Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  But Derby Line still cannot return to the old ways—Homeland Security won’t allow it. Crossing the border on Church Street continues to be prohibited. After the Buzz Roy protest, a border patrol agent was assigned to sit in a cruiser, all day and all night, on Church Street just outside the Haskell Library to stop anyone from following in Roy’s footsteps. Border patrol agents still yell at locals who don’t immediately check in at customs after passing through a border gate. The unsmiling men with shaved heads and sunglasses haven’t all left town. Crossing the border still means demands for passports and secondary questioning and even searches, and many on both sides have decided to avoid it as much as possible. “They don’t treat locals any better than anybody else,” said an exasperated Karen Jenne.

  In an ironic twist, Canadian officials moved in late 2012 to close off the Canadian side of Church Street to stop people from illegally entering Canada from America. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police installed a row of flowerpots across the road, because illegal immigrants in the United States were seeking refuge in Canada, which has easier rules for obtaining political asylum.

  The fortress-like mentality damaged businesses on both sides of the border. Fewer Canadians are willing to cross to shop in downtown Derby Line, and fewer Americans run errands in Stanstead. “Our business from the American side has gone down drastically,” said Amber Stremmelaar, the daughter of the owner of Pizzeria Steve 2002. “It’s a hassle for Americans to come over. If you have leftovers they won’t let you bring them home with you across the border.”

  Fewer Canadians come to shop at Brown’s Drug Store as well. Buzz Roy believes that Homeland Security is slowly killing his village, all in the name of an absurd concept of perfect security. “There’s no negotiating with these people,” says Roy. “It’s totally senseless. There is no thought put into it. Al Qaeda has won. They have changed our lives.”

  For decades, the wooded campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, was a quiet, public oasis near one of the busiest suburban commercial districts in the Washington, D.C., area. Its 300 acres were open to all, and its long, narrow, winding streets, where researchers walked from one red-brick science building to the next, gave NIH the feel of a sprawling state university. A subway station built nearby gave people from all over Washington easy access to the campus. The academic atmosphere at NIH made it both an intellectual magnet for world-class scientists as well as a welcoming, cultural jewel for the entire community, with outdoor film festivals, picnics, and theater and orchestral performances that drew enthusiastic audiences from the surrounding neighborhoods.

  For Gary Daum, a computer science and music teacher at a nearby prep school, NIH gave him the opportunity to fulfill his dream of conducting an orchestra. In the late 1990s, Daum, whose wife worked at NIH, helped found the NIH Community Orchestra, which was open to any and all amateur musicians, both employees and nonemployees alike. The orchestra rehearsed and performed on the NIH campus, and its concerts quickly became a fixture on the NIH cultural calendar. The highlight of the year came each December when the orchestra, along with an NIH community choral group, performed Handel’s Messiah, including the Hallelujah Chorus, in NIH’s Masur Auditorium, attracting large, joyous audiences including top NIH officials.

  The events of September 11, 2001, abruptly and permanently altered life at NIH. Its traditional culture of openness was suddenly ended. Newly empowered security officials dictated that the campus be closed off from the public. Very quickly, new rules were interpreted to mean that outside organizations like the community orchestra were no longer welcome on the NIH campus. With its tight new security procedures, NIH would not allow outsiders—like nonemployee amateur musicians—access to the campus in the evenings or on weekends. And it would not open itself up to the crowds of nonemployees who would come to listen to the concerts at the auditorium. NIH was assuming a fortress mentality, just like Homeland Security had done in Derby Line, Vermont, and the unintended consequences were piling up.

  “We were told that the Masur Auditorium was closed to outside groups,” recalls Daum. “We had no choice. We couldn’t perform the Messiah in December.”

  There was no chance for Daum to question or debate the decision. The NIH officials who banished the orchestra did not even consider that the orchestra’s performances had always been well attended by the patients undergoing treatment at the NIH clinical center on campus.

