25 years after 9/11, our definition of terrorism continues to expand

Expanding the terrorism label

0:00Hey, everyone. You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker. And I'm Gene Demby. Gene, have you been reading about how the Trump administration has deemed a lot of left-leaning activism as terrorism? Yeah, the Trump administration designated Antifa a terrorist group. And of course, Antifa is not even a formal organization. It's a decentralized movement. But now, Trump has lumped a protest against ICE and the No Kings protests and campus protests we saw around Israel and Gaza into this big mass with Antifa.

0:36He just said they were all terrorists. I mean, the Trump administration called Alex Preddy a Renee Good terrorist. Of course, those are the people who were shot and killed by ICE officers in Minneapolis earlier this year. Yeah, and I mean, a lot of groups are being labeled terrorists under the current administration. Whether it's narco-terrorists in Ecuador, or even recently, more broadly, the entire Democratic Party. Wait, I missed the Democratic Party part of this. But I guess that was maybe inevitable.

1:07But it's been a while to watch how this label, terrorist, has expanded over the last couple decades since the birth of the Department of Homeland Security after 9-11. Right. And in the two decades since the DHS was created, people suspected of being terrorists were often assumed to be Muslim in some way. So maybe ironically, the Trump administration wants us to have a more inclusive, expansive concept of terrorism, or at least enough so that any liberal or left-leaning political actors that he doesn't like can get that label.

1:38Right. So, Jean, with the 25th anniversary of 9-11 coming up, it made me wonder how the term terrorism has evolved.

The post 911 counterterrorism apparatus

1:49The word terrorist and terrorism is very prominent, but it's very ambiguous, not narrowly defined. That's Sahar Salad. She's the director of research at the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding. Sahar Salad conducts research on Muslims in the United States.

2:28And she talked to me about the ways that the terms terrorism and terrorist have been tied to Muslims. Well, so initially, you know, after 9-11, Muslims felt it because we were the ones, even though nowhere does it say that Muslims are terrorists by our government, it's the ways in which the counterterrorism laws and policies were put into place and who they targeted. That association of Muslim with terrorism really was felt. So the war on terror really was, you know, an unusual moment when, after these terrorist attacks, the United States, instead of saying, you know, we're going to respond by going to war with a country,

3:12we're going to war against those who commit acts of terror. While we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in the year immediately after 9-11, we were engaging in this really global war. What were some of the tools and policies that this war on terror introduced and, like, what were some of the repercussions of it? Yeah, the USA Patriot Act, that one was huge because what it did was it granted more authority to conduct surveillance, but without due process.

3:45So there's something called secret evidence that if it's in an effort to thwart another terrorist attack, the government was able to really surveil and use secret evidence, which is evidence that they've collected against perhaps individuals or organizations that they think are committing acts of terror without providing them with the evidence that they have. So this is like taking away, essentially, your ability to defend yourself within the courts if you don't know what the evidence is that the government has, you know, sort of collected against you.

4:19The USA Patriot Act really just expanded the American government's ability to surveil. But there's so many policies that have been put into place, some that are terminated, like a national security entry exit registration system, which was put into place during the Bush administration, terminated under Obama. But if you were coming from one of 25 countries, you had to register with the government, meaning you were photographed, interrogated, and, you know, you had your fingerprint taken. And so this is like creating a database, and 24 of those countries were Muslim-majority.

4:54So we really, that's where we see that this is really targeting Muslims, specifically North Korea was the only non-Muslim country on that list. And there have been all of these laws and policies that have been put into place. We federalized airport security, TSA is a 9-11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security is a 9-11 creation, ICE is a 9-11 creation. So, you know, you can see the expansiveness of these programs that were created after 9-11.

5:26When there is this kind of surveillance and demonizing, do you see this kind of demonizing that is happening with Muslims being done with other groups as well?

Surveillance of domestic protesters

5:36Yeah, for sure. I think now people are starting to pay attention to the dangers of our counterterrorism laws and policies because we're hearing that they're starting to surveil protesters, for example. So across the country, another counterterrorism sort of policy were fusion centers were popping up across the country. And these are centers that are part of a counterterrorist program to find terrorists, potential terrorists, and thwart another terrorist attack.

