Never-ending war on terror 9780520297401, 0520297407, 9780520297418, 0520297415

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Never-Ending War on Terror Alex Lubin

university of california press

Never-Ending War on Terror

american studies now: critical histories of the present Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness. 1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson 2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige 3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam 4. Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira 5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby 6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby 7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris 8. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan 9. Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question, by Lázaro Lima 10. A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, by L. H. Stallings 11. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, by Julie Sze 12. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century, by Naomi A. Paik 13. Never-Ending War on Terror, by Alex Lubin

Never-Ending War on Terror Alex Lubin

university of california press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Alex Lubin Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lubin, Alex, author. Title: Never-ending war on terror / Alex Lubin. Other titles: American studies now ; 13. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Series: American studies now : critical histories of the present ; 13 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2020026460 (print) | lccn 2020026461 (ebook) |isbn 9780520297401 (cloth) | isbn 9780520297418 (paperback) | isbn 9780520969773 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: War on Terrorism, 2001–2009—Social aspects—United States. | War and society—United States—History—21st century. Classification: lcc hv6432 .l76 2021 (print) | lcc hv6432 (ebook) |ddc 363.325/160973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026460 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2020026461 Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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contents

Overview vii An Introduction without a Beginning 1 1. Mourning in America 26 2. Privacy and Security 46 3. Liberal Torture 69 4. Extrajudicial Assassination by Drone 89 A Conclusion without an Ending 109

Acknowledgments 119 Notes 121 Glossary 133 Key Figures 137 Selected Bibliography 139

ov ervi ew

an introduction without a beginning Although the US War on Terror is waged as a response to the events of 9 / 11, the war has a history before 9 / 11 that is rooted in the post–Cold War era of globalization. Like all wars, the US War on Terror is framed as defensive and necessary in ways that elide the contributions of US imperial violence to global and US inequality. In addition, the War on Terror relies on mourning and melancholy in order to justify the defense of a national formation that never was. Settler Colonialism

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Globalization

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Melancholy

chapter 1. mourning in america Following the events of 9 / 11, culture played a key role in making sense of the terrorist attacks. Central to the work of culture was linking US vulnerability to militarism and revising US history as an exceptional project rather than a violent one. Homeland

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The Uncanny

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US / Israel Analogies

chapter 2. privacy and security Under a state of emergency, the United States expanded its capacity to violate Fourth Amendment norms of privacy in the name of national security. Moreover, increasingly militarized policing during the War on Terror has blurred the boundaries between domestic policing and global counterinsurgency warfare. Policing

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Surveillance

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Counterinsurgency

chapter 3. liberal torture Under the War on Terror the law has been used to rationalize the use of torture to extract information. The torture program has been justified as lawful in order to confirm the US understanding of itself as respectful of the rule of law. The torture program defined any and all men captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan as “enemy combatants” undeserving of any national or international legal protection. Torture

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Lawfare

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Enemy Combatants

chapter 4. extrajudicial assassination by drone In an effort to affirm the rule of law, the Obama presidential administration diverged from the use of torture and confinement in favor of an extrajudicial assassination program that included the targeting of US citizens. The drone program has driven some to join terrorist organizations that target the United States and has become a recent subject of rebellion and resistance against the US War on Terror. Kill List

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Extrajudicial Killing

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Remote-Controlled Warfare

a conclusion without an ending Although the War on Terror is a response to contemporary historical and political conditions, it is a continuation of a long feature of US settler colonial culture in which the mourning of a lost nation that never existed becomes the pretext for state-sanctioned violence. The costs of war go well beyond economic considerations and must account for the immiseration of millions of people across the expanding geographies of the war. Moreover, the War on Terror is a normative part of everyday life in the United States and informs domestic policing. War Profiteering

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Global Solidarity

An Introduction without a Beginning How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism? Howard Zinn1

In January 2017 Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to US president Donald Trump and admitted purveyor of “alternative facts,” invoked the memory of a “Bowling Green massacre” as a rationale for the Trump administration’s purportedly more muscular approach to fighting terrorism. Included in this new approach was a proposed travel ban on most Muslims seeking to visit or immigrate to the United States. Conway justified the administration’s anti-Muslim federal policies by claiming that Islam was consonant with terrorism, as evidenced by incidents like those at Bowling Green, Kentucky. Moreover, citing the Obama administration’s Muslim registry as precedent for the Trump administration’s proposed ban, she argued that Trump’s proposal was a reasonable response to the events in Bowling Green. “[T]wo Iraqi nationals came to this country,” she claimed, “joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the 1

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Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers’ lives away2 . . . Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”3 Conway’s story ignored important facts while creating outright lies. While focused on the fantasy of Muslim terrorists, Conway ignored several examples of domestic acts of terrorism perpetrated by white nationalists; acts that generated very few policy responses, much less travel restrictions. There were no policy realignments and remedies proposed to address the rise of domestic terrorism; indeed, in recent history the Trump administration praised members of alt-right organizations who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally as “good people.” Similarly, Conway’s fabrication failed to recognize that the relatively few recent acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims within the United States involved US citizens who had little or no connection to the Middle East. Therefore, a travel ban based on Islamic religious affiliation would do very little to curb acts of domestic terrorism, whether perpetrated by white nationalists or Muslim Americans. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of Conway’s argument was its outright falsity; there was no Bowling Green massacre, at least not as she described it. Although Conway would later admit that she misspoke about an alleged massacre in Bowling Green, Kentucky, her statement echoed several other lies perpetrated by presidential administrations to justify a never-ending war on terror. These lies frequently point to phantom terrorist activity on the part of Muslims—always presumed to have connections to the Middle East, despite the fact that the largest number of Muslims in the world reside outside of the Middle East—to justify an enduring national commitment to the War on Terror as well as to the global expansion of the battlefield to places not involved in any violent attacks on the United States.

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Wars are frequently waged in the name of vanquishing alleged crimes that never took place. The US entry into the Korean war was based on the unsubstantiated claim that the Soviet Union had inspired North Korean aggression against South Korea. Yet there was no evidence of Soviet influence, and moreover, the evidence suggests that the South had initiated the civil war in Korea. In 1964, in an effort to justify US engagement in the Vietnam War, President Johnson claimed that US ships had been attacked, unprovoked, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The desire to vanquish this false attack drew the United States deeply into the Vietnam War, and forever impacted the lives of millions of Vietnamese as well as American soldiers drafted into the conflict. The Korean and Vietnamese lies make Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative fact” seem rather inconsequential. While the “Bowling Green” example is an especially brazen lie, it is not the only, nor most consequential, lie told to justify the current War on Terror. The 2003 targeting of Iraq as part of the War on Terror was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein’s military had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) and that Hussein had aided the terrorist group al-Qaeda by providing logistical support to, and territory for, training. Neither of the rationales for the Iraq invasion was true, although each was accepted as truthful for far longer than the Trump administration’s Bowling Green lie. And the consequences of the Iraq lie have been far more tragic, not only for Americans who have died in Iraq, but for the entire Iraqi society that has been transformed forever by the US military invasion and continued occupation. Some estimates place the Iraqi war dead (accounting not only for direct violence but also indirect forms of violence from sanctions) at around 1 million people, while the number of displaced Iraqis is perhaps even greater.4 But the US purveyors of

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the Iraq lie never faced serious consequences; in fact, in a strange twist of fate, the perpetrators of the 2003 Iraq-WMD lie, such as former George W. Bush administration official David Frum, are now talking heads for left-leaning media, often lobbing the most blistering attacks on the Trump administration’s fabrications. The War on Terror has become so normative that there are now pitched political battles between those who lied for the purportedly noble goals of defeating Saddam Hussein and those who lied to discriminate against global Islam in general. Within this discursive echo chamber, there is very little analysis of what constitutes the War on Terror, nor of whether it was ever based on legitimate goals in the first place. For the last decade I have taught the course “The US War on Terror” to undergraduate students at a large public university in the United States and at an elite private university in Beirut, Lebanon. Although the student demographics of these two institutions of higher education could not be more different, I have noticed some strikingly similar student attitudes toward the War on Terror. For most of my students, especially those attending college right after high school, the War on Terror is a fixed reality of everyday life, something that has been a persistent feature during their lifetime and something that will forever endure. These students assume that travelers have always been screened at airports by something like the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) before arriving at their departure gate, that it is natural and usually permissible for the president of the United States to exert unilateral authority to prosecute warfare, that the government regularly collects private information from cell phones and internet searches, and that Muslims played little part in the making of the United States except in recent times as security threats. For my students the War on

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Terror is just a part of everyday life; they don’t always recognize that things weren’t always this way, and that means that they aren’t always aware that things don’t have to be the way they are. We are at a critical juncture in the world’s history, as the global battlefield in the War on Terror continues to impact more and more aspects of our public and private lives within the United States, and as the global scale of violence and misery increases consistently. While my students in the US assume that the War on Terror is something that takes place over there, in places about which they often know very little, it is increasingly the case that the War on Terror is staged globally and within the US. Not only are American citizens’ cell phone records and airport security protocols impacted by the War on Terror, but the state’s capacity and willingness to police any protest that seems to challenge the existing political order within the US has become an embedded feature of everyday life. In the name of waging a war on terror, environmental justice activists, Black Lives Matter protesters, and Indigenous water protectors have faced the forces of War on Terror–inspired counterinsurgency warfare. Hence, the War on Terror is not just about vanquishing the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, it is also, and much more so, about securing the global power of the United States and the multinational corporations that US power is meant to secure. My approach to teaching students about the War on Terror is to deconstruct what we take for granted about the war as it impacts our daily life. This means that I guide students through transforming notions of privacy and security from the 1970s to the present, showing them how public concern over government power has transformed from the Vietnam War and Watergate eras to the present. It is important to demonstrate that the War

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on Terror’s norms were made at a particular historical conjuncture and that there is an era prior to the current War on Terror when what we take for granted today would have seemed strangely odd and perhaps “un-American.” At the same time that I show students how the War on Terror emerged at a particular historical moment, I also seek to challenge the notion that the War on Terror is somehow an exception to an otherwise benevolent era of US military hegemony. For so many of my students, the events of 9 / 11 (at least in the United States) are an exceptional moment in history that requires an equally exceptional response. I question my students’ assumptions about the exceptionality of the US War on Terror by showing how the tactics used throughout the War on Terror have a long past, and in this sense I present the war as having a long history undergirding the structure of US settler colonial formation. What is confounding about the War on Terror is that it is both new and old—it is staged within a new epoch in American imperial culture, but it is continuous with a long history of American national development. Fighting wars against terrorism has been something of an American pastime. The United States has long justified warfare based on the debasement of supposed enemies who, working outside of the state, are viewed as terrorists. For example, at the dawn of the nation’s founding, the state waged war against Indigenous people—“savages” and “terrorists” according to the United States—in the name of manifest destiny and territorial expansion. This first and perhaps continuous war against terrorism at the nation’s founding is referred to as the “Indian Wars.” During the 1970s, under the framework of the US “War on Drugs,” local, state, and federal legislatures passed laws targeting drug dealers and gang members as “street terrorists.” In this iteration of a fight

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against terrorism, drug dealers, and later gang members, were defined as irrational threats that needed to be vanquished via militarized police power. Around the same time as the War on Drugs, the United States supported “proxy” and “dirty” wars across Latin America in an effort to fight the “terror” of communism and popular democracy. Throughout the dirty wars across Latin America, the terrorist was the “guerrilla” fighter, the anticolonial “terrorist” communist seeking to undermine liberal democracy. Fighting terrorism is a common rationale for the distribution of US state power domestically and globally.5 The challenge in finding a beginning for the US War on Terror is that fighting terrorism and terrorists has been a long feature of US imperial culture, although the figure occupying the role of terrorist, and the actions that characterize terrorism, have changed over time. In the present iteration of the War on Terror, Muslims occupy the role of terrorists, and the consequences in terms of ascendant Islamophobia have been dire on Muslim communities globally. Moreover, the geopolitical contexts within which the United States wages its fights against terrorism have transformed over time. From the expansionist territorial logic of America’s “Indian Wars” to the Cold War struggle to contain communism after World War II, the fight against terrorism has been continuous but executed in pursuit of different ends and in response to different perceived threats. In this way, the figure of the terrorist is a durable image, one that can be assigned to understanding different villains in the context of different historical conjunctures. How can we account for a war on terror that has a past but that promotes itself as occupying a temporal zone never encountered before? Perhaps the silencing of past wars, of wars on, and of, terror is precisely the meaning of the US War on Terror. The US

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War on Terror is a war of memory and meaning (as all wars are), one utilized to explain a particular cultural, geopolitical, and economic moment while repressing, or projecting onto others, previous incidents of US-led state violence. In this way, the War on Terror is something of a palimpsest, drawing on new meanings and memories to cover over the ruins of past violence. Yet, as with all palimpsests, the past is never fully concealed or subjugated, and it frequently emerges in the US War on Terror as something of a haunting. In this book I read the imperial culture of the War on Terror not only in terms of how it helps rationalize the war’s military conflicts but also in terms of how it manages, and disavows, the historical realities of US imperialism. The origin of the contemporary US War on Terror is usually traced to the post–September 11, 2001, war against nonstate actors who targeted US civilians to gain political goals. It is located in Iraq, Afghanistan, and increasingly, in an expanding geography of states across North Africa and the Middle East. And yet the War on Terror summons a wellspring of images and memories that invoke previous wars on terror, previous terrorists, and previous insecurities. In this sense the US War on Terror is a battle involving the unrivaled power of the US empire— its military and security infrastructure—as well as a battle over meanings and memory: it is both a material war with serious geopolitical outcomes, especially for its targets, as well as a discursive battle about the meaning of US empire, the place of America in the world, during a moment when the so-called “American Century,” defined by the Cold War, no longer exists. War on Terror rhetoric frames the United States as a perpetual victim of violence rather than as the single most influential perpetrator, and justifies its prosecution of warfare as defensive, justified, and indispensable. This is not a new narrative about the

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United States; in fact, it echoes the justification for all warfare, beginning with settler colonial wars against Indigenous peoples. As I argue throughout this book, the War on Terror is a contemporary iteration of an older American jeremiad about the indispensability of US global power to a rational world order. This has been the rhetoric of so-called Indian Wars, of Wilsonian Democracy, of the Monroe Doctrine, of the Cold War, to list a few examples. In each previous case, American violence is understood within the United States as occurring in reaction to threats against civilization and in fact necessary to the protection of civilization itself. Moreover, this narrative of American imperial culture not only justifies acts of state violence but also works to conceal past scenes of American imperial violence and settler colonialism while displacing American violence onto others in order to emphasize perpetual American vulnerability and precarity. Although terrorism and cultural representations of terrorism were not new in September 2001, the spectacle and magnitude of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Centers in Lower Manhattan and on the Pentagon were watershed events that were understood to rupture time and space. September 11, 2001, became a date that established a pre- and post-9 / 11 era, with the post-9 / 11 era being a time when national identity seemed to reconstitute and erase previous and complex events. President George W. Bush would argue that there was a “before 9 / 11ʺ and an “after 9 / 11,ʺ and in this way he was successful in prosecuting a violent war against peoples and countries not related to 9 / 11 (in the case of Iraq, for example) and to be understood as beginning from a temporal and geopolitical “ground zero,” as in a new starting point, a “virgin land,” a “terra nullus.” 6 Although the War on Terror is continuous with previous settler and imperial wars, the historical conjunctures that animate

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the present War on Terror story are different than previous iterations. To put it most succinctly—the War on Terror is the name of American imperial culture in the era of globalization; it recycles long-standing tropes of US imperial culture to explain an epoch when the economy has globalized, precipitating multiple economic and social crises. Understanding the War on Terror requires a discussion of battlefields and their consequences, of revised norms about security and nationalism—it requires a discussion of all of the cultural meanings deployed to justify it—but in order to understand why the War on Terror replaced the Cold War, one has to recognize the importance of the ascendance of globalization on the changing arc of US imperial culture. The new set of historical circumstances within which the contemporary US War on Terror is executed is, in its most basic form, the era of globalized capitalism. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, global Northern capitalists implemented an economic order that allowed US-based multinational corporations the ability to sell goods and use labor globally. The consequences of globalization have far-reaching consequences on many sectors of American political, social, and cultural life, including on the sort of US militarism required to sustain it. Throughout much of the twentieth century, US geopolitical power was understood within the United States as benevolent and necessary for global order. Although politicians would make strenuous arguments about the necessity of US power in places like Southeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula, Latin America, and the Middle East, the cultural meaning of this stance was best articulated in 1941 by the editor of Life Magazine, Henry Luce, who argued that the era of American indispensability should be called “the American Century,” one in which American defini-

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tions of freedom and liberty would be extended to the global arena. Luce’s formulation promoted a series of myths about American global power: America as the dynamic center of the ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice—out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.7

Critically important to Luce’s vision for the American Century was the management of anticommunism at home to ensure that the global face of American power would radiate national unity and consensus. These precepts guided policy making within the National Security Council during the Cold War and found a home in George Keenan’s policy document NSC-68, which made the policy argument to realize Luce’s cultural argument. The American Century was an organizing idea of US-based Cold War warriors; it endured for nearly half of the twentieth century. By 1989, however, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led some to argue that the American Century had prevailed and the world would encounter what Francis Fukuyama called the “end of history,” by which he meant, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”8 And yet Fukuyama’s forecast proved misguided; something very different was at work. Although the Cold War’s division of the world into capitalist and communist spheres ended with capitalist supremacy, the captains of capitalism, who had encouraged secret wars across Latin America and

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Southeast Asia, the maestros of coups dʼetat in Iran and Chile, saw the necessity for the United States to remain on a war footing, both to ensure continued American global hegemony as well as to expand a US economy based in militarism. In their Project for the New American Century (PNAC), neoconservative pundits (some of whom, like William Kristol, now assume the role of Trump administration critic) imagined the possibilities for a new global conflict that, like the Cold War, would serve as the scaffolding of an imperial culture that dominated at home and abroad. The Project for the New American Century discarded the Cold War’s division of the world into “home” and “abroad,” capitalist and communist, and instead relied on a new formulation, the “homeland,” that proved durable in linking militarism and national culture and economy. As early as 1996 the PNAC advocated regime change in Iraq and the necessity for perpetual military readiness. Following the US Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, handing the presidency to George W. Bush, several members of the PNAC, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, and John Bolton, were in positions of power within the Bush administration and now had the authority to realize the Project for a New American Century’s goals.9 Around the same time that neoconservative policy makers within the foreign policy establishment were plotting ways to revise and resubmit Luce’s vision of the American Century, several transformations in political economy radically altered the landscape for workers globally—one lesson of this book is that militarism and political economy are linked. The end of the Cold War was an economic opportunity to expand the Northern-centric economy globally, much to the detriment of economies and peoples in the developing or Third World that

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were required to aggressively privatize and adopt World Bank and International Monetary Fund imposed austerity measures. September 11 was prophetic—September 11, 1973, that is— when US-backed forces encouraged a coup dʼetat in Chile that violently overthrew a popularly elected socialist government and replaced it with an authoritarian leader—Augusto Pinochet— who would commit to privatizing the Chilean economy and selling off national assets to US banks (not to mention to using the full power of the US-backed military to murder political opponents). The Chile plan, hatched by an unholy alliance of military hawks and economists from the University of Chicago, was something of an experiment that would develop a blueprint for US global military and economic hegemony after the Cold War. The plan involved forcing the leaders of developing countries to address their growing foreign debt by privatizing their economies in ways that benefited US-based multinational corporations and severely harmed local and national economies. The politics of enforced austerity would funnel the wealth and labor of the developing world into Northern banks.10 At the same time, the end of the Cold War made new lowwage labor and production markets globally available to US corporations. Thus, while enforced austerity turned much of the globe into a ghetto, vast swaths of the US industrial economy was also being gutted and American workers faced joblessness, declining wages, and fierce limits on their ability to organize. Meanwhile, public disinvestment in the social wage—schools, roads, healthcare—meant that working people had no safety net to cushion the blows of the global economy. Union membership at the end of the American Century, already declining in the 1970s, declined steeply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership in 2015 was about

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half of what it was in 1983, when nearly 20 percent of working people were members of a labor union. According to these same statistics, union members earned $200 per week more, on average, than nonunion members.11 Hence, the consequences of declining union membership are in wages, but they are also in the collective rights of working people to determine their benefits and contract. In short, workers lost power and wages as a result of declining union membership, as well as due to technological innovations that reduced the need for human labor power and to the increasing offshoring of manufacturing and then service-related work. This New World Order, controlled as it was by a growing class of Northern oligarchs, created vast inequality between the global North and the rest of the world, and within the United States, between rich and poor. In The Poorer Nations, Vijay Prashad narrates the inequality produced by this neoliberal moment. In 1992, Prashad writes, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization found that “over 780 million people, mainly in Africa, South Asia and Latin America, do not have enough food to meet their basic daily needs for energy and protein.”12 According to the global wealth databook, in 2018 the richest 1 percent of people own 45 percent of the world’s wealth.13 The top-ten richest men in the world collectively own more wealth than the GDP of several countries, including Switzerland. And the gap between rich and poor is growing quickly. According to Oxfam, “in 2009, the combined wealth of the world’s richest 380 people equaled the wealth of the bottom half. By 2017, just 42 billionaires had as much as the bottom 50%.”14 Although wealth inequality is greatest in countries of the global South, wealth inequality is also growing in the global North, and in the United States in particular where there is the largest share of the world’s multimillionaires.

