Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  There were no calls from newspaper columnists to send elite commandos into places like Elohim City. Shooting suspected white supremacist guerrillas on sight, deporting them, seizing whites from their airplane seats for the misfortune of being the wrong race in the wrong place at the wrong time were unthinkable options. Yet white supremacist terrorism was the oldest, bloodiest, and most resilient terrorism in the history of the United States. Its justifications and its symbolism were rooted in the American national heritage, making its appeal to Americans orders of magnitude larger than Islamic terror could ever claim. Its soldiers called themselves Patriots. Their enemies were America’s enemies.

  Deemphasizing the role of white supremacy in incidents like Ruby Ridge made it easier for elements of the American right, both fringe and respectable, to interpret and portray them as extreme examples of overreach from a government naturally inclined to trample liberties. They witnessed these sieges and, as McVeigh and his ilk had wanted, imagined themselves to be next to be targeted. In the view of influential conservatives, the government was not acting against fascists stockpiling weapons for the race war but was itself fascist. Six days before Oklahoma City, Wayne LaPierre, of the politically mighty National Rifle Association, cited both Ruby Ridge and Waco as evidence that it was no longer “unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black stormtrooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens.” On the NRA’s online message boards, internet pioneers swapped conspiracy theories about the coming government disarmament and fantasized about murdering ATF agents. Not long before the bombing, Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful broadcaster on the right in an era before Fox News, told his radio listeners that “the second violent American revolution is just about—I got my fingers about a fourth of an inch apart—is just about that far away.” At trial McVeigh’s lawyers described him as just the latest conservative to be persecuted by the government. Yes, they acknowledged, he did have “considerable anger about the federal government, but that does not distinguish him from millions of other Americans.”

  The respectable right expressed outrage at any suggestion that it had anything in common with McVeigh. Claiming so was a cynical, dangerous political gambit by liberals to persecute and muzzle conservatives. Bill Clinton, a centrist whom the right considered a radical, angrily demanded that the “purveyors of paranoia” on the right take responsibility for the consequences their invective could have. But the cautious Clinton spoke against generic “hatred,” rather than white supremacy specifically. Limbaugh called the president “irresponsible and vacuous,” determined to ensure that the right be “permanently disqualified and silenced” through a campaign of innuendo. Newt Gingrich, the architect of a historic GOP congressional victory based on white backlash to Clinton, denounced as “grotesque and irresponsible” the idea that mainstream conservative rhetoric lent legitimacy to acts of terrorism like McVeigh’s.

  A political context like that meant there would be no urgency to pass legislation addressing the worst act of terrorism in American history. Although Clinton had promised “certain, swift, and severe” justice for Oklahoma City, no bill was passed until April 1996, largely thanks to the House, led by Gingrich. Congressional hearings on Waco and Ruby Ridge undercut any Republican willingness to give federal authorities more power; four months after Oklahoma City, Randy Weaver and his surviving family won a $3.1 million wrongful-death suit against the federal government. A civil liberties alliance spanning from the ACLU to Larry Pratt, a gun activist who briefly cochaired Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign, rallied to prevent the law from redefining terrorism to include what one attorney called “so much activity that the section cannot help but be enforced selectively, according to the politics of the day.” It was an assertion of bedrock civil-libertarian principle—ideological similarity is not the same thing as operational association—and in 1996 it got an attentive hearing. It helped that one example the ACLU’s Gregory Nojeim offered to show the bill’s slippery slope to criminalization was the “forcible blocking of an abortion clinic, if that use of force violated any criminal law.” Churches lending anti-abortion groups transportation or meeting space could become federal targets. A Los Angeles Times poll found that 70 percent of the public feared the new legislation would restrict American freedoms.

  By the time of its passage, the bill had changed substantially. Aspects of it that could expand the reach of investigators and prosecutors into the affairs of conservative whites, particularly their financial records and gun modifications, were stripped away. The section that Nojeim warned would broaden the definitions of terrorism was gone. To the consternation of the Justice Department, no expansion of FBI surveillance authority into this domain made it into the final version. That “eviscerated the heart and soul” of the bill, lamented the Michigan Democrat John Conyers.

  But what remained in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was extraordinary. In addition to making the American carceral state more lethal, the bill contained sweeping expansions of government authority to combat terrorism—but only the sort of terrorism that didn’t involve white supremacists.

  Congress used Oklahoma City as an opportunity to give prosecutors greater authority to more easily convict people in the United States of ties to foreign, typically nonwhite terrorist groups, rather than those allied with McVeigh and Millar. A measure known as 2339B, part of an expanding body of law prohibiting “material support” for terrorism, made it a crime to contribute to nonviolent activities and charities of banned foreign terrorist groups. Support for the measure came from the FBI, which had begun investigating American Muslims’ donations to jihadist-linked charities after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Associations with even nonviolent members of banned foreign terrorist organizations, rather than involvement in actual acts of terrorism, was now sufficient evidence to get someone banned from entering the country. For good measure, a bill ostensibly aimed at responding to Oklahoma City included a congressional finding that Clinton ought to take “all necessary means, including covert action and military force” to destroy “terrorist infrastructure,” but only that belonging to “international terrorists,” such as “overseas terrorist training facilities and safe havens.”

