Epilogue

In the introduction to her book on the impact of the Yugoslav wars of secession on Bosnian women, Worlds Apart, former U.S. ambassador Swanee Hunt expresses serious concerns about the state of American democracy in the post-9/11 era. Presuming that it is the geopolitical responsibility of the United States to advance ethnic, religious, and women’s rights abroad, she contrasts the Clinton administration’s humanitarian aid to Muslims in Bosnia with George W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hunt writes that while 9/11 could have been turned into an opportunity for Americans to empathize with and “understand what the people in Bosnia felt,” the Bush administration instead decided to “flagrantly disregard” human rights and use American resources for an unjustified war at the critical moment when “America could have solved most of the humanitarian crises in the world and become the friend of billions.”1 She conjures up the figure of the Bosnian Muslim woman as a symbolic victim and survivor, whose story can lead to a politics of diversity and tolerance as the basis for humanitarian action. Recovering the now-forgotten image of the violated body that had less than a decade ago led to moral outrage on the part of the U.S. public, the book’s introduction suggests that Americans can emerge as humanitarian political actors even after 9/11 if they reinvest in liberal ideals. I end with this example that calls for reviving 1990s humanitarianism to propose that the imagined break between U.S. policy in the post-9/11 period, conceived as a moment of crisis for American democratic ideals, and during the conflict in Bosnia, portrayed as its moment of possibility, obscures the ideological continuities between Cold War racial liberalism, postsocialist humanitarian imperialism, and post-9/11 militarism. U.S. intervention on behalf of human rights during the 1990s wars in the Balkans continues to serve as proof of the nation’s willingness to aid properly reformed Muslims when they are figured as objects of humanitarian intervention. As such, it undergirds contemporary U.S. warfare in the Middle East as an ongoing, democratic, and egalitarian struggle for religious tolerance and women’s rights.

The racialization of ideological and religious differences in late twentieth-century U.S. geopolitics underlying the entrenchment of postsocialist imperialism, which this book has traced through analyses of how media, military, and juridical technologies are deployed to morally underwrite U.S. militarism, continues to justify post-9/11 interventionism as being about democratization. However, the contradictions inherent in claims to U.S. democratic transparency, manifest in the many modes of documentation used to expose hidden human rights abuses in the 1990s, have come to the forefront in unprecedented ways. From the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in 2001 to reduce restrictions on the government’s ability to collect intelligence in its war on terror, to the military technologies and methods of waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is increasingly impossible to imagine U.S. governance as self-evidently transparent in contrast to the opacity of tyrannical rule elsewhere.

For instance, a 2011 episode of Frontline traces the emergence of what journalist Dana Priest calls “Top Secret America,” a product of “9/11’s unprecedented yet largely invisible legacy: the creation of a vast maze of clandestine government and private agencies designed to hunt terrorists and prevent future attacks on the U.S.”2 According to the program, the aftermath of 9/11 led to the waging of a new kind of war in which U.S. presidents have access to continuing funding with indefinite limits and which is, even more importantly, “shrouded in secrecy.” In 2001, under the guidance of Cofer Black, President Bush signed a far-reaching finding permitting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to engage in a covert war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda. Priest argues that this launched the largest undercover operation since the height of the Cold War. “Fighting in the shadows,” CIA operatives saw on-the-ground combat for the first time since the Second World War, and the Taliban regime quickly fell. The victory in Afghanistan was then folded into a broader U.S. geopolitical strategy that has come to be known as the “war on terror.” Indeed, as Frontline explains, even as the victory in Afghanistan was being celebrated, the CIA was already active in other wars spread across at least a dozen countries.

The perpetuation of the globalized war on terror has necessitated the usage of novel military and intelligence technologies, which in turn created an entirely new infrastructure, both within the United States and abroad. Frontline’s “Top Secret America” shows how “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” rooms, located in places such as Tampa, Florida, became locales from which predator missiles could be launched with the click of a button against such potential “targets” as individual vehicles driving along a dirt road in Yemen. For Priest, drones were just one of the extraordinary technologies indicating that the rules had been completely overhauled. The secret authorization of “enhanced interrogation techniques” for use on suspected terrorists legalized what had until then been considered torture. Priest uncovered a network of nearly twenty-four “black sites,” secret prisons funded and run by the CIA located throughout the world, constructed to accommodate the ever-growing number of suspected terrorists. These facilities, as part of an international network of prisons sanctioned by the White House, characterize the unprecedented development of what Priest terms a U.S. “secretly run government.”

