Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State - Hardcover

Greenberg, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804138214 ISBN 13: 9780804138215

Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The definitive account of how America’s War on Terror sparked a decade-long assault on the rule of law, weakening our courts and our Constitution in the name of national security.

The day after September 11, President Bush tasked the attorney general with preventing another terrorist attack on the United States. From that day forward, the Bush administration turned to the Department of Justice to give its imprimatur to activities that had previously been unthinkable—from the NSA’s spying on US citizens to indefinite detention to torture. Many of these activities were secretly authorized, others done in the light of day.

When President Obama took office, many observers expected a reversal of these encroachments upon civil liberties and justice, but the new administration found the rogue policies to be deeply entrenched and, at times, worth preserving. Obama ramped up targeted killings, held fast to aggressive surveillance policies, and fell short on bringing reform to detention and interrogation.

How did America veer so far from its founding principles of justice? Rogue Justice connects the dots for the first time—from the Patriot Act to today’s military commissions, from terrorism prosecutions to intelligence priorities, from the ACLU’s activism to Edward Snowden’s revelations. And it poses a stark question: Will the American justice system ever recover from the compromises it made for the war on terror?

Riveting and deeply reported, Rogue Justice could only have been written by Karen Greenberg, one of this country’s top experts on Guantánamo, torture, and terrorism, with a deep knowledge of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Now she brings to life the full story of law and policy after 9/11, introducing us to the key players and events, showing that time and again, when liberty and security have clashed, justice has been the victim.

— Kirkus, Best Books of 2016

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen J. Greenberg is director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law. She is also the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days and coeditor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.

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9780804138215|excerpt

Greenberg / ROGUE JUSTICE

Chapter 1

Justice at War

Attorney General John Ashcroft spent the morning of September 11, 2001, on a Gulfstream jet, heading to Milwaukee to celebrate Library Day with schoolchildren. He never made it to the event. As soon as the jet landed, a black-­clad SWAT team surrounded it and hovered, weapons at the ready, as the plane was refueled and prepared for the return journey to Washington, DC. He made it out just in time—­air travel in the United States would soon be suspended—­and joined other top government officials at the White House early the next morning to meet with President George W. Bush, who had returned from his own Library Day event in Florida.

Ashcroft was seated between CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He could feel the president’s eyes on him. “Don’t ever let this happen again,” Bush said.

“I took it personally,” Ashcroft later wrote. “From that moment forward, I devoted myself to an intense, sometimes secret war with a mission many people thought was impossible: stopping terrorists from striking again on American soil.”

Although the president had been looking directly at him when he gave this command, Ashcroft wasn’t entirely sure that it was intended for him. But regardless of whom Bush was holding accountable for the previous day’s events, everyone in the room probably felt some version of Ashcroft’s sense of responsibility and mission. The attack had caught them all off guard. They had failed in their duty to protect the country. Each of them now had to figure out what had gone wrong under his or her watch, how to correct it, and, above all, how to prevent a catastrophe like 9/11 from ever happening again.

Ashcroft’s Justice Department, especially its storied law enforcement and investigative wing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a unique role in this reckoning. The FBI and the lawyers under Ashcroft’s command would not only have to ferret out and round up those responsible for the attacks; they would also have to stop those who might be planning something similar. This was not a task for which Ashcroft was directly prepared, either by experience or by temperament. As a governor and a senator, he’d focused on domestic issues, carving out a place for himself as a Christian conservative opposed to abortion, desegregation, and big government. As he had told Larry King in February 2001 during a discussion of gun control, “We’ve got enough laws on the books. I think what we need is tougher enforcement.” It was enough for lawyers and investigators to step in after people had committed crimes, at which point, he said, “we should nail them.” Seven months after he talked to King, it was clear that this approach would not suffice when it came to terrorism.

When he returned to his office after the White House meeting, Ashcroft assembled his top deputies. They were being deployed in the war on terror, he told them. They would have to peer into the future and beyond the nation’s borders in order to do their new job: keeping the country safe.



Robert Mueller’s first full day on the job as FBI director was September 10, 2001. He hadn’t even found the bathrooms in his new headquarters when the planes hit the buildings in New York and Washington. But he was plenty oriented to the job of combating terrorism—­certainly more so than his boss. Princeton-­educated, worldly, a decorated Vietnam Marine veteran, and a prominent prosecutor, Mueller had told the Senate committee vetting his nomination to the FBI post in the summer of 2001 that “the major threat that we have, and the threat that the Bureau needs to worry about the most, is terrorism.”

Yet as Mueller recalled for a 2012 gathering of Harvard Business School students, one of his very first meetings with President Bush after 9/11 didn’t go very well. He was in the Oval Office describing to Bush and Cheney his agents’ efforts to piece together an account of who the conspirators were, how they had carried out their attacks, and what their connection was to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, when Bush interrupted him: “Stop it! What you’re telling me the bureau is doing is what you’ve been doing for a hundred years; my question for you today is what is the bureau doing today to prevent the next terrorist attack.” The president, Mueller said, asked him that same question every day for the next four years.

What the bureau had been doing for a hundred years, or at least for the previous decade or so, clearly hadn’t worked. As Ashcroft told Congress on September 25, the attacks revealed “a total breakdown in our intelligence, one that cannot be excused and must never be forgotten.” Mueller, Ashcroft, and others had immediately begun to investigate how the bureau had missed the signs that a terrorist attack was imminent. This wasn’t the first time the FBI had had to investigate itself. Less than a year earlier, in February 2001, it had arrested one of its own agents, Robert Hanssen. Hanssen had been spying for the Russians for years without being caught. High-­profile failures like these had led investigators to ugly conclusions about the health of America’s premier law enforcement agency. Internal communications were, as one report put it, rife with “human error, compounded by antiquated and cumbersome information technology systems and procedures.” There was no networked computer system for research and information sharing; field agents were reduced to consulting public libraries to obtain information. Relationships among the various sections of the agency were “dysfunctional” and “broken,” which led to repeated failures to communicate. The bureau was cripplingly short on able translators.

Sometimes the consequences of the disarray were only minor, if embarrassing. Ashcroft, for instance, was forced to postpone Timothy McVeigh’s execution in the wake of a disclosure that the FBI had failed to provide evidence to McVeigh’s defense team, a lapse that turned out to be the result of disorganization. But sometimes they were devastating, as in the case of Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist suspected of transmitting nuclear secrets to China—­“allegations of espionage as significant as any the United States Government is likely to face,” as the official report on the debacle put it. But, the report concluded, the “FBI’s . . . investigation of Wen Ho Lee, in virtually every material respect, was deeply and fundamentally flawed.” The agency failed to make the Lee case a priority. It assigned an overworked, underexperienced agent to it and then denied him resources. Information got tangled up in bureaucratic webs. Supervisors ignored the case. In the meantime Lee, who had indisputably downloaded nuclear secrets onto a flash drive and who had been caught on wiretap promising a captured spy that he would find out who had turned him in, languished in solitary confinement for nine months, becoming a civil liberties cause célèbre. In the end, he pleaded guilty to just one of the fifty-­nine counts on which he had been indicted, then went on to write a book called My Country Versus Me, in which he argued that he had been a victim of racial profiling.

If the FBI’s logistical and informational infrastructure was too dysfunctional to nail the bad guys, it certainly wasn’t up to the task of finding out in advance who they were and what they were up to and then preventing them from committing crimes. Running an effective intelligence operation required...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House USA Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804138214
• ISBN 13: 9780804138215
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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