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PERVASIVE IMPUNITY  
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Cora Currier
October 16, 2025
The New York Review of Books
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_ Richard Beck’s Homeland charts how four presidential
administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war
on terror” by hiding behind legality and process. _

Kitchen workers at the Camp Phoenix US military base moving a
papier-mâché sculpture of the Statue of Liberty in preparation for a
telecast of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Kabul,
Afghanistan, January 20, 2009, Zackary Canepari/Redux Images

 

Reviewed:

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life
by Richard Beck
Crown, 556 pp., $33.00

In early 2017 my colleagues at _The Intercept _and I published a
series of articles about the FBI’s counterterrorism policies. The
articles were based on leaked documents that showed the wide latitude
the bureau gave itself to surveil students, journalists, and civil
society, and detailed its policies on the use of informants. The FBI,
the documents specified, targeted Muslim student groups and recruited
informants at airports. Agents would offer potential sources help with
their immigration status as a “dangle” to get them to
cooperate—something that defense and civil liberties attorneys had
long suspected but that the FBI officially denied.

Our timing was not fortuitous. Donald Trump had just taken office. The
Steele dossier was circulating, with its salacious allegations about
the new president’s supposed romps in Moscow. Former FBI directors
Robert Mueller and James Comey were soon to become unlikely symbols of
“the resistance.” When, in October 2018, the FBI agent Terry
Albury was convicted of disclosing documents to _The
Intercept_—which he did, he said, to expose anti-Muslim bias and
surveillance overreach—his case got a fraction of the attention that
those of previous national security whistleblowers had received.

All of this seemed to be an early indication of how much the “war on
terror,” which was the focus of our investigation, had receded, or
at least been overshadowed, now that Trump was in power. Trump’s
so-called Muslim ban—the executive order forbidding people from
several Muslim-majority countries to enter the US—feels in
retrospect more a harbinger of hard-line immigration policies and
general chaotic showmanship than a sign of a particular emphasis on
terror threats. At the same time, Trump’s posturing as an antiwar
candidate did not prevent him from continuing, and even intensifying,
the disparate military actions involved in the “war on terror”
that the country has waged since the September 11 attacks.

Trump’s first administration changed the rules of engagement in
Afghanistan and other countries, leading to an increase in bombings
and civilian casualties. Deadly night raids in Afghanistan continued,
as did strikes in Iraq and Syria (where, even before Trump’s
presidency, the extensive air campaign against the Islamic State had
rendered debates over precision drone strikes and kill lists somewhat
quaint). Under Joe Biden, crises in Gaza and Ukraine further eclipsed
counterterrorism as a central public concern. The US withdrew from
Afghanistan in August 2021. Worries about government spying on US
citizens were overtaken by increased awareness of (and acquiescence
to) corporate data harvesting.

And yet the various templates of the “war on terror” are still
very much in use today. Trump, for instance, declared “antifa” a
terror organization after the shooting of the conservative activist
Charlie Kirk. The Department of Homeland Security was created in late
2002, and the extensive surveillance capabilities it has built up in
the years since are enabling the administration’s ramped-up
immigration enforcement. The US military, to say nothing of the
special forces and the CIA, still carries out counterterrorism
trainings and operations around the world. The continued existence of
the military commissions and the detention center at Guantánamo, the
occasional drone strike in Somalia, the batch of trainers dispatched
to Niger—these once controversial policies have turned into mere
state functions. Trump’s strikes against alleged drug traffickers in
the Caribbean, which the White House has justified by designating
cartels as terror groups, have been greeted with alarm, but it’s
unfortunately easy to imagine them becoming accepted in the same way.

In reporting on the subject myself, I have often felt, as the writer
and Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay put it in _Uncertain Ground:
Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War _(2022), “unsure of
whether I’m fulfilling a civic obligation, exploring a personal
obsession…or simply screaming into the void.”

The “war on terror” is so pervasive and hard to define that it is
easy to lose sight of its most shocking features.

 Over the years it became “a kind of water that people noticed just
every so often,” as Richard Beck puts it in his new
book, _Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life_, “even though
they spent their lives swimming in it.”

It’s a cliché, Beck points out, to talk about the war coming home
to be visited on the country’s citizens; it is far more accurate to
say that it began at home and has continued here. _Homeland_ is a
polemical account that shows how September 11 reshaped the American
psyche—and argues persuasively that the resulting militarism
“transformed everything from the kinds of heroes Americans wanted to
see on television to the vehicles they drove to the grocery store and
the city streets on which they walked.” Donald Rumsfeld said in a
speech in October 2001, “We have two choices: Either we change the
way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the
latter.” In fact we chose both.

