Lessons and Legacies of the War On Terror

From moral panic to permanent war

Gershon Shafir, Everard Meade, William Aceves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138694460
• eBook ISBN: 9781136188749
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume examines the lessons and legacies of the U.S.-led "Global War on Terror," utilizing the framework of a political "moral panic."

A decade after 9/11, it is increasingly difficult to deny that terror has prevailed – not as a specific enemy, but as a way of life. Transport, trade, and communications are repeatedly threatened and disrupted worldwide. While the pace and intensity of terror attacks have abated, many of the temporary security measures and sacrifices of liberty adopted in their immediate aftermath have become more or less permanent.

This book examines the social, cultural, and political drivers of the war on terror through the framework of a "political moral panic": the exploration of threats to particular individuals or institutions that come to be viewed as threats to a way of life, social norms and values, civilization, and even morality itself. Drawing upon a wide range of domestic and international case studies, this volume reinforces the need for reason, empathy, and a dogged defence of principle in the face of terror.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, human rights, U.S. foreign policy, American politics, and Security Studies and I.R. in general.

1 Introduction

Constructing national and global insecurity

Alison Brysk, Everard Meade, and Gershon Shafir

A decade after the September 11th attack on the United States, it is increasingly difficult to deny that terror has prevailed – not as a specific enemy, but as a way of life. Transport, trade, and communications have been threatened and disrupted worldwide; basic international norms for the conduct of war and law enforcement have been trampled; thousands of civilians have been killed in international and civil wars; massive terror attacks have rocked London, Madrid, and Mumbai; and dozens of smaller and larger bombings have wrought devastation in the Middle East and North Africa. Segments of Islamic communities have radicalized in the Middle East and Europe in a vicious cycle with rising anti-Islamic xenophobia, hate crimes, and violations of religious freedom in the West. As Benjamin Franklin predicted, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

While the pace and intensity of terror attacks have abated, many of the temporary security measures and sacrifices of liberty adopted in their immediate aftermath have become more or less permanent. This volume explores the war on terror, not as a fleeting over-reaction, but as the foundation of a new anti-democratic global order that transcends partisan politics and national borders.

As Shafir and Brysk demonstrated in their comparative volume National Insecurity and Human Rights: Democracies Debate Counterterrorism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006), the UNITED STATES and its allies responded to the terrorist threat by constructing “national insecurity,” a mirror image of the apocalyptic worldview of religious terror. The resulting policies diluted democracy at home and abroad, and damaged the West’s comparative advantage of legitimacy, tolerance, and flexibility, empowering autocratic security elites. This volume explores how and why many of these policies have become permanent fixtures of the exercise of power, irrespective of the administration or party in power, and analyzes the interrelated implications of a permanent war on terror at home and abroad.

The contributors examine the social, cultural, and political drivers of the war on terror through the framework of a “political moral panic.” Moral panics are responses to perceived existential threats – threats to particular individuals or institutions that come to be viewed as threats to a way of life, social norms and values, civilization, and even morality itself. A powerful illustration of this version of threat is found in the 2006 National Security Strategy for Combating Terrorism: “The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were acts of war against the United States, peaceful people throughout the world, and the very principles of liberty and human dignity.” The terms of the war on terror exaggerated the strategic threat, defined “the enemy” in ever-expanding concentric circles, and encouraged the use of disproportionate force in response. More important, the moral panic over terrorism facilitated the revival and entrenchment of a broad range of repressive policies from the past with relatively little debate or dissent.

The initial preoccupation with “why they hate us” quickly turned into how much they hate us, and the seemingly limitless ways in which they could harm us (with little unpacking of “us” or “them”). The Bush–Cheney Administration amplified this panic at every turn. By singling out a threat in isolation, giving it a name and a simple narrative, and then deploying it in a concerted public relations campaign, the terms of the war on terror became self-reinforcing and self-reproducing. Otherwise skeptical journalists, commentators, congressmen, and others accepted a limited set of questions about the nature of the threat and how to respond to it, and thus fell into a rhetorical trap – “it’s complicated and there’s a lot we don’t know” faced off against “it’s simple and we know everything we need to know” in encounter after encounter. In the pressure to respond, to offer answers and solutions in the face of uncertainty, the latter, simpler answer triumphed time and time again.

Rather than big-brother media manipulation, or “manufactured consent,” the Bush–Cheney Administration used its privileged knowledge of the threat to exacerbate existing fears, rather than to mitigate them. While their view wasn’t omniscient by any means, and there was plenty of cause for short-term overreaction, they were well positioned to offer a more rational risk assessment, or at least to counter the most extravagant and apocalyptic myths. They not only declined to do so, but they manipulated the mystery of what they supposedly did know but couldn’t reveal for dramatic political effect – think of Condoleezza Rice’s warning of the “smoking gun” appearing as “mushroom cloud.”

