Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Exposed in the summer of 2004 as uprisings exploded across Iraq, the brutality of Abu Ghraib resulted in the first instance of the Bush administration and the Security State conceding error. Except the responsibility wasn’t theirs: it belonged to junior enlisted personnel acting like what a Pentagon investigation called “ ‘Animal House’ on the night shift.” A series of Pentagon reports sought to portray the Abu Ghraib abuse as a departure from what went on at the black sites and Guantanamo. “No policy, directive or doctrine directly or indirectly caused violent or sexual abuse. In these cases, Soldiers knew they were violating the approved techniques and procedures,” read one. A former defense secretary, James Schlesinger, lamented that such tortures “migrated” from Guantanamo, a formulation that suggested animal compulsion rather than deliberate decisions taken by men like Rumsfeld, Guantanamo commander Geoffrey Miller, and Sanchez. If Rumsfeld resigned over the scandal, Schlesinger said, it would be “a boon for all of America’s enemies.”

  The brutality at Abu Ghraib in some measure provided release for the frustrations of a war that did not unfold as its architects had promised. Ian Fishback, a company commander in Iraq, wrote to Senator John McCain—a fervent advocate of the War on Terror and the Iraq occupation as well as a survivor of torture in Vietnamese captivity—pleading for a ban on military torture. Alabama’s Senator Sessions implied Fishback was slandering the military: “Captain Fishback said he had seen at least one interrogation where prisoners were being abused. Now I don’t know what abused means. I’m a former prosecutor. What does ‘abused’ mean?” Sessions would have been appointed as a federal judge had colleagues not come forward with accounts of his racism. These included the prosecution of three civil rights workers, including a onetime Martin Luther King deputy, for organizing Black Alabamans.

  McCain immediately demanded Sessions deliver an “abject and deep apology” to Fishback. Affecting innocence, Sessions insisted that all he had done was read Fishback’s account in The New York Times. It was the Senate’s sanctimonious, slanderous opponents of so-called torture who owed the military an apology, he continued. “Those in this Senate who have accused up and down members of the chain of command of the United States Army, the United States Marines, the Department of Defense of being—promoting policies to abuse prisoners, they ought to think about whether they should apologize,” Sessions fumed.

  Locked inside the unreality it created to invade Iraq, the Bush administration chose to compound the lies to avoid acknowledging the disaster it had unleashed. It insisted there was no substantial resistance from Iraqis. It called Iraqi insurgents “anti-Iraqi forces” and sought to attribute the insurgency to Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein dead-enders. Rumsfeld, increasingly an object of derision from U.S. troops whose lives he had treated so cavalierly, accused reporters of manufacturing narratives of failure and his critics of lacking sufficient faith in America. “The only way this effort could fail is if people were to be persuaded that the cause is lost or that it’s not worth the pain, or if those who seem to measure progress in Iraq against a more perfect world convince others to throw in the towel,” he said.

  The Democratic senator who on 9/12 had pronounced himself sanguine about killing Muslim civilians, Zell Miller, gave a venomous speech at Bush’s renomination convention excoriating liberals for the calumny of accurately characterizing the American presence in Iraq: “Today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.” As the insurgency coalesced into a civil war in 2005, with Shiite parties empowered by the United States operating torture chambers out of the Interior Ministry, Cheney insisted the resistance was in its “last throes.” When no weapons of mass destruction were found, Bush was left pleading that there was no choice but to continue with a mission civilisatrice. “Iraq will either be a peaceful democratic country or it will again be a source of violence, a haven for terror and a threat to America and to the world,” he said in April 2004.

  But Iraq’s slide into chaos rendered conservatives dissatisfied with the president’s rhetoric of obligation. American exceptionalism could never permit them to embrace withdrawal, but there was another option. “I’d like to see one other thing in Iraq,” wrote Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard after visiting Baghdad in April 2004, “an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.” Six months later epidemiologists from the British publication The Lancet estimated that the war and its effects had killed at least one hundred thousand Iraqis.

