Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  On October 11, 2002, Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Kerry all voted for the Iraq war, each sounding different and characteristic notes about its merits. Clinton portrayed her preferred course—through the United Nations—as an alternative to Bush’s unilateralism that granted greater “support and legitimacy” to the endeavor. She recognized that her vote “could lead to war” but expressed hope that a show of unity would “make success in the United Nations more likely and war less likely.” She urged antiwar Democrats to vote for the war on that basis while presenting the trauma of her adopted state as a reason to launch an unrelated invasion. “In balancing the risks of action versus inaction,” she said, “I think New Yorkers, who have gone through the fires of hell, may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I know I am.”

  Biden echoed the sentiment that the vote was not “a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security.” That was effectively a key pro-war Democratic talking point—Gephardt used it in the corresponding House vote—but Biden added his own delusions. The wording of the resolution demanded Saddam’s disarmament, not necessarily regime change, although Biden allowed that an invading army was likely to ensure Saddam’s downfall. And it was wise to keep the regime-change objective euphemistic, lest the United States alienate “other countries who do not share that goal and whose support we need to disarm Iraq and possibly rebuild it.” Attempting to bolster Powell, Biden praised the president for choosing a “course of moderation and deliberation,” while in the next breath lamenting that the “imminence and inevitability” of the threat from Iraq “have been exaggerated.”

  If Clinton and Biden portrayed their votes for the war as a way to avoid it, Kerry covered his own motives in incoherent antiwar rhetoric. He praised the “tough questions” asked by the skeptical Republican statesmen Brent Scowcroft and James Baker. Protesting too much, Kerry castigated Bush for “casting about in an unfocused, undisciplined, overly public internal debate for a rationale for war” and “fail[ing] to prove any direct link” between Saddam and 9/11. But then Kerry asked if, in a post-9/11 world, “we can afford to ignore the possibility” of an alliance between Saddam and “some terrorist group.”

  Yes, Kerry, announced, he would vote for the war resolution, but that would not be the end of the story. “In giving the president this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days” about creating a thorough UN inspections regime and building a large international military coalition “if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so,” Kerry vowed, “I will be the first to speak out.” Kerry insisted on removing “doubt or confusion” as to his position: “I will support a multilateral effort to disarm Iraq by force, if we have exhausted all other options. But I cannot, and will not, support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless the threat is imminent and no multilateral effort is possible.”

  The anticipated invasion attracted some of the largest protest marches ever seen in cities across America and the globe. They registered not at all with the Democratic Party or elite liberal journalists. George Packer, a leading liberal invasion advocate, lamented in The New York Times Magazine that the protesters couldn’t imagine that “the Iraqi people, while not welcoming the threat of bombs, might be realistic enough to accept a war as their only hope of liberation from tyranny.” Leon Wieseltier, the driving intellectual force at The New Republic and a self-styled cultural policeman, asked, “How can any liberal, any individual who associates himself with the party of humanity, not count himself in this coalition of the willing?” Thomas Friedman, the Times foreign policy columnist, envisioned American forces “draining the swamps” of the Middle East. Defending America’s open society, he said, required teaching millions of Middle Easterners to “suck on this.” Bill Keller of The New York Times marveled that so many “unlikely” prominent liberal writers at “The Washington Post, the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek” agreed with him in supporting the war. He called it the “I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,” demonstrating a stunning historical ignorance of the relationship between liberalism and empire for someone who would soon edit the paper.

  As the 2004 election approached, Democratic leaders saw for the first time the anger of progressive voters who had watched in disgust as their leaders lined up behind Bush. Kerry, the front-runner for the nomination, saw the early Democratic enthusiasm go to the former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose candidacy was predicated on opposing both the war and the Democratic acquiescence to it. Kerry played War on Terror politics against Dean in September 2003, calling him “dead wrong” for referring to Hamas militants as “soldiers.” It was central to Kerry’s argument for his candidacy: that he, a combat veteran turned protester turned statesman, was uniquely positioned to lead America in a time of danger.

  But Kerry kept undermining his own appeal to competence. Everywhere he went, particularly as the Iraqi insurgency intensified, voters demanded to know why he’d voted for the war. When Bush asked the same Congress that approved the Iraq invasion to authorize $87 billion for “reconstruction,” Kerry refused, and boasted of it to Democratic audiences, even as he declared himself for “winning the war.” A New York Times reporter noted that it took Kerry “40 minutes to arrive at a somewhat simple formulation” of his position on the war: for it, but against how Bush pursued it.

  In March 2004 Bush’s strategists, acutely sensitive to Kerry’s weakness, baited him with a West Virginia ad attacking him for voting against the reconstruction funding. Kerry, unable to refrain from addressing it, boasted that he sought to finance the reconstruction by repealing Bush’s hated tax cuts—so, he explained, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Bush, a creature of certainty, assured voters that they would, at least, always know where he stood. Kerry, stung by the critique, insisted in August that even with the benefit of hindsight, he would have voted for the war.

