SHATTERING JUSTICE & re-making the muslim threat

a visual timeline of war on terror

Success! click on the button below to enter the exhibit.
Enter Exhibit
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Muslim Counterpublics Lab uses this information to see which organizations and individuals are acesseing our site in order to best understand how to cater the information presented herein.  Please note that by entering your email address and accessing our site, you also opt-in to receiving email updates from us.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.  You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

© Muslim Counterpublics Lab

MUSLIM COUNTERPUBLICS LAB

HomeAboutGallery ModeFeatured ResourceBibliographyContactDonate
©2021 Justice for Muslims Collection
Change Year

Intro Slide

1

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

No items found.

Visual for year 2001 of the War on Terror timeline.

2001

2

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

President George Bush Address to Joint Session of Congress on September 20th, 2001 where he uses the phrase “War on Terror” for the first time (stated at 14:25)

September 11th World Trade Center attacks

On the morning of 9/11/01, 19 members of al Qaeda coordinated a series of airplane hijackings and subsequent suicide attacks against multiple targets in the United States.

Working in groups of five and, in one case, four (a fifth operative was later determined to have been delayed at customs) the hijackers boarded four flights to California taking off from three different Northeastern airports, took control of the aircraft and rerouted them to crash into multiple targets. Two of the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which collapsed, also causing significant damage to surrounding buildings. The third plane crashed into the Pentagon building in Arlington, VA, causing a partial collapse. The group of hijackers on the fourth flight encountered substantial resistance from passengers for control of the plane, originally headed for Washington D.C., which eventually crash landed in a field outside of Shanksville, PA. It is believed that the intended target of the fourth aircraft was either the White House or the U.S. Capitol building. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks and many thousands more were injured. 

The 9/11 attacks triggered a swift and severe response by the Bush administration, which identified al Qaeda, and its leader Osama bin Laden, as the initial focus nearly immediately, relying in part on prior existing intelligence that indicated the group had been planning exactly this sort of attack.

The sweeping program of anti-terrorism initiatives and military interventions that were enacted in the wake of 9/11, however, went far beyond bringing the group responsible to justice, developing instead into a global War on Terror that would span decades and fundamentally reshape a multitude of institutions and countries.      

Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)

Congress acted swiftly after 9/11 to give the Bush administration wide latitude to respond militarily. Just one week after the attacks, on September 18, 2001, Bush signed the resulting legislation into law. The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) granted the executive branch the power to use:

"All necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons."

The AUMF was initially presented to Congress - and the public - as a limited mandate that was necessary in order to effectively root out al Qaeda by targeting the Taliban, which was seen to be harboring the terrorist group. In reality, however, its sweeping language has proven to be nearly endlessly open to interpretation and hence to expansion of its scope. Since its passage, the AUMF has provided legal cover not only for Bush, but for subsequent administrations to wage war abroad with impunity, without obtaining fresh Congressional approval. To take just one illustrative example, the mandate provided by the 2001 AUMF is so broad that it has been used by multiple administrations to justify targeting groups that did not even exist at the time of the World Trade Center attacks.

President Bush uses the phrase “War on Terror” for the 1st time

On September 20, 2001 then president Bush declared before a joint session of Congress that:

“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."

He went on to describe any nation which was determined to be harboring terrorists or terrorist organizations a hostile regime. These two tenets became the rhetorical foundation of the Bush Doctrine in foreign policy, a program of preventative warfare focused on preemptive, often unilateral action in defense of U.S. security interests, and to promote “Western” values such as democracy and freedom.

The philosophical approach to global conflict underpinning the Bush Doctrine is one that sees terrorism solely as the result of a violent, backwards ideology prevalent in the Muslim world, rather than acknowledging geopolitical and other root causes for conflict. According to this approach, it is not enough for the United States to merely respond to direct, known threats. Because its national security is inherently threatened by the mere existence of “Islamist” ideologies, the U.S. is justified in treating vast swaths of the world as a battlefield in order to protect itself. The Bush Doctrine also gives cover for nation-building, as the promotion, by force or otherwise, of western-style democracy is seen as a fundamental component of winning the ideological war.

War in Afghanistan

On October 7, 2001, then president Bush announced the beginning of strikes by a U.S. and U.K. led coalition of forces against Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, citing the government’s refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden for extradition to the U.S. and failure to meet other demands, such as allowing inspections of military training camps. The military campaign Operation Enduring Freedom made rapid gains. By mid-November, 2001, U.S. and U.S. supported Afghan troops had secured control of the capital city of Kabul, and by the end of the year the Taliban had been driven out of its last remaining stronghold, in the Northern city of Kandahar. After narrowly evading capture in battle in December, Osama bin Laden fled to Pakistan with his remaining forces. Despite this, the number of U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan increased, from 1,300 initially to 2,500 in December, 2001, with the Bush administration declaring its intent to stay and “help stabilize” the country. The sprawling, two decades long conflict that followed became the longest running war in U.S. history. 

White House officials worked hard to publicly position the war in Afghanistan as being for the good of the Afghan people, who were cast as innocent victims of the brutal and anti-democratic Taliban in need of rescue by the virtuous United States. Then first lady Laura Bush made it her particular cause to evangelize on the plight of Afghan women, making stirring speeches linking anti-terrorism to women’s rights in statements such as, “Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.” This humanitarian posturing served to obscure the U.S.’s true interests in undertaking the military invasion and subsequent occupation that was unasked for by Afghans. It is also believed by the staggering human cost of the U.S.’s involvement in the country. As of April of 2021, the war in Afghanistan directly caused an estimated 71,000 civilian deaths - including, of course, of women and children - out of a total of about 200,000 casualties. This number does not include the many lives lost or plunged into upheaval by the auxiliary harms associated with near constant warfare, such as dislocation, disease, and malnutrition.    

President Bush announces first strikes/war on Afghanistan:

PATRIOT Act signed into law

Signed into law on October 26, 2001 the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act was a sweeping domestic counter-terrorism program that greatly expanded the executive’s surveillance ability while curtailing previous limitations on overstep. In the name of national security, the PATRIOT Act, as it is commonly known, granted government agencies vast new abilities to obtain intelligence secretly, through wiretapping, as well as by the surveillance of electronic activity including everything from financial transactions to library records.

Under its “Business Records Provision,” companies, including internet and phone companies, could also be required to comply with secret court orders requiring the release of any metadata the government deemed relevant. The ability of law enforcement to execute search warrants without notice was also expanded. In addition to these grants of power, the PATRIOT Act mandated stiffer penalties and, in some cases, removed statutes of limitations on prosecution for terror-related crimes.

Although the PATRIOT Act broadly outlined the types of actions, or, crucially, intended actions, that fall under the umbrella of domestic terrorism, its intent was to expand the government’s discretion in identifying and investigating terror-related crimes, not to define them. This is reflected in its often vague and over-broad language, which critics have pointed out could reasonably be interpreted to apply to the perfectly legal protest activities of a wide variety of domestic organizations. This, and concerns about privacy - and the provisions for secrecy that make it nearly impossible to know the scope of invasion - have fueled widespread pushback to the PATRIOT Act. Over the years, various provisions have been challenged and subsequently altered, or have expired or been struck down, while others have been expanded, but its overall structure and grounding in overriding concern for national security and the anti-terrorism paradigm remain. 

It is unintentionally telling, perhaps, that the PATRIOT Act included a provision, titled “Sense of Congress Condemning Discrimination Against Arab and Muslim Americans,” that specifically denied any intent to disproportionately target Muslims. Despite this disclaimer, Muslim Americans and their communities have, in practice, borne the brunt of the PATRIOT Act’s harmful impacts.        

Bush signs Executive Order authorizing military commissions

On November 13, 2001 then president Bush signed an executive order authorizing the trial of non-U.S. citizens captured outside the U.S. and suspected of terrorism and related crimes by military commissions. Relegating these trials to specially created tribunals, as opposed to relying on existing processes such as court martial, allowed the Bush administration to sidestep the due process and human rights guarantees of the international rule of law that govern ordinary battlefield conditions, while also placing them outside of the reach of the requirements of the United States judicial system. This system meant that terror suspects could be detained,  convicted and even sentenced to death without a public trial or any formal process for appeal.

The 2001 order did not require even that defendants be told of the reason for their arrest; nor did it grant a right to defense counsel. Paving the way for grave human rights abuses, it also did not contain any provision disallowing forced confessions from being admitted as evidence. By sidestepping the judiciary, the military commissions system represented an almost unprecedented expansion of executive power that becomes even more  breathtaking when it is considered in conjunction with the broad mandates of the AUMF and the PATRIOT Act - all ushered in under the pretense of national emergency in the early days of the War on Terror.

ID: Text reads: 2001. September 11th: World Trade Center attack. PATRIOT Act signed into law. Authorization of Military Force. War in Afghanistan. President Bush authorizes order for military tribunals to try suspected terrorists. President Bush uses “War on Terror” phrase for the first time on Sept. 20th. Images include two disembodied business suit-sleeved arms shaking hands over a document that reads: 107th Congress 1st Session. H.J. Res. 64. PATRIOT Act signed into law. Images also include: the New York City skyline as the World Trade Center towers are engulfed in smoke; three military tanks; and Muslim women huddled together, many with body language that conveys fear or shock, with mountains behind them in the background.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2002 of the War on Terror timeline.

2002

3

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

NSEERS implemented

Initiated in September of 2002, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), sometimes called Special Registration, was a multi-phase registration program that targeted non-immigrant visitors from suspect countries who were lawfully present in the U.S., such as those holding work or school visas. With the exception of North Korea, all of the countries of origin that were singled out for special attention were Muslim majority nations.

NSEERS required all visa holders from these 25 countries to register with the government upon entry, a process that involved finger-printing, photographs, and interrogation. While they remained in the country, males over the age of 16 were required to renew their registration every 30 days, including by providing proof of employment or continued matriculation. Finally, they were required to register once again when they left the country, and to exit the U.S. only through designated ports. More than 90,000 Muslim visitors to the United States were subject to this discriminatory registration program and thousands were detained, interrogated and deported for failure to comply with its requirements.

The Bush administration justified NSEERS by pointing out that some of the 9/11 hijackers had been lawfully present in the U.S. at the time of the attacks. However, it failed to produce a single federal terrorism prosecution before finally being suspended in 2011. In 2016, fearing a revival by the incoming Trump administration, then president Obama dismantled the regulatory framework underlying the NSEERS program.

Guantanamo Bay Prison opens

Four months to the day after the events of 9/11, on January 11, 2002, the first twenty men to be detained there arrived at the newly opened offshore prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States initially seized Guantanamo Bay from Spain in 1903, and currently retains possession of it, despite Cuba’s objections, under a subsequent lease agreement that can only be terminated with the consent of both parties. The U.S. military has long operated a naval base there, and in the 1990’s, it was briefly used to detain Haitian and Cuban refugees. Court rulings from that time held that because Guantanamo Bay was outside the territorial bounds of the U.S. that those held there were not entitled to constitutional protections - a factor that no doubt played a role in selecting the site for the new prison designed specifically to hold suspects in the War on Terror. From the outset, the Bush administration insisted that it had an absolute right to detain, interrogate, and try people it designated as suspects in the War on Terror, and that that power was not subject to the ordinary limits imposed by the international rule of law or the United States justice system. The physically separate setting of the Guantanamo Bay prison stands as a powerful symbol of the U.S. government’s intent to create a system outside the law, operating beyond the reach of not only existing institutions but any mechanisms for transparency and accountability to the public that might prevent or curtail human rights abuses.

Since 2002, a total of 780 prisoners have been held at Guantanamo - all of them Muslim men and boys. In addition to the inherent horror of being held indefinitely without meaningful legal recourse and often without even being given an explanation of the charges they faced, the Guantanamo detainees were routinely subject to humiliation and abuse. The systematized program of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would later be revealed in the Senate torture report was developed at Guantanamo and signed off on by senior Bush administration officials, most notably then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Some of the more egregious forms of abusive interrogation techniques faced by inmates included sensory deprivation and submission to extremes of heat and cold, prolonged sleep periods of sleep deprivation, sometimes for weeks, prolonged 20 hour interrogation sessions, prolonged use of stress positions such as standing, removal of clothing and forced grooming, use of hoods during interrogation, and the use of psychological torture tactics such as scenarios designed to make the detainee believe that he or his family was at imminent risk of death, or exploitation of detainees’ individual phobias. In addition to interrogation, the living conditions at Guantanamo are grim at best, and reports have found that prisoners have routinely endured beatings, threats of rape and sexual harassment, as well as religious discrimination, including desecration of Qurans and being kept from prayer. The continued existence of Guantanamo Bay Prison normalizes a culture of legalized abuse of Muslims and cements the association of Islam with terrorism that was perpetuated by the government in the wake of 9/11. 

White House designates Guantanamo Bay detainees “enemy combatants”

In March, 2002, Bush administration officials began using the term “enemy combatant” to refer to the men it had detained at Guantanamo under suspicion of support for the Taliban or al Qaeda. The phrase was a legal term of art that served two seemingly contradictory purposes. On the one hand, it used the language of war to signal the government’s position that these men were more than ordinary criminal suspects, thus justifying their extreme treatment. At the same time, the term sidestepped existing battlefield designations, such as prisoner of war, that would have entitled those captured to the due process and human rights protections of the Geneva Conventions. Defining the men held at Guantanamo as enemy combatants also set the stage for the post-9/11 paradigm of indefinite detention, as the government argued a corollary of the designation was that detainees could be held for the duration of hostilities - in this case not a traditional war but the nebulous War on Terror. 

Similarly to the language of war utilized in general by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, the term “enemy combatant” is highly disingenuous when considered in light of the facts. Only about 5% of the men who have been held at Guantanamo were actually captured by American troops and, even more troubling, 86% were apparently turned in to U.S. or allied forces in exchange for cash bounties. As courts in later years began to hear habeas cases brought by Guantanamo prisoners, it became clear that the Department of Defense’s own records confirmed that the vast majority of those detained had never taken up arms against the United States. In 2009, the Obama administration term officially retired the term - but retained the power of indefinite detention.       

