Weaponising Religion: 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Permanent Security State

The official account of the destruction of World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and WTC buildings 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and a wing of the Pentagon, on 9/11/2001 has never been tested through an independent judicial or forensic inquiry, and remains, twenty-five years on, highly contested [1, 2]. Emergency responders and eye witnesses reported subterranean explosions at the base of towers 1 and 2 immediately prior to their collapse [5]. A Manhattan seismograph recorded earth tremors minutes before the towers came down [5]. Eye witnesses also observed multiple explosions on the exteriors of the towers prior to and during their collapse which are also evident on video recordings [5]. Such explosions explain how concrete and steel from the towers were ejected upwards and away from the towers before they collapsed downwards [5]. Eye witness and journalistic reports of multiple explosions as the cause of the collapse of the towers were initially aired on mainstream news channels [5]. But eye-witness testimony was replaced within hours by the officially promulgated narrative that the buildings collapsed because of the planes flown into them by Muslim hijackers although no trained pilot has ever been able to replicate on a flight simulator the conditions and flight paths allegedly taken by the untrained individuals said to have taken over the planes using box cutters [1, 5, 52].

The official enquiry into the attacks — the 9/11 Commission — did not consider evidence from eye witnesses of explosions capable of triggering seismographs prior to the towers’ collapse [1]. Nor did it consider evidence that the consistent pattern of the collapsing towers resembled controlled demolitions rather than the response of a steel framed building to kerosene fires [3, 4].

In 2008, a US agency investigation of the collapse of WTC7, which was not hit by planes or debris, concluded it was the first steel framed building in history to collapse from fire alone [4]. But a four-year structural study of the collapse of WTC7 led by J. Leroy Hulsey at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and funded by the advocacy group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, concluded in 2019 that office fires alone could not have produced the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, and that the observed pattern of failure required the near simultaneous failure of every supporting column, and resembled a controlled demolition [3].

What actually happened that day remains a matter of scientific and scholarly controversy. David Ray Griffin, Piers Robinson, and many other scholars have pressed the case that the huge number of coincidences and anomalies in the day’s events — such as the fact six war games were being played out that day in the New York area with the involvement of air traffic control and intelligence and military assets including the plot that planes would be flown into buildings — indicated federal agency, intelligence and military foreknowledge and involvement in the events [5, 6]. Perhaps the most striking evidence is the huge number of stock options taken out against US airlines, and companies headquartered in the towers, in the days leading up to the attacks [5]. And that many prominent people in the US and UK — such as the controversial author Salman Rushdie — were forewarned by intelligence services not to travel on that day [5].

Whatever the truth of the physical events, the language in which the Bush administration interpreted them identified religion as the motive. And five days after the attacks, Bush used religious language when he described the needed geopolitical response as a ‘crusade’ [7]. The Pentagon reinforced the identification of religion as the motive for the attacks by naming the US response ‘Infinite Justice’ [7]. The phrase was dropped when it was argued such a phrase could only be attributed to God [7].

This religious rhetoric was not accidental. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001 to 2006, Michael Gerson, studied theology at Wheaton College and built the administration’s post-9/11 communications strategy around biblical discourse [8]. In a 2004 lecture, Gerson claimed his governing principle in advising Bush and writing his speeches was ‘to avoid identifying the purposes of an individual or a nation with the purposes of God.’ [8] But Gerson and Bush embraced exactly that presumption in Bush’s inaugural Presidential address and subsequently. In the speech, Bush declared that Jesus Christ, who ‘fills time and eternity with his purpose,’ authored the American story of battling tyranny for freedom [7]. Similar language in Bush’s second inaugural address was used to describe the permanence of American power as unchanging ‘yesterday, today and forever,’ words from the Christological language of Hebrews 13:8 [7].

Gerson’s own account credits him with sharpening David Frum’s ‘axis of hatred’ into ‘axis of evil’ specifically for its theological weight, a formulation that grouped Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea together despite no operational relationships between them [8]. Content analysis of the administration’s major addresses has traced how this language operated: repeatedly labelling an enemy as evil closes down the space in which other accounts can be heard [7].