Meanwhile, definitions of the enemy expanded, and the range of proposed responses contracted. The reorganization of a wide swath of government agencies under the heading of “homeland security,” and the formal establishment of the “deterrence of terrorism” as the top priority of all federal law enforcement reinforced this collapsing at every turn. Metaphorical invocations of war – repeated assertions that the attacks were “acts of war,” that the country needed to get “on a war footing,” or that unprecedented domestic surveillance was justified because “we are at war” – prepared the cultural and institutional terrain for real war, and the thorough militarization of counter-terrorism.

While the breadth and speed with which the global war on terror developed initially caught many critics off guard, it has faced deep and abiding opposition. Millions around the world protested the invasion of Iraq; the revelation of the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib produced a media firestorm, congressional hearings, and criminal prosecutions; and the fate of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba became a central issue in the 2008 presidential election and the subject of a voluminous and rich jurisprudence on civil rights and the law of armed conflict. But, most of the underlying policies have weathered the storm, and most of them have continued under the Obama Administration. More important, the legal and institutional changes wrought during the post 9/11 emergency have become more or less permanent, affecting millions of ordinary people without the most ancillary connection to terrorism.

The war on terror has spilled over into a more general crackdown against non-citizens. The new policies include the revival of the use of detention as a punitive deterrent to undocumented immigration, the classification of case files and other information about immigrants, and the criminalization of minor immigration-related offenses, such as driving without a license, or presenting false documents. Unprecedented rates of arrest, detention, and deportation have separated families, despite overall declines in immigration. The securitization of immigration on top of prior attempts at the formal criminalization of non-citizens as national policy, in turn, casts a long cultural shadow, fueling everything from state laws targeting Mexican workers, to local controversies over the construction of mosques and Islamic cultural centers.

A variety of moral entrepreneurs, many in the highest echelons of the state, have perpetuated this moral panic, and mobilized it to their own ends. Using the perceived threat of “terrorist infiltration” as a point of entry, a lawyer in Kansas developed the idea of “self-deportation”– making it so difficult for undocumented immigrants to function in society that they “deport” themselves – and deployed it in a series of restrictive local immigration laws, which have passed in Arizona, Alabama, and several other states. It’s a similar story with local campaigns to ban Sha’ria law in Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Most of them were dreamed up and written elsewhere and the local controversies they have spawned have nothing to do with a real threat of Sha’ria law or Muslim practices dominating their communities – they are simply a way of telling Muslims minorities, potential immigrants, or political progressives who may sympathize with them that they are not welcome.

The goal of this volume is not to pass judgment on popular beliefs or to unilaterally condemn a set of policy decisions at face value. Rather, the contributors explore how ideas and policies that were publicly disavowed in living memory because they sustained hateful or intolerant practices, or because of the serious and systematic abuses they spawned, have been revived without any real acknowledgement of why they were abandoned in the first place.

Indeed, one of the most insidious aspects of political moral panics is the way in which they obscure the genealogies of repressive policies. Many of the migrants and refugees caught up in the current crackdown against undocumented immigration, for example, fled the terror and genocide produced by U.S.-backed counterinsurgency regimes in Central America in the 1980s. Similar kinds of blowback characterize U.S. policy towards Iran and Sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of Iraq or Afghanistan. Asaf Siniver and other security analysts have noted the total lack of “introspection,” or inquiry into “self-responsibility” for the “root causes” of terrorism among the governments waging the war on terror. At a more pedestrian level, those who raised causal connections in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 often faced a stiff backlash. Witness the pillory of Susan Sontag for suggesting a degree of realpolitik in Al Qaeda’s strategy or mentioning the courage of the hijackers in a New Yorker editorial, or the hysterical response to novelist and military historian Caleb Carr’s rather modest assertion that terrorism is a tactic and not an ideology.

