Although many were skeptical about Bush’s capacity as a leader, he and his experienced national security team quickly impressed many who doubted him. The president displayed a level of gravitas that was very different from the character comedian Will Ferrell had played on Saturday Night Live, a bumbler who stumbled over his own words and was never in real command of the issues. Faced with this crisis, Bush showed that there was another side to his public presence. On September 14, 2001, he made a surprise appearance at “Ground Zero,” the site of the World Trade Center attack, standing on a pile of rubble before rescue workers who were still desperately trying to find people buried in the debris. With the television cameras relaying his every move, Bush, in impromptu fashion, placed his arm around one of the firemen. As he spoke to the rescuers, one in the back yelled out, “I can’t hear you!” Seizing the moment, Bush grabbed the bullhorn and said: “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The moment conveyed an image of strength and defiance, fostering the belief that Bush could be a leader capable of handling this challenge.17
Other politicians found their footing in the crisis. New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for instance, emerged with a new heroic image. His administration had been plagued by problems with policing and racism, as well as some scandals in the mayor’s personal life, but his leadership in the aftermath of the attacks swept those concerns away, at least in the short term. “Giuliani has been a cranky and not terribly effective mayor, too distracted by marital and health problems to work on the city’s surging murder rate,” the journalist Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek. “But in this cataclysm which he rightly called ‘the most difficult week in the history of New York,’ the city and the country have found that most elusive of all democratic treasures—real leadership.” 18
Bipartisanship prevailed, with Democrats supporting the administration’s initial plans against al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan. Congress readily complied with the president’s decision to claim wartime footing, passing on September 14, 2001, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) with only one vote against in the House and none in the Senate. The resolution authorized the president 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.” With such broad parameters, the response to 9/11 quickly became a full war in every sense of the term. The “war on terror” would be conducted in an aggressive and ruthless fashion, with an aim toward dismantling the entire operation of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as well as any countries that were believed to be supporting terrorist networks.19
That said, President Bush wanted to make clear that the war on terror was not a war against Islam. He was especially concerned about Muslim immigrants, most of whom had arrived from South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), Iran, and Arabic-speaking countries, reaching significant numbers in the 1990s. In contrast to Europe, where Muslim immigrants had been geographically concentrated, new arrivals in America had scattered themselves all over the country in forming communities. Approximately 90 percent of one section of Dearborn, Michigan, the Southend district, for instance, was composed of Muslim immigrants.20 “Arabic signs hawking insurance, dental work, auto repair, bargain blue jeans and fresh fruit stretch for miles down Warren Avenue,” wrote one reporter, “as 188 Arab-owned businesses have opened in the last decade.” 21 In the wake of 9/11, ugly incidents of racial and religious hate crimes sprang up across the nation: a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was killed by a man who went on to shoot a Lebanese clerk at another gas station, while a 46-year-old Pakistani immigrant was murdered in a grocery store.22
In response, the president decided to speak at the Islamic Center in Washington on September 17, 2001. When the center opened on Embassy Row in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had visited to make it clear that he considered Muslims a vital part of America’s religious heritage; now another Republican returned to confirm that point. In his remarks, Bush argued that it was vital for Americans to understand that the terrorists did not represent Muslims: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.” The president even quoted from the Koran: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil.” Then, in his own words, he continued to argue that American Muslims were “friends” who bore no connection to the attacks. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about,” Bush insisted. “Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” Reflecting on the president’s comments, Sayyid Syeed, the secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, noted that “Americans have shown great maturity.” 23
Meanwhile, the rest of society worked to return to business as usual, as much as possible. The National Football League, which had replaced baseball as America’s favorite sport, only postponed games for one weekend before resuming the next. On September 23, New England Patriots guard Joe Andruzzi—the brother of three New York firemen—ran out of the tunnel at Foxboro Stadium waving American flags. As the crowd chanted “USA! USA!” the player ran to midfield to meet some first responders from New York. Then, at the end of the week, the comedy show Saturday Night Live took to the air again. The broadcast began solemnly, with the singer Paul Simon offering a stark performance of “The Boxer” as an array of New York firemen and policemen stood by. Then the cameras cut to a shot of producer Lorne Michaels speaking with Mayor Giuliani. On behalf of a nervous nation, Michaels asked for his permission: “Can we be funny?” Giuliani gave a deadpan response: “Why start now?” 24
The War on Terror
As the nation sought to return to normal, the Bush administration launched a new chapter in American foreign policy. Its first target was Afghanistan. The Taliban regime had harbored Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda for many years, offering a base of operations, raising funds, and nurturing the networks that carried out the 9/11 attacks and other incidents as well. In late September, President Bush announced that America was “in hot pursuit” of al-Qaeda and would follow them wherever they ran, including Afghanistan. Experts warned that the United States would become bogged down there, much as the Soviet Union had been during the 1980s, but the president insisted he understood the difficulties. It would be “very hard” to fight a “guerrilla war with conventional forces,” he said. “We understand that.” 25
