How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  49 Ibuka set up shop: My account of Sony is from Nick Lyons, The Sony Vision (New York, 1976); Akio Morita, From a 500-Dollar Company to a Global Corporation (Pittsburgh, 1985); Morita, Made in Japan; John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life (Boston, 1999); and Genryu, the 50th-anniversary history of Sony, translated and abbreviated at sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory.

  50 “Yankee Alley”: Nathan, Sony, 15.

  51 “The Americans had brought”: Morita, Made in Japan, 51.

  52 stocked a library: Hyungsub Choi, “Manufacturing Knowledge in Transit: Technical Practice, Organizational Change, and the Rise of the Semiconductor Industry in the United States and Japan, 1948–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins, 2007), 109–10. Morita writes that Sony cooked “oxalic ferrite” to make ferric oxide (Made in Japan, 56). This seems to be a slightly garbled translation of ferrous oxalate.

  53 “could be recognized”: Morita, Made in Japan, 70.

  54 “thought of ourselves”: Ibid.

  55 “We were little boys”: Morita, 500-Dollar Company, 223.

  56 “Sony Boy”: Sony Boy still would have been read in Japan as Japanese.

  57 “like priceless art”: Spitz, Beatles, 35.

  58 The trade balance: Aaron Forsberg, America and the Japanese Miracle: The Cold War Context of Japan’s Postwar Economic Revival, 1950–60 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 10.

  59 “colonial” … “We ship her”: Jerry Brown, quoted in M. J. Heale, “Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980–1993,” Journal of American Studies 43 (2009): 23. See also Andrew C. McKevitt, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017).

  60 closed forty assembly plants: Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT, 2010), 252–59.

  61 “I’m proud”: Gabor, Man Who Discovered Quality, 126.

  62 “Imagine, a few years”: Quoted in Andrea Chronister, “Japan-Bashing: How Propaganda Shapes Americans’ Perceptions of the Japanese” (M.A. thesis, Lehigh University, 1992), 74.

  63 Trump on television: The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC, April 25, 1988. Trump’s complaints extended to the nations of the Persian Gulf, too.

  64 “It’s because of you”: Who Killed Vincent Chin?, dir. Christine Choy (Film News Now Foundation, 1987).

  65 Time started reporting: Time, May 10, 1971.

  66 “Let’s become a Japan”: Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: The New U.S.–Japan Relations (Ann Arbor, MI, 1989), 36. Translation published without Morita’s permission.

  22. THE WAR OF POINTS

  1 “few mud huts”: Lloyd Hamilton, 1934, quoted in Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (London, 2009), 54.

  2 “friendly and energetic”: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York, 2007), 65.

  3 Awadh bin Laden: In my account of the Bin Laden family, I’ve leaned heavily on Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York, 2008). Details from that book unless otherwise cited.

  4 “an immense aircraft”: Ibid., 42.

  5 consulate at Dhahran: Parker T. Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States: Birth of a Security Partnership (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 31–32, 85.

  6 largest concentration: Vitalis, America’s Kingdom, 34.

  7 “just like a bit of U.S.A.”: Mary Eddy, 1954, quoted in ibid., 80.

  8 Voice of the Arabs: Hart, Saudi Arabia and the U.S., 82–85.

  9 “It’ll be over”: Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ, 2011), 199.

  10 “finally sow shit”: Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (London, 2001), 69.

  11 hundred tons of heavy construction equipment … tunnels, etc.: Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, trans. James Howarth (London, 2005), 48; Wright, Looming Tower, 114.

  12 “The myth of the superpower”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 48.

  13 Within four hours: Richard P. Hallion, Storm over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, DC, 1992), 134.

  14 “There are no caves,” etc.: Dialogue reported in Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York, 2004), 223.

  15 “After the danger” … “I would hope so”: Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York, 1991), 270.

  16 “Come with all” … “Come as fast”: Wright, Looming Tower, 157.

