Terrorism is on the rise — only this time the culprits are more sinister than ever before.
While society pledges to “never forget” monumental tragedies such as 9/11 or the Holocaust, there remains a perplexing tendency to overlook contemporary terrorism and other state-sanctioned atrocities. Over the past five years, from Sudan to Lebanon, Palestine to East Turkestan, over two dozen other nations have been the victims of what can only be described as terrorism. Undoubtedly, the U.S. government, with its foreign policy and military actions, is now the largest active contributor to tragedies around the world.
In an effort to protect national security and fight terrorism overseas in the post-9/11 era, the U.S. deployed many forms of coercive measures, including state surveillance, attack drones, cyber operations, and covert interventions. It is clear that throughout this era, the United States government has not only overstepped its authority, but has also forfeited its moral right to govern and become the terrorist it claimed to fight against.
John Locke developed the idea of the consent of the governed: where government derives its authority from the will and consent of the people. By systematically violating that will, illegally surveilling, prosecuting, and incarcerating those it is meant to serve, funding and perpetuating the very terror it claimed to fight, and failing its people, it dissolves the contract of governance. In this dissolution, the state forfeits the very legitimacy that gives it the right to exist.
America’s government, post 9/11
We are truly unaware of the full invasiveness and overreach that resulted from the 2001 Patriot Act, largely because for decades the American public has been governed by what is now recognized as “Secret Law”. Even the leaks by Edward Snowden and the early alarms sounded by Senator Ron Wyden — who warned that Americans would be “stunned and angry” if they knew how the government had secretly interpreted its powers — reveal only a fraction of a reality hidden behind purposeful sensationalization and short-term memories.
Declassified records now show that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) radically reinterpreted the Patriot Act in secret, expanding the definition of “relevant” records to authorize the bulk collection of the private telephone metadata of virtually every American. While national security officials justified these tools as “vital” measures to detect patterns and prevent threats from “bogeymen,” they conveniently ignored the reality that telephone metadata allowed surveillance and the building of a comprehensive map of our political, religious, and private lives. This continued abuse of secret interpretations doesn’t just fail to represent the people, it actively violates the right of the people. By hiding the very laws it enforces, the government dissolves the social contract and loses its moral right to exist.
The evidence is not hard to find: targeted killings, covert operations in religious centers, and surveillance apparatuses. Consider the case of Yonas Fikre, who was placed on the No-Fly List without explanation (The No-Fly List is the blacklisting of a person from flying on any airline, and stripped Fikre of his rights without due process). When Fikre sued to challenge the legality of his placement, the government waited until the case reached the Supreme Court in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) v. Fikre (2024) to suddenly remove him from the list, attempting to dismiss the case as “moot” before a judge could rule on the underlying abuse. This recurring strategy of the state is simple and devious: use invasive & secret powers until a citizen fights back, then retreat behind loopholes that allow you to avoid setting legal precedents that would protect the rest of the public.
Nowhere is this betrayal of trust more obvious and depraved than in “Operation Flex,” a 2006-2007 FBI infiltration of Southern California mosques. This indiscriminate targeting of innocent Americans based solely on their faith is no doubt unconstitutional and destructive. In Orange County, an informant named Craig Monteilh was paid to pose as a Muslim convert and “indiscriminately collect personal information” on hundreds of congregants. He attended prayers, planted hidden recorders in mosques, homes, and businesses and even left recording devices within offices that captured private conversations such as religious counseling sessions. Just imagine the societal fallout. When the person praying next to you or who was sitting in your living room at iftar was a paid instrument of the state, the social fabric and trust between and within the community dissolves. The 2022 Supreme Court ruling in FBI v. Fazaga allowed the government to shield these actions behind the “state secrets privilege”, which we’ll revisit in a moment.
The domestic infiltration mirrors the even colder logic behind the government’s action on an international stage. I hope you’ve heard of the “targeted killing” program, where the executive branch operates as judge, jury, and executioner using drone strikes to assassinate “threats” — even if you’re an American citizen. In secret “Terror Tuesday” meetings, the president would personally approve names for the “kill lists,’ leading to the 2011 assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen without due process.
The scary thought is that even if Anwar was an immediate threat to national security, was his son? Two weeks later, a separate strike killed his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, an American teenager who was never on a list. Former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Michael Hayden admitted: “We kill people based on metadata.” The illegal collection of metadata was used to curate a profile that signed a citizen’s death warrant all without his knowledge or due process.
These are not all new anomalies; the historical pattern is obvious for those who make an effort. The history and murder of Malcolm X was as purposefully shrouded as any other federally sanctioned hit. Federal court filings from the $100 million lawsuit against the FBI, CIA, and New York Police Department (NYPD) document the corruption. In 2021, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam were exonerated after having been framed for over 50 years. Evidence was brought that showed the government fraudulently concealed evidence, revealing that the state routinely prioritizes its own institutional survival over the lives of innocent citizens. The reason I say “sanctioned” is because, according to the lawsuit, the FBI actively compromised Malcolm X’s safety under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, who arrested his security team and removed guards from the Audubon Ballroom just days before the assassination. In addition, undercover federal agents and informants were physically present at the time of the assassination but took no steps to intervene.
In essence, the historical evidence demonstrates the cessation of the title of “guardian of the people”; instead, the government has become the architect of terror. In the short depiction I laid out above, does the average mind not jump to the question of tyranny? How do we still find ourselves trusting a government that uses the law to the disadvantage of the people? What was the very basis of the Declaration of Independence?