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Prashad argues in The Poorer Nations that the Third World encountered the politics of Northern-driven enforced austerity as an unidentified flying object, an unwelcome and terrifying external power that caused fear and confusion. In similar ways, but for different reasons, within the United States, the blame for the consequences of globalization and the crisis of increasing disorder and unease in daily life was placed on the bogeyman of the Muslim terrorist. Like so many previous geopolitical moments when capitalist transformation produces crisis, working people’s antipathy has been directed toward an external threat rather than toward the contradictions of capitalism itself. Similar to the phenomenon of “moral panics” described by Stuart Hall during the era of Thatcherism in Britain, Islamophobia directs fear and anger toward Muslims rather than toward growing wealth inequality and globalization. The War on Terror—the fear of the Muslim other—is symptomatic of a historical conjuncture; it helps explain profound transformations in economy and culture as a result of globalization without disrupting the American mythology of perpetual vulnerability and innocence. Moreover, it directs animosity away from systemic analysis of capitalism and toward racialized global and domestic communities, especially Muslims. Although Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition may seem tangential to an analysis of the War on Terror, it is an indispensable analysis of the linked traditions of Islamophobia and racism in the making of Western civilization, one that helps provide a framework for understanding how and why the current War on Terror’s militarism and policing especially targets Muslim and Black peoples (categories that are not necessarily distinct). In Black Marxism, Robinson theorized “racial capitalism” as a term that underscored ways that

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racialism preceded the development of global capitalism, and indeed was necessary to its formation. Further, much like Edward Said’s constructions in Orientalism, Robinson understood that the formation of European racial capitalism was based not only in racial distinctions—intra-European as well as European / non-European—but also in a foundational Islamophobia, one that sought to expunge the considerable contributions of Islam to the making of European modernity. Although Islamic society and cultures contributed in lasting ways to the formation of modern Europe, Robinson wrote that European society was consumed by “the fear and hatred of ‘blackamoors’; the demonization of Islam; the transfiguration of Muhammad the Prophet into the anti-Christ. Not surprisingly, Europeans, that is ‘Christiandom,’ still experience recurrences of antipathy toward what became their shared phantasmagoria.”15 Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in America is not timeless, but reemerges at different historical conjunctures to rationalize US geopolitics. Arabs began to immigrate to the United states in large numbers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where they were racialized as white, or almost white. For much of the twentieth century, Arab Americans (a multireligious category) were largely invisible as a distinct ethnic group in American society. However, as Evelyn Alsutany and Melani McAlister argue, Arab Muslims began to be racialized as notquite white after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as images of Palestinian Fedayeen (freedom fighters) assumed oversized roles in American popular culture.16 Moreover, geopolitical conflicts over oil helped popularize stereotypes of Arab Muslims as threatening to American economic well-being and geopolitical primacy. The stereotype of the Arab Muslim terrorist whose fealty to God overrode his rational capacities circulated in movies, television,

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and literature through the 1970s onward, as the trailblazing Arab American scholar Jack Shaheen has shown.17 Hence, when 9 / 11 / 2001 occurred, the spectacle of Arab terrorism fit into a preexisting script about Arab Muslim terrorists, a racial stereotype that targeted a diverse group of people across the Middle East and North Africa, and in America, often also including South Asians, Iranian, and Sikh peoples. Lies about Arab Muslim support across the Middle East for al-Qaeda’s attacks spread immediately after 9 / 11. Moreover, false news reporting that Muslim Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, celebrated the terrorist attacks spread on national media. All Arabs (whether Muslim or not) and all Muslims (whether Arab or not) became targets not only of random vigilante violence but also of the government and national security infrastructure. Moustafa Bayoumi writes compellingly about the impact of post-9 / 11 anti-Muslim racism in several domains of public and private life. Of particular note in Bayoumi’s analysis is his discussion of the claim that, following 9 / 11, Arab Americans had become the “new Blacks.” The analogy between Arab Americans and Black Americans is meant to be intellectually provocative, highlighting ways that Arab American invisibility pre-9 / 11 has been transformed into hypersurveillance of Arab Americans similar to the hypersurveillance, historically and in the present, of Black Americans. Bayoumi notes that many of the racial profiling strategies used by law enforcement to target Black Americans throughout the twentieth century were, following 9 / 11, deployed to target Arab Americans. For example, in 2003 the Bush administration banned racial profiling in policing, but included exceptions in the case of racial and ethnic groups who may be involved, or plotting, terrorist activity. Moreover, following 9 / 11 the Bush administration launched a program of

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Special Registration that required adult males from twenty-four Muslim-majority countries to register their location within the United States. According to Bayoumi, “Special Registration led to approximately 14,000 deportation proceedings.” The Bush administration’s special registry targeting Muslims was continued by the Obama administration and has become the template for the Trump administration’s travel ban.18 What is at stake in Bayoumi’s provocative analysis of the popular analogizing of Blacks and Arabs after 9 / 11 is the recognition that the strategies of counterinsurgency warfare deployed in the War on Terror were not created in 2001 as a result of “ground zero” but have been deeply imprinted in American society prior to 9 / 11 in how the United States has waged warfare historically—not only abroad but on racially targeted communities “at home.” Indeed, the history of police violence and Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance and harassment of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities during most of US history provides a template for how the United States racializes, surveils, and targets Arab Americans, South Asian, Sikh, and Muslim peoples following 9 / 11. Moreover, a central claim of Never-Ending War on Terror is that wars targeting Muslim majority countries across West Asia are always transnational and therefore concurrently target American Muslims within the United States as “suspect” communities.19 The targeting of Arab and Muslim Americans following 9 / 11 has a past; hence, an analysis of the War on Terror must consider both the historical long view as well as the contemporary moment. Analyzing the War on Terror requires attention to the palimpsestic nature of imperial culture—the ways in which it is embedded in a deep nostalgia and melancholia related to previous imagined imperial glories while at the same time rooted to

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the mourning and indeterminacy of the present. The spectacular events of September 11, 2001, were frequently understood to be a violation of American innocence and the national response was both a mourning and a resolve to return to some more innocent and secure era of US nationalism. Throughout the era of the War on Terror, nostalgia and melancholia have been utilized politically to justify an endless War on Terror, one that has few goals or ends except to address national grief and to return to a mythic, unspoiled past—a desire, as it were, to “make America great again.” Writing about what he viewed as a resurgence of populist fascism across Europe and the particular forms of nostalgia for racist violence and colonial rule in the United Kingdom, social theorist Paul Gilroy argues that the UK’s nostalgia for imperial prominence and monoculture are best understood as a “postcolonial melancholia” in which the vanished empire is essentially unmourned. The meaning of its loss remains pending. The chronic, nagging pain of its absence feeds a melancholic attachment. This is both to Nazism—the unchanging evil we need to always see ourselves as good—and to a resolutely air-brushed version of colonial history in which gunboat diplomacy was moral uplift, civilizing missions were completed, the trains ran on time and the natives appreciated the value of stability.20

What Gilroy understood for the United Kingdom was a particular conjuncture of postcolonial melancholia across Britain that was manifest in heightened scorn and fear of the UK’s multiculturalism and a commensurate embrace of populist fascism. Gilroy’s construction helps clarify an aspect of the US War on Terror, which is steeped in nostalgic longing for the days of presumed benevolent imperialism and national innocence. Just

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as UK postcolonial melancholia attaches itself to popular fascism, in the United States imperial melancholia is composed of a politics of disavowal and displacement, one that transfers the violent acts of US empire onto the actions of racialized others and that wages warfare in the name of a return to a previously pure imperial formation. This explains why the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the War on Terror deployed tropes of Indian wars to make sense of the fight against al-Qaeda. Bush invoked the fantasy of a Hollywood “cowboys and Indians” western when he proclaimed his desire to find the terrorists, “dead or alive,” and his desire to “smoke them out.”21 The Obama administration’s argument for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rested on the invocation of foundational American values that precluded torture. The Trump administration fabricates Muslim violence while overlooking the violence of white nationalists in the name of making America great again. The War on Terror must be understood through its nostalgia and melancholia, as much as it needs to be understood as a violent military project with no end in sight. Hence, throughout this book I present a discussion of the War on Terror’s cultural politics as well as its material history in order to reveal aspects of the war itself, but also to highlight those histories that are willfully forgotten in the process of projecting violence onto racial others. Although Kellyanne Conway probably had no knowledge that her deceit would unmask a violent past of US history, imperial melancholia is often palimpsestic, and sometimes reveals its covering conceit. Conway’s lie opened a fissure within the US narrative of justified violence; in asking for her listeners to remember Bowling Green as a justification for a racist US policy, Conway unintentionally invoked the memory of another

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violent scene at a place called Bowling Green, one implicating the United States. A massacre did take place in Bowling Green, but it was perpetrated by the European colonizers against the Lenape peoples in 1643 in what became New York City. According to the February 25, 1643, journal entry of the Dutch witness David Pietersz de Vries, during the massacre, infants were torn from their mother’s breast and hacked to death in the presence of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water . . . Other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.22

Today, Bowling Green, Manhattan, is the site of the National Museum of the American Indian, underscoring the persistent “absence / presence” of settler colonial violence in the making of American national culture. A reckoning with the present War on Terror—the National Museum of the American Indian makes clear—must engage the settler colonial violence of Indian removal and genocide as the unspoken origin of US national and imperial culture. In the Trump administration’s Bowling Green lie, we see something that is not exceptional; instead, we witness in stark terms how the disavowal and displacement of US state violence onto an “other” helps justify state-sanctioned violence and war; we witness how the War on Terror is a war of terror. No single book can fully explain the complex and deeply historical and political aspects of the US War on Terror, and this book is merely a small contribution to a large body of scholarship. Rather than attempting anything like a comprehensive

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political history of the War on Terror, this book is instead focused on a set of keywords through which to understand the linked political and cultural histories of the War on Terror. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a keyword (or two) that resonates across the political and cultural terrain of the War on Terror. Taken together, the keywords are intended to serve as something like a DNA strand, through which to understand the basic building blocks of the War on Terror. In the first chapter I explore the meaning of the word homeland as it became used in the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and as it animates various cultural examples that revised American nationalism in the wake of September 11, 2001. This chapter explores the affective work of 9 / 11 memorialization, beginning with an analysis of the 9 / 11 “Tribute to Heroes” concert. In my analysis of the tribute concert I focus on the production of melancholia in my discussion of how songs by Bruce Springsteen (“My City of Ruins”) and Wyclef Jean (“Redemption Song”) became anthems of 9 / 11 precisely because of the ways they erased the social processes about which the songs were originally produced. The power of memorialization following 9 / 11, I argue, helped map out the discursive and material dimensions of the War on Terror, which would be articulated most succinctly as “protecting the homeland.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the concept of “homeland,” drawing on Amy Kaplan’s important work on this term as well as the hit television series Homeland. In chapter 2 I focus on the keywords privacy and security by exploring the vast infrastructure of securitization that formed in the War on Terror. I offer a close reading of the PATRIOT Act to demonstrate how the globalized view of homeland discussed in chapter 1 contributed to a view of national security

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that combined “domestic” policing to global counterinsurgencies. A key example of this is the formation of a transit in policing and counterinsurgency across urban geographies in the United States and battlefields in the War on Terror, including Baghdad and occupied Palestine. Moreover, America’s proxy in the Middle East, Israel, played a seminal role in training US military and police on the tactics of urban policing and counterinsurgency practices, and in doing so, demonstrates the material consequences of the cultural representations of shows like Homeland. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the case of the whistleblower Edward Snowden and his revelations about the National Security Agency’s limitless abilities to surveil globally and domestically. In chapter 3 I explore the keyword torture. This chapter argues that American empire is a liberal formation that operates within and through law and not around law. Hence, as the United States considered how to interrogate Iraqi and Afghan prisoners, it deployed what legal sociologists call “lawfare” to rationalize and justify enhanced interrogations, torture, and extraordinary renditions. I analyze the legal memos written by the Office of Special Counsel as a practice of lawfare and I focus on how they created new categories, such as “enemy combatants,” that helped the United States avoid the Geneva Conventions and international human rights laws. This chapter concludes with a discussion of a prehistory of the US torture program by focusing on the “house of screams”—Homan Square in Chicago—a site of torture used in secret by the Chicago Police Department prior to the use of “enhanced interrogations” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Chapter 4’s focus on the keyword drone examines the Obama administration’s revision of the Bush administrations torture / confinement program into an extrajudicial, targeted assassination

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program. Drawing on the recently declassified “Drone Papers,” this chapter argues that extrajudicial assassinations were the hallmark of the Obama administration’s liberalism, not a departure from it. The rhetoric of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, of upholding the Geneva Conventions and norms of international law, were consistent with changing tactics toward remote-controlled, extrajudicial assassination that received less public scrutiny in the United States and that allowed the Obama administration to comply with legal norms while killing in new ways. In addition to focusing on the Obama administration’s increasingly lethal drone program, I will also discuss a few examples of how communities of activists attempt to contest the drone’s imperial visual gaze through various performative artistic acts, what Ronak Kapadia brilliantly terms “insurgent aesthetics.”23 In the conclusion I offer an overview of how the War on Terror has transformed society. I pay close attention to how executive power, notions of privacy, and the unitary executive have developed during the years of the WOT. I also examine the rise of Trumpism as symptomatic of the WOT, focusing especially on how the WOT rhetoric of terror and security has helped solidify Trump’s white hetero-patriarchy, rooted in statesponsored counterinsurgency. To conclude, I focus on several examples of how the War on Terror has become normalized as an aspect of everyday global life in ways that suggest terrifying new military and corporate linkages, as well as hopeful transnational communities of shared fate. The American Studies Now book series is meant to offer short, accessible books on pressing, if not urgent, matters. In the process of writing a “short” book on a long history I have necessarily had to omit much of the story and to write in a generalized way

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about a complicated history. Perhaps most unnaturally, I have had to invoke the work of many other scholars in an attempt at a brief synthesis of history without giving the sort of credit one is accustomed to in an academic book. The benefits of this approach are that I get the privilege of telling an accessible story about a very complex matter. The risks of this approach are that the story requires more depth and precision, more substantive engagement with the superb work of colleagues who do the difficult work of excavating the War on Terror. Much of what we know about the War on Terror comes from journalists and their staff working in the field who often risk their lives and security to tell the story of this violent conflict. Even if it would be possible to fill this book with a list of secondary sources, I would never be able to name the mostly hidden labor that has gone into making this story available—the deadly work of stringers and journalists across West Asia who dare to investigate the dark side of global power. According to the group Reporters Without Borders, 1,035 journalists were killed covering stories in conflict zones during the years 2003–15.24 I dedicate this book to the journalists and journalistic staff-support (as well as to the whistleblowers) across the landscapes of the War on Terror whose dangerous work is not in vain.

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Mourning in America

In the days following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush claimed, “we are entering a new world.” Bush outlined the landscape for this new world by arguing that the attacks were inspired by the terrorists’ evil nature, their disdain for freedom, and their hatred of America. “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”1 Bush argued that the terrorists were driven by a natural disdain for freedom—apparently there were no political reasons for al-Qaeda’s attacks, only a primordial and racial hatred for freedom and liberty. He equated the terrorists with the mafia, with Nazis, with totalitarianism. They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.2 26

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Bush argued to Congress that al-Qaeda was the last remaining detritus of America’s Cold War enemies, and in so doing he echoed the Project for a New American Century’s call to extend the permanent military readiness of the Cold War beyond the fall of the Soviet Union and into an indefinite future. The 9 / 11 attacks took place in a geopolitical context in which the fight against terrorism was understood as a US-led global war pitting those who love “freedom” against those who do not. “This is the world’s fight,” Bush argued. “This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”3 Bush’s address to Congress, like his address to the nation immediately after the terrorist attacks, linked the political resolve to vanquish the “enemies of freedom” with sadness and mourning. In his address to Congress, Bush displayed the badge of a policeman who had died while trying to save those in the World Trade Center. He repeatedly invoked the memory of the passengers on United Flight 93 who sacrificed their lives to prevent a successful terrorist attack, of the firefighters and other first responders who risked their lives to save others. Across media were daily reminders of tragedy, loss, and despair, including photographs taken from around New York of missing loved ones, family members of first responders, ad hoc shrines and public memorials to those who died. Taken together, the spectacle of mourning and the political resolve for warfare were linked in ways that presented war as the only salve for loss and mourning. No political discussion about why al-Qaeda had attacked the United States was necessary—or welcomed—because the force of mourning closed down any critical analysis, including within the US Congress. The violence of terrorism was somehow regarded as substantively distinct

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from the violence of states, and the political grievances of terrorists fell on disinterested ears. Judith Butler argues that mourning and the recognition of human vulnerability can serve as the basis for human community rooted to radical notions of human vulnerability. The recognition of fragility and loss is a moment when the human condition is most exposed, and we may be compelled to understand our collective connectedness as frail human bodies. Butler asks, “Could the experience of a dislocation of first-world safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally?” 4 However, Butler also notes that vulnerable life, rooted in the notion of human frailty and loss, may also be the basis for revenge or violence as we attempt to fill the void of loss and grief with something other than the recognition of human frailty. Instead, what can occur in the face of unspeakable grief is violence; rather than dwell on the frailty of all human bodies, following 9 / 11 Americans sought to expunge their grief through violence, to regard the terrorist as an ungrievable life, to make American grief exceptional. Marita Sturken notes that the impulse to memorialize the loss of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan took place much more rapidly than the memorialization of other tragedies in American history. September 11, 2001, became a spectacle marked by the absence of the World Trade Center’s former presence; and, although the buildings had never been central to conceptions of American national identity, their memorialization seemed to elevate the buildings to national prominence. Sturken argues: “In the face of absence, especially an absence so violently and tragically wrought at the cost of so many lives, people feel a need to create a presence of some kind, and it may be for this reason that questions of memorialization have so quickly fol-

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lowed this event.”5 The rush to fill the absence, to replace grief with national resolve, meant unleashing state violence rather than reconfiguring community along lines of human frailty. Only three days following the 9 / 11 attacks, the US Senate unanimously passed Senate Joint Resolution 23, the “Authorization for Use of Military Force” (AUMF), in compliance with the War Powers resolution. Ever since the secret wars in Southeast Asia, the US Congress has attempted to limit the authority of the president to wage war without congressional approval (as required by the United States Constitution). And yet, the post-9 / 11 war authorization granted the president the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.6

The House of Representatives soon followed, with 425 members voting for approval, and only one lone vote opposing. The authorization was nothing short of a blank check; it not only granted the president the authority to go to war anywhere in the name of fighting terrorism but also turned back decades of efforts to limit the war powers of the executive branch in order to prevent the mistakes of Vietnam, where the president acted unilaterally, and often in secret, without the approval of the people’s elected representatives. The AUMF continues to be a presence in the political life of a never-ending war—it has justified the expansion of a limitless battlefield and handed the executive branch unfettered use of the largest and most powerful military in the world.

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The lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force was by Barbara Lee, the congressional representative from Oakland, California, who argued for some restraint and time for reflection. Recognizing that mourning could be a powerful impetus for violence rather than solidarity, Lee sought to halt the rush to war. “However difficult this vote may be,” she argued, “some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let’s step back for a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.”7 Lee’s caution was prophetic, and only at the time of this writing in 2019 has the US Congress fully realized that the 2001 military authorization granted a blank check for the president to wage war in any way, at any time, in any place in the name of protecting the abstract goals of “freedom.” In 2001, however, when the Congress voted to authorize military force, the power of mourning, and the melancholic desire to fill loss with something that had been lost, was greater than the power of reason—dissent was understood to aid terrorists. The combined power of mourning, melancholia, and militarism shaped the days, months, and years following 9 / 11—these combined powers contributed to a national culture bent on actively forgetting US complicity in a global world order that made life across large parts of the globe unlivable, to “return” to some lost era of American purity, to displace historical acts of American violence onto others. The work of forgetting and projecting was obvious in the nationally televised “Tribute to Heroes” concert that aired ten days following the terrorist attacks on all network television stations and cable channels. As Jeffrey Melnick has persuasively argued in his book 9 / 11 Culture,

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the concert paid tribute to a fallen, masculine nation, but in the process rewrote aspects of American history in ways that gave renewed focus to the task ahead of the nation.8 The work of culture was to facilitate forgetting while repurposing vulnerability and decline as justifications for US reconstruction and retribution—here we see the nation’s imperial melancholia at work, as the harms of slavery and of globalization were mapped onto the terrorists, as the United States framed itself as victim rather than perpetrator. The concert’s stagecraft evoked the somber mood of the nation, featuring a dark stage often lit only by candlelight. While the concert seemed to convey universal emotions of mourning and national resolve, the performances also demonstrated a nation attempting to reconcile aspects of disunity that characterized the nation in the days, years, decades, and centuries prior to the terrorist attacks. Although it appeared that 9 / 11 unified the nation around a shared sense of grief, in fact, the terrorist attack also exposed several fault lines in American society, lines forged by the history and present of settler colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. The “Tribute to Heroes” concert included twenty-one artists, but the iconic moments of the concert took place when Bruce Springsteen—“the Boss”—performed the song that would become something of a post-9 / 11 national anthem, “My City of Ruins.” The song is a melodrama of “beset manhood,” to quote the classic analysis of literary scholar Nina Baym—it is about the decline of a city and the resolve to “rise up” and rebuild.9 The terms of resilience and rejuvenation are not defined, and just like Springsteen’s other iconic hit, “Born in the U. S. A.”—an antiwar song about the abandonment of working-class Vietnam

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veterans—“My City of Ruins” became something of a masculine and patriotic anthem despite its rather dystopian intended message. The lyrics of “My City of Ruins” are about deindustrializing America, where cities like Springsteen’s Asbury Park, New Jersey, that once symbolized America’s manufacturing prowess were closed down and vacated as a result of the offshoring of production. As recently at 1970, Asbury Park was the site of race riots, setting underemployed working-class Black and white people against each other. Springsteen’s 1999 song was about workingclass discontent, but without any recognition of the divisions between the city’s Black and white residents. Springsteen croons, “Young men on the corner / Like scattered leaves / The boardedup windows / The empty streets / While my brother’s down on his knees.”10 The song’s chorus, “Come on, Rise Up!” was likely targeted at working-class union members struggling to keep jobs from moving offshore in the midst of globalization’s assault of working people. And yet, by the time Springsteen performed the song at the post-9 / 11 “Tribute to Heroes” concert, “My City of Ruins” gained new purchase on the American consciousness, transforming from a song about declension and uncertainty in the face of deindustrialization to one about resilience and redemption in the face of a new threat. As Melnick has suggested, by the time of the concert it was impossible to hear the song as anything but a tribute to Lower Manhattan. While the song’s ode to a city’s deterioration was experienced as an analogy for the terrorist attacks on New York City, the renewed focus of the song was its chorus, its invocation of “rising.” In order to make clear that “My City of Ruins” was about national rising and not declension, Springsteen’s first post-9 / 11 album—explicitly dedicated to the memory of 9 / 11—