6:12These were put into place after 9-11. Well, there's one in Boston, there's one in Austin. And there have been reports showing that these fusion centers, because they're not finding, like, these terrorists, are now being used to surveil and look at people who were protesting during Black Lives Matter. People who were protesting during the Palestinian protests that we saw on college campuses, universities collaborating. So essentially, surveil their students who are participating in these protests. So certainly, like, that's called Mission Crete.

6:44You know, what was put into place to really stop another 9-11 we're seeing being used against, you know, all these other groups. This whole Antifa, you know, and so labeling Antifa, which Trump has done as a terrorist organization, you know. So now we're going to see how is this going to impact groups who are participating in protesting the government because they disagree with the laws and policies.

7:17And if they're labeled a potential terrorist organization, you know, as I stated earlier, will the government use secret evidence in these cases, you know. It just, their due process is, you know, and their civil liberties are just shrunk once you're tried as a potential terrorist versus other criminal behavior. So it's something that people should really be paying attention to. We don't want to see the expansion of our terrorist laws and policies.

7:50And I, you know, I say this a lot. When somebody commits a horrific, violent act and they're not a Muslim, you know, we want to be very careful to call them a terrorist. So, like, if a white man commits a shooting, a mass shooting, you know, in my world, people go, well, that's terrorism. Why aren't we calling them terrorists? And it's like, well, because the minute we start calling everyone terrorists, we start to expand these laws and policies that really we should have more transparency and accountability.

8:22We should really be critical of these laws and policies, not expanding them. Okay, can I ask you something that, pardon me, there's, you were talking about, like, we shouldn't expand the idea of what a terrorist is, but it already seems like this administration is doing that anyway. And, like, how do you navigate that? Well, I think that, you know, it's not just this administration. I think, for example, the USA Patriot Act had in it a clause about indefinite detention.

8:57Yes. For, you know, so indefinite detention is something that the USA Patriot Act, you know, that there's a clause in there about that. I think that we have to be very cognizant and aware of what it means to start labeling everything as a potential terrorist threat. We have to think about, you know, what does that allow our government to participate in? If it's combating terrorism, protecting the nation from a terrorist threat, it can justify the use of our military, you know?

9:31So I think, like, navigating it, the way we have to navigate it is we have to become aware of what does it mean when something is marked as a terrorist organization or an issue as marked as, you know, a part of, like, the war on terror. Because I think that's when you start to see our civil liberties and our democratic norms, values, institutions. That's when we start to see them really being—we've seen this happen over the last, you know, almost 25 years, that there's a, you know, attack against, you know, our democratic institutions.

10:05And a lot of that, I think, we can tie to this war on terror and the global war on terror.

10:13When we come back— The war on terror has come home. And it always was.

10:22That's coming up. Stay with us. Parker, just Parker, code switch.

Historical roots of state violence

10:35We've been trying to break down the way that the terms terrorist and terrorism have been expanding under the current administration. And I was curious about the history of the terms in the U.S. So I spoke with Alex Lubin. He's the author of the book Never Ending War on Terror. And he says that the American government's view of terrorism traces back to its military campaigns against indigenous people. The word terrorism has existed since going back, at least, to the French Revolution.

11:06But in the U.S. context, the United States understood, for example, its wars against indigenous peoples in frontier cities as wars on terrorism. And not officially and legally in that respect, but using the term terrorism to define indigenous people as sort of a threat to the very existence of the United States, as a threat to frontier communities,

11:37as a kind of violence that is beyond the pale, that's irrational, not organized for any purpose. Often groups have been called terrorists because it's presumed that they have no goals, that they're just constitutionally violent. The historical use of the term has been applied to all sorts of groups, like Native American people defending their land. In the more modern period, the Black power activists were considered domestic terrorists, or Black extremists who threatened the future of the United States.

12:18Members of the Black Panther Party were considered terrorists, members of the Brown Berets and Chicano nationalist movements have been called terrorists. In the 1980s, interestingly to me, at least, drug dealers were called terrorists. And what that meant was that in the war on drugs, drug dealers could be prosecuted as terrorists. But it also meant that sort of whole lethal infrastructure of the state and police and military could be used to police the war on drugs.