I argued in my 2004 monograph An Angel Directs the Storm that the use of religious rhetoric by the Bush administration built on a long standing American civil religion, documented by Robert Bellah, and which from the pilgrim fathers onwards drew on biblical archetypes of exodus, a chosen people, and national sacrifice [9, 27, 28]. In their ethnographic study of the American flag and militaristic cult Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle argue that core to American civil religion is a totemic sacrificial system requiring blood sacrifice [32]. This system treats every US war death — from the Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, to the ‘war on terror’ — as a sacrifice for the nation state because the flag, not the cross, is the object of national devotion [32].

Bush’s religious rhetoric drew on this domestic sacrificial tradition. It also drew on a civilisational thesis current in American foreign-policy circles before 9/11. In 1993, Samuel Huntington claimed in Foreign Affairs that future conflicts would run along civilisational and religious, rather than ideological, fault lines, with Islamic and Confucian cultures identified as the chief challenges to US supremacy [10]. Foreign Affairs is the in-house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the US foreign-policy organisation whose Rockefeller-funded War and Peace Studies shapes State Department geopolitical policy, and whose members have included successive Secretaries of State and CIA directors [41].

The CFR was founded in 1921 as the American counterpart to Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, which was founded at a British-American meeting during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 [42]. The two organisations remain institutionally separate, and neither has governmental authority. But their overlapping membership of government officials, diplomats and academics has made them key fora in which UK and US foreign-policy establishments think aloud, Huntington’s clash of civilisation thesis being a case in point [41]. Whatever the thesis’s analytical merits — and Edward Said’s objection that it flattened more than a billion people into a single category has real force — it supplied a ready geopolitical strategy the day the 9/11 events were assigned an exclusively Muslim agency [11, 43].

The weaponising of religion for imperial and military purposes is not new. In 312 CE Constantine, when he was battling his brother for the role of Roman Emperor, had his soldiers mark their shields with the Chi-Rho monogram — a symbol of the name of Jesus Christ which he claimed he saw in a vision in the sky — before the Battle of Milvian Bridge [12]. After he won the battle and was proclaimed Emperor, Constantine went on to use the symbol as a rallying standard through later imperial campaigns. And he adopted Christianity as an imperial cult in an effort to bridge the growing divide between Rome and Byzantium [12].

This historic fusion of religious symbol and military power was repeatedly taken up by Muslims and Christians in conflicts over succeeding centuries, and was widely used to justify the horrific mass slaughter of the First World War. All over Britain there are memorials in churches and public squares claiming the millions of war dead gave their lives for God, King and Country. But it was the King, not God, who refused to negotiate with the King’s relatives in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary after the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, and so precipitated the mass slaughter of millions from Gallipoli to the Somme.

Manufacturing the Enemy

The deep irony of the use of religious rhetoric to justify the war on terror was that the al-Qaeda network the 9/11 Commission blamed for the events of 9/11 originated in the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, which funded and armed the Afghan mujahideen against Soviet occupation through the 1980s [13]. Washington funneled over $600 million a year at its peak — more than $20 billion in total — through Pakistan’s ISI, with Britain’s MI6 and SAS involved in training mujahideen alongside the Americans, Saudi Arabia and China [13]. The CIA and ISI deliberately favoured the most religiously militant factions on the calculation that they fought hardest. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami alone received over $600 million despite Hekmatyar’s standing, even then, as one of the region’s most violent Islamist commanders and a major heroin trafficker [13]. Pakistan’s then president, Benazir Bhutto, told President George H. W. Bush directly that the West was ‘creating a Frankenstein.’ [13]

The precise extent of any direct financial relationship between the CIA and bin Laden remains disputed. But the wider architecture is not: the training camps, recruitment networks and transnational jihadist infrastructure that became al-Qaeda grew out of a programme designed and funded by Western intelligence services [13]. Two of bin Laden’s key wartime allies, Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, were among the CIA’s most heavily backed clients [13]. Blowback, in Chalmers Johnson’s phrase, was the word used to explain the situation, though all along al-Qaeda was a propagandist religious patsy for US foreign policy and military campaigns in Afghanistan and the Caucasus, and later in the Middle East and the Balkans [13].