  17 “everything aloft”: Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York, 1995), 468.

  18 ten times the size of the Berlin Airlift: Hallion, Storm over Iraq, 138.

  19 “You could have walked”: Ibid., 137.

  20 Iraq had seized Kuwait: Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Revolution in Warfare?: Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis, MD, 1995), 7–9.

  21 fourth largest … sixth largest: Hallion, Storm over Iraq, 128.

  22 “about getting kicked”: H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (New York, 1992), 332.

  23 triumph through airpower: On airpower in Vietnam and Desert Storm, I’ve been guided by Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA, 2006), chaps. 6–7.

  24 5 million tons … 250 pounds: Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, 2015), 229.

  25 Thanh Hóa Bridge: Walter J. Boyne, “Breaking the Dragon’s Jaw,” Air Force Magazine, August 2011, 60.

  26 Operation Desert Storm: My account is from Hallion, Storm over Iraq; Michael J. Mazarr, Don M. Snider, and James A. Blackwell Jr., Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned (Boulder, CO, 1993); and Benjamin S. Lambeth, “Air Power, Space Power, and Geography,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (1999): 63–82.

  27 “You pick precisely”: Mazarr et al., Desert Storm, 96.

  28 GPS-guided charge: On the use of GPS, see Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare (Annapolis, MD, 2002), chap. 5.

  29 hadn’t even been necessary: Thomas Mahnken and Barry D. Watts, “What the Gulf War Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About the Future of Warfare,” International Security 22 (1997): 160–61.

  30 “revolution in military affairs”: Useful overviews of the RMA are Eliot A. Cohen, “A Revolution in Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 75 (1996): 37–54, and Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (London, 2000).

  31 “targets and non-targets,” etc.: Quoted in Rip and Hasik, Precision Revolution, 131. I’ve been guided in my understanding of this by William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016), chap. 6.

  32 a touchy subject: Powell, American Journey, 474; Schwarzkopf, Doesn’t Take a Hero, 332–35.

  33 “inadvertently pissed”: Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York, 2006), 195.

  34 Great efforts were taken: Powell, American Journey, 474; Schwarzkopf, Doesn’t Take a Hero, 332.

  35 “We had to avoid”: Schwarzkopf, Doesn’t Take a Hero, 355.

  36 For Osama bin Laden: On Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the road to 9/11, I’ve relied especially on Bergen, Holy War, Inc.; Coll, Ghost Wars; The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Washington, DC, 2004); and Wright, Looming Tower.

  37 “It is unconscionable”: Wright, Looming Tower, 209–10.

  38 “turning the Arabian Peninsula”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 16.

  39 It’s genuinely unclear: The 9/11 Commission Report judged the bombing to be “principally” the work of Saudi Hezbollah but mentioned “signs that al Qaeda played some role” (60).

  40 “You can see,” etc.: Rowa
n Scarborough, “Air Force Barracks Is Built by Bin Laden’s Family Firm,” Washington Times, September 15, 1998.

  41 first commercially available satellite phones: Coll, Bin Ladens, 467.

  42 “several tens of thousands”: Werner Daum, “Universalism and the West,” Harvard International Review, Summer 2001, 19. Similar estimates are discussed in Noam Chomsky, 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (New York, 2011), 79–80.

  43 “100,000 new fanatics”: “Punish and Be Damned,” The Economist, August 27, 1998, 16.

  44 “a military base” … “It wasn’t a children’s school”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 119.

  45 “To us, Afghanistan”: 9/11 Commission Report, 340.

  46 “Your forces” … “You spread” … “Is there a worse”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 163, 167.

  47 “rid the world”: “Bush Vows to Rid the World of ‘Evil-Doers,’” CNN, September 16, 2001, edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism.

  48 “I just don’t think”: Presidential Debate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, October 11, 2001, APP.

  49 Rumsfeld estimated: Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York, 2011), 400.

  50 122 U.S. service members: Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars (New York, 2011), 136.