Meanwhile, as the more “conventional” war that followed in the footsteps of Special Operations Forces began the Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq in 2003, on the home front the “war to protect the homeland” was in full swing. The National Security Agency (NSA) started intercepting phone calls and e-mail communiqués of U.S. citizens. With the advent of what came to be known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, a warrant was no longer needed for such actions. The NSA created a “global electronic dragnet” that captures 1.7 billion intercepts from computer networks, phone calls, and radio broadcasts from around the world, every day. To sort through the tremendous amount of data collected, the NSA solicited the help of nearly 480 private contractors, spending billions of dollars. The war over information is now fought from office parks scattered all over America, “hidden in plain sight.”3 As places from which to launch drone strikes, engage in cyberconflict, and collect information, unremarkable commercial buildings sprung up in suburban areas. According to Priest and her associates, many are only a few stories high, but they extend deep underground, complete with shops and places to eat—a secret “underworld” that, as Frontline documents, most Americans do not know exists. Priest calls this an “alternative geography of the United States,” which supports the newfangled, invisible bureaucracy. The “secret geography” is both hidden from the public and proximate, dotting the map of the entire nation.

Even after one of the most public failures of U.S. national intelligence—the failure to find the purported weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—“top secret America” has only continued to grow under the direction of the recently created position and office of the Director of National Intelligence. As a presidential hopeful, Barack Obama promised to work for a return to “transparency.” However, almost all of the undisclosed operations have been reauthorized by the new administration, which in fact increased the usage of lethal drone attacks and other covert actions. Priest posits that funding for “top secret America” was expanded in spite of the economic crisis, as was the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Employing nearly one million people, “top secret America” has produced a shadow army that performs jobs about which most U.S. citizens cannot know.

As Frontline’s “Top Secret America” demonstrates, the opacity of the post-9/11 mode of warfare is interwoven into the everyday, familiar landscapes of U.S. life. The very ordinariness of office parks inhabited by security and intelligence employees enables the underground world to remain undetected. A very extraordinary form of clandestine and long-distance warfare is thus fought from edifices that conjure up normality. Indeed, the new war, because it blends into the texture of commonplace American geographies, is not felt as a war by most of the U.S. public. Many U.S. citizens never directly experience or need to give much thought to the destructive impact wreaked by the new military and surveillance technologies, in terms of both lost lives and destroyed infrastructures abroad. As prisoners, victims of torture are kept out of sight (barring, of course, exceptional instances, such as when the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light). Abu Ghraib, however, seems to be no exception. Meanwhile, even as exposés, such as the Frontline episode, periodically gesture to the secrecy and antidemocratic tendencies of the war on terror and the war for homeland security, simultaneously a barrage of images and discourses justifies the machineries of concealment. For instance, although the stealth techniques of the homeland protection programs explicitly infringe on civil liberties, they are nonetheless understood as fundamentally being about the protection of U.S. democratic ideals (the American way of life) against the terrors wreaked by religious extremists. In this sense, the principles of U.S. democracy are upheld even as its procedural and juridical rules are overturned.

Portraits of atrocity in the part of the world seen to generate terror and terrorists are also used to justify U.S. secrecy as being, at its core, about the spread of democracy. In this sense, the new war is a continuation of the 1990s humanitarian interventions of postsocialist imperialism. While shadow domestic geographies that enable the perpetuation of the U.S. war on terror are hidden in suburban buildings, and black sites keep prisoners out of the U.S. public view, images of spectacular deaths caused by religious extremism proliferate.4 Even as I write this epilogue, the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013, in which three people were killed and 264 others were injured, looms large as a tragedy that seemingly justifies the need for the nation’s ongoing vigilance against what has come to be broadly termed “Islamist terrorism.” Indeed, the imperative to expose religious motivations for violence stands in stark contrast to “top secret America’s” networks of concealment made defensible by nationalist discourses of securitization. Yet the drive to lay bare religious violence as simultaneously not of the here and now, and as the ultimate threat to the spread of modernity and universal human values through its use of contemporary communications and networking technologies, is about more than the post-9/11 ossification of the composite figure of the “Muslim Terrorist” as a new enemy par excellence.