  Kerry clung to his military credentials, arriving at the Democratic convention via a ferry crossing Boston Harbor as if it were the Mekong. With a salute onstage, he declared himself “reporting for duty,” and surrounded himself with fellow veterans. Yet Kerry’s prominence in the antiwar movement a generation earlier aggravated those veterans who considered his war protest a betrayal. A conspiratorial lot of them, calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, filmed TV commercials deceitfully accusing Kerry of faking the war wounds that yielded his Purple Hearts. Concocting that sort of fake news became known as Swiftboating. Its purpose was to un-Troop its targets, excluding them from the public veneration that the post-9/11 era afforded to military service.

  With the election looming, Osama bin Laden observed the American landscape he had reshaped. His plan had “exceeded all expectations,” he gloated, thanks to the indefinite, expanding war. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda,’ ” bin Laden marveled in a videotape he released October 30, “in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”

  Bush was showing the Muslim world the America that bin Laden depicted: both a bloodthirsty oppresser and a vulnerable one. The United States looked like a rampaging tyrant, ruling through fear and coercion, yet one which Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan were demonstrating could be defeated. Bin Laden explained his strategy as simply provoking America into being itself. Much as the Soviet Union had collapsed after the Afghanistan insurgency—which he neglected to mention had aligned him with the CIA—bin Laden said, “We are continuing this policy, in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A strategically targeted, persistent resistance to the enemy would provoke a reaction the enemy could neither sustain nor end. And the enemy was every American, he reminded his audience, as
he held all Americans collectively guilty for the violence U.S. policy inflicted upon Muslim countries. Their ability to “prevent another Manhattan” was in their own hands, “not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush.”

  Kerry gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine a month before he lost the election. By then, it was an article of faith that the War on Terror would last perhaps a generation, a presumption that had removed any pressure on politicians to articulate the conditions for victory. For the first time, Kerry gestured at what he believed an acceptable outcome would be. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” he said, analogizing terrorism to prostitution, gambling, and organized crime. “It’s something that you continue to fight,” he continued, “but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

  It was not terrorism, however, that was threatening the fabric of American life, as bin Laden gleefully pointed out: counterterrorism was. Kerry had accommodated the politics that insisted that the terrorists ought to be the “focus of our lives.” He was never able to reconcile the end of the war he sought with the politics propelling it, because they were irreconcilable. They would only get more people killed, traumatized, and robbed of their freedom.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THEIR LOSS IN 2004, Democrats, adrift and shut out of power, found a way to make Islamophobia work for them.

  In fall 2005 a shipping conglomerate known as Dubai Ports World acquired a British company that operated several U.S. seaports. The changeover from one foreign firm to another caused little concern among U.S. regulators, particularly as Dubai Ports World was controlled by one of the monarchs of the United Arab Emirates. For years Democrats had gotten little political traction with issues of homeland security, but they now saw an opportunity to capitalize on Islamophobia and xenophobia. “Dubai has had a very strong nexus with terrorism,” warned Chuck Schumer, a New York senator rising within the party leadership.

  Schumer’s claim was patently absurd. The port operations in question had long been privately managed. The current company doing so was foreign-owned—just by citizens of a European country. Dubai, an oligarchic playpen, had no substantive “nexus with terrorism.” Schumer presented a fantastical theory that “the way terrorists would work is they would infiltrate an organization like Dubai Royal Ports.” An Israeli shipping company executive, incredulous at the accusations, wrote Hillary Clinton, who had joined with Schumer, that Dubai Ports World “maintain[s] the highest security standards in all its terminals around the world.” Bush’s dismissal of the Dubai Ports World hysteria ensured Democratic intensity against the plan, and in March 2006 the now-embattled Republicans rejected the ports deal. The company promptly gave up and announced it would divest its American port operations, ultimately selling them to the insurance firm AIG, which would play a key role in 2008’s global financial calamity.

  Democratic demagoguery with respect to Arabs and Islam reinforced the degree to which Islamophobia was now part of American life. From at least July 2006 to February 2008, the FBI placed the executive director of CAIR, Nihad Awad, under surveillance, according to leaked documents. The leader of the largest American Muslim civil-rights groups was never charged with a crime. “The pressure, the stress—you don’t see any relief coming,” reflected Adham Hassoun, who by 2005 resided in the special housing unit of the Federal Detention Center in Miami, where he was charged with terrorism.

  It was an unusual accusation. The Justice Department had not charged Hassoun with involvement in any act of violence. Nor had it accused him of plotting any support for terrorism against America. Instead, in a cascading series of indictments, it alleged that he was a cog in a “North American support cell” that raised money and recruits for overseas jihadist groups. The evidence the department cited came in the form of checks to jihad-adjacent refugee charities that Hassoun had written in the nineties, when doing so was legal. It also revealed that the FBI had already had him under surveillance, though he was never charged with any crime until well after 9/11. But Hassoun had a certain association. He was charged not only as a codefendant of Jose Padilla—who by now was functionally cleared of anything to do with the “dirty bomb” scare that had initially landed him in military detention—but also as having recruited Padilla for miscellaneous jihad.