DOJ Torture Memos written

Unhappy with the existing parameters of international and domestic law, the Bush administration worked diligently in the early days of the War on Terror to create a legal and narrative framework that would justify torture. Two internal Department of Justice (DOJ) memos from 2002 sketch the broad outlines of this strategy. The first memo was  written in August, 2002 by then assistant attorney general John Bybee to CIA general counsel and outlined what “enhanced” interrogation techniques the administration believed would be legally acceptable in the case of Abu Zubaydah, who was the first War on Terror suspect detained in secret by the CIA. Zubaydah was injured in the raid by Pakistani forces that resulted in his capture and was sent to a hospital in Pakistan, where he cooperated with initial questioning by the FBI before his interrogation was taken over by the CIA. Citing security concerns and a desire to evade notice by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the CIA declined to transfer Zubaydah into military custody as was standard, instead moving him to a secret detention site in Thailand in June. The Bybee memo sent less than two months later is a clear indication that the Bush administration was aware of and supported the nascent CIA torture program for which Zubaydah became a guinea pig. Officially titled “Interrogation of an al Qaeda Operative,” the memo approved the following techniques: 1) attention grasp, 2) walling, 3) facial hold, 4) facial slap, 5) cramped confinement, 6) wall standing, 7) stress positions, 8) sleep deprivation, 9) insects placed in a confinement box, and 10) the waterboard.  

A second August, 2001 memo that was sent from assistant attorney general Bybee’s office to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales purported to outline the scope of interrogation techniques acceptable under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). Actually written by DOJ official John Yoo, who would become infamous for his vocal support of torture, this memo offered an interpretation of the UN CAT that was wholly inconsistent with international law and most constitutional opinion. In order for a particular act to rise to the level of torture, according to Yoo, it must cause the level of intense pain associated with severe physical injury or death and for interrogation to be considered mental torture, it must inflict serious psychological harm for an extended period of time, for example months or even years. Yoo also reiterated that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to captured al Qaeda and Taliban members, because they were, respectively, non-state actors, or actors of a failed state. Finally, the Yoo memo argued that the President would not necessarily be constrained by an act of Congress prohibiting torture, in regards to enemy detainees held outside the United States. 

The 2002 Bybee/Yoo memos laid the groundwork for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the brutal enhanced interrogation techniques that were utilized at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Subsequent legal direction during the Bush and Obama administrations, responding to various court rulings and public revelations, sought to limit the blank check for torture approved in these early communications, but the overall framework sanctioning the abuse of Muslim prisoners endured.              

CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program begins

Beginning in 2002, the CIA operated a clandestine network of black sites around the world as part of its Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program. Rendition refers to the practice of transferring captives to another jurisdiction to be detained or face trial. It is constrained under international law because of the concern it will be used to circumvent the human rights requirements of the originating country. The Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture both prohibit the transfer of enemy prisoners to countries that torture. Sometimes referred to as extraordinary rendition - although it might better be called simply kidnapping - the practice as it was used by the CIA was designed to do exactly that. The Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, who was falsely believed to be a high level al Qaeda operative, became the first person detained by the CIA post-9/11 when he was removed from Pakistan, where he had been captured, to a black site set up in Thailand. CIA records revealed in the 2014 Senate Torture Report indicate that the agency did not want to transfer Zubaydah into military custody because they wanted to avoid declaring him as a prisoner to the International Committee for the Red Cross. Once in secret detention, he was subjected to horrific abuse as the system of “enhanced interrogation” techniques that became the blueprint for CIA torture was developed and tested. Told that if he died in custody he would be cremated so that no one would know what had happened to him, Zubaydah spent four and a half years in CIA black sites around the world before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, where he remains. 

The Washington Post was the first to reveal the existence of the U.S.’s global detention and interrogation network, in November of 2005. Its reach was extensive, involving 10 secret prisons, and the direct or indirect involvement of at least 54 governments. In addition to operating sites in countries such as Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, the CIA relied on other countries, such as Jordan and Morocco, for interrogation assistance, in yet other cases rendered suspects directly into the custody of countries where they faced torture and death, such as Syria. The UK, Canada, Italy, Germany and Sweden were all among the countries who were complicit in other ways, such as by capturing suspects and transferring them to CIA custody, or by allowing stopovers of secret CIA flights. Camp Echo, at Guantanamo Bay Prison, also housed a CIA black site. In the wake of the Post’s story, CIA officials ordered the destruction of videotapes documenting the torture of two detainees, including Abu Zubaydah. In 2006, then President Bush publicly acknowledged the program and ordered the transfer of the detainees into military custody, at Guantanamo. However, while nominally asserting an absolute ban on inhuman and degrading treatment, Bush allowed the CIA to resume operation of black sites in 2007. 

The CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program finally came to an official end in 2009, after a NY Times story about the destruction of video evidence prompted an investigation into the program by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The resulting 6,700 page report was completed in 2012, but it took another two years before a 525 page executive summary was released to the public, in 2014. The Senate Torture Report, as it came to be known, revealed the systematic use of torture that was facilitated by the secrecy and lack of accountability of a program deliberately designed to allow it, in defiance of domestic and international law. The more egregious interrogation techniques that it identified as routine included rectal feeding and rehydration, confinement in boxes, waterboarding, prolonged periods of sleep deprivation followed by prolonged interrogations, beatings, and threats. That this was done with full knowledge and involvement at the highest levels of the Bush administration was made clear through painstaking examination of internal documents. The Senate’s report put the number of people who endured custody in the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program at 119; however, independent reports have estimated the true number is closer to 200.           

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established

The post-9/11 reorientation of U.S. institutions across the board to reflect counter-terrorism priorities was dramatic and swift. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which then President Bush signed into law in November, was the largest reorganization of federal agencies since the Department of Defense was created in 1947. It established the Office of Homeland Security (OHS) dedicated to national security, an additional cabinet position, and a new regulatory agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assume umbrella jurisdiction over everything deemed necessary to the protection of national security interests, including immigration and customs, border control, cyber-security, the secret service, transportation, and even federal disaster relief management. The DHS also contains most of the regulatory mechanisms that allow enforcement of the 2001 PATRIOT Act.       

2 US citizens declared enemy combatants

Although early use of the term focused on non-citizens captured abroad, in mid-2002 the Bush administration expanded the definition by designating two U.S. citizens “enemy combatants.” The first, Yaser Esam Hamdi, was captured in Afghanistan and held initially at Guantanamo. The second, Jose Padillla, was arrested at the Chicago airport in the U.S. and subsequently removed from the criminal justice system after the President signed an order declaring him an enemy combatant. Neither man was apprehended during the course of armed conflict. The Bush administration claimed the authority to hold these men incommunicado without charge and without access to counsel despite the fact that they were U.S. citizens, solely on the basis of this unilaterally made designation.

First War on Terror drone strike in Yemen

Although they had been used for surveillance for nearly a decade, the U.S. military did not attempt to adapt drone technology as a weapon until the advent of the War on Terror. The first launch of a CIA Predator drone was in Afghanistan on the very first day of the war, but it was poorly executed and led to infighting in U.S. and allied forces after it missed its Taliban target and killed 7 bystanders instead. The next one was launched the following year into Yemen - a country with which the United States was definitively not at war. Using drone strikes to expand the reach of the U.S. military outside the borders of existing conflicts without arousing public controversy would become a hallmark of the global war on terror. 

That first drone strike launched in Yemen, on November 3, 2002, hit a truck containing its target - a Yemeni citizen and al Qaeda operative who was believed to be involved with the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole - and five other people, killing all six. One of the remaining five was a U.S. citizen. After the 2002 strike, the U.S. did not conduct any drone operations in Yemen again until 2009, under incoming President Obama.  

ID: Text reads: 2002. Torture memos written: to be considered torture, actions must rise to the level of organ failure or death. CIA’s Rendition, Torture, and Interrogation Program begins. First War on Terror strike in Yemen. Guantanamo Bay prison opens. Detainees are deemed “enemy combatants.” National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) implemented. Department of Homeland Security created. Images include a plane that is connected to chains that bound Muslim men in orange jumpsuits and blag hoods over their heads and faces. “Enemy” is written on their hoods. Images also include fingerprint documents, a passport with the word “DEPORT” stamped in its pages, and the White House.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2003 of the War on Terror timeline.

2003

4

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

War in Iraq begins

In his 2002 State of the Union Address, then president George W. Bush used the phrase “axis of evil” for the first time, referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Later the same year, the Bush administration was successful in passing a second Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) through Congress, this time authorizing a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Bush administration officials presented the case for war against Iraq as a question of imminent threat to U.S. security interests, based on the assertion that Hussein’s government had “weapons of mass destruction” at its disposal. This assertion was later revealed to be blatantly false, but nevertheless, only one member of Congress, California democrat Barbara Lee, voted against this second AUMF.

On March 20, 2003, over the protest of vast swathes of the American public and the international community, a U.S. led military coalition invaded Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was euphemistically called, launched a decades long conflict that would leave the country mired in chaos after causing the deaths of upwards of 200,000 Iraqi civilians. Beyond its human cost, the flimsy legal rationale for the invasion of Iraq would become part of the blueprint for engaging in nation building and war without meaningful congressional approval that has characterized the approach of the U.S. military under the War on Terror.    

‍

ICE replaces INS under jurisdiction of new Department of Homeland Security

The post-9/11 reorientation of U.S. institutions across the board to reflect counter-terrorism priorities was dramatic and swift. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which then President Bush signed into law in November, was the largest reorganization of federal agencies since the Department of Defense was created in 1947. It established the Office of Homeland Security (OHS) dedicated to national security, an additional cabinet position, and a new regulatory agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assume umbrella jurisdiction over everything deemed necessary to the protection of national security interests, including immigration and customs, border control, cyber-security, the secret service, transportation, and even federal disaster relief management. Part of this regulatory overhaul was the closure of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the creation of a brand new agency that combined the investigation and enforcement functions of the INS with U.S. customs control to create Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

Saddam Hussein captured

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S.-led coalition forces on December 13, 2003, after being found huddled inside a hole in the ground less than 10 miles from his hometown of Tikrit. Photos of Hussein looking bedraggled and resigned were widely circulated and held up by the Bush administration as evidence of the declaration, made earlier that year after the Iraqi government was toppled, of “Mission Accomplished.” After a trial that was nominally for war crimes committed by his government against the Iraqi people in 1982, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging in 2006. His execution was captured on film and shared widely.

ID: Text reads: 2003. Department of Homeland Security opens new agency called Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) to replace Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Iraq War begins. Saddam Hussein captured. Images include the border wall erected at the border of the so-called U.S. and Mexico. Border patrol agents walk along the fence as two hands grasp each through the slats in the wall. The bodies of a man and child are lain in burial shrouds and atop the Iraqi flag with accompanying text: body count? Next to a faded sketch of Saddam Hussein, Bush speaks in a microphone while wearing a U.S. Army jacket. Accompanying text reads: “We got him.”

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2004 of the War on Terror timeline.

2004

5

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Rasul v. Bush

Rasul v. Bush was one of the first two Guantanamo cases to reach the Supreme Court, which were decided on the same day, June 28, 2004. A British citizen captured in Afghanistan, Shafik Rasul was the lead petitioner in a case brought on behalf of a group of Guantanamo prisoners. The central question was whether non-citizens being held outside of the territorial U.S. could access federal courts at all to challenge their detention. Overturning the lower court, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court held that because the United States exercised complete jurisdiction over Guantanamo, foreign nationals being held there did have a right to bring petitions for habeas review of the legality of their detention in federal court.  

‍

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld was one of the first two Guantanamo cases to reach the Supreme Court, which were decided on the same day, June 28, 2004. Yaser Esam Hamdi was a United States citizen who had been captured in Afghanistan. Accusing him of fighting for the Taliban, the Bush administration designated Hamdi an “enemy combatant,” and as such he was subject to indefinite detention without charge, without trial, and without access to an attorney. The question before the Supreme Court was whether his detention as an enemy combatant violated his constitutional rights to due process as a U.S. citizen. Rejecting the Bush administration’s argument that it had absolute authority to detain without charge, a majority of the Court found that U.S. citizens captured abroad did retain due process rights and that these had been violated in this particular case.

Hamdi, the Court ruled, had a constitutional right to be informed of the charges against him and to a fair process where he would have an opportunity to rebut the government’s designation. However, the opinion declined to specify, other than very broadly, what form this process should take, refusing, for example, to specifically apply the requirements contained in the Geneva Conventions. It also stressed the importance of the government’s interest in national security in determining the shape of what judicial processes and allowances might be acceptable. This language, in particular, has subsequently been relied upon by lower courts to justify expansions of the authority to detain without due process; for example, by justifying the use of hearsay evidence and automatic presumptions in favor government evidence.   

Rumsfeld v. Padilla

Similar to the facts in the earlier Hamdi case, Rumsfeld v. Padilla concerned a U.S. citizen who was subject to indefinite detention after being designated an enemy combatant. Jose Padilla was arrested at the Chicago O’hare airport in Illinois when he was returning from Pakistan. He was initially held because he was believed to be a material witness in a federal case involving al Qaeda. However, after he was identified by the FBI as a suspect himself in a material support for terrorism case, President Bush signed an order designating Padilla an enemy combatant and he was subsequently removed from the criminal justice system to military custody in South Carolina. In a habeas petition filed on his behalf, Padilla’s attorney argued that the AUMF did not give the government the authority to designate a U.S. citizen apprehended on U.S. soil an enemy combatant and detain them indefinitely without charge. Citing a technicality about jurisdiction based on where the habeas petition was filed, the Court declined to reach the merits of Padilla’s case. 

Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) established

In response to Supreme Court rulings earlier in the year imposing some limits on the authority of indefinite detention, the Bush administration established a system of Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) within the military. The CSRTs provided an extremely limited process through which Guantanamo detainees could challenge their status. One major hurdle faced by prisoners in the tribunals is that just by virtue of being held at Guantanamo they were de facto considered enemy combatants, so that they were always fighting the designation from a presumption of guilt. The term enemy combatant was also broadly and not particularly formally defined, making it very easy for the government to establish some sort of connection, however indirect, between detainees and al Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated forces.” 

In terms of due process, the CSRT system fell far short of providing the bare minimum guarantee of a meaningful opportunity for detainees to learn the facts of the case against them, much less to have it reviewed by a neutral decision maker. Tribunal proceedings were held in private, decisions were heavily redacted if they were released at all, and while detainees were technically allowed a personal representative, that person was not allowed to actually advocate on their behalf. Should a detainee challenge be successful, no provision was made for a process leading to eventual release. In essence, the CSRT process was designed to give the appearance of due process while continuing to bypass established legal processes such as habeas petitions that would have potentially disrupted the status quo at Guantanamo.       

U.S. bombs Pakistan

Beginning in 2004, the U.S. began to launch drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Northern Pakistan, once again expanding the reach of the military under the auspices of the War on Terror into countries with which the U.S. is not at war. In the years since, drone warfare in Pakistan has escalated steadily causing some to describe the U.S.’s involvement there as a covert war. To date, an estimated 56,661 Pakistanis have been killed, and more than 40% of those have been civilian deaths.  

