Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  That pointed to how the right responded to a politically agonizing moment: the bin Laden killing. It was out of the question to credit Obama, who, after authorizing the raid, had delighted in mocking Donald Trump to his face at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In one of the more generous Republican reactions, Eric Cantor, the House GOP majority leader, “commend[ed] Obama,” but for “follow[ing] the vigilance of President Bush in bringing bin Laden to justice.” A more convenient narrative, promoted by Liz Cheney and others, offered that torture made killing bin Laden possible. Obama could still be portrayed as disarming America.

  This was the explanation that the CIA wanted the public to accept, particularly about torture producing the identity of a key bin Laden courier. Its chief proponent was Jose Rodriguez, the CIA Counterterrorism Center chief who for years ran the torture program before he and his deputy Gina Haspel destroyed the videotapes of Abu Zubaydah and Nashiri’s waterboardings. The evidence disproving their assertion about the value of torture in this instance was at that point widely known: surveillance was most important in uncovering the trail leading to bin Laden. The CIA already had the courier’s name before the particular instance of torture. But the evidence showing it remained hidden in agency files that a Senate intelligence committee staffer named Daniel Jones was quietly excavating. McCain produced a comment from then-CIA-director Panetta contradicting former attorney general Michael Mukasey’s assertion that waterboarding produced the identity of the courier. Yet at the CIA, with White House and Pentagon support, negotiations quickly began with filmmakers Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow on a Hollywood depiction of the bin Laden killing that presented CIA torture as paving a straight path to Abbottabad.

  Reaction to a Middle Eastern upheaval underscored the influence that the nativist coalition had achieved within the right. The Arab Spring uprisings beginning in 2011 beguiled GOP foreign policy as much as they did Obama. Despite initial elite rapture over mass demonstrations for democracy, the nativists’ critique took hold: it was a disastrous triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood.

  Obama didn’t know what position to take. The protests were not merely destabilizing American quasi-adversaries such as Moammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad but also clients like Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh and allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. For thirty years Mubarak had guaranteed the cold but real peace with Israel that his predecessor died to forge. With Cairo’s Tahrir Square holding the world’s attention, Obama equivocated. While Biden said Mubarak was not a dictator, Obama finally called for the Egyptian president to gradually relinquish power. McConnell and GOP House Speaker John Boehner backed Obama. Mitt Romney, discomfited by ushering a longtime ally from power, ultimately agreed that Mubarak’s time was up. Newt Gingrich, by contrast, heralded where the energy on the right was heading. “I think there are a lot of differences between the Muslim Brotherhood and the rest of us,” he said.

  When Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and an erratic man, became Egypt’s first elected president, gone were any vestiges on the right of Bush-era faith in democracy to render Mideast politics convivial to American hegemony. Sean Hannity, whom Imam Rauf granted an interview, was stunned when Rauf would not call the Brotherhood terrorists. As Rauf praised the vote, however “messy” the new democratic politics were, Hannity cried, “They’re voting for a radical Islamist.”

  With Egypt under Muslim Brotherhood influence, the Arab Spring began to seem on the right like a civilizational calamity. Speaking at a South Carolina fundraiser for his presidential campaign, Gingrich said it was shaping up “more like an anti-Christian spring.” A conspiracy theory began to spread that a classified White House study on political reform in the Arab world was an accord with the Brotherhood on regime change in Egypt. “Listen, President Obama was negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood and saying that they are moderates,” ACT for America’s Brigitte Gabriel asserted as fact on Hannity’s show.

  At the Western Conservative Summit the following year, Gaffney portrayed Obama as colluding with the Muslim Brotherhood to weaken a historic bulwark against Islamization. After awkwardly joking that the audience would want “cyanide” after his lecture, an indignant Gaffney showed a photograph of Morsi, “a radical Islamist, a Muslim Brother, a man who seeks to impose sharia on his own people,” before lamenting “we have helped him come to power.” Gaffney explained the whole calamity by claiming the Brotherhood had infiltrated Obama’s government. Proof of the conspiracy was Adlouni’s memo, which Gaffney called “the strategic plan, the mission statement” of the Brotherhood in America. As for the Brotherhood’s agents in government, Gaffney deceitfully cited Huma Abedin, a senior aide to Hillary Clinton and a Jordanian American whose combination of Muslim background and proximity to the hated Clinton ensured her harassment by racists. Abedin was just one of several identifiably nonwhite or Muslim officials or advisers he flashed on the screen under the header the brotherhood’s penetration of team obama.

  Obama’s Libya war fed this new mode of right-wing critique. To prevent Moammar Qaddafi from carrying out a threat to raze the city of Benghazi, Obama joined a British-and-French-led coalition to bomb the Libyan leader into submission. There was not much enthusiasm on the right for war with Qaddafi. But Obama’s choice to keep America a junior partner in a British–French coalition fighting by air and sea offended the right’s American exceptionalist honor.