  Over time, NIH completely walled itself off from the surrounding neighborhoods, constructing 10-foot-high steel fences around its entire perimeter. It built security gates at each entrance, where guards stopped and often searched and swabbed down cars for bombs. Now, residents in the surrounding neighborhoods could no longer walk through the campus, and security officials threw up gates and blockades to make certain that no one exiting the NIH subway station could actually get into NIH without authorization. Even visiting foreign scientists were treated with suspicion.

  Inevitably, working in such an isolated bubble threatened the very purpose of NIH, which was to bring together the world’s greatest minds to foster cutting-edge medical research. Treating the NIH campus like the headquarters of the CIA meant that medical researchers could no longer benefit from the kind of intellectual spontaneity that so often leads to innovative ideas.

  The scientific community began to chafe at the excessive security. To many, it seemed as if the security managers—often drawn from the same kind of people who had been high school hall monitors—were now taking control to transform the nature of the campus. The “paranoid security obsessiveness” at NIH, complained science blogger Mark Hoofnagle, was “unnecessary and counterproductive to the free exchange of ideas science needs in order to be open, international and collaborative.”

  Banning the orchestra, as well as a theater group that had performed on the campus for years, only served to make the isolation of NIH even worse. The new security regime at NIH left the sixty-piece orchestra without a place to practice or perform, and in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Gary Daum wasn’t certain he could keep the group alive. He canceled rehearsals in September and October 2001.

  But like Buzz Roy in Derby Line, Daum decided to fight back. He refused to let the orchestra become a victim of post-9/11 hysteria. He was determined that the orchestra would hold its Christmas concert, and perform Handel’s Messiah and the Hallelujah Chorus one more time. “It was something we needed,” said Harold Seifried, an NIH scientist and now the orchestra’s president.

  Daum cobbled together rehearsal spaces in church basements and high schools around Washington’s Maryland suburbs. By November 2001, the orchestra was able to hold a series of intense practice sessions, making up for the lost time after the attacks. Finally, Daum found a stage at a high school in Rockville, Maryland, where the orchestra could perform during the holidays, and he put out the word that the orchestra’s Messiah would go on as scheduled.

  The December 2001 concert attracted a large crowd of people from around the Washington area who, just months after 9/11, were eager for some holiday cheer and seemed deeply moved by the Hallelujah Chorus. “It was very powerful for me,” recalls Daum of that night’s Messiah. “Because I thought these would be the last notes to be performed by the orchestra. We had no plans on what we were going to do next.”

  In the summer of 2002, a committee of orchestra members held a series of meetings to decide whether the group could continue. They decided to keep going, despite the fact that they were still unable to persuade NIH security officials to allow the orchestra back onto the NIH campus. Daum kept scrambling just fast enough to find churches and high schools that would take them, and the orchestra barely stayed afloat. That fall, a year after the attacks, the group performed a somber choral and orchestral piece that Daum had written, entitled Psalm 9-11, in yet another high school auditorium. Eventually, Georgetown Prep, the private school where Daum taught, agreed to host the group’s performances, and did so for several years. The orches
tra survived.

  But while it is still called the NIH Community Orchestra, more than a decade after 9/11 the group has never been allowed back to rehearse or perform on the NIH campus. As a result, its ties to NIH have gradually diminished. Now, only about 25 percent of the group’s musicians work at NIH, and most of its newest members are young musicians with no ties to NIH who joined simply for the chance to perform with a group of talented amateurs. They know little about its long-lost connections to NIH or about the fight to keep the orchestra alive in the days after 9/11.

  But Gary Daum is still angry that NIH bureaucrats have been so willing to abandon their ties to the community—and to isolate themselves in the process—all in the name of security. “I ask every year whether we can go back and perform at Masur Auditorium,” said Daum. “And every year, all they say is, we are working on it.”

