In early 2017 my colleagues at The Intercept and I published a series of articles about the FBI’s counterterrorism policies. The articles were based on leaked documents that showed the wide latitude the bureau gave itself to surveil students, journalists, and civil society, and detailed its policies on the use of informants. The FBI, the documents specified, targeted Muslim student groups and recruited informants at airports. Agents would offer potential sources help with their immigration status as a “dangle” to get them to cooperate—something that defense and civil liberties attorneys had long suspected but that the FBI officially denied.
Our timing was not fortuitous. Donald Trump had just taken office. The Steele dossier was circulating, with its salacious allegations about the new president’s supposed romps in Moscow. Former FBI directors Robert Mueller and James Comey were soon to become unlikely symbols of “the resistance.” When, in October 2018, the FBI agent Terry Albury was convicted of disclosing documents to The Intercept—which he did, he said, to expose anti-Muslim bias and surveillance overreach—his case got a fraction of the attention that those of previous national security whistleblowers had received.
All of this seemed to be an early indication of how much the “war on terror,” which was the focus of our investigation, had receded, or at least been overshadowed, now that Trump was in power. Trump’s so-called Muslim ban—the executive order forbidding people from several Muslim-majority countries to enter the US—feels in retrospect more a harbinger of hard-line immigration policies and general chaotic showmanship than a sign of a particular emphasis on terror threats. At the same time, Trump’s posturing as an antiwar candidate did not prevent him from continuing, and even intensifying, the disparate military actions involved in the “war on terror” that the country has waged since the September 11 attacks.
Trump’s first administration changed the rules of engagement in Afghanistan and other countries, leading to an increase in bombings and civilian casualties. Deadly night raids in Afghanistan continued, as did strikes in Iraq and Syria (where, even before Trump’s presidency, the extensive air campaign against the Islamic State had rendered debates over precision drone strikes and kill lists somewhat quaint). Under Joe Biden, crises in Gaza and Ukraine further eclipsed counterterrorism as a central public concern. The US withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021. Worries about government spying on US citizens were overtaken by increased awareness of (and acquiescence to) corporate data harvesting.
And yet the various templates of the “war on terror” are still very much in use today. Trump, for instance, declared “antifa” a terror organization after the shooting of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The Department of Homeland Security was created in late 2002, and the extensive surveillance capabilities it has built up in the years since are enabling the administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement. The US military, to say nothing of the special forces and the CIA, still carries out counterterrorism trainings and operations around the world. The continued existence of the military commissions and the detention center at Guantánamo, the occasional drone strike in Somalia, the batch of trainers dispatched to Niger—these once controversial policies have turned into mere state functions. Trump’s strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, which the White House has justified by designating cartels as terror groups, have been greeted with alarm, but it’s unfortunately easy to imagine them becoming accepted in the same way.
In reporting on the subject myself, I have often felt, as the writer and Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay put it in Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (2022), “unsure of whether I’m fulfilling a civic obligation, exploring a personal obsession…or simply screaming into the void.”
The “war on terror” is so pervasive and hard to define that it is easy to lose sight of its most shocking features.* Over the years it became “a kind of water that people noticed just every so often,” as Richard Beck puts it in his new book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, “even though they spent their lives swimming in it.”
It’s a cliché, Beck points out, to talk about the war coming home to be visited on the country’s citizens; it is far more accurate to say that it began at home and has continued here. Homeland is a polemical account that shows how September 11 reshaped the American psyche—and argues persuasively that the resulting militarism “transformed everything from the kinds of heroes Americans wanted to see on television to the vehicles they drove to the grocery store and the city streets on which they walked.” Donald Rumsfeld said in a speech in October 2001, “We have two choices: Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter.” In fact we chose both.