  The minimal congressional appetite for a war in Libya prompted Obama to commit a flagrant violation of the war powers the Constitution vests in Congress. As broad as the 2001 AUMF was, there was no arguing that Qaddafi or Libya were part of it. Obama instead bypassed Congress entirely, armed with dubious justification from the Office of Legal Counsel about why he wasn’t breaking the 1973 War Powers Resolution. All pretense of a non-war vanished with the death of Qaddafi. Hillary Clinton, visiting Tripoli, spoke like Caesar: “We came, we saw, he died.”

  Thinking he was applying the lessons of Iraq, Obama, determined to keep U.S. troops off Libyan soil, forswore any involvement to rectify the vacuum he helped create. What followed Qaddafi was chaos, state failure, and a desperate, politically incendiary refugee flow across the Mediterranean and into Geert Wilders’s narrative of Islamic conquest. For years afterward the United States attacked Libyan jihadist targets from the air and accepted little responsibility for a nation it had destabilized. Among the debacles of the invasion was the jihadist assault on Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens. Now the right saw a humiliation for America owing to forces Obama encouraged. Helpfully, Benghazi seemed like a checkmate on Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. It became an obsession on the right—but in the process, Benghazi itself became the debacle, not the Libya war.

  Libya vexed Mitt Romney, who was running for president. In an echo of John Kerry, he initially supported the war “and the mission,” while indulging conservatives by calling Obama “weak” and denigrating the United Nations and the French. At a New Hampshire campaign stop in July 2011, Romney asked the only relevant question about the war—“Who’s going to own Libya if we get rid of the government there?”—but never called for its end. He was left talking in the abstract about Obama’s insufficient faith in “America [as] an exceptional nation.”

  Romney’s inauthenticity had already been on display during his unsuccessful 2008 campaign. With an explosion in white petty-bourgeois mobilization on the right, the patrician Romney would only find himself in ever more painful contortions. The moderate Massachusetts governor who had enacted a precursor to Obama’s health care expansion was now, Romney said in February 2012, a “severely conservative” man. While Gingrich embraced Gaffney’s “stealth jihad” conspiracy, Romney found himself caught between his ambition and his decency. “We’re not going to have sharia law applied in U.S. courts. That’s never going to happen,” he said in a 2011 debate, but, acknowledging the subtext, he added, “People of all faiths are welcome in this country.” Accurately reading the regnant
politics on the right, Romney gave no such quarter on immigration. He would support the DREAM Act only if it made military service a condition of citizenship. The furthest he would moderate his position was to pledge not to “round people up,” but migrants would have to reapply for U.S. citizenship back in their “home” countries. Asked to reconcile those positions in January 2012, he said that an estimated 12 million people would have to “self-deport.” By April, the Arizona state legislator who wrote the Show Me Your Papers law said Romney’s immigration policy was “identical to mine.”

  One of Romney’s delusions was the opposite of Obama’s: Romney wanted to deemphasize the Forever War yet intensify the politics of fear. He did not advocate any rollback of the War on Terror but submerged it in broader symbolic themes. He stressed the need for unapologetic American global leadership and other traditional Republican defense themes, like confronting a resurgent Russia or enlarging the navy. That satisfied American exceptionalism while straddling the respectable balance between sounding like a businessman’s Reagan at some times and, at others, the opponent of sharia whom Donald Trump endorsed in Vegas.

  Romney, agonizingly, could not find a critique of Benghazi to indict Obama. His first statement in the aftermath of the attack drew overwhelming criticism for its accusation, now pedigreed on the nativist right, that Obama “sympathiz[ed] with those who waged the attacks.” A fallback attack he settled on could not survive scrutiny. Romney said Obama could not bring himself to call Benghazi a terrorist attack because doing so would undermine his claim of decimating al-Qaeda. Yet Obama had called Benghazi an “act of terror” that very day. When Romney made the claim in a presidential debate, moderator Candy Crowley pointed out that it was false.

  The Benghazi-centric right was so certain that the attack was a dream opportunity to discredit both Obama and Clinton that it was incredulous when Romney lost. One of Romney’s advisers, Gabriel Schoenfeld—a neoconservative Commentary writer who in 2006 demanded the prosecution of the New York Times reporters who exposed STELLARWIND—blamed the defeat on the candidate’s inability to capitalize on Benghazi. It was an unpersuasive explanation, but it spoke to a certain political shock, a decade after 9/11, that a terrorist attack might not benefit the right.

  It also spoke to a predicament Romney shared with other establishment Republicans. Socially and economically distant from the nativists of the Tea Party, they had lost the ability to convince the enraged nativists that they were ultimately aligned culturally and politically. The Tea Party had no patience for Republican politicians they saw as accommodating Obama. Obama’s reelection, occurring in the context of Benghazi, where the United States looked helpless before vengeful Muslims, reinforced the calamity. The nationalists on the right, having already endured McCain’s rebukes and Romney’s haplessness, were disinclined to listen to the establishment Republicans telling them they needed to moderate even further in defeat. True to form, the mainstream members of the party believed that Romney’s embrace of immigration restrictionism had doomed him, and urged fellow Republicans to “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform” lest they become a party of their “core constituencies,” meaning whites.