Beck’s history begins with the nation’s response to what he calls
an “unprecedented experience of national humiliation.” He
chronicles the rise of security culture—from the growth of
the TSA to the designation of parks and plazas as “security
zones” and Super Bowls as “National Special Security
Events”—and suspicion of and racism against Muslims (and other
people who look the way Americans think Muslims do). They were
targeted in hate crimes and protests and by local and federal
authorities for surveillance and detention. The contention that they
posed a threat was largely baseless: a rapid roundup after the attacks
of more than 1,200 people, mostly Muslim or Arab, resulted in zero
terrorism convictions. One major study of purported terrorism
convictions between 2001 and 2010 found that most cases involved
broadly defined “material support” laws (which could criminalize
charitable contributions or social connections) or plots fully
concocted by the FBI and its agents provocateurs. One informant
spent three years trying and failing to get a Harlem-based jazz
musician to do something illegal; that informant eventually became so
distraught about his work with the FBI that he set himself on fire
outside the White House. (He survived).

Beck, whose first book, _We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in
the 1980s_ (2015), was about unfounded allegations of sex abuse and
satanic rituals in daycare centers, recounts in detail the ordeal of a
sixteen-year-old girl named Adama Bah. Born in Guinea and raised in
New York City, Bah was detained for six weeks in 2005 after her
classmate said (or might have said—it’s still unclear) that she
might be a potential suicide bomber. She was repeatedly strip-searched
and interrogated, was forced to wear an ankle bracelet for two and a
half years, and wound up on the no-fly list. Not until 2014 did a
judge declare that list unconstitutional and order the government to
create a process for people to challenge their inclusion on it. Beck
also discusses Rafil Dhafir, a doctor who was investigated for his
charity work in Iraq. He was ultimately convicted of Medicare fraud,
but unproven allegations of links to terrorism were used to justify a
twenty-two-year sentence. Cases like these communicated to millions of
people in the US, Beck writes, that “you are not a full and equal
member of our society. You are neither secure nor safe here.”

_Homeland_ is more of a researched commentary than a reported
chronicle, an approach familiar from Beck’s writing for _n+1_,
where he is an editor._ _He analyzes such disparate texts as Paul
Bremer’s emergency orders governing Iraq after the US invasion
(Bremer once flew in the president of Michigan State University to
explain free market economics to Iraqi ministers and business leaders,
in “a kind of liberal democracy kindergarten”) and advertisements
for trucks and SUVs (one boasted that the “military grade” 2014
F-150 was subjected to “torture-testing”). Some of the book’s
strongest sections focus on the media, whether Peter Jennings’s
marathon broadcast on September 11 or the disclosure of photos of
prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Or consider the superhero franchises of the era. In her brave and
incisive book _The Terror Dream _(2007), on which Beck draws
heavily, Susan Faludi contended that “the deepest psychological
legacy of our original war on terror”—the settling of the
continent through violent conquest of Native American
tribes—“wasn’t the pleasure we now take in dominance but the
original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal.” For
Faludi, Beck writes, original shame was “the taking of English
captives, usually women, by Native Americans” during the seventeenth
century. Beck sees this as a “usefully provocative” reading of a
period in which the world’s superpower, to cover the shame of being
blindsided by the attacks, “did a lot of starting fights and
searching for enemies.” And, echoing Faludi’s analysis of
captivity narratives, Beck finds that in the early 2000s, it was
superhero movies that “converted real, traumatic experiences into
parables of trial and redemption.”

Batman and Iron Man “embodied on the screen…the special ops
soldier’s synthesis of training, human ingenuity, and cutting-edge
technology” along with the idea that sometimes a hero needed to do
unpopular, even illegal things. Under George W. Bush, they are
unrepentant, but by Barack Obama’s time, when _The Dark Knight
Rises_ and the final _Iron Man_ film came out, the heroes are
struggling. Public opinion has turned against Batman; Iron Man
has PTSD. Both films end with apparently self-sacrificing missions,
in which it turns out that the superheroes are actually operating
remotely piloted weapons—mirroring Obama’s decision to increase
drone strikes and reduce troop numbers.

_Homeland_ zigs and zags through the years via close readings and
tangents, alternately profound, fun, and occasionally slightly
tedious, to understand why September 11 produced the effects it did.
One reason the military response ballooned so rapidly, Beck argues, is
that the Bush administration was successful in refashioning the fight
with al-Qaeda into “a larger civilizational mission” in which
Muslims were both “victims to be saved and barbarians to be
eliminated.” Obama could not fix that mission creep with his speech
in Cairo in 2009, when he promised to rein in the most overt abuses
and clash-of-civilizations rhetoric—he succeeded only in infuriating
the right-wingers who thought he was a secret Kenyan Muslim. Obama
could have declared the “war on terror” over after the killing of
bin Laden, but he recommitted the US to the incoherent goals of the
occupation in Afghanistan and a whack-a-mole drone campaign across the
region. At the same time, his administration’s intervention in Libya
and clumsy response to the war in Syria exacerbated the migration
crisis. All of this helped fuel the nativist discontent that Tea
Partiers and then Trump used to gain power.

_Homeland_ effectively recreates the texture of the war as Americans
lived it, and the book builds to a diagnosis: even as we move on to
other crises and other fears, the “war on terror” persists like an
infection that has spread through the body politic. Its two main
symptoms, Beck argues, are a “degraded” notion of citizenship and
the rise of what he calls “impunity culture.” Taken together, Beck
ventures, this can also explain something less precise: “the
intensifying feeling that something has gone wrong with life in the
United States.”

Foreign policy has never been a particularly democratic aspect of
government, but after September 11 it became even less so, through
excessive secrecy, mass surveillance, and crackdowns on whistleblowing
and other acts of dissent. The invasion of Iraq proceeded over the
objection of millions of Americans. Congress completely abdicated its
war powers duties, passing instead the open-ended Authorization for
Use of Military Force (AUMF), a paragraph-long law that only one
representative—Barbara Lee of California—had the courage to vote
against in September 2001. During the Bush and Obama administrations
that law was invoked thirty-seven times to justify military actions.
Beck points out that this amounts to thirty-seven missed opportunities
to question the wisdom of those actions. Beck also ascribes the
corrosion of citizenship to the policing of public space and online
life, the repression of protest, and the provision of surplus military
equipment to police, which resulted in tanks rolling through Ferguson,
Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014.
“Y’all are treating us like ISIS,” one protester told
reporters. The war “fueled a social climate of overriding anxiety
and dread,” Beck writes, “and it made a mockery of the idea that
democratic governments use military violence only as a means of last
resort.”

Impunity is part of this degradation, too. There has been “a
systematic refusal,” Beck writes,

to pursue any measure of accountability for the crimes committed
during a war that most people agree was detrimental to the country’s
international reputation and its capacity for global leadership.

And while “accountability would have been very much in the larger
national interest,” the chance was passed up. Here, as elsewhere in
the book, the arc of disillusionment passes through Obama. His
administration put a public emphasis on legality and process,
presenting the image of cabinet-level Socratic dialogues about
targeted killings and voluminous memos to defend them, in contrast to
John Yoo’s ideological, legally sloppy opinions rationalizing
torture and other executive power grabs under Bush. Obama withdrew
Yoo’s memos but declined to investigate anyone involved with the
torture program, and he supported the CIA in opposing the
declassification of documents, out of concern that their disclosure
would hurt morale at the agency. Apart from mass breaches via Edward
Snowden and WikiLeaks, the Obama administration was so ruthlessly
effective at keeping control of information that his promise to
oversee the “most transparent administration in history” became a
punch line among national security nerds.

You don’t have to look hard for other examples of pervasive
impunity. Murder charges against marines accused of the massacre of
twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005 were dropped, and
as _The New Yorker_’s 2024 podcast _In the Dark_ revealed, the
military hid the gruesome photos of the killings because it had
learned a lesson from Abu Ghraib. The images, from the military’s
perspective, were more dangerous than what they documented. The Obama
administration fought for years against the release of other photos of
prisoner abuse, as well as videos of hunger- striking detainees being
force-fed, on the circular reasoning that the images would “inflame
Muslim sensitivities” and endanger troops overseas. The Supreme
Court established the writ of habeas corpus for prisoners at
Guantánamo, dealing a blow to indefinite detention, but then allowed
it to continue in practice by mostly declining to interfere with lower
courts refusing detainees’ petitions for release. The US
assassinated an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen, then
killed two of his children, and stubbornly insisted all along that it
was justified in doing so.

That said, when Beck writes that “the war itself was impunity
culture on a global scale, waged with no regard for international law,
little regard for the civilian casualties,” I think he misses one
reason it has continued for this long. As Samuel Moyn argues in his
book _Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented
War_ (2021), a defining feature of modern warfare is a professed and
often actual concern for its legality and for civilian casualties. For
all its good intentions, this focus on the law has often obscured more
fundamental questions about war itself. Stephen Preston, general
counsel for the Department of Defense under Obama, said in 2015 that
he had noted a growing “conventional wisdom that the United
States’ use of lethal force in the armed conflict against
al-Qa’ida was ‘unlawful.’ For me, and others in the
Administration, this was deeply disturbing.” It was not the strikes
in Pakistan or Yemen that were disturbing but the widespread
assumption of their illegality. Preston would find Beck’s book
disturbing indeed.