  51 “very new type” … “We’ll have to”: “Text: Pentagon Briefing on Military Response to Terrorist Attacks,” Washington Post, September 18, 2001.

  52 metaphor of the network: A helpful exploration is Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis, 2009).

  53 “Taliban-plinking”: Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, CA, 2005), 95–96.

  54 “The planes” … “The American forces”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 182.

  55 Drones have killed: Figures discussed in Chris Woods, “Understanding the Gulf Between Public and U.S. Government Estimates of Civilian Casualties in Covert Drone Strikes,” in Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict: Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications, ed. David Cortright, Rachel Fairhurst, and Kristen Wall (Chicago, 2015), 186. An excellent guide to drones is Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (New York, 2015).

  56 “We’re not a colonial”: “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Al Jazeera,” February 25, 2003, www.digitaljournal.com/article/34851.

  57 “Wizard of Oz moment”: Quoted in Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 141.

  58 “We need to create”: Max Boot, “Washington Needs a Colonial Office,” Financial Times, July 3, 2003.

  59 “a surprisingly inept”: Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York, 2004), 2.

  60 “We’re a liberating power”: “Text of President Bush’s Press Conference,” NYT, April 13, 2004.

  61 “Green Zone”: Rajiv Chandrasekeran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York, 2006).

  62 “We covet no one’s”: Rumsfeld, briefing, November 16, 2001, avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/dod_brief93.asp.

  63 “If we were a true empire”: Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler, “Cheney Calls for More Unity in Fight Against Terrorism,” NYT, January 25, 2004.

  64 “the presence and activities”: Donald H. Rumsfeld, “Positioning Our Military for a Rapidly Changing World,” Seattle Times, September 24, 2004.

  65 kicked out of place after place: On U.S. base closures, see Sasha Davis, The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA, 2015). On foreign base closures, see Stacie L. Pettyjohn and Jennifer Kavanaugh, Access Granted: Political Challenges to the U.S. Overseas Military Presence, 1945–2014 (Santa Monica, CA, 2016).

  66 Hatoyama: Yuko Kawato, Protests Against U.S. Military Base Policy in Asia: Persuasion and Its Limits (Stanford, CA, 2015), chap. 2.

  67 Many on Guam saw in the base expansion: Frank Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån: Chamorro Nationalism, Regional Economic Integration and US Defence Interests Shape Guam’s Recent History,” Journal of Pacific History 46 (2011): 373.

  68 activists put up determined resistance: Tiara Rose Na‘puti, “Charting Contemporary Chamoru Activism: Anti-Militarization and Social Movements in Guåhan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2013).

  69 “This is old-school”: Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån,” 373.

  70 “they are a possession,” etc.: Lieutenant Colonel Douglas, quoted in Ronald Stade, Pacific Passages: World Culture and Local Politics in Guam (Stockholm, 1998), 192–93.

  71 “the dark side” … “It’s going to be vital”: Meet the Press, NBC, September 16, 2001.

  72 those laws didn’t hold: An important overview: Kal Raustiala, Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?: The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (New York, 2009), chap. 7.

  73 “They are outsourcing”: Maher Arar, quoted in Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York, 2008), 133. See 108–109 for estimates of the scope of extraordinary rendition. On the CIA’s private fleet, see Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (New York, 2006).

  74 “black sites”: A key source is Dana Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” Washington Post, November 2, 2005.

  75 a small handful: Despite the prominent controversy, for years only three detainees were known to have been waterboarded. But in 2012 Human Rights Watch interviewed two detainees rendered to Libya who offered credible reports of water torture. In 2014 the Senate Intelligence Committee released a redacted report referring to waterboarding paraphernalia stored at an Afghan detention site that was not a location the CIA had used for the three detainees. See Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya (Washington, DC, 2012); 51; Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, Senate Report 113–288, December 9, 2014, 51n245.