The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) repeatedly urges those fighting the war on terror to learn the lessons of the Cold War, warning against short-term alliances with repressive regimes, etc., but it posits no causal relationship between the two, and, in fact presents the history of U.S. responses to terrorism in complete isolation. In its attempt to avoid partisanship or ideology, the report avoids causation altogether, and portrays terrorism almost as a force of nature. A threat without a cause is a threat that can’t be reasoned with, sized up, or fleshed out. It is all possibility, “self-renewing menace potential,” as Brian Massumi describes it. This uncertain, amorphous quality, when combined with an exemplary act of violence, and many superficial markers of cultural difference, makes for the perfect panic. Though panics are popular phenomena, political moral panics are engineered for political needs by political leaders, who play upon and encourage existing fear and rage, even if genuine public panic remains weak, as indicated by the relatively modest rise in hate crimes against Muslims in the United States after 9/11. As Kathryn Olmsted shows, panics over perceived conspiracies against an “American way of life” during World War I, the Cold War, and the current war on terror have provided unique opportunities for the rapid (and largely permanent) expansion of government power.

In order to explore much more precisely how the ideas and institutions of the global war on terror have turned into a permanent feature of the exercise of power, the contributors to this volume pursue three related goals: (1) a broad theoretical framework which examines the deeper drivers of the global war on terror (GWOT or WOT) as a political moral panic; (2) an integrated approach to the domestic and international dimensions of the war on terror; and (3) an exploration of continuities across the Bush and Obama administrations that highlight the enduring aspects of the war on terror.

The volume begins with a broad theoretical introduction. Shafir and Schairer conceptualize moral panic not as a “theme” but rather as a comprehensive analytical framework. They examine each of the customary features of Stanley Cohen’s original theory of moral panics, reevaluate, and reconceptualize them in detail. They extend the reach of moral panic theory from the study of social deviance that is amplified by mass media to the analysis of politics that revolve around moral and symbolic battles, connect it with political institutions and dynamics, and identify the circumstances in which it is likely to emerge and persist. From the perspective of moral panic they explore why with the end of the panic’s “life cycle” so many of the policies that constituted the war on terror have not been dismantled, even after the term itself has been dropped. They propose an alternative response to grave threats, combining a careful assessment of the exaggeration of threats through “risk analysis”; the promise of liberal education for combating the overbroad definition of adversaries; and the tools of constitutional law and the rule of law to properly constrain disproportionate responses.

Rescuing the submerged histories, giving a voice to those who have borne the brunt of abusive counterterrorism policies is critical to preventing the revival of such policies in the next panic. Aceves examines the enormous potential that civil lawsuits provide for retelling these histories in front of impartial arbiters, with empirical evidence, and in the survivors’ own words. While the constitutionality of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the indeterminate detention of “enemy combatants,” and many other aspects of the war on terror have been explored in a vast legal literature, civil remedies for the same kinds of abuses have received very little attention. As Aceves points out, in addition to the procedural robustness and legitimacy of the civil justice system in the UNITED STATES, there is good recent precedent for using civil lawsuits to give the victims of torture (at home and abroad) a day in court and a formal validation of their claims, even if there’s no way of collecting monetary damages. Civil suits also offer an orderly path to a broader global pattern of post-atrocity reparations. Moreover, the system is “victim-centered … it allows the victims to control the proceedings, from the filing of the initial lawsuit, through the presentation of evidence, and to the execution of judgment.” His recounting of several cases where the victims of torture and arbitrary detention as part of the war on terror have sought civil remedies under the “Bivens doctrine” – whereby they file suit against particular U.S. officials for violations of their constitutional rights – shows how U.S. officials in the Bush–Cheney and then the Obama Administration have invoked “state-secrets” privilege to prevent discovery and to withhold information necessary to sustain these claims, and how the federal appeals courts have allowed these obstructionist tactics to stand. In keeping with the broader thrust of this volume, Aceves shows that blaming the president or a cabal of national security officials for these decisions is off point. The moral panic and the extreme risk aversion it nourishes are sustained by the quiet cascading of many seemingly small decisions by law enforcement, government lawyers, and ultimately judges at every level, who have allowed the erosion of basic constitutional principles.

This kind of bureaucratic risk aversion, aided and abetted by extreme secrecy and a lack of transparency, has facilitated the evisceration of the rights of asylum seekers in the United States. Meade explores the rise of a sweeping new notion of deterrence in U.S. immigration policy after 9/11, including the adjudication of asylum claims. Tasked with deterring terrorism above all other priorities, immigration enforcement agencies and personnel fell back on a variety of punitive and prejudicial practices, and undermined the fragile progress made by the Refugee Act (1980) in creating a system in which individual asylum seekers could seek refuge from persecution in the United States based on their individual merits. In an alarming number of cases, the very same evidence that sustains a credible asylum claim has been used to detain, and exclude asylum seekers from legal status in the United States, as fraudsters and threats to national security. When members of the general public (or even federal judges) get a glimpse of the experience of asylum seekers, they are confronted by overlapping spectacles – a spectacle of criminality reinforced by their arrest and detention in remote facilities, the forensic examination of their documents, and the repeated invocation of “terrorism,” however peripheral the putative association; and a spectacle of desperation reinforced by hunger strikes, “rescues” at sea or in the desert, and other situations in which “refugees appear as groups of desperate people begging for asylum, rather than individuals demanding their rights.”

