Site Provides Historical Context and Resources Around Reckoning With 20 Years of Injustice

September 2, 2021, New York – Ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights today launched “The 9/11 Effect,” providing background and resources on the United States’ post-9/11 response that caused two decades of injustice at home and abroad. Having represented people directly harmed by policies enacted in 9/11’s wake, the Center for Constitutional Rights has compiled content driven by the lived experiences of the people, communities, and movements the organization serves to inform both its analysis and agenda. The page pulls together highlights of twenty years of the organization’s related work – from cases to videos and client stories, to media clips and opinion pieces – and offers new analysis, resources, demands, and information about upcoming events. 

Just weeks after 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights was on the front lines responding to a series of shocking human rights abuses, filing the earliest legal challenges to nearly every facet of the Bush administration’s attacks on Muslims, immigrants, and the rule of law. The organization has since led challenges seeking to end and obtain accountability for torture and indefinite detention at Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, secret CIA detention and torture, drone strikes on civilian populations, torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other abuses by private military contractors, warrantless surveillance, Muslim profiling, the FBI’s abuse of the No-Fly List, and more. 

“The manifestations of the 9/11 effect have seeped into all aspects of present day law and politics,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We must heal our communities and repair our country’s broken foundations by redirecting the trillions of dollars of resources that fuel U.S. militarism and the domestic national security apparatus to support those most harmed by this human rights crisis and to provide accountability and redress for the individuals whose lives were destroyed.” Azmy has also issued a full statement marking the 20th anniversary here.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has a comprehensive 2021-2022 federal policy agenda, which includes specific demands around dismantling the so-called War on Terror—from calling for the Biden administration to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, to providing victims of the U.S. torture program with accountability and dismantling the terrorism framework .

The organization says these actions are necessary to shift the national priorities and reallocate our public resources away from discriminatory systems and into programs, solutions, and institutions that center and bolster marginalized communities. What the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks to make clear is that the unifying ideology behind the 9/11 Effect both predates 2001 by decades, in some cases by centuries, and continues to permeate public life twenty years later – on the border, in detention centers, and in law enforcement agencies. Many of the issues on the front pages today, the organization points out, are ripple effects of ill-conceived policies implemented in response to 9/11 that perpetuate existing structural inequities targeting Muslims, immigrants, and Black and Brown people. Without acknowledging that common systemic problem, the Center for Constitutional Rights argues, we cannot possibly solve these systemic issues. 

To learn more about the Center for Constitutional Rights’ response to the post-9/11 human rights crisis, calls to action, and ways to get involved, visit www.ccrjustice.org/9-11Effect.