  76 Tinian, Wake, and Midway: Simon Reid-Henry, “Exceptional Sovereignty?: Guantánamo Bay and the Re-Colonial Present,” Antipode 39 (2007): 629.

  77 “foreign territory, not subject”: Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, “Possible Habeas Jurisdiction over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” December 28, 2001, in The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joseph L. Dratel (New York, 2005), 37. A useful discussion of Guantánamo Bay as imperial history is Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo?,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 831–58.

  78 “Strawberry Fields”: Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York, 2013), 17.

  79 “fully American enclave,” etc.: Amended Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, Rasulv. Bush, February 19, 2002, in The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joseph L. Dratel (New York, 2008), 21.

  80 “this lease”: Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466, 487 (2004) (Kennedy, J., concurring).

  CONCLUSION: ENDURING EMPIRE

  1 huge garment-manufacturing center: Behind the Labels: Garment Workers on U.S. Saipan, dir. Tessa Lessin (Oxygen, 2001); John Ydstie, “The Abramoff-DeLay-Mariana Islands Connection,” NPR: Weekend Edition, June 17, 2006; Rebecca Clarren, “Paradise Lost: Greed, Sex Slavery, Forced Abortions and Right-Wing Moralists,” Ms., Spring 2006, www.msmagazine.com/spring2006/paradise_full.asp.

  2 Congress sought to close it: Lessin, Behind the Labels; Clarren, “Paradise Lost.”

  3 He offered junkets: Jack Abramoff, Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist (Washington, DC, 2011), 77.

  4 The visitors enjoyed: Clarren, “Paradise Lost”; John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (New York, 2007), 182; 20/20, ABC News, May 24, 1999.

  5 “one of the grand constitutional�
�: Abramoff, Capitol Punishment, 125.

  6 “You are a shining light” … “You represent”: 20/20, ABC News, May 24, 1999.

  7 “a perfect petri dish” … “It’s like my”: Juliet Eilperin, “A ‘Petri Dish’ in the Pacific,” Washington Post, June 26, 2000.

  8 “The Man Who Bought”: Time, cover, January 8, 2006.

  9 “my hangman”: Abramoff, Capitol Punishment, 175.

  10 “out of the limits”: Citizenship Act of 1934, 48 Stat. 797.

  11 “the citizenship of persons”: House Report 75–1303, quoted in Gabriel J. Chin, “Why Senator John McCain Cannot Be President: Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship,” Michigan Law Review First Impressions 107 (2008), 7.

  12 “eleven months and”: Ibid.

  13 Palin made no secret: Tom Kizzia, “Yup’ik Ties Give Palins Unique Alaska Connection,” Seattle Times, October 23, 2008.

  14 member of the Alaskan Independence Party: Kate Zernike, “A Palin Joined Alaskan Third Party, Just Not Sarah Palin,” NYT, September 3, 2008.

  15 “Alaska was no different,” etc.: Lynette Clark, interviewed in Lisa Karpova, “Alaska Independence Movement,” Pravda, April 20, 2008, www.pravdareport.com/world/americas/20-04-2008/104960-alaskaindep-0.

  16 “Your party plays,” etc.: Sarah Palin, Address to the Alaskan Independence Party Convention, 2008, youtu.be/ZwvPNXYrIyI.

  17 “very strong weakness,” etc.: Mark Penn, “Weekly Strategic Review on Hillary Clinton for President Campaign,” March 19, 2007, posted at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/08/penn-strategy-memo-march-19-2008/37952.

  18 “near staff revolt”: Kyle Cheney, “No, Clinton Didn’t Start the Birther Thing. This Guy Did,” Politico, September 16, 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/09/birthe-movement-founder-trump-clinton-228304.

  19 They circulated an anonymous email: John Avlon, Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama (New York, 2014), 204–207.

  20 “I think there are questions”: Gabriel Winant, “The Birthers in Congress,” Salon, July 28, 2009, www.salon.com/2009/07/28/birther_enablers.