Abu Ghraib Prison photos leaked
“Abu Ghraib is the fully predictable image of what a torture culture looks like. Abu Ghraib is not a few bad apples, it is the apple tree.” - David Luban

Five months after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government, in August 2003, the U.S. reopened the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. By the end of that year, an estimated 7,000 Iraqis had been detained and interrogated there, with about 90% of that number subsequently determined to have been mistakenly arrested and/or to have had no intelligence value. Similarly harsh “enhanced interrogation” techniques to the program of torture developed at Guantanamo Bay prison were routinely employed at Abu Ghraib, although modifications were made. According to government officials, these modifications accounted for the fact that the Abu Ghraib prison was located in an active theater of war and therefore the Geneva Conventions applied, but that assertion has proved contrary to fact. There is substantial evidence that some of the most notorious tactics employed at Abu Ghraib, such as the use of dogs in interrogations, were at least initially explicitly approved by Bush administration officials. 

In April, 2004 a soldier found graphic photos detailing prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and reported them to his superiors, launching an internal investigation. The photos were subsequently leaked to the press and sparked widespread outrage. Among the photos released were shocking images including one in which soldiers posed cheerfully with the body of a prisoner who had died during interrogation in an imitation of the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Additional images depicted guards subjecting inmates to a myriad of abuses, including forced nudity, simulated fellatio and rape, leashing prisoners, menacing them with dogs, and beating them with brooms. The internal investigation that followed the media storm in the wake of the leak of the images resulted in the Taguba report, which outlined in excruciating detail just how rampant and systemic such blatantly illegal abuse was at the facility. 

The sheer openness with which the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was carried out makes it extremely unlikely that it was unknown to superior officers in the military and Bush administration. This common sense observation is supported by internal documentation and evidence from before the incidents became public. Nonetheless, government officials insisted that what occurred was an isolated and exceptional incident, the result of “a few bad apples” that did not reflect the general practices or culture of the U.S. military or acknowledge that any normalization of torture had occurred to make Abu Ghraib inevitable. Eleven U.S. soldiers of common rank were eventually punished for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib; no ranking officials within the military or the Bush administration ever faced consequences. The notorious prison reverted to Iraqi control in 2006, and closed in 2014.    

ID: Text reads: 2004. Combatant Status Review Tribunals established: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Rasul v. Bush, Rumsfeld v. Padilla. United States bombs Pakistan. Abu Ghraib prison photos released. Images include orange-sleeved arms reaching out from behind prison bars, holding pieces of paper that read “Petition. We want our rights back!” and “I want my rights back!” A man wearing an orange jumpsuit is seated with hands that appear to be bound behind his back as a dog snarls close to the man as if the dog is about to attack the man. A map of Pakistan is superimposed by a drone plane and missile, alongside the notorious image of a Muslim man being tortured at Abu Ghraib, who is forced to balance atop a narrow box with a tattered sheet drapped over him and a hood over his head and face, as wires attached to his fingers and under his hood crisscross his body.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2005 of the War on Terror timeline.

2005

6

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Detainee Treatment Act signed into law

Following a 2004 report by the International Committee for the Red Cross that found substantial evidence of interrogation techniques “tantamount to torture” being used at Guantanamo Bay prison - and in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal - Congress introduced and eventually managed to pass bipartisan legislation seeking to standardize rules for interrogation and reign in abuse. President Bush signed the resulting Detainee Treatment Act into law on December 30, 2005. On its face, the Act banned the torture, broadly defined as “cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment,” of any prisoner in U.S. custody anywhere in the world, including Guantanamo. However, the new legislation was flawed to the point of meaninglessness. In addition to over broad language and lack of specificity when it came to actually setting definitions and guidelines, it contained massive loopholes that essentially re-affirmed the program of legalized torture ushered in after 9/11. 

Although it purported to ban torture at Guantanamo, two compromise provisions added in the course of Congress debating the Detainee Treatment Act effectively rendered enforcement of this ban impossible. For one thing, it exempted government officials from responsibility for any acts that they reasonably were unaware were unlawful. Most damning, however, was a provision in the final version of the bill that specifically prevented Guantanamo detainees from bringing habeas petitions in federal courts. Shutting off the ability of victims to have their day in court in this way effectively guaranteed that the Act’s prohibition of torture was a right Guantanamo prisoners would hold on paper only. Undermining the supposed intent of the Act even further, then President Bush including a signing statement when he passed it into law, reserving the right to not be bound by its provisions if necessary for national security. 

ID: Text reads: 2005. Detainee Treatment Act signed into law. “Prohibiting cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of any prisoner of the U.S. Government.” Images include a Muslim man wearing an orange jumpsuit wiht text superimposed on his back that reads “I’m still being tortured.” The man is shackled in chains on his wrists. A disembodied set of hands are bound in chains, and the chains dangle as if falling on the back of the Muslim man’s neck.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2006 of the War on Terror timeline.

2006

7

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

With its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court rejected the attempt by Congress to unilaterally deny habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees via the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and appeared to finally make the due process guarantees of the Geneva Conventions enforceable in federal court. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen captured in Afghanistan, was alleged to have been Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard. Hamdan was formally designated an enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal and subsequently tried by military commission and found guilty of material support for terrorism.

The Supreme Court determined that the military commission trial had violated his due process rights under international law as reflected in the Geneva Conventions and domestically according to standards laid out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice by denying him access to evidence and relevant parts of the trial proceedings. However, the Supreme Court’s ruling did not outright dismiss the process of trial by military commissions; rather it made the much more limited argument that because Congress had not acted explicitly to create a constitutionally acceptable process for trying Guantanamo detainees whatever system the military did use must comply with the due process requirements of existing regulations.      

1st Military Commissions Act signed into law

In a series of decisions centering on Guantanamo issued between 2004-2006, the Supreme Court defined the limits of the detention authority of the executive under the auspices of the War on Terror by requiring some form of due process. Rather than give up on the goal of a separate, extrajudicial system for terror suspects, however, the government responded by doubling down on the process of trial by military commission.

The Military Commissions Act (MCA) passed by Congress in 2006 granted explicit authority to the military to implement a special process of trial by tribunal. Procedurally, the 2006 MCA improved somewhat on the ad hoc tribunal system it replaced (most notably by providing an avenue for appeal) but it fell far short of ensuring even the most basic rights guarantees of the criminal justice system or parallel processes within the military, much less those enshrined in international law. Of particular concern, for example, was the fact that it did not ban evidence obtained through coercion. In addition, the MCA’s definitions were so broad that it provided essentially no meaningful limits on who could potentially be tried by military commission.

When Barack Obama took office, he attempted to cure some of the defects in the MCA to bring the process into line with later court cases. The updated 2009 MCA finally banned evidence obtained under coercion, for example. However, the Obama administration did not abandon the extrajudicial and inherently rights infringing system of trial by military commission.

Federal Bureau of Prisons opens 1st Communications Management Unit (CMU) in Terre Haute, IN

The innocuous sounding Communications Management Units, or CMUs, were the outcome of a secretive special detention program enacted by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (“Bureau”) in 2006 with no public notice. They are separate, self-contained units set up within existing detention facilities to isolate a portion of the prison population with suspected connections to terrorism in order to limit and monitor their communications. The first operational CMU is located on the site of the former death row of a medium security prison in Terre Haute, IN. The choice of a medium security facility reflects the fact that the prisoners were not considered to be particularly high security risks. Nevertheless, they are subject to an exceptionally heightened level of scrutiny and control. 

CMU prisoners are entirely isolated from the general prison population and they are subject to constant surveillance by guards and cameras. All interactions between prisoners on the special unit are recorded and sent to a counterterrorism team in West Virginia to be analyzed. Their contact with the outside world is also restricted to an extraordinary degree. The visitation policy at Terre Haute was four times more restrictive than even the Bureau’s highest security prisons - including the “Supermax” facility in Colorado where the most notorious convicted terrorists are held. In contrast to other prisoners, CMU inmates are not allowed any physical contact with visitors at all, not even a brief hug when saying goodbye. Despite this, the imprisoned men are subject to invasive strip searches before and after the visit. Visits are tightly monitored, of course, and initially were required to be conducted in English. Limits on phone calls are similarly draconian - initially the Terre Haute inmates were allowed only one 15 minute call per week, and, although that number has since been slightly increased, it is still far less than even half of the 300 phone minutes per month that is standard in the general population.

In addition to the lack of public notice, lists of detainees to be transferred to the newly created facilities in Terre Haute and a subsequent location in Marion, IL, which opened in 2008, were kept secret. It wasn’t until 2010, when the Bureau finally disclosed their existence to the public, that independent reports about the inmates’ identities began to emerge. Further muddying the waters, there were initially no written criteria at all for determining transfers, with decisions resting within the discretion of only a handful of people. The prisoners themselves were given no explanation for their transfers - and no process existed for them to challenge the designation. When the Bureau did eventually identify its supposed guidelines, they were so vague and over-broad that they could reasonably have been found to apply to nearly the entire general population.

The secrecy and lack of clarity was intended to conceal the clear discriminatory nature of the CMUs. Of the 17 original transfers to Terre Haute, 15 of the prisoners were Muslim. When the program was disclosed in 2010, more than 2/3 of the total population at both sites were Muslim men. For comparison, Muslims comprise only 6% of the general population. A significant minority of the early transfers were Black Muslims convicted of crimes completely unrelated to terrorism who had been determined to have been overly vocal about their beliefs after being “radicalized” while incarcerated. This overwhelming association with Islamophobia has led to the two initial CMUs being jointly nicknamed “Little Gitmo” or “Guantanamo North.”      

“9/11 Five” transferred to Guantanamo from CIA Black Sites abroad

After publicly acknowledging the existence of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, in 2006, then President Bush ordered the remaining detainees in CIA custody abroad be transferred to military custody at Guantanamo. This included the so-called “9/11 Five,” a group determined to have been among the primary architects of the September 11 attacks. The stories of these five men are chilling case studies in torture. The five men were captured in various raids by the U.S. and associated forces in 2002-2003 in Afghanistan and Pakistan and turned over to CIA custody. Although the details of where they were rendered and at what times differ, and in some cases are not known with precision, all five had similar experiences of being detained and brutally interrogated in a series of secret CIA black sites around the world, sometimes being moved for a period of time into the custody of another government that was known to torture and at other times to facilities operated directly by the CIA.

The most well-known of the five, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was considered to be the primary mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times while in CIA custody. The torture that Ramzi bin Al-Shibh, a Yemeni man who was also considered one of the primary coordinators of 9/11, was subjected to is perhaps the most well-documented. While he was in custody in Morocco, Al-Shibh was subjected to torture technically conducted by Moroccan authorities, but observed by CIA operatives, who recorded portions of the interrogation sessions. From Morocco, he was rendered to several additional sites, including a CIA facility in Poland that was the subject of an independent investigation by the Council of Europe’s Commission for Human Rights, who reported that while in custody there Al-Shibh had endured near constant interrogation that included beatings, sleep deprivation, withholding of food, cramped confinement and waterboarding, as well as psychological torture such as white noise and sensory deprivation. This interrogation plan for Al-Shibh in Poland was later confirmed by CIA records in the course of the investigation that culminated in the 2014 “Torture Report” in the U.S. Senate. Attesting to the extreme secrecy of the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program, not much at all is known about the whereabouts of another of the five, Ammar al Baluchi, who was held in Afghanistan with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for several months in 2002 and then rendered several times to unknown locations where he also was brutally tortured for three years. Since being transferred in 2006, the 9/11 Five have been at Guantanamo, where they are still awaiting trial.

ID: Text reads: 2006. Military Commissions Act signed into law. Little Gitmo. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. First Communications Management Unit opens in Terre Haute, Indiana. Images include Bush signing a document with a caption that reads “protecting America”, prison guards leading a Muslim man away, a Muslim man wearing an orange jumpsuit and a kufi with body language that conveys despair, a young Muslim child pointing and looking out of frame, and a prison-type phone with a disconnected cord next to his arm. Text reads, “Abu, I miss you.”

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2007 of the War on Terror timeline.

2007

8

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

NYPD Radicalization study released

In 2007, the New York Police Department NYPD released an internal study on “radicalization” in American communities that helped institutionalize harmful War on Terror stereotypes about Muslims and set the stage for future initiatives linking anti-terrorism and policing. The NYPD study purported to find a predictive link between ideology and terrorism. Further, it claimed to be able to identify an individual's susceptibility to extremist ideologies, and therefore isolate potential threats to national security.

The study, which was similar to one produced by the FBI the previous year, was problematic for several reasons. For one, it relied on debunked social science to claim that outward expressions of religiosity - beard length, for example - could be used to determine an individual’s political ideological orientation. In addition, the foundation claim, that ideology is a reliable predictor of propensity toward violence, itself is completely unsupported by empirical evidence. Finally, its gloss of scientific language could not conceal that the behavioral and appearance-based identifiers the NYPD study relied on applied almost exclusively to Arab and Muslim Americans. Radicalization theories like the one advanced in the NYPD study paved the way for  justifying later law enforcement programs like Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) that allowed for the widespread surveillance and targeting of Muslim communities.        

Bush announces creation of AFRICOM

The creation of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007 allowed for an exponential expansion of the U.S.’s military influence in the name of the War on Terror, without necessitating declarations of hostilities that would trigger accountability mechanisms from the international community or Congress. The AFRICOM program, which became operational in 2008, was pitched as a “light footprint,” flexible and collaborative approach to fighting terrorism, and thereby protecting U.S. national security interests, on the African continent.

To take just a few examples, AFRICOM was involved in the 2011 military intervention in Libya, carried out by NATO with extensive participation from the U.S., ostensibly for humanitarian reasons but with an eye toward regime change - Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was one of the most vociferous early opponents of AFRICOM. It has also facilitated the escalation of the U.S. military campaign in Somalia that has had such a devastating effect on that country. The involvement of American forces in African conflicts varies, with some heavily invested operations, such as Somalia, and other cases where the U.S. provides training and support to local forces, many of which have a history and association with human rights abuses. AFRICOM currently operates 29 bases in 15 countries or territories in Africa, and has at least some military presence in 53 out of the 54 countries on the continent. In addition, the number of U.S. military personnel present on the African continent has increased 170 percent since AFRICOM was created.       

