Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  The first DHS official in charge of what was called the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was a former New York federal prosecutor experienced in terrorism cases. Not only did Michael Garcia defend the post-9/11 Muslim immigrant roundups, he suggested baselessly that they prevented further terrorism. It was an “exercise in disruption,” Garcia told Ted Kennedy, one of the few Senate Democrats to reject DHS. “It’s hard to disprove a connection between a disruptive exercise and the fact that you did not have follow-up attacks.”

  The retooled Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a series of raids—not on suspected terror cells, but on businesses employing undocumented immigrants. In 2005, it raided thirteen hundred businesses. In 2006, it tripled its pace to forty-four hundred. That year, ICE began a years-long, nationwide roundup, Operation Return to Sender, which arrested twenty-three thousand people at work and even from their homes. Few of those seized had any criminal record. Under cover of homeland security, ICE “receiv[ed] millions [in] congressional funds to get dangerous criminals off the streets, but are using it for routine immigration enforcement,” the executive director of the Arizona ACLU, Alessandra Soler Meetze, observed.

  Before dawn on a Tuesday morning in March 2007, an ICE raid targeted a New Bedford, Massachusetts, textile factory where poorly paid workers made vests and backpacks for the military. Once the loudspeaker warned that immigration agents had arrived, chaos erupted on the floor as workers scrambled to hide. Some rushed the bathroom to jump from the window. ICE agents, some of them with their handguns drawn, arrested 361 people. While women in the factory screamed and cried, the agents sorted their quarry into groups, zip-tied their hands, and led them to detention on a nearby army base, where some remained for months before deportation. At a church that evening Luis Matias pleaded for help for the three-year-old girl and nine-month-old baby of his tenant, whom ICE had arrested. “It’s inhumane to take a mother from her children. She’s not a criminal,” Matias said. Another of those arrested was the mother of eight-year-old Luis Gomez. Luis, unaware his parents had emigrated illegally, later remembered hiding for a week, missing school, out of fear he would be next. “Here I was,” he recalled to a reporter, “suddenly in charge of my family.”

  Lieberman touted his role in creating DHS when he ran for president in 2004. It was part of a broader pitch: he was the Democrat who was going to take over the War on Terror from the hapless Bush. He argued that 9/11 exposed an “amorphous threat we face from fanatics who find justification for evil behavior in Islam,” comparable to “fascism and communism.” His 2003 definition of the enemy anticipated Bush’s eventual description of a wellspring for terrorism existing within Islam itself. Lieberman wasn’t so rabid as to describe most Muslims as radicals; “the vast majority” opposed the fanatics. Hearkening to a condescending liberal tradition two centuries old, one that justified brute military force, and one that gained extensive purchase in liberal intellectual circles for years after 9/11, Lieberman urged the United States to act in the name of such threatened Muslims, “who are being besieged by isolation and intolerance.” The emerging quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which the senator supported, were the result of Bush’s botched execution, not any conceptual arrogance. Americans weren’t doing enough “to adequately seed the garden to enable peace, prosperity and democracy to take root and to prevent terrorism from returning.” But there could be no doubt that “forceful action” was necessary to “drain the swamps that breed terrorism.”

  Anyone on the left looking for a champion against the wars did not find a consistent, empowered Democratic voice. They certainly did not find one who made opposition to the wars as central to his or her political persona as Lieberman made his advocacy. Neither did those, such as Muslims and immigrants, whom the War on Terror persecuted. With the Republican Party increasingly rabid, millions of Americans seeking an alternative to endless war had no choice but to hope the Democratic Party, perhaps belatedly, would hear them. Then, when the public mood turned against the Iraq war, Democrats shifted with them, jettisoning their previous support. The ultimate difference between Lieberman and the Democrats he once helped lead was not that Lieberman was for the War on Terror and they weren’t. It was that Lieberman had conviction and they didn’t.

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  LIBERALS EMERGED FROM THE COLD WAR divided, traumatized, and unsure of their principles. Anti-communist liberalism built the structures that confronted the Soviet Union, but that did not spare it the demagoguery of conservatives for whom liberalism was a stalking horse for communism. Dean Acheson, a Cold War architect, sneered at this “attack of the primitives.” Cold War liberalism marched to its doom in Vietnam, but nothing claimed its place within the Democratic Party. Progressives attempted to harness the agony of Vietnam and the reactionary nature of domestic anti-communism into a broader critique of militarism, but uncertain liberals, unwilling to part with American exceptionalism, kept the party from moving too far in that direction. No sooner did liberals exhale at the fall of the Berlin Wall than Democrats appeared to discredit themselves by voting against the massively popular, successful Gulf War. The lesson Democrats drew was that peace was a losing issue. The safest Democratic position on military affairs was avoidance, followed by technocracy—often an attempt at aligning with what it saw as the responsible, pragmatic forces of the Security State—followed by attempts at marshaling American hegemony for liberal purposes. Rather than resolve the Democrats’ foreign policy contradictions, Bill Clinton’s presidency reflected them, bombing its way into an inchoate exceptionalist right to humanitarian-premised military intervention. Following in a liberal-imperial tradition they seemed not to recognize, the Clintonites tacitly premised their Balkans air strikes on enforcing standards of civilized behavior.