Beck’s history begins with the nation’s response to what he calls an “unprecedented experience of national humiliation.” He chronicles the rise of security culture—from the growth of the TSA to the designation of parks and plazas as “security zones” and Super Bowls as “National Special Security Events”—and suspicion of and racism against Muslims (and other people who look the way Americans think Muslims do). They were targeted in hate crimes and protests and by local and federal authorities for surveillance and detention. The contention that they posed a threat was largely baseless: a rapid roundup after the attacks of more than 1,200 people, mostly Muslim or Arab, resulted in zero terrorism convictions. One major study of purported terrorism convictions between 2001 and 2010 found that most cases involved broadly defined “material support” laws (which could criminalize charitable contributions or social connections) or plots fully concocted by the FBI and its agents provocateurs. One informant spent three years trying and failing to get a Harlem-based jazz musician to do something illegal; that informant eventually became so distraught about his work with the FBI that he set himself on fire outside the White House. (He survived).
Beck, whose first book, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (2015), was about unfounded allegations of sex abuse and satanic rituals in daycare centers, recounts in detail the ordeal of a sixteen-year-old girl named Adama Bah. Born in Guinea and raised in New York City, Bah was detained for six weeks in 2005 after her classmate said (or might have said—it’s still unclear) that she might be a potential suicide bomber. She was repeatedly strip-searched and interrogated, was forced to wear an ankle bracelet for two and a half years, and wound up on the no-fly list. Not until 2014 did a judge declare that list unconstitutional and order the government to create a process for people to challenge their inclusion on it. Beck also discusses Rafil Dhafir, a doctor who was investigated for his charity work in Iraq. He was ultimately convicted of Medicare fraud, but unproven allegations of links to terrorism were used to justify a twenty-two-year sentence. Cases like these communicated to millions of people in the US, Beck writes, that “you are not a full and equal member of our society. You are neither secure nor safe here.”
Homeland is more of a researched commentary than a reported chronicle, an approach familiar from Beck’s writing for n+1, where he is an editor. He analyzes such disparate texts as Paul Bremer’s emergency orders governing Iraq after the US invasion (Bremer once flew in the president of Michigan State University to explain free market economics to Iraqi ministers and business leaders, in “a kind of liberal democracy kindergarten”) and advertisements for trucks and SUVs (one boasted that the “military grade” 2014 F-150 was subjected to “torture-testing”). Some of the book’s strongest sections focus on the media, whether Peter Jennings’s marathon broadcast on September 11 or the disclosure of photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Or consider the superhero franchises of the era. In her brave and incisive book The Terror Dream (2007), on which Beck draws heavily, Susan Faludi contended that “the deepest psychological legacy of our original war on terror”—the settling of the continent through violent conquest of Native American tribes—“wasn’t the pleasure we now take in dominance but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal.” For Faludi, Beck writes, original shame was “the taking of English captives, usually women, by Native Americans” during the seventeenth century. Beck sees this as a “usefully provocative” reading of a period in which the world’s superpower, to cover the shame of being blindsided by the attacks, “did a lot of starting fights and searching for enemies.” And, echoing Faludi’s analysis of captivity narratives, Beck finds that in the early 2000s, it was superhero movies that “converted real, traumatic experiences into parables of trial and redemption.”
Batman and Iron Man “embodied on the screen…the special ops soldier’s synthesis of training, human ingenuity, and cutting-edge technology” along with the idea that sometimes a hero needed to do unpopular, even illegal things. Under George W. Bush, they are unrepentant, but by Barack Obama’s time, when The Dark Knight Rises and the final Iron Man film came out, the heroes are struggling. Public opinion has turned against Batman; Iron Man has PTSD. Both films end with apparently self-sacrificing missions, in which it turns out that the superheroes are actually operating remotely piloted weapons—mirroring Obama’s decision to increase drone strikes and reduce troop numbers.
Homeland zigs and zags through the years via close readings and tangents, alternately profound, fun, and occasionally slightly tedious, to understand why September 11 produced the effects it did. One reason the military response ballooned so rapidly, Beck argues, is that the Bush administration was successful in refashioning the fight with al-Qaeda into “a larger civilizational mission” in which Muslims were both “victims to be saved and barbarians to be eliminated.” Obama could not fix that mission creep with his speech in Cairo in 2009, when he promised to rein in the most overt abuses and clash-of-civilizations rhetoric—he succeeded only in infuriating the right-wingers who thought he was a secret Kenyan Muslim. Obama could have declared the “war on terror” over after the killing of bin Laden, but he recommitted the US to the incoherent goals of the occupation in Afghanistan and a whack-a-mole drone campaign across the region. At the same time, his administration’s intervention in Libya and clumsy response to the war in Syria exacerbated the migration crisis. All of this helped fuel the nativist discontent that Tea Partiers and then Trump used to gain power.