ID: Text reads: 2007. NYPD radicalization study released: pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, jihadization. Bush announces creation of AFRICOM. Images include a map of the African continent, superimposed by a giant drone plane and surrounded by silhouetted soldiers carrying large guns.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2008 of the War on Terror timeline.

2008 A

9

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP) begins

In 2008, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) quietly began targeting qualified Muslim applicants for immigration benefits, including naturalization under the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP). The goal of CARRP was to ensure that immigration benefits were not granted to individuals who posed a threat to national security. Unsurprisingly, applicants from Muslim majority countries have been singled out for special consideration under the language of CARRP. In addition, the process the USCIS uses to determine individuals subject to CARRP restriction is highly problematic.

For one thing, it is conducted largely in secret, with applicants who are generally unaware of the program at all left with no explanation for unexpected delays and denials. Adding another layer of lack of accountability the program relies on the government’s sprawling and notorious Terror Watchlist that was created in 2003 to cross-check applicants. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of CARRP, however, is that it cedes large portions of the USCIS’s regulatory authority to law enforcement, particularly the FBI. CARRP not only requires immigration officials to share broadly defined relevant national security information about applicants with enforcement agencies, it gives the FBI the ability to make final decisions on whether to accept, deny, or hold naturalization applications. CARRP is a prime example of the way in which immigration enforcement has been indelibly linked to the priorities of anti-terrorism and immigration by Muslims and individuals perceived as Muslim. According to an ACLU lawsuit, an estimated 42,000 individuals have experienced delays or denials after being targeted under CARRP.          

2nd CMU opens in Marion, IL

In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Prisons opened a second Communications Management Unit, or CMU, in Marion, IL. Like the one IN, the Marion facility was opened without public notice. CMU prisoners are entirely isolated from the general prison population and they are subject to constant surveillance by guards and cameras. All interactions between prisoners on the special unit are recorded and sent to a counterterrorism team in West Virginia to be analyzed. Their contact with the outside world is also restricted to an extraordinary degree, with visitation policies many times more restrictive than even the highest security, “Supermax” prisons.

In contrast prisoners in the general population, CMU inmates are not allowed any physical contact with visitors at all, not even a brief hug when saying goodbye, despite being subject to invasive strip searches before and after. Visits are tightly monitored, of course, and initially were required to be conducted in English. Reflecting the aim of the CMU’s, which is to restrict and monitor communication, limits on phone calls are similarly draconian - initially inmates were allowed only one 15 minute call per week, subsequently increased to two 15 minute calls, subject to the ability of officials to impose a monthly limit - far less than even half of the 300 phone minutes per month that is standard in the general population.

In addition to the lack of public notice, lists of detainees to be transferred to the CMUs were kept secret. It wasn’t until 2010, when the Bureau finally disclosed their existence to the public, that independent reports about the inmates’ identities began to emerge. Further muddying the waters, there were initially no written criteria at all for determining transfers, with decisions resting within the discretion of only a handful of people. The prisoners themselves were given no explanation for their transfers - and no process existed for them to challenge the designation. When the Bureau did eventually identify its supposed guidelines, they were so vague and over-broad that they could reasonably have been found to apply to nearly the entire general population. The secrecy and lack of clarity was intended to conceal the clear discriminatory nature of the CMUs.

When the program was disclosed in 2010, more than 2/3 of the total population at both sites were Muslim men. For comparison, Muslims comprise only 6% of the general population. Belying the Bureau’s assertion that the men were dangerous terrorists, a significant minority of the early transfers were Black Muslims convicted of unrelated crimes that had been determined to have been overly vocal after being “radicalized” while incarcerated. With the opening of the Marion facility an apparently conscious effort was made to include non-Muslim “balancers” to combat the appearance that Muslims were being targeted. One former inmate, animal-rights activist Andrew Stepanian, recalls guards apologizing while telling him that he was only at Marion for this purpose. The overwhelming association with Islamophobia has led to the two initial CMUs being jointly nicknamed “Little Gitmo” or “Guantanamo North.”

Fort Dix Five convicted in entrapment case

The case of the “Fort Dix Five” is a prime example of the impact of profiling and widespread surveillance of Muslims, as well as the shameless use of informants to manufacture federal terrorism cases post-9/11. Four of the men - three brothers and a family friend - who would eventually be charged and convicted with conspiracy to attack the military facility at Fort Dix in New Jersey came to the attention of the FBI after a Circuit City employee found a video they had brought to the store to have converted to DVD suspicious and reported it to the police. The resulting FBI surveillance operation lasted more than a year and involved two paid informants, both of whom had criminal records and financial incentive to obtain a conviction at all costs. One FBI informant targeted the friend, Mohammed Shnewer, who was nineteen at the time, befriending him and then using his beliefs about injustices faced by Muslims to manipulate him into taking a violent position against the United States, for example by watching jihadist videos and encouraging angry reactions. When the young man showed no inclination to engage in violent action, the encouragement became more more insistent and concrete. It was the informant who eventually suggested Fort Dix as a target and convinced Shnewer to go on mission to surveil it. It was at this point that the fifth man, Serdar Tatar, got swept up into the FBI operation. Tatar’s father owned a pizza business that delivered to the base, and so, at the advice of his informant friend, Shnewer approached him for a road map of the area. An especial irony of the manufactured case against these men is that Tatar actually found the request to be suspicious and reported it himself to authorities. After the initial trip, the informant was unable to convince Shnewer to take any further surveillance missions or otherwise plan for an attack, or to engage in any related criminal behavior such as bomb-making. 

At the same time this was going on a second FBI informant was getting close to the three brothers - Dritan, Shain, and Eljvir Duka - and using long, secretly recorded conversations about religion to push them toward violence. Despite them being named in the conspiracy, there is no evidence that the Duka brothers even knew about the supposed plot to blow up Fort Dix. The brothers were eventually arrested for purchasing illegal firearms. The list of guns was given to them by the informant. At trial, despite hundreds of hours of recorded conversation, discussion surrounding crucial moments in the gun deal was missing, and no evidence was given to connect the purchase to a plot against Fort Dix. 

Even with the strenuous efforts of the two informants, the evidence the government was able to obtain linking the Fort Dix Five to even a blatantly manufactured terrorist plot was tenuous at best. Nevertheless, the court denied their entrapment defense and all five men were convicted of conspiracy to harm military personnel and sentenced to prison in December, 2008. Serdar Tatar, who provided the map, received the lightest sentence, of 36 years. All four of the men who were subject to the FBI’s entrapment were sentenced to life in prison and Dritan and Shain Duka received enhanced sentences of an additional 30 years due to the weapons charges. The Duka brothers and Mohammed Shnewer are currently serving their sentences in maximum security prisons designed to house the worst threats to national security. All attempts to appeal the 2008 decision have been denied.    

ID: Text reads: 2008. Fort Dix Five convicted in entrapment case. Boumediene v. Bush. Second Communications Management Unit opens in Marion, Illinois. Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program. Images include Mohamad Shnewer and Shain Duka persecuted in the Fort Dix Five case, surrounded by shadowy figures, and the Statue of Liberty holding a red stop sign instead of a torch that is superimposed with text that reads “denied.”

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2008 of the War on Terror timeline.

2008 B

10

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Boumediene v. Bush

Decided in 2008, Boumediene v. Bush was the last Guantanamo case to reach the Supreme Court. Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian native who was seized in Bosnia in 2002 at the behest of U.S. intelligence was designated an enemy combatant and transferred to military custody at Guantanamo. Subsequently, he filed a habeas corpus petition citing due process violations under U.S. and international law. By 2008, his case had been through several iterations, impacted by the constantly shifting landscape of Guantanamo jurisprudence as Congress, the Bush administration, and the military reacted to decisions by shifting processes and arguments.

The central question in this case concerned a provision of the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA) that prohibited habeas petitions in detention cases. Instead, the MCA substituted the procedural requirements outlined in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which also contained a provision specifically barring Guantanamo detainees from filing habeas petitions in federal court. The court in Boumediene rejected this framework as an unconstitutional violation of due process rights, regardless of citizenship status or being held at Guantanamo as an enemy combatant. Specifically, the court found that the MCA’s prohibition was an unconstitutional suspension of the right to habeas corpus because the procedures contained in the DTA did not adequately protect detainees’ due process rights. In evaluating the DTA process, the court also finally ruled that Guantanamo detainees were entitled to the rights provisions of the Geneva Conventions. 

On its face, the ruling in Boumediene was a victory. In practice, however, it has meant very little for the men in indefinite detention at Guantanamo. While the decision guaranteed limited access to federal courts for mounting challenges to process, as long as the separate system of trial by military commissions system remains in place the detainees will not truly get their day in court.              ‍

Secure Communities program initiated

Implemented by the Bush administration in 2008, the federal Secure Communities Program was designed to link federal immigration and local law enforcement. In jurisdictions where Secure Communities was in place, law enforcement was required to share data, such as fingerprints, with not only the FBI but also Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would sync the information with DHS databases, checking in the process for immigration violations. ICE agents were then empowered to make detainer arrests of up to 48 hours and initiate deportation hearings. Nominally justified as keeping non-citizen criminals off U.S. streets, the Secure Communities program in reality gave ICE free rein to target non-citizens who had never been convicted of a crime. Critics of the program have also noted that it actually hinders efforts to truly make Americans safer, as it sets local law enforcement at odds with the communities and potentially has a chilling effect on reporting crime. In addition to these issues, the data sharing function of Secure Communities has been used to further build the War on Terror surveillance infrastructure relied on by other federal programs that criminalize and target Muslims and those perceived as Muslim.

ID: Text reads: 2008. Boumediene v. Bush. “Petitioners have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus. They are not barred from seeking the writ or invoking the Suspension Clause’s protections because they have been designated as enemy combatants or because of their presence at Guantanamo.” Supreme Court of the United States. Syllabus. Boumediene el at. V. Bush, President of the United States, et al. Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. No. 06-1195. Argued December 5, 2007–Decided June 12, 2008*. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Secure Communities piloted by Bush. Images include Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian Bosnian Muslim man, wearning an orange jumpsuit and while prying the bars of a jail open with the text Guantanamo stamped above him; a photograph of an ICE building superimposed with gradients and a large blue handprint; and a graphic of an older Muslim man holding his phone while leaning on his car as he is searched from behind by law enforcement.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2009 of the War on Terror timeline.

2009 A

11

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

“Holy Land Five” sentenced

The Holy Land Five federal case is paradigmatic of how broadly the government has interpreted the doctrine of material support for terrorism - and how much leeway courts have given this approach in the name of national security. The Holy Land Foundation was a charitable organization formed in the 1980’s to support Palestinians and other war victims and refugees. The so-called Holy Land Five were accused of using this organization as a front to funnel funds to Hamas. The basis of this charge was the government’s claim that by utilizing zakat committees (a group of charities in the West Bank and Gaza whose network, ironically, was also used by USAID) to distribute monetary and other aid, the Holy Land Foundation was essentially freeing up the resources of Hamas, which also had a charitable arm, for terrorist activities. On this tenuous connection rested the claim that the Foundation and its five leaders charged in the case had provided material support for terrorism.

No direct connection was ever established between the Holy Land Foundation or the particular zakat committees they relied on, and Hamas. Going even further, the government argued that by engaging in these charitable activities the reputation of Hamas in the region was enhanced, which also amounted to material support. In a ruling that essentially criminalized all charitable activity in the West Bank and Gaza, the court sided with the government. The Holy Land Foundation and its five leaders individually were convicted of providing material support to Hamas in 2008, and in 2009 the five men received sentences ranging from fifteen to sixty-five years in federal prison.       

Drone strikes in Yemen resume under Obama

While the Bush administration did not launch any further drone strikes in Yemen after the first, in 2002, incursions into that country resumed and swiftly escalated after Obama took office. Early drone strikes were carried out under the Obama administration program of targeted killings of terror suspects, which was initially kept secret but acknowledged in 2010.

Independent reports of the casualties associated with 6 targeted killings by drone in Yemen - the initial one in 2009 and the others from 2012-2013 - place the number of resulting deaths at 82, with at least 57 of them civilians. In addition to targeted killings, the United States became increasingly involved in warfare in after the ruling government was overthrown during the Arab Spring of 2011. In keeping with the trend established by President Obama, U.S. involvement in Yemen has been overwhelmingly through airstrikes with very little engagement of ground troops. After 2011, drone strikes in Yemen increased steadily during the Obama administration and continued to do so under Trump. Despite frequent claims that it is less destructive than other forms of warfare, the humanitarian impact of the U.S.’s drone attacks on Yemeni citizens has been catastrophic.

ID: Text reads: 2009. Holy Land Five sentenced to 15–65 years in prison. Drone strikes in Yemen resume under Obama. Images include the HLF 5 Arab Muslim men, Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Mohammad El-Mezain and Abdulrahman Odeh sitting in a court room with tape over their mouths. Behind them Muslims protest their persecution, holding signs that read “I need my dad back”, “faith over fear!”, “free the Holy Land Five!”, “Charity is not a crime”, “justice.” Images also include a map of Yemen superimposed with a drone plane and over a dozen missiles hurtling through the air.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2009 of the War on Terror timeline.

2009 B

12

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Government admits to torturing Mohammed al Qahtani

During 2002-2003, Guantanamo detainee Mohammed al Qahtani was routinely subjected to horrific abuse under the the CIA’s “First Special Interrogation Plan,” a systematic program of torture designed with input from privately contracted psychiatrists and overseen by the White House - the plan was personally approved by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Under the implementation of this “aggressive interrogation” program, al Qahtani, who had a known history of severe mental illness, endured beatings, prolonged sleep deprivation combined with systematic 20 hour long interrogations, religious and sexual humiliation and threats against his family, among other things. His torture was well documented in internal interrogation logs, one of which was leaked in 2006 and published in TIME magazine, making the public aware of the abuses for the first time. In May of 2008 all military commission charges against al Qahtani were dropped - he had not made a single statement implicating himself while not under torture or threat of torture - in January, 2009 military commission official Susan Crawford admitted in federal court that the government’s treatment of al Qahtani amounted to torture. To this day, his case is the sole instance of a senior United States official admitting to having tortured an individual.

ID: Text reads: 2009. Government admits to torturing Mohammed al-Qahtani. “We tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani.” “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case.” -Susan J. Crawford, Named Convening Authority of Military Commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. Images include graphics of flags and empty tables with microphones from the Military Commissions; Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi Muslim man, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with his hands handcuffed behind his back as he looks over his shoulder; and an American military prison guard who is holding al-Qahtani by his arm.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2010 of the War on Terror timeline.

