Bringing the War Home

How the excesses of the War on Terror paved the way for our disastrous covid response.

My review of the book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck was originally published in the Claremont Review of Books and is reprinted here with permission.

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In February 2022 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin condemning online voices and public gatherings attacking such government COVID policies as mask and vaccine mandates. Those spreading “misinformation” about the pandemic, DHS warned, were undermining “public trust in the U.S. government institutions” and could be considered a “domestic threat actor” or a “primary terrorism-related threat.”

How did government vigilance against lethal attacks like 9/11 culminate in the claim that critics of public health measures were terrorists? The bulletin ignored the possibility that one reason trust in our governing institutions had been undermined was not denunciations of our pandemic policies but the policies themselves, along with the government’s manipulative public messaging about them. For DHS—a federal department that did not exist 20 years ago but today has a $103 billion budget—the real problem was anyone so rude as to call attention to such failings.

The government’s excessive COVID response did not begin with the 2020 pandemic. In Homeland, Richard Beck explores how the War on Terror has transformed American society and politics. A writer for the literary magazine n+1and a political progressive, Beck praises Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, speculates on the root causes of mass shootings, digresses about immigration policy, and warns repeatedly about the “existential threat” posed by climate change. He also belabors the idea that racism and Islamophobia drove the War on Terror. Although a disciplined editor could have abbreviated these sections, trimming the book’s nearly 600 pages in the bargain, Homeland nevertheless usefully chronicles our misadventures in fighting terrorism at home and abroad. The corrosive effects that Beck describes should appall both liberals and conservatives who care about living in a free society.

A shocking chapter on the rise of mass domestic surveillance, facilitated by “public-private partnerships” between government and Big Tech (i.e., corporatism), compensates for many of the book’s shortcomings. Beyond the familiar themes of mass surveillance, trampling of civil liberties, endless foreign wars, and other standard critiques of the War on Terror, Beck also explores lesser-known effects on our civic culture. He chronicles how, for example, we have destroyed many urban public spaces by closing them off to pedestrians and effectively militarizing them. This has done nothing to make people safer, or even to make them feel safer.

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As Beck describes it, the Patriot Act has led to 1,200 detentions without due process but has yet to result in a single conviction for terrorist acts. The FBI was empowered to engage in entrapment, euphemistically dubbed “preemptive prosecution,” a precursor to the full weaponization of the agency we have witnessed in response to the political success of Donald J. Trump. As is now well documented, U.S. government-sponsored torture was normalized in black sites abroad, leading eventually to the revelations of Abu Ghraib, a terrifying house of horrors and a shameful blot on the United States military. Homeland’s treatment of this disaster is unsparing.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations come in for Beck’s severe criticism, in support of the notion that the War on Terror has been a bipartisan affair with few dissenting voices in either party, whether in the legislative or executive branches. Beck chronicles the massive, wasted resources spent on useless high-tech equipment to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which failed to save lives, recalling similar wasteful spending on ineffective pandemic measures—from cloth masks to school closures to mRNA vaccines for children—that likewise did more harm than good, squandering trust in the government’s ability to “keep us safe.” Similarly, President Obama oversaw a broad and often indiscriminate secret government program surveilling the American population generally, as revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, paving the way for the Centers for Disease Control to do the same during COVID to see if Americans followed lockdown orders.

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The themes explored in Homeland invite wider consideration of contemporary American life in the post-COVID era. The War on Terror laid the legal groundwork for the pandemic response’s subsequent militarized biosecurity state. With Americans turning against endless wars in the Middle East, an old enemy was recast as a perennial and invisible threat: microbes, whether of natural or artificial origin. Like terrorism, viral and bacterial threats are—conveniently for those invested in ever-increasing social control and public funding—a mostly invisible foe that can never be fully vanquished.

In the two decades before COVID, public and private institutional leaders in the United States ran several dry-run tabletop simulations that anticipated and prepared our disastrous disaster responses. Following these exercises, frontline medical teams recommended increasing administrative state powers to impose quarantine, isolation, media censorship, and even the intervention of the military during a public health crisis. U.S. lawmakers introduced these proposed recommendations, adding to them the empowerment of local police and the National Guard during public health emergencies. In 2002 these were codified as the “U.S. Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act,” which permitted quarantine, isolation, and censorship, applied not only to the sick but also to asymptomatic persons. With such legal changes, U.S. governors can call a state of emergency at will, with citizen resistance constituting a felony. These provisions are grounded in the novel legal doctrine, codified during the War on Terror, that the protection of public health overrules any individual or privacy rights.

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Following 9/11, the influential jurist Richard Posner argued, “Even torture may sometimes be justified in the struggle against terrorism, but it should not be considered legally justified” (emphasis in the original). But anyone who tortures another for political ends will naturally believe that torture in that instance is morally and politically justified—that this is an emergency in which the legal exception is warranted. It’s surely a crisis of national security, after all. Otherwise, why engage in torture? The line of reasoning becomes circular.

Posner’s contention—that failing to defend our nation means government cannot pursue any of its other goals—echoes Justice Robert Jackson’s Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949) dissent, which warned against converting “the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” In 2007 Posner argued that it’s not only “defense against human enemies” that may justify states of emergency. To illustrate this, he asked us to “imagine strict quarantining and compulsory vaccination in response to a pandemic.” Eighteen years later, we no longer need to imagine it—we can remember it. Our increasing reliance on declaring emergencies requires naming new enemies, both foreign and domestic. It just so happens that invisible pathogens are a recurrent, ever-present enemy, always ready to strike with little warning, and thus always an available pretext to trigger the state of exception.

Thus, biomedical security, which was previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, has assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations since 9/11. Already in 2005, David Nabarro, a British civil servant working for both the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), grossly overpredicted that avian influenza would kill 5 million to 150 million people. To prevent this disaster, the WHO made recommendations that no nation was prepared to accept at the time, which included the proposal of population-wide lockdowns. In 2001, Richard Hatchett, who served on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Council, was already recommending obligatory confinement of the entire population in response to biological threats. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an influential entity coordinating global vaccine investment in close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Like many others today, Hatchett regards the fight against COVID as a “war” analogous to the War on Terror.

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By 2006, the emerging biosecurity paradigm was already distorting our spending priorities. That year, Congress allocated $120,000 to the National Institutes of Health to fight influenza, which kills 36,000 Americans in a mild flu year. By contrast, Congress appropriated $1.76 billion for biodefense, even though the only biological attack on our soil, the anthrax outbreak of 2001, killed just five people.

Echoing the National Security Agency’s misadventures in the War on Terror, evidence emerged during COVID that the CIA has been using unauthorized digital surveillance to spy on ordinary Americans—with neither judicial oversight nor congressional approval. In an April 2021 public letter, Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed concern that the CIA program was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection [of data], and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA] collection.” Despite Congress’s clear intent to limit warrantless collection of Americans’ private records, the senators warned, “these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

The legacy of the War on Terror described in Homeland—and its newly repackaged Biomedical Security State sequel—suggests that the U.S. government’s tools deployed against foreign threats are now, routinely, turned against our own citizens. The typical casualties in this war are not foreign or domestic terrorists, but innocent civilians and their civil liberties.

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