Chapter 4

Keep Quiet and Stay in Your Home

It gives me a reason to hate them more.

—visitor at Ground Zero

It wasn’t just New York. Americans built September 11 memorials all over the country. Just southwest of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the architects Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman designed a memorial comprising 184 benches, one for each person who died in the Pentagon and on American Airlines Flight 77. Each bench was engraved with one of the victims’ names and poised above a small, rectangular pool of illuminated water. Naperville, Illinois, dedicated its 9/11 memorial in 2003. It included a steel beam from one of the Twin Towers, perched on top of a pentagon-shaped marble pedestal. Other beams acquired by a church in Albuquerque were blessed by a Roman Catholic bishop, and a church in Palos Hills, Illinois, installed a large piece of the Trade Center in its entryway. Green Bay, Wisconsin, erected two thirty-foot-tall stainless-steel towers next to the Fox River, replacing a statue of a Green Bay Packer catching a football while standing on top of a gigantic football. And a town in New Jersey built life-size statues of a fireman, police officer, emergency medical services worker, stockbroker, and rescue dog, all gathered together on a pedestal engraved with the words “Hope,” “Bravery,” and “Peace.”[1]

For the most part, the organizers behind these memorials worked hard to avoid any suggestion of whatever it was people meant when they said the word “politics.” In New York, suspicions that politics were infiltrating the rebuilding process at Ground Zero were constant stumbling blocks. Earlier plans for the rebuilt World Trade Center complex included not just the September 11 Museum but also a cultural and educational center where people could learn about how tolerance, diversity, and liberty had been achieved throughout hundreds of years of human history. It was the brainchild of Tom Bernstein, the president of a sports and entertainment complex on the west side of Manhattan as well as a personal friend of George W. Bush, and it was going to be called the International Freedom Center (IFC).[2] Spotlighting the highs as well as the lows of humanity’s march toward liberty and justice, the center promised to be a knotty but ultimately inspiring counterpoint to the memories of loss and grief that would forever swirl around the larger site.

Almost as soon as the project was announced, however, family members of some of the first responders voiced outrage. In addition to covering great moments of human achievement and liberation, the proposed IFC would include exhibits on slavery, the Holocaust, and the Native American genocide. To Debra Burlingame, whose brother had been the pilot on American Airlines Flight 77, that was unacceptable. She was furious at the idea that Ground Zero would become “a playground for culture and art,” and a separate group of 9/11 families voiced similar concerns in a petition sent to Governor Pataki. “We, the undersigned,” they wrote, “believe that the World Trade Center Memorial should stand as a solemn remembrance of those who died on September 11th, 2001, and not as a journey of history’s ‘failures’ or as a debate about domestic and foreign policy in the post-9/11 world. Political discussions have no place at the World Trade Center September 11th Memorial.”[3] The proposal was scuttled, and the Freedom Center was never built.

Not everyone held the view that politics should be kept away from memorials. In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the September 11 crash site that people were likeliest to forget, local residents constructed a temporary memorial in advance of the official commemoration of Flight 93. A large wooden cross was erected close to the crash site, and a nearby chain-link fence was hung with hundreds of flags, notes, teddy bears, and bumper stickers. The signs changed from week to week and month to month, but they voiced a much wider range of political sentiment than would have been acceptable to the top-down organizers of the memorials in New York and Washington. One researcher visited the site in 2005 and saw the following messages, among others: “America No. 1, Thank God,” “It’s Not Just a Flag, It’s a Way of Life,” “Red State Insurgency,” “Guns Don’t Kill People, Abortion Clinics Kill People,” and “Back to the Bible or…Back to the Jungle!”[4]

You could find things like this in New York, too, if you knew where to look or just spent enough time hanging around. Back when Ground Zero was still a cleanup zone and then a construction site, it was surrounded by plywood walls to keep onlookers at bay. These walls quickly became repositories of sadness, consolation, and hope, but also anger. One message, written in large black letters, read, “Bomb Afghanistan.” Another person wrote, “Our grief is not a call for war,” to which yet another responded, “Fuck you, you left-wing coward piece of shit.” One writer met an Israeli couple who had come to visit the site during the first winter after the attacks. She asked them why they had come, and one of them said it was “a reason to hate them more.” When the writer asked, “Who?” the woman responded, “Arabs.”[5]

In Shanksville, the publication of plans for the official memorial did not dispel the Islamophobic sentiments that were simmering away at the unofficial site. Instead, it intensified them. In September 2005, the Flight 93 Advisory Commission announced the winners of its design competition, which had attracted more than a thousand entries. Paul and Milena Murdoch would make their design, “Crescent of Embrace,” a reality. With much more room to work with in rural Pennsylvania than officials had in lower Manhattan and Washington, the Murdochs presented a sprawling design that included a tower filled with wind chimes, a black slate wall to mark the place where Flight 93 crashed into the ground, and a crescent-shaped pathway lined with red maple trees, with forty additional groves of trees planted nearby. People liked the tower and the wall, but for one of the jurors, the crescent was a major issue. Tom Burnett Sr., whose son died in the crash, told his fellow jurors that the crescent “goes back centuries as an old-time Islamic symbol.” He thought the shape would turn the memorial into a celebration of the religion that had killed his son and that the jury would “be a laughingstock” if the project were allowed to go forward.[6]

Burnett’s objections were more or less dismissed at the outset, but then a conservative blogger took up the cause. Where Burnett had seen the crescent shape as an unintentional mistake on the architects’ part, Alec Rawls, who maintained a site called Error Theory (and who was also the son of philosopher John Rawls), thought the Murdochs knew exactly what they were doing. He started up a new website, CrescentOfBetrayal.com, where he explained that the crescent shape of the maple-lined pathway was just the tip of the iceberg—the whole memorial was a coded celebration of Islamic extremism. His site alleged that the crescent was geographically oriented toward Mecca, the holy city that observant Muslims face during prayer. He thought the tower of wind chimes had drawn inspiration from “an Islamic sundial” and that the top of the tower resembled a minaret, “from which Muslims are called to prayer.” He then employed numerology to allege that the site was honoring the plane’s four hijackers along with the forty passengers and crew who were killed. Rawls and those who signed his petition demanded that the original design be investigated and that the jury choose a new design that was “not tainted with Islamic symbolism.”[7]

President Bush had gone out of his way after September 11 to say that the war on terror was not a war on Muslims as such. America was going after a certain group of Muslims who espoused violent and extreme beliefs, but that was not the true face of the religion. “Islam,” he said, “is peace.” But people like Burnett and Rawls suspected that Bush was just being polite for the cameras. They thought it was perfectly obvious that Muslims were America’s enemies everywhere in the world, including in America itself. Such views could not be voiced in the mainstream media or polite company, but they were shared by millions of Americans, some of whom worked for police departments, the military, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Muslims living in the United States have been targets ever since.

The war on terror gives the lie to or at least complicates the old expression about how wars “come home,” the idea that the way a country practices military violence overseas will eventually show up in its policing, or how traumatized veterans will wreak havoc in their communities upon their return from foreign battlefields. Well before Barack Obama inaugurated his drone warfare campaign across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, before the Bush administration started agitating for the invasion of Iraq, and even before the United States dropped a single bomb on Afghanistan, the government began rounding up Muslims inside its own borders, and vigilantes across the country sought out mosques to vandalize and people on the streets who appeared to be Muslim or Arab to harass and intimidate. On September 12, 2001, a mob of hundreds of angry white people marched on a mosque in Chicago. Some of them brought weapons, and others chanted “Kill the Arabs” as they walked. The crowd came back the following two nights as well, and more than a hundred police officers had to encircle the neighborhood to keep the mob away from residents. One of the marchers spoke to a reporter and said, “I’m proud to be an American and I hate Arabs and I always have.”[8] Over the following two months, police officers and FBI agents arrested and detained at least twelve hundred and perhaps as many as five thousand Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men. Many of these detainees were not told why they had been arrested, nor were they allowed to communicate with attorneys.[9] All of this happened before U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces drove the Taliban out of Kabul and took the Afghan capital on November 13. The war on terror never “came home.” It started there.

Hate crimes spiked dramatically. On September 15, a Sikh American named Balbir Singh Sodhi was planting flowers outside the gas station he ran in Mesa, Arizona. In accordance with his faith, he wore a turban and a beard. Mistaking him for an Arab Muslim, forty-two-year-old Frank Silva Roque, who worked as a mechanic in a Boeing repair facility, drove his truck to Sodhi’s gas station and shot him five times with a handgun, killing him. Earlier in the day, before the shooting, Roque had donated $75 to a Red Cross fund for the relief workers at Ground Zero.[10] Then he drove to a different gas station and shot at the Lebanese American cashier he found there, though he fortunately missed. Still not satisfied, he moved on to his former home, which a local Afghan family had bought, and shot at the outside of the house. He bragged about the killing afterward at a bar, reportedly saying, “They’re investigating the murder of a turban-head down the street.” When he was arrested the next day, he was still defiant. “I stand for America all the way!” he yelled. “I’m an American. Go ahead. Arrest me and let those terrorists run wild!”[11]

The day Frank Roque was arrested, a thirty-one-year-old white supremacist named Mark Stroman, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, walked into a Dallas convenience store called Mom’s Grocery and killed its forty-six-year-old owner, Waqar Hasan, who had emigrated from Pakistan and moved to the area earlier that year. Hasan was grilling hamburgers when he was killed. Five days later, Stroman shot a Bangladeshi immigrant, Rais Bhuiyan, at a gas station, and two weeks after that he killed an Indian immigrant named Vasudev Patel at a different gas station. After his arrest, he told police that his sister had died in the North Tower on September 11, though no evidence was ever found to support his claim. He said he had done no more than what every other American wanted to. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Bhuiyan, the only one of his victims to survive, spent the rest of Stroman’s life protesting his would-be-killer’s death sentence, going so far as to sue in an attempt to stop the execution. When asked why he was trying to save Stroman’s life, Bhuiyan said, “I was raised very well by my parents and teachers. They raised me with good morals and strong faith.” He said that contemplating Stroman’s impending execution made him “very emotional and very sad, and makes me want to do more.”[12]

In 2003, a thirty-year-old New Yorker named Larme Price rampaged through Brooklyn and Queens over a period of seven weeks, shooting five men point-blank in the head, four of whom died. All of them were immigrants, though only one was from the Middle East. In California, someone tagged a mosque in Conejo Valley with the message “Jesus is the Lord and Allah is the Devil.” A man drove his car through the front of an Islamic center in Cleveland, Ohio, and in Virginia bricks were thrown through the windows of an Islamic bookstore. In the six calendar years preceding September 11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation never recorded more than 32 anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States in a given year. In 2001, that number rose to 481, and over the following seven years it never dropped below 100.[13] Muslim and Arab Americans faced a national, slow-moving pogrom after September 11, and in the years since they have never known anything like the relative peace they enjoyed during the twentieth century. The version of America that existed for those communities before September 11 is gone.

The vigilante violence and government roundups constituted a national tragedy for Muslim and Arab communities in the United States, but they also revealed the government’s hysterical determination to exaggerate the scale of the terrorist threat rather than focusing on the threats that really existed. Again and again, immigrants who committed minor violations to remain in the country were treated as sleeper cells awaiting activation, and unremarkable criticisms of the country’s foreign policy were interpreted as the beginning of a plot to bring down the government. And in many cases, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies made up terrorist plots out of whole cloth and then used paid undercover agents to persuade innocent Muslims to participate in them, carrying out a campaign of mass entrapment that continued for years.

For Muslims and Arabs themselves, one of the most devastating effects of these campaigns was that it became difficult and sometimes impossible to participate in civic life—to speak your mind freely in a student group, attend public discussions at a mosque, respond to a bigot on a Facebook thread about politics, or even argue with someone who was being a jerk in public. With respect to the agencies that carried out these campaigns, however, the most pressing question is, why bother? The government didn’t need to invent terrorists living in upstate New York in order to justify its war; real terrorists had already destroyed lower Manhattan and attacked the Pentagon. The worst attack in the country’s history hardly needed to be padded out with a handful of imaginary small-time plots to vandalize a synagogue or mail a pipe bomb to an Army base.

The first decade of the war on terror is filled with liberal commentators accusing the Bush administration of cynically exploiting the country’s fears in order to drum up support for military action, but it seems just as likely, if not more so, that exaggerating the terrorist threat responded to a genuine internal need rather than a fictional external one. In the context of the country’s longer history and mythology, Americans have good reason to be anxious about what nonwhites might have planned for them. The United States was founded on the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans, and it was built on the backs of enslaved Africans who still function as the country’s permanent underclass. America’s whole mythology, from Mary Rowlandson down through the cowboys and the Texas Rangers, is an attempt to justify that dispossession and to manage the attendant guilt that is always trying to make its way to the surface. There is a grim relief, a perverse wish fulfillment, in convincing yourself that the punishment you’ve long dreaded has finally arrived.

After September 11, Muslim and Arab Americans paid the price for their country’s uncontrollable anxieties. In order for Americans to feel that the war was justified, the enemy needed to be omnipresent, vicious, irrational, devoid of scruples, and capable of bringing down the country from the inside. When it turned out that actual Muslim and Arab Americans were not that kind of enemy, the government fantasized the enemy into being. The result was the steady exclusion of Muslims and Arabs from public life in the United States, a degradation of citizenship that would eventually be expanded to other populations as well.

On the “Hate Crimes Statistics” page of its official website, the FBI lists a number of ways in which its data sets might be useful to the wider public. Most of them are matter-of-fact—“supply the media with credible information,” “help researchers in determining trends in hate crimes”—but one of them suggests that the bureau sympathizes with victims and wants to help end their persecution: “show hate crime victims that they are not alone.”[14] This is ironic, because it would be hard to think of an institution that did more to isolate and persecute Muslim Americans during the war on terror than the FBI.

In late October 2001, Congress and President Bush passed and signed the USA PATRIOT Act, which is partially styled in all-capital letters because it is an impressively torturous acronym: the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. The bill granted law enforcement expansive new powers. It allowed government agents to make lists of organizations they suspected of supporting domestic terrorism, and to jail and deport anyone who materially supported those organizations, all on the basis of evidence that could be kept secret. It also allowed them to jail anyone who committed a crime that, in the government’s view, was intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “influence the policy of a government by intimidation.” Citizens and noncitizens alike could be detained as enemy combatants, held without bail and without access to lawyers. These people could be tried before military tribunals as opposed to the normal criminal courts. And finally, the bill authorized the government to build detention camps, at which people could be held indefinitely.[15]

The immediate post-9/11 dragnet was swift and expansive, and must count as one of the most shameful episodes in the country’s history. The more than twelve hundred detentions didn’t result in a single terrorism conviction. What they did instead was rip hundreds of immigrants away from their families and lives on the basis of minor violations. The detainees’ families often had no idea where their loved ones had been taken or why. Many of them didn’t see their husbands, brothers, and fathers—almost all of those detained were men—for years. Some of them, in cases that ended in deportation, never saw them again (President Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the southern border was by no means an innovation). And while the FBI never again matched the volume of detentions and deportations that it managed in the months after September 11, the practice continued for years, without the mass protest mobilization that greeted Trump’s Islamophobic policies starting in 2017.

One of the people eventually caught up in the FBI’s longer-term dragnet was a sixteen-year-old New Yorker named Adama Bah. She was a sophomore at Heritage High School in Manhattan. She’d been born in Koubia, a small town of just a couple thousand people in the West African country of Guinea. She came to the United States with her mother when she was a toddler, and eventually the rest of her family joined them. She had no memories of Guinea, and New York was her home. She lived with her parents; her brothers, Abdoul, Mohammed, and Saydu; and her sister, Mariama. In a documentary made about her case in 2011, two things are obvious: The family is very poor, and the siblings are very close. They joke and fight a lot. “The only thing Mohammed loves,” Adama says, “is GameCube and Game Boy, and he loves Muslims.” Of Mariama, all Abdoul has to say is, “She dance too much.”[16]

Adama’s father, also named Mohammed, wasn’t all that religiously observant, but after she graduated from junior high, he sent her to an Islamic boarding school. It was too strict for her, and she missed her home, but she liked that she was able to learn about her religion. “They taught how a woman should act, how a man should act, everything. The hijab and the face veil was a choice for the girls.” After returning to New York and public school, she wore a niqab for a few months, along with colored contacts for a bit of pizzazz. “If you can’t see my face, look at my nice eyes!” she said. There were lots of jokes with her classmates about the mystery of what she looked like, which she remembers as good-natured and not hostile. Then she switched out the niqab for an abaya, and her high school friends said, “Oh, you’re not ugly! You have nice teeth.”[17] Adama remembers that on September 11 she was confused. “Who is this Osama bin Laden guy?” she thought. “What is he up to? Why would he do this?” None of her friends knew who bin Laden was, either, but one of them made a joke that stuck with her. “Your name is very close to his name,” they said. “Adama, Osama.”[18]

One Thursday morning in March 2005, FBI agents, along with police and Department of Homeland Security officers, appeared at her family’s apartment at dawn. They woke everybody up, herded the family into the living room, and searched the apartment. After a while, Adama’s father entered the apartment in handcuffs; the police had arrested him at the mosque. He told his family that they were going to take him away. Adama saw the police take her mother, Aissatou, into the kitchen, and she heard them yell at her. Aissatou didn’t speak much English, but Adama heard the agents yell, “We’re going to deport you and your whole family!” Adama had suspected for a while that not everything was in order with her father’s immigration papers, so his arrest wasn’t a total shock, but then they told her to pick a pair of sneakers and put them on. “You’re coming with us,” they said. She didn’t know where they were going, and neither did her parents.

They put Adama and her father in a car. Once they arrived at the jail, Adama was put in a cell by herself, though she could still see her father. Then she was interrogated. The agents had told her father that he needed to sign a form consenting to their interviewing Adama, who was underage. It didn’t seem as though he had a choice in the matter, so he signed it. For her part, Adama didn’t know she had the right to a lawyer or to remain silent, and the people interviewing her never mentioned it, so she tried to be as honest as possible. When asked how she felt about President Bush, she said, “I don’t like him.”[19]

It was at the jail that Adama learned for the first time that she wasn’t a legal resident of the United States. “I didn’t know I wasn’t an American,” she said, “until I was sixteen and in handcuffs.”[20] It was at this point that her father, who had to his detriment been overly accommodating to the government agents so far, decided the stakes were too high not to resist. An interrogator handed them a document laying out the process for seeing a Guinean consular officer. Mohammed could read English, but he asked his daughter to pretend to be translating the document into Pular, their native language. Then he told her, “Whatever you do, do not say you can go back to your country. They will circumcise you there.” Female genital mutilation was common in Guinea. Adama’s mother had been subjected to it as a girl, and she and Mohammed feared it so much for their daughters that they never returned to Guinea, not even for a short visit.

As Adama was being fingerprinted, she saw a girl from her mosque. Tashnuba Hayder was also sixteen, and like Adama she’d been arrested by FBI and Homeland Security agents that morning. While they knew each other well enough to say “hello,” they weren’t friends. The sight of Tashnuba threw Adama into a panic. “What the hell is she doing here?” she thought. “Who am I gonna see next?” As Adama’s interrogation proceeded, she began to figure out what was going on. The agents said that the founder of Tashnuba’s religious group at the mosque was suspected of terrorist involvement. Adama wasn’t a part of the religious group, but she knew about it, and that sounded crazy to her. “The study group…was all women,” she said. “So it was women learning about religion, women’s empowerment, why we cover, how we do the prayer, when to pray, things like that.”[21] She said it was mostly a group for converts, people new to Islam who needed to be shown the ropes. It made no sense to her that anyone would try to recruit jihadis out of a group of people who barely knew which direction they were supposed to face while praying.

But the FBI agents said that Tashnuba had written down Adama’s name on a list of potential suicide bombers. That was a shock to Adama. Why would someone she barely knew identify her as a terrorist recruit? She would later learn that the agents told Tashnuba the inverse, that Adama had written her name down on a list. The FBI and Homeland Security never produced any evidence that either girl had produced such a list,[22] and today it is still unclear why the two girls were detained in the first place. The agents did their best to intimidate Adama, telling her they’d go through her computer and find whatever it was she was hiding there. Adama knew there was nothing on her computer that was even remotely connected to terrorism, but the interrogations could make you feel crazy, as though maybe you really were dangerous and had tricked yourself along with everyone else. She kept having to remind herself, “Wait a minute, I’m not this person. What are they talking about?”[23] Then the interrogators harassed her about choosing to cover, just as her schoolmates had, though with more hostility.

When Adama emerged from the interrogation room, her father was gone. They told her he was going to see an immigration judge that day, but they wouldn’t tell her anything beyond that. Then they put Adama and Tashnuba in a black Escalade—years later, Adama said she still found it traumatic to see black Escalades on the street—and drove off, first to another facility in Manhattan and then to a juvenile detention center in Pennsylvania. Upon arrival, a guard told the two girls that they would be strip-searched. When they protested, saying it was against their religion, the guard said, “It’s either that or we hold you down.” Tashnuba went first, and then it was Adama’s turn. She recalls crying the whole time. “It must be against some law for you to do this to me,” she said. “No, it’s not,” the guard replied. “You no longer have rights.” When she was finished, she was given some new clothes to wear and was told she had five minutes to shower. “I knew I only had five minutes,” she said, “but I just sat at the corner of the shower and held myself and cried.”

I was thinking, I cannot believe what I just went through. I was just crying and crying and crying. I don’t know how long, but then I just told myself that I had to get up. I washed myself really quickly. I’ve never felt like I needed God more than I did on this day. So, I did ghusl, which is like a special shower for prayer. I prayed, “God, you’ve got to hear me for this one. I’ve never asked for anything that I desperately needed but this one.”[24]

After she dressed, the guards took away her headscarf. She and Tashnuba stayed up late that night in their cell, getting to know each other and marveling at their predicament, laughing and then crying and then laughing again. It seemed like a cruel and elaborate prank.