2010

13

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project

The ruling in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project is paradigmatic of the incredibly broad way in which the doctrine of “material support for terrorism” has been interpreted in the post-9/11 legal landscape. The case involved a provision in the PATRIOT Act that expanded the statutory definition of material support for terrorism to include “expert advice or assistance” given to groups designated as terrorist organizations. The Humanitarian Law Project was prevented under this statute from its efforts seeking to help the Kurdistan Worker’s Party in Turkey and a separatist group in Sri Lanka, both designated as terrorist organizations by the United States, with finding a path toward peaceful conflict resolution, an injunction which was upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Affirming the legality of the PATRIOT Act against the first major challenge to one of its provisions, the Court found that Congress intended to prevent aid of any sort to terrorist groups, even when it was intended to promote peace or facilitate alternatives to violence. The decision was widely criticized by human rights groups for affirming the PATRIOT Act’s vague and over broad definition even in a case where the defendant was so clearly not aiding in activities related to terrorism. In addition, the Court found that the government’s action was justified even though the Humanitarian Law Project was engaging in protected speech under the First Amendment, applying a more lenient test for weighing the government’s interest than had been used in free speech jurisprudence since the 1940’s. The ruling in Holder v. Humanitarian effectively gave the executive the green light to target human rights groups as criminals and terrorists.     

Disposition Matrix (“Kill List”)

During the Obama administration, the focus of the military War on Terror shifted heavily in favor of drone warfare. Partly in order to distance himself from the legacy of endless war associated with his predecessor, Obama emphasized the importance of withdrawing troops on the ground while simultaneously escalating the number and territorial reach of U.S. airstrikes. The way in which he promoted reliance on drones as a positive development was also part and parcel of the skilled way in which Obama re-positioned the War on Terror rhetorically, replacing bombastic Bush-era terminology with euphemistic language designed to signal a desire to move past the abuses of the past.

One particularly chilling euphemism to emerge was the “disposition matrix.” The disposition matrix was a database that was used to identify targets for drone killings. In theory, it was a sophisticated and adaptable system that minimized the potential for collateral damage. In practice, it was an old-fashioned kill list. During his first term, Obama met with military and administration officials on so-called “Terror Tuesdays” to go over disposition matrix data and determine the week’s roster of targeted killings. The grid at the heart of disposition matrix incorporated existing kill lists from military special forces and the CIA and was continually updated based on new intelligence; one of the primary criticisms - outside of the questionable legitimacy in general of extrajudicial assassination - was that there was little to no transparency regarding the process for an individual’s inclusion on the list, and some identified targets appeared to be largely random. 

What was particularly troubling about Obama's drone warfare was the determination that all military-age males were considered combatants. In the event that the identities of those killed were unknown, they were deemed enemy combatants nonetheless - effectively making them guilty until proven innocent - posthumously.‍

Obama administration creates Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program

Philosophically, the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program is a child of the pervasive War on Terror narrative that sees violence, and terrorism in particular, as the inevitable result of irrational rage being endemic somehow in Muslim society, directed against the United States by an ideology of extremism that fundamentally opposes civilization. Instead of being used as a justification for war, here this narrative underlies the creation of a vast system of domestic surveillance aimed at Muslim-American communities. Although it was presented neutrally as a broad national strategy for preventing violent extremism in American communities, CVE was transparently designed to target Muslims. This is apparent from even a cursory examination of the language surrounding its rollout, which focused heavily on the responsibility Muslim-Americans had to denounce terrorism and identified young, Muslim men as particularly at risk for radicalization. The association is also supported by the fact that it was introduced first in cities, such as Minneapolis, that had large Muslim populations but were not particularly associated with violent crime. And, crucially, it is confirmed by data - the targets of CVE have been overwhelmingly Muslim, despite the fact that white supremacist violence is by far the most prevalent domestic threat. Making the connection even more explicit, upon taking office, Trump suggested renaming the program “Countering Radical Islam” to reflect its true focus. 

The stated aim of the CVE program was to recruit community members, such as teachers, social workers, and religious leaders, to assist the government in identifying individuals “at-risk” of radicalization. The criteria it uses in making these identifications, such as perceived religiosity, have been widely debunked as pseudo-scientific and susceptible to the intrusion of bias. In practice, it has been used by the FBI to infiltrate mosques and other private community spaces, either coopting them as a platform for Islamophobic messaging or in order to single out individuals for surveillance regardless of wrongdoing, and recruit informants.‍

ID: Text reads: 2010. Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Free speech = material support for terrorism. Obama Administration creates Countering Violent Extremism program (CVE). أجهز على قائمة Disposition matrix created (kill list). Images include a white Muslim American man holding a camera, a silouhette of a person holding a large gun, and a stack of bills with text “material support” written on it.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2011 of the War on Terror timeline.

2011

14

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Osama bin Laden is killed

In a late night address on May 2, 2011 then President Obama announced that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed by NAVY Seals in a raid in Pakistan. The language in Obama’s speech about the extrajudicial killing was celebratory, sobering only when it touched on the American deaths caused by the 9/11 attacks for which bin Laden was responsible.

No acknowledgment was made of the deaths of Muslims around the world caused by 10 years of the U.S. War on Terror that was launched in the wake of those attacks. If the military response post-9/11 was necessary in order to rein in al Qaeda, bin Laden’s death may have been seen as a kind of victory in war, but when it finally happened it appeared as merely a kind of footnote to the violence the U.S. had used him to justify.

Extrajudicial killings of Anwar al Alwaki (and his son later killed in drone strike)

During the Obama administration, targeted killings carried out by drone strike became a key feature of the War on Terror. Once a target was identified as a sufficient threat they were put on a kill list and the military or the CIA would be tasked with finding them and launching drones to take them out wherever they happened to be, a process that allowed the U.S. to make frequent attacks in countries outside of the war zones.

On September 30, 2011, Obama announced a drone strike in Yemen had been successful in killing a man who had been identified as a target earlier that year. That target was Anwar al-Awlaki, and he was an American citizen. The administration justified and even celebrated al-Awlaki’s killing by claiming he was an active member of al Qaeda forces that was directly responsible for many Yemeni deaths. Whether it was true that he was an active al Qaeda operative, or indeed had ever been involved with the group, is a matter of debate, but one thing is clear - there was no due process given to him by his government when it determined his guilt and sentenced him to die.

In 2014, the Obama administration produced a white paper providing retroactive legal justification for the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. The paper argued that citizens outside of the U.S. could legitimately be killed by drone strike without due process if capture was not feasible and they posed an imminent threat to national security. Since inclusion on War on Terror kill lists precluded any attempt at capture, this argument was fairly disingenuous, in addition to the many problematic elements involved in creating those lists. It is worth noting, as well, that the Obama administration only saw the need to provide legal justification for cases where American citizens were themselves the target of drone strikes. U.S. citizens killed incidentally, such as Samir Khan, who died in the same 2011 strike as al-Awlaki were presumed to be legitimate. 

Making his story all the more emblematic of the destruction caused by the U.S. drone war, Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16 year old son, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in another drone strike just two weeks later. Asked to comment on his death, a White House press correspondent  responded chillingly that it was only to be expected with a terrorist for a father.

In 2017, al-Awlaki’s 8 year old daughter, also a U.S. citizen, was also killed by U.S. forces, in a raid just days into the incoming Trump administration.  

Peter King radicalization hearings

In March, 2011, NY Republican Peter King, who chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security at the time, announced a series of congressional hearings investigating radicalization within Muslim communities, including what he suggested was a widespread failure by Muslim Americans to address this problem. King’s Islamophobia was well known; he was the representative against the proposal to build a Muslim community center near ground zero in New York. Although there was substantial public outcry around the hearings, King also had real influence and he garnered support for his claims about the collective responsibility of Muslim-American communities to address the supposed scourge of radicalization from both sides of the aisle. Ten years into the War on Terror, rhetoric around radicalization as a path to terrorism that assumed an inherent link to Islam and Muslims was a well-worn groove.

NATO military intervention in Libya

In March 2011, in response to the civil war in Libya, the US coordinated strikes with other UN countries. Days after these initial strikes, NATO began a military campaign in Libya, ostensibly to prevent civilian deaths. The NATO alliance’s stated goal was a limited intervention to insure the terms of two UN Security Council Resolutions, including sanctions on supporters of Muammar Gaddafi and enforcement of a no-fly zone. The NATO campaign ended in October, 2011, following Gaddafi’s death, leading some to conclude that humanitarian concerns were second to regime change in motivating the intervention.

A Human Rights Watch report the following year detailing the high cost in terms of civilian casualties, including in strikes where no apparent military target was present at all, in violation of international law. In the U.S., the Libyan conflict became the center of controversy after Congress voted against a resolution to authorize the continued involvement of American military forces. Then president Obama continued to commit militarily in the country despite the lack of Congressional approval, prompting rare (and highly partisan) criticism of the scope of the war powers claimed by the executive under the War on Terror’s mandate.

U.S. begins drone strikes in Somalia

In addition to Pakistan and Yemen, Somalia is one of the primary countries with which the U.S. is not technically at war that has been targeted militarily throughout the War on Terror. President Obama authorized the first military drone strikes in Somalia in June, 2011, against individuals believed to be connected to recent al Qaeda activity in Yemen. During Obama’s second term the number of strikes increased steadily as the air campaign against al-Shabaab, a militant group with ties to al Qaeda which controlled large parts of southern Somalia, escalated. Consistent with the Obama administration’s focus on drone warfare, this coincided with a reduction of group troops and operations in the area.

Under Obama, drone strikes were technically carried out under the “high value target” program that targeted individuals who had been designated a threat to U.S. security interests. In 2017, however, Trump made changes to U.S. drone policy that included designating Somalia an “Area of Active Hostilities” (despite the lack of any formal declaration of war), paving the way for a dramatic expansion of lethal drone operations, as they were now considered to be, de facto, in the course of active combat and were no longer constrained by even the modest limit of having pre-determined targets. In addition to ramping up the air war against al-Shabaab, Trump also expanded the list of groups to be targeted within Somalia, launching the first drone strikes against ISIS targets in November, 2017.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated at least 538 people were killed in drone strikes in Somalia during 2017, ten times the number killed in all previous year combined, and attacks continued to escalate in the following years. Following the release of a 2019 report by Amnesty International that detailed the devastation caused by the drone war in Somalia, U.S. government officials issued a statement acknowledging the deaths of 14 civilians in a series of strikes the year before; prior to this, the Department of Defense had consistently reported zero civilian casualties in Somalia. Airstrikes in Somalia have continued in 2021 under President Biden.

NDAA authorizes indefinite detention

After threatening to veto earlier versions, then President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual piece of legislation that sets the budget and priorities of the Department of Defense, into law on December 31, 2011. In language echoing the broad mandate of the 2001 AUMF, the 2011 NDAA authorized the indefinite detention in military custody of members of al Qaeda, Taliban, or associated forces, as well as individuals supporting those or other designated terrorist organizations. Obama included a signing statement on the legislation pledging not to interpret its language broadly as giving the type of authority to detain claimed by the Bush administration in the early days of the War on Terror, but of course such signing statements are not binding and are frequently disregarded by subsequent administrations.

In 2012, a district court issued an injunction against the indefinite detention provision of the NDAA, finding it an unconstitutional expansion of executive authority, but this was overturned by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals the following year. In 2014, the Supreme Court declined to review the case on appeal, effectively leaving the NDAA’s grant of detention authority intact.

In addition to the grant of indefinite detention authority, the 2011 NDAA also contained provisions making it more difficult to transfer prisoners out of military custody, including by explicitly blocking transfers of Guantanamo detainees even after they had been cleared for release. These provisions were included in a deliberate effort to prevent the Obama from closing Guantanamo, and they have largely been effective. Restrictions on the ability to transfer detainees continue to stymie efforts to close the facility. 

ID: Text reads: 2011. The US begins carrying out drone strikes in Somalia. Drone strike kills Anwar Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son. “He should have had a more responsible father.” -Obama’s former press secretary. NATO military intervention in Libya. Osama bin Laden is killed. National Defense Authorization Act authorizes indefinite detention: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060… Obama Administration creates Countering Violent Extremism program (CVE). Images include a sketch of 14-year-old Sudanese Muslim American boy Ahmed Mohamed, a large drone plane, maps of Somalia and Syria, barbed wire, a Muslim imprisoned in a small cage while prostrated in Ṣalāh, and Osama bin Laden with x’s over his eyes. In the background of the image a city is engulfed in smoke and men standing together amidst rubble.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2012 of the War on Terror timeline.

2012

15

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Tarek Mehanna sentencing

Tarek Mehanna is a pharmacist who was born, lived and worked in the United States. A devout Muslim and outspoken critic us U.S. foreign policy, Mehanna came under the scrutiny of the FBI after a 2004 trip to Yemen, which he said was for religious and language training, and the government later characterized as related to terrorist activity, and was surveilled for the next several years.

In 2008 he was charged with providing false information about the Yemen trip to the FBI and with material support for terrorism in 2009. Mehanna believes that his eventual arrest was a result of his refusing to become an informant for the FBI. The government’s case against Mehanna hinged mainly on its characterization of his activities in Yemen, where he was involved with translating a jihadist text. According to the FBI, this translation was done at the behest of al Qaeda, but no evidence was presented that proved this or otherwise connected Mehanna to the terrorist group. At his trial, the government argued that this translation constituted material support for terrorism. To support this claim, they cited numerous instances of Mehanna’s continuing to speak out upon his return in support of opinions they considered to be aligned with the goals of al Qaeda, though again no evidence of an actual connection to the group was proffered. Mehanna was convicted of conspiracy and material support for terrorism in 2011 in a decision that was condemned by rights groups as a criminal prosecution of unpopular ideas that would have a chilling effect on free speech. 

In his 2012 sentencing hearing, Mehanna delivered a powerful statement reiterating his belief that the state violence perpetrated against Muslims by the United States must be loudly condemned, and contrasting the government’s characterization of him as obsessed by violence when all he had done was speak with its own actions. Mehanna was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison.