  The Iraq war had been glorious; the fault lay with the Iraqis. Some in the Security State agreed. A military source told Newsweek that the Sunni population “is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists . . . we have to change that equation.” By 2006 the cable news war promoter Tucker Carlson announced that he had “zero sympathy” for Iraqis, who “don’t use toilet paper or forks,” thereby demonstrating to Carlson their cultural inferiority. “They can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view,” Carlson said. Neocon defense theorist Danielle Pletka later lamented the Iraqis’ “political immaturity” and “embrace [of] sect and tribe over ideas.” Evangelicals were reaching a similar conclusion after a war they had embraced in part to convert Muslims unleashed an orgy of violence that endangered missionaries and Iraqi Christians.

  There were other villains to pursue closer to home: the liberal media undermining the War on Terror. In 2005 the military acknowledged multiple incidences of desecration of the Koran—though it preferred to describe them as “mishandling”—at Guantanamo. One of the confirmed desecrations was what The Washington Post described as a “two-word obscenity” scribbled in a Koran; the military claimed a detainee might have written it. The Wall Street Journal pronounced the details “unhorrifying” and the “hullabaloo” around the Koran desecrations as “all about repudiating the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror.” Barnes, speaking on Fox News, counteraccused the Muslim world: “Why is it that Muslim terrorists can bomb a mosque in Pakistan and there are not demonstrations anywhere, and yet they think some Koran has been mishandled and there are these demonstrations? I mean, that is spectacular hypocrisy, which shows you how politically bizarre a lot of the Muslim world is.” When The New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau exposed part of the NSA’s STELLARWIND bulk surveillance, an army captain accused them of “gravely endanger[ing] the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here.” The next time the captain, Tom Cotton, heard an explosion, he said, “I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.”

  Bush never abandoned his war. But in recognition of the political threat that anger over it gave rise to, he empaneled a commission to blame the CIA. The Robb-Silberman Commission, whose mandate focused exclusively on WMD intelligence failures, urged politicians to put greater pressure on the Security State. The intelligence community “will not do its best unless it is pressed by policymakers—sometimes to the point of discomfort,” it advised. To apply the necessary force, Bush replaced Tenet with House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Goss, a former CIA operations officer. Goss brought in a coterie of loyalists whom the agency considered political commissars. Alumni leaked damaging stories about Goss’s deputies, whom they christened the “Gosslings” and sometimes “Hill Pukes,” and about highly regarded agency counterterrorism veterans resigning. Goss’s GOP replacement on the House committee, Representative Pete Hoekstra, accused intelligence leakers in 2006 of trying to sabotage Bush “or help al Qaeda, or perhaps both.” Adding injury to insult was Congress’s 2004 decision to strip the CIA of its centrality within the intelligence community. It created a new position, a director of national intelligence (DNI), as a kind of coordinator, without budgetary authority, atop the agencies. Beholden to none of them, the DNI was in a stronger posit
ion to be obligated to the president appointing him or her.

  With domestic dissatisfaction over the situation in Iraq intensifying, Bush redefined the War on Terror as something more explicitly anti-Islamic. It was his key to arguing that Americans had to keep fighting, no matter how horrifying what the Pentagon now called the “Long War” became. While Bush said the enemy was “very different from the religion of Islam,” it was motivated by a “clear and focused ideology” that he compared to communism, inflating by implication the scale of purchase this ideology had. But the president was not prepared to give it a specific name—only to nod to those on the right who had chafed at his euphemism and longed for him to identify the enemy as Islamic. “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism. Others militant jihadism. Still others Islamofascism,” Bush declared. After creating the conditions for Zarqawi to eclipse bin Laden in bloodshed, Bush dismissed as “an excuse” any suggestion that American bellicosity had spurred an appetite for this ideology. As Ashcroft had done four years earlier with his roundups, Bush demanded that “all responsible Islamic leaders” denounce this radicalism, which he said was different from their religion, just not different enough. Bush’s speech was simultaneously an assertion, providing assurance to conservatives, of both Muslim guilt and American innocence.

