The War on Terror has transformed America. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Spencer Ackerman explores the lasting effects in \u201cReign of Terror.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The culture of 9\/11 echoed the jihadism it sought to destroy: brutal, messianic, aggrieved, censorious, and eschatological. Conservatives had long used New York City as a synecdoche for the cosmopolitan decadence they saw corrupting America. But now that New York could serve as a rallying cry for war, it was a city of martyrs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On \u201cthe Pile,\u201d as the ruins of the World Trade Center became known, Bush stood beside rescue workers and shouted through a bullhorn, \u201cThe people who knocked down these buildings will hear us all soon.\u201d The response was not only political. Americans drove hundreds of miles to Manhattan to stand in solidarity with New Yorkers, donating whatever skills they had to an impromptu rescue effort. Their embrace contrasted conspicuously with how Bush treated New Yorkers\u2019 ba\u00adsic material needs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fires at Ground Zero burned for one hundred days, filling the air over lower Manhattan and beyond with carcinogenic toxins for locals, and particularly firefighters, to inhale. Christine Todd Whit\u00adman, the former New Jersey governor who ran Bush\u2019s Environmental Pro\u00adtection Agency, blithely assured residents and rescue workers that \u201cair samples we have taken at all levels \u2026 cause us no concern.\u201d The residential deep cleaning that was recommended to mitigate the risk by health experts was left by the government to be performed by landlords, who did the sort of job familiar to generations of local renters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
New Yorkers mattered less than did enlisting their suffering for a war that possessed an ominous spir\u00aditual component. The Wall Street Journal <\/i>columnist Peggy Noonan mar\u00adveled at \u201cGod Bless America\u201d sung on Park Avenue and concluded, \u201cGod is back. He\u2019s bursting out all over.\u201d Subway trains put on American flag de\u00adcals that would remain twenty years later. The flag was now a shroud. It also became a border, segregating those who were authentically Amer\u00adican from those who were not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A thirty-three-year-old Palestinian-born woman raised in Chicago, Lina Elayyan, told reporter Tram Nguyen that people who wore hijab, like her mother, felt as if \u201cthey had a bullseye on their forehead.\u201d Hate crimes against Muslims \u2014 or those, like Sikhs, per\u00adceived to be Muslims by whites uninterested in distinctions \u2014 skyrocketed from 28 incidents in 2000 to 481 in the final months of 2001. A generation of Arab and Desi children were called \u201cOsama\u201d by white classmates. <\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
With racism came conspiracy. False rumors spread that Jews who worked in the World Trade Center warned one another to stay home on 9\/11. A durable conspiracy theory called 9\/11 trutherism, which took root on both the far left and the far right, held that the towers were destroyed by a treason\u00adous globalist government that sought to gin up an imperial war. \u201cLarry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC complex, admitted \u2026 that he and the NYFD decided to \u2018pull\u2019 WTC 7,\u201d wrote a rising conspiracist named Alex Jones, who twisted Silverstein\u2019s words. More respectable versions of the post\u20119\/11 fury were no less vicious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Commentators, and hardly only conser\u00advative ones, pathologized Arabs and Muslims, whose critiques of America were proof of their <\/i>conspiratorial thinking. Within days of 9\/11, the right-wing radio host Dennis Prager told the Fox News host Bill O\u2019Reilly, \u201cIt is very sad to say, but a significant percentage of the Muslim world hates us.\u201d Before September ended, O\u2019Reilly urged, \u201cI think we should put troops on the border right now.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Enemies were everywhere. A Palestinian man named Adham Amin Hassoun worked at a Miami technology company. Born in Lebanon, Hassoun had lived through the horror of the Lebanese civil war. A youth spent surviving bombings, beat\u00adings, and even kidnappings taught him both the fragility of civilization and the resilience of humanity. Hassoun was active in his mosque, quick to open his wallet to Muslim refugee charities, and he found inspiration in the solidaristic community aid efforts after Hurricane Andrew demolished much of South Florida in 1992. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAll that bullshit I used to hear\u201d in the Middle East about the perfidy of Americans lay in ruins, he recalled, since \u201cthese people were like us.\u201d After 9\/11 Hassoun knew that there would be a backlash against Muslims\u2014the lessons Lebanon taught were indelible\u2014but he couldn\u2019t accept the enormity of what was coming. \u201cI got phone calls from overseas, \u2018Leave the country.