ID: Text reads: United States District Court. United States of America, Plaintiff, vs. Mehanna, Defendant. Case No. CR 18-398 NBLW. Indictment 18 U.S.C. § 1958. The Grand Jury charges: Count One. Use of Interstate Commerce Facilities in Commission of Murder-for-Hire 18 U.S.C. § 1958. On April 12, 2012, the defendant, Tarek Mehanna, did knowingly and intentionally conspire to provide material support to al Qaeda, with conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and conspiracy to make false statements to the FBI. Indictment-1. “This trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from foreign invaders Soviets, Americans, or Martians. This is what I believe. It’s what I’ve always believed, and what I will always believe. This is not terrorism, and it’s not extremism. It’s what the arrows on that seal above your head represent: defense of the homeland. So, I disagree with my layers when they say that you don’t have to agree with my beliefs - no. Anyone with common sense and humanity has no choice but to agree with me. If someone breaks into your home to rob you and harm your family, logic dictates that you do whatever it takes to expel that invader from your home. But when that home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the U.S. military, for some reason the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed terrorism adn the people defending themselves against those who come to kill them from across the ocean become the terrorists who are killing Americans...The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with killing Americans. But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.” Images include a photo of Egyptian American Tarek Mehanna, and graphics of a target, Mehanna speaking at a podium while wearing a kufi and orange jumpsuit, and an FBI agent wearing a suit with FBI written on the back who’s back faces us as he holds a gun behind his back.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2013 of the War on Terror timeline.

2013

16

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Hunger strike at Guantanamo

Over the course of its operation, there have been several hunger strikes by detainees at Guantanamo Bay Prison protesting their conditions and treatment. That this extreme method of protest is often the only real means prisoners have of exercising control over their own bodies sends a powerful message about the violence and hopelessness of Guantanamo. As such, it poses a threat to the violent government apparatus that creates and maintains the situation these men are in, and as a result hunger strikers have been met with vicious resistance from their jailers.

In addition to tactics such as locking protesters in solitary confinement, authorities at Guantanamo utilize brutal methods force feeding in order to prevent hunger strikers from dying of starvation. These are so invasive and physically painful that they are considered to be torture in and of themselves under international law, and they frequently cause physical damage that can be permanent. The issue of force feeding at Guantanamo came to the forefront after an ongoing wave of hunger strikes in 2013 garnered attention from press. The government has consistently characterized force feeding as a form of suicide prevention motivated by care for the prisoners. Revelations about the brutality of the procedure - yet another form of torture suffered by the Guantanamo inmates - pointed to the rank hypocrisy of this claim. The attention that was paid to the 2013 hunger strikers and their protest caused then President Obama to reopen the task force on closing Guantanamo and publicly commit to making ending the facility a priority of his second term and some steps toward that goal were taken, such as the approval of transfers for several detainees to Yemen.

References

www.usnews.com

www.theatlantic.com

Obama administration creates PPG for drone strikes

In May 2013, as part of his rhetorical campaign to shift public perceptions about the global War on Terror, then president Obama released a single page fact sheet announcing the transfer of authority for the U.S. drone warfare from the CIA to the Pentagon and outlining a set of Presidential Policies and Guidelines (PPG) for drone strikes. The full document was not declassified until 2016. This internal policy purported to limit the negative impacts of drone warfare, including by providing measures to prevent civilian casualties, but it was substantially flawed.

The PPG outlined a process that required a determination of the clear presence of enemy targets, posing an imminent threat to U.S. security interests, and a reasonable certainty that no non-combatant targets were present. In practice, however, these determinations were often made after the fact, and people killed by drones were generally considered de facto to be combatant targets, unless some compelling evidence of their innocence was provided posthumously - at which point it was obviously irrelevant to the victim. The drone strikes PPG also lacked any mechanism for enforcement of its guidelines and did not contain any mechanism for public transparency.

The Obama administration nonetheless characterized the document as imposing clear limits on drone warfare and, although they acknowledged that the internal document would have no weight of law, they purported to believe that public knowledge of its existence would cause it to constrain future administrations as well.

References

www.washingtonpost.com

www.usnews.com


ID: Text reads: 2013. Edward Snowden blows the whistle on the NSA and mass surveillance. “It was never about terrorism. Surveillance is about control.” -Edward Snowden. Hunger strikes occur in Guantanamo Bay prison. Images include a Muslim man being subjected to forced feeding in constraints, and a very large CCTV security camera towering over his head and flanked by two giant eyes, conveying a feeling of being monitored and surveilled.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2014 of the War on Terror timeline.

2014

17

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Audio/ Visual: Obama: “We tortured some folks”

President Obama answering questions about the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program, saying “We tortured some folks” (stated at 2:07):

Hassan v. NYPD

In 2011, the Associated Press broke a story revealing the massive program of surveillance targeting Muslim American communities that was instituted by the NYPD post 9/11. The following year, two civil rights organizations filed suit on behalf of several Muslim plaintiffs in New Jersey who had been the victims of this secretive program.

The NYPD program targeted mosques, Muslim student groups, businesses, and community organizations within 100 miles of New York City and beyond, including Buffalo, New Haven, Philadelphia and New Jersey. The program especially and heavily cultivated and relied on informants, was an early example of how so-called national security objectives continue to play a significant role in policing, leading to abuses. Similarly to later, more official law enforcement initiatives such as Countering Violent Extremism, the NYPD program was based on debunked social science claiming a link between appearance based and behavioral identifiers and propensity to commit violent acts of terrorism. Its reach and scope, however, were truly terrifying.

Under its auspices, Muslims or those identified as Muslim were surveilled solely on the basis of an assumed connection with terrorism arising from their religion, not only in New York and New Jersey but up and down the Northeastern seaboard. The case was initially dismissed based on the lower court’s vague deference to the NYPD’s stated justification of national security interests, but it finally gained traction on appeal in the 3rd Circuit in 2014. The NYPD settled lawsuits against the program in 2017 (Raza v. City of New York) and in 2018 (Hassan V. City of New York), agreeing to stop its surveillance activities, reform its surveillance guidelines, as well as pay monetary damages.

U.S., Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates begin airstrikes against Islamic State targets // U.S. led coalition begins supporting anti-ISIL forces in Iraq and Syria

In August, 2014 a U.S. led military coalition began a campaign targeting the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) in Iraq, following substantial territorial gains and the subsequent declaration of a ruling Islamic caliphate by the militant Sunni group that displaced vast swathes of Iraqi government forces in the western part of the country. The following month the U.S. expanded its campaign against ISIS, joining five allied Arab states in launching airstrikes into Syria. The advance of ISIS in conjunction with the U.S. bombing of Iraq and Syria created a refugee crisis, especially devastating to Yezidi and Kurdish populations, the impacts of which are still being felt in 2021.

Obama administration discontinues Secure Communities program

In 2014, concerned with the dubious constitutionality of the Secure Communities Program, which linked federal immigration and law enforcement, then President Obama discontinued it, replacing it with a new program called Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which attempted to resolve some of the underlying issues. Critics of PEP noted that while it narrowed the purview of DHS and ICE it left the data-sharing structure in place, and was at best a modest reform of the problematic program.

ID: Text reads: 2014. Hassan v. NYPD. A diverse group of American plaintiffs filed suit to end the New York Police Department’s invasive and discriminatory spying program. United States, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates begin airstrikes against ISIS. US-led coalition starts supporting anti-ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq. Images include a Muslim elder man, a younger Muslim man holding a sign that reads “NYPD stop spying on me!”, and three Muslim young women wearing headscarves who appear to be friends and are talking and and having a good time as five oversized security cameras loom over them, their lens set to capture their movements and activities. Text below the young women reads “MSA” and a city skyline is behind them. At the bottom portion of the image are Muslim men and likely a boy with their backs facing towards us, running. Some of them are carrying backpacks and one is carrying a large gun. Smoke rises up in front of them in the distance. Question marks are drawn above some of their heads.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2015 of the War on Terror timeline.

2015

18

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Obama administration holds CVE summit at White House

In February, 2015, the first ever Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) summit since it was launched in 2011 was held at the White House, with the Obama administration announcing its intent to expand CVE programming on the model of the pilot programs in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Boston. Part of the expansion involved allocating funds toward developing educational outreach material aimed at Muslim youth and the creation of online resources. The position of CVE coordinator was also created, within the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials presented the summit as an opportunity to influence the course of the CVE program to better reflect its stated goals of community led efforts against "radicalization."

Despite this rhetoric, the vast majority of CVE interventions in the pilot program cities, including Los Angeles, were led by and served the interests of law enforcement agencies, primarily the FBI. Few Muslim-American community groups were invited to participate in the summit, and the ones that did attend made only superficial protest of the rampant surveillance, recruitment of informants, and profiling of the Muslim community enabled by CVE. After the expanded program was initiated in 2016, at least one of these groups received CVE grant funding.

Trump on the campaign trail: “Take out their families”

Trump responds to San Bernardino shootings with a statement in support of banning Muslims from entering the US. According to his released statement, "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." Trump went on to say that "large segments of the Muslim population" have "great hatred towards Americans," which he described as "beyond comprehension." He also cited a discredited poll by a notoriously anti-Muslim organization and made sweeping, generalizing and reductive claims about Sharia and Jihad.

ID: Text reads: Trump calls for a Muslim Ban on the campaign trail. "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslim entering the United States.... until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sesnse of reason or respect for human life." Obama Administration holds first ever Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) summit at the White House. Images include Trump pointing his hand upwards towards a group of Muslims who are behind bars that are in the shape of a map of the United States, Obama signing a document, CCTV surveillance cameras, a mosque, and young children. The surveillance cameras loom over the children.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2016 of the War on Terror timeline.

2016

19

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

FBI launches “Don’t Be a Puppet” website

In April, 2016 the FBI launched a website aimed at teens that it promoted as an educational tool that would help youth identify and resist violent extremism. The website, which included a game, was heavy-handed and rife with stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs. Despite a token reference to the KKK, the clear assumption behind the site was that Muslim teenagers, in particular, were vulnerable to being radicalized by extremist ideologies online.

This presumed connection between Islam and terrorism was on full display in activities that asked visitors to spot suspicious behavior, for example in a testimonial of an Arab Muslim-American woman referring to the FBI as her “enemy.” Also problematic was the thinly veiled surveillance motivation for the website, which urged individuals to report “suspicious” activity in their community. The examples provided of suspicious behavior - traveling somewhere that sounds suspicious, speaking in an “unusual” language - would have been meaningless, everyday events if they were not meant to cue bias and stereotypes. Critics of the site pointed out that the FBI was unlikely to be soliciting calls informing them of trips to Germany, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, for example.

ID: Text reads: 2016. FBI launches a new program targeting teenagers called “Don’t Be A Puppet.” Department of Homeland Security Releases Applications for Countering Violent Extremism, or “CVE” grant programs. Images include a mannequin-type puppet held up by strings with a silhouetted mosque and crescent moons with stars in the background. Below the puppet someone (FBI agent, cop, psychiatrist, teacher?) questions a Muslim woman, asking “Do you support American troops” as they write her answer down. The Muslim woman wonders, “Am I a puppet?” In the background are FBI agents and someone wearing a suit standing next to a chart that reads “Muslims are terrorists.” The person is standing in front of a group of people as if teaching a class. At the bottom of the image is a right-pointing arrow with text that reads, from left to right, “countering violent extremism” and “counterterrorism.”

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2017 of the War on Terror timeline.

2017

20

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Trump replaces Obama-era rules for drones strikes, expanding battlefield designations and loosening requirements for civilians, etc.

One of Trump’s first military acts upon taking office was to replace the non-binding policy on the use of drones put in place by the Obama administration in 2013 with a set of guidelines that were far more lenient. The Trump rules expanded the definition of what constitutes a battlefield dramatically, making the distinction between strikes against enemy forces and targeted killings outside of a war zone nearly meaningless. At the same, the process for determining individual targets was decentralized, allowing individual operators to make decisions in the field.

In contrast, the Obama-era standard was to meet with military and administration officials to determine with “near certainty” that an individual was a threat. Trump’s almost immediate replacement of Obama’s drone guidelines with a framework that easily undid the previous administration’s modest attempts at reform provide an apt example of how War on Terror structures have acquired a life of their own. Following through on a statement he made on the campaign trail in 2015 claiming the way to defeat terrorists was to “take out their families, Trump also reversed a 2016 executive order on limiting civilian casualties of U.S. drone strikes and laying out the beginnings of a process for accountability for the impacts on targeted countries.

Trump signs Executive Order restarting Secure Communities Program

In 2014, concerned with the dubious constitutionality of the Secure Communities Program, which linked federal immigration and law enforcement, then President Obama discontinued it, replacing it with a new program called Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which attempted to resolve some of the underlying issues. Critics of PEP noted that while it narrowed the purview of DHS and ICE it left the data-sharing structure in place, and was at best a modest reform of the problematic program. Consistent with his pattern of reversing Obama-era War on Terror decisions wherever possible, Trump revived the Secure Communities Program by executive order in 2017.

The language of Trump’s order sought to broaden the mandate of the program instituted by the Bush administration even further in the direction of criminalizing immigration. For example, it explicitly allowed the targeting of immigrants who had not even been accused of a crime by adding language about, for example, abuse of public benefits to the list of groups of that could be subject to removal. In addition, the order reversed course entirely from PEP, expanding the reach of DHS and ICE’s authority, including by granting broad discretion to individual ICE agents in determining who to detain and even deport.

Trump signs Executive Order reversing Obama’s attempt to close Guantanamo, keeping it open indefinitely - 2018 (prior drafts released in 2017)

In January, 2018, then President Trump signed an executive order, reversing the policy of both previous administrations, and keeping the prison at Guantanamo Bay open indefinitely. In addition to discontinuing efforts to work toward closing the prison, the order included a provision allowing for the transfer of additional detainees to Guantanamo.

In speeches, Trump presented Guantanamo as a keystone of U.S. national security, supporting this with sweeping claims about detainees released under Obama only to be met again on the battlefield. These anecdotes are not supported by data, which suggests that the recidivism of Guantanamo detainees is roughly the same as the general prison population. It also obscures that fact that actually very little progress was made during Obama’s two terms to close the prison, often due to roadblocks in the ability to release even those who had long been cleared of all charges.

Muslim and African Bans enacted and challenged

With the election of Donald Trump, the underlying War on Terror policy direction towards criminalizing immigration, and especially targeting Muslim immigrants, became explicit. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to halt all immigration of Muslims into the U.S. and his administration worked quickly to deliver on that promise.

The first executive order implementing a “Muslim Ban” was signed during Trump's first week in office, on January 27, 2017 -- a culmination of Trumps' rampant, dehumanizing anti-Muslim rhetoic central to his campaign. It halted all entry to the U.S. by individuals immigrating from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, all Muslim majority countries, for an initial period of 90 days. It also imposed stops on individuals admitted as refugees - that fact that this provision contained an exception for religious minorities, i.e. Christians, was a clear signal of the order’s discriminatory intent. Implementation of this first, most blatantly unconstitutional Muslim Ban was immediately blocked in district courts across the country, and eventually defeated in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A subsequent second version of the Muslim Ban issued in March, 2017 made minor changes, including standardizing the stoppage of refugee admissions so that no individual countries were singled out and removing the exception for religious minorities. The new order faced similar legal challenges, and implementation was blocked by courts in Maryland and Hawaii. This time, it reached the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against it, noting the clear intent of the policy to discriminate against Muslims in particular despite the changes.