  “That loss was really catastrophic,” Donald Trump reflected the following year. Trump had no need to convince the nativists that he, so socially and economically distant as well, was aligned with them culturally and politically. Accordingly, he had a contrary diagnosis of the party’s loss. It was the GOP’s election to win, but Romney was just so inauthentic. “It looked so false,” Trump continued. “Somebody was giving him just horrible advice.”

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  AT MIDMORNING ON AUGUST 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page entered the Sikh temple in the Oak Creek suburb of Milwaukee holding a nine-millimeter pistol. Temple staff were preparing lunch for the coming services. As Page opened fire, congregants grabbed children and ran for the nearest room to hide. Satwant Singh Kaleka, the sixty-five-year-old temple president, was hit with two shots near his hip. Bleeding, he grabbed a butter knife and charged to his end. The first police officer to arrive, Brian Murphy, was shot twelve times—three other bullets lodged in his body armor—while trying to get Kaleka’s congregation to safety. Page killed five others and wounded four more before another policeman shot him in the stomach. He turned his gun on himself rather than be captured.

  Page left behind no manifesto. But he was a white supremacist and army veteran executing a deliberate terrorist plan, exactly the type of potentially violent personality the DHS analyst Daryl Johnson had warned about three years earlier. Page had the fourteen-word white supremacist credo tattooed on him and played in a white-power band called End Apathy. The accepted explanation, based on a rise in post-9/11 hate crimes against Sikhs and a general lack of white supremacist interest in targeting them, was that Page likely thought he was killing Muslims. A criminology professor in Omaha who had known Page recalled him talking about “towel heads” and “sand niggers.” Johnson, disgusted, said Wade’s rampage showed that “DHS is scoffing at the mission of doing domestic counterterrorism, as is Congress.” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center called Page “the American Anders Breivik.”

  Breivik was a Norwegian in his thirties who believed what his favorite “counterjihadist” blogs and web fora—Gates of the West, Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, the American neo-Nazis’ Stormfront—told him about the Islamization of Europe. Living with his mother, selling fake diplomas online, and playing World of Warcraft in what he called his “fart room,” Breivik nurtured his grievances until they became a worldview. He wrote about reimposing patriarchy on the insufficiently docile women around him. His enemies, after the Muslims and the women, were the progressive, respectable “cultural Marxists” who dominated Norwegian politics, and he divided them into categories of traitors to be executed or spared. It made no sense to him that the bloggers who had so insightfully diagnosed the horror of the white man’s condition stopped short of endorsing the mass Muslim deportation that was so clearly necessary. Like Grandpa Millar of Elohim City, what Breivik sought was, functionally, a white man’s caliphate.

  On a rented farm, Breivik, now calling himself the Judicious Knight Commander of a new Knights Templar, put together a plan. Whatever his feelings about Muslims, al-Qaeda had left helpful bomb-making tips on the internet. He marveled at how easy it was to acquire the chemicals to make a bomb “unless you’re called Abdullah Rashid Muhammed.” On July 22, 2011, he bombed the Oslo parliament house before driving an hour to embark for the island of Utoya where, dressed as a policeman, he slaughtered teenagers attending the Labour Party’s youth retreat. After killing seventy-seven people, most of them children, he told the police, “That’s what they call terror, isn’t it?”

  Breivik left behind a manifesto he called 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Its citations included the leading figures of the American and European counterjihadist right, including Pamela Geller and Frank Gaffney, as well as work done by the neoconservative-originated Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. None of them made as big a mark on Breivik as Robert Spencer. The manifesto quoted Spencer 64 times and referenced Spencer’s work 162 times. Spencer disclaimed any responsibility, taking umbrage at the “blame game . . . as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.” For her part, Geller railed against “a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.”

  Beyond the outraged self-defense lay the sort of apologia that the counterjihadists typically accused Muslims of engaging in. Bruce Bawer, author of a book called Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and another writer cited by Breivik, lamented in The Wall Street Journal that Breivik had “a legitimate concern about genuine problems,” namely “the Islamization of Europe,” and now their shared cause would suffer. “If anyone incited him to
violence,” Geller judged, “it was Islamic supremacists.”

  More than a decade of socially acceptable depictions of Muslims as a threat to America and Europe yielded a substantial cohort who believed Islam threatened Western civilization. At Oak Creek, Islamophobia crossed an undefended border. It was by no means the first time Sikhs had suffered because of post-9/11 white supremacist ignorance. But Oak Creek made unignorable the reality that Islamophobia did not only imperil Muslims. Wade Michael Page was merely the first to decide the times called for an American Breivik.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LEFT VS. OBAMA’S WAR ON TERROR

  2009–2014

  In Democratic politics and much self-identifying liberal journalism, there remained a fundamental allergy to leftist critiques of the War on Terror. The largest mass protests in human history—including a 12-to-14-million-person demonstration in eight hundred cities on February 15, 2003, the largest single-day protest recorded thus far—had as little influence on the senior Democratic leadership as it did on Bush. Few reporters attended a cathartic 2008 evening in Washington, D.C., emceed by antiwar journalist Jeremy Scahill, at which a service-member panel convened by Iraq Veterans Against the War discussed what they considered the horrors they had committed or witnessed. It attested to a marginalization of the left that seemed, in retrospect, foreordained the moment the planes hit the Twin Towers.