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was titled “The Rising” and featured “My City of Ruins.” The 2002 version of the song conjured very different meanings than the 1999 version as the narrative of working-class struggle in the face of neoliberalism became a durable story of national redemption in the face of terrorism. Another performance featured during the “Tribute to Heroes” concert did work similar to Springsteen’s in concealing one history while opening up another. Wearing a leather jacket covered in American stars and stripes, Wyclef Jean, the Haitian lead singer of the Fugees, performed the Bob Marley classic, “Redemption Song.” Marley’s version of the song is a story firmly grounded in the Black radical tradition; it is about the cultural inheritance of resistance and redemption that comes from struggling against legacies of anti-Blackness and chattel slavery. It was significant that Jean sang Marley’s redemption song; as a Haitian singer, Jean inherits a legacy of Black anticolonialism similar to Marley’s. Haiti was the scene of the first successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere, and its first Black sovereign state. Moreover, the military barracks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which would figure so prominently in the US War on Terror, had by the time of Jean’s performance been used by the Clinton administration as a place to detain indefinitely, and often without care, Haitian refugees with HIV / AIDS.11 Jean’s haunting performance of “Redemption Song” opens on a black stage with the isolated sound of a snare drum beating a military cadence. Jean punctures the darkness and military beat with Marley’s words, “Old pirates, yes, they rob I / Sold I to the merchant ships / Minutes after they took I / From the bottomless pit / But my hand was made strong / By the hand of the Almighty / We forward in this generation / Triumphantly.”12 These jarring words about the enslavement of human beings

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could have seemed out of place at a concert intended to unify American national identity; the song is an indictment of the international slave trade that contributed to the making of the West. And yet, by the end of Jean’s song, Marley’s ode to slave rebellion and redemption gives way to Jean and fellow Fugee Lauren Hill singing “God Bless America” to the rhythm of Marley’s song. Thus, the “Tribute to Heroes” concert transformed a song about slavery and redemption into a song about US resilience in the face of terrorism. In the process, the US history of chattel slavery was transferred onto the horrors of terrorism, and the redemption found in the Black radical tradition was displaced onto the righteous fury of the United States as it embarked on a war against terrorism. How could a song about the organized abandonment of Springsteen’s Asbury Park become a song about masculine resilience and strength in the face of terrorism? How could a song about slavery and slave rebellion do the cultural work of mourning 9 / 11 and consolidating US nationalism for the War on Terror? From what was the United States being redeemed in Jean’s “Redemption Song”—was it redeemed from its own history of slavery and colonization, or did redemption somehow transform the US into the slave, the colonized, the victim of terrorist violence? The memory of slave rebellions, anticolonial leaders, or working-class trade unionists were not explicitly invoked in the concert as symbols of American greatness; instead the concert’s message seemed to turn the US state into the heroic victim of violence, and not a perpetrator. A muscular, redemptive, masculine America would emerge phoenix-like from the site of the terrorist attacks, while the history of US slavery, imperial and colonial violence, military coups across the Middle East, would be displaced onto a Muslim other. Songs like “My City of Ruins”

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and “Redemption Song” would cast the United States as the slave fighting bondage, the worker fighting the ravages of a disorganized global economy. Springsteen’s and Jean’s performances in the “Tribute to Heroes” concert had something in common with George W. Bush’s address to the nation following the 9 / 11 attacks. Each of these texts revised complicated American histories in ways that made the United States into an exceptional victim and that displaced US histories of racism, class violence, and military violence onto a broad, ill-defined, and capacious figure—the Muslim terrorist. The cultural work of the “Tribute” concert and the politics of the Bush address to Congress would invoke past atrocities in US history, but blame them on the figure of the terrorist. Slavery was understood to be the attribute of Islamic fundamentalism— its oppression of women—and not a key component of US national development. Organized capitalist abandonment under neoliberal globalization would be justified as necessary to establish global stability against the irrational and destabilizing forces of Islamic and “oriental” disorder. In these ways and others, the War on Terror developed not merely as a military response to the 9 / 11 attacks but as a set of understandings about the purity and righteousness of the United States—its exceptionalism—in the face of an increasingly disorganized and purportedly Islamic world order. Hence, the War on Terror would be both a material practice of warfare, drones, and counterinsurgency and a war of meanings, history, and psychological transference that reestablished US exceptionalism, purity, and innocence in the face of new, post– Cold War realities. More than anyone, cultural studies scholar Amy Kaplan has identified ways that disavowed, repressed, and displaced state violence operates as the logic driving the War on Terror. Kaplan

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draws on Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny in order to understand the cultural processes at work in American mourning after 9 / 11. Freud argued that the uncanny is a psychological condition of cognitive dissonance in which the subject is attracted to something that is both horrid and horrible and yet strangely familiar. The uncanny is a moment of recognition, identification, and displacement that enables a subject to recognize a familiar atrocity, to be drawn to it as something familiar, but to distance themself from that atrocity. Kaplan refers to the War on Terror as an uncanny war because of the ways that it is built on the hauntings of previous US atrocities repressed in the present, and often displaced onto others.13 The use of the term “ground zero,” for example, used to represent the location of the al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, revises previous meanings of the term, which originally referred to the detonation of an atomic bomb. Here, the nuclear history of the United States and the unspeakable atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not to mention its sacrifice of Indigenous lands and peoples in the US to test the bomb—was repressed in the remaking of “ground zero” as a location of US vulnerability and fragility. Despite this reworking of “ground zero” as a symbol of US vulnerability, however, Kaplan argues that the term nevertheless invokes its other, repressed histories. “In the use of Ground Zero to express the unprecedented nature of recent terrorist attacks,” Kaplan argues, “we can hear the echoes of earlier forms of terror perpetuated by the United States, which locates Americans within world history, rather than as an exception to it.”14 Similarly, Kaplan focuses on the novel use of the term “homeland” following 9 / 11—both to signify the new combined security agencies under the Department of Homeland Security and

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the colloquial use of the phrase “protect the homeland.” The concept of homeland radically revises Cold War constructions of the United States as the homefront, or the sphere of the domestic. Instead, homeland conjures notions of mythic pasts that are rooted in the land itself—it is a racial concept similar to constructions like “fatherland.” At the same time, homelands are often things that have been violently lost, from which people have been forcefully dispossessed—Palestinians, Indigenous peoples facing colonialism, and Kashmiris, to name just a few examples, frequently refer to homelands as locations from which they were violently removed, as places that have been colonized and exist in imaginations and not in geopolitics. They are spaces to which people hope to return. Because the concept of the homeland conjures both timeless roots as well as lost origins, Kaplan suggests that the concept invokes as much insecurity as security: Although homeland security may strive to cordon off the nation as a domestic space from external foreign threats, it is actually about breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside, about seeing the homeland in a state of constant emergency from threats within and without. . . . The homeland depends on a radical insecurity, where the home itself serves as the battleground. If every facet of civilian life is subject to terrorist attack, if a commercial airliner can be turned into a deadly bomb, then every facet of domestic life—in the double sense of the word as private and national— must be both protected and mobilized against these threats.15

The concept of the homeland dissolves the barrier between domestic and foreign, setting up the conditions of possibility for a global war without spatial or temporal boundaries. It is also a highly racialized concept that links “blood and soil,” while demonizing those who “don’t belong.” Homeland displaces the

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“nation of immigrants” myth and substitutes a rooted notion of racially white, timeless belonging to the United States. Although the presidency of Donald Trump would make this clear in its deployment of “Make America Great Again,” the contours of such racial nostalgia have their roots in the making of the War on Terror’s use of homeland as a metaphor for the nation—Trumpism is merely a symptom of processes long in the making. The concept of homeland, in the case of the Department of Homeland Security, sutures the spaces previously regarded as distinctly home and abroad and blurs the boundaries between a “foreign war” against terrorism and the long-standing practice of US-based policing that regards racial others as insurgents requiring containment. The supposed necessity for this new agency was the result of perceived miscommunication between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the tracking of terrorists prior to 9 / 11. The CIA knew who the 9 / 11 terrorists were, had tracked them abroad, but largely forgot about them when they entered the United States on legal visas. The FBI, on the other hand, monitored several of the would-be 9 / 11 terrorists in the United States as suspicious foreigners, but the information they collected did not always connect to the foreign intelligence held by the CIA. Hence, as the 9 / 11 Commission would report in their assessment of the policy failures on 9 / 11 / 2001, the inability to “connect the dots” between foreign and domestic intelligence led to an inability to fully read the signs of the terrorist attack. Miscommunication between the CIA and FBI was one part of the problem addressed by the formation of a Department of Homeland Security, but it is also the case that Bush administration officials ignored warnings that predicted al-Qaeda using commercial aircraft as weapons aimed at US targets. As Jane Mayer

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outlines in her definitive book The Dark Side, the Bush / Cheney administration was disinterested, to say the least, in daily briefings that warned of impending attacks on the United States.16 The Department of Homeland Security was formed in October of 2001 (as the Office of Homeland Security before becoming a cabinet-level agency in November 2002). The department became an umbrella agency for twenty-two departments responsible for what had previously been regarded as domestic security. US Customs, Immigration, and Naturalization (INS), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the US Coast Guard, the Nuclear Incident Response Team (and others)—all agencies that reported to disparate centers before 9 / 11—were brought together under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. In the congressional debate over the bill to create the DHS the Congress stripped 170,000 federal employees of the right to union membership, arguing that 9 / 11 required such sacrifices on the part of workers. The “Tribute to Heroes” concert and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security demonstrate the linked material and discursive dimensions of the War on Terror. Together, the cultural and policy work of the United States following 9 / 11 was to revise American exceptionalism after the American Century in ways that presented the United States as the world’s exceptional victim of Islamic extremism, and to transform US militarism into an indispensable good required to preserve freedom globally. The concept of “homeland” links formerly domestic and international terrain under the rubric of national security. Homeland now shapes policy approaches in the War on Terror, but it is also made meaningful in culture, where the concept stitches together a global narrative about security and terrorism.

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We could read any of the post-9 / 11 terrorism-format television dramas in order to see how the meaning of the homeland is articulated in ways that link the foreign battlefields of the War on Terror to the presumably private domain of the home. Yet no television drama has been more influential, nor as successful, in clarifying what “homeland” means than the popular television drama Homeland, which has aired on Showtime for eight seasons. The show joins a genre of War on Terror television dramas that offer viewers an insider view of the CIA and FBI as they fight terrorists. In most cases the viewer is asked to identify with the CIA and to see the necessity of counterinsurgency tactics, including torture, as justified means to thwart terrorist attacks that occur regularly on-screen and for seemingly random reasons. In the war on terror drama format, the trauma of 9 / 11 is repeated daily and antiterrorist warfare regularly confronts a “ticking time bomb scenario” in which the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and “enhanced” policing are required to save lives. Homeland diverges from the War on Terror drama television genre in that the terrorist suspect is a returning, white American prisoner of war (POW). Moreover, the protagonist, CIA agent Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, is a flawed character whose bipolar disorder makes it difficult for her and viewers to discern reality. Another way in which Homeland diverges from the War on Terror drama format is that terrorism is presented as having a rationale, misplaced as it may be: a Muslim mastermind named Abu Nazir (loosely based on Osama bin Laden) seeks to harm the United States in retaliation for a US drone strike that targeted his family, killing his youngest son. Abu Nazir’s plot to target the US Congress is driven by his desire for retribution, and although this explanation for terror-

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ism lacks any analysis of imperialism or globalization as a rationale for terrorism, it does at least suggest that terrorism is not merely the reaction of people who hate freedom. One of the ways that Homeland reproduces a narrative of America’s exceptional vulnerability is by borrowing a similar national mythology about victimhood from the state of Israel. Homeland translates an Israeli narrative about fighting Muslim terrorism in a “dangerous neighborhood” into a US justification for the War on Terror. The drama is the most successful transfer of an Israeli-format television drama to the United States, and represents a conscious effort by the US Jewish Federation’s entertainment division to bring Israeli-format TV to America. Homeland is an Americanized version of the Israeli television drama Prisoners of War, a drama that presents the homecoming of two Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers held captive in Lebanon following Israel’s occupation of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000. Prisoners’ plot revolves around the reintegration of the POWs into an Israeli society where time has moved on without the soldiers— the soldiers’ wives have moved on, as have their friends and the rest of society. The plot thickens, however, when viewers discover that a third missing soldier, presumed dead in Lebanon, is actually alive and living in Syria as a Muslim. The plot in season 2 of Prisoners revolves around whether the converted Muslim, now back in Israel, has turned against Israel. Prisoners is written by Gideon Raff, who was born and raised in Jerusalem and served in the IDF but did his film schooling at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Raff did not write Prisoners in Israel but instead inside a Barnes and Noble store in Los Angeles. After the success of the first year of Prisoners, the format was picked up by Showtime and remade into Homeland by producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, who created and

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produced the successful War on Terror show 24. Homeland merges Prisoners’ Israeli narrative of perpetual vulnerability and necessary targeting of Muslims as possible terrorists to a post-9 / 11 US narrative of victimhood and resolve to vanquish enemies. Israel did not have a commercial television channel until 1993, relying on state-controlled television prior to that time. The relatively rapid success of Israeli commercial television encouraged the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles Entertainment division, which was led by CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler, to pitch Israeli-format dramas to US television executives. Further, Tassler organized master classes in Israel for US actors and producers in an effort to further link Hollywood to the emerging Israeli industry. By 2012 there were as many Israeli-format shows in the United States as UK-based format shows, and at the time of this writing, there are currently in production several Israeli-format shows for the US market, including HBO’s In Treatment, CBS’s The Ex List, and Fox’s Traffic Light. Homeland is the most successful example of Israeli-format television in the United States. It debuted at the beginning of the second season of Prisoners (in Israel), and while the latter show is an Israeli drama written in Los Angeles, the former show was an American drama that borrowed heavily from Israeli securitization narratives. Drawing on the post-9 / 11 concept “homeland,” the show links the internal drama of the domestic home (the house) with the geopolitics of an international war against terrorism. Homeland’s pilot opens with a scene, set shortly after 9 / 11 / 2001, in which CIA agent Carrie Mathison is informed by a suspected Iraqi terrorist about a plot against America that will be fulfilled by a captured American prisoner of war. The CIA has no knowledge of an American POW, so only Carrie maintains the veracity of the story. Viewers are immediately intro-

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duced to a central plotline of the show—Carrie sees things her peers do not because her bipolar disorder allows her to experience multiple realities at once. Although Carrie’s bipolarism makes her the object of scorn and skepticism from the CIA, those who know her best believe she is the wisest detective in the agency. Years following the opening revelation about a potential POW who has turned against America, Sergeant Nicholas Brody, long considered dead, is discovered alive by US forces in Iraq. Unbeknownst to the United States, Brody has been a prisoner of war for many years and his rescue is celebrated as a victory by the US. Yet viewers are made aware that something is off about Brody and his family. Before he is discovered alive, the episode delves into the private life of Brody’s household, in which his absence has led to the disintegration of normative patriarchal order. Brody’s wife is having an affair with Brody’s best friend. Moreover, Brody’s teenage daughter smokes weed in her bedroom and refuses to show deference to her mother. If 9 / 11 was a violation of the US homeland, in the pilot episode of Homeland we are led to believe that 9 / 11 is also a violation of the literal home. When Brody finally returns home, he is hailed as a national hero. But Carrie recalls the Iraqi prisoner’s warning following 9 / 11 that there is an American POW who has turned. She immediately suspects Brody of working on behalf of terrorists, while her CIA colleagues believe she is paranoid. Ultimately, we learn that Brody is working on behalf of terrorists; the foreshadowing of this is revealed in his conversion to Islam, which has seemingly inspired his lack of sexual desire for his wife and his violent sexual activity. In sum, becoming Muslim has made Brody violent, irrational, and perverse.

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Underscoring the translation of Israeli and US narratives, much of Homeland’s second season was filmed in Israel, although the narrative setting was often Beirut, Lebanon. Beirut is depicted as just another Muslim capital—a violent desert outpost where women in niqab negotiate gangs of swarthy Arab militias with guns. In order to fit in to Beirut, Carrie dyes her blond hair brown and wears the hijab. While in Beirut Carrie witnesses the meeting between the al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Nazir and members of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s resistance party. In imagining that Hezbollah and al-Qaeda have joined forces, Homeland fuses these two groups—despite their vastly different agendas, donors, and religious ideologies—in order to facilitate the US / Israel translation. In reality, al-Qaeda receives financial backing from Saudi Arabia and is a Sunni organization inspired by a particular form of Wahabi-ist belief. Hezbollah, on the other hand, receives support from Iran and Syria and is a Shi‘a organization, dedicated primarily to resisting Israel. Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have battled against each other in Syria and parts of Lebanon, and while both organizations oppose US policy in the Middle East, they are often more strongly opposed to each other. Yet in Homeland, Middle East terrorism is generalized across the region in order to combine Israeli and US counterinsurgencies as one good war to protect the homeland. Hence, Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon is mapped onto the US war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The particularities of each conflict matter very little—the only salient features are that both the United States and Israel are righteous victims defending themselves from irrational, violent Muslims. This chapter has focused on the cultural terrain of meaningmaking, in which the United States memorializes its status as righteous victim, uniquely capable of vanquishing global threats

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to freedom and liberty. In this meaning-making process, histories of US imperial and settler violence are disavowed and renarrated as histories of US precarity. During the “Tribute to Heroes” concert, the meaning-making required a disavowal of de-industrialism during globalization and the transformation of US forms of chattel slavery into a fabricated story of attacks on US freedom and liberty. In the television series Homeland, a popular mythology about Israel’s perpetual vulnerability and the righteousness of its settler violence became usable (again) through analogy in ways that made the United States become, like Israel, a perpetual victim of Islamic-inspired violence. The mythologized Israeli struggle against its supposedly violent neighbors, its romanticized perpetual struggle for survival, became the organizing narrative of US national identity following 9 / 11. Culture is not merely a stand-alone industry that reflects, or mirrors, reality; its meaning-making capacity structures policy and politics in ways that define those deserving and undeserving of public care and protection. Culture is also a terrain that helps define a political moment in ways that guide future policy. As we will see in the next chapter, the struggle to protect a “homeland” was bolstered by a shift in cultural norms related to the importance of privacy as a fundamental right of US citizenship, as well as the need for collaboration between policing and militarism to vanquish terrorism.

