Oh, theres no doubt that regardless of who did it, the Governments have deliberately used it to tighten their control on the population, not just in the UK and US either, a lot of Middle Eastern countries have used this as an excuse to 'stamp down'. This is possibly why we are seeing a slow increase in Terrorism in the Borderline friendly states.
The Labour Government will not, in my opinion, pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq until it has at least introduced ID cards and fingerprint logging on children when they start school in the UK. Regardless of how it started, the 'War on Terror' continues because both our governments made really constricting statements of principal and cannot back down from them. If 'We don't talk to Terrorists', then why this is how almost every situation like this gets solved, I'm certain both the British and American readers remember that the UK governement 'Did not negotiate' with the IRA for a long long time, and it took a third country to intervene. Unfortunately, there's no real country that can walk up to the US and knock it about the head with it's own pig-headedness on the matter, as they did with us.