On October 7, 2001, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a coordinated series of massive airstrikes and special operations on the ground. An array of new technologies proved to be vital in the attack. Predator drones, computerized aircraft that operated without an on-board pilot, were capable of firing antitank missiles and capturing precise radar images of opposition forces. A new precision-guided weapon called the Joint Direct Attack Munitions, directed to its target by a Global Positioning System (GPS), had the capacity to correct and change its course of flight after being separated from the tip of a standard bomb. These technologies represented a large proportion of the fighting because Bush hoped to avoid, as long as possible, any significant presence of American troops on the ground. Initially the operation looked efficient and effective. “Use of Pinpoint Airpower Comes of Age in New War,” proclaimed the New York Times. By December 22, 2001, the Taliban had been routed. NATO and the United States then worked with the Northern Alliance, a local anti-Taliban group, to establish a new interim government.26
The war against terrorism was also conducted on the home front, with a striking escalation of domestic counterterrorism programs. Americans’ anxieties, already at high levels in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, ramped up to new levels when an anthrax scare hit Washington. Just a week after 9/11, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Tom Brokaw, anchor of the NBC Nightly News, received packages con
taining high-grade anthrax. “I actually saw it [the letter] and I think I even picked it up at one point, and so I may have been exposed,” explained a defiant Brokaw. “I’m not sure, but I’m confident that Cipro is going to get me through this,” he said, holding up a bottle of antibiotics that were suddenly much in demand.27 As other anthrax attacks spread, five died and seventeen others became ill. Though many worried that Islamic terrorists were behind the attacks, evidence later led the government to conclude it was the work of a mentally ill microbiologist inside the United States. Regardless of their origins, the anthrax attacks only heightened the growing sense of vulnerability at home, especially as false alarms of similar incidents spread across the panicked country. In a suburb of Portland, Oregon, the police shut down the main highway after someone found a strange powder, only to discover a local running club had sprinkled wheat flour to create a path on the road. In another suburb outside Washington, DC, police burst into a church after a secretary reported that her mouth felt tingly after opening an envelope.28 The panic over the anthrax incidents, real and imagined, only accelerated the drive to expand the reach of the federal government’s response.
Despite the panic, the sudden increase in counterterrorism programs prompted resistance. Many conservative Republicans, steeped in the limited government philosophies of the Reagan era, initially opposed any expansion of federal power, even in the face of terrorism. Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, worried that the “war on terror” might repeat the excesses of prior periods of wartime in which the government violated constitutional rights in the pursuit of security. Such concerns from both ends of the political spectrum created some odd alliances against the bill. Representative Bob Barr, a conservative Georgian who had led the drive to impeach Bill Clinton, worried about increasing the reach of grand juries, while Representative Maxine Waters, an outspoken liberal from Los Angeles, agreed that “we have to draw the line” at civil liberties. “I find myself agreeing with Mr. Barr,” she noted, “and that is very unusual.” Outside Congress, moreover, there was institutional resistance to the new proposals for counterterrorism changes. Existing government agencies, for instance, resented the creation of new organizations that might impinge on what they defensively saw as their “turf.” 29
In spite of the concerns, the 9/11 attacks had exposed a variety of vulnerabilities, ranging from airport security that offered little protection against threats, to tourist sites in major cities that suddenly seemed incredibly exposed. Before 9/11, airline passengers were allowed to travel with small knives, scissors, and box cutters; at other sites, physical screening was virtually nonexistent. In the early weeks after the attacks, the same bipartisan support that had marked the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom abroad was repeated in the effort to create new security measures at home. Swept up in the moment, few congressmen objected when the Department of Justice requested legislation that would vastly increase the ability of the federal government to conduct surveillance on its citizens. Officially named the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, the law was more commonly known by the acronym that sprawling title was meant to create: the “USA PATRIOT Act.” The law expanded the ability of the government to conduct roving wiretaps which traced multiple phones without multiple subpoenas, to monitor e-mail and business records, to have more authority over undocumented immigrants, to make it harder to appeal detention and also to expand the working definition of a terrorist. The USA PATRIOT Act passed the House by a decisive vote of 357 to 66 on October 24, 2001, and the Senate 98 to 1 the following day.30
Not all parts of the war on terror received bipartisan support. Indeed, polarization only seemed to deepen as the government’s efforts expanded. Airport security proved to be a particularly tricky topic. Initially, House Republicans under Majority Leader Tom DeLay hoped to keep airport security in private hands, as it had been on 9/11. But in early November, a passenger at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport made it past the private-sector screeners of United Airlines with several knives, a stun gun, and a can of pepper spray in his carry-on luggage, an incident that effectively ended the case for continuing private security.31 The Bush White House, meanwhile, proposed that the federal government do more to guard airports but insisted that its employees, unlike all other federal workers, be exempt from civil service protections so the government could hire and fire at will. Democrats opposed this plan, arguing that the president was exploiting the need for airport security to continue a longer conservative campaign against public sector unions. In the end, Bush acceded to the demands of Senate Democrats and signed a bill that required the government to use federal workers with the standard protections.32
At other times, President Bush circumvented the legislative branch altogether, invoking his wartime powers as commander-in-chief to pursue terrorism without needing to subject himself to the political process. In November 2001, the president signed a directive allowing for the use of special military tribunals to prosecute alleged terrorists, rather than the traditional judicial process. Under these new arrangements, the secretary of defense was given the responsibility for selecting the judges as well as the rules of interrogation. One month later, the administration established a massive detention center at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Guantanamo, which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the “least worst place we could have selected,” was pointedly not a US territory. Therefore, the administration argued that US laws were not applicable there and the Geneva Conventions did not apply.
