Rogue Justice review: Bush, 9/11 and the assault on American liberty

Rogue Justice review: Bush, 9/11 and the assault on American liberty
Karen Greenberg’s new book explores the decade after the cataclysm of 9/11 and how the US came ‘perilously close’ to ‘losing the protections of the Bill of Rights’

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After the towers of the World Trade Center disintegrated and the Pentagon was set aflame, the administration of George W Bush systematically exploited the panic of a horrified country to dramatically expand its own powers. It never hesitated to undermine “the rights to freedom of speech and religion, to freedom from capricious searches and seizures, to due process and fair treatment, and to protections from cruel and unusual punishment”– in other words, all of privileges guaranteed by the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth amendments to the US constitution.

Greenberg is director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University in New York. She begins her book with the astonishing intelligence failure that may have made 9/11 possible:

An FBI field agent in Minneapolis had filed a report about Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who had paid $8,300 in cash to get time on a flight academy’s 747 simulator. As part of a request for a search warrant to examine Moussaoui’s computer – after agents had jailed him when they discovered he had overstayed his visa – the agent wrote: “This is a guy who could fly an airplane into the World Trade Center.”

It turned out that the computer contained what Greenberg calls a “trove of information” about the hijackers and their plans. The FBI, however, only found that out after the 9/11 attacks.

Washington never acted on the agent’s request for a warrant, which required the approval of the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court. But the court never even received a request for the warrant, because a Fisa judge had accused the FBI of “routinely lying in the affidavits used to obtain court orders, and agents had become unwilling to stick out their necks by approaching the court for the warrants it could issue”.

This failure to crack the biggest terrorism case the FBI ever had set off a stream of decisions in federal courts and Congress that were designed to free the intelligence community of nearly all the restraints the Fisa court had imposed on surveillance activities since its creation in 1978.

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