\u2019 All the time I would say, \u2018No, no, no, they\u2019re wiser, it\u2019s not like with the Japanese,\u2019\u201d Hassoun recalled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For entire months afterward, when cable news wasn\u2019t rebroadcasting footage of the towers collapsing or the burnt facade of the Pentagon, it doc\u00adumented a cascade of disasters following 9\/11. Powderized anthrax spores were mailed to the U.S. Capitol, and around the country, bearing the mes\u00adsage You cannot stop us<\/i>; the FBI never did. <\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In December, a college student, Monique Danison, noticed that a fellow passenger aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami attempted to ignite a fuse in his shoe, but the passengers and crew restrained him. Reports about the fear grip\u00adping American Muslims, like Elayyan and her mother, received less empha\u00adsis and made little impact on the direction of the country. Particularly in New York, people retreated indoors and watched the unfolding violence on TV in a kind of catatonia. It augured a phenomenon that would last for a generation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The overwhelming majority of Americans \u2014 the ones who did not serve in the military or the security services; the ones who were not pursued by the security services \u2014 experienced the 9\/11 era as a media event. Those Americans could disengage from it when it grew unbearable. An America in a fugue state went looking for heroes. Vanity Fair <\/i>dis\u00adpatched Annie Leibovitz to photograph Bush\u2019s war cabinet. New York\u2019s reactionary mayor, Rudy Giuliani, not three years removed from the police slaying of Amadou Diallo, was apotheosized on the cover of Tina Brown\u2019s latest venture, Talk <\/i>magazine, as the mayor of America. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Giuliani had catastrophically placed his command center in the World Trade Center, the only place in New York known to have been a terrorist target. He echoed Whitman in insisting that the air was safe to breathe \u2014 elbowing federal agencies out of the way to get workers back on the job, regardless of the health risks \u2014 and passed through Ground Zero with his face protected by what Village Voice <\/i>journalist Wayne Barrett recalled as no more than \u201ca dust mask on his mouth.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brown was hardly the only media figure to wash Giuliani\u2019s brutal mayoralty in the blood of 9\/11. Giuliani had always been a media creation, propelled by journalists who might have found him incor\u00adrigible but generally treated him as a necessity to control an out\u2011of\u2011control city \u2014 something that, in practice, meant repressing Black, brown, and poor New Yorkers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In short order the Fox network began airing a smash hit TV show about a counterterrorist who each season combated another immi\u00adnent apocalyptic attack by torturing its perpetrators. Jack Bauer\u2019s more resilient enemies on 24 <\/i>were the bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians attempting to prevent him from saving America. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the right\u2019s guiding legal light, used the show to champion impunity for torture. \u201cJack Bauer saved Los Angeles,\u201d Scalia told an Ottawa legal conference. \u201cAre you going to convict Jack Bauer?\u201d Never had a people thrust into an avowedly epochal conflict been asked to do less in response to it. The NFL paused its week-two games the Sunday after 9\/11, then resumed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bush urged people to go shopping as a way to stimulate a wartime economy. Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the \u201cwrath\u201d of the United States emerging and, simultaneously, hoped Ameri\u00adcans would not \u201clet what\u2019s happened here in any way throw off their normal level of economic activity.\u201d It was a decisive message that the wealthy would not have to make any sacrifices \u2014 Bush pressed on with cutting their taxes in wartime \u2014 while the working class would, as ever, be a different story. Manhattan plastic surgeons marveled that rich New Yorkers viewed a tummy tuck as therapy for 9\/11\u2011induced stress. One cosmetic surgery consultant explained, \u201cSome of them are telling me, \u2018I may not have a face-lift this year, but whether there is a bomb or not, I\u2019m going to be a blonde. And I\u2019m not going to give up my Botox.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wall Street made sure to hang a giant flag outside the New York Stock Exchange. The flag was an intellectual border as well, and it would be policed. Within days of the attacks Susan Sontag, a titan of American literature, wrote in The New Yorker <\/i>that bin Laden had shown that America\u2019s global domination sowed the seeds of atrocities like 9\/11. She warned that the country was choosing martyrdom over understanding the bitter lesson of the attack. \u201cWhere is the acknowledgment that this was not a \u2018cowardly\u2019 attack on \u2018civilization\u2019 or \u2018liberty\u2019 or \u2018humanity\u2019 or \u2018the free world\u2019 but an attack on the world\u2019s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a con\u00adsequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In three paragraphs Son\u00adtag summarized the emerging \u201cSoviet Party Congress\u201d mode of American politics that would shape a generation: a faith in the righteousness of vio\u00adlence and a deliberate ignorance of both its origins and its effects. The vilification Sontag reaped lasted until her death in 2004. Joan Di\u00addion recalled reading three separate denunciations of Sontag on a single page of the neoconservative Weekly Standard. <\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eminent conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer devoted a Washington Post <\/i>column to Sontag\u2019s \u201cmoral obtuseness.\u201d The neoliberal New Republic, <\/i>which saw its role as policing a left it considered indecent and unreliably American, sneered at Sontag\u2019s \u201cself-flagellation.\u201d Sontag was correct that 9\/11 was about American power, conceded the magazine\u2019s Lawrence F. Kaplan. But rather than dismantling it, the time had come to \u201cwield it effectively in the coming struggle.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Re\u00adjecting Sontag ensured that no one could respectably argue that stopping the next 9\/11 required relinquishing American hegemony. Anything resem\u00adbling that suggestion would be considered not only anti-American but mor\u00adally deficient. \u201cIn the wake of a massacre that killed more than 5,000 innocent Americans in a single day,\u201d Krauthammer sniffed, \u201cone might ex\u00adpect moral clarity.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That funneled American responses to 9\/11 down a bellicose and censo\u00adrious path. The country star Toby Keith released an anthem heralding the epic ass-kicking coming \u201cCourtesy of the Red, White and Blue.\u201d It cap\u00adtured the national mood. People in uniform, from the military to police to firefighters, were valorized to the point of civic worship, an impulse most conspicuous in those whose lives intersected with such people rarely. To criticize the national mobilization was to disrespect the troops, to disrespect the 9\/11 dead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Strokes, on the cusp of contending for the title of the city\u2019s dominant rock band, pulled their September debut album to remove a song whose chorus went \u201cNew York City cops, but they ain\u2019t too smart.\u201d Being Muslim in public was treated as a disreputable political act. Har\u00advard\u2019s 2002 valedictorian, Zayed M. Yasin, was compelled to change the title of a speech about justice from \u201cAmerican Jihad\u201d to \u201cOf Faith and Citizenship\u201d; students protested Yasin anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the months after 9\/11, Didion, taking the banner from the canceled Sontag, wrote that \u201cinquiry into the nature of the enemy we faced \u2026 was to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy \u2026 Pathetic fallacy was everywhere.\u201d One such fallacy concerned the Qatar-based Arabic-language satellite news channel Al Jazeera. In the months following 9\/11, al\u2011Qaeda issued its communiques through the channel. Osama bin Laden even granted its Taysir Allouni an interview in October 2001. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For years afterward, Ameri\u00adcan political and media classes treated Al Jazeera, a news organization, as little more than al\u2011Qaeda\u2019s amplifier, providing critical aid to an enemy. That meant treating Al Jazeera not primarily as a forum where the War on Terror was treated more critically than most, but as a combatant. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in November, it bombed Al Jazeera\u2019s bureau in Kabul and said it had indications that the building was \u201ca known al\u2011Qaeda facility.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next month, Pentagon communications chief Victoria Clarke claimed that the U.S. did not have indications that the channel operated out of the building, though Al Jazeera had said it provided the Americans with their location. During the apogee of American geopolitical supremacy in the 1990s, national politics had devolved into a culture war. Now elites, needing to make 9\/11 meaningful, treated the trauma as a path to a longed-for na\u00adtional unity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Commentators spoke of a frivolous \u201choliday from history\u201d coming to a close, as if the country were a young man recognizing the need to put aside childish things. \u201cOne good thing could come from this horror,\u201d wrote Roger Rosenblatt in Time<\/i>, \u201cit could spell the end of the age of irony.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now it would be an age of iron. It was in this context \u2014 outwardly receiving deference from a frightened public; threatened with scapegoating for 9\/11 by fearful politicians; ex\u00adpected to act as an instrument of both vengeance and deterrence \u2014 that the Security State constructed what became known as the War on Terror. Its name reflected what both Sontag and Didion had diagnosed: exceptionalist euphemism that masked a boundless, direful ambition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From \u201c<\/i>Reign of Terror<\/i><\/a>\u201d by Spencer Ackerman, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Spencer Ackerman.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n