“After 911” presents a discussion of difficult questions surrounding the military and media orchestrated war on terror campaign set quickly into action after the fall of the World Trade Center Towers. Meshing media and military footage with footage and commentary from three conferences in the Information War Technology and Peace project, the film distills central points of criticism in the post 911 debate: unilateral and hyper-militarized U.S. foreign policy strategies, media constructions and media myths, the role of technology as weapons of attack and weapons of defense, psychological warfare and the creation of a culture of fear.
The film’s evocative opening is the sound of muffled walkie-talkie voices played to glimpses of a confused looking President Bush. The documentary then transitions to the kooky image of early black and white Disney violence set to the calm, mature voice of writer Robert Coover as he speaks of those “dreams of others” that shape the reality of most; “dreams honed, systematized and transmitted by language” ; dreams accepted and internalized by the conditioned masses. At its outset, “After 911” presents itself as a sharp political and philosophical audio-visual commentary on the psychological warfare central to the historical justification of violent political history across the globe. Even the springs that give chaotic flight to Mickey Mouse and his overweight rival in the opening cartoon sequence seem to suggest the systematic nature of political violence.
Also in its first moments, the film introduces the event of 9/11 with eerie music— evoking the dark, fearful and uncertain mood felt in the U.S. in particular after the terrorist attacks in September of 2001—and the slow motion footage of the towers falling and military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. The slow speed of these visual queues allude to the process of creating a collective memory and the military-media myth-making that saturated the American public even minutes after the attacks in New York. In contrast to this dream-like footage, the film offers the lucid commentary of intellectuals, academics and public figures presented during the TACT Symposium, the 911+1 Forum and Exhibition and the DIS/SIM Symposium.
As the documentary points out, the Information War Technology and Peace project aims to spread awareness and foster politicized dialogue about current U.S. policy. These debates—unlike the deluge of patriotic imagery—did not flood the public sphere in the moments after the attacks. “After 911” thus presents a political conversation that was silenced for months after the attacks with the intensification of surveillance and stripping away of legal protections of individuals in the name of patriotism. For some, fear of personal safety may still stifle public expression of skepticism about the U.S. political motivations. It can be argued then that “After 911” portrays an intellectual openness that was possible only well after 911 and remains largely contained in the safe, insulated space of liberal academia. Speaker Maja Zehfuss comments on the initial silencing of public criticism of the war against terror in the name of paying “respect the memory of the dead.”
The academic narrative of “After 911” pushes past the awestruck attitude that focuses on the tactics of terrorist warfare to reveal a conflict arising from age-old geopolitical issues. Carol Cohn comments that the attacks awoke Americans to interrelated global issues previously ignored: the rise of fundamentalism, colonial legacies, structural adjustment policies, crumbling state sectors and booming shadow economies. Instead of probing the socio-economic and political circumstances in the Middle East that set the stage for terrorist violence, Daniel Deudney, Mary Kaldor, Carl Conetta and Robert Steele point out that the U.S. turned to a warfare strategy that would only add fuel to the fire. Questioning the U.S.’s historically imperialist action or addressing structural poverty in the Middle East was not considered. Instead, the Bush administration pumped the defense budget up to unprecedented levels, draining the U.S.’s resources for social policy and international development and thereby compromising non-military state infrastructure. Furthermore, as Fateh Azzam and P. Terrence Hopmann point out, the U.S. government acted unilaterally, ignoring international legal frameworks and crippling the authority of the UN and foreign interest. The speakers are careful to point out the extreme danger and political arrogance of taking such action without foreign support and international consensus.
One important focus of the documentary is the role of technological innovation as a key facet of contemporary militarization. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Bruce Sterling point out, the Bush administration has deemed technological innovation the perfect remedy and defense solution, ignoring those above-mentioned underlying and ongoing geopolitical processes. Meanwhile, technological innovation has handed power over from the soldier to the weapon itself. As Colonel Tom Ehrhard explains, weapons are designed to autonomously decide whether and how to attack a target. As in the first Gulf War where images showing only the bomb’s perspective removed human casualties from the image of war and lessened skepticism about destruction, “man out of the loop systems” today remove human vulnerability from the equation, leading to less hesitation to use physical force.
Technology is also intimately related to the culture of paranoia cultivated in the post 911 American psyche. Surveillance technology and the quest for vigilance in the name of pre-emptive warfare has led—according to Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd, Admiral Rodney P. Rempt, Tom Levin and Peter Cornwell—to the uncritical acceptance of “invasive tactics” that strip individuals of their civil and human rights and pit them against one another in a big brother environment. The media’s crucial role to this anxious social-psychological state is best represented in the film’s montage of tens of clips of newscasters’ and politicians’ televised mention of anthrax. The montage makes the point that the media’s function is to drill paranoia into the public psyche, but it also serves as a comical comment on the absurdity of the media’s pavlovian—and sometimes even contradictory—emphasis on specific catch-phrases.
While “After 911” presents a comprehensive discussion of the psychological and technological means by which war is manufactured and public assent solicited, it does not explore the underlying profitability of the military-industrial complex pushing the war-making machine. In this respect, it contrasts Eugene Jarecki’s documentary “Why We Fight” in which the economic interests are focal to the understanding of American politics. Perhaps “After 911” falls short in assuming its audience to have previous understanding of—or to be able to suspect—the profit-driven nature of militarization.
In its final moments, “After 911” turns back to the subject of dreams and the imaginary in post 911 politics. Scholars point to the dichotomized and racialized media myths constructed to demonize the fundamentalist Muslim enemy and to valorize the American soldier as brave freedom fighters. As Thomas Lasner and Mohammed el Nawaway make clear, the media offers a mythical narrative and a mediated reality that viewers accept as fact in their own understanding of reality. In the post 911 rhetoric that facilitated the political-psychological process of ‘othering’—that phenomenon well-explored in the works of Edward Said—American patriotism becomes equated with fearing and hating the dehumanized eastern enemy. John Santos and Sari Nussbeibeh pose difficult questions: So far into this process of alienation and division, what would it take at this point in history to see the ‘other’ as human and to create trust?
It seems that the possibility of overcoming and reversing this process of divisive psychological warfare could occur only if citizens had the tools to demystify and challenge those political and economic dreams that seem to override concerns about the welfare of average members of society—both civilians and soldiers. “After 911” seems to imply that despite the fact that the critical thinking skills and questioning attitudes necessary for this process of demystification may not be widely cultivated in the media-seduced masses, the evidence to destroy these myths are embedded everywhere around us. Coover’s reading of an excerpt of I Only Wish that I Could Weep ends the documentary on this note with a final reflection: “The story behind the story was in the story.”