  After 9/11, even the most left-wing Democratic legislators wanted no part in challenging the coalescing War on Terror. Bush vowed on September 20 to “rid the world of the evildoers.” Afterward, California’s Maxine Waters said the Democrats planned on resisting him “no time soon.” She didn’t want to send young people to war, she told CNN’s Tucker Carlson, “but we’re going to stand with the families who have been harmed. There is a lot of pain in this nation, and we are in mourning. We are trying to stay unified, and we don’t want to create bickering and fighting at this time. There are questions to be asked. Now is not the time.”

  It was instead a time to exorcise the left and restore the reputation of the Cold War liberalism that had built an international order around American hegemony. An elite strain of liberalism reconciled with American power as a moral force during the Balkan wars in the 1990s, and came to view “humanitarian intervention” as a valorous legacy of Bill Clinton’s. After 9/11, Democratic fear of opposition intersected with elite liberal enthusiasm for the opportunities the war generated. Outraged by Sontag and other “Blame America Firsters,” with their “ignorant and dangerous appeasement of the terrorism of Sept. 11,” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter predicted that next terrorist attack would prompt “a big old-fashioned peace movement,” something he considered contemptible. “Peace won’t be with you, brother. It’s kill or be killed.” Alter, “like President Bush and the vast majority of the country,” was in favor of a fantastical “targeted war that tries hard to avoid civilian casualties, Islamic blowback and other unintended consequences.” In June 2002 the liberal grassroots organization MoveOn issued a bulletin asking “Can Democracy Survive an Endless ‘War’?” It quoted James Madison and Benjamin Franklin to decry the PATRIOT Act, and raised the plight of immigrants in detention. The editor of The New Republic later called it a travesty that reflected a “liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post–September 11 world” and its war against “totalitarian Islam.”

  As Bush shifted focus from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in his 2002 “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address, the House Democratic leader, Dick Gephardt, acknowledged, “There has be
en no daylight between us in this war on terrorism. We have met almost every single week and built a bipartisan consensus that is helping America win this war.” A few months later Daschle showed some daylight, remarking that the war “will have failed” if bin Laden remained at large. When DeLay called Daschle “disgusting” for that comment, Daschle’s aides quickly clarified that their boss meant “no criticism of Bush or his campaign against terrorism.”

  Prominent Democrats also defended Bush as he filled Guantanamo Bay with men caught in a legally nebulous situation. A former Senate Judiciary chairman expressed confidence that “the president is right” to declare Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners unlawful enemy combatants. Some detained Taliban “may very well” meet the criteria for prisoners of war, said Joe Biden, but it was an academic point, since “they all will be treated, though, in terms of humaneness, according to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.” Feinstein, one of Biden’s colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, toured Camp X-Ray, the chicken-coop outdoor cages baking in the Cuban heat that served as Guantanamo’s first terrorism jail. Given the choice of being imprisoned in San Quentin, Feinstein said, “I’d rather be in Guantanamo Bay.”

  Some were more straightforwardly bloodthirsty, as with Zell Miller’s Senate-floor dismissal of civilian casualties. That sort of response made Democratic leaders wince, though rarely enough to condemn. Far more broadly shared among the center and the center-left was a respectable version of Miller’s froth, one that accepted the violation of American Muslims’ rights as a matter of grim necessity. Richard Ben-Veniste, a lawyer who had participated in the Watergate prosecutions, defended the FBI’s right to infiltrate mosques. “We cannot allow an institution, a building, a mosque, to be specific, to be completely prohibited from any kind of intelligence activities, because that would provide sanctuary in an unrealistic way given the information we know,” Ben-Veniste judged. Of course the FBI couldn’t be allowed to penetrate mosques “willy nilly,” which would be “grossly unfair to our loyal and patriotic Muslim population in this country.” It was a hard problem, Ben-Veniste admitted, but “there’s got to be a balance.” Later Ben-Veniste would join the 9/11 Commission, which charted a technocratic, consensus course on the war that treated 9/11 as a Security State failure, absolving both Bush and American foreign policy more broadly.

  With the Forever War fortified by liberal enlistment, leftist writers like Arundhati Roy saw early on where it would lead. The United States couldn’t fight an enemy it didn’t understand, she wrote in The Guardian, so “for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.”

  Confident in their abilities to temper whatever excesses emanated from a president they considered oafish and arrogant, Democrats sought to make the War on Terror work more rationally, and helped construct the institutional architecture they thought would keep it that way. Whatever discomfort they felt with that effort did not develop into opposition. That would only come after scandal, disaster, or a groundswell of disgust from the Democratic electorate. Nowhere did these dynamics manifest more catastrophically than over the Iraq war.

