We look at how post-9/11 policies and the so-called war on terror reshaped the country and the world with two Columbia faculty members who convened a two-day symposium on “The Forever War and the First Amendment.” The symposium brought together journalists, scholars, lawyers and activists to explore the legacy of the “war on terror,” specifically focused on the impact on democratic rights, including the freedoms of speech and the press.
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First Amendment freedoms “were tested right away in the days and weeks after 9/11,” says Jameel Jaffer, legal expert and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “All of the surveillance authorities that were put in place after 9/11,” says Jaffer, “their use was initially justified by reference to foreign threats. And now, increasingly, we’re seeing the Trump administration use these things to suppress domestic dissent.”
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“If you go back to that climate after 9/11 … newsrooms institute[d] shifts, so they started making beats for covering national security,” says Azmat Khan of the Columbia Journalism School, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the massive civilian death toll from U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. “Legacy news media in that time period was incredibly dependent on anonymous sources, sometimes unvetted intelligence, leaks to journalists that oftentimes came from an administration that was trying to lead the public to war.”
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