Undeterred, the Trump administration issued a third executive order in September, 2017. This new Muslim and African Ban made changes that were narrowly tailored to meet technical constitutional requirements without substantial impact in terms of targeting Muslim immigrants in practice. For example, the order added Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela to the list of banned countries; however, existing regulations already prohibited most immigration from Venezuela and North Korea does not allow immigration to the U.S. at all, making the only substantive inclusion another Muslim majority country. The third ban also sidestepped the issue of refugees by avoiding explicit language, but in effect it retained elements of the original Muslim Ban, for example by halting all immigrant and non-immigrant visas for entrants from Syria. This time, the policy reached the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the third version of the Muslim Ban in Trump v. Hawaii the following year.  

ID: Text reads: 2017. Three versions of the Muslim Ban signed. Donald J. Trump is calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Images include Trump signing an executive order, a globe with lines crisscrossing across the banned countries alongside text “ban” and “banned”, and two Muslims wearing headscarves protesting outside the U.S. Supreme Court, holding signs that read “no ban no wall, sanctuary for all!” and “ no Muslim Ban ever.”

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2018 of the War on Terror timeline.

2018

21

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

NDAA signed with section including study of Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood is an old organization, established in Egypt in the 1920s with the goal of promoting Islamic values through political means, including, at the time, opposing British colonial rule. The contemporary organization is global in its reach and has been involved in many major political events in the Middle East.

Following the uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring, which included the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the political arm of Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to participate in elections in their home country after a long ban and won in several democratically conducted elections, including for President. However, the political Islam represented by the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in democratic elections was met with increasing discomfort by Western powers including the U.S. Within two years, the organization was again formally criminalized in Egypt, and many members were jailed for alleged connections to terrorism, although their global influence remained strong.

Within the U.S. pressure grew to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, and legislation to that effect was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz and others in 2017. Despite warnings from the CIA that the it would only serve to fuel extremist sentiment and the fact that criminalizing the Muslim Brotherhood, which was influential in many countries, would hinder U.S. diplomatic efforts, the Trump administration enthusiastically supported the designation. As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood were included as a terrorist organization in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual piece of legislation that outlines the budget and priorities of the Department of Defense.

Trump v. Hawaii upholds 3rd Muslim Ban

This third iteration of the Trump administration Muslim and African Ban made changes that were narrowly tailored to meet technical constitutional requirements without substantial impact in terms of targeting Muslim immigrants in practice. For example, the order added Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela to the list of banned countries; however, existing regulations already prohibited most immigration from Venezuela and North Korea does not allow immigration to the U.S. at all, making the only substantive inclusion another Muslim majority country.

The third ban also sidestepped the issue of refugees by avoiding explicit language, but in effect it retained elements of the original Muslim Ban, for example by halting all immigrant and non-immigrant visas for entrants from Syria. This time, challenges to the policy reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the third version of the Muslim Ban in Trump v. Hawaii.

Noor Salman case for material support for terrorism goes to trial (exonerated)

Following the deadly 2016 attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the shooter’s widow, Noor Salman, was arrested and charged with material support for terrorism. The case against Salman rested on her largely assumed knowledge of her husband’s hatred of the gay community and his consumption of jihadist media. From this, the government argued that she had knowledge of her husband’s intent to attack a particular target, and, therefore, that she was guilty of material support.

Salman was the victim of violent abuse at the hands of her husband, evidence was presented at her trial that she was particularly vulnerable to suggestion due to cognitive disability, and she had a young son in need of her protection. Following a year of imprisonment during the trial, months of which Salman was held in solitary confinement, she was exonerated of all charges in 2018. Salman’s prosecution under the material support for terrorism doctrine is a shocking example of government overreach in the War on Terror. That her exoneration is an extreme outlier in federal terrorism cases is another such example.

ID: Text reads: 2018. NDAA signed with section including study of Muslim Brotherhood. On June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court upholds the Muslim Ban as constitutional in Trump v. Hawaii. Trump signs Executive Order reversing Obama’s attempt to close Guantanamo Bay prison, keeping it open indefinitely. Noor Salman case for material support for terrorism goes to trial (exonerated). Images include Muslim men imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay prison wearing organe jumpsuits and black hoods covering their head and face, surrounded by barbed wire, prison structure, and surveillance cameras. There are silhouettes of two people in front of the imprisoned men, one is a woman with “terrorist?” drawn on her back and another holding a gun, facing the woman’s direction.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 A

22

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

House votes to block US weapons deal with Saudi Arabia // Trump vetoes bipartisan bills blocking sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia

In May, 2019, the Trump administration announced its intent to use emergency authority to push through an $8 billion sale of arms and surveillance equipment to Saudi Arabia, destined to be used in that countries war against Yemen. Congress, which had passed a nearly unanimous resolution condemning U.S. military aid to Saudi Arabia aiding in the war in Yemen in 2017, attempted to block the sale.

In addition to anger over the Trump administration’s circumventing of Congressional approval for actions supporting a war the House had already signaled it disapproved of, the arms deal came in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which sparked widespread outrage. However, the initial resolution passed by Congress in 2019 did not have the two-thirds majority necessary to be veto proof and partisan wrangling resulting in the eventual passage of three separate bills. Trump vetoed all three resolutions in July, and the sale of arms went forward after the veto was sustained in the Senate. 

Trump meets with Pakistani PM Imran Khan

In an effort to repair U.S.-Pakistani relations as proposed peace talks with the Taliban were getting underway, then President Trump met with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, at the White House in July, 2019. In the course of the meeting, which he publicized aggressively on Twitter, Trump claimed that he could win the war in Afghanistan in 10 days, but that it would require a display of force that would leave 10 million people dead and wipe Afghanistan off the face of the Earth.

In a statement that was promptly refuted, Trump also claimed that the Prime Minister of India had personally requested U.S. mediation on the topic the contested region of Kashmir. In later statements, Khan accused the Trump administration and U.S. of using Pakistan to clean up its mess in Afghanistan while displaying no real interest in diplomacy.

ID: Text reads: 2019. House votes in favor of blocking US weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoes bipartisan bills to block weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Trump meets with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan: “I have plans for Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be over in literally 10 days.” Images include drones, Jamal Khashoggi, the map of Afghanistan, people praying Ṣalāh, and Trump meeting with Mohammed bin Salman and with Imran Khan.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 B

23

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Domineque Ray’s execution

After a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court overturned a stay granted by the lower court, defeating his last hope of finding an avenue for appeal, Domineque Ray, a Black American Muslim man, was executed in Alabama on February 7, 2019. Ray had been convicted and sentenced to death for three murders he allegedly committed as a teenager, and had been on death row since 1999. In the intervening years, the Supreme Court had ruled that a jury considering a death sentence must consider the context in which the crime was committed, including the defendant’s life circumstances and mental health.

Despite evidence that the jury in Ray’s case did not have and/or did not consider relevant information, however, his sentence was repeatedly upheld. The last minute question before the Supreme Court in 2019, however, involved a claim that his religious freedom was being violated by the Alabama facility’s refusal to allow an imam to be present with Ray, a convert to Islam, in the execution chamber. The decision to allow the lethal injection to go forward with Ray’s chosen spiritual advisor available but inexplicably banned from his presence is especially heartbreaking in light of another ruling, issued barely a month later, in which the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution to a Buddhist prisoner in Texas on the exact same basis. 

House Democrats issue statement condemning Ilhan Omar for anti-semitism

Since being elected to Congress, MN representative Ilhan Omar, a vocal opponent of Islamophobia and bigotry and frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy, has faced no shortage of attacks, including from colleagues.

In 2019, Omar attracted bipartisan ire for comments she made questioning the influence of the U.S. Israel lobby. Omar’s comments arose in the context of objecting to proposed legislation, as well as existing provisions in, for example, employment contracts that would prohibit the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Specifically, she publicly objected to what essentially amounted to a requirement of support for a foreign government. As a result, she was accused of anti-semitism with varying degrees of vitriol and threatened with removal from her committee appointments.

After, among other things, Islamophobic tweets targeting the congresswoman from then president Trump raised concerns for her safety, congressional democrats introduced a resolution they hoped would be a compromise that took the controversy out of the public eye. The resolution, which condemned both Islamophobia and anti-semitism, passed overwhelmingly, with the only holdouts being the most vocal Republicans calling for Omar’s removal from committees, but it should not have necessary. The narrative behind the public controversy as well as the resolution placed Omar’s comments criticizing Israel on a policy level on the same basis as Trump’s hateful Islamophobia and called for each to be condemned equally. Rep. Omar became the focus of similarly problematic controversy again in 2021, when remarks she made about the need to confront atrocities committed by the U.S. and Israel as well Hamas and the Taliban touched off a storm of accusations that she was falsely equating terrorism and the actions of democratic governments.

In response, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was instrumental in proposing the 2019 resolution, issued an immediate statement calling for her apology and Omar was again threatened with removal from her congressional committee appointments.  

Trump bullies ICC into rejecting probe into war crimes in Afghanistan

In 2017, an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor submitted a request for a formal probe into war crimes and other human rights abuses in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, during the early 2000’s. The request, based on nearly a decade of investigation, alleged crimes against humanity committed by the Taliban, the Afghan National Security Forces, and the United States military as well as the CIA. The claims against the U.S. centered around the operation of secret detention sites operated by the CIA in Afghanistan, the details of which were outlined in the Senate Torture Report in 2014, as well as reports of rape and other abuse of Afghan civilians by the U.S. military and associated forces.

The Trump administration’s opposition to the proposed investigation was immediate and fierce. The ICC was established by the treaty referred to as the Rome Statute in 1998 and began to hear cases in 2002. Although the United States signed the Rome Statute in 2000, it was never ratified by Congress, largely because of opposition from the Bush administration. As a result, Trump officials argued the ICC had no authority over the U.S. and refused to cooperate with the investigation in any capacity. The prosecutor who had submitted the request found her U.S. visa revoked. In the wake of extreme pressure, a panel of the ICC denied the request for an Afghanistan war crimes probe, citing the non-cooperation of the involved parties as partial justification.  

ID: Text reads: 2019. Domineque Ray’s Execution: The Supreme Court Vacates a Stay of Execution for Muslim Prisoner Domineque Ray, who requested the presence of an Imam inside the death chamber instead of a reverand. “On Nov. 6, 2018, the State scheduled Domineque Ray’s execution date for Feb. 7, 2019. Because Ray waited until January 28 to seek relief, we grant the State application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.” Democrats issue a statement condemning Rep. Ilhan Omar on anti-semitism. Trump bullies the ICC into rejecting a probe of war crimes in Afghanistan that implicates the US. Images include Domineque Ray, a Black American Muslim man, strapped to a gurney, as his Imam looks in through a window, silhouetted people standing around holding pens and clipboards, Ilhan Omar wearing an orange headscarf, the map of Afghanistan with boards lying on top and stick-like figures of over two dozen people standing around the map of the country, and Trump pushing away the ICC logo (a scale of justice surrounded by a wreath of olive branches).

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 C

24

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

The Office For Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention established

The Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (OTVTP) was an office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that was established in April 2019 under the Trump Administration. OTVTP replaced the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships (OTPP), which the Trump Administration established in November 2017. And prior to that, OTPP replaced the Obama Administration's Office for Community Partnerships (OCP), which had first established the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. Under the Trump Administration, OTVTP programming and grant fuding was defunded and downsized. The office was criticized for rescinding grants to organizations that targeted white supremacist groups and for awarding grants to more police departments because it was further evidence of Trump's intention to target Muslim and other marginalized communities. The Trump Administration initially touted the idea of renaming the CVE program to "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," but this was met by significant pushback and ultimately fell through. Like other iterations of this program, the emphasis still remains on Muslims.

ID: Text reads: 2019. The Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships (OTTP) changes to the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (OTVTP). Images include Black and Brown Muslim parents and children embracing each other. Behind them is a U.S. flag with white stripes superimposed with text “Office for Terrorism Prevention Partnerships” and red stripes that extend like tentacle-like ribbons starting to wrap around the people, including over one Muslim woman’s mouth to silence her. Text on the red tentacle-like ribbons reads: Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2020 the War on Terror timeline.

2020

25

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani

In January, 2020, a U.S. drone strike hit near the airport in Baghdad, killing 10 people, among them Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, widely regarded as the second most powerful political figure in Iran. In response to criticism that the U.S. had no evidence the Iranian general posed an imminent threat to American national security interests, the Trump administration accused UN investigators of giving a free pass to terrorists.

Although the U.S. has targeted Iranian-backed forces in the region frequently during the War on Terror, and Trump administration officials sought to portray Soleimani’s killing as justified by virtue of his connections to designated terrorist factions in Iraq, the blatant assassination of a high ranking official in another state’s government was so much a departure from the norms of international conduct that it led many observers to fear that war was inevitable.

Trump expands Muslim Ban with addition of 6 new countries

In 2020, emboldened by the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of its third iteration, then president Trump moved to expand the reach of the Muslim Ban, which placed extreme limits on entry to the U.S. on applicants from Muslim majority countries. The expansion to the list of travel-restricted countries under Trump’s Muslim Ban included Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and Tanzania. 

Tanvir v. Tanzin

In October, 2020, the Supreme Court heard the case of Tanvir v. Tanzin, which revolved around a group of Muslim men, all U.S. citizens, who were placed on the federally maintained “no-fly” list in retaliation after refusing to become informants for the FBI. Just days before their trial, the men were informed that they had been removed from the notoriously secretive list, prompting a lower court judge to dismiss the case. After an appeals court reinstated the case, which included claims against individual FBI agents, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Muslim plaintiffs. 

ID: Text reads: 2020. Trump authorizes assassination of Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani causing the US and Iran to be on the brink of war. ICC allows Afghanistan inquiry to proceed. Trump expands the Muslim Ban to include: Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria. Images include a photograph of Qasem Soleimani superimposed with a missile with a U.S. flag painted on its side, as well as the maps of some of the countries targeted by the Ban.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2021 the War on Terror timeline.