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  THE RESPONSE TO OKLAHOMA City was clarifying. When terrorism was white—when its identity and its purpose claimed the same heritage as a substantial portion of the dominant American racial caste—America sympathized with principled objections against unleashing the coercive, punitive, and violent powers of the state. When terrorism was white, politicians and journalists recognized that such a response consigned their neighbors to an unfair burden of collective suspicion, one from which they might never escape. When terrorism was white, the prospect of criminalizing a large swath of Americans was unthinkable. When terrorism was white, the collective American response was to focus the machinery of its wrath anywhere else, sparing white supremacy the expansive violence America pledged against terrorism that was foreign, Muslim, nonwhite.

  Timothy McVeigh was convicted on June 2, 1997, and sentenced to death. He was tried openly, before a jury of his peers, with full access to legal counsel. The warnings he received from law enforcement against self-incrimination ahead of his interviews with federal authorities prompted no outcry about affording legal rights to terrorists. There was no demand for McVeigh to be abused in prison, held incommunicado, or moved to military custody. Putting McVeigh on trial was uncontroversial. No one contended that McVeigh should instead be summarily executed. No one believed that a failure to do so would embolden his fellow white terrorists. White America could recognize the fundamental humanity of the ordinary boy.

  Facing execution as the summer of 2001 began, McVeigh selected the William Ernest Henley poem “Invictus” to serve as a declaration of victory. Its final couplet deemed McVeigh the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. He was defiant in the face of an enemy that he had pro
ved was not too mighty to be challenged. Its corruption fed its violence. Its infamous acts would be on display because of what he had done. He wanted white Americans to know that they, like him, could be warriors. McVeigh would not go to death in defeat. He would greet death as a martyr.

  CHAPTER ONE

  9/11 AND THE SECURITY STATE

  2001–2003

  Throughout the spring and summer of 2001, the world’s most powerful security apparatus collected and issued warnings of what appeared to be a forthcoming attack on the United States, its allies, or its interests. It was more than a threat to America. It was a threat to them.

  They were the stewards of American power: the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the uniformed military, the FBI, and all the other intelligence and law-enforcement adjuncts that made the U.S. the dominant global force of the post–Cold War era. Whatever cultural attraction, financial engine, and diplomatic architecture America offered, it was their might that guaranteed America’s preeminence. What in turn guaranteed the power of this Security State was its ability to keep Americans safe at home. The Security State had succeeded so thoroughly that America exercised its strength abroad while taking its own domestic safety for granted. America acted. As the global hegemon, it was not acted upon. That assumption was part of a civic religion, as old as the country itself, known as American exceptionalism: the prerogative that America, by destiny as much as by right, set terms for the world that it was not itself bound by, a global policeman’s doctrine of qualified immunity.

  Indications of an emergency accumulated as the summer advanced. “The system was blinking red,” the CIA director, George Tenet, would later recall. For more than two years, out of public view, Tenet had considered himself “at war” with the enemy he was tracking, a group called al-Qaeda. By August 6, a briefing prepared for President George W. Bush was specifically titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA could not provide Bush with a date, time, or location for any potential attack, specificity it considered beyond reasonable expectations for intelligence. The Security State hoped that providing a general strategic warning would be enough to spur Bush into urgency. Yet the president responded to the report by telling his al-Qaeda briefer, Michael Morell, “Okay, Michael, you’ve covered your ass.”

  The CIA knew much about Osama bin Laden, an impossibly wealthy Saudi construction scion who had turned religious militant. Bin Laden had declared war on the United States because “for over seven years America has been occupying the lands of Islam in its holiest of places,” he explained in his 1998 communiqué. “The Arabian peninsula has never—since God made it flat, created its desert and encircled it with seas—been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations.” Since it underwrote the world order, America was ultimately responsible for the cheapness of Muslim life worldwide: the Iraqis it starved and bombed; all those tortured and slain by America’s allies in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Pakistan, and beyond; and even the deaths caused by American rivals or enemies, like Chechens killed by Russians or Bosnian Muslims exterminated by Bosnian Serbs.

  Bin Laden’s charisma obscured the conspiratorial nature of his critique. Here was a billionaire who had given up a life of opulence to defend his coreligionists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Miraculously—that is, thanks to the indomitable guerrillas of Afghanistan, and support from Riyadh, Islamabad, and satanic Washington, something he preferred not to emphasize—bin Laden’s side won. Now, as he targeted the only remaining superpower, he told Muslims they could redeem all the humiliation they felt. All it required was violence—violence that wasn’t just permissible, but holy. Bin Laden sought to force America to abandon its grip on the Muslim world. Knowing by now how superpowers work, all he needed was to provoke it into unsustainable military campaigns.