  The rush to transform the United States from an open society to a walled fortress, prompted by the 9/11 attacks and propelled by billions of dollars spent on homeland security, has not been curbed by the killing of Osama bin Laden. The death of the nation’s main adversary has done surprisingly little to change the debate over how best to balance security, civil liberties, and freedom of movement. It is no longer much of a debate—security always wins. Only a few Americans, like Buzz Roy and Gary Daum, have been willing to fight back against the forces compelling us to accept smaller lives.

  Jeremy Németh, a planning and design expert at the University of Colorado at Denver, has begun to quantify how much space Americans have been willing to abandon. He found that more than 35 percent of the civic center district of New York City—the area around Foley Square and the downtown federal buildings and courthouses—is now inside a security zone, and thus open only to those with authorized access. In Los Angeles, 23 acres of land in the city is inside a security zone. Németh describes these new security enclaves in America’s biggest cities as the result of “the architecture of fear.”

  “The security apparatus has kind of taken over,” Németh says. “The security experts have begun to take over city planning and design.” Indeed, the architectural profession has been forced—by clients, lawyers, insurance companies, and government regulators—to make security, rather than design elegance, a top priority. Now, there are even design firms, like Rock Twelve in New York, that specialize in security architecture, developing new types of car and truck barriers.

  Airports, of course, are a lost cause; they have been the biggest victims of this security fetish and now feel more like temporary detention centers than gateways to the world. But American landmarks have also borne the brunt, turning from symbols of freedom and courage into signs of national paranoia and government control. At the U.S. Capitol, for example, lawmakers have insulated themselves from spontaneous contact with voters through the construction of a TSA-style “visitor center” that sharply limits and controls public access to the Capitol.

  Across the street at the Supreme Court, the court’s tall and majestic front doors, traditionally thrown open to allow Americans to hear judicial arguments, have been permanently closed. The decision, “like so many mindless decisions attributed to security concerns, is a grand affront—architecturally, symbolically, politically,” wrote Washington Post architecture critic Philip Kennicott. “The decision will enforce new and unwanted meanings on one of the city’s most dramatic and successful public buildings.”

  The exemplar of the new security obsession is, of course, the successor to the twin towers in New York, One World Trade Center. The tower’s first 200 feet off the ground will be a solid pedestal built to be impervious to truck bombs. Yet that hardened design was not enough for the New York Police Department, which refused to give its approval to the design until even more security measures were added and the building’s base was set farther back from sidewalks and the street. The New York Times reported that the building will come equipped with $20 million in electronic security, including chemical, biological, and radiation detection, and “video analytics” that use computers to continuously scan video feeds from the building’s cameras to alert human guards if a nearby car is lingering too long or a person is walking too fast. One World Trade Center will be the tallest castle in America.

  Outside the country, U.S. embassies, America’s symbolic outreach to other nations, are now among the most forbidding buildings on the planet. Collectively they send a message that foreigners are no longer welcome. The U.S. embassy in Britain, located in London’s Grosvenor Square, is being replaced with a new terrorist-proof building across town that has drawn withering English criticism. Warren Ellis, a British graphic novelist, was particularly scathing. The new embassy, he wrote on his blog, is “a 12-story cube clad in a blastproof glass and plastic façade surrounded by a 30-meter blast zone. . . . It looks not unlike a high-end bunker that has been simply dropped from space on London, an impregnable and isolated chunk of America. And while security is an obvious and present concern, I think perhaps this building says a little more than it was intended to. In fact, let’s admit it. IT’S A FORTRESS WITH A FUCKING MOAT. It doesn’t say, welcome to a little piece of America, one of the best ideas the world ever had and a country that welcomes the tired and poor and afraid. It says, if you even look at us funny we’ll pour boiling oil on you from the roof. Raise the drawbridge! Release the Mongolian Terror Trout!”