How governments use metadata to oppress overseas
Atrocities committed against populations, from the persecution of Rohingya people in Burma to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people are traced back to a breakdown in trust between governance and the people.
In northwest China, the state co-opted the “Global War on Terror” to justify the detention of over a million Uyghurs in “political education” camps, utilizing biometric data to gather DNA, iris scans, and voice samples for predictive policing. Similarly, in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s “Blue Wolf” and “Red Wolf” facial recognition tools automatically enroll Palestinians into the “Wolf Pack” biometric database without their consent to restrict movement in what Amnesty International’s 2023 report called “automated apartheid.” Governments perpetuate violence under the guise of order and with the same textbook — the rhetoric of “security” being used to justify repression.
We often see revolutions as the ultimate breakdown between government and the people, frequently portrayed as civil war. But civil war is not the people versus the government — it is government versus government, with the people as casualties. Look at Sudan, the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, where the state was split between rival military and commercial agendas. This conflict is not a struggle for liberty but a war between factions each sustained by a transnational network of gold smuggling and foreign arms from powers like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Russia, and Iran. In this state of collapse, the “government” exists only for its own survival while the people become casualties of its greed.
True revolutions are fundamentally different and deserve their own characterization. As historian R.R. Palmer argued in The Age of the Democratic Revolution that every modern democracy was born from a radical insistence that power must be redistributed from the state back to the governed. While civil war destroys the people to preserve a regime, revolution reclaims the state to serve the people. It is our historical right to demand accountability that obligates us to call our own government to account.
In our current climate, the danger we have fallen into is that the general public has stopped educating itself on what their government does in its name. We are presented gift boxes labeled “national security” and we overlook the true danger of what the package within carries.
Keeping citizens in the dark
CIA and military “false flag” operations are not fringe conspiracy theories; they have been formally proposed at the highest levels to justify military plans. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on Operation Northwoods, a top-secret proposal to commit acts of terrorism against U.S. military and civilian targets that included hijacking aircraft and sinking boats of refugees to blame Cuba and justify an invasion. Similarly, declassified NSA history admits that the Gulf of Tonkin “second attack” in 1964 never happened, which signals that intelligence may have been “deliberately skewed” to provide the pretext for the Vietnam War. The idea of following the money is becoming more and more important.
Only limited information is released to the public. As with the Epstein files, we have no idea what lies beneath the dark waters of the FBI and CIA’s data centers. Until everything is brought to the surface, we won’t uncover the truth. And as is often the case, the claim of “state secrets privilege” is invoked precisely in cases where the government conducted illegal operations. Would we have ever learned about the National Security Agency’s collection of “information about Americans’ phone calls” and the “capturing [of] e-mail and other private communications” for the purpose of fighting terrorism had it not been for Edward Snowden’s leak? Is it truly so much a dystopia as it is simply reality, that everything you do is both tracked and can be weaponized against you at any moment?
The Declaration of Independence is clear: “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” Even while equipped with the most advanced military and surveillance technology on earth, why is it not preventing the violence occurring within the United States’ borders on a daily basis? This is a more straightforward failure by our government and a legitimate grievance. We have the right to hold our democracy accountable. If we were to pretend that the illegal government actions discussed were done with good intentions and in the name of security, we still cannot ignore or forgive the failure on the part of the government to protect us. Each argument illustrates the failure of the government to uphold its end of the contract between citizen and governance.
As we speak (I recognize I am writing and you are reading, but allow the metaphor) our tax dollars are being used to fund terrorism abroad. So under what logic can we view our government as a trustworthy guardian of our safety? And how much longer are we planning to forfeit our rights under the guise of so-called security?
Governments are not people. A government does not operate under the same values as the individual. It really only represents the overarching goal of its own continued existence. This legitimacy is given by the people with and goes hand in hand with the requirement to serve the people. Our taxes are given under the stipulation that we contribute to a system meant to support us. And yet when there is a clear and consistent divide between the will of the people and the government’s actions, that directly indicates both a failure to govern and a failure to achieve legitimacy. Take the talking point of foreign aid: the scale of military support for Israel is absurd. Since 1946, the U.S. has funneled over $300 billion in aid, with $17.9 billion authorized in the first year of the Gaza war alone. This massive flow of weaponry persists despite a seismic shift in the “consent of the governed”; by 2026, polls showed that 60% of Americans held negative views of the Israeli government, and only 11% of the public supported increasing military aid. If the people oppose it, how can it occur? What rationale allows our government to spend in ways antithetical to the wishes of those from whom it derives its authority?
If you have been following along, I hope that you, like me, have reached the conclusion that our government has sacrificed its right to exist because it derives its power from the people and has failed to protect, represent, or follow their will.
True change will not come from within the current system, but through the collective political movement of ordinary people on a grand scale. The social contract that we have is in tatters; if the government continues to fail to acknowledge the people and persists in doing things antithetical to the wishes of the governed, we possess the same rights the American revolutionaries did: the right to compel the state to realign with our values. Confronting the underlying goals of the state is a necessity; otherwise, our rights will be sacrificed time and time again to feed an industry of ruin.
As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish any form of government that becomes destructive to our liberty. Until we use our collective will to hold those in power accountable, the cycle of violence and hypocrisy will persist.
Image credits: Cover photo by David Maiolo, used under CC SA 3.0 Unported. [Link to license.] [Link to original image.] This image was edited and cropped from original.
Al-Hikmah 
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