12:52They're really playing fast and loose with the term. Does it have an official designation in the U.S. context? Yeah, there is a category in U.S. law to prosecute people under domestic terrorism. And I believe that Timothy McVeigh, for example, the Oklahoma City bomber, was prosecuted and executed under domestic terrorism laws. But there's another way in which the category terrorism operates outside of law to justify all sorts of playing fast and loose, as you said, with state power to prosecute people or to go after people who somehow are defying laws or are acting so irrationally that new forms of state power are needed to prosecute them.

13:43What it allows the government to do, I think, what it allows the government to do, I think, operates both in law, right? But it also operates politically and in culture. And it's the second part that I think is far more nefarious. Yeah. What it does in culture is to unleash all sorts of counterterrorism measures, right? And usually, since 2001, the U.S. government has thought about terrorism as something that comes from abroad into the United States.

14:19But increasingly, certain forms of domestic unrest, for example, the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, were regarded as forms of insurgency that needed to be contained using counterinsurgency, policing or containment and prosecution. We have seen in the recent Department of Justice process that they are developing a list of so-called domestic terrorists.

14:50And in the most current administration, we've seen, for example, eight people affiliated with, supposedly affiliated, because I don't know that Antifa is actual, has offices or an identifiable identity. But nevertheless, they've been prosecuted as suspected Antifa members for sort of engaging in domestic terrorism. And we've also seen, of course, most tragically recently, Renee Good and Alex Preddy, two people assassinated by ICE officers, being accused of being domestic terrorists, although the administration has walked that back.

15:26But presumably, in calling them domestic terrorism, their execution was justified. What does the use of that term against people like Renee Good on Alex Preddy, and the people you just mentioned, signal to you? Yeah, it signals to me that, on the one hand, they've been labeled and tried without any due process, right? But it also means that the agents of the state have the authority to be judge, jury, and executioner.

16:00And that's a very scary condition to be in. But what it also suggests, Parker, is a longer history in which certain groups have been targeted for extrajudicial violence. And what I'm thinking about here, as I mentioned at the start, are the ways that sort of indigenous protest movements, right? The American Indian movement in the 1960s and 70s were dealt with, or water protectors on the Lakota lands that were considered and then faced all sorts of prosecution by sort of militarized police.

16:40Or black power activists, or black power activists in the 1960s and 70s, who were called black identity extremists, or were considered, when Asada Shakur was considered an enemy of the state, that needed to be understood as like a terrorist. Or more specifically, after 9-11, Muslims in the United States were prosecuted under, or at least surveilled under a justification of protecting the United States from terrorism.

17:13But that actually has a longer history in the ways that the United States has represented and understood Palestinians, even before 9-11, as somehow constituted naturally in their DNA as being terrorists. Rather than as people fighting occupation, using armed struggle to resist their occupation. That's another valence of terrorism, right? Is that during the era of the Cold War, groups across the so-called Third World or the decolonizing world, Africa, Asia, that used armed resistance to kick European powers out of their lands,

17:57were understood to be terrorists, from the Algerians, to people in the Congo, like Lumumba, or people in Vietnam, who wanted no French or U.S. imperialists in their lands. And so it goes back, depending on how you are viewing things or from where you're viewing things, certain acts of violence are legitimate forms of containment and self-defense, and other forms of violence are beyond the pale and considered terrorists. Golly. I mean, so like, in that regard, those who are anti-imperialists can be considered terrorists.

18:32No, those who are anti-imperialists have been considered, right? The FLN, right? The Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These were considered terrorists by U.S. and European powers, precisely.

The everywhere war comes home

18:48Wait, so how would you define the war on terror? I mean, it's a huge issue, because I think the war on terror was the most contemporary iteration of what has been a much longer struggle or a longer battle to define state violence as legitimate, right? And so the U.S. war on terror post-2001, certainly it had a new target in Afghanistan, in al-Qaeda, in, as it became under the Bush administration, the Muslim world, people who hated our freedoms, as Bush said.

19:33It became a war that Vice President Dick Cheney said would have to indulge in tactics of the dark side, like extraordinary renditions and torture and black sides, because our enemy was against the freedom-loving world, as George W. Bush said it. He wasn't the first person to use that language. And the kinds of understanding of certain kinds of violence as beyond the pale, right, is one that has longer histories in colonial wars, as we just talked about.