The next day, Adama was told to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance before breakfast. She refused. “I’m like, ‘Fuck the American flag. I’m not saluting it.’ ” Soon after, The New York Times published an article recounting the girls’ arrest, including the FBI’s suspicions of terrorist involvement. The news got around to Adama’s guards, who then increased the frequency of the strip searches to three times a day. This made Adama furious. She wanted to make herself repulsive so that the guards would leave her alone. Using the bathroom, she’d think, “I hope I stink this place up, I pray that my shit would make this place close down or something.” She left toilet paper stuck to her ass as a nasty surprise for the guard to find when it was time for the next search. She even tried not wiping at all. She was trying to force the guards to share in her degradation.

Adama was held at the juvenile detention center for six weeks. For the first three, her family had no idea where she was. Once they located her, a lawyer was hired and sent to the detention center to work on her release. That took another three and a half weeks. Adama turned seventeen in prison. When the release was finally secured, the terms stipulated that she would have to wear an ankle bracelet twenty-four hours a day. The FBI and Homeland Security seemed to have forgotten all about their prior belief that Adama was an aspiring suicide bomber, but they still wanted to pursue a case against her for being in the country illegally. As she left the detention center on the day of her release, a guard called her a “fucking n***** terrorist.”[25] She also said goodbye to Tashnuba, who, along with her mother, was also in the country illegally. Tashnuba and her mother were deported to Bangladesh immediately after her release, and Adama never saw her again.

Adama’s classmates were delighted to see her return to school, but that reunion was short-lived. After sixteen months in prison, Mohammed Bah was deported to Guinea in 2006. Adama saw him only once before he left, in a brief, wrenching visit at the New Jersey facility where he was being held. He told her to take care of the family in his absence. “It’s your job,” he said, “you’re the next person in line.” Adama remembers her mother telling her, “It’s all your fault, it’s all your fault,” and how upsetting that was to hear. But she tried to do what her father had asked of her. With her mother unable to work, Adama dropped out of school and took whatever babysitting and cleaning jobs she could find. She says that at certain points the family starved: “For days there would be no food in the house.” A chance meeting with a social worker informed them that the family could apply for public assistance. That would have been good to know from the outset, but “nobody tells you about this stuff,” Adama says. Not wanting her siblings to be deprived of the things she was being deprived of, Adama took sole responsibility for making money, working three, four, even five jobs over the course of a single day, and then racing home to make her 10:00 p.m. curfew. Miss it even once, she’d been warned, and you’ll go back to jail. Adama and her friends drifted away from one another; they could no longer relate to her experiences, nor she to theirs. Her childhood was over.

She wore the ankle bracelet, which constantly made her heel hurt, for two and a half years. She and her mother attended immigration hearing after immigration hearing in the hope of Adama’s being allowed to stay in the United States, but the decision kept getting postponed. In the meantime, someone at Child Protective Services caught wind of the Bah family’s poverty and started an investigation, meaning that Adama’s siblings now also had to worry about being sent into foster care. The hostility with which the family was treated by their adoptive country is breathtaking. For a time, Adama’s younger brother was sent to live with an activist in Rockville, Maryland, so as to avoid foster care. He hated it. Suburban Maryland was boring, and he missed his siblings terribly. “I’d rather fight with Abdoul,” he said.[26]

Adama finally got asylum in 2007, at her seventh and final hearing. An immigration judge agreed she would be at risk of mutilation were she to be sent back to Guinea, and she was granted an employment authorization card. Looking down and smiling after her ankle bracelet was removed, she said, “My feet look funny.” She had decided to wear her headscarf to the hearing. This wasn’t a foregone conclusion. She’d removed it before a previous hearing, hoping the judge would be more inclined to let her stay if she didn’t look so Muslim. “But after I took it off, I was still treated like shit,” she said. “So I went back, I wore my head scarf. This time I knew why and it was not coming off again. It’s not me. I am a Muslim woman.” She told the filmmaker who was documenting her experiences that while she’d previously been angry almost all of the time, she was now starting to accept that “God let it happen that way.”

That may be, but it’s hard to avoid feeling that Adama’s anger is one of the reasons she survived her ordeal at all, and she kept it in reserve, ready for deployment, as the case continued to follow her over the next several years. In 2009, she tried to board a flight to Texas, where she and several friends were going to celebrate her asylum. When she arrived at the gate, an airline representative told her that she was on the federal government’s no-fly list. She was put in handcuffs, taken to a back room, and held for thirteen hours. The next year, she tried to fly to Chicago with a family she was working for as a nanny. Worried about a repeat of the prior year’s debacle, she had called her lawyer beforehand, and he had assured her there should be no problems. But the same thing happened again, and she lost out on the money she was going to make on the trip. “Something in me just triggered,” she said. “I told myself, ‘I’m done. I’m tired. I am not going to go through this again.’ I told my lawyers, ‘I want to sue these motherfuckers,’ and so we filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and Director of the Terrorist Screening Center Timothy Healy.”[27]

The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, and Bah was one of thirteen Muslim plaintiffs, including four veterans, none of whom had ever been charged with any crime related to terrorism. In 2014, a federal judge ruled that the government’s no-fly list was unconstitutional, ordering that procedures be implemented that would allow people to challenge their inclusion.[28] This was some measure of justice, but not the full one. No court could undo the deportation of her father. No judge could restore to Adama the days and nights she spent desperately trying to support her family instead of finishing her high school education and becoming an adult alongside her peers. No legislature could un-leak the government document that baselessly identified her as a potential suicide bomber. No jury could erase her memories of being shoved into a black Escalade and then subjected to strip searches. The time Adama spent under the watchful and punitive eye of the FBI and the federal judiciary destroyed her childhood, violated her human rights, and permanently altered the trajectory of her life, erasing pathways and opportunities that might otherwise have been available to her. And although the government’s years of surveillance failed to identify any terrorist or uncover any plot, it does not follow that the FBI’s efforts were wasted. The story’s “happy ending” notwithstanding, the United States successfully delivered a message to Adama and people like her: You are not a full and equal member of our society. You are neither secure nor safe here. Whatever dreams and aspirations you might have cultivated as a child must now take a backseat to the smaller dream of staying out of trouble. The government delivered this message over and over and over after September 11, as though it wanted to make sure the lesson stuck.

What’s most striking about the federal government’s detention and surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans in the period immediately following September 11 is how few terrorists they managed to catch. Hundreds and potentially thousands of people like Adama Bah were arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts, whether because they had made a donation to the wrong charity or because they were seen hanging out at the wrong bookstore and chatting with people there. In these early cases, however, the evidence connecting the government’s suspects to terrorism either collapsed under the slightest scrutiny or just never appeared all. At this point, the government should have released the detainees, offered public apologies, and paid out civil damages. Instead, prosecutors and judges simply changed tack, pretending that terrorism had never been the primary concern and focusing instead on violations of immigration law to push for deportation. A program billed at the outset as a first line of defense against terrorists operating inside the United States turned out in practice to be little more than a new way for the government to persecute its immigrant population, particularly those immigrants who practiced Islam.