Homeland effectively recreates the texture of the war as Americans lived it, and the book builds to a diagnosis: even as we move on to other crises and other fears, the “war on terror” persists like an infection that has spread through the body politic. Its two main symptoms, Beck argues, are a “degraded” notion of citizenship and the rise of what he calls “impunity culture.” Taken together, Beck ventures, this can also explain something less precise: “the intensifying feeling that something has gone wrong with life in the United States.”
Foreign policy has never been a particularly democratic aspect of government, but after September 11 it became even less so, through excessive secrecy, mass surveillance, and crackdowns on whistleblowing and other acts of dissent. The invasion of Iraq proceeded over the objection of millions of Americans. Congress completely abdicated its war powers duties, passing instead the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a paragraph-long law that only one representative—Barbara Lee of California—had the courage to vote against in September 2001. During the Bush and Obama administrations that law was invoked thirty-seven times to justify military actions. Beck points out that this amounts to thirty-seven missed opportunities to question the wisdom of those actions. Beck also ascribes the corrosion of citizenship to the policing of public space and online life, the repression of protest, and the provision of surplus military equipment to police, which resulted in tanks rolling through Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. “Y’all are treating us like ISIS,” one protester told reporters. The war “fueled a social climate of overriding anxiety and dread,” Beck writes, “and it made a mockery of the idea that democratic governments use military violence only as a means of last resort.”
Impunity is part of this degradation, too. There has been “a systematic refusal,” Beck writes,
to pursue any measure of accountability for the crimes committed during a war that most people agree was detrimental to the country’s international reputation and its capacity for global leadership.
And while “accountability would have been very much in the larger national interest,” the chance was passed up. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the arc of disillusionment passes through Obama. His administration put a public emphasis on legality and process, presenting the image of cabinet-level Socratic dialogues about targeted killings and voluminous memos to defend them, in contrast to John Yoo’s ideological, legally sloppy opinions rationalizing torture and other executive power grabs under Bush. Obama withdrew Yoo’s memos but declined to investigate anyone involved with the torture program, and he supported the CIA in opposing the declassification of documents, out of concern that their disclosure would hurt morale at the agency. Apart from mass breaches via Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, the Obama administration was so ruthlessly effective at keeping control of information that his promise to oversee the “most transparent administration in history” became a punch line among national security nerds.
You don’t have to look hard for other examples of pervasive impunity. Murder charges against marines accused of the massacre of twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005 were dropped, and as The New Yorker’s 2024 podcast In the Dark revealed, the military hid the gruesome photos of the killings because it had learned a lesson from Abu Ghraib. The images, from the military’s perspective, were more dangerous than what they documented. The Obama administration fought for years against the release of other photos of prisoner abuse, as well as videos of hunger- striking detainees being force-fed, on the circular reasoning that the images would “inflame Muslim sensitivities” and endanger troops overseas. The Supreme Court established the writ of habeas corpus for prisoners at Guantánamo, dealing a blow to indefinite detention, but then allowed it to continue in practice by mostly declining to interfere with lower courts refusing detainees’ petitions for release. The US assassinated an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen, then killed two of his children, and stubbornly insisted all along that it was justified in doing so.
That said, when Beck writes that “the war itself was impunity culture on a global scale, waged with no regard for international law, little regard for the civilian casualties,” I think he misses one reason it has continued for this long. As Samuel Moyn argues in his book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021), a defining feature of modern warfare is a professed and often actual concern for its legality and for civilian casualties. For all its good intentions, this focus on the law has often obscured more fundamental questions about war itself. Stephen Preston, general counsel for the Department of Defense under Obama, said in 2015 that he had noted a growing “conventional wisdom that the United States’ use of lethal force in the armed conflict against al-Qa’ida was ‘unlawful.’ For me, and others in the Administration, this was deeply disturbing.” It was not the strikes in Pakistan or Yemen that were disturbing but the widespread assumption of their illegality. Preston would find Beck’s book disturbing indeed.
