It was a tribal response. Brennan and these alumni, known as “Formers,” spoke for a generation of CIA officers implicated in torturing at least 119 people. Many of them, including Alfreda Bikowsky, Michael D’Andrea, and Haspel, remained at the agency; during Brennan’s clash with the Senate, he quietly promoted someone over Haspel to run the clandestine service. Having won the fight over criminal liability for torture, the CIA would accept no political liability, and neither the truth nor the constitutional oversight of the Senate would be an obstacle. Glenn Carle, who interrogated a man he came to believe was innocent at an Afghanistan black site, explained the agency’s paranoia: “We’re always the ones left holding the bag after we’re asked to mine the harbors or overthrow the government.” But the CIA’s response to the Senate was “intellectually shoddy, simple-minded, unnecessarily defensive, circle-the-wagons reactive and wrong and harmful.” And to spy on the Senate “is flat criminal activity.”
Asked years later if it was appropriate for ODNI to have told the Senate violence would result from the release of the report, a spokesman, Timothy Barrett, said the office stood by its warning, explaining that “lack of violence does not reflect a lack of threats.”
* * *
—
EVEN IF MANNING, Snowden, and Jones were not recognizable leftists, it was, in the main, leftists who championed them, centrists and conservatives who disdained them, and liberals who weren’t sure about them. Their actions were understood as resistance to the War on Terror, and so the only place for them would be on the left, however uncomfortably. Snowden had committed a radical act but was himself no radical. In 2019, he described “the major ideological conflict of my time” as “between the authoritarian and the liberal democratic.”
Left-wing movement politics during the Obama years were not fueled by antiwar activism. The primary issues at that time concerned the increasing precarity of everyday life, such as the Occupy protests against a stillborn economic future. But antiwar perspectives and values were infused throughout the left. Both the Dreamers’ fight for citizenship and the hostility it aroused spoke to the post-9/11 conception of immigration as a terrorism threat. Another social movement put on display what the War on Terror had brought back home, and whom it could be aimed against.
On August 9, 2014, in a largely Black suburb of St. Louis, police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown six times, twice in the head. Wilson, driving, chanced across Brown and a friend, who enraged him by crossing the street too close to his SUV. Wilson ordered them out of the road, an altercation followed, and Wilson chased the unarmed teenager. Brown’s body lay in the baking heat of Ferguson, Missouri, for four hours. Six days of growing protests followed before Ferguson officials identified Wilson as the killer.
The stonewalling reflected the impunity the police had long held over majority-Black Ferguson. The Justice Department would later find that the cops looted residents by treating policework as an opportunity for “revenue generation.” Wilson claimed he had been charged by Brown and feared for his life. A grand jury declined to indict the officer in November. A chorus of white justification across the political and journalistic spectrum warned against rushing to judge Wilson. Pushing against it were the activists of a movement on the rise called Black Lives Matter (BLM). A decentralized challenge to white supremacy, BLM had been born the previous year when cofounder Alicia Garza coined the phrase on Facebook in grief after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murdering seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Now it mobilized.
Beginning in August, Fergusonites were reinforced by hundreds of mostly Black out-of-towners for enraged protests. Demonstrators threw rocks and batteries—the police would claim there were gunshots, though no officer was hit—burned police cars, looted stores, and burned buildings. Against that was a police response fit for an occupying army. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Ferguson’s police “look far more like soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan than the police of decades ago.” They sported ballistic helmets with night-vision mounts, body armor, pixelated camouflage fatigues, Ka-Bar-style knives favored by marines, wraparound sunglasses or goggles, desert boots, and sniper rifles. They drove giant black BearCat armored vehicles—the Ferguson police even had Humvees—mounted with satellite-dish sonic weapons known as long-range acoustic devices, which pummel eardrums. Officers leveled their M4 carbines at protesters and fired .60-caliber rubber bullets. One hit a pastor, Renita Lamkin, as she mediated between police and protesters demanding the release of local alderman Antonio French. Others hit reporters, including The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux and Bild’s Lukas Hermsmeier, both of whom were arrested for “failing to disperse.” Nighttime curfews and “keep walking” rules became licenses for police to arrest demonstrators and journalists such as Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and HuffPost’s Ryan J. Reilly. Police threw flash-bang grenades, obscured identifiers including their name tags, and intimidated protesters with dogs and doused them in tear gas.
The deliberately disproