Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice (review)

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice is a compilation of the stories of individuals whose lives have been unjustly impacted by U.S. counterterrorism policies and practices in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The book is part of a larger trend of recent publications that use oral history interviews to document stories of loss, grief, healing, discrimination, and injustice after 9/11. Some of these works include After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years that Followed, edited by Mary Marshall Clark et al., (New York: New Press, 2011) and Irum Shiekh’s Detained Without Cause: Muslims’ Stories of Detention and Deportation in America After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave, 2011). These works, which use testimonies of lived experience to confront and challenge the U.S. government’s responses to 9/11, are critical at a time when dominant discourses in the United States about Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Middle Eastern religions, politics, and cultures are grossly oversimplified and misinformed.

The foreword to Patriot Acts is written by Karen Korematsu, the daughter of Fred T. Korematsu, a second-generation Japanese American who was arrested and convicted in 1942 for refusing to obey the exclusion orders implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Mr. Korematsu’s federal conviction was eventually overturned in the 1983 case, Korematsu v. U.S., in which Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote, “It stands as a caution that, in times of distress, the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect governmental actions from close scrutiny and accountability [and] that, in times of international hostility and antagonisms, our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused” (11).

By sharing her father’s story, Korematsu illuminates parallels between the discrimination against Japanese Americans during the period of internment and the discrimination against Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities during the post-9/11 “war on terror.” In doing so, she situates the narratives in Patriot Acts within a long history of violent government reactions to acts of violence—a paradox that rational people seem to accept in “times of distress” and “petty fear.” But the criminalization of entire racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious groups in response to violence—especially violence on catastrophic levels—cannot exist independent of other historical forces. Korematsu’s fore-word is important because it reminds us that we cannot fully understand the meaning of the narratives in Patriot Acts without reading them within related histories of nationalism, racism, militarism, and U.S. imperialism. Only then can these narratives transform into critical lessons for the future.

The narratives in Patriot Acts bring public attention to the widespread and damaging effects of counterterrorism policies and practices on the daily lives of people living and working in the United States. Far from the war zones of Afghanistan or the cages of Guantánamo Bay, these narratives demonstrate how the U.S. legal and penal systems have deeply embedded the extreme logic of the “war on terror.” Indeed, these narratives showcase how extreme military and police power intrude into people’s daily lives: the detention of a teenage Muslim girl the FBI accused of being a potential suicide bomber without a shred of evidence; the FBI’s constant harassment of the family and friends of an artist who performed a poem calling for radical social change; a businessman’s harsh prison sentence for raising money to provide food for Palestinian widows and orphans; the police confrontation with a group of young Muslim Americans for collectively praying in a parking lot; and a police informant’s entrapment of a young Muslim. Each of these stories speaks to the human consequences of the U.S. government’s...