Both impunity and degraded citizenship are on obvious display less than a year into Trump’s second term. But one of the core contentions of Homeland, which was completed before the 2024 election, is that these are bipartisan problems that predate and will outlast Trump. Beck has recently argued in n+1 that just as Obama “rationalized and bureaucratized” Bush’s war,
today, it is the Democrats who are selecting which elements of Trumpist reaction to incorporate into the country’s longer-term plans, crafting the most draconian immigration legislation in the country’s history, dropping opposition to the death penalty from their party platform, and pushing the United States and China toward full-scale military conflict. And after October 7, it was a Democratic administration that funded and equipped an Israeli military campaign of such indiscriminate savagery and destruction.
There are differences with regard to particular policies and countries, but Democrats and Republicans are united in consensus that America’s role in the world is a militarized one. This, Beck maintains, derives from what he thinks is the clearest economic rationale for the “war on terror,” whose multipronged nature could never really be explained by the war-for-oil thesis so popular on protest signs in the early 2000s. In an interview last year with Current Affairs, Beck said that the organizing principle of US foreign policy “is the defense, maintenance, adjustment, reestablishment of America’s global economic leadership.” That economic leadership has been harder to maintain over decades of slowing growth and widening inequality across the globe. A high-tech, flexible military not “bound by any conventional definitions of victory or defeat,” together with a drastically expanded border security apparatus, is one way to try to insulate Americans from the effects of the economic order they sit atop—effects like violent fundamentalism, mass migration, and political instability.
The United States has linked its world-spanning military to economic security at home since FDR, as the historian Andrew Preston shows in Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security (2025). The difference now is that the previous basis of US hegemony—which was that it oversaw the spectacular global growth of the postwar period—has been removed. Without being able to promise a share in that growth, the United States has turned, in the words of the historian Giovanni Arrighi, to “mere domination.”
Beck is dubious that a posture of “militarized intransigence” will help the US transition into a multipolar world, “one that will be impossible to navigate without a concerted emphasis on mutually beneficial diplomacy.” In an epilogue written when Israel’s assault on Gaza was a few months old, with Biden still the presumptive Democratic nominee, Beck suggests a few things the US could do to repair the damage September 11 wrought: repeal the AUMF, reduce the military’s budget by half, pay reparations to families targeted by the FBI, and more. And yet he doesn’t believe such things would or could ever come to pass.
The depressive mood of Homeland’s last pages is hard to argue with, but they cover so much ground that they can threaten to undermine Beck’s thesis, which is that the “war on terror” can explain the bulk of the country’s crises. Though I’m inclined to agree with him on its profound significance, many other things have gone wrong to get us to where we are.
There is a generational perspective here that I recognize. The book opens with Beck as a freshman in high school in a Philadelphia suburb on September 11, 2001. Not far away in Delaware, I was also in the ninth grade, and like him I remember a muddle of rumors and TV news, a feeling of foreboding from the adults around me that was borne out in the next great upheavals of my teens and twenties: the Iraq War protests, the 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, police killings that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2016 election. Each of those moments was marked by the question of whether the US had ever been the country it said it was. Were the crises a betrayal of American ideals or their embodiment? The beginning of our political lives coincided with the beginning of the end of American dominance both in the world and, for a certain strain of young progressives, in our minds.
While that was traumatic, as Beck argues, it was also an opening for some to be able to imagine a world in which America was not on top. That doesn’t have to be an entirely negative vision. Paradoxically, the best way to rebuild a sense of citizenship may be to diminish the singular importance of the nation itself—to find a way to feel oneself a citizen of something other than a country and to work toward a broader set of interests. It’s possible to see the beginnings of that in the movements cited throughout Beck’s book, like Indigenous pipeline protests and international solidarity with Palestine. Even if America’s leaders cannot adjust to the idea that this is not the only country in the world, perhaps its people can.
English (US) · 