This kind of tool was genuinely useful to the government for a number of reasons that will be discussed at length later, but it still presented a problem. The premise of the war on terror was that Islamist extremists threatened Americans around the world and at home. So where, then, were the domestic terrorists? The war could be seen as legitimate only if the threat it claimed to combat was real. Law enforcement’s early failures to secure a single terrorism conviction seemed like a bad omen, but as the war progressed toward the end of its first decade, the government’s record on prosecuting domestic terrorism appeared to be improving. In 2010, the Department of Justice released a list of all the terrorism and terrorism-related convictions that had been obtained since September 11. The list included 403 entries. Suspects had been charged with crimes ranging from making false statements and passport fraud all the way up to conspiring to kill members of the U.S. military, and the government had obtained convictions across the country, in New York, Florida, Texas, Minnesota, Virginia, and elsewhere. Some defendants had been sentenced to nothing more than time already served, while others were put away for life.[29] Taken at face value, the list was an impressive document. To go by its calculations, the federal government was disrupting domestic terrorist plots at a rate of nearly four extremists every month.

In 2014, however, two civil rights lawyers analyzed all of the cases on the list and concluded that the government’s successes in prosecuting domestic terrorism were almost entirely fictional. They found that federal law enforcement had decided to make up for a lack of real terror plots by essentially inventing them, sometimes out of whole cloth. In hundreds of cases, the FBI sent undercover informants into mosques, Islamic bookstores, and community centers to strike up conversations with potential targets. These targets were not people the government suspected of having already committed any crime, which meant the informants were tasked with proposing a fictional terror plot and then persuading them to participate, needling and cajoling their POIs, or “persons of interest,” over weeks, months, and even years. POIs tended to fit a particular profile. People who had criticized U.S. foreign policy, whether online or in a mosque, were good targets. So was anyone who expressed even the slightest interest in jihad, or who conducted internet searches on weapons or combat training. Even in the absence of these specific activities, a relatively unattached, young Muslim man could make an excellent target, particularly if he needed money. By systematically combing through Muslim and Arab communities around the country, these informants carried out a campaign of mass entrapment. It was as though law enforcement, in the absence of real terrorist threats, needed to imagine them into being on the country’s behalf.

The two lawyers, Stephen Downs and Kathy Manley, used the term “preemptive prosecution” to identify terror convictions that had been wholly or partially invented by law enforcement. They defined preemptive prosecution as follows:

Preemptive prosecution…is a law enforcement strategy, adopted after 9/11, to target and prosecute individuals or organizations whose beliefs, ideology, or religious affiliations raise security concerns for the government. The actual criminal charges are pretexts, manufactured by the government to incarcerate the targets for their beliefs. These pretexts include:

Using this definition as a starting point, Downs and Manley found that the DOJ’s list of convictions was much less impressive than it seemed. They concluded that nearly three-quarters of the convictions were based on “suspicion of the defendant’s perceived ideology and not his/her criminal activity,” with another fifth involving the government inflating and manipulating instances of minor, non-terrorist criminal activity until they could win convictions on terrorism charges. That meant that just 5.8 percent of the cases on the list involved people who had embarked on terrorism-related crimes on their own and that the threat of domestic terrorism was largely a hysterical fiction.

Many of these convictions were obtained only because the government engaged in what is commonly understood as entrapment. The Department of Justice itself is very clear that entrapment is not a legitimate method of criminal investigation, stating on its website that “entrapment is a complete defense to a criminal charge” (emphasis added).[31] But federal prosecutors successfully carved out an exception for themselves in cases involving terrorism, arguing that defendants were ideologically “predisposed” to participate in terrorism even if they had nothing to do with formulating the plot and acquiring the materials necessary to put it into action. Unless a defendant had explicitly and affirmatively stated that they wanted nothing to do with the undercover informant’s scheme, judges would not allow their attorneys to mount an entrapment defense. So long as the FBI’s agents could keep stringing their targets along, it didn’t matter how reluctant the suspect’s participation was, it didn’t matter how many times he tried to minimize his involvement, and it didn’t even matter if he barely had a clue about what was going on: A conviction was all but certain.

Without this loophole, which rendered the entrapment defense functionally useless, prosecutors in many of these cases would have been laughed out of court. To give one example, in 2003, American soldiers in Iraq found the name, address, and phone number of an Albany imam, Yassin Aref, written on a piece of paper in a bombed-out encampment. Aref was a Kurdish refugee who had fled Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Suspicious of Aref’s ideology, the government carried out a sting operation, sending an informant into the mosque under the cover name “Malik.” First, Malik persuaded a member of Aref’s mosque, Mohammed Hossain, to accept a loan so that he could improve his rental properties, telling him that “the money for the loan came from the sale of a missile to a terrorist group.”[32] Hossain told Malik that he had no interest in terrorism, but he needed the money, and he took the loan. Then Hossain asked Aref to witness the loan. This was Aref’s only involvement with the whole scheme, and the government never produced evidence that Aref had any idea that the funds were derived from terrorism. The FBI even included a fake missile as part of the sting, which, as a weapon of mass destruction, would allow prosecutors to seek a harsher sentence. But the bureau never showed the missile to Aref, because they were pretty sure he would get scared and back out completely if they did. Neither of the two targets had any interest in supporting terrorism or killing Americans: One needed a loan for his work as a landlord, and the other wanted to do a favor for a congregant. Both were sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

In addition to preying on people’s good intentions, the government could exploit their vulnerability. Shortly after September 11, the FBI sent an undercover informant named Mohamed Alanssi into Abdulrahman Farhane’s House of Knowledge Islamic bookstore on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Farhane was the father of six children, and Alanssi had told the FBI that he held radical views on Islam. Alanssi struck up conversations with Farhane and told him that he was looking for a way to send money to Islamic fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Farhane told Alanssi that he would not personally be able to help, but he introduced him to a man named Tarik Shah. Shah, Farhane told Alanssi, could help get the money out of the country.

Tarik Shah was a jazz bassist and martial artist, and radical politics was part of his familial inheritance. His father was a lieutenant with Malcolm X, working out of the No. 7 Temple in Harlem, and as an adult Shah adopted the great man’s religious commitment as well as the Black Panthers’ belief in the importance of teaching Black people how to defend themselves in a racist society. His life in music wasn’t any kind of spectacular success, but it was a real career. He toured Europe with the famous singer Betty Carter in the 1980s, and he also played with the pianist Ahmad Jamal, the singer Abbey Lincoln, and the towering saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. In 1993, as part of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, he played at Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball. When he wasn’t on tour and playing gigs, he taught martial arts at his Expansion of Knowledge Center in Harlem. Like much of the Black Panthers’ work in the middle of the twentieth century, Shah’s martial arts instruction was simultaneously a political project, a consciousness-raising exercise, and a community service. He taught everyone from children to police officers. He also sold homemade pies out of the back of his car.[33]

Alanssi spent three years trying to get Shah to do something illegal without any success, a protracted and consistent string of failures for which the FBI paid him about $100,000.[34] At that point, the bureau could have reasonably concluded that Shah simply wasn’t interested in helping terrorists, but instead they sent in a second informant to work on him, a man named Saeed Torres, who went by the name Shariff. (For his part, Alanssi became so disillusioned and frustrated by his work with the FBI that in 2004 he stood outside the White House and set himself on fire.) Torres was a former Black Panther himself. In an interview, he recalled joining the party in the spring of 1967. “I was a little fly kid wearing fly clothes,” he said. “I was interested in what they were saying: ‘What the government can’t supply we take upon ourselves to get to the people.’ ” He wasn’t an informant then, because the Panthers, he said, killed informants. He became a Muslim in the early 1970s, drawn to the same things that had appealed to Shah. “What drew me to Islam was more of that militant aspect,” he said. “Not a jihadist but more of a stand up, take no bullshit.” By the 1980s, the Panthers’ revolutionary project was much diminished from its glory days, but Torres was still part of a neighborhood security council, walking the streets and driving off drug dealers during the height of the crack epidemic. “I was an asset to the community,” he said. “I loved it. I loved it.”

