2001
September 11 and the Patriot Act

Jeremy Scahill

April 27 2021, 6:56 p.m.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., left, addresses reporters on Oct., 3 2001, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Manny Ceneta/AFP via Getty Images

Joe Biden was on an Amtrak train, making his daily commute from Delaware to Washington, D.C., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. His wife Jill called him as news began to spread of the attacks, and mid-sentence, she interrupted herself. “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God,” she said. “Another plane — the other tower.” Biden made it to Washington and fielded a stream of calls from his family telling him to get away from the Capitol after hearing reports that another plane was heading for Congress. Biden, standing in a nearby park, assured his concerned loved ones that he was safe and that he needed to get to work.

In the hours after the September 11 attacks began, Biden played a key role in organizing fellow lawmakers to convene in emergency sessions. He also spoke to President George W. Bush, advising him to reject advice from his security detail and return to Washington. Biden had spent the first months of the Bush administration strategizing on how he was going to deal with people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, whom he considered dangerous extremists. Once the attacks happened, Biden told Bush he was at his service. “I’d never seen a single day change the stakes for the country as drastically as 9/11 had,” Biden later recalled. “The way I saw it, this wasn’t just about meeting the challenge of terrorism; it was about taking advantage of an incredible opportunity to improve our internal security and solidify our relations around the world.” Biden said, “I really thought this was the moment we could drive a stake through the heart of the Cheney-Rumsfeld unilateralism.” He was spectacularly wrong. More than that, Biden would aid the very agenda that he claimed to oppose.

Biden was a passionate promoter of the Patriot Act and repeatedly claimed that it was based on his proposals from the 1990s, including the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He has bragged that he passed earlier surveillance legislation even though “civil libertarians were opposed to it.” And Biden chided his colleagues for not supporting even further-reaching measures that he wanted at the time. “There were those who decided that the threat to Americans was apparently not serious enough to give the president all the changes in law he requested,” Biden said.

In his Senate floor speech on October 25, 2001, Biden said, “The anti-terrorism bill we consider today is measured and prudent.” He boasted that the Patriot Act “contains several provisions which are identical or nearly identical to those I previously proposed.” Biden predicted that the Patriot Act “will not upset the balance between strong law enforcement and protection of our valued civil liberties.” He also said the criticisms of the law from the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil liberties groups were “ill-informed and overblown.” From 2001 to 2002, the ACLU gave Biden a lukewarm 60 percent approval rating on civil rights and civil liberties.

The
Intercept_

2001
U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan

Murtaza Hussain

April 27 2021, 6:57 p.m.

Sen. Joe Biden, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, meets with Afghan students at a school in Kabul on Jan. 12, 2002.

Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Joe Biden joined in the unanimous Senate vote authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. During the early period of the occupation, he was aggressive about the role of the United States in reshaping Afghan society and clear about using military force as a tool for statecraft. On a 2002 fact-finding mission to Kabul, Biden called for a long-term international security force to be deployed to the country in order to prevent a return to civil war. “I’m not talking about international peacekeepers. I’m not talking about U.N. blue helmets. I’m talking about people who shoot and kill people,” Biden said. “I’m talking about people who are a bunch of badasses who will come in here with guns and understand that they don’t have to check with anybody before they return fire.”

The
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2002
Holding Prisoners at Guantánamo and Denying Them POW Status

Jeremy Scahill

April 27 2021, 6:58 p.m.

People in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, military prison during in-processing to the detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002.

Photo: Shane Mccoy/Mai/Mai/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

In the early months of the so-called war on terror, the Bush administration began to transfer people snatched on the battlefield — or handed over to the U.S. by foreign governments — to a military prison at Guantánamo Bay. In January 2002, Joe Biden appeared on CNN and was asked about holding people at Guantánamo as well as the Bush administration’s refusal to grant some of them prisoner-of-war status. After CNN’s Wolf Blitzer noted that civil liberties groups and European governments were opposed to these moves, Biden defended President George W. Bush. “No, I think the president is right,” he said. He declared that accused Al Qaeda fighters were not entitled to POW status and said it was debatable for Taliban prisoners. Biden said that people Bush accused of terrorism do “not qualify as prisoners of war and the status that would allow them.” He asserted that their status was a decision for the U.S. military to make. Biden also claimed at the time that people held at Guantánamo were being treated humanely, which would soon be proven false as revelations about CIA black sites and torture emerged.