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In response to the terrorist attacks of 9 / 11 / 2001, the New York Police Department (NYPD) established a new division to surveil and infiltrate Muslim American spaces and lives across New York City. Called the “demographics unit,” and later the “zone assessment unit,” the division was specifically designed to surveil places of Muslim congregation and to focus on individuals from twenty-eight listed “ancestries of interest,” including Black American Muslims. The unit monitored Islamic religious practices across the city and focused on a series of presumed “hot spots,” including “restaurants, cafes, halal meat shops and hookah bars.” Undercover agents were sent to these hot spots to monitor everything from discussions about food to religion. Moreover, the agents often initiated conversations about terrorism in order to flesh out (or entrap) potential suspects, who were then detained. According to their definitive study of the NYPD demographics unit, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition found that

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NYPD agents documented how many times a day Muslim students prayed during a university whitewater rafting trip, which Egyptian businesses shut their doors for daily prayers, which restaurants played Al-Jazeera, and which Newark businesses sold halal products and alcohol. Not only did the NYPD single out American Muslims for surveillance, but officers found every facet of American Muslim religiosity and outward practice of Islam—whether Sunni or Shi‘a—worthy of exceptional scrutiny. Further, where the NYPD was spying in Arab neighborhoods with sizeable populations of Syrian Jews and Egyptian Christians, the intelligence unit explicitly focused on the Muslim populations.1

The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition report also found that the post-9 / 11 surveillance on Muslim Americans has undermined Muslim Americans’ civil liberties as well as the ability of law enforcement to collect actionable intelligence. Police surveillance has discouraged Muslim Americans’ participation in religious events, has limited free speech, and has reduced Muslim American cooperation with local law enforcement in all domains.2 Not surprisingly, the War on Terror’s invocation of protecting the homeland targets bodies globally, including those within the United States. “Terrorism” is a capacious category used to describe a wide range of behaviors, usually on the part of nonstate actors. The term carries considerable analytic power because its very name invokes fear and dread, emotions that can justify a disproportionate response. Following September 11, 2001, many questioned what measures would be required to respond to terrorism, and what would be permissible in the name of fighting terrorism. The response on the part of the Bush administration, as well as of several state and city administrations such as New York City, was that any and all means could be employed to vanquish the

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existential threat of terrorism, including using tactics within the United States that make indistinguishable the prosecution of domestic securitization and foreign counterinsurgency warfare. This chapter is an exploration of these linked processes. US vice president Dick Cheney, who was arguably the mastermind of the Bush administration’s approach to the War on Terror, believed that in order to vanquish terrorism—an exceptional enemy—the United States needed to deploy exceptional tactics, unfettered by the restraints posed by congressional and judicial oversight. As he informed the journalist Tim Russert on Meet the Press in the first episode of the show just a few days following the 9 / 11 attacks, America needed to work in the shadows, in what he referred to as “the dark side.” We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.3

The “dark side” is most often associated with the Bush administration’s use of torture, extraordinary renditions, and indefinite detention in places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (I describe these aspects of the dark side in chapter 3), but it also included revising norms of privacy and executive authority. Working in the dark side required that the Bush administration assert a case for expansive powers to be held singularly in the executive branch of government. Cheney’s statement, therefore, must be read in the context of a war that his administration sold as exceptional; but it also must be read in the context of a longer

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history of conservative attacks on American civil liberties and a related wariness about the federal government’s commitments to privacy and due process, commitments that the administration believed had weakened the ability of the United States to defeat terrorism. In the wake of the Vietnam era’s secret wars, revelations about government spying on American citizens, and the Nixon administration’s break-in at the Watergate Hotel, Congress and the courts attempted to curb the ability of the executive branch of the government to spy on American citizens without judicial oversight. Congressional and judicial constraints on executive powers on the one hand, and calls for greater executive powers on the other, have operated like a pendulum throughout the twentieth century, with the period following the Vietnam War swinging toward a version of civil liberties and congressional oversight, and the period following 9 / 11 swinging toward a version called the “unitary executive,” in which the president can assert greater powers to prosecute military actions without congressional or judicial oversight. The Constitution of the United States outlines the boundaries of the three branches of government in the first three articles. While the president serves as “Commander in Chief” of the armed services, only the Congress has the authority to declare (and fund) war. The president, according to the Constitution, must obtain congressional approval to declare war, although they may deploy troops for military actions without a war declaration. Despite the Constitutional mandate to consult with Congress before going to war, US presidents have waged undeclared wars (military actions) with little congressional oversight and, as the name implies, without an official declaration of war. None

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of the military actions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan were wars that Congress declared, although clearly historians refer to these conflicts as wars. The last time the Congress officially declared war was in 1942, to cover US warfare in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. Following the military failures in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, which included secret military actions without congressional oversight or knowledge, the Congress sought to delimit when and how the president could send troops without a declaration of war approved by Congress. In 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Act, which stipulated strict time frames for reporting to Congress after sending troops to battle. However, in the wake of the War Powers Act, presidents found ways to circumvent Congress by using executive orders. The Constitution stipulates that in times of emergency, the president can override or circumvent Congress by issuing executive orders with almost limitless power. One of the most notorious examples of presidential use of an executive order was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s order placing Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Another area where Congress sought to limit executive power was in the regulation of government surveillance and spying, especially on US citizens. Following the social protest movements of the 1960s, civil libertarians became concerned that the government had usurped too much authority in its attempt to surveil and infiltrate groups it deemed a threat to the political order. Civil libertarians asserted the primacy of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (which grants the right to privacy) in their attempt to limit the authority of the government to infiltrate some Americans’ private lives. This is an old story, with roots going back to the 1920s when the government

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spied on American citizens (often immigrants) who it suspected of communism. As early as 1928, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis forecast how new surveillance technology would test the limits of the Fourth Amendment: The progress of science in furnishing the Government with [the] means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it would be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.4

By the 1970s it was obvious that the government had used enhanced surveillance technology to illegally spy on American citizens. Sometimes, this surveillance took place when an American citizen was in communication with a non-US citizen who was “suspected” of being a security risk to the United States. Investigations throughout the 1970s revealed cases of domestic political spying, mail opening, assassination plots, and unwarranted surveillance. The FBI had infiltrated social protests movements within the US, and the National Security Agency (NSA) had surveilled meetings and conversations between US and nonUS citizens. In 1977 a Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights recommended that the Fourth Amendment be extended to include the intelligence field. The work of the subcommittee led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, which provided “a statutory procedure for the authorization of warrants to use electronic surveillance in order to obtain foreign intelligence when Americans are involved or when such surveillance is conducted in the U. S.”5 FISA requires a judicial warrant before the government can surveil information within the United States, and it established the Foreign

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Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) to review governmental requests for warrants. While the FISA court is intended to provide a check on government power or prevent government abuse of its surveillance powers, in practice FISA courts have usually given the government carte blanche to do as it pleases. Very few requests have ever been denied; in the forty years following its passage in 1978 the FISA court rejected only twentyone of the government’s applications for surveillance, leading many to argue that it is merely the government’s rubber-stamp.6 And yet, despite the fact that there are very few limits on governmental spying powers, neoconservatives have argued that even the FISA process, with its approval for most government surveillance, has weakened US national security. Well before 9 / 11, neoconservatives had argued that civil libertarians’ efforts at limiting the authority of the executive to wage war and to spy undermined US military capabilities. The requirements of the FISA court, they argued, impede the government’s ability to work expeditiously to intercept information about impending terrorist attacks. Moreover, the neocons argued that only a strong executive (the president), unfettered by the whims of the people’s representatives, could project a strong military footing globally. It is important to note that the ascendance of civil liberties post–Vietnam and Watergate eras was not in response to the US government’s longtime surveillance of social protest movements and people of color. In her smart analysis of the surveillance of blackness in US history, Simone Browne demonstrates how US state surveillance has its roots in the slave patrols intended to capture fleeing enslaved Black people, or to return so-called “fugitives” to their “owners.”7 Similarly, US frontier militaries surveilled Indigenous peoples in order to facilitate settler

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colonial capture of native lands. Nor was the ascendance of twentieth-century civil liberties a reaction to the FBI’s harassment of the Black Panther Party, the United Farm Workers, and the American Indian Movement, each of which included extrajudicial assassinations of young radicals including Larry Casuse and Fred Hampton.8 These forms of surveillance did not always raise the ire of civil libertarians—in fact, these forms of surveillance were regarded as necessary forms of state securitization. What most concerned civil libertarians was the rise of the unitary executive—the expansive powers of the president—and not necessarily the deployment of state securitization and counterinsurgency on domestic, racialized targets. A US surveillance regime has targeted Black and Indigenous people long before Justice Brandeis prophesized government overreach in the terrain of espionage, as well as throughout the post-Vietnam era when Congress attempted to limit government surveillance capacities. In light of this fact, the drama at the center of the current War on Terror, in which civil libertarians castigate the executive branch’s expansive usurpation of government power, is somewhat detached from the ever-present surveillance and infiltration of communities of color. There is more than one War on Terror narrative, to be sure. All that said, the pendulum was on the side of greater civil liberties and government oversight when Osama bin Laden and alQaeda entered the popular imagination. One feature that distinguishes government response to pre- and post-9 / 11 terrorist attacks is the pre-9 / 11 judicial approach to prosecuting perpetrators prior to rendering a punishment. For example, on February 26, 1993, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others bombed the New York City World Trade Center, killing six and injuring a thousand. Two years later, Abdel Rahman was tried and convicted

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of the bombing in a US court and sentenced to life at a federal prison in North Carolina. In April 1995 the white American terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people. Both McVeigh and Nichols were tried and convicted. During the Clinton presidency, incidences of al-Qaeda-based bombings increased. In November 1995 a car bomb exploded at a US military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, led to trials and convictions of four members of al-Qaeda. In October 2000 a Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, was damaged when a small boat loaded with explosives ran into its side, killing seventeen sailors. Importantly, the Clinton Justice Department sought to prosecute suspected terrorists in courts of law and were reluctant to punish prior to conviction. As Jane Mayer has illustrated, prior to the September 11 attacks, the Clinton administration targeted a suspected al-Qaeda compound that was thought to house Osama bin Laden, but the Justice Department was reluctant to order an extrajudicial assassination for fear that children and women might also die in any attack. Moreover, the Justice Department expressed concerns about the legality of extrajudicial assassinations. Just prior to September 11, 2001, the rule of law, trumpeted by civil libertarians, seemed to hold authority in the fight against terrorism and al-Qaeda. Following September 11, however, the pendulum swung far in the opposite direction and the dark side prevailed. Neoconservatives argued that civil libertarians’ concerns about executive authority had enabled al-Qaeda’s ability to thrive and grow by limiting the president’s ability to target terrorists. In order to “restore” the president’s ability to fight terrorists, neoconservatives advocated a unitary executive thesis, the idea that the

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president must be able to act quickly and unilaterally to fight terrorists because the terrorists were plotting violence in an ongoing and imminent basis. Following the 9 / 11 attacks, Congress gave sanction to the idea of a unitary executive in its War Authorization Act (discussed in chapter 1). But it also granted the government greater surveillance capacity through the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Just one month following the September 11 attacks, the US Congress passed an expansive security bill called “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” (the USA PATRIOT Act). Although it mostly coordinated existing tools available to investigate crimes, the PATRIOT Act contained several provisions unique to the War on Terror that revised previous norms of privacy and government surveillance. Section 215 of the act allowed the government to collect customer data (metadata) from private businesses like banks and cellular telephone companies in order to create a profile of suspected terrorists and to act quickly, often without a judicial warrant. Section 412 of the act allowed for the indefinite detention of immigrant and noncitizen terrorism suspects, while other provisions of the act sanctioned registries of certain classes of travelers that, in effect, profiled Arab, Muslim, and South Asian Americans. The PATRIOT Act passed Congress with very little dissent, as only one US Senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, offered opposition. Feingold argued that the law would undermine civil liberties and in so doing would jeopardize the very rationale for the US War on Terror. If, as the Bush administration argued, the War on Terror was a war between the terrorist “who hates our freedoms” and “freedom-loving” people, then it would seem contradictory to limit individual freedom in the name of protecting

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freedom. As Feingold argued against the PATRIOT Act, “Preserving our freedom is one of the main reasons that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism. We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people.”9 Yet it appears that most Americans found it permissible to relinquish certain expectations of privacy in the name of national security. Passage of the PATRIOT Act elicited little public scorn. In one of the most revealing stories about the scope of the government’s bulk data collection capacity, comedian John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight ran a lengthy segment in which it analyzed the implications of unwarranted government data surveillances as well as Americans’ apathy toward this form of government oversight. Oliver’s intrepid film crew roamed New York City’s Times Square with a camera in hand, asking people if they cared about government surveillance of their cellular phone communications and whether they had heard of Edward Snowden. Snowden was the National Security Agency (NSA) data analyst who became a whistleblower when he revealed the full extent of the government’s surveillance capacities and practices with regard to US citizens. When asked if they were concerned about the matter of government collection of cellular phone data most of Oliver’s respondents said that they did not care because they had nothing to hide. If government surveillance would allow for the capture of a terrorist, they argued, it was worth the sacrifice of privacy. However, when Oliver’s crew revealed to Times Square passersby that government surveillance capacities included the monitoring and viewing of private selfies, including, “dick pics,” the passersby immediately changed their views and resolutely argued that the government had no right to collect or view such information. Violating privacy in

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the name of capturing a terrorist was permissible, according to the Times Square audience, but violating privacy in ways that exposed intimate personal details unrelated to national security went too far. Oliver’s segment on privacy paid no attention to the state’s regular surveillance of the poor nor to the ways that some communities have never had the expectation or privilege of privacy. What we now know about the expansive capacity of the government to spy on US citizens in the wake of the PATRIOT Act comes from NSA whistleblower Snowden. He was contracted by the NSA as an employee of Booze, Allen, Hamilton to oversee several surveillance programs. In the course of his work, Snowden learned that the government was engaged in a vast program of surveillance on cellular communications, all of which was enabled by the PATRIOT Act’s section 215. The government claimed that the bulk data collection of private cellular communications was anonymous, that the NSA was merely viewing a high-level web of communications that could potentially reveal terrorist activity. Yet Snowden revealed that, in fact, the NSA bulk data collection program enabled it to learn a tremendous amount of personal information about every American. Moreover, Snowden revealed that as an NSA employee, he had the capacity to listen to the cellular communications of any American—there was no judicial oversight to prevent the massive violation of individual privacy.10 Snowden’s revelations were so embarrassing to the government that he was compelled to flee the United States in order to avoid prosecution on charges of treason. Although most of Snowden’s revelations involved government actions initiated during the Bush administration, the Obama administration gave tacit support to much of the Bush administrationʼs “dark side” tactics

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with regard to surveillance by refusing to prosecute those who violated rights to privacy while at the same time aggressively pursuing any government whistleblowers (with even more determination than previous administrations) who shed light on government surveillance. In addition to revealing a private and expansive government surveillance program that violated American citizens’ Fourth Amendment privacy protections, Snowden’s leak also revealed the complicity of cellular telephony companies with government surveillance tactics, thereby eroding the naïve belief that corporations could shield against government intrusion into private lives. Further, Snowden’s leaks revealed that the US government was monitoring the private transactions and cellular communications of financial institutions and heads of state such as German chancellor Angela Merkel. In this revelation we see that the NSA’s surveillance program was not merely in the name of fighting terrorism but also in the name of protecting US financial interests by spying on economic and national competitors, even among nations considered to be allies. The War on Terror’s expansive norms of surveillance and security define a global battlefield in which “foreign” terrorists and US citizens face increasing surveillance and securitization. The ever-growing infrastructure of global surveillance technology raises constitutional issues about government power, to be sure, but it also configures a global terrain of counterinsurgency warfare that increasingly links the Department of Defense’s prosecution of the War on Terror and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s and local police attempts to contain threats of terrorism within the United States. The erosion of privacy norms in the United States under the War on Terror cannot be divorced from the erection of global counterinsurgency policing

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and militarism infrastructure—surveillance and counterinsurgency warfare are two pillars of the War on Terror. Hence, in the remainder of this chapter I discuss how surveillance and securitization suture together the “homeland’s” limitless frontiers by considering how local, “domestic” policing has borrowed heavily from global counterterrorism practices. My analysis will focus on the international transit of counterinsurgency and surveillance infrastructure across the United States and Israel in order to illuminate the material outcomes of “protecting the homeland.” In my discussion of the Showtime series Homeland in the first chapter, I noted that the show is a remake of an Israeli series Prisoners of War and that the US and Israeli television industries have collaborated to bridge the narrative and media infrastructure required to bring Israeli-format television to the United States. Israeli television narratives broadcast in the US help audiences to make sense of the US War on Terror. Given the long history of the US identification with Israel, it is not surprising that following September 11, 2001, many Americans understood the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks as analogous to the struggle against terrorism in Israel. In the US popular imagination, both the United States and Israel face the existential threat of “Islamic terrorism” and are perpetually vulnerable and innocent.11 The cultural linking of the US and Israel solidified the marriage of mourning and militarism, vulnerability and resolve, as Israel’s national story of a heroic birth after the Holocaust became a useful analogy for America’s presumed rebirth after 9 / 11. In the aftermath of the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, as Americans sought to understand how threats from afar could alter everyday life within the boundaries of the nation, some turned to a comparison in order to give

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the moment its full weight. Chicago rabbi Gary Gerson, who played a public role on television and in newspapers, attempted to help people cope with fear and death following the terrorist attacks: “Humanity came apart in lower Manhattan today, and each of us is wounded. We mourn the loss of our innocence. . . . Terror has struck us, but it will not destroy us. Now we are all Israelis.” The refrain, “We are all Israelis,” appeared frequently in media coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center to explain the United States as well as its solidarity and identification with Israel. In the wake of Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, then–Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman declared US solidarity with Israel by proclaiming, “Today, we are all Israelis.”12 The Israel comparison helped establish the United States as an entitled victim, whose reaction to terrorism could only be understood as defensive. In other words, the Israel comparison seemed to erase a long history of US state violence—its role as perpetrator of global violence—and to mark the origins of the War on Terror after 9 / 11. “Ground zero” became not merely the location of the twin towers in Lower Manhattan but also a temporal zone of beginnings, a “terra nullus,” to invoke Jodi Byrd’s sense of the settler colonial commonsense of US empire. The “we are all Israelis” comparison represses and displaces any violence perpetrated by Israel or the United States onto the “terrorists,” thereby erasing settler colonial policies and practices.13 Increasingly, the meaning of “protect the homeland” extends beyond cultural appropriation and includes adopting Israeli inspired practices of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. The affective identification with Israel is made material in the global transit in counterinsurgency hardware and tactics across the United States and Israel that are the bedrock of the War on

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Terror’s concept of protecting the homeland. The sharing of counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics across the United States and Israel has its origins in the post–Cold War years; in the 1980s the US “drug war” was increasingly understood as a war on terror that could be fought using the Israeli counterinsurgency model. The 1989 National Defense Authorization Act, for example, named drugs as a national security threat and authorized the Department of Defense (DOD) to coordinate state and community tactics in the war on drugs. Under the war on drugs, the DOD was granted broad authority over local and state police forces, which increasingly deployed tactics and weapons more commonly used in overseas warfare to fight drug crimes. The coordinated efforts of the DOD and state and local policing included reconnaissance and observations teams to report illegal drug use and trafficking, aerial surveillance, Coast Guard patrols, aerial spraying of herbicides on potential drug crops, aerial thermal imaging, and more. According to Reyes Z. Cole, a major in the California National Guard who prosecuted the war on drugs, “Counterdrug and counterinsurgency operations strive for the same end state, rely heavily on the use of counterinsurgency doctrine to be effective, and are examples of fourth-generation warfare—low intensity asymmetric warfare conducted by groups (rather than by nations or states) who seek major reallocations of power or the overthrow of social systems.”14 Alongside the treatment of wars on drugs and gangs as military counterinsurgency replete with the use of military hardware in urban cities, drug lords and gang members were increasingly referred to as “street terrorists.” In 1988 the California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act established a separate legal category of gang-related crimes, and penalized gang crimes more harshly than other crimes. Throughout the

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1980s the number of arrests for drug-related crimes increased 126 percent, leading to a precipitous rise in incarcerations, making the United States the country with the largest incarcerated population in the world (748 inmates per 100,000 citizens). Nearly half of the ranks of the incarcerated in state and federal prisons were sentenced on drug-related charges.15 After 9 / 11 the drug war morphed into a “global” war on terror with Arabs and Muslims at home and abroad as the primary targets. The Bush administration’s restructuring of domestic and foreign police forces under the rubric of homeland security and the PATRIOT Act paved the way for a transnational network of policing and military strategies across uneven “occupied” areas including communities of color in the United States and occupied Palestine. One of the ways that the Department of Homeland Security conjoins the “domestic” and “foreign” is in its policing of the international drug trade. Section G of the act, which created the Department of Homeland Security, equated policing drug trafficking with fighting terrorism; it stipulates that the DHS shall “monitor connections between illegal drug trafficking and terrorism, coordinate efforts to sever such connections, and otherwise contribute to efforts to interdict illegal drug trafficking.” The association of drug trafficking with terrorism codified a long-standing practice to prosecute the “War on Drugs” as a war on terror, but it also did so in ways that repressed the complicity of the United States in supporting drug trafficking during the era of the Iran-Contra scandal.16 Israeli counterinsurgency measures, developed and practiced in the West Bank and Gaza in the wake of two intifadas (Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation), increasingly served as models for US wars at home and abroad in the era of the War on Terror. But more than this, as Laleh Khalili argues, the tran-

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siting of military and security regimes across the United States and Israel demonstrates that “Palestine is an archetypal laboratory and a crucial node of global counterinsurgencies.” Thus, when the US began its War on Terror it increasingly turned to Israel as a laboratory for testing new technologies of counterinsurgency that were then deployed in the United States. The USIsrael security relationship constitutes what Khalili calls a “horizontal circuit” in which “colonial policing or ‘security’ practices have been transmitted across time from one location to another, with Palestine as either a point of origin or an intermediary node of transmission.”17 In 2002 members of the US military visited the West Bank Palestinian city of Jenin in order to observe and practice Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in densely populated urban cities. Steve Niva has shown how the United States began to model similar forms of urban warfare it encountered in occupied Palestine in its siege of Iraq. The US strategy followed Israeli tactics in constructing walls to partition areas of control and to contain insurgent activities. In 2003, writing in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh broke the news that Israeli military officials had trained American counterparts at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and that “Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers— again in secret—when full-field operations [in Iraq] begin.”18 Similar sharing of counterinsurgency practices informs the US construction of a border wall on its southern border. The security firm working to police and militarize the US-Mexico border fence is Elbit Systems, a Haifa-based security firm building the Israeli security wall that became a subcontractor in Boeing’s bid to provide security along the US-Mexico border. Elbit’s American subsidiary, Kollsman, specializes in “Sensor Systems & Electro Optics [and] serves a domestic customer

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base providing Fire Control Systems, Tactical Laser Systems, . . . and Thermal Imaging Systems for aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and soldiers.”19 As in the case of the US-Mexico border, the “horizontal circuit” of counterinsurgency sharing has not only assisted the United States abroad in its wars against Iraq and Afghanistan but also has penetrated the US “homeland,” which has become a space that is increasingly understood as a battleground in the War on Terror. In 2005 the Washington Post reported that Israeli experts had visited the United States to train urban police forces in the use of new forms of surveillance, urban policing, and bomb detection strategies. Domestic US police forces increasingly look to Israel for mentorship and expertise. As US Capitol police chief Terrence Gainor argued, “Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism.”20 Israel’s “study abroad” program for US law enforcement is fostered by groups such as the US-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs ( JINSA), which has established the Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP). LEEP is a joint initiative of the Israeli National Police, the Israel Ministry of International Security, and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) “to support and strengthen American law enforcement counterterrorism practices.” LEEP educates US law enforcement specialists in areas of joint Israeli-US concerns, such as surveillance of terrorists and border security and has attracted law enforcements agents from many agencies. Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and a LEEP graduate, argued, “It is impossible to fight transnational crime which is terrorism unilaterally. It is partnerships, the bonds that are being forged here, it is the cooperation around the globe that will ultimately allow us to prevail.” Similarly, Joe Polisar, the police chief of Garden Grove, California, and also a

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LEEP participant, suggests, “American Law Enforcement and American Public Safety is starving for this kind of information, the experience the Israelis can bring.”21 The linkages between Israeli and US counterinsurgency technologies translate to a domestic policing and incarceration infrastructure that increasingly looks like just another front in the global war on terror. The combined power of militarized COIN strategies, high-tech surveillance, heavily armored police forces, and rapidly expanding incarceration rates transform law enforcement in the United States into a quasi-occupying army in US cities. Hence, the domestic sphere is increasingly rendered as a battleground. Incidents of domestic social unrest such as the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which were sparked in part by the police beating of Rodney King and the exoneration of the police, and the more contemporary Occupy Wall Street movement are increasingly confronted by government agents trained in “foreign” counterinsurgency measures. The geographies of occupied Palestine and occupied urban communities of color have become much closer as a result of the “horizontal circuit” of securitization. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina exposed the combined violence of neoliberal governance and heightened domestic counterinsurgency when a predominantly African American metropolis was devastated not only by a natural disaster but also by the unnatural processes of neoliberal privatization, and the deployment of US military with shoot-to-kill orders. The flood exposed the inadequacy of public care for certain classes of people, including foremost the Black poor. Moreover, the military response—which appeared to be an occupation deploying counterinsurgency tactics, including the private military deployed in Afghanistan, Blackwater—underscored the global shape of homeland security.