Then he did something stupid. He robbed a New York City subway booth. He says he committed the robbery not out of petty greed but because he was a “revolutionary activist,” describing the places he targeted—post offices and banks were also on the list—as “institutions to be appropriated for our cause.”[35] The money from the theft was given back to the community, but Torres got caught, and he was charged with grand larceny, impersonation of a New York City transit cop, and possession of a weapon. As he faced down a twenty-year sentence, the FBI approached him and said they could ensure his early release if he took a job as an informant. Torres took the deal, got out in 2000, and went to work. To keep his conscience clean, he told himself that he was helping to make amends for his prior mistakes by serving on the front lines of the war on terror.[36]

As “Shariff,” Torres took a gradual approach in getting close to Shah. First he took bass lessons at his house, three times a week. Shariff never learned all that much about playing bass, but the two men struck up a rapport, and because Shah clearly loved to talk, Shariff could get by with little more than the monosyllabic responses that were required to keep Shah in the flow of his own speechifying. Shah bragged about his martial arts prowess, and he waxed eloquent on the West’s persecution of Muslims, both around the world and at home. Shariff recorded all of it. Eventually, Shariff told Shah that he needed a place to stay, so Shah vouched for Shariff to his mother, who rented him a room in Shah’s home. Eventually, Shariff learned that Shah had a major financial problem and no good way of solving it. Shah owed more than $70,000 in unpaid child support. He’d been making payments, but he couldn’t keep up, and in 2000 the government had suspended his passport over the arrears. For a jazz musician who made his money touring, this was a disaster. The United States might have been the center of the jazz universe through the end of the 1960s, but as American audiences left jazz behind for other genres in the last decades of the twentieth century, the greater level of interest in jazz among European listeners, combined with the generous subsidies that European governments provided to the arts, meant that performing in Europe was just about the only way a non-superstar jazz musician could make a decent living. By revoking his passport because of his failure to make child support payments, the government all but ensured that Shah would never be able to make child support payments.

Shah dreamed of opening up his own martial arts training center, but he hadn’t been able to find a suitable space, and even if he did find one, he didn’t have the money to get it into shape. This gave Shariff the window he needed. He said that he had a space Shah could use, an empty warehouse building in Queens. He’d intended to use it for drumming and dancing lessons, but the dancers didn’t like rehearsing on the warehouse’s cold floors in their bare feet. Shah was welcome to it. He began to make plans. Wrestling mats could be brought in to deal with the concrete floors, and the warehouse was big enough to train people in all sorts of disciplines, from wrestling and jujitsu to sword fighting and archery.[37]

A short while later, Shariff came to Shah with another proposal. He said two friends—one from Saudi Arabia and one from Iran—were looking for a self-defense expert, and he asked Shah whether he’d be willing to meet one of them. Shah said he was. Shariff and Shah traveled to Plattsburgh, New York, to meet a man Shah thought was a terrorist recruiter (in reality, another undercover FBI agent). Shah listened to what the undercover agent had to say, bragged about his mastery of knife fighting, and ranted against the American police state. The meeting ended without any concrete plans being made.[38] The following month, agent and target traveled to Florida, to meet a doctor friend of Shah’s. The FBI hoped to get him involved as well, but when Shariff and Shah arrived at Dr. Sabir’s home, the physician was not there. Then a year went by, with Shah going about his daily life and doing nothing to advance the plot. Finally, in May 2005, Dr. Sabir flew to New York to visit Shah, and the two of them met with the “terrorist recruiter.” He asked them to take an oath pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda, which they did. Shah and Sabir were arrested the following week.

Neither of the two men had actually provided any support or services to terrorists. Shah never taught a martial arts class to al-Qaeda recruits, and Dr. Sabir never treated any wounded Taliban fighters. As he sat in jail and considered the charge against him, however—a single count of conspiracy—Shah knew that his prospects for avoiding a guilty verdict were slim. He had spent a lot of time bragging during his conversations with Shariff, talking about moves that could cause someone to “drown in their own blood” and demonstrating how to use his upright bass as a weapon: “All I’ve got to do is, pop, flick it like, boom, move out the way,” he said. “Flip, pop, pop, right in the middle of your head.”[39] That kind of boasting can be heard every day in any martial arts studio in the country, but it wasn’t going to sound good in the context of a terrorism trial, nor would the fact that he’d told Shariff that his life as a jazz musician would provide the “greatest cover” for his participation in the plot.[40]

The son of a Black Panther had been seduced by the fantasy of putting his fighting skills to use against the state that had persecuted his family and community for his entire life, and the FBI, discovering how easily Shah could be enchanted by his own visions of rebellion, had pounced. His vision might have been modest—America wasn’t going to be brought to its knees just because some jihadists learned jujitsu in a Queens warehouse—but it was enough to bring criminal charges. For the government, Shah’s Black nationalist politics provided all the “predisposition” they needed to send him to prison. Believing he would never receive a fair trial, Shah pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Dr. Sabir had more faith in the criminal justice system and decided to stand trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years.

If apolitical children like Adama Bah and radicals like Tarik Shah could be targeted by the post-9/11 crackdown on Muslim and Arab life in the United States, so could people whose professional and political activities were squarely within the mainstream. Until 2003, Rafil Dhafir’s life looked like a textbook illustration of the American dream. Born in Iraq, Dhafir graduated from Baghdad University’s College of Medicine in 1971 and immigrated to the United States the following year so that he could complete his medical studies. He was intellectually and professionally ambitious. He came to the United States because he’d been told it was “the best place in the world” to study medicine, and he chose to specialize in cancer research rather than cardiology because of how much work there was to be done in the field. “In those days there were no drugs available, nothing,” he said.[41] He did a fellowship in oncology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and then he taught for a while at Texas Tech in Amarillo. Eventually, he wound up in Fayetteville, New York, just east of Syracuse. He opened a private practice in Rome, a forty-mile drive from his house, because the town had no oncology practice to speak of. He could have gone to work in Syracuse—it was closer and he would have made more money—but he wanted to provide help where help was needed. When his patients couldn’t afford treatment, he treated them anyway and asked them to pay what they could. Dhafir also established himself at the center of Muslim life in Syracuse. He spent lots of time at the Islamic Society of Central New York, even becoming its spiritual leader for about seven years when the center was unable to find a full-time imam. His family, his work, and his religion were the three suns around which Dhafir’s life orbited. Over the first thirty years of his time in the United States, he conformed to the immigrant ideal in every respect.

In the early 1990s, Dhafir’s personal life collided with world events. After defeating but not deposing Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War, the United States persuaded the United Nations Security Council to impose a harsh sanctions regime on Iraq. The sanctions banned almost all forms of trade with Iraq, and those categories of trade that weren’t banned entirely, such as medicine and food, were strictly regulated. The precise extent of their impact has been hotly debated during the twenty-first century—one report said the sanctions killed more than half a million children, while other surveys arrived at a much lower figure—but there is no doubt that life under sanctions was devastating for Iraqis. Materials commonly used in the production of agricultural or medical equipment were kept out of the country because of the possibility that they would be used to make weapons. Restrictions on manufacturing equipment made it difficult or impossible for Iraqis to repair the damage caused by the war, meaning that bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, and water treatment facilities were left useless. Depleted uranium from bombs used during the war also worked its way into the food and water supplies, and within a couple years of the war’s end, cancer rates in Iraq were going up at a horrible rate.