  The right rejoiced. One of Bush’s former security aides, Richard Falkenrath, considered the president’s “more sophisticated” depiction of what he called “radical Islam . . . closer to the truth” about the post-9/11 enemy. One of his political strategists, Dan Bartlett, hailed Bush’s speech as a matter of national necessity. “If we don’t take the enemy seriously, it’s impossible for us to defeat them,” he told MSNBC. The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce of California, “welcome[d] the president’s move from the generic ‘war on terrorism’ to the more specific ‘Islamic radicalism,’ ” and considered a “long struggle” against it unavoidable. Bay Buchanan, Pat’s sister and a conservative columnist, hailed on CNN that “up to now it’s war on terrorists, we’re after terrorists. And now he actually called it, it was radical Islam.” On Fox, Barnes similarly exulted that “the president over and over again used the word ‘Islamic.’ It’s Islamic radicalism, or it’s Islamofascism, and so on.” Bush and his aides “don’t explain what it is because they said their hands are bound by the rules of political correctness and they can’t say it’s an offshoot of Islam that’s gone crazy, which is exactly what it is,” observed Tucker Carlson, by then an MSNBC host.

  Stanley McChrystal, by this time leading JSOC and hunting Zarqawi, later reflected that Islam was little more than a “unifying rationale” for the jihadists, a solution to a fundamentally geopolitical phenomenon. “It wasn’t why they fought the fight,” he said. “The Islamic world felt like it had gotten dealt a bad hand from the West. It felt like the autocratic regimes supported by the West—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and whatnot—were illegitimate. So there was this pent-up rage and frustration; part of it was economic and part of it was social. Islam gave them a unifying connection, like soldiers in any war, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in the Crusades. But I don’t think that was what we were fighting, and I don’t think it was why they were fighting.”

  Bush’s redefinition did little to arrest the deterioration of his political power. The War on Terror saved Republicans in the midterm elections of 2002; the war in Iraq doomed them in 2006. Conservatives were the last to abandon their leader, but Bush’s push for an immigration reform that would have legalized millions of undocumented immigrants alienated many. The president praised “the vast majority of illegal immigrants [as] decent people,” and decried militarizing the southern border even as he and border state governors sent thousands of national guardsmen to it. “A few steps, including calling out the National Guard, significant though they may be, will not change the pervasive illegality of our current immigration system,” lamented Sessions, who preferred increasing “short-term detention” and “expanding border fencing and barriers.” The time had come to look past Bush, toward a new leader of the Long War. If even the Islam-is-peace president eventually, if tentatively, recognized the Islamic nature of the enemy, the next leader could do no less.

  But the bleeding ulcer of Iraq was rapidly draining conservatives of the hold on power they thought the Long War would guarantee. They now faced the prospect that the liberals could control both the War on Terror and, as important, the wartime narrative.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LIBERAL COMPLICITY IN THE WAR ON TERROR

  2001–2008

  As the FBI began rounding up Muslims and immigrants in the fall of 2001, a powerful Democrat worried that the government’s domestic counterterrorism efforts were inefficient.

  The organizational chart of security-adjacent functions displayed an incoherent patchwork of responsibilities. Airport security was the domain of the Department of Transportation. Confronting threats to and from shipping belonged to both Treasury Department customs inspectors and the Coast Guard. Bush brought Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge into the White House to impose some degree of order, but the federal bureaucracy was too intractable, cabinet secretaries too powerful against a mere White House aide, and the stakes too high. “Governor Ridge obviously has the confidence of the president and our support,” stated Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrats’ 2000 vice-presidential nominee. “I don’t think he’s been given all the tools he needs to get this job done.”