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As counterinsurgency and surveillance tactics circulate globally and “at home” it can be difficult to discern how the foreign battlefields of the War on Terror are distinct from domestic policing. As Israeli counterintelligence practices become the model for domestic policing and border control, as government surveillance tactics under occupation are deployed at home, it would seem that the intent of homeland security is to convert home and abroad into a singular battlefield such that the boundary between private (as in domestic) and public (as in foreign) is indistinguishable. Underscoring the blurred lines separating home and abroad throughout the era of the War on Terror, the US government has recycled military hardware deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to US police departments, including those within public school districts and higher education institutions. The Department of Defense’s 1033 program allows excess military equipment to be used in local law enforcement. Although most of the 1033 program equipment includes items like cold-weather equipment and fax machines, less often the program has allowed for the transfer of tanks, ammunition, and anti-riot gear to USbased police forces. More than eight thousand local law enforcement agencies have used the DOD 1033 program since its inception, allowing for more than $5 billion in military hardware to be transferred to the United States. Among the items transferred through this program are a military transport vehicle to the San Diego school district. The Los Angeles school district has received assault rifles, grenade launchers, and a Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle. More than 117 universities have participated in the 1033 program, including UC Berkeley, which received an Armored Response Counter-Attack Truck, and The Ohio State University, which received an MRAP vehicle with a machine-gun turret.

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Since 9 / 11 we have witnessed new security regimes transform parts of the United States into armed counterinsurgency conflicts. There are too many examples. In response to protests following the police murder of Michael Brown, the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, which had participated in a LEEP training program in Israel, confronted protestors with an armed military response that included military-grade equipment acquired via the DOD 1033 program. Most recently, Indigenous protest by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe against the Keystone Pipeline was confronted with War on Terror–style police occupation and a private mercenary counterinsurgency contracting firm, Tigerswan, that had been hired by the state of South Dakota to contain and put down pipeline protestors.22 The “dark side” of US warfare that Dick Cheney forecast and executed was not only a dirty interrogation program that includes black sites and waterboarding tactics (as I discuss in the next chapter) but also the reconstitution of everyday life into one in which the fight against terrorism makes indistinguishable the government’s surveillance of enemies and its surveillance of everyone, and also makes indistinguishable the counterinsurgency violence aimed at terrorists and the counterinsurgency policing of everyone. Understanding how we got to this point requires challenging the exceptionalist narratives that normalize global surveillance and counterinsurgency tactics. This challenge means recognizing that September 11, 2001, had a history rooted to the Cold War imperial folly in Afghanistan and the greater Middle East as well as longer wars against Indigenous people. This challenge means shining a light on a long history of US imperial violence that forces us to question the victim status claimed by US policy makers in their prosecution of the War on Terror. This challenge also includes revising Israeli settler

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colonial narratives that erase the occupation of the West Bank, the concealment of the Gaza Strip, and the refusal to allow refugees to return to their homes as required by international law. My students have been raised in a world where it is a radical act to question the innocence of the United States in its prosecution of the War on Terror. This is because the “dark side” of surveillance and counterinsurgency has been wedded to the cultural politics of mourning in ways that provide an alibi for state violence and that turn certain populations, such as the Muslim Americans targeted by the NYPD’s demographics unit, into criminals by virtue of their targeted status. We need to find ways to puncture this innocence, as well as to see through the melancholia at the heart of American exceptionalism. My analysis of torture in the next chapter is intended to unmask the covering conceit of US innocence.

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In late 2002 an Afghan peanut farmer named Dilawar left his village of Yakubi in eastern Afghanistan and purchased a taxi, which he planned to operate in a larger city. Later that year, on December 1, while driving three customers, a local Afghan leader and his militia stopped the taxi and detained Dilawar and his customers until they could be handed over to US military forces. The Afghan leader had been found guilty of an armed attack on a US military base in Afghanistan and, in order to avoid arrest by US forces, he agreed to turn over “suspected” terrorists, like Dilawar, to US forces in exchange for financial compensation. Dilawar and his customers were ensnared in this dirty transaction. Dilawar was taken to the US-run prison at Bagram Air Force Base where military police (MPs) subcontracted by the US military were instructed to use force in order to extract intelligence from Dilawar and other prisoners about possible terrorist networks or planned terrorist activity. The MPsʼ force was supposed to be harsh, to the point that the prisoner would divulge 69

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information, but not so harsh that the prisoner would die. Torture was and is illegal, but the Central Intelligence Agency, with the assistance of contracted psychologists, had developed an enhanced interrogation program as early as 2002 that used brute force and psychological abuse under the faulty assumption that such tactics would lead to truthful confessions of actionable intelligence. Dilawar was chained from the ceiling of his cell and beaten on both legs, a procedure that the MPs determined was not life threatening. Yet, after repeated assaults to his body, Dilawar ultimately died at the hands of US forces. Although the US military would declare Dilawar’s death a homicide (perpetrated, presumably, by another prisoner), the coroner’s report indicated that his legs had been “pulpified” by successive beatings and that, had he lived, he would have had to have his legs amputated. Investigative reporting has revealed that Dilawar’s death was at the hands of the US MPs at Bagram (an Academy Award–winning documentary directed by Alex Gibney, Taxi to the Dark Side, explores Dilawar’s extrajudicial assassination). Dilawar was not a terrorist and had no information about terrorist activities.1 In another cell at Bagram’s prison was the British Pakistani Mozamm Begg, who was an eyewitness to Dilawar’s murder and that of another detained person. Begg had been captured at his home in Pakistan by Pakistani intelligence officers and transferred to US forces at Bagram. He spent one year in Bagram before being transferred to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Begg was suspected of participating in al-Qaeda training camps as well as operating a bookstore in London that distributed al-Qaeda propaganda. He was transferred to a USrun detention facility at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy combatant,” a new legal category that was invented, as I describe below, to evade the norms of the Geneva

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Conventions, which set forth, among other international standards in warfare, the humanitarian rights of prisoners of war (POWs). Defined as neither a POW nor a soldier of a foreign state, Begg and other detained humans would be treated by the US military under a completely novel legal framework that dispensed with legal norms and human rights. While in their custody, Begg was tortured and abused by US forces. At Bagram, Begg reported that he was hog-tied, physically assaulted, denied legal representation, and threatened with sexual abuse, physical harm, and rendition to Egypt or Syria, where he would be treated even more harshly. While at Guantanamo, Begg was held in solitary confinement for nearly six hundred days despite the fact that he was not charged with any crime. Begg was finally allowed legal representation after his first year in Guantanamo, in 2004, as a result of the US Supreme Court’s Rasul v. Bush (2004) ruling that decided that detainees had habeas corpus rights and could challenge their detention. Begg obtained legal support from the Center for Constitutional Rights and ultimately received the support of the British government, which sought the release of British citizens from Guantanamo. Once transferred to Britain, Begg and other British detainees were tried on terrorism charges and were ultimately released without charges. Dilawar’s and Begg’s stories are not exceptional and represent only two of the most publicized stories of “enemy combatants” under US “care.” Their stories were publicized because of the brave acts of people who practiced civil disobedience, like Chelsea Manning, intrepid lawyers, and scholars of the War on Terror. The use of torture and the legal gymnastics that sanctioned “enhanced interrogations” are both exceptional and normative in US history. Although the United States publicly prides itself on

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being something of a global ambassador of human rights (often chastising its enemies for human rights violations) and supporters of the Geneva Conventionsʼ guiding treatment of enemies during wartime, the fact is that torture is not new to the United States—indeed, we could make a case that the CIA has promoted torture on a global scale throughout much of its existence. Sociologist Lisa Hajjar has described the Central Intelligence Agency’s interest in studying the science of interrogational torture as early as 1956 when it established the MK-ULTRA program involving psychological torture as a means to extract actionable intelligence. The CIA outlined its interest in psychological torture in a 1956 document titled “Community Control Techniques: An Analysis in the Methods Used by Communist State Police in the Arrest, Interrogation, and Indoctrination of People Regarded as ‘Enemies of the State.’ ” The CIA was interested in how torture could psychologically break down a suspect, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding US personnel from divulging state secrets under such conditions. Yet the CIA also played an active role in training those who would use interrogational torture in Vietnam. The association developed the Phoenix program which, Hajjar notes, “combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation, and extrajudicial executions.”2 In 1963 the CIA developed a manual of interrogations to guide agents (whether Vietnamese or, later, Latin American) on extracting information from unwilling sources. The preference for this manual was to avoid bodily harm while focusing on the human senses in order “to cause victims to feel responsible for the suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their tortures.”3 Throughout the era of “dirty wars” in Latin America, the CIA

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trained Latin American militias and strongmen through the secret “Project X” and in classrooms at the US Army School of the Americas, located in Fort Benning, Georgia. Much of the CIA’s torture program came to light in the mid-1980s, when Congress investigated US-supported atrocities in Central America. Following 9 / 11 / 2001 the Bush administration authorized the CIA to engaged in a “kill or capture” campaign against alQaeda, with the CIA being given the responsibility to interrogate and detain “high value” targets, and the military given the responsibility for others. Moreover, on September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that empowered the CIA to establish secret detention and interrogations operations overseas. The International Red Cross called the CIA’s detention facilities “a hidden global internment network.” In addition, the Bush memorandum authorized a secret “high-value target list” that included the names of around two dozen individuals the CIA was authorized to either kill or capture. The president did not have to review the names included on the list, nor did the CIA require any oversight from the executive or judicial branch prior to acting on the kill or capture list. These powers were intended to enable the CIA to hunt for al-Qaeda leaders and, ultimately, to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. As the CIA was empowered to kill and capture al-Qaeda operatives, they had broad new powers to work in the shadows to hunt for terrorists. Although the CIA rendition program was secret, it required (and was granted) permission from all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to fly secret CIA rendition flights within the airspace of NATO allies. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICR) has documented

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more than seven hundred imprisoned people, flown over NATO countries on their way to Guantanamo prison. According to the ICR, prisoners were photographed (both clothed and naked), subject to body cavity searches, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, with earphones placed over the ears and blindfolded. They were shackled by hands and feet. The ICRC reports that “on some occasions detainees were transported lying flat on the floor of the plane . . . with their hands cuffed behind their backs . . . [causing them] severe pain and discomfort.” 4 CIA interrogators deployed the interrogation techniques learned from US practices in Vietnam and Latin America. They also consulted with Egyptian and Saudi interrogators on the best methods to extract information. Based on history and consultations with harsh interrogators, the CIA developed a list of thirteen permitted aggressive interrogation techniques. These practices were classified under the category “enhanced interrogations,” and they were intended to push the boundaries of what is permissible without violating human rights and Geneva conventions. These practices included nudity, sleep depravation, stress positions, dietary restriction, and waterboarding. In 2014 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigated the CIA’s interrogation methods under the Bush administration and concluded that waterboarding was torture and a violation of international norms and law. They also found that the CIA had misled congressional oversight committees about the extent of the interrogation program and that the CIA had obstructed investigations into the enhanced interrogation methods. If this were not enough, the select committee further demonstrated that the interrogation methods deployed by the CIA were ineffective and often yielded misleading information. “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an

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effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”5 Many political pundits who comment on the CIA’s torture program lament the loss of American standing in the world or highlight how the program signaled a divergence from “American values.” Perhaps the most poignant moments of the 2014 congressional debate about torture took place when Republican US senator John McCain took to the Senate floor to argue against the CIA’s torture program. McCain came to national prominence after his release following several years of captivity and torture as a POW during the Vietnam War. McCain had physical disabilities as a result of his torture, and as he presented to the Senate about the matter of torture he spoke emotionally from personal experience. First, he argued that torture could extract a detainee’s confession, but this confession would likely be dishonest or misleading. McCain knew this to be the case, because when he was tortured in Vietnam, he had confessed to being a criminal against the North Vietnamese—just to avoid further torture. Second, McCain argued that if the United States sanctioned torture, they would normalize it and jeopardize the safety of captured US military, who would likely be tortured by a foreign country. McCain was most passionate when he argued that torture would undermine the American way: it is essential to our success in this war that we ask those who fight it for us to remember at all times that they are defending a sacred ideal of how nations should be governed and conduct their relations with others—even our enemies. Those of us who give them this duty are obliged by history, by our nation’s highest ideals and the many terrible sacrifices made to protect them, by our respect for human dignity to make clear we need not risk our national honor to prevail in this or any war. We

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need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.6

While McCain was lauded for his strong moral argument against torture, he remained one of the staunchest hawks advocating for robust military adventures across the Middle East. Three years after he broke ranks with Republican colleagues over the matter of torture, he joked about his desire to bomb Iran, despite the fact that Iran had no connection to the September 11 attacks. McCain, like so many who were “shocked” by the CIA’s torture program, seemed comfortable with state violence that included “collateral” killing and maiming, but found torture of an individual an especially abhorrent departure from the American way. The practice of torture only seems like a detour from the America “we know” if we forget histories of US-led state violence at home and abroad and histories of scalping, lynching, capital punishment, extrajudicial assassinations, and more that have been permissible at different historical conjunctures. What made the CIA’s torture program exceptional was not its use of violence but its scaffolding in US law. When the Bush administration granted the CIA authority to develop an “enhanced interrogation” program, it did not seek to violate or skirt established law; instead, it sought to find legal justification to develop such an interrogation program—that is, to deploy “lawfare,” a term that connotes the deployment of law for national security ends. For our purposes, lawfare speaks to the attempt to rationalize what had been previously regarded as illegal—in this case, torture—by reinterpreting the law in ways that provide cover to the formerly illegal act. The Bush administration engaged lawfare when it turned to its Office of Legal

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Counsel for advice and justification for enhanced interrogations. Drawing on the analysis of John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general, the administration argued that detainees did not carry rights accorded by the Geneva Conventions because they were nonstate actors who “cannot be a party to the international agreements government war.” Moreover, Yoo argued that because Afghanistan was a failed state, it should not be granted the rights given to states under the Geneva Conventions. And finally, Yoo argued that the president has the right, as commander in chief, to interpret national and international laws with regard to al-Qaeda and therefore has the supreme authority to decide whether Geneva Conventions ought to apply.7 A couple of weeks after Yoo’s memorandum, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales advised the White House that, despite the reservations of Secretary of State Colin Powell, he believed that Geneva Conventions standards regarding prisoners of war did not obtain in the case of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. President George W. Bush adopted Yoo’s and Gonzales’s recommendations on February 7, 2002, in a memorandum to his administration. Importantly, Bush did not advocate dispensing with legality or with the Geneva Conventions; rather, he asserted his authority to decide whether the Geneva Conventions obtained in the case and he concluded that they did not. “I accept the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time. Accordingly, I determine that the provisions of Geneva will apply to our present conflict with the Taliban.” Bush makes a distinction that is rhetorical but not substantive. Wanting to preserve the norms of legality, but not wanting to be constrained

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by those norms, Bush asserted the rule of law under the Geneva Conventions, but argued that members of al-Qaeda were never the intended subjects of human rights and the Geneva Conventions. In order to support this rhetorical gymnastics, Bush’s administration asserted that terrorists were “unlawful combatants” (rather than prisoners of war).8 As “unlawful combatants” (or sometimes “enemy combatants”), Afghan and Pakistani people captured in broad military sweeps of the region were denied human rights. As nonstate actors they were devoid of legal protection in an international system that regulated warfare among states and their militaries. When the human rights of captured humans were demanded (by lawyers and aid workers), the United States declared that it did not have jurisdiction to intervene, as the treatment of detainees was often carried out by third-party actors or contractors to whom someone was renditioned, or in non-US spaces such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The deployment of law to advocate treatment of detainees that exceeds or violates international law underscores a rhetorical device at the heart of the War on Terror, and one that I have argued in previous chapters has justified the expansive use of surveillance and counterinsurgency state powers. At its core, the War on Terror is a rhetorical battle to uphold American exceptionalism and innocence while prosecuting a material conflict with deadly consequences. In the torture case, we see how the rhetorical use of law and legality to rationalize the violence of an enhanced interrogation program meant wedding American commitments to human rights to the abrogation of human rights in the case of terrorists. Amy Kaplan’s reading of Guantanamo Bay as an uncanny space is especially helpful in unmasking the rhetoric of imperial

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melancholia at the core of the US War on Terror as it relates to the enhanced interrogation atrocities. Guantanamo Bay sits in the “heart of American empire,” Kaplan writes. It was “acquired” in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and has since been used to cement American empire in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its lawlessness—as a space that is covered by neither Cuban nor American jurisdiction—is not an aberration; in fact, it is a defining feature of US imperial culture whereby colonized territory can be profitably used by the United States, its resources stripped, while the people living in the colony are denied most of the rights and benefits accorded US citizens. As Kaplan argues, Guantanamo’s past, in which it was a holding area of refugees attempting entry to the United States, haunts its use as a gulag during the War on Terror—it has been deemed partially domestic and partially foreign through its history as a military base, coaling station, and prison. As such, from a legal perspective, Guantanamo is nowhere and therefore something of a legal blind spot.9 How the public came to know about the US rendition and torture programs is largely the result of intrepid journalists who rely on the bravery of intelligence officials or soldiers who, in an act of disobedience and conscience, blow the whistle on government immorality and law-breaking. We know about the government’s surveillance capacities largely as a result of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing through his decision to share classified information with journalists at The Guardian newspaper. Similarly, the public became aware of government torture of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as a result of a soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib photos to a superior. In this case, the leaked images were not the result of a whistleblower working directly with a journalist to make embarrassing

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information public, but instead, information that was revealed and condemned within the military chain of command. We know much more about the torture program at Guantanamo Bay as a result of the bravery of Chelsea Manning, who worked as an intelligence analyst in the Army. During the course of their work, Manning learned of several military-sanctioned programs they felt violated legal and ethical norms. Manning felt compelled to download more than seven hundred thousand documents and share them with Julian Assange, the editor of the website WikiLeaks. Whereas Edward Snowden shared classified information with media outlets who would vet the information and then write about it, Manning released information directly to WikiLeaks, which published the information for anyone to see. At the time of this writing, there are legal debates about whether the same legal protections afforded journalists who published the Snowden information should obtain for Julian Assange. Currently, the United States argues that Assange is not a journalist but merely the operator of a website, while Assange and his lawyers argue that WikiLeaks is a media resource and that he is being unfairly prosecuted in violation of his rights as a journalist. What is most important for our purposes, however, is not how or the medium in which whistleblowers leak their information, but instead, the information that was leaked pertaining to the prosecution of the War on Terror. What Manning divulged painted a dark picture of the violence of the War on Terror, especially for those who were euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage,” as well as of the immorality of US international diplomacy. Contained in Manning’s documents was information, released in 2010, of a US helicopter crew laughing while they killed a dozen Iraqi people during an airstrike over

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Baghdad. In the video, a pilot on one of the US Apache helicopters involved can be heard joking, “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” Manning’s documents also revealed the failure of US authorities to investigate reports of prisoner abuse and torture carried out by allied Iraqi police officers. The extent of prisoner abuse included shackling, blindfolding, hanging by wrists or ankles, whipping, punching, kicking, and electric shock.10 In addition, Manning released several thousand documents that revealed embarrassing features of US diplomacy, including evidence that the United States was running a secret surveillance program targeting the leadership of the United Nations. At a time when the United States and United Kingdom claimed they could not detail the number of deaths in Iraq as a result of Western militarism, Manning released classified military data indicating that the US in fact did have estimates of more than a hundred thousand Iraqi deaths at that time, a number that far exceeded what was publicly known at the time. And, at a time when the United States argued that only the “worst of the worst” were detained at Guantanamo Bay, Manning released 759 “detainee assessment” dossiers which included information that the US knew of several detainees who were innocent but continued to be held in Guantanamo prison. Moreover, the dossiers indicate that many of the “convictions” obtained on detainees were derived as a result of the testimony of other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who had personal stakes in naming names. Manning’s documents demonstrate that US authorities failed to investigate a growing number of reports of prisoner abuse under its jurisdiction. As Shane Kadidal, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, argues about Manning’s Guantanamo revelations, “It’s one thing to tell a few anecdotes based on a few items being leaked, but to be able to say across

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the board that most of the men who are there shouldn’t be there, were people that could be safely released . . . that is pretty staggering.”11 Chelsea Manning’s revelations constitute acts of great courage that should be celebrated in the United States: after all, the WikiLeaks material that they released shone a bright spotlight on CIA torture practices at Guantanamo Bay. And yet, the Obama Justice Department charged Manning with twenty-two offenses, the most serious of which was aiding the enemy, a charge to which Manning would ultimately be exonerated. However, on July 30, 2013, Manning was convicted of eleven charges and sentenced to thirty-five yearsʼ imprisonment (Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to seven years in 2017). During their imprisonment, Manning was placed in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day for nearly eleven months—treatment that a United Nations special rapporteur on torture found constituted torture. I conclude that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement (regardless of the name given to his regime by the prison authorities) constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regard to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.12

In addition to facing solitary confinement, Manning was abused by a criminal justice system that refused to accept Manning’s transgender identity and their desire to live as a woman. Manning was placed in male prisons, despite requests to be moved to a female facility. She was initially denied hormone therapy, the right to grow her hair and use cosmetics, until she filed a federal lawsuit to demand these rights; she eventually won the right to

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hormone therapy but was denied a transfer to a women’s prison and the right to female grooming standards. In the years following public revelations about torture at Guantanamo Bay and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, it remains the case that Manning is a pariah due to her “leak,” while torture is making something of a return under the Trump administration, which claims that torture is a legitimate practice to interrogate “bad apples.” But the softening of public views of torture has also been facilitated by the CIA’s public diplomacy within the United States, which includes efforts to link the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden to information won through enhanced interrogations. Collaboration between the CIA and Hollywood is not new; in the mid-1990s the CIA developed an entertainment industry liaison program to “assist” with filmic representations of the agency. Throughout the Cold War, the agency funded cultural festivals as fronts for espionage in developing countries. Tricia Jenkins demonstrates in her book The CIA in Hollywood that the CIA exerts influence in Hollywood, working closely with the producers and writers of several War on Terror films.13 The CIA / Hollywood linkage is especially problematic in the case of the film Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, which dramatizes the SEAL team hunt and capture of Osama bin Laden. For an entire year, members of the CIA who were affiliated with the hunt for bin Laden provided information and advice to Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal. In addition, Boal was in the audience for a ceremony honoring the Seal team, hosted by CIA director Leon Panetta. During this ceremony Panetta shared classified information about the search for bin Laden, prompting the Senate intelligence committee to investigate.