Britain had long practised this pattern of manufacturing and exploiting religious conflict as an instrument of imperial control. In British India the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 introduced separate electorates for Muslims, embedding religious identity into the structure of political representation and deliberately fragmenting the nationalist movement along communal lines [45]. Britain applied a comparable logic in Ceylon, where colonial census categories, and differential access to mission education and civil-service employment, hardened a Sinhalese-Tamil distinction that was less rigid before colonial rule, and that erupted into civil war after independence [46]. In British Malaya, colonial administrators fixed ‘Malay’ as a racial and religious category bound to Islam, entrenching ethnic boundaries that were fluid in pre-colonial Malaya [47]. And Kashmir’s Muslim-majority population was left under a Hindu prince as a strategic buffer state within the British imperial system, a legacy that produced the still unresolved Kashmir dispute at partition in 1947 [48].

Britain repurposed the same strategy during the ‘war on terror’. From 2011 the UK ran covert programmes through the Ministry of Defence’s Military Strategic Effects unit, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Counter-Daesh Communications Cell, and the cross-government Conflict, Stability and Security Fund. These programmes spent at least £350 million supporting Syrian Islamist armed factions and media outlets to unseat Syria’s President Assad, according to Declassified UK’s reporting [14]. Jaysh al-Islam, a Saudi-funded coalition the UK government’s own documents classified as part of the ‘moderate armed opposition’ in Syria, was filmed parading captive Islamic State fighters in cages, while flying al-Qaeda’s black flag after its leader merged the group with the al-Nusra Front [14].

The proof this was British government policy came in 2015, when the terrorism prosecution of Swedish national Bherlin Gildo collapsed at Woolwich Crown Court after his defense produced investigative reporting from the Guardian and the New York Times, and in particular Seymour Hersh’s account of an arms ‘rat line’ through Libya, Turkey, Jordan and Croatia, which showed British intelligence was supplying Syrian networks Gildo had fought alongside [15]. The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case rather than have British involvement tested in open court [15]. An internal government review, seen by Middle East Eye, concluded the intelligence programme was ‘poorly planned’ and ‘probably illegal.’ [16]

Building the Permanent Security State

Alongside invasions, aerial bombing and drone attacks of eight Muslim nations since 9/11, the US, UK, and EU promulgated many new laws allegedly to fight the manufactured enemy of al-Qaeda in the homelands. The USA PATRIOT Act passed the US Senate with 98 votes for and one against six weeks after 9/11 [17]. It granted sweeping surveillance powers, legalised the indefinite detention of non-citizens, and reduced judicial oversight of government spying on citizens, and arbitrary arrests [17]. Its provisions were subsequently renewed and remain in place. The US also created dozens of new security agencies after 9/11 including the Department of Homeland Security [17].

Britain’s Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, rushed through the Westminster Parliament within weeks of 9/11, allowed the Home Secretary to detain foreign terror suspects indefinitely without charge or trial. This involved suspension of habeas corpus – the legal requirement that a person arrested for an alleged crime is brought bodily before a court within 24 hours of incarceration – which English law traces back to Magna Carta. Under the Anti-Terrorism act, sixteen men were held without trial at HMP Belmarsh, some for close to three years, before the House of Lords ruled in December 2004 that the power was unlawful, not because the emergency was unjustified, but because the power applied only to foreigners [18]. Lord Hoffmann’s dissent went further: ‘the real threat to the life of the nation… comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.’ [18] Parliament’s response was not to relinquish the power but to extend it to British citizens as well, through a ‘control-order’ regime a High Court judge later called ‘an affront to justice.’ [18]

Agencies charged with administering the war on terror and the surveillance state have grown significantly since 9/11 in the UK as well as the US and other western democracies. In the UK MI5 records show the Service doubling in manpower from roughly 2,000 in 2001 to around 4,000 today [19]. Counter-terrorism now consumes two-thirds of MI5 activities, a growth the Service attributes to 9/11, and the 2005 London bombings [19].