Depictions of Islamic radicalism, extremism, and terrorism both constitute and exceed the contemporary racialization of Arabs and Muslims, the effects of which are palpable in anti-Muslim acts of reprisal and discrimination that led U.S. Arab and Muslim communities to a collective plea in the wake of the Marathon bombings, summed up by Khaled Beydoun as, “Please don’t be Arabs or Muslims.”5 Yet what is at stake is not just the designation of ethnic “Arab or Muslims” as the enemy but rather the discursive construction of a religiously fanatical and dogmatic Muslim or Arab perpetrator. The other is no longer simply knowable through his or her racial exteriority, but rather, it has become imperative to uncover and expose his or her interiority. The U.S. secular media and politicians’ imperative to know whether violence is caused by perverse religious beliefs (although, of course, designations of faith gone awry are almost exclusively conflated with fundamentalist Islam in the U.S. public imaginary), and ensuing classifications of violent acts as terroristic or not based on motive, demonstrate the extent to which liberal democracy (and the operations of global capital) authorize U.S. militarism to discover, isolate, and eliminate those who have failed to convert or reform their beliefs, using any means necessary to do so. What is important to emphasize is that not all Muslims are singled out for exclusion and disciplining in this frame. It is, rather, that U.S. technologies of governance, including surveillance, policing, and military technologies, are vested with the power to tell radical, extreme, and fundamentalist Muslims apart from properly reformed Muslims fitting into the fabric of a secular, global ethos supporting the rule of law, free markets, and liberal democracy.

The fact that the so-called Boston bombers, once captured, turned out to be from the postsocialist world is one productive example through which to apprehend and untangle some of the complicated new imbrications of race and religion, interiority and exteriority, and concealment and revelation underpinning contemporary U.S. enactments of imperial violence. The two brothers implicated in the crime, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are ethnic Chechens who immigrated to the United States in 2002 and 2003 respectively. As the U.S. media attempted to piece together a coherent narrative about the making of terrorists, an organizing theme and anxiety underpinning many of the stories circulating on television and in print revolved around how difficult it is to uncover and spot religious extremists before they turn to acts of terror. The Washington Post described the Tsarnaev brothers thus: “With their baseball hats and sauntering gaits, they appeared to friends and neighbors like ordinary American boys. But the Boston bombing suspects were refugees from another world—the blood, rubble and dirty wars of the Russian Caucasus. . . . Hidden behind the lives they had been leading in Massachusetts is a biography containing old resentments that appear to have mutated into radical Islamic violence.”6 According to this article, the brothers’ performance of their Americanness was quite convincing. From their hoodies, to their active participation in boxing and wrestling, they easily blended into the texture of everyday life in the United States. Yet, as this article opines, their “blood,” which chained them to a landscape of atrocity, and “biography,” which formed their persons out of ancient ethnic hatreds, predetermined their surrender to the forces of radical Islam—their hidden “mutation.” Put otherwise by CNN, “they might have fulfilled every immigrant’s dream” had it not been for their radicalization that led to the nation’s “nightmare.”7

The brothers’ ambiguous whiteness and Europeanness, contextualized as it is through Cold War racializing discourses about Eastern Europe, makes evident why revealing perverse religious beliefs, or “mutated” ones, has become the imperative of the day. The radical difference that matters is no longer simply visible, grafted onto the skin and legible as phenotype. As Sarah Kendzior has written,

After wild speculation from CNN about a “dark-skinned suspect,” on Thursday the New York Post published a cover photo falsely suggesting a Moroccan-American high school track star, Salah Barhoun, was one of the bombers. . . .