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Although it is now confirmed that enhanced interrogations yielded little to no useful information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty nevertheless suggests that enhanced interrogations were the key to extracting information about bin Laden’s location. Moreover, the film implies that Obama-era prohibitions on torture actually delayed the capture of bin Laden. The film opens with a black screen, as sounds from 9 / 11 emergency calls echo across the theater. Audience members hear the pained and terrified calls of people in the World Trade Centers, as they report becoming engulfed in flames. In effect, the opening montage is meant to reenact a scene of deadly torture (death by fire) that establishes symmetry to the following scene depicting a CIA-run black site where viewers watch an enhanced interrogation. Viewers share the film protagonistʼs discomfort (but determination) at viewing torture. The protagonist is a CIA officer named Maya (played by Jessica Chastain). The prisoner is shown suspended from the ceiling by ropes linked to his arms. The interrogators, masked, deliver beatings when the prisoner refuses to offer up the desired information. The masked interrogators repeatedly tell the detainee, “when you lie, I hurt you.” During a break in the torture, one of the soldiers explains to Maya, “Just so you know, it’s going to take a while. He has to learn how helpless he is.” When the interrogation continues, the prisoner is waterboarded. When information is still withheld, the prisoner is stripped naked, hung by his arms, and later paraded around his cell like a dog. The prisoner is later placed in a box, where he begins to divulge incomplete information. The film’s juxtaposition between the terror of humans killed by flames on 9 / 11 and the simulated murder by drowning (waterboarding) frames “enhanced interrogations” as

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morally superior to the violence of terrorism in an effort to distinguish what they do from what we do.14 Zero Dark Thirty is not a documentary about the search for bin Laden; rather, it is a fiction that presents torture as beneficial and a morally permissible form of interrogation, one that yields indispensable information. Beyond the opening scenes of the film, torture is represented throughout the movie as a normative form of interrogation that narrows the hunt for bin Laden to useful suspects. At one point in the film, the CIA interrogators lament that the newly elected Obama administration’s prohibitions on torture delayed the capture of al-Qaeda detainees, necessitating CIA operatives who will go rogue in order to extract information. Zero Dark Thirty is thus propaganda entertainment that misleadingly argues that the CIA’s torture and rendition programs, its operation of dark sites, were indispensable to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. Although President Barack Obama’s 2008 election was partly a referendum on the Bush administration’s torture program— Obama claimed that torture was an embarrassment to the US commitment to the rule of law—Obama’s Justice Department refused to prosecute any high-level officials who sanctioned torture, which could have supported public acknowledgment that torture is wrong. While some of the lower-level military police and contractors who engaged in torture were prosecuted as “bad apples,” Bush administration officials and lawyers who justified and implemented the torture program faced no accountability. Meanwhile, the Obama administration prosecuted whistleblowers who revealed the dirty business of torture at Guantanamo Bay, like Chelsea Manning, with unprecedented vigor. While CIA officials who helped shape popular-culture representations

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of torture, perhaps by leaking classified information about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, were exonerated, soldiers like Chelsea Manning, who leaked information revealing the violent torture program, were imprisoned and, according to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, tortured while in prison. Torture was normalized by casting the torturers as heroic and transforming those who revealed torture into threats to the nation. Like much of the War on Terror discourse, we do a great disservice to history if we assume that torture in places like Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay is exceptional or new—it is neither. As mentioned previously, the CIA has studied torture and trained third-world dictators in the use of torture since at least the end of World War II. Moreover, the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program is similar to the use of violent interrogation by police, enacted long before the War on Terror. Indeed, revelations about Guantanamo Bay reminded many of similar revelations about police torture of detainees in holding cells in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s, illustrating how the US torture policy is not merely one feature of the US colonial history in the Americas and its current prosecution of a war against terrorism but also a reminder of the US history of torture through policing and prisons. When the Obama administration condemned the previous administration’s use of torture at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay as un-American, it did not implicate the “house of screams” in the heart of the city where Barack Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, started their unlikely run for the White House—Chicago. Yet during the Chicago mayoral administration of Rahm Emmanuel, as the United States attempted to move beyond its practice of torture in Guantanamo Bay, another police torture site became the subject of

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popular protest. Following the police murder of Laquan McDonald, activists in Chicago began to publicize police mistreatment of African American men under Chicago Police Department custody. Many activists highlighted in this protest a police detention facility called Homan Square (named after the notorious Chicago slumlord, Samuel Homan), where thousands of African Americans had been detained in secret prior to their arrest. According to an investigative report by The Guardian, at Homan Square, Black detainees are “handcuffed to a wall in dark and foreboding rooms and cells, with inconsistent access to food, drink, or access to bathroom facilities. . . . when this sensory deprivation does not yield sufficient cooperation, the police interrogators all too often employ physical brutality that meets the United Nations Convention Against Torture’s definition of torture.”15 What Homan Square reveals is how unexceptional torture actually is, and the ways that the US condemnation of the torture at Guantanamo Bay somehow ignored police violence and torture of US citizens within the United States. Public condemnation of torture at Guantanamo Bay may have given antipolice violence activists in the US new leverage to condemn police violence. But there is another way in which the US torture program in the US War on Terror has unearthed the political unconscious of colonial and police violence. In the closing scenes of the film Zero Dark Thirty, the Navy Seals who realize they have just killed Osama bin Laden radio back to their base, “Geronimo! For God and country. Geronimo.” Geronimo was the US military code-name for bin Laden, underscoring how the US War on Terror is a continuation, and sometimes reenactment, of US Indian Wars.16 While the Obama administration condemned the Bush administration for its sanctioning of

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enhanced interrogations and torture, neither administration considered the long history of War on Terror interrogation tactics (and counterinsurgency practices), as they have been used within the United States against Indigenous and other communities of color.

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At the outset of July 2008, a bridal party was making its way on foot to the groom’s village in a place called Kamala, in the province of Nangarhar, Afghanistan. Before the wedding party reached the groom’s village, however, a US airstrike targeted the bridal party. The first airstrike landed on a group of children who had run ahead of the main party. A second strike hit the center of the group, killing mostly women. The bride survived the first two airstrikes, but while running away from the gruesome scene of her party, she was killed by a third US airstrike. According to reporting in The Guardian, one of the elderly men escorting the wedding party, Mr. Hajj Khan, recounted the terror of this moment: We were walking, I was holding my grandson’s hand, when there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson’s hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn’t make out which part was which.1 89

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There were forty-seven victims of this US air raid, in a country where, by the end of 2005, more than six hundred civilians had died via US airstrikes. That number would swell as the technological capacity to use unmanned and weaponized airpower— drones—escalated under the Obama administration. According to local Afghan journalists, membership in the Taliban or in other organizations fighting the United States swells following airstrikes targeting civilians, and, indeed, ongoing recruitment to the fight against the United States is often driven by US torture and drone strike policy.2 While running for president in 2008, candidate Barack Obama centered a critique of the Bush administration’s torture policy and its use of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Torture was a stain on the American image as a bastion of liberal democracy and human rights, he argued. Moreover, the US sanction and practice of torture, argued Obama, was “un-American” and threatened US national interests because it damaged the prestige of the American image abroad. He resolved to bring suspected terrorist to justice in courts of law and to close the detention facility at Guantanamo in the first hundred days of his presidential administration. Although he made criticism of Bush’s War on Terror a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, his criticism of torture did not mean that he sought to terminate the War on Terror. Indeed, while arguing that he hoped to reset the history of US militarism in the greater Middle East, he nevertheless found ways to sanitize the War on Terror while increasing its lethality. After winning election, Obama made plans to fulfill his campaign promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and to use military tribunals to prosecute suspected terrorists detained under the “unlawful enemy combatant” protocols

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of the Bush administration. To this end, on his third day in office in 2009, he issued an executive order to close the detention facility, “as soon as possible, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” At the time of the order, there were 240 detainees held in Guantanamo.3 Obama encountered several problems, however, when trying to close Guantanamo. First, there was little political will in the United States to transfer suspected terrorists to US federal prisons—“not in my backyard,” argued many politicians wary of political blowback at having accused terrorists in their midst. Hence, the Congress passed laws in its budget restricting the resettlement of suspected terrorists to US prisons. Second, although many of the detainees were not the “worst of the worst” but merely unfortunate souls swept up in US (or allied) military raids, it was often difficult to return these detainees to their home countries because the home country suspected the detainee of being a terrorist. In the case of Yemeni detainees, for example, the home country (Yemen) was in the midst of civil war and not capable of supporting resettlement. Third, the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program—or state-sanctioned torture—corrupted the possibility of future legal prosecution. Under US and military legal norms, evidence and confessions extracted through force and torture are inadmissible in trial. Although in US legal cases there are regular reports of police acting violently to extract confessions from “suspects,” police coercion is hidden from view so that legal cases can proceed. In the case of Guantanamo detainees, however, the torture was documented by international human rights organizations and by human rights lawyers. In cases where a detainee was tortured, it would be nearly impossible to prosecute under US and military-court norms of jurisprudence since evidence collection was corrupted by acts of torture.

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As a result of the difficulty in closing Guantanamo, the Obama administration adopted a gradual, if not glacial, process whereby military tribunals would assess which detainees could be released to their home countries. At the same time, the administration publicly vowed to close Guantanamo and regularly condemned torture as “un-American,” but mostly allowed the detention facility at Guantanamo to continue its work unimpeded, with the caveat that “enhanced interrogations” would be revised to not include torture. This policy enabled the Obama administration to maintain the façade of being committed to the rule of law, while simultaneously embracing a new tool in the War on Terror that seemed to alleviate the legal conundrum Guantanamo inspired. This chapter examines the Obama administration’s revision of the Bush administration torture/confinement program into a targeted assassination program. Drawing on the recently declassified “Drone Papers”—a cache of leaked official documents related to the unmanned US drone program—this chapter argues that extrajudicial assassinations were the hallmark of the Obama administration’s liberalism and not a departure from it. The rhetoric of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo, of upholding the Geneva Conventions and norms of international law, were consistent with changing tactics toward remote-controlled, extrajudicial assassinations that received less public scrutiny in the United States and that allowed the Obama administration to comply with legal norms while killing in new ways. The Bush administration’s “kill or capture” program was interested in obtaining actionable intelligence from terrorist suspects, with the presumption that future terrorist attacks were inevitable and pending. Working under the presumption that every captured person held information about future terrorist

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activities, the enhanced interrogation—torture—program was developed to extract information not for future legal cases but for future military action. As the Obama administration assumed control over the War on Terror, however, it veered away from the Bush administration’s “kill or capture” regime due to the difficulties of working within legal frameworks to prosecute captured suspected terrorists. The Obama administration maintained a moral high-ground by opposing torture, while at the same time turning to a targeted, extrajudicial assassination program using the newly available technological development of the armed, unmanned drone. The Predator drone had been developed before September 11, 2001, but could only be deployed as an armed weapon toward the end of the Bush administration. The US military had deployed drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Clinton administration, but during that time the drone did not have the capacity to carry warheads. Moreover, there is a long history of aerial surveillance used in colonial and imperial warfare to map territory and to identify targets. The birdʼs-eye view of targeted geographies enables unprecedented capacity to spy on, as well as to survey for, future military-economic development. The utility of the Predator drone was not only its ability to surveil deep into sovereign territory but to do so without detection from surveilled populations and with unprecedented visual resolution. To commanders in chief eager to wage warfare without placing their own citizens in harm’s way, the unmanned drone became a remote-controlled soldier of choice, capable of providing intelligence while US humans could be kept “safe” in remote locations in allied countries like Germany, or in distant US locations in Virginia or Nevada.

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Prior to 9 / 11, as the Predator drone developed the capacity to carry warheads, the Clinton administration refused to carry out an armed drone strike against suspected terrorists, fearing that the use of the drone as an armed weapon would, in effect, act as a state-sponsored, remote-controlled assassination program. As Jane Mayer demonstrates in The Dark Side the Clinton administration, using information from a Predator drone, believed it had identified Osama bin Laden following al-Qaeda’s attacks on the USS Cole in the Persian Gulf and on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) argued that the Clinton administration should use the armed Predator drone to strike at the military camp where bin Laden was located. However, Attorney General Janet Reno made convincing arguments that targeting bin Laden in this way would amount to a violation of international law regarding assassinations and, moreover, that the administration’s goals were to capture terrorists and bring them to justice in US courts of law. Because it believed that the Bush administration’s “capture or kill” and enhanced interrogation programs were illegal, the Obama administration viewed the armed Predator drone as something of a panacea. Moreover, shaped by the rhetoric of exceptionalism that saturated post-9 / 11 America, President Obama was less concerned by targeted assassinations than President Clinton. The armed, unmanned drone was offered as an alternative to the messy business of enhanced interrogations. The drone was fetishized as rooted in unbiased, highly accurate visual data that would only target, with precision, “deserving” terrorists. It was presented as completely safe for US military personnel because the remote control of the drone would take place in distant locations far from the battlefield. The drone was even presented as safer to civilians in the battlefield because its

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precise targeting would reduce “collateral” death. Defending the drone as a humane form of warfare, then–counterterrorism advisor John Brennan argued that during a year-long period beginning in 2010 the armed drone had killed six hundred terrorists with zero civilian casualties: “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” 4 As I discuss below, Brennan’s statement was an outright distortion, if not lie, about the drone’s lethality to civilians. While the drone program was presented as a more humane, safe, and effective tool to wage the War on Terror, it was beset by several legal conundrums similar to those facing the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. By what authority could the military carry out a drone strike? By what criteria would “targets” of a drone strike be selected? Given that the Obama administration had won election partly based on its criticism of the Bush administration’s illegality during its prosecution of the War on Terror, the drone program presented Obama with a problem. How could the administration authorize an extrajudicial assassination program while maintaining a commitment to the rule of law, not to mention to a “new way forward” in the Middle East?5 The Obama administration skirted these thorny questions by working as the Bush administration did—in the dark side. The drone program was largely hidden from view of the American public, while the difficult legal questions raised by state-sanctioned assassinations were ignored. Terrorists were exceptional enemies requiring exceptional forms of state-sanctioned violence. State-sanctioned assassinations were not a new tactic, and as with so many aspects of the War on Terror, the drone program was not so much exceptional as it was a continuation of a rather

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long history of state violence that has killed political enemies deemed exceptional—from leaders of indigenous anticolonial rebellions to Latin American populist leaders during the era of “dirty wars,” the United States has used assassination as a tool of warfare in contradistinction to international law. What distinguishes the drone program from previous forms of statesanctioned assassinations is the technological capacity to execute it remotely, drawing on a web of surveillance infrastructure and a secretive “kill chain” through which targets, both US and foreign, are identified. The drone program relies on a mixture of human and signals intelligence. Human intelligence refers to soldiers and embedded spies on the ground in conflict zones. Human intelligence officers collect data regarding suspected terrorists and communicate with a central command center. The central command center then coordinates with drone controllers, sometimes located near that command center, and sometimes located more remotely across the Atlantic in the United States. The linkage between human and drone intelligence increases confidence that the target of a drone strike is accurate and verified by human intelligence. Toward the end of the Bush administration and at the beginning of Obama’s, however, the US drone program increasingly relied not on the coordination of drone and human intelligence, but on the coordination between drone and signals intelligence. Signals intelligence refers to information gathered from a constellation of data collected through a vast network of surveillance of phone records, satellite data, bank records, travel infrastructure, and much more. The transition from human to signals intelligence meant that drone strikes were being launched without human verification that targets were accurate. This remote-

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controlled assassination program was thus rooted to confidence in a suspected terroristʼs “signature.” A “signature” refers to a correlation of signals that, over time, the CIA has determined fit the profile of terrorists. The signals information might include information about telephone communications, bank records, and drone images that, when combined, fit the “signature” of a terrorist. Based on such a profile, the Obama administration ordered “signature strikes” across Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan on human beings who acted like the CIA’s construct of a terrorist, but whose identities they could not actually verify.6 For example, a signature strike could target an individual who a drone indicated had the physical stature of Osama bin Laden, who used their cell phone to communicate with regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan known to contain terrorist camps, and who used banks to wire funds that are known to cater to terrorist networks. Such a signature might be sufficient to warrant a strike, even though it is impossible to verify that the target is actually a known terrorist guilty of a crime. The chain of command to authorize the killing of a target confirmed through a signature originates with signals intelligence. According to a tranche of whistleblower-released documents called the “Drone Papers” obtained by The Intercept, the US drone program also relies on an elaborate series of surveillance steps that, in conjunction, constitute what journalists at The Intercept call the “kill chain.”7 The kill chain originates with signals intelligence of cell phone and radio signals picked up by drones, satellites, and planes. The surveillance may also include radar and heat detection. Next, the receiving drone, satellite, or plane transfers the surveillance information to military command satellites that transfer the information to military bases in

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either Florida, Virginia, or Nevada. At these military bases in the United States, officials direct the armed drones to target the original target. A guided missile, often a Hellfire missile, can be launched with the press of a button. Writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper in 2016, Malik Jalal offers terrifying testimony about what it means to be listed on the US kill list. Jalal is from Waziristan in the tribal borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is one of the elder leaders of the North Waziristan Peace Committee, which negotiates peace between Taliban and other tribal communities. The United States has labeled the North Waziristan Peace Committee a terrorist organization, but the group is sanctioned as a peace organization by the Pakistani government. Jalal cannot know for sure, nor can anyone beyond the small group of officials sanctioned to see the kill list know for sure, whether he is in fact targeted for assassination by the United States. However, a series of tragedies involving deadly drone attacks on family and friends have convinced him that he is on the list. He learned of his targeting due to a series of deadly events. In the first occasion, Jalal asked his nephew to drive his car to a repair shop for an oil change. En route to the repair shop Jalal’s nephew and car were destroyed by a Hellfire missile, launched by a US drone. In a second tragedy, a car driving behind Jalal was targeted and destroyed—the car was the same color and make as Jalal’s and all of the laborers inside were murdered. In the third instance, Jalal called ahead to his friend to inform him that he had nearly arrived at his friend’s house for dinner. Before arriving at his friend’s house, however, it was targeted by an airstrike and Jalal’s friend was murdered by the missile. The pattern of drone murder surrounding Jalal convinced him that he was indeed on the kill list. As he wrote in The Independent,

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I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the “Kill List.” I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive. I don’t want to end up a “Bugsplat”—the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.8

Jalal traveled to England under the protection of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in order to speak to Western powers that wanted to kill him. He believed that risking travel to England was the only way that he would not be murdered and the only way to protect his family. Moreover, he was tired of knowing that he was a target: friends stopped inviting him over, he was fearful of using his phone for fear that he would signal a drone, and he created as much distance as he could from his family in order to protect them. I took to the habit of sleeping under the trees, well above my home, to avoid acting as a magnet of death for my whole family. But one night my youngest son, Hilal (then aged six), followed me out to the mountainside. He said that he, too, feared the droning engines at night. I tried to comfort him. I said that drones wouldn’t target children, but Hilal refused to believe me. He said that missiles had often killed children. It was then that I knew that I could not let them go on living like this.9

Much of what we know about the drone program comes from revelations made in whistleblower-released drone papers that have been analyzed and released by investigative journalists like Jeremy Scahill. Scahill’s documentary on drone killings, Dirty

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Wars, exposes the expansion of targeting killing across an evergrowing geography moving beyond the original regions of the War on Terror. Scahill documents drone strikes across Yemen and Somalia, with coordination from third-party warlords in both regions, working with a secret arm of the US military called the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC).10 The kill chain is problematic in and of itself, but so too is the matter of whether a president has the right to order an assassination without a trial, without any human confirmation that the human they are targeting is guilty, without any congressional or judicial oversight. Indeed, while it was the Bush administration that advocated the unitary executive thesis, the Obama administration enjoyed the privileges of its consequences. In effect, the Obama administration’s sanitized prosecution of the War on Terror included an extrajudicial assassination program that targeted known and unknown targets, including foreign and sometimes United States citizens. The kill chain is authorized via a chain of command that originates with the secretive JSOC, which identifies targets to be vetted by the Department of Defense. Select members of the cabinet then approve the kill list to be presented to the president. President Obama had the sole power to approve or disapprove the recommended kill list. Although US attorney general Eric Holder was part of the cabinet-level consultation in the kill chain, there was no formal judicial review of targets—no FISA court, no trials, no formal sentencing. In 2011 it became clear that the US kill list included US citizens, as well as “foreign” terrorist suspects. Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki was radicalized before 2001, but his determination to fight the United States grew in the wake of the War on Terror. He formally joined al-Qaeda after 9 / 11 and