Having left Iraq in order to learn how to treat cancer, Dhafir felt he should do something to assist the people he’d left behind. He founded a charity called Help the Needy, and he began to raise money for food, clothing, and medical supplies to be sent to Iraq. The charity’s aims were not political. Dhafir hated Saddam, but he did not want his charity work to bump up against the geopolitics of America’s postwar blockade of Iraq. He just wanted to get aid to where it was needed. The charity was small and understaffed, with Dhafir and a few friends handling many different jobs themselves. A woman they hired as a tax preparer eventually refused to keep working with them because of how sloppy she found the charity’s administrative practices, claiming that Help the Needy told donors their deductions would be tax-deductible before it had even applied for tax-exempt status.[42] This would eventually come to haunt Dhafir and his colleagues, but through the 1990s and the first couple years of the new century the work seemed to be going well. Help the Needy raised several million dollars and used an intermediary in Jordan to get the money to Iraq. They focused particularly on sending money around Ramadan and Eid so that people would have enough food to put on proper celebrations.[43] Despite the charity’s disorganization, Help the Needy representatives did ask U.S. government officials at one point whether their humanitarian aid work was legal. They were told that it was.[44]

On February 26, 2003, Dhafir and several other men connected to Help the Needy were arrested. He was charged with violating U.S. sanctions laws and money laundering, and at the press conference announcing the arrests, U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby said that funds raised by Help the Needy had not actually been used for humanitarian aid. He would not say what evidence the government had to support that claim, but the charity’s sloppy administrative practices made it easy for him to imply the worst. “You can move money through charitable means into Iraq if you do it in the right way,” he said. “It kind of begs the question: You go through all this effort, why wouldn’t you do it legally, if that truly was your intent?”[45] Other government officials were more explicit. On the day of the arrests, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the government had apprehended “funders of terrorism,” and New York’s governor, George Pataki, said the arrests proved the existence of “terrorists living here in New York among us…who are supporting and aiding and abetting those who would destroy our way of life and kill our friends and neighbors.”[46]

The arrests landed in the wider community like a bomb. Dhafir’s cancer patients were left scratching their heads at the locked doors of his medical practice, wondering how they were going to find a new doctor to pick up their treatment. Even if they could find one, they doubted he or she would have Dr. Dhafir’s skill. “He was just an outstanding doctor,” one patient said. “I had cancer and he cured it….It was a 100 percent shock to me that something like this could happen.”[47] And in addition to the arrest of Dhafir and his Help the Needy colleagues, nine government agencies, including the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, worked together to interrogate members of around 150 Muslim families in and around Syracuse. Some of those interviewed said government officials harassed and intimidated them, asking wide-ranging and invasive questions about their cultural and religious beliefs. They talked to reporters about their experiences, but anonymously; they worried that speaking out in public would get them deported or jeopardize their student visa status. An assistant U.S. attorney responded to questions about this harassment with the blithe assertion that “law enforcement is always sensitive to religious differences. I cannot imagine anyone in law enforcement would try to communicate with anyone who had difficulty understanding them.”[48] And when members of the local Muslim community scraped together more than $1 million as a surety against the possibility of Dhafir’s trying to flee the country, Dhafir was still denied bail four times.[49]

Indicted on charges of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as well as twelve counts of money laundering, Dhafir faced a maximum sentence of 265 years in prison, but he refused to take a plea bargain. Whatever administrative errors Help the Needy had made were extremely common in the charity world, the kind of thing the government punished with small fines and other slaps on the wrist, not serious prison time. And as for the idea that Dhafir was a secret supporter of terrorism, that was outrageous, and the government had no evidence suggesting otherwise. Curiously, they hadn’t tried very hard to find that evidence, either. Despite mounting a large and complex operation to interrogate what seemed like every Muslim in Syracuse, the prosecutor’s office had not bothered to send anyone to Jordan or Iraq to track down where the funds it claimed were missing had actually gone. Dhafir was both furious and, as he describes it now, “stupid enough to believe in the American justice system.”[50] He wanted his day in court.

When that day came, prosecutors had a surprise for Dhafir. Added to his indictment were twenty-five charges of Medicare fraud. The government claimed that although Dhafir had sometimes not personally been in the office when his patients received their chemotherapy and other treatments, the reimbursement forms submitted by his office all said he was present. That was all. There was no suggestion that any of Dhafir’s patients had been improperly cared for, nor any evidence that Dhafir had benefited financially from the incorrect paperwork. The change in tactics made for a confusing trial. Cases like Dhafir’s, in which some office administrator accidentally commits Medicare “fraud” by filling out a form in the wrong way, usually resulted in little more than a reprimand, or maybe a fine if the mistakes had been occurring for a long time or were particularly costly. But here the government sought a conviction and prison time.

Dhafir’s defense attorney wanted to tell the jury what was really going on, that Dhafir had been arrested under suspicions of financing international terrorism that the government quickly realized it had no hope of substantiating. That would have made the prosecution look bad from the start, and it would also have allowed the defense to further point out that the government’s response to Dhafir’s alleged violation of U.S. sanctions was also extreme. In recent years, an activist group called Voices in the Wilderness had made headlines by intentionally violating sanctions laws, traveling to Iraq in person to deliver food and medical supplies to Iraqis. Some of the group’s leaders faced steep fines, but none had been arrested, nor was the government trying to put any of them in jail. But the judge presiding over Dhafir’s trial ruled that the defense could not so much as mention the reason why the FBI had investigated Dhafir to begin with. Nothing about terrorism, nothing about the government’s failed efforts to track Help the Needy’s donations to extremists, and nothing about Ashcroft and Pataki painting Dhafir as a key node in the global terrorism financing network. Instead, the trial proceeded amid a cloud of unreality, as prosecutors pretended to believe that a man whose administrative errors had neither enriched himself nor hurt his patients deserved to spend several decades behind bars. As the trial dragged on, Dhafir was kept in jail and classed as the highest level of “security risk,” forbidden to attend Islamic classes and with strict limits on his outdoor time. His refusal to undergo a strip search, which he said violated his religious beliefs, also meant his jailers wouldn’t allow him any physical contact with those who visited him. By the end of 2005, he hadn’t touched his wife in more than two years.[51]

Following Dhafir’s conviction in 2005, the government suddenly wanted to talk about terrorism again. In a sentencing memo submitted after the guilty verdict, the prosecution asked for a sentence of at least twenty-four years and four months, citing Dhafir’s links to terrorism as a partial justification for the long prison term. “In the 1980s,” prosecutors wrote, “Rafil Dhafir traveled repeatedly to Pakistan where he worked as a volunteer doctor in the mujihadin refugee camps on the border of Afghanistan.”[52] The government did not mention that he was volunteering for Doctors Without Borders, though it did begrudgingly acknowledge in a footnote that the mujahideen were America’s allies during the 1980s, when the United States was waging a proxy war to push the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan by funding the country’s insurgents (to the tune of $630 million a year by 1987). The judge sentenced Dhafir to twenty-two years in prison, and the Department of Justice started including him on a list of successful terrorism prosecutions.[53] All of Dhafir’s appeals failed in the following years, and he developed gout, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and finally prostate cancer in prison.[54] He was released to home confinement in the spring of 2020 and fitted with an ankle bracelet so the government could track his movements. He will never practice medicine again.