  “The second part of 2004, that’s when the charitable stuff starts coming” up in his interrogations, Hassoun recalled. “Before that it was, ‘Do you know any of these bad guys?’ . . . They just wanted Padilla’s head. I was collateral damage.”

  Bounced around a series of immigration lockups, county jails, and federal detention centers, Hassoun spent four years before his trial in solitary confinement. Miami guards took pity on him, urging him not to give up. (“You can’t believe how nice they were,” he said.) Every morning, following instructions, they would ransack his cell and confiscate his meager possessions; every evening the guards returned them. The “psychological warfare” of his solitude intensified as prosecutors pressed him to take a plea deal in exchange for testimony. “I get emotional sometimes. I have tears in my eyes,” he remembered. “My belief as a Muslim helped me stay tough, because I know there’s a day of judgment. I’ll see them, one by one.”

  Although conservatives had derided a “law-enforcement approach” to terrorism after 9/11, the Bush administration prosecuted hundreds of people in federal courts for terror-related offenses. Liberals and civil libertarians typically highlighted those measures to argue that Bush’s military tribunals and indefinite detentions were unnecessary, as if necessity was why Bush had opted for nonjudicial imprisonment. But cases like Hassoun’s revealed that the post-9/11 criminal justice system had become uncomfortably similar to this supposedly exceptional apparatus. The typical posture for federal judges who heard terrorism-related cases, in criminal and particularly in constitutional contexts, was deference to the government’s national security authorities. Judges tended to start from the perspective that they appropriately possessed minimal authority to review the executive’s security claims in wartime. But now that this was an endless war, the state of emergency had become the new status quo, amounting to a separate justice system for Muslims.

  In February 2005 federal prosecutors in Virginia charged Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a twenty-three-year old from Falls Church, with plotting to assassinate Bush on behalf of al-Qaeda. They claimed he represented “one of the most dangerous terrorist threats that America faces in the perilous world after Sept. 11, 2001: an Al Qaeda operative born and raised in the United States, trained and committed to carry out deadly attacks on American soil.” The entirety of the evidence in Abu Ali’s case were his confessions during his twenty months in a Saudi prison. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, a Clinton appointee, rejected Abu Ali’s protests that his statements had been coerced through torture. Lee also permitted unnamed Saudi agents to deliver taped depositions assuring the court that the confessions were legitimate. There was no evidence, or much of a claim by prosecutors, that the plot was in any advanced stage. With Abu Ali’s conviction never in doubt, Lee sentenced him to thirty years. Perversely, he not only lost his sentencing appeal, but on remand he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Hassoun considered his own trial a formality. Prosecutors were permitted to place an entire bin Laden CNN interview into evidence, because the FBI had wiretapped Hassoun mentioning to codefendant Kifah Jayyousi in 1997 that he planned on watching it, on the grounds that bin Laden “spoke to [Hassoun’s] entire state of mind.” The U.S. attorney, Alex Acosta, further contended that his discussions of aiding refugees of wars like Kosovo were “codewords for fighting violent jihad.” In one conversation, predating the PATRIOT Act by five years, the FBI claimed that when Hassoun told someone “go and smell some fresh air,” he actually meant “traveling to a jihad area.” Hassoun was not permitted to introduce into evidence an account the government had of a man known as Uways, who wa
s with Padilla at an Afghanistan training camp and said that someone named Abu Malki, not Hassoun, had sent Padilla there.

  Regardless, American juries were not in the habit of acquitting Muslims in terrorism cases, and certainly not Muslims suspected of having set in motion a onetime enemy combatant who was said to want to detonate a radiological bomb. In such an environment, prosecutors were able to argue that Hassoun’s refusal to talk to FBI agents in June 2002 “shows he remained committed to his program of religious extremism,” even as the case centered on checks he wrote and conversations he had before material support carried the higher PATRIOT Act–imposed penalties. The aspect of the courtroom farce that surprised Hassoun the most was how tall his children had grown in the five years since his arrest. “I tried to hold my tears back,” he said. “It’s inhumane what they did to me. I expect it from Russia, from Lebanon, but from the United States? What did I do?”

  Hassoun, Padilla, and Jayyousi were convicted on August 16, 2007. By now prosecutors were claiming that Hassoun “indoctrinated people and converted them to become al-Qaeda fighters,” referring to Padilla. Hassoun was convicted on charges of abetting murder, maiming, and kidnapping, even though the government could not point to anyone to whom Hassoun had made financial contributions who was responsible for such crimes. At his sentencing, Judge Marcia Cooke rejected the Justice Department’s recommendation for life imprisonment. The fact that the FBI had him under surveillance for years and “did nothing . . . does not support the government’s argument that Mr. Hassoun poses such a danger to the community that he needs to be imprisoned for the rest of his life,” Cooke said. She sentenced Hassoun to fifteen years.