Vice President Dick Cheney led the campaign to strengthen the power of the executive branch in the war on terror.33 A conservative Republican from Wyoming who had served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Cheney had been extremely frustrated when Congress reasserted its authority in the 1970s. Though a former congressman himself, Cheney believed the legislative branch was inefficient and ineffective. In his view, the president had to circumvent Congress, especially on matters of national security. (This had been one of the major themes of the minority report Cheney crafted for the Iran-Contra Committee.) At his direction, a team of legal advisors that included White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the Office of Legal Counsel’s John Yoo, and David Addington and Lewis Libby in the Office of the Vice President provided legal memoranda to justify a massive expansion of executive authority. A shrewd political strategist who had spent decades in Washington, Cheney spread support for this new philosophy by placing allies in lower-level executive branch decisions, where they could then report recommendations aligned with his own to their superiors, and thereby create the illusion of independent confirmation of his own ideas.34
Meanwhile, to grant US interrogators as much leeway as they could, the Justice Department released an opinion that created an extremely narrow definition of torture, thereby establishing a legal foundation for previously suspect acts now described euphemistically as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” 35 In a departure from past norms, CIA interrogators could now use once-banned techniques such as “waterboarding,” in which a subject’s face was drenched with water while they were held down, simulating the sensation of drowning. The administration argued that waterboarding allowed it to obtain information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had plotted much of the 9/11 attack. Despite such claims, investigative reporting found that waterboarding rarely yielded substantial results, and key data had instead been obtained through other, more traditional investigatory methods. Later investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed these findings, concluding that “the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation.” 36
Despite the lack of results, the aggressive stance toward terrorists still resonated in popular culture. Conservatives who had dismissed federal agents as reckless “jack-booted thugs” during the Clinton era a decade earlier, now came to welcome an image of gung-ho heroes who operated outside the law
. One of the most popular television shows of the period, which first aired in November 2001, was the war-on-terror drama 24. The thriller revolved around a fictional counterterrorist unit headed by the elite agent Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland), whose heroic exploits unfolded in real time, with a digital clock ticking away seconds on screen. Over the course of the show, Bauer saved the nation from repeated Islamic terrorist plots, using whatever means were necessary. “I have killed two people since midnight,” he threatened an innocent bystander in one scene. “So maybe . . . maybe you should be a little more afraid of me than you are right now.”
In a sign of the sweeping influence of popular culture, 24 didn’t merely reflect the policies of the war on terror; it actively shaped them. “The military loves our show,” boasted cocreator Joel Surnow. Officials at Guantanamo Bay later admitted that they took “lots of ideas” from the show’s interrogation scenes, and legal authorities soon began invoking the show as a rationalization for extreme measures such as waterboarding prisoners, terrorizing them with dogs, and even subjecting them to sexual humiliation.37 John Yoo, the constitutional lawyer who authored the so-called “torture memos,” invoked the drama in his book War by Other Means: “What if, as the Fox television program ‘24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?” Even the Supreme Court was swayed by the show’s framing of national security issues. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Justice Antonin Scalia reflected in a speech on the constitutionality of such measures. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” 38 Fiction was now shaping fact.
While 24 popularized a fictionalized war on terror on the Fox broadcast network, its sister station Fox News emerged as an important promoter for the real war on terror. The conservative cable news network had found its footing during the Clinton impeachment process, but it flourished in the aftermath of 9/11. In sharp contrast to its rival CNN, which consciously framed its coverage for a diverse international audience, Fox News increasingly played to viewers at home with populist, nationalistic themes. Patriotic messages and American flags became fixtures on its broadcasts, as the entire network threw itself behind the administration’s case for the war on terror. Fully committed to the cause, Fox News saw its ratings spike. In January 2002, it finally surpassed CNN as the most-watched cable news network. “What Fox is doing,” a conservative media analyst applauded, was demonstrating “that one can be unabashedly patriotic and be a good news journalist at the same time.” 39
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