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Chapter 4 Whose Homeland Security? On September 11, the wheel of history turned and the world will never be the same. . . . The attacks of September 11 were acts of terrorism against America orchestrated and carried out by individuals living within our borders. Today’s terrorists enjoy the benefits of our free society even as they commit themselves to our destruction. They live in our communities—plotting, planning and waiting to kill Americans again. —Attorney General John Ashcroft (2001b) A TTORNEY GENERAL John Ashcroft’s declaration that “the world will never be the same” was a prescient script for the American government ’s actions after the 9/11 attacks, whether in the United States, the Arab and Muslim worlds, or other outposts of the global “war on terror.” In the United States, the notion that terrorists were hiding in American communities just waiting to attack, living undercover lives that had public veneers of normalcy, provoked fear in the hearts of Americans and cast an air of suspicion on Arab and Muslim Americans. Government statements were clear in their directives: “The federal government cannot fight this reign of terror alone. Every American must help us defend our nation against this enemy” (Ashcroft 2001b). Since terrorists were alleged to be inconspicuously residing in “our communities,” the message was apparent: Arabs and Muslims in the United States should be closely observed and their seemingly normal activities should be treated as suspect. Arabs and Muslims, who understood their position as subjects of watchdogs in a panoptical world, were to be placed under a microscope by their non-Arab or non-Muslim neighbors. Study data show that social relationships between themselves, their neighbors, and strangers were commonly perceived by Arab Muslims to have changed into a new set of roles: one party was looking out for danger, while the other was behaving in ways that would demonstrate innocence. 110 The government’s statements and pleas for help thus socially constructed Arabs and Muslims living in the United States as persons who were likely to be connected to the 9/11 attacks and other future acts of terrorism . They were people who, if not terrorists themselves, might be hiding terrorists or covering up their knowledge of brewing terrorist plots. So constructed, Arabs and Muslims in the United States were symbolically reconstituted as people who were not really part of the American nation; they were the “them,” and thus not fully eligible for the nation’s package of civil and constitutional rights. In fact, they were often described as persons whose presence in the United States was to take advantage of these very rights in order to plot destruction, as in the Ashcroft statement opening this chapter. As a result of the way they were now publicly perceived, many of the persons interviewed for this study were visited by law enforcement authorities because a neighbor or coworker had reported them as acting in a suspicious manner—whether because they made overseas phone calls, because they opened their trunk frequently, or because of the way they were dressed. Others reported being removed from airplanes or denied boarding; some lost their jobs, and some simply reported that life in the United States was no longer the same. These and other aspects of the post-9/11 Arab and Muslim experience, as discussed in this and subsequent chapters, all contributed to a sense of “homeland insecurity .” This feeling abated over time, but never really went away during the period of this study. This chapter focuses on federal government statements and policies implemented after the 9/11 attacks. At the same time as it asked the American public to watch out for suspicious behavior, the government crafted an extensive set of policies aimed at “trimming the haystack” to find the needle that “resists discovery” (Leiken 2004, 136). These measures included mass arrests, preventive detentions, FBI interviews, registration and fingerprinting of tens of thousands of male foreign nationals, widespread wiretapping, secret hearings, closures of charities, criminal indictments, and reviews of private Internet, telecommunication, and financial records, which were secured through more than thirty thousand national security letters issued annually to American businesses after the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act (Cole 2006). These measures were directed almost solely against persons of Arab ethnicity or the Muslim faith. Their ongoing reportage effectively sent a message to the American people that ethnic and religious profiling was acceptable, even necessary, so long as it was directed at these groups. In the end, few terrorists...

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