Both impunity and degraded citizenship are on obvious display less
than a year into Trump’s second term. But one of the core
contentions of _Homeland_, which was completed before the 2024
election, is that these are bipartisan problems that predate and will
outlast Trump. Beck has recently argued in _n+1 _that just as Obama
“rationalized and bureaucratized” Bush’s war,

today, it is the Democrats who are selecting which elements of
Trumpist reaction to incorporate into the country’s longer-term
plans, crafting the most draconian immigration legislation in the
country’s history, dropping opposition to the death penalty from
their party platform, and pushing the United States and China toward
full-scale military conflict. And after October 7, it was a Democratic
administration that funded and equipped an Israeli military campaign
of such indiscriminate savagery and destruction.

There are differences with regard to particular policies and
countries, but Democrats and Republicans are united in consensus that
America’s role in the world is a militarized one. This, Beck
maintains, derives from what he thinks is the clearest economic
rationale for the “war on terror,” whose multipronged nature could
never really be explained by the war-for-oil thesis so popular on
protest signs in the early 2000s. In an interview last year
with _Current Affairs_, Beck said that the organizing principle of US
foreign policy “is the defense, maintenance, adjustment,
reestablishment of America’s global economic leadership.” That
economic leadership has been harder to maintain over decades of
slowing growth and widening inequality across the globe. A high-tech,
flexible military not “bound by any conventional definitions of
victory or defeat,” together with a drastically expanded border
security apparatus, is one way to try to insulate Americans from the
effects of the economic order they sit atop—effects like violent
fundamentalism, mass migration, and political instability.

The United States has linked its world-spanning military to economic
security at home since FDR, as the historian Andrew Preston shows
in _Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National
Security_ (2025). The difference now is that the previous basis of US
hegemony—which was that it oversaw the spectacular global growth of
the postwar period—has been removed. Without being able to promise a
share in that growth, the United States has turned, in the words of
the historian Giovanni Arrighi, to “mere domination.”

Beck is dubious that a posture of “militarized intransigence” will
help the US transition into a multipolar world, “one that will be
impossible to navigate without a concerted emphasis on mutually
beneficial diplomacy.” In an epilogue written when Israel’s
assault on Gaza was a few months old, with Biden still the presumptive
Democratic nominee, Beck suggests a few things the US could do to
repair the damage September 11 wrought: repeal the AUMF, reduce the
military’s budget by half, pay reparations to families targeted by
the FBI, and more. And yet he doesn’t believe such things would or
could ever come to pass.

The depressive mood of _Homeland_’s last pages is hard to argue
with, but they cover so much ground that they can threaten to
undermine Beck’s thesis, which is that the “war on terror” can
explain the bulk of the country’s crises. Though I’m inclined to
agree with him on its profound significance, many other things have
gone wrong to get us to where we are.

There is a generational perspective here that I recognize. The book
opens with Beck as a freshman in high school in a Philadelphia suburb
on September 11, 2001. Not far away in Delaware, I was also in the
ninth grade, and like him I remember a muddle of rumors and TV news,
a feeling of foreboding from the adults around me that was borne out
in the next great upheavals of my teens and twenties: the Iraq War
protests, the 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, police
killings that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2016
election. Each of those moments was marked by the question of whether
the US had ever been the country it said it was. Were the crises a
betrayal of American ideals or their embodiment? The beginning of our
political lives coincided with the beginning of the end of American
dominance both in the world and, for a certain strain of young
progressives, in our minds.

While that was traumatic, as Beck argues, it was also an opening for
some to be able to imagine a world in which America was not on top.
That doesn’t have to be an entirely negative vision. Paradoxically,
the best way to rebuild a sense of citizenship may be to diminish the
singular importance of the nation itself—to find a way to feel
oneself a citizen of something other than a country and to work toward
a broader set of interests. It’s possible to see the beginnings of
that in the movements cited throughout Beck’s book, like Indigenous
pipeline protests and international solidarity with Palestine. Even if
America’s leaders cannot adjust to the idea that this is not the
only country in the world, perhaps its people can.

_CORA CURRIER is a writer and editor with a particular interest in war
and surveillance, feminism, and art and politics. She was a reporter
for Serial podcast’s fourth season
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on Guantánamo Bay, and a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Before that, she spent over six years as a reporter and editor with
The Intercept [[link removed]], where she broke
stories on the Snowden
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the FBI
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and CBP
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reported from Italy
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Salvador
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and Guatemala
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Before that, she covered Guantánamo
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and classification for ProPublica
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editorial staff at The New Yorker. She is also an editor at Lux
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_Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New Republic
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New Inquiry
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