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  THREE POLITICIANS PERSONIFIED the Democratic acquiescence to the Iraq war: Senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden.

  Over his decades in public life, Biden, by 2002 the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cultivated various images: yuppie liberal, Catholic working-class champion, global statesman. He and Kerry had voted against the 1991 Gulf War. Kerry’s opposition emerged from his history. A twice-wounded combat veteran of Vietnam, navy lieutenant Kerry became one of the war’s most famous protesters, testifying before Congress about the brutality of Vietnam and getting photographed with John Lennon. Clinton, a former first lady, was a committed feminist who had moved to New York in 2000 to launch an independent political career. The 9/11 attacks “marked me,” she would tell WNYC, “and made me feel that [counterterrorism] was my number-one obligation as a senator.” Aides would later say her hawkishness was not merely to forestall the inevitable objections to a woman’s national-security leadership, but the result of “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” While conservatives merely heckled Kerry and Biden, they actively loathed Clinton for gendered reasons that they struggled to conceal.

  Biden positioned himself as a War on Terror troubleshooter during and after the invasion of Afghanistan. His concern was that Bush was insufficiently committed to extending Hamid Karzai’s writ throughout the country—“We are not talking about a task that is beyond our capability,” Biden said in Kabul—which amateurishly showcased American weakness instead of strength. Biden hoped to strengthen the position of Colin Powell over Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives, whom Biden had long considered delusional. In the summer of 2002, as administration attention and resources flowed away from Afghanistan and toward a forthcoming invasion, Biden convened a two-day public tutorial in his committee on the merits and drawbacks of an unprovoked war, which he presented as a “national dialogue.”

  The hearings highlighted the dangers of occupation, such as the basic uncertainty around who and what would replace Saddam Hussein, and the bloody, long, and expensive commitment required to midwife a democratic Iraq. Like Biden himself, the hearings stopped far short of opposition to the war. The overwhelming focus of expert testimony concerned guessing at the extent of Saddam’s weapons program, the pragmatic considerations of an invasion, and the diplomatic legwork required to justify an action whose justice—if not its wisdom—was presumed. Central questions about how the United States would handle the post-Saddam vacuum, supposedly the purpose of the hearing, received vague or vacuous answers. They included confident assurances from neoconservative professor Fouad Ajami that Iraqis would greet American soldiers with “kites and boom boxes.” Rend Rahim Francke, a future Iraqi ambassador to Washington, insisted, “We will not have a civil war in Iraq.” A retired army colonel boasted that the United States could “expect significant international involvement in any post-conflict situation.”

  While claiming the hearings were “not designed to prejudice any particular course of action,” Biden signaled his own support for invading. “Even if the right response to his pursuit is not so crystal clear, one thing is clear: these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.”

  Kerry, a member of the committee, was envisioning a presidential run. His concerns on Iraq were formalistic. “When and how, what is the process, what brings you to the point of pulling the trigger, what sort of makes you reach that point where you have made the decision that you have exhausted the doctrine of remedies, if you will, in the context of international law and of going to war?” he asked. Kerry wondered whether legitimizing a war required pressing for a more intrusive inspections regime than Saddam could tolerate. “Certainly, if he has the things that he does not want us to find, he will not live up to it, so those who want the justification to go in will get the justification,” Kerry continued, “but in the absence of that, we do not have a chance of having exhausted that doctrine of remedies in a way that I think answers the question to mom and pop in America as to why their young child may come home in a body bag.” Kerry, as it happened, outlined the exact course that Bush, at the behest of the similarly minded Powell, would pursue at the United Nations that coming fall.

  The party’s foreign policy luminaries made those process concerns central. Like Biden and Kerry, they sought not only to strengthen Powell but to portray an Iraq incursion less as an invasion than as a post-9/11 test of the relevance of the international institutions they selectively favored. “The path of inspections is all too familiar, but it is worth traveling one last time. If the Iraqis break their promise, the case for military action will be stronger,” Clinton secretary of state
Madeleine Albright testified to Biden’s committee. Clinton’s diplomatic hero of the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, urged legislators to vote for the war. “This would help Secretary Powell in obtaining the best possible resolution at the Security Council by sending a signal of national unity to the Security Council’s members,” Holbrooke said, even as he stressed that UN approval was not “absolutely necessary” for a subsequent invasion, since Clinton hadn’t obtained one for NATO’s Balkan bombings.

  Even as Kerry, Clinton, and Biden moved to embrace the war, other Democratic eminences showed what opposing it looked like in the wake of 9/11. Ted Kennedy and Al Gore—who had given his 2000 presidential rival pivotal post-9/11 support by calling Bush “my commander in chief”—both opposed invading Iraq, but on the grounds that it would imperil the War on Terror. Kennedy, noting the “open secret” of uniformed military discomfort with Rumsfeld’s invasion plan, attempted to align opposition to the Iraq war with the interests of the Security State. Bill Clinton, by nature more equivocal, endorsed regime change on CNN two days before telling a Democratic fundraiser that bin Laden needed to be dealt with first.