Later that Thursday, the FBI released photos of two young men wearing baseball caps—men who so resembled all-American frat boys that people joked they would be the target of “racial bro-filing.” The men were Caucasian, so the speculation turned away from foreign terror and toward the excuses routinely made for white men who kill: mental illness, anti-government grudges, frustrations at home. The men were white and Caucasian—until the next day, when they became the wrong kind of Caucasian, and suddenly they were not so “white” after all.8

Kendzior is quite right to point out that the unearthing of Islamic religious extremism as the motivation for the bombing, which the media has supported through numerous accounts of Chechnya’s radicalization over the last two decades, shifted the terms through which the crime was discussed and through which it will be prosecuted. The surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has in fact been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction—a charge that surely would not have been made had the suspect been American born or a non-Muslim. Moreover, in spite of the fact that the use of drones by the U.S. government has killed nearly 4,700 people, in contrast to the 3 killed by the bombs placed by the Tsarnaev brothers, Islamist motivation in and of itself is enough to collapse an act of violence into an act of mass destruction.9 As is well known, drones are not classified as weapons of mass destruction, in large part because they are framed as a necessary technology used to uncover the destructive acts planned by radical Others unsuitable for thriving in a secular liberal world. If one takes whiteness to be associated with U.S. belonging, Kendzior is also right to argue that the bombers, once identified as Chechen, were deemed to be “not so ‘white’ after all.” Indeed, some U.S. politicians called for trying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant in spite of his legal status as a U.S. citizen.10

Yet given my argument throughout this book about the development of multiculturalism as a racial and secular value attributing morality to U.S. violence as a global humanitarian and humanizing process, I suggest that it would be a mistake to read media portraits of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as “not so ‘white’ after all.” As the news reports cited previously demonstrate, the press continually read his external appearance as normatively white. Rather, it might be more accurate to conclude that the press figured Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as being not so American after all, and this precisely because through his association with religious extremism he proved himself to be not tolerant enough of diversity. In a sense, the fact that he is from a part of the world formerly under Soviet rule, a region marked in the U.S. imaginary as intolerant, illiberal, and monocultural, makes him a likely candidate (within the frame familiar to U.S. audiences) to fall prey to Islamic “extremism.” As radical Islam takes the place of communism in U.S. depictions of radical alterity that threatens liberal notions of normative (non-threatening, cultural) diversity that can be allowed to flourish, what remains from the Cold War era is the understanding that it is interiority/belief that signifies the differences that matter. As the Tsarnaev brothers’ uncle proclaimed to the media by way of asserting his own belonging to the U.S. nation, “‘Anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it’s a fraud, it’s a fake,’ he said. He described the family as peace-loving, ethnic Chechens.”11 What the suspects’ uncle’s statement reveals is that even as the historic association of whiteness with value continues to structure inequities and injustices within the United States, the value attributed to the proper U.S. citizen increasingly has to do with espousing the correct sort of beliefs, including tolerance and respect for cultural diversity, through which the nation recognizes itself in contradistinction to extremism, fundamentalism, and terrorism.

As emerging communications technologies that constitute our “intelligence” about the world simultaneously support and vindicate our own government’s secrecy and violation of the rule of law and enable the real-time exposure of others’ atrocities, we must continue to pay attention to how and where our gaze is elicited and directed across media and political discourses. This includes thinking about the ways in which languages of juridical rights and humanitarian intervention reproduce the injury and devastation they seek to oppose, reaffirming our humanity. It may also entail envisaging and pursuing a politics of refusal, like Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić, whose films reject the imperative to replicate spectacles of the violated body. As part of seeing otherwise, it is important to reexamine the concept of liberal rights (individual rights, minority rights, and human rights) as the only path to social justice and democracy, an assumption that emerged with the United States’ mythologizing of the civil rights movement and the ossification of multiculturalism as the hallmarks of U.S. racial progress narratives. By foregrounding the cultural mythologies through which claims to rights, tolerance, and diversity have led to violence, we can begin to conceptualize and reclaim alternative formulations for justice.