2021 A

26

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Biden launches drone strikes against Syria and loosens restrictions on retaliatory airstrikes

In the first military act of his administration, incoming President Joe Biden launched a drone strike against Syria in February, 2021, killing 22. The targeted strike was claimed to be in response to an attack on a U.S. military facility in Erbil, a city located in the Kurdistan region of Iraq by Iranian-backed Shia militants. A statement released by the Pentagon characterized the attacks as a “measured response” that was taken in conjunction with diplomatic efforts.

In general, the Biden administration has worked to characterize its approach to drone warfare as cautious and motivated by the underlying purpose of deescalation of U.S. military intervention globally. For example, Biden almost immediately suspended the Trump administration’s policy guidelines on drones (the details of which were released for the first time in 2021 after the incoming administration complied with a court order to provide them pursuant to outstanding Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the NY Times and the ACLU) and has announced his intent to develop a new framework that includes more meaningful mechanisms for accountability. Possibly signaling both the intent and the limits of the intended approach to this goal, many Obama-era officials have returned to work in Biden’s administration.

In June, 2021 the U.S. again launched retaliatory airstrikes against Iranian targets, this time in Iraq and Syria, prompting criticism. In defending the strikes, the Biden administration signaled its willingness to become the fourth successive administration to rely on the authority of the 2001 AUMF and the inertial weight of the War on Terror’s global footprint to justify military interventions against countries with which we are not at war - within third party countries with which we are also not at war - circumventing Congress and the international community in the process.

Biden announces intention to close Guantanamo Bay prison

Upon taking office President Biden pledged to restart the process of closing Guantanamo Bay Prison that Trump had stopped. In July 2019 the Biden administration took a first step toward that goal by releasing a Moroccan man, Abdul Latif Nasser, for repatriation to his home country, a transfer that had originally been cleared by the Pentagon in 2016. One of a class of “forever prisoners” who had been classified as too dangerous to release despite the lack of evidence against them, Nasser had been held at Guantanamo without charges for 19 years.

Three additional detainees were cleared for transfer out of Guantanamo in May but it has not yet been determined where these men would go upon release. At the same time the Biden administration was taking these steps, six former detainees who had been held without charge for years after being released from Guantanamo into the custody of the United Arab Emirates were repatriated to their home country of Yemen.

There are now 36 prisoners who remain in custody at Guantanamo, including the “9/11 Five,” the five men believed to be responsible for planning the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, who have yet to go to trial. The majority of those that remain, however, are “forever prisoners” like Nasser, held indefinitely despite never being charged with a crime.

Biden signs Executive order ending Secure Communities program

In one of a slew of executive orders related to immigration issued almost immediately upon taking office in 2021, Biden discontinued the federal Secure Communities program, which gave immigration enforcement agencies access to law enforcement data and broad authority to detain and remove individuals with immigration violations.

The Bush administration program had been discontinued once before, by Obama in 2014, but was reinstated by executive order by Trump in 2017. It is unclear what additional steps, if any, the Biden administration will take regarding the underlying framework for cooperation between DHS, ICE and local law enforcement that was created by the Secure Communities program, or the targeting of Muslim immigrants in particular that has been facilitated by its data sharing and collection mechanisms.

The Biden Administration also rescinded the Muslim and African Ban among his first executive orders and proclamations in office, removing the restrictions on immigration and visa issuances from nearly a dozen Muslim majority and African countries. Despite this move, the applicants and their families impacted by the Ban are still stuck in the State Department's visa backlog. For these families, the Muslim and African Ban is far from over.

Biden replaces office for targeted violence and terrorism prevention with The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships

In May 2021, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the establishment of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or “CP3.” CP3 replaces the Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (OTVTP), which was established under the Trump Administration. This office has gone through multiple iterations beginning with the Barack Obama Administration and spanning three presidential administrations, including the Office for Community Partnerships (OCP), the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships (OTPP), as well as OTVTP and CP3. The mission of CP3, much like its predecessors, is to “prevent acts of targeted violence and terrorism by working with the whole of society to establish and expand local prevention frameworks.” CP3 has “Regional Prevention Coordinators (RPCs)” stationed across the US to “help establish and support prevention efforts at the local level.” The office claims its approach is different from earlier iterations of the office by taking a public health-informed approach that was informed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The office CP3 has Regional Prevention Coordinators (RPCs) stationed across the United States.

Test

ID: Text reads: 2021. Biden announces intention to close Guantanamo Bay prison. Biden signs Executive Order ending Secure Communities program. Biden launches drone strikes against Syria and loosens restrictions on retaliatory airstrikes. Biden begins U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan with the Taliban resuming power and Afghans fleeing for safety. Images include a Muslim man imprionsed at Guantanamo Bay mlitary prison being forcibly led away by two prison gaurds; President Joe Biden sitting as his desk signing an Executive Order with text “Secure Communities” superimposed on top of folders on his desk; a drone flying an American flag with a bloody red handprint; a map of Syria with the names and locations of major cities; and photographs of U.S. or foreign troops carrying large weapons in front of an airplane; members of the Taliban seated in Afghanistan’s presidential palace, and a cargo plane with over 200 refugees from Afghanistan.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Visual for year 2021 the War on Terror timeline.

2021 B

27

/25

This is some text inside of a div block.

Biden begins U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan with the Taliban resuming power

In April, President Biden announced that he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 9/11/2021, the twentieth anniversary of the 2001 attacks. That date was later moved up to August 31 but before the withdrawal could be completed, on August 15th, the Taliban suddenly took control of the capital city of Kabul, plunging the process into chaos. In his initial announcement as well as subsequent speeches defending the withdrawal, Biden characterized the war in Afghanistan as having been won, asserting that the U.S. had accomplished its mission - to see Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda neutralized - and now Afghans must take responsibility for their country. These remarks ignore the fact that the U.S. military has been present in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years - despite having neutralized the military threat posed by al Qaeda in the first several months of the war and killing bin Laden himself in 2011. They also erase the fact that when the Bush administration sought approval for the invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001, the justification given was the national security threat posed not only by al Qaeda, but by the Taliban, which it characterized as a state sponsor of terrorism. Now, the Taliban is in a stronger position than ever before and the humanitarian crisis in the country has been massively compounded by two decades of war and occupation. An estimated 47,000 Afghan civilians have died in the conflict, a number that does not reflect the associated human costs of war due to dislocation, disease, and economic upheaval. In addition, the U.S. has spent more than $2 trillion on the war in Afghanistan to date, and those costs - human and monetary - are unlikely to end with the withdrawal of troops and American personnel. Indeed, before the withdrawal had even been completed, the Biden administration ordered airstrikes against ISIS targets in the country, in retaliation for an attack at the Kabul airport that killed 13 Americans and 170 Afghans. Several Afghan civilians, including three children, were killed in the retaliatory drone strikes.

President Biden delivers remarks on ending the war in Afghanistan:

US Drone strike kills 10 Afghan Civilians

On August 26, 2001 days before the US was set to complete troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was a suicide bombing, that the group ISIS-K took responsibility for at the Hamid Karzai International Airport that killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 American troops. In response to the attack, the US conducted a drone strike in Kabul on August 29, targeting a vehicle it claimed was occupied by ISIS-K members. Upon investigation, it was uncovered that the driver of the vehicle was an aid worker transporting water containers to his family. In total, ten civilians were killed by the US including seven children. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley initially referred to the attack as a "righteous strike" at a press conference on September 1, nearly two weeks later,  Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command referred to the strike as a "tragic mistake." Despite this acknowledgement, the Pentagon announced in December 2001, that none of the military personnel involved in the drone strike would face any repercussions.

ID: Text reads: 2021. US drone strike kills 10 Afghan civilians. Bigen begins U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan with the Taliban resuming power and Afghans feeling for safety. Images include a drone overlaid with the USA flag, a large plume of smoke as if after a drone strike, and graphic-style images of the 10 Afghan civilians, who include very young and smiling children as well as adults. Other images include photographs of Afghan civilians leaving Kabul in hangar planes, soldiers policing the boarding of a plane in Kabul, and leaders of the Taliban at the Presidential Palace.

The content of this website is proprietary information of Muslim Counterpublics Lab. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, modify, create derivative works, or in any other way use any part of the digital exhibition without the express and prior written permission of Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

About Us

Dr. Maha Hilal, Exhibition Director & Curator

Dr. Maha Hilal is a Muslim Arab American an expert researcher and writer on institutionalized Islamophobia and author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Newsweek, Business Insider,Truthout, among others. She is the founding Executive Director of the Muslim Counterpublic and an organizer with Witness Against Torture. She earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, D.C. She received her Master's Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Maura Dwyer, 
Exhibition Artist

Maura Dwyer is an artist from northeast Baltimore, where she paints murals, works with grassroots organizations to design graphics and illustrations, and co-creates interdisciplinary events that use the arts as a strategy to communicate complex ideas and spark critical dialogue.

Zaynub Siddiqui, Exhibition Artist

Zaynub siddiqui is 21 and is currently pursuing M.S in Counseling at Johns Hopkins University, she is a graduate of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Where she earned her degree in Psychology with a focus on children’s education and psychology. She currently is an Art teacher and teaches grades 4th-8th. In her free time Zaynub is an illustrator and often has exhibitions in the DMV.

Art instagram @zaynub_s

Katie is a white woman with short brown wavy hair who is smiling. Katie is wearing a black and white striped blouse with a bookshelf and throw pillow in the background.
Katie Wylie, 
Exhibition Research and Content Creator

Katie Wylie is the editorial and content manager of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab.

Kris is a white person wearing a backwards cap, red glasses, a floral polo shirt, an Allah pendant and is smiling. Blurred behind them is a meadow of white flowers
Kris Garrity,
Exhibition Writer and Editor

Kris Garrity, they/them, is a white Muslim who lives in Washington, DC on the unceded Lands of the Nacotchtank, Piscataway, Doeg-Tauxenants and Pamunkey Peoples. Kris is a parent, researcher, writer, and community organizer. They are the Program Associate with Muslim Counterpublics Lab and co-coordinator of the For Us Not Amazon Coaliton in the DMV with Dr. Maha Hilal. Kris also organizes with Serve Your City/Ward 6 Mutual Aid in DC. Their research focuses on surveillance, state violence and whiteness.

Bibliography

Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Edit. For Example. Start Editing.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists hijacked four airplanes and carried out attacks on the United States, killing more than three thousand Americans and sending the country reeling.

Three days after the attacks, President George W. Bush declared, "This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace." Yet in the days following, Bush declared a "War on Terror," which would result in years of Muslims being targeted on the basis of collective punishment and scapegoating.  

In 2009, President Barack Obama said, "America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace." Instead, Obama perpetuated the War on Terror's infrastructure that Bush had put in place, rendering his words entirely empty. President Donald Trump's overtly Islamophobic rhetoric added fuel to the fire, stoking public fears to justify the continuation of the War his predecessors had committed to.  

In Innocent until Proven Muslim, scholar and organizer Dr.Maha Hilal tells the powerful story of two decades of the War on Terror, exploring how the official narrative has justified the creation of a sprawling apparatus of state violence rooted in Islamophobia and excused its worst abuses. Hilal offers not only an overview of the many iterations of the War on Terror in law and policy, but also examines how Muslim Americans have internalized oppression, how some influential Muslim Americans have perpetuated collective responsibility, and how the lived experiences of Muslim Americans reflect what it means to live as part of a "suspect" community. Along the way, this marginalized community gives voice to lessons that we can all learn from their experiences, and to what it would take to create a better future.

Twenty years after the tragic events of 9/11, we must look at its full legacy in order to move toward a United States that is truly inclusive and unified

Featured Resource

Innocent Until Proven Muslim:

By Maha Hilal

For more information and to purchase the book, please go to bit.ly/InnocentUntilProvenMuslimBook

Intro

1

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2001 of the War on Terror timeline.

2001

2

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2002 of the War on Terror timeline.

2002

3

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2003 of the War on Terror timeline.

2003

4

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2004 of the War on Terror timeline.

2004

5

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2005 of the War on Terror timeline.

2005

6

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2006 of the War on Terror timeline.

2006

7

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2007 of the War on Terror timeline.

2007

8

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2008 of the War on Terror timeline.

2008 A

9

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2008 of the War on Terror timeline.

2008 B

10

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2009 of the War on Terror timeline.

2009 A

11

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2009 of the War on Terror timeline.

2009 B

12

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2010 of the War on Terror timeline.

2010

13

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2011 of the War on Terror timeline.

2011

14

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2012 of the War on Terror timeline.

2012

15

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2013 of the War on Terror timeline.

2013

16

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2014 of the War on Terror timeline.

2014

17

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2015 of the War on Terror timeline.

2015

18

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2016 of the War on Terror timeline.

2016

19

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2017 of the War on Terror timeline.

2017

20

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2018 of the War on Terror timeline.

2018

21

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 A

22

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 B

23

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 C

24

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2020 the War on Terror timeline.

2020

25

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2021 the War on Terror timeline.

2021 A

26

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2021 the War on Terror timeline.

2021 B

27

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Intro

1

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2001 of the War on Terror timeline.

2001

2

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2002 of the War on Terror timeline.

2002

3

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2003 of the War on Terror timeline.

2003

4

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2004 of the War on Terror timeline.

2004

5

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2005 of the War on Terror timeline.

2005

6

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2006 of the War on Terror timeline.

2006

7

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2007 of the War on Terror timeline.

2007

8

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2008 of the War on Terror timeline.

2008 A

9

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2008 of the War on Terror timeline.

2008 B

10

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2009 of the War on Terror timeline.

2009 A

11

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2009 of the War on Terror timeline.

2009 B

12

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2010 of the War on Terror timeline.

2010

13

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2011 of the War on Terror timeline.

2011

14

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2012 of the War on Terror timeline.

2012

15

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2013 of the War on Terror timeline.

2013

16

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2014 of the War on Terror timeline.

2014

17

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2015 of the War on Terror timeline.

2015

18

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2016 of the War on Terror timeline.

2016

19

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2017 of the War on Terror timeline.

2017

20

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2018 of the War on Terror timeline.

2018

21

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 A

22

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 B

23

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2019 of the War on Terror timeline.

2019 C

24

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2020 the War on Terror timeline.

2020

25

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2021 the War on Terror timeline.

2021 A

26

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Visual for year 2021 the War on Terror timeline.

2021 B

27

A VISUAL TIMELINE OF THE WAR ON TERROR

Click to Play video

A message from our Executive Director, Dr. Maha Hilal

Scroll to learn more

Intro

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008 A

2008 B

2009 A

2009 B

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019 A

2019 B

2019 C

2020

2021 A

2021 B