on the pathological desires of the US security establishment to plot 9/11 from within. His Die CIA und der 11.September (The CIA and September 11), has sold tens of thousands of copies.

In the case of the world ten years after September 11, 2011, a state even more repressive, intrusive and paranoid has come into being. Security measures at airports are mere placebos designed to pacify and reassure. As the authority on computer security Bruce Schneier observed last year (NYT, Nov 23, 2010), 'We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids.' This, as Schneier aptly calls it, isn't so much security as security theatre.

Fear is a currency valued and weighed by policy makers. Hope is merely treated as a deluding aspiration. The security state, by definition, does not live on the air of optimism, let alone reality. It feeds on contingencies and hypothetical scenarios: 'What if this attack was to happen here?' There is nothing more tragic than seeing a rough policy implemented against the unknowable.

On this anniversary, the political and intellectual left is fractured and emasculated, with many obsessed with backing neo-conservative causes of 'democratisation' and humanitarian meddling. The right remains trapped in fantasies of empire, fearful that the United States might lose its hold as the premier brute of world politics should its misdirected sword be sheathed. They need not worry – that bully is not bound to go into an early retirement.

There will always be room to commemorate. Human beings not only revere the death instinct but those who have perished. But the legacy, forced and hoisted as it has been courtesy of American power, has had an all too real affect on the lives of untold millions. And there are few signs yet of a withering away of the Security State. The one thing that has frayed spectacularly is the Republic itself.