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gave sermons in the service of al-Qaeda on the internet. The Obama administration placed al-Awlaki’s name on the US kill list in April 2010, while he was living in Yemen. He was killed by a drone strike on September 20, 2011. Two weeks later al-Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman, also a US citizen, was killed in another drone strike. In its defense of the right to kill US citizens without trial, the Obama administration argued that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) granted the president the authority to kill without legal restraint in the name of fighting terror. Following considerable pressure from lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Obama Justice Department released a memorandum that justified its targeting of American citizens for death: We believe that the AUMF’s authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of the forces of an enemy authorization within the scope of the force authorization [such as cases] [w]here high-level government officials have determined that a capture operation is infeasible and that the targeted person is part of a dangerous enemy force and is engaged in activities that pose a continued and imminent threat to US persons or interests.11

The Department of Justice memorandum justifying extrajudicial targeted killing of US citizens makes clear that the 2001 AUMF continues to be a blank check for state-sanctioned violence for more than a decade after it was passed and that the Obama administration’s appeal to the rule of law as a rationale for his presidency was consistent with a policy that enabled the assassination of US citizens with complete disregard for any Constitutional (much less, human) rights. To put it another way, the “rule of law” rhetoric that undergirded Obama’s liberalism,

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which was the same rhetoric that chastised the Bush administration for its sanctioning of torture, was consistent with Obama’s use of unprecedented lethal killing power. We are still learning the full extent of the drone program and its consequences. Much of the program remains to be revealed in leaked documents, such as the Drone Papers. And yet we know from activist organizations documenting the consequences of drones across the Middle East, Eastern Africa, and Central Asia that the US drone program does not create a safer environment for people unaffiliated with terrorist activities. According to reports from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which collects news reporting from across Western Asia, at the time of this writing, since the rise of the armed unmanned drone there have been the following number of confirmed US drone strikes: 430 in Pakistan, 336 in Yemen, 202 in Somalia, and 13,072 in Afghanistan. It is difficult to obtain data on who was targeted in these strikes and who was killed, in part because the targeting is often based on signals intelligence (and in some cases the actual identity of the target is not even known) and in part because the US military holds this data in secret. Moreover, when a drone strikes is approved, all male targets in the target’s region are, by definition, called “enemy combatants” and are therefore a priori “known” to the United States as worthy of extrajudicial assassination.12 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reporting provides some estimate of civilian casualties (likely referring to women and children since all men are deemed guilty). Of the estimated 4,000 people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, approximately 900 civilians (including children) were killed. Of the estimated 1,300 people killed in drone strikes in Yemen, approximately 200 were civilians (including children). Of the estimated 1,400 people killed in drone strikes in Somalia, approximately 90 were

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civilians (including children). And finally, of the estimated 10,000 people killed by US drone strikes in Afghanistan, approximately 900 were civilians (including children).13 The number of people injured in the combined US drone strike program in the countries listed is approximately 2,990.14 The data on civilian casualties, limited as it may be, undermines the US government’s contention that drones represent a more humane form of killing and that there have been few civilian casualties. Moreover, it is clear that the “militants” killed by drone strikes include any and all men of a certain age profiled by US surveillance—there is little way to know that the men killed were actually militants, although in some cases the United States provides information about the identity of the targeted, suspected terrorist. What must life be like for people living under the gaze of a drone? The average age of the Pakistani population is twentytwo years, which means that most Pakistani citizens were aged four, or younger, when the current War on Terror commenced. We learn something about living under the gaze of the drone in congressional testimony from a thirteen-year-old Pakistani boy named Zubair, who told Congress that he fears clear, blue skies because he anticipates drone strikes when there is good atmospheric visibility. “I no longer love blue skies,” Zubair told Congress. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey . . . When the sky brightens, drones return, and we live in fear.” Zubair and his twelve-year-old sister, Nabeela, were injured in a drone strike in North Waziristan, when shrapnel from a strike ripped through their bodies.15 In a similar story to Zubair and Nabeela’s, in 2014 The Guardian newspaper gave fourteen-year-old Mohammed Saleh Tauiman a camera so that he could record life under the drone in Marib

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Province, Yemen. In 2011 Tauiman’s father and brother had been killed in a drone strike while herding the family’s camels. As Tauiman told The Guardian, “I see them [drones] every day and we are scared of them . . . A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.”16 Tragically, Tauiman never completed his photography project because he was killed by a US drone strike in January 2015. The use of the drone in the War on Terror offers the United States not only the capacity to kill remotely but also to establish an imperial gaze through which to map, understand, and ultimately know the expanding battlefields of the war. The drone is a tool not only of killing in warfare but also of seeing and therefore knowing.17 In his compelling counter-history of what he calls the “forever war,” Ronak Kapadia focuses on forms of resistance to drone-knowing, its imperial gaze, by analyzing artistic works that pose compelling counter-visuals and counter-epistemes of the War on Terror. Kapadia refers to these counter-visuals as “insurgent aesthetics,” playing on the imperial practice of labeling as “insurgents” all people who resist imperial occupation and warfare in the greater Middle East. “Attention to insurgent aesthetics,” Kapadia argues, “. . . points to other ways of collectively sensing and knowing the forever war outside the constraints of dominant imperial visuality.”18 In 2014 a collective of artists decided to install an art project in a field in the Khyber Phutoonkwa region of Pakistan that could provide something of an “insurgent aesthetic.” In the imperial gaze of the drone operator in Nevada or Virginia, the euphemism for dead bodies is “bug splat” because the pixelated versions of humanity displayed in remote-controlled drone

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bases in the United States look like dead bugs following a drone strike. Realizing that humanity had been reduced to animality and death, a collective of South Asian artists within Pakistan and its diaspora launched the #NotABugSplat installation to challenge the erasure of Pakistani humanity under the drone war. As one of the artists involved in the installation argued, “We want to shame drone operators and make them realize the human cost of their actions.”19 The installation includes a massive quilt featuring a photo of an unnamed Pakistani girl who lost her parents in a drone strike in 2010 in the North Waziristan village of Dande Darpa Khel. The quilt is large enough, and of a resolution, that when drones and satellites view this highly targeted region of Pakistan, they will not see a dot or a bug but a child’s face. The image is so large that it is captured by surveillance satellites used to construct visual, imperial maps of a battlefield. From here on out, however, the landscape will not be a depersonalized battlefield, but a site where a child lives. #NotABugSplat was supported by a Pakistani NGO called the Foundation for Fundamental Rights and was also supported by several locals who helped construct and erect the installation. The work was awarded a UN Award for Peace and Understanding and was featured on global media.20 #NotABugSplat’s politics is rooted in the notion that the drone’s imperial gaze depersonalizes a targeted landscape and erases its inhabitants. Under the drone’s visual regime, it becomes possible to imagine executing an airstrike with little regard for human life. The installation of the human face on the landscape, however, intervenes in the drone’s visual logic by making incontrovertible the human cost of an airstrike. In a similar vein, the Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal has attempted to counter the ease with which the War on Terror enables remote-controlled violence.

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Like #NotABugSplat, Bilal seeks to unmask the anonymity of remote-controlled killing by centering his own body as a target of deadly remote-controlled, violent pleasure. In 2007 Bilal designed an art installation in Chicago that offered viewers the opportunity to “shoot an Iraqi.” Bilal lived for thirty-six days in a prison cell–sized room in which a paint gun was aimed at him. The room, and Bilal’s daily life, were livestreamed on the internet so that viewers could interact with the exhibit by shooting Bilal with the remote-controlled paint gun, or by writing comments in an online chat forum. The installation was called “Domestic Attention,” and over the thirty-six-day period in which the exhibit was active, viewers from more than 136 countries fired 65,000 paint pellets at Bilal. By the end of the performance, Bilal reported feeling anxious, traumatized, and afraid. The paint balls were not the only violence Bilal faced; he also noted that many of the comments posted to the online chatgroup were hostile, profane, and racist. Something about the remoteness of violence, and the similarity of violence to a game, had made “shooting an Iraqi” popular and pleasurable.21 Wafaa Bilal was born in Iraq during the era of Saddam Hussein. He and his family were forced to flee the country following two wars with Iran and then the US invasion. They settled in refugee camps across the greater Middle East before arriving in the United States. In 2005 Bilal’s brother was killed at a US military checkpoint in Iraq. He curated “Domestic Tension” in 2007 to challenge the remote visuality and pleasure he perceived deriving from the War on Terror. Although the drone program had not yet fully escalated, “Domestic Tension” is nevertheless focused on how an imperially mediated visual gaze dehumanizes people targeted by the War on Terror. Moreover, the exhibit demonstrates what happens when killing is done remotely and

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in the format of a game—it becomes normative and acceptable, much like the drone program itself. Although candidate Donald Trump campaigned against the Obama administration’s military interventions in the Middle East, his opposition to deploying US military troops in the War on Terror has not included a resolve to decrease the number of drone strikes across the Middle East and North Africa. Despite the “American First” brand of his populism, Trump increased the number of US troops in the Middle East by 33 percent following his election.22 Moreover, according to Steve Niva, Trump has escalated the US drone program. In his first seventy-four days in office, Trump authorized seventy-five drone strikes, “which represents a five-fold increase over Obama’s rate.” Moreover, under the Trump administration, the drone war has expanded the battlefield considerably into North and West Africa, not to mention in Yemen, which had been a favored target of the Obama administration’s drone program. The drone monitoring group “Airwars” estimates that civilian casualties are expected to double under the Trump administration.23 While the Trump administration’s drone program may be more frequent and lethal than Obama’s, it represents the continuation of a program made normative by Obama. The Obama administration targeted US citizens for extrajudicial assassination, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, while the Trump administration, early in its administration, approved the murder of al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter (a US citizen) in a JSOC military raid. Although the Obama administration represented itself as a radical alternative to the Bush approach to fighting terrorism, its use of the drone and a kill list was enabled by the Bush administration’s legal arguments about the unitary executive as

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a rationale for torture. Hence our daily, by-the-minute, “breaking news” culture that presumes vast shifts in American political culture from Bush to Obama to Trump actually conceals what has been a long-standing political consensus: the United States has the right to kill without legal restraint whomever it chooses in the name of fighting terrorism.

A Conclusion without an Ending

This story has no conclusion, just as it has no obvious beginning. As the antiwar Left calls for an end to wars in Afghanistan and other geographies where the War on Terror takes place, it is unclear how to dismantle the war’s meanings and feelings, which are so embedded in everyday life that they are hardly recognizable. Much of our reality is so saturated by decades of securitization and counterinsurgency practices—from fingerprint scans and facial recognition software on our phones to barcodes on our credit and library cards—that it is difficult to consider the possibilities for unmaking this reality. Over the years that I have taught a course on the War on Terror, many of my students have critiqued the war by lamenting how the US embrace of torture, drone strikes, and unchecked government surveillance has contributed to the erosion of American values and to the diminished standing of the United States in the world. While I share my students’ surprise at the rapidity with which the War on Terror has transformed the era of publicly avowed civil liberties, I remind them that it is only 109

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from a privileged position that they can claim to never have experienced forms of state terror perfected under the War on Terror. Many communities within the United States (and many more communities outside of the United States) have faced torture, extrajudicial assassinations, and unending surveillance for much longer than the recent War on Terror. Indigenous people have long experienced the forms of counterinsurgency that have defined the War on Terror in the form of frontier warfare, forced removal and relocation, and statesponsored surveillance of indigenous political organization, to name just a few examples. Black radical communities in the United States have long experienced “bloodhound” laws that sought to surveil Northern “free” communities during slavery to capture “fugitive” Black people and the labeling of Black freedom struggles as terroristic. Latinos have faced counterinsurgency forces at the US-Mexico border and in their attempts to organize unions. Political organizations like the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the United Farm Workers, and Earth First have faced the brute power of the US surveillance state for a period of time extending well before the War on Terror. Claiming that the contemporary War on Terror revises cherished American norms ignores history while leaving uninterrogated the ways that American exceptionalism assumes that US state-perpetuated violence is somehow better than the violence of nonstate actors and, relatedly, that “our” suffering is superior to “theirs.” Although American political life is seriously divided, there remains a remarkable level of political consensus about the necessity of the War on Terror. As a consequence, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which has granted virtually unchecked power to successive presidents to kill in the

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name of fighting terrorism, remains in effect. Moreover, there is little political backlash to increasing surveillance and harassment of Muslim and Arab Americans. While there are highly consequential differences in the political platforms and commitments of US political parties and presidential administrations, there is nevertheless an equal amount of consensus across political parties that expansive executive powers are required to fight a never-ending global War on Terror. I began the book with the Trump administration’s lie about a “Bowling Green massacre” not because it is the worst or most consequential lie told in the War on Terror, but because it underscores something about the palimpsestic nature of US imperial culture. There have been far more consequential deceptions at the heart of the War on Terror. In 2020 the Washington Post published a damning cache of newly declassified information showing that the US war in Afghanistan has been misleadingly sold to Americans as a success when, in fact, military officials and political leaders have known, and confessed in private, that the war is a failure. US administrations, unwilling to admit defeat, have persevered in warfare with no sense of what winning means, and they regularly have misled the public about their success. The realities of the war in Afghanistan is that human life has been sacrificed in the name of fighting an abstract war against terrorism.1 The “Afghanistan Papers,” as they are now known, are similar to the Pentagon Papers released during the Vietnam era in that they expose the absurdity of a national commitment to a lost cause that not only harms US citizens but has done unspeakable damage to Afghanistan. Perhaps most revealing and damning about the Afghanistan Papers is their revelation that, despite the seeming discord and political shifts across the Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies, there

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has been far more consensus about the need to promote the Afghanistan war, even in the face of obvious failure. Although it is impossible to measure the extent of destruction wrought by the War on Terror, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ “Costs of War” project has compiled data on some of the economic and human costs. “Costs of War” estimates that the United States will have spent $6.4 trillion on the War on Terror since its inception through fiscal-year 2020. Overall, approximately 801,000 people have died in the War on Terror, and several times more than that have been killed indirectly. The War on Terror has created approximately 21 million war refugees and displaced persons. Currently, according to “Costs of War,” US counterterrorism activities take place in eighty countries.2 Why is such a failed enterprise never-ending? One reason that the War on Terror is never-ending is because warfare is economically profitable for American defense contractors and has helped to sustain an economy that offers few opportunities for manufacturing growth. Around 10 percent of the nearly $2.2 trillion in manufacturing output in the United States comes from the sale of weapons to the Department of Defense.3 In 2001, on the eve of the War on Terror, the US Department of Defense spent $147.9 billion on military contracts. Every year of the War on Terror has meant an increase in DOD military contract dollars. By 2008 the DOD spent $402 billion on defense contracts. In the ten-year period following 9 / 11 / 2001, defense contracts totaled $3.3 trillion.4 Workers for military contractors (providing weapons, ammunition, oil, and other military supplies) currently outnumber US soldiers by 3 to 1 in Iraq and Afghanistan.5 Although the military-industrial complex has ruled American public life since World War II, the War on Terror represents an

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especially Orwellian nexus linking defense contractors and politicians. In War on Terror, Inc., Solomon Hughes documents the post-9 / 11 role of former CIA director James Woolsey in recruiting investors to a fund called Palladian Capital, which invests in weapons and security firms. As Hughes writes, “[p]otential shareholders were told that the war on terror ‘offer[s] substantial promise for homeland security investment,’ ” Palladian Capital uses their funds “‘to invest in companies with immediate solutions designed to prevent harmful attacks, cope with the aftermath of attack or disaster and recover from terrorist attacks and other threats to homeland security.’” Woolsey was not only one of the managing directors of Palladian Capital but also a member of US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board. In this capacity, Woolsey helped sell the lie that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks. As Hughes notes, Palladian’s board was filled with former administration officials, including, “a former director of the National Security Agency, a former deputy director of the Defense Advance Research Agency—the organization running the United States military weapons laboratories—and a former security of the Army.” 6 At a time when manufacturing has been in decline as a result of globalization, weapons manufacturing has sustained some communities that have been otherwise decimated by deindustrialization. As the federal budget has disinvested in social services like healthcare and education, it has increased spending on the military, which represents an investment not just in continued military readiness and warfare but also in jobs. Local communities struggling economically offer huge tax incentives to weapons manufacturers to lure factories. As a consequence, a war that has inflicted misery on large swaths of the globe has meant, to some people, access to the few available decent-paying jobs.

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It is not just the economic rewards of warfare that make the War on Terror never-ending; cultural politics have also made warfare normative. Throughout this book I have argued that the War on Terror relies on politicizing mourning in a way that creates a melancholic attachment to a lost national purity and vulnerability that never was. I focus on the formation of the term “homeland” as an example of the ways that the War on Terror reconstitutes a lost “homeland,” while developing a military and police infrastructure to protect that lost homeland from future, and often hypothetical, threats. Central to the making of a melancholic attachment to a lost homeland has been an attachment to Israeli national narratives, through the television series Homeland and in the reconstruction of US policing as Israeli-inspired counterinsurgency policing. Moreover, protecting the “homeland” has meant revising democratic notions about the balance of governmental power; in order to prosecute what has been understood as an exceptional moment, presidential administrations of both major political parties have insisted on, and benefited from, the unitary executive. In order to puncture the commonsense everyday of imperial melancholia, I have tried to show some of the ways that the War on Terror is not about the defense of a mythical, lost homeland but actually a continuation of a settler colonial nation that has deployed exceptional forms of state violence against Indigenous people, people of color, and the poor since its founding. I have tried to show continuity not only across US presidential administrations from 2001 onward but also continuity in US-sanctioned state violence that has defined American national identity since its founding in settler colonial wars against Indigenous populations. The War on Terror only looks exceptional if we embrace

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the faulty notion articulated by the Bush / Obama / Trump triumvirate that American grief after 9 / 11 was exceptional, and that the events of September 11, 2001, somehow (re)created a new “ground zero” from which the United States “made America great again.” I have suggested, instead, that the attempt to start from “ground zero” is rooted to an imperial melancholia (and settler colonial fantasy) that laments the loss of a mythical American empire that was once benevolent toward, and indispensable to, the world. The US War on Terror is a truly global war as policing, counterinsurgency, surveillance, and state violence are increasingly distributed everywhere, even as different communities experience it in more deadly ways than others. Opposition to the War on Terror cannot come only from antiwar activists seeking to get troops out of conflict zones, nor from civil libertarians hoping to restore the rule of law; in addition, there needs to be an international solidarity movement that globally links communities of a shared fate, a movement that can deflate the tired narrative of American exceptionalism. We are beginning to see new forms of transnational solidarity driven by the War on Terror in social movements across the globe that recognize their shared fate under counterinsurgency violence. Dr. Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe, documents some of the forms of international solidarity that have informed anti-oil pipeline protests among Lakota water-protectors in his book Our History Is the Future.7 Estes documents forms of solidarity to antiKeystone XL pipeline activists and Palestinian refugees. Moreover, Estes, with his comrades in the Indigenous community organization the Red Nation, has organized political protests in collaboration with Palestinian activists who locate their analysis

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of the violence of War on Terror–inspired surveillance and counterinsurgency in a longer history of settler colonialism that transits across the United States and Israel.8 Similarly, in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Dr. Angela Y. Davis documents how the United States has targeted Black radical intellectuals and activists as terrorists, before and during the War on Terror, in ways that have encouraged the continued internationalism of the Black Freedom Movement. For example, when Davis was arrested in relation to a murder (charges for which she was fully exonerated) in October 1970, President Richard Nixon praised the FBI for its “capture of the dangerous terrorist, Angela Davis.” Davis notes that the terrorist appellation had also been applied to her comrade, Assata Shakur, who was listed by the FBI as one of “America’s most wanted terrorists” as late as 2013, deep into the current War on Terror’s tenure.9 As recently as 2017, in response to protests coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement, the FBI has classified “Black identity extremism” as a terrorist threat. No similar movement has classified white nationalists as terrorist threats, despite recent evidence of white nationalists’ violence at the 2017 “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia. The labeling of Black radical intellectuals and activists as terrorists demonstrates the long history of the War on Terror, as well as the infrastructures of violence targeting all who are called “terrorist.” Among the first letters of solidarity that came to Angela Davis while she was imprisoned in 1970 were from Palestinian political prisoners. Similar transnational forms of solidarity with Palestinians have characterized Indigenous antipipeline protests, immigrant rights organizing against militarized borders, and the movement for Black lives. While the War on Terror represents a global transit in counterinsurgency polic-

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ing and militaries that targets colonized people globally, it has an undertow in the global solidarity movements linking those it labels “insurgent.” In response to the treatment of poor people of color in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad wrote “Of Refuge and Language.” Hammad probes the meaning of the term “refugee” to describe American citizens fleeing disaster in relation to the use of the term to describe her Palestinian relatives. The treatment of Katrina “refugees” opened a critical portal into the global linkages driving War on Terror counterinsurgencies. Hammad notes the similarities in treatment and fate shared by Katrina refugees and global diasporas seeking to belong somewhere. In the end, Hammad implores readers to recognize not only that there are refugees in America but that America is not exceptional. The final line of the poem reads, “The rest of the world lives here too, in America.” Hammad punctures the presumption of distance between the “the rest of the world” and America, suggesting instead that the world lives in America, just as the War on Terror lives in America, too. Evacuated as if criminal Rescued by neighbors Shot by soldiers Adamant they belong The rest of the world can now see What I have seen Do not look away The rest of the world lives here too In America10

ack nowledgm ents

Writing a short book was more difficult and took much longer than I had anticipated. My delay in finishing this book was in part due to the fact that it is difficult to distill a large body of information into a concise and accessible story. It has also been a challenge to wrangle with a topic that is still very much ongoing and does not have a clear beginning or ending. Nearly every day there are new revelations about the lies and deceptions that drive the US War on Terror, and at some point I had to decide on a stopping point with regard to the volume of information I had at hand so I could conclude the project. I thank Moustafa Bayoumi, Amy Kaplan, Melani McAlister, Vijay Prashad, Laleh Khalili, Lisa Hajjar, Ronak Kapadia, Jasbir Puar, Nikhil Singh, and Nick Estes for the ways I have benefited from being in conversation—in person and / or through your writing—with your ideas. I had the pleasure of presenting parts of this book at the University of Illinois at Chicago, thanks to Nadine Naber, a wonderful interlocutor. At UIC, Peter Coviello offered helpful suggestions concerning my analysis of mourning and liberalism. Julie Sze provided encouragement at a critical moment, and her excellent Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, written for the American Studies Now series, modeled how to write a short book about a long history.