Political theorist Sheldon Wolin’s account of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ provides an insightful analysis of the post 9/11 condition of the West [33]. Unlike classical totalitarianism, it does not require the installation of dictators, or the suspension of constitutional and legal norms. Instead it involves the steady, legally sanctioned accretion of executive and corporate power under cover of permanent emergency, sustained by what Judith Shklar calls the ‘liberalism of fear’ [34]. This idea runs from Thomas Hobbes’ Civil War rhetoric of the State as Leviathan through Immanuel Kant’s account of civil government as the means to ‘perpetual peace’ to the National Security State. The core legitimacy of the National Security State rests on a redefined social contract to protect citizens from fear. As Giorgio Agamben argues, this new social contract licenses the expansion of state of emergency powers into a permanent ‘state of exception’ on the basis of newly created enemies, and new fears, to justify further expansion [44].

Prevent and the Widening Net

Britain’s Prevent programme is another illustration of this strategy. Launched in 2003 as one of four strands — Prevent, Pursue, Protect, Prepare — of the government’s CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy, and placed on a statutory footing by the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, Prevent imposes a legal duty on public bodies – schools, universities, NHS trusts, local councils – to identify and refer individuals judged to be at risk of radicalisation into terrorism [40]. It was framed initially around the threat of al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist violence. But the definitional boundaries have since crept into territory no reasonable reading of its founding remit would cover [40].

Prevent guidance used to train public-sector workers now lists ‘cultural nationalism’ – officialese for the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and lack of integration of immigrant communities – as a category warranting referral, a criterion broad enough to flag concerns about children as young as 11, and millions of British people who feel the government and the justice system now favours non-white immigrants over indigenous Britons [20]. Home Office records show that in the year to March 2022, Prevent referrals citing ‘extreme right-wing’ concerns outnumbered those citing Islamist-related concerns, even as Islamist cases still make up the vast majority of actual counter-terrorism investigations [20].

Chat Control in the European Union

The European Union took up a version of Britain’s Prevent strategy with its social media ‘Chat Control’ framework. In 2021 the EU adopted a temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232, permitting surveillance of private messages for child sexual abuse material. A successor, the proposed EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR), has been under negotiation since 2022 and made scanning of EU citizen communications compulsory. Early drafts extended the obligation to end-to-end encrypted services through client-side scanning performed on users’ devices before encryption. Digital rights groups, and the Council of the EU’s Legal Service, warned this extension amounts to generalised surveillance of private communication, contrary to Article 7 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights [23].

On 9 July 2026, the European Parliament voted 314 to 276 to reject extending the temporary regime of CSAR. But the motion fell 47 votes short of the absolute majority required to block it, so the scanning continues until 2028, while the proposal to make CSAR permanent returns for debate in the EU parliament in September 2026 [22, 23]. A framework for accessing citizens’ private communications, built for the stated purpose of child-protection, and linked to proposed EU Digital IDs, now stands as the default surveillance regime of all EU member states.

The Starmer government announced its own compulsory digital identity scheme in September 2025, framed as a measure against illegal migration but extending the state’s capacity to track its own citizens [21]. And it announced expansion of digital surveillance in the UK on 8 June 2026, giving Apple and Google three months to build scanning controls into every smart phone and tablet sold in the country. As with the EU, the government claims the rationale is child protection. But successive governments from 1997 have consistently ignored the mass abuse, grooming, rape and trafficking of hundreds of thousands of British children over decades, as attested to in the 2014 Jay Report which documented sixteen years of police and council failure to stop the rape and trafficking of at least 1,400 children in Rotherham alone, and more recently in eye witness testimony to the Rape Gang Inquiry published in 2026 [49, 50, 51].