  Lieberman’s concerns had nothing to say on behalf of the hundreds locked within the Metropolitan Detention Center. But he and his sober-minded colleagues in both parties could not abide the organizational chaos within domestic counterterrorism. Before 9/11 no one referred to American territory as the “homeland.” The term, ironically, sounded foreign to American ears, uncomfortably echoing the claimed spiritual connection between a birthplace and its people, which was central to European nationalisms. Lieberman nevertheless introduced in October 2001 a Senate bill to create a Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Whatever its name, the concept had excellent technocratic credentials. The spring before the attacks, a bipartisan panel of two former centrist senators, Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, had recommended precisely this consolidation of domestic security functions. Characteristically, Lieberman worked alongside a centrist Republican, Arlen Specter, as serious people in Washington understood that bipartisanship was the way to change important things.

  Bush wasn’t convinced. Lieberman’s proposed new cabinet department was itself unwieldy, as it cobbled together agencies with different missions and internal cultures into an entity with a $38 billion budget and the loosely defined mandate of preventing terrorist attacks. Lieberman persisted, calling for “bold organizational change.” Bush, checkmated by his own War on Terror logic, finally acquiesced in June, bringing aboard congressional Republicans. Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, boasted that Democrats had supported creating the new department “before it was cool.”

  There was Democratic dissent over the Department of Homeland Security. Although Lieberman had reached the highest echelons of the party, he was distrusted by its progressive wing. House Democrats rejected DHS by wide margins. But only nine Senate Democrats voted against it. Senator Russ Feingold, who had resisted the PATRIOT Act, warned that the new department would weaken “protections against unwarranted government intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans.” Voices like his became peripheral within the party after 9/11, while voices like Lieberman’s became central.

  By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Democratic Party believed the substantial and unequally distributed wealth created during Bill Clinton’s presidency vindicated its decision to marginalize its left wing. Lacking firm ideological commitments after generations of loosening its ties to labor, increasingly divorced from the material conditions of the vast majority of Americans, and terrified of being on the wrong side of security issues, Democrats compensated with technoc
racy and institutionalism. No one, in an atmosphere of fear over the possibility of a radiological bomb being transported in a suitcase, could object to increasing port inspections of shipping containers. DHS also wasn’t involved in foreign policy, and so would avoid provoking battles over war and peace that exposed divides in the Democratic Party. And DHS was unavoidably politically advantageous in a country rallying around Bush, even when the president stripped out union protections for the hundreds of thousands of federal workers within the new department, endangering a Democratic constituency.

  All this rationality and opportunity concealed a radical shift that lay at the heart of the Department of Homeland Security. A massive government apparatus devoted to counterterrorism was now in control of immigration. During the twentieth century, the government had placed enforcement of its immigration policies within the departments of Treasury, Commerce, and then Justice, snapshots of how different generations understood the purpose of immigration. Those agencies variously withstood and reflected severe immigration panics in American history, including a nativist groundswell in the 1920s and a backlash to the relaxation of immigration restrictions in the 1960s. They reflected a consensus, however strained it often was, that immigration might be a contentious issue, but it was not a security threat. But Lieberman, his centrist Democratic and Republican colleagues, and the experts they consulted viewed immigration, a cornerstone of American identity, through the prism of terrorism.

  To DHS’s advocates, doing so was practical: the hijackers had exposed the fact that nineteen men without criminal records could easily enter the country, as would be inevitable in an open society. Republicans, taking an opportunity to exploit 9/11 for their preexisting antipathy to nonwhite immigration, portrayed American openness as a risk. Democrats, in that atmosphere, portrayed it as a challenge that sensible people could rationally address. “The real importance of this bill, which you should be commended for, is to tackle the problem of the border, which, as we’ve heard before, has been long ignored,” the Brookings Institution’s centrist governance studies expert Elaine Kamarck testified to Lieberman’s committee in April 2002. “Let me point out that these problems of the border are not new, but until September 11 there was never the sense of urgency to overcome all the bureaucratic intransigence to this.” Some among them understood the bill’s potential implications. “We have five thousand unaccompanied alien children a year. Do they belong in a Department of Homeland Security? I don’t think so,” California senator Dianne Feinstein said that June, five months before voting to create the department.