Gottschalk’s exploration of the revival of a barely-latent Islamophobia in the Park51 mosque controversy in lower Manhattan relies upon a similar notion of spectacle and the leveraging of a national moral panic over a local controversy. By systematically comparing this episode to the build-up to the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993, he shows how the language, politics, and relationships between media coverage and law enforcement produced a similar result – in both cases the very existence of a religious group came to be widely perceived as a threat to “the American way of life.” However, thanks to the norms of American Protestant secularism, whereas the demonization of the Branch Davidians didn’t extend to all Christians and they were isolated as a “cult,” the Islamic terrorists conjured up by the Park51 controversy cast suspicion on all Muslims. Once again, a political moral panic has empowered broader cultural forces, and revived practices rooted in previous panics.

Closer to the fighting on the ground, private security firms who tout their expertise, flexibility, and discretion have proliferated, earning billions of dollars in federal contracts and top security clearance, with very little oversight. Large military operations, diplomatic security details, and training courses have always involved private contractors, but the use of private intelligence officers, soldiers-for-hire, and shell corporations to finance and equip clandestine operations was largely abandoned after the Iran-Contra debacle and the revelation of various and sundry alliances forged in fighting the war on drugs. Counterinsurgency doctrine, largely abandoned in the aftermath of bloody and politically disastrous campaigns of torture and murder in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, has re-emerged as the magic bullet in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Similarly, the strategic assassination of presumed terrorists and the political leaders of insurgent groups, banned after congressional oversight committees revealed the often indiscriminate killing of more than twenty thousand individuals from several different countries during the Phoenix Program in Southeast Asia, was revived by President Bush, and has been dramatically expanded by President Obama, aided by unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Prestholdt and Pedersen pieces illustrate how the domestic and international dimensions of the war on terror are part of a coherent whole, by showing how the moral panic over terrorism at home has played out in East Africa and El Salvador, respectively. Prestholdt explores how an obscure Al Qaeda operative was reinvented as a “master terrorist” by a group of moral entrepreneurs that included both U.S. counterterrorism officials and African policymakers eager to take advantage of U.S. aid. Through the rhetorical prisms of “war” and “specters,” they exaggerated the threat that he posed and imagined him as part of a larger phenomenon, lumping together dissidents of very different political persuasions into an exaggerated, amorphous threat. The appearance of this exaggerated threat, in turn, helped to redefine East Africa from a victim of terror attacks (the 1998 embassy bombings) to a “breeding ground” and a “safe haven” for terrorists, and thus served as a pretext for massive new U.S. military investment in the Horn of Africa. What began as a law enforcement operation to assist democratic allies in the region, turned into U.S. support for a series of proxy regimes in East Africa which have rolled back a generation of democratic reforms in the name of counterterrorism.

Pedersen examines how the political moral panic over terrorism helped to transform the “El Salvador option” for counterinsurgency or “population-centered warfare,” from a piece of late-Cold-War arcana, sullied by systematic human rights violations, into a sterling example of building democracy through military intervention. Drawing on his own fieldwork, Pedersen shows how the counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador imagined generic insurgents everywhere and configured all opposition to the regime as opposition to the cause of democracy in the Cold War, leading to tacit support for death squads and an action–reaction escalation of the civil war. In the end, the policy was quietly abandoned and any empirical analysis of its long-term legacy would be hard pressed to call it a “success” – murder, gang violence, social fragmentation, and mass exodus the United States seem to have been the primary results. But, through a series of serendipitous events and personal connections, U.S. military planners revived the “El Salvador option,” including the death squads (renamed “covert actions squads”), as a roadmap for “success” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impetus for massive U.S. investment in counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than naïveté or ignorance, Pedersen shows that this revival was part and parcel of a whole new science of political risk analysis that redefined “success” in ways that obscured inconvenient historical data and justified preparation for seemingly remote possibilities. In the end, similar to the case in East Africa, a political moral panic revived policies rooted in previous panics, and obfuscated the reasons why they had been abandoned.

If the political moral panic over terrorism imposes a kind of amnesia, allowing us to accept disavowed policies and practic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: constructing national and global insecurity
• 2 The war on terror as political moral panic
• Part I: Responses at Ground Zero
• Part II: Globalization of the war on terror
• Index