The FBI never replicated the orgy of arrests and deportations that it carried out in the immediate wake of September 11, but government persecution of Muslims continued at a steady clip for years, keeping the government well supplied with scapegoats to hold up as examples of how much danger the country faced. As late as 2009, the FBI used an agent provocateur named Shahed Hussain to lure four ex-convicts, none of them more than marginally involved with Islam, into a plot to bomb two Bronx synagogues and shoot down military aircraft at an airport just west of Newburgh, New York. The four defendants participated only because the FBI’s informant had posed as a wealthy Pakistani businessman, and they hoped to scam him out of his money. The FBI chose the targets, financed and planned the entire operation, and sought out the participants. Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen did little more than occasionally ride around in a car the FBI owned. After their arrest, they spent four months in solitary confinement, twenty-three hours a day,[55] and New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, praised the FBI for its work. “The good news here,” he said, “is that the NYPD and the FBI did exactly what they’re trained to do and they have prevented what could be a terrible event in our city.”[56] All four were convicted. At the sentencing hearing, the federal judge Colleen McMahon criticized the FBI. “The essence of what occurred here is that a government…created acts of terrorism out of [a defendant’s] fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true,” she said. “The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot—there was no nefarious plot to foil.” Hamstrung by the sentencing requirements of their conviction, however, and convinced that the defendants were virulent antisemites, Judge McMahon sentenced each of them to twenty-five years in prison. Their convictions were all upheld on appeal. (In 2023, it turned out that Judge McMahon was still upset about the FBI’s behavior. She ordered the compassionate release of three of the Newburgh defendants, writing in her decision that “the real lead conspirator” in the case “was the United States.”)[57]

The effects of cases like these stretched far beyond those who were personally caught up in them. By arresting, deporting, and incarcerating thousands of Muslims and Arabs who lived in the United States, the government drove millions more out of civic life. One could be Muslim or Arab in the United States, or one could fully exercise one’s citizenship, but it became nearly impossible to do both.

This fact was driven home to people at the slightest excuse. In the summer of 2006, a man named Raed Jarrar, who had emigrated from Iraq and obtained a green card in the United States, tried to board a JetBlue flight from New York to the Bay Area. As he was eating breakfast in the terminal, a TSA agent approached him, asked for his information, and wrote it down. Then he told Jarrar that others in the airport were offended by his T-shirt. “I looked down at my T-shirt to see which one I was wearing,” Jarrar said. “I’d just woken up that morning, put on a clean T-shirt and whatever, jeans, sneakers.” The shirt said “We Will Not Be Silent” in English and Arabic. It asserted nothing beyond the idea that First Amendment rights applied to Arabs along with everyone else, and now the TSA wanted Jarrar to take it off before he’d be allowed to board the plane. He refused, and the situation escalated. Hoping to calm things down, the JetBlue desk agent proposed what she called a “compromise.” “We will buy you a T-shirt and put it on top of this one.” “That’s not a compromise,” Jarrar replied. He needed to make his flight, so he agreed to put on the new shirt over his original one, but he told the officers that he would “pursue this case with a constitutional rights organization as soon as I arrive in California.” The agents went over to a newsstand and debated which T-shirt to buy. “Should we buy him the I HEART NEW YORK T-shirt?” one said. “No,” another replied, “we don’t want to take him from one extreme to another.” Jarrar later learned that the airline had seated a flight attendant behind him to watch his movements and take notes on the channels he watched. “I came to realize it was not an option for me to be just an American, even if I wanted to,” Jarrar said. “The moment they put that T-shirt on me, that was the end of it, seriously. I came to understand my identity the hard way.”[58]

It became much more difficult for Muslim Americans to associate in groups. Mosques, community groups, and Muslim Student Associations (MSAs) on college campuses either knew they were under surveillance or worried that they were, and it was hard for new members to overcome the reasonable suspicion that they were FBI informants. “When it came to the MSA and the activities we would do,” a college student named Malaika said, “we tried to avoid all politics. We didn’t know where that would lead and we wanted to keep it strictly educational.”[59] Rather than participating in the political debates that would shape their lives, MSA members found themselves simply trying to explain, over and over, that they were just as American as everyone else. Anything more ambitious than a friendly, anodyne presentation explaining how Muslims celebrated different holidays could draw an immediate firestorm of media criticism. In 2013, the national activist group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organized a group of students at Northeastern University to stage a walkout at an event where Israeli soldiers were speaking. In response to this ordinary act of political protest, the university condemned the students, forced them to produce a “civility statement,” and put the campus SJP group on probation.[60] Three years before that, a twenty-year-old Egyptian American college student from Silicon Valley had taken his car in for an oil change and discovered a GPS tracker planted on the back. He took the device home and posted photos of it online. Two days later, FBI agents arrived, demanding that their equipment be returned. It became clear as he talked to them that the government had been monitoring his phone and email as well.[61]

Some Muslim and Arab Americans continued to protest, to criticize U.S. foreign policy in public, to organize actions opposed to the government’s persecution of their communities. But as time passed, they became increasingly exceptional cases. For many, the safer, more reasonable response was to disappear from public life and retreat to the confines of the community or the home. “I also became more quiet,” Talat Hamdani said. Her son, an EMT, had died on September 11 after rushing to the Twin Towers to help, after which the New York Post portrayed him as a terrorist who hadn’t died but disappeared into the extremist underground. “I gave others a chance to talk as much as they could, to reveal themselves, what they’re saying,” she said. “Initially I was all mouth, I would talk and talk and talk. But after 9/11, going through that traumatic time, I don’t trust anybody anymore. I just trust my sons. That’s it.”[62] Gurwinder Singh, a Sikh man who grew up in Queens, was eight years old on September 11. He was bullied relentlessly at school over the following months. “One time on the bus ride home, an African-American kid pulled my patka off my hair. I couldn’t do anything; I was helpless.” He withdrew as well. “Every time I got on the bus after that, I wondered, Will it happen again? Anytime I saw someone who might pick a fight, I got anxious. I wouldn’t look at them at all. I just tried to disappear.”[63] “I don’t want to do anything even remotely questionable,” said one Muslim participant in a sociologist’s study. “If I’m about to get into an argument with someone about something stupid, like they sold me something defective, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, if I start arguing with this guy, he’s going to think that all Muslim people are argumentative.’…It’s like you can’t do anything wrong, because you’re there for your whole community, and everyone’s going to be branded in the mind of this person.” The requirement wasn’t just that people comport themselves with dignity and politeness for fear of reflecting badly on the wider community; Muslims and Arabs in post-9/11 America were expected to be submissive, silent, and self-effacing. “I have to be more careful in how I conduct myself,” another study participant said.

Like even something as simple as riding the subway. If somebody shoves you out of the way, you should be able to glare at that person. But since I feel like I have to represent all Muslims everywhere now, I feel like I have to smile at the person and say, ‘ “Oh, I’m sorry, I must have been in your way.”[64]

For others, even riding the subway or the bus became too much, no matter how hard they tried to blend into the scenery. Abdul, who lived in Colorado, stopped attending Friday prayers at the mosque. “What if somebody were to bomb this place if they’re really angry?…It does scare me, and so I just wanted to stay home, just do my prayers at home rather than take the risk.” Abdul was not the only one who made this calculation. As another Colorado Muslim said, “Everybody just basically locked themselves inside their homes.”[65]