20:06The post-2001 war on terror was sort of the, was a unique moment, right? It was in response to an actual act of violence against the United States in the planes flying into the World Trade Center. That was an act of terrorism, right? But the wars that came for 20-plus never-ending years after that expanded into a global battlefield in which vanquishing the terrorists justified U.S. and NATO allies going after enemies everywhere, right?

20:50Historians call it the everywhere war for a reason, because U.S. drone warfare was taking place in Somalia, right? It was taking place in Iraq, which was not one of the countries that attacked the United States or was harboring al-Qaeda. It began to be a rationale for all sorts of counterinsurgency measures anywhere and everywhere that have since come home. And ICE is now being deployed in our airports, right?

21:23And targeting U.S. citizens. The war on terror has come home. And it always was. Wait, what's that phrase? Like the chickens come home to roost? Right. Does it feel adequate for this moment? I think so. I mean, I think that's a longer sort of theory of anti-colonial thought, right? The sort of boomerang theory of empire that says that it ultimately comes back to the metropole, right?

21:56That the sort of barbarity of overseas wars often come home. Certainly, that's what I think Malcolm X had in mind when he talked about the chickens come home to roost. But certainly, that seems to be something that's happening now. Or another way to say that, and another way to think about this as scholars that I know and read talk about, is that the very concept of a homeland is in itself a post-2001 creation.

22:28The United States used to talk about itself during the Cold War as a domestic space. The domestic and the foreign was the division between the United States and the rest of the world. But after 2001, the category homeland in homeland security or protecting the homeland or the popular television show in the post-2001 era homeland was a formation or an ideological creation that argued that the U.S. homeland was now everywhere.

23:02And indeed, what the Department of Homeland Security did was to suture together all of the forms of policing and surveillance and militarism abroad during the U.S. war on terror to U.S. domestic surveillance projects. But what DHS has also done is to expand the category of the homeland to be about the global battlefield. But the logic of that is a presumption that defending the homeland means using extraordinary state violence wherever defending the homeland can take place.

23:41And increasingly under the Trump administration, that's meant deploying masked gunmen to U.S. cities in an act of defending the homeland from the so-called terrorists like Alex Preddy and Renee Good. I mean, Alex, I know this is probably obvious, but, like, why should people care about this?

Erosion of constitutional protections

24:05Well, there are several reasons. One is that we're seeing the erosion of certain protections that I think for a long time people have taken for granted. There have been, in the United States, pitched battles about, for example, the Second Amendment, right? Do people have the right to bear arms in their house, for example? And those debates, I think, are well known, or at least highly visible.

24:40We've seen all sorts of debates in the United States about abortion rights and whether they're protected by the Constitution. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court has recently said they are not. But we haven't seen similar concern, I think, in public discourse about, for example, Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. We have too few debates in our society about the power of the state to wield violence in our communities.

25:13I don't hear those debates very often these days. And, in fact, the goalposts for when the state can use legitimate violence against U.S. citizens has moved entirely in this generation, and particularly in the last few years, and particularly with this administration's deployment of ICE agents in U.S. cities. So that the frontiers of where homeland security exists and where it ends have been completely obliterated.

25:49And defending the homeland or deploying U.S. state violence can take place in Oakland, where I am right now, or it can take place in Tehran. And there's not much distinction in how those are deployed today. It seems to me American citizens are willing to relinquish certain prized freedoms that an earlier generation fought for,

26:20the generation that fought against government oversight and executive power during the Watergate era, for example, or in the era of the Vietnam War, when U.S. citizens were furious that the U.S. was waging secret wars in Southeast Asia. When U.S. soldiers were being drafted and killed in that war. And so, you know, one of the legacies of the war on terror that I'm interested in is the expanded use of executive power. The U.S. president has become an all-powerful king in many ways.

26:51And it's not just because of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a symptom of that longer history of the war on terror. Alex, thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure, Parker. Thanks. And that's our show. A reminder that you can follow us on Instagram at NPRCodeSwitch. This episode was produced by Xavier Lopez and Jess Kung. It was edited by Leah Dinella and Dahlia Mortada.

27:24This rerun was edited by Jasmine Romero. Our engineer was Jimmy Keighley. And of course, we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massive. So that's Christina Calla and Courtney Stein and Barton Girdwood and Maya Dangerfield and Noor Gill and Yolanda Sanguini. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. I'm B.E. Parker. B.E. Easy, y'all. Hydrate.