  If Tenet, a holdover from Bill Clinton’s presidency, thought he was waging a war on al-Qaeda, the summer’s warnings demonstrated that he was losing. His CIA, the centrifugal force uniting the nation’s sixteen intelligence agencies, had failed to notify the FBI and the State Department that it had extensively monitored the travels of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, future 9/11 hijackers who entered the United States legally. FBI officials made their own mistakes, including not knowing how to procure a surveillance warrant on an al-Qaeda target. Some of their inhibitions had the force of law, such as Clinton attorney general Janet Reno’s 1994 “wall” edict preventing the bureau from sharing its intelligence information with CIA agents responsible for building criminal cases. The National Security Agency, the brightest star in a global Anglosphere surveillance constellation, did not translate an intercept that referenced 9/11 as the date for the attack. Tenet and White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke later traded accusations of negligence over al-Qaeda, responsibility for which Michael Scheuer, the founder of the CIA’s Usama bin Laden Unit, ascribed to both of them. After past al-Qaeda attacks, including the horrific 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, the military leadership assented to missile strikes on al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. There was little appetite for anything more from the generals and admirals who had grander visions of what warfare in an age of U.S. unipolarity should be.

  While the CIA desk that Scheuer founded studied al-Qaeda’s motivations and justifications, as did several counterterrorism agents in the FBI, few within the higher echelons of the security services were interested in understanding them. Al-Qaeda’s message was to them an indistinguishable blur justifying violence through inscrutable interpretations of Islam, a religion that was primarily familiar to most white Americans as a frightening accelerator of Black resistance, thanks to demonized figures like Malcolm X. None of that was as relevant to the Security State as the sheer fact that bin Laden had declared war. All hegemonies throughout human history have become the objects of violent resistance from those who consider themselves to be unjustly dominated. But because the United States believed itself to be exceptional, it was poorly equipped to understand that the sort of geopolitical, economic, and cultural impact it has on the world would at some point provoke a violent response. Such recognition was too close, for elite comfort, to contending the entirely separate proposition that America deserved such an attack. But exceptionalism equipped the nation very well to turn its trauma outward onto the world.

  That trauma was real. Live news footage, soon to run on an endless loop, showed two passenger jets piercing the Twin Towers like missiles. Then it televised police officers and firefighters rushing to their deaths in the hopes of saving whomever they could. It showed terrified office workers jumping to their deaths before an icon of cosmopolitan America fell forever. For days afterward New York’s skyline was defined by the plume of smoke that replaced the World Trade Center. That inescapable smoke, lingering over the city, smelled nauseatingly sweet, creating the awful recollection that it emerged from the incineration of 2,606 people. Neither the New Yorkers who died agonizing deaths, nor those left behind, nor those persecuted in what was to follow were meaningfully complicit in policies bin Laden expressly attributed to them.

  Whatever historical forces led to 9/11, it was an act of mass murder, geopolitical in effect, national in scope, and deeply local in impact. New Yorkers found themselves trapped in a defining experience. There were desperate rushes to post pictures of missing loved ones on lampposts and storefronts by votive candlelight. Police cordons at Canal Street, Houston Street, and Fourteenth Street kept Manhattanites separated from downtown and subjected to spot searches. Viewing the wreckage overwhelming the Financial District, Donald Trump, a real estate developer and New York fixture, called in to a local television show to boast, inaccurately, that his nearby property at 40 Wall Street was now the tallest building in Manhattan. He marveled at all the “easily recognizable” firms “wiped out” by the destruction, adding, “and many of the people are gone wi
th them.”

  Despite the snap judgment six years earlier that jihadists had bombed Oklahoma City, September 11 came as a horrifying dislocation. “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’ ” Bush told legislators nine days after the attack, answering, “They hate our freedoms—our freedoms of religion, our freedoms of speech, our freedoms to vote, and assemble, and disagree with each other.” Senator Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, articulated the subtext. “I say bomb the hell out of them. If there is collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our American citizens to be expendable.” The ignorant, solipsistic, and ahistorical explanation for the attack that American political and cultural leaders provided spoke to a desire to proclaim the country’s innocence ahead of the vengeance to come. Neil Young, who once wrote “Cortez the Killer,” contemplated the passenger resistance aboard United Airlines Flight 93 and wrote “Let’s Roll.”

  A traumatized public united behind Bush, granting him approval ratings in the 90s. His advisers moved rapidly to cement his image as a “war president,” someone whom it could be politically disastrous to question. If there was going to be a public reckoning over the failures preceding 9/11, its target would not be Bush but the security institutions that had been warning him of an attack. While the Security State typically aligned with the right, now the right presented it with a tacit threat. “The failures in the intelligence are so widespread, so deep, that we owe the American people a searching job,” said Bush’s ally Richard Shelby, the GOP chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. What Tenet had considered to be three years of war against al-Qaeda was now dismissed by political elites as a failed “law-enforcement” approach to terror. At the same time, Bush was offering the Security State more power than ever before. They were the means through which America would seek revenge. The Security State did not need to be coerced into the War on Terror. It had much to gain from aligning with Bush, and much to lose from rejecting him.