  Richard Sennett, a professor at New York University, says that architects hate the way American buildings are now being designed and constructed, but few ever publicly complain because they need the work in the wake of the financial crisis and recession. “Nobody wants to design a fortress,” said Sennett. “People are very frustrated by it. It is against the direction that the profession wants to go. Before 9/11, the trend in urban design was to make big buildings more street friendly.” Yet today, Sennett believes that 9/11 has reinforced a longstanding strain of insularity in the American culture. “The security obsession fits into a longer, broader way Americans inhabit space.”

  America remains on combat footing in the global war on terror, without realizing that the war that was declared after 9/11 is all but over. The main adversary in that war, Osama bin Laden, is dead, and al Qaeda is broken. What is left are shattered remnants and splinter groups.

  Individual extremists, connected through the Internet or by fighting with Islamic insurgencies in other countries, often motivated by anger over American military actions, now pose a bigger domestic threat than organized Islamist terrorism aimed directly at the United States. “Lone wolf” terrorists, like the brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that killed 3 and wounded about 180, can sow fear and generate national headlines with sporadic small-scale attacks. But they lack the power or capability of a significant terrorist organization. While the possibility of such incidents means that the nation has to remain cautiously on guard, they don’t amount to the kind of existential threats initially feared in the wake of 9/11. They are best treated as criminal matters.

  The sudden success of ISIS in Iraq attracted foreign fighters and raised the potential for a new terrorist threat, but the group’s primary focus was on its immediate enemy in Baghdad. President Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS in the summer of 2014 raised the potential for a completely new war on terror, without ever having declared an end to the previous one. It also signified a questionable “whack-a-mole” strategy, in which the U.S. targets Islamic militant insurgencies before they ever attack the United States, just in case they might do so in the future. That strategy would almost guarantee that those groups will eventually turn against us, and that the endless war on terror would remain endless.

  Boston stoked outsized fears largely because the American psyche has remained fragile in the years since 9/11. After Boston, of course, many political leaders revived post-9/11 fears and began calling once again for greater limits on privacy, freedom of movement, and the constitutional rights of Americans. Boston was actually shut down for a day during the manhunt
for the suspects, an unprecedented action that led to a renewed debate over the limits of security in the post-9/11 era.

  In the wake of Boston, Major League Baseball directed that all of its teams impose strict new security procedures for ticketed customers entering the nation’s baseball parks, and by 2015 each team must use either handheld or walk-through metal detectors. For fans of America’s most traditional national pastime, taking in a game was being transformed into a grim trip to the airport.

  The level of resources devoted to fighting terrorism still remains out of proportion to the actual threat level posed by terrorism. So it is only natural that the FBI, Homeland Security, and state and local law enforcement agencies have to find ways to fill their days. In late 2012, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a civil rights group, obtained a series of FBI documents that showed that the FBI had been spying on the Occupy Wall Street movement, treating it like a terrorist threat. FBI agents in New York and across the country conducted surveillance on the Occupy movement and shared information with businesses, universities, and local police and other law enforcement agencies. In Indianapolis, the FBI issued a “potential criminal activity alert” even before any protests were scheduled there. In Syracuse, New York, the Joint Terrorism Task Force sent information about Occupy protests to campus police at colleges in the region.

  These FBI documents underscore the danger posed by the unbridled growth of the nation’s counterterrorism infrastructure, and how easily the machinery designed to catch terrorists can be turned to other targets. Often, counterterrorism resources are just wasted. Homeland Security’s so-called fusion centers, which are supposed to bring together federal, state, and local law enforcement officials to gather terrorism-related intelligence, have turned out to be a multibillion-dollar boondoggle. They have produced shoddy intelligence reports that unnecessarily endangered the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens, even as more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds earmarked for the centers could not be accounted for, according to a scathing Senate investigation in 2012. Many of the intelligence reports produced by the centers were so bad that they were withheld from distribution inside the government. Others that were distributed should not have been. In 2011, one Illinois fusion center warned darkly that Russian hackers had tapped into the computer system of a water district in Springfield. In fact, a repairman had remotely accessed the water district’s computer system while on vacation in Russia.