Then there was “extraordinary rendition” — the American policy of subcontracting torture abroad. In about 1,000 secret flights, chartered Central Intelligence Agency planes, often flying illegally through Canadian and European air space and using their airports, ferried Muslim suspects to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan — states long condemned by the US State Department for human rights violations.14 From Malawi to Bosnia, the CIA also carried out “cross-border arrests that verged on kidnappings,” according to Human Rights Watch,15 and whisked away the captives to foreign jails or Guantanamo Bay or secret CIA-run detention facilities in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe. The CIA reportedly captured 3,000 people worldwide, and its “black sites” held 100 desaparecidos, as the disappeared of Latin America used to be called. “We invoke the term very decidedly,” Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch told me in 2005.

Washington also provided overt or tacit support for allies who invoked the war on terrorism as a cover to crack down on Muslim dissidents and Muslim resistance to occupation or repressive rule. Waving the anti-terrorism banner, Russia, Israel, China, Uzbekistan and the Philippines intensified repression in Chechnya, the West Bank and Gaza, Zinjiang, the Ferghana Valley and Mindanao Island, respectively.

At Home in America

Within weeks of 9/11, the Bush administration arrested about 1,200 Muslims. The Justice Department’s own internal watchdog would later catalog the harsh treatment meted out in the 762 cases that he examined: verbal and physical abuse of the detainees, including slamming them against the wall, confining them to their cells for 23 hours a day, restricting them to one legal phone call a week and one social phone call a month, and denying them legal counsel for long periods. They were not told for weeks why they were held — for an average of 80 days each. In the end, not one was charged with terrorism-related offenses.16

The administration introduced a plan to register non-citizen and non-green cardholders from certain Muslim countries. More than 80,000 responded, including many who had been in the US illegally. About 14,000 were picked out for deportation.17 Rather than risk arrest, thousands left the country. These people were “not terrorists,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, but “had come to the United States for the same reason previous generations of immigrants had, for a better life and for freedom.18 That is not to say that illegal immigrants should have been allowed to stay, but rather that the government conducted a selective prosecution. There were, after all, nearly 11 million illegal immigrants in the US and 305,000 outstanding deportation orders at that time.

The administration also finger-printed and questioned 50,000 Muslims from or associated with Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq and Sudan. About 8,000 were identified by the FBI for “voluntary” interviews that turned out to be “highly coercive,” according to Romero; they were questioned about their “bank accounts, mosque attendance and opinion about the US, in violation of their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and religion.” Few, if any, were found to have any terrorist connection.