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I am grateful to Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez for accepting my project in the American Studies Now series at University of California Press, and especially to Niels Hooper for his guidance and patience with the project. I was inspired to write this book by students at the University of New Mexico and at the American University of Beirut, where at each school I have taught a “US War on Terror” class for the last decade. Two graduate students at New Mexico were especially helpful in developing the most recent version the course: thank you, Elspeth Iralu and Axel Gonzales.

notes

introduction 1. “Howard Zinn on War,” Zinn Education Project, accessed May 1, 2020, www.zinnedproject.org/materials/howard-zinn-on-war/?. 2. Aaron Blake, “Kellyanne Conway’s ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ Wasn’t a Slip of the Tongue. She’s Said It Before,” Washington Post, February 26, 2017. 3. Samantha Schmidt and Lindsey Bever, “Kellyanne Conway Cites ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ That Never Happened to Defend Travel Ban,” Washington Post, February 3, 2017. 4. “Iraq: The Human Cost,” MIT Center for International Studies, accessed December 3, 2019, http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/. 5. On the other hand, groups contesting state violence have regularly referred to the terrorism of the state. For example, during the Jim Crow era, anti-lynching crusaders like the Black radical Ida B. Wells framed the anti-lynching fight against the Ku Klux Klan’s violence as a war against terrorism. In this sense, Wells argued that terrorism could be perpetrated by dominant power. 6. Jodi Byrd makes a compelling case that at the heart of settler colonial common sense is that notion that historical time begins with the imperial power’s origin story, and this story requires the erasure of 121

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indigenous presence prior to that origin. The nation thereby creates a “terra nullus” to clear ground on which to construct its foundational fictions. In this way, we might think of the War on Terror’s “ground zero” as a settler colonial logic of indigenous removal coupled with a foundational fiction of national progress. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 7. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life Magazine no. 10, February 17, 1941. 8. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest no. 16, Summer 1989. 9. “Project for the New American Century,” Library of Congress, accessed December 3, 2019, www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0011283/. 10. See, for example, Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (New York: Verso Books, 2014); and Naomi Kline, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Picador Books, 2008). 11. Megan Dunn and James Walker, Union Membership in the United States, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2016, accessed December 3, 2019, www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-theunited-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf. 12. Prashad, Poorer Nations, 231. 13. “Facts: Global Inequality,” Inequality.org, accessed December 3, 2019, https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/#global-wealth-inequality. 14. “Facts: Global Inequality.” 15. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 67. 16. Evelyn Alsutany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U. S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 17. Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, 3rd ed. (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2014). 18. Moustafa Bayoumi, “The Race Is On: Muslims and Arabs in the American Imagination,” Middle East Research and Information Project, March 10, 2010, accessed May 1, 2020, http://merip.org/2010/03/the-race-

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is-on/. See also Bayoumi, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 19. There are many excellent studies of Islamophobia and anti– Arab American racism. See, for example, Kaled Baydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Erik Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America (New York: New York University Press, 2017); and Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremis, and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso Books, 2015). 20. Paul Gilroy, “Why Harry’s Disoriented about Empire,” The Guardian, January 17, 2005, accessed May 4, 2020, www.theguardian .com/uk/2005/jan/18/britishidentity.monarchy. 21. Brian Knowlton, “Terror in America / ‘We’re Going to Smoke Them Out’: President Airs His Anger,” New York Times, September 19, 2001, accessed April 29, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/news /terror-in-america-were-going-to-smoke-them-out-president-airs-hisanger.html. 22. Theresa Braine, “The Real Bowling Green Massacre,” Indian Country Today, February 24, 2017. 23. Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 24. “Journalists Killed,” Reporters without Borders, accessed December 3, 2019, https://rsf.org/en/journalists-killed. Not all of the journalists’ deaths reported here were due to the War on Terror.

chapter one. mourning in america 1. “Text: President George Bush Addresses the Nation,” Washington Post, September 20, 2001. 2. “Bush Addresses the Nation.” 3. “Bush Addresses the Nation.” 4. Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 1 (2003): 19. 5. Marita Sturken, “10 Years after September 11,” Social Science Research Council Essay Forum, accessed May 4, 2020, http://essays .ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/memorializing-absence/.

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6. US Senate Joint Resolution 23, “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” 107th Cong. (2001–2002), Congress.org, accessed December 3, 2019, www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/23. 7. Cited in Glenn Greenwald, “Barbara Lee’s Lone Vote on September 14, 2001, Was as Prescient as It Was Brave and Heroic,” The Intercept, September 11, 2016, accessed February 10, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2016/09/11/barbara-lees-lone-vote-on-sept-14–2001-was-asprescient-as-it-was-brave-and-heroic/. 8. Jeffrey Melnick, 9 / 11 Culture (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 9. Nina Baym, “Narratives of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 123–39. 10. Bruce Springsteen, “My City of Ruins,” on The Rising, Sony Legacy, 2002. 11. For an excellent discussion of Haitian refugees and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, see Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U. S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 12. Bob Marley, “Redemption Song,” on Bob Marley & the Wailers, Uprising, Island / Tough Gong, 1980. 13. Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 82–93. 14. Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 84. 15. Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 90. 16. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, reprint ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).

chapter two. privacy and security Portions of this chapter were previously published in Alex Lubin, “We Are All Israelis: The Politics of Colonial Comparisons,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 4 (2008): 671–90; and Lubin, “The Disappearing Frontiers of US Homeland Security: Mapping the Transit of Security across the US and Israel,” Jadaliyya, February 26, 2013, accessed December 8, 2019, www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28118/The-Disappearing-Frontiers-

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of-US-Homeland-Security-Mapping-the-Transit-of-Security-acrossthe-US-and-Israel. 1. Diala Shamas and Mermeen Arastu, Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims, accessed February 11, 2020, www.law.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/page-assets/academics/clinics /immigration/clear/Mapping-Muslims.pdf. 2. Shamas and Arastu, Mapping Muslims. Moustafa Bayoumi presents an excellent discussion of the lived realities of NYPD surveillance of Muslim Americans in his How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009). 3. “The Vice President Appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert,” Camp David, Maryland, September 16, 2001, George W. Bush Whitehouse Archive, accessed December 3, 2019, https:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches /speeches/vp20010916.html. 4. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438 (1928) (Louis Brandeis dissenting). 5. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, accessed December 3, 2019, https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/Foreign%20Intelligence %20Surveillance%20Act%20Of%201978.pdf. 6. The FISA court rejected more government applications in 2017 (twenty-six in total) than during any other one-year period in its history. See Andrew Blake, “FISA Court Denied More Surveillance Warrants in 2017 Than Any Year on Record,” Washington Times, April 26, 2018. 7. Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 8. On the state-sanctioned murder of Larry Casuse, see Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “ ‘No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers’: Bordertown Violence and Resistance to Settler Colonialism,” special issue, “Essentializing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,” Wicazo Sa Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 111–31. On the state-sanctioned murder of Fred Hampton, see Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, rev. ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2019).

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9. “Statement of U. S. Senator Russ Feingold on the Anti-Terrorism Bill from the Senate Floor, October 25, 2001,” www.senate.gove /~feingold/releases/01/10/102501at.html. 10. See Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019). See also Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U. S. Surveillance State (New York: Picador, 2015). 11. This is a linkage I elaborate upon in Lubin, “We Are All Israelis.” See also Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 12. Lubin, “We Are All Israelis,” 671. 13. Byrd, Transit of Empire. 14. Lubin, “Disappearing Frontiers of US Homeland Security.” 15. Cited in Lubin, “Disappearing Frontiers of US Homeland Security.” 16. Cited in ibid. 17. Cited in ibid. 18. Cited in ibid. 19. Cited in ibid. 20. Cited in ibid. 21. Cited in ibid. 22. Aileen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to ‘Defeat Pipeline Insurgenciesʼ,” The Intercept, May 27, 2017, accessed December 8, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-revealsecurity-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipelineinsurgencies/.

chapter three. liberal torture 1. Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney (2007; Velocity / Thinkfilm, 2008), DVD. 2. Lisa Hajjar, “The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings,” The Nation, December 16, 2004, accessed on May 4,

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2020, www.thenation.com/article/archive/cia-didnt-just-torture-itexperimented-human-beings/. 3. Lisa Hajjar, “CIA: KUBARK’s Very Long Shadow,” Aljazeera.com, August 6, 2012, accessed on May 4, 2020, www.aljazeera.com/indepth /opinion/2012/08/201285121033592843.html. 4. ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen High-Value Detainees in CIA Custody, February 2007, accessed December 9, 2019, www.nybooks .com/media/doc/2010/04/22/icrc-report.pdf. 5. Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program together with Foreword by Chairman Feinstein and Additional and Minority Views, December 9, 2014, accessed December 9, 2019, www.intelligence.senate.gov /sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf. 6. “Senator McCain’s Full Statement on the CIA Torture Report,” USA Today, December 9, 2014, accessed December 10, 2019, www .usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/09/john-mccain-statementcia-terror-report/20144015/. 7. John Yoo, “Applications of Treaties and Laws to al Quida and Taliban Detainees,” Office of the Deputy Assistant Attorney General, January 8, 2002. 8. White House memorandum, “Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees,” February 7, 2002 (declassified on February 7, 2012). 9. Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantanamo?”, American Quarterly 7, no. 3 (September 2005): 832–58. 10. Peter Walker, “Bradley Manning Trial: What We Know from the Leaked WikiLeaks Documents,” The Guardian, July 30, 2013. 11. Shane Kadidal, quoted in Matt Sledge, “Bradley Manning Uncovered U. S. Torture, Abuse, Soldiers Laughing as They Killed Innocent Civilians,” Huffington Post, August 8, 2013. 12. Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning’s Treatment Was Cruel and Inhuman, UN Torture Chief Rules,” The Guardian, March 12, 2012. 13. Tricia Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

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14. Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (2013; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2013), DVD. 15. Flint Taylor, “Homan Square Is Chicago’s New ‘House of Screams,’ ” The Guardian, April 13, 2016. 16. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

chapter four. extrajudicial assassination by drone 1. Clancy Chassay, “I Was Still Holding My Grandson’s Hand—The Rest Was Gone,” The Guardian, December 15, 2008, accessed December 10, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/16/afghanistan-talibanus-foreign-policy. 2. Chassay, “Still Holding My Grandsonʼs Hand.” See also Abdul Waheed Wafa and Mark McDonald, “Deadly U. S. Airstrike Said to Hit Afghan Wedding Party,” New York Times, November 5, 2008. 3. Arun Rath, “Trump Inherits Guantanamo’s Remaining Detainees,” National Public Radio, January 19, 2017, accessed December 10, 2019, www.npr.org/2017/01/19/510448989/trump-inherits-guantanamosremaining-detainees. 4. Scott Shane, “C. I. A. Is Disputed on Civilian Toll in Drone Strikes,” New York Times, August 11, 2011. 5. Barack Obama, “The New Way Forward—The President’s Address,” Obama Whitehouse Archives, December 1, 2009, accessed December 10, 2019, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009 /12/01/new-way-forward-presidents-address. 6. Hugh Gusterson, “Drone Warfare in Waziristan and New Military Humanism,” Current Anthropology 60, Suppl. 19 (February 2019): 77–86. 7. The Intercept, “The Drone Papers,” https://theintercept.com /drone-papers/. 8. Malik Jalal, “I’m on the Kill List: This Is What It Feels Like to Be Hunted by Drones,” The Independent, April 12, 2016.

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9. Jalal, “Iʼm on the Kill List.” 10. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013). 11. Spencer Ackerman, “US Cited Controversial Law in Decision to Kill American Citizen by Drone,” The Guardian, June 23, 2014, accessed December 10, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2014 /jun/23/us-justification-drone-killing-american-citizen-awlaki. 12. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Drone Warfare,” accessed December 10, 2019, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/dronewar/. For statistics on drone strikes, see also Peter Bergen, David Sterman, and Melissa Salyk-Virk, “Americaʼs Counterterrorism Wars,” NewAmerica.org, accessed December 10, 2019, www.newamerica.org/indepth/americas-counterterrorism-wars/. 13. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Drone Warfare.” These data are based on ranges of known strikes and casualties. I have used a round number of the higher-range number in my approximation. These numbers are changing regularly, and only present a snapshot at the time of data collection. 14. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Drone Warfare.” 15. Alexander Abad-Santos, “This 13-Year-Old Is Scared When the Sky Is Blue Because of Our Drones,” The Atlantic, October 29, 2013. 16. Hyacinth Mascarenhas, “ ‘I No Longer Love Blue Skies’: What Life Is Like under the Constant Threat of Drone Attack,” Salon, February 15, 2015, accessed December 19, 2019, www.salon.com/2015 /02/14/i_no_longer_love_blue_skies_what_life_is_like_under_the_ constant_threat_of_a_drone_attack_partner/. 17. See, for example, Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, eds., Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); and Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 18. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 75. 19. Sophia Saifi, “Not a ‘Bug Splat’: Artists Give Drone Victims a Face in Pakistan,” CNN, April 9, 2014, accessed December 10, 2019, www.cnn.com/2014/04/09/world/asia/pakistan-drones-not-a-bug-splat /index.html.

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20. Saks Afridi, “A Giant Installation That Targets Predator Drone Operators,” accessed December 10, 2019, www.saksafridi.com /notabugsplat. 21. See Waffaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and Resistance under the Gun (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008). 22. Steve Niva, “Trump’s Drone Surge,” Middle East Research and Information Project, no. 283 (Summer 2017), accessed December 10, 2019, https://merip.org/2018/02/trumps-drone-surge/. 23. Niva, “Trump’s Drone Surge.”

a conclusion without an ending 1. Craig Whitlock, “At War with the Truth: The Afghanistan Papers,” Washington Post, December 9, 2019. 2. “Costs of War,” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, accessed December 10, 2019, https://watson .brown.edu/costsofwar/. 3. Louis Uchitelle, “The U. S. Still Leans on the MilitaryIndustrial Complex,” New York Times, September 22, 2017, accessed February 24, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/business/economy /military-industrial-complex.html. 4. Face the Facts USA: A Project of the George Washington University, “Fed Contractors Profit from the War on Terror,” released March 1, 2013, accessed February 24, 2020, www.facethefactsusa.org /facts/fed-contractors-profit-war-terror/. 5. Catherine Lutz, “The War in Afghanistan May Not be Effective—But, for Some, It’s Profitable,” Pacific Standard, September 6, 2017, accessed February 24, 2020, https://psmag.com/news/the-warin-afghanistan-profitable-for-some. 6. Solomon Hughes, War on Terror, Inc. (New York: Verso Books, 2007), 1–3. 7. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline (New York: Verso Books, 2019). See also Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NODAPL Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

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8. See, for example, The Red Nation, “The Liberation of Palestine Represents an Alternative Path for Native Nations,” statement adopted September 6, 2019, accessed December 12, 2019, https://therednation .org/2019/09/07/the-liberation-of-palestine-represents-an-alternativepath-for-native-nations/. 9. Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 10. Suheir Hammad, “Of Refuge and Language,” cited on Democracy Now, accessed December 12, 2019, www.democracynow.org/2005 /9/26/palestinian_american_poet_suheir_hammad_of.

glossa ry

the american century A term coined in 1941 by Henry Luce, editor of Life Magazine, “The American Century” has come to be known as the era of American power in the Cold War era. Luce argued that America’s role in the world was as a benevolent superpower, seeking only to spread liberty and democracy to those in need. The American Century was a mythology about American power that presumed the inherent exceptionalism, greatness, and importance of the United States globally. The American Century ended, presumably, with the end of the Cold War. homeland The United States had never referred to itself as a “homeland” until after 9 / 11. The word conjures a “fatherland” as well as a place of origin from which a people has been unwillingly dispossessed. Amy Kaplan argues that the term’s use following 9 / 11 implies an inherent insecurity by invoking the nation as something that is already lost, or that can be lost. imperial melancholia A term inspired by Paul Gilroy to signify sadness and mourning in the present about a presumed imperial greatness that has been lost. Gilroy uses the term to connote ways through which British people long for the presumed glory days of

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empire as a means to romanticize a past that never was, as well as to blame those considered foreign to that imperial glory. I use the term to refer to the fantasized America that is presumed lost as a result of terrorism, an America based in a mythology, and one that never was. Imperial melancholia does important cultural work in the War on Terror to frame never-ending warfare as an attempt to return to some mythic past of pure, benevolent, and indispensable empire. islamophobia While the term would seem to refer to a “phobia,” or fear, in actuality Islamophobia is another term of anti-Muslim racism. Islamophobia has been at the core of Western cultural development, through the making of a world order based on the division of the globe into orient and occident. Although Muslims have been an integral part of America since its founding, Islamophobia has been present throughout American history, and became heightened especially during the Cold War, with US military engagement across the greater Middle East and geopolitical conflicts over oil. lawfare Lawfare can refer to a state’s attempt to use law to justify its power or by vulnerable populations to use law to fight state power. In this book I have used lawfare to refer to the ways that revisions to long-standing norms about enhanced interrogations and waterboarding were justified via legal interpretations about executive authority and the rightlessness of terrorists. Lawfare connotes ways that liberal notions of the rule of law have been deployed to justify practices such as torture and expansion of the executive branch’s war powers. terrorism The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as follows: “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” As a legal category, terrorism names the violence of nonstate actors, targeting a state or civilians in pursuit of a political goal. As noted throughout this book, state violence, which distributes terror globally, is not regarded as terrorism.

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Hence, the category “terrorism” is a loaded one, defining certain forms of violence as primitive or savage, and other forms of violence as normative and necessary. torture The United Nations (UN) identifies three core elements of torture: (1) the intentional infliction of mental or physical pain; (2) inflicted by a public official; (3) for a specific purpose. The UN Convention against Torture was enacted in 1984. A key provision of the UN Convention is the idea of “universal jurisdiction,” which means that any party to the convention has standing to prosecute violations of the torture conventions. The United States is a signatory to the UN Convention against Torture, which means that those who participated in torture during the War on Terror could be prosecuted, an argument pushed by Human Rights Watch, among others. whistleblower A whistleblower is someone working within a government or company who, in the course of their work, publicly (but usually anonymously) calls out illegal or unethical behavior. Most governments and companies explicitly protect whistleblowing, as it is understood as a valuable check on government and corporate power. Whistleblowing laws protect the rights of employees to alert third parties to illegal practices, without fear of retaliation or retribution. In this book I have focused on whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, as well as those unnamed in the Drone Papers and Afghanistan Papers, who have leaked information in the service of the public good. One aspect of the War on Terror has been the unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers, who no longer enjoy the protections afforded by whistleblowing laws.

k ey figur es

wafaa bilal An Iraqi American artist who has curated several arts projects to comment on, and criticize, the Islamophobic violence targeting the greater Middle East in the name of the War on Terror. In this book I focused on Bilal’s 2007 exhibit, “Domestic Tension.” Bilal’s website is http://wafaabilal.com. dick cheney The vice president of the United States in the Bush administration, and largely credited as the mastermind of the War on Terror. Cheney was fond of preparing for doomsday scenarios, such as 9 / 11, long before 2001. Cheney imagined the possibilities for a war on terror while he was a contributor to the Project for a New American Century and while he was CEO of Halliburton. Cheney had hoped to invade Iraq well before 9 / 11. barbara lee The US representative for California’s 13th congressional district, primarily encompassing Oakland. Lee worked on Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign for president and volunteered with the Black Panther Party. In 2001 Lee was the only congressperson to oppose the Authorization for Use of Military Force that granted the Bush administration unchecked power to fight a war on terror.

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Key Figures

chelsea manning A solider in the War on Terror who became a whistleblower when she encountered evidence of the US military’s misdeeds in Iraq and maltreatment of detainees whom the government knew were likely innocent. Manning was courtmartialed in 2013 and sentenced to prison. While in prison, Manning’s gender transition to female was ignored and she was denied access to a woman’s prison and to hormone treatment. Moreover, Manning faced torture-like conditions, according to a UN report. Manning’s sentence was commuted by President Obama after seven years of imprisonment. In 2018 Manning was arrested again for failure to testify in a trial against WikiLeaks. She is imprisoned at the time of this writing. edward snowden Contracted by the National Security Agency while working as an analyst for Booz, Allen, Hamilton. In the course of his work, Snowden realized that the US government’s surveillance capacities included spying on American citizens, global business leaders, and foreign heads of state, including allies. Snowden released evidence of unwarranted government surveillance to journalists at several newspapers. In order to evade arrest and imprisonment, Snowden fled to Russia. john yoo A law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. During the Bush / Cheney administration, Yoo worked in the Office of Legal Counsel and helped draft what would come to be known as the “torture memos” justifying enhanced interrogations and waterboarding. Yoo was instrumental in advocating for expansive executive powers and the rightlessness of suspected terrorists.

selected bibliogr a phy

Alsutany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9 / 11. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Bayoumi, Moustafa. This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Beydoun, Khaled A. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Grewal, Inderpal. Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in TwentyFirst-Century America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Hajjar, Lisa. Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights. New York: Routledge, 2012. Kapadia, Ronak. Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Kaplan, Amy. Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Khalili, Laleh. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Kundnani, Arun. The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. New York: Verso Books, 2015. Maira, Sunaina. The 9 / 11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

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Selected Bibliography

McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Melnick, Jeffrey. 9 / 11 Culture. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Parks, Lisa, and Caren Kaplan, eds. Life in the Age of Drone Warfare. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Singh, Nikhil. Race and America’s Long War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

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