The Human Cost

The endless and global war on terror, conducted under the banner of religiously inspired terrorism, has led to a huge loss of life. Johns Hopkins researchers publishing in The Lancet estimated roughly 98,000 excess Iraqi deaths by September 2004, rising to some 655,000 by mid-2006, of which 601,000 were attributed to violence [24]. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s tracking of US strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2020 recorded thousands of drone and covert strikes with civilian casualties running into the tens of thousands [25]. Depleted uranium munitions used in these and earlier conflicts have also left a measurable radiological legacy across the Balkans and the Middle East with substantial rises in cancer and genetic birth deformities [26]. Deadly cluster munitions used in Iraq scattered thousands of unexploded bomblets across civilian areas which are also indiscriminate by design.

The indiscriminate character of the weapons deployed in the war on terror has divided politicians and scholars on its legality. US religious scholars such as George Weigel, Michael Novak and Jean Bethke Elshtain offered just-war defences of the Iraq invasion. Weigel claimed the war was a ‘proportionate and discriminate’ response to 9/11 although there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11 [35]. A core principle of the religious idea of just war is that it must be discriminate and only target combatants and not civilians. But the cluster bombing of Hilla, and the siege and chemical bombing of Fallujah, were indiscriminate and resulted in a horrific record of adult cancers and birth deformities [26]. Pope John Paul II took the opposite position, telling the Vatican diplomatic corps in January 2003 that ‘war is not always inevitable; it is always a defeat for humanity.’ [36] Pope Benedict XVI continued that line of magisterial dissent in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est. The dispute concerns religious reasoning about the justice of war, first developed by Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, and deepened from the sixteenth century by Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius to protect non-combatants from the total wars of empire. After Grotius the just war tradition cannot apply to wars which deploy weapons that are indiscriminate.

Manufacturing Religious Enemies

Operation Cyclone, the Syrian rat line, Belmarsh, Prevent’s widening net, and Chat Control are not five separate stories but one dynamic, repeated across four decades on both sides of the Atlantic. A religiously defined enemy is created for the purposes of war — initially against Russia and later against Middle Eastern regimes – by agencies of states that will later fight it. The fight against that enemy licenses powers of detention, surveillance and control broader than the stated threat requires. And once created, for an allegedly religious threat, those powers are later redirected toward whatever category of dissent the state next finds inconvenient, including what the UK government now labels cultural nationalism which has grown because of a government-funded mass immigration programme, and the failure of the government to secure national borders.

The use of religious propaganda to promote endless and indiscriminate war, and to derogate the legal rights of citizens to freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest has a long history. Harold Lasswell in his study of First World War mobilisation, defined propaganda as the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols [37]. Edward Bernays refined the definition as the ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses’ [38]. Messaging campaigns by governments to justify war and restraints on conventional freedoms of religion, speech and movement are classic examples of what Jacques Ellul called political propaganda [39].

Political and religious propaganda were taken up as a coordinated strategy by the foreign policy establishments and intelligence agencies of the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and other western democracies after 9/11. The manufacture and weaponisation of religious extremism was the distinctively malign feature of post-9/11 propaganda and it has deeply harmed the standing of religious traditions in the eyes of millions of people. But it has proven highly effective, because identifying an enemy as religious and evil, rather than as a political actor with negotiable grievances, forecloses diplomatic negotiations, and the democratic accountability that would otherwise constrain war-making abroad and the accumulation of state power at home.

As we have seen, the weaponisation of religion by empires is a multi-millennial practice. Constantine used it, and so did the agents of the British East India Company who moved ethnic groups across the empire where they came into conflict with natives. The imperial division of India and Pakistan, under the direction of the British Crown as represented by the then Viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten, led to a huge loss of life. But it was designed to enable the British to have greater purchase over two religiously divided and newly independent nations. This is the classic British imperial divide and rule strategy. But now it is turned against the imperial homelands, and for the same purposes: to subdue and control native populations, to grow the power of the state, and to foment the financially profitable business of war.

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    (Featured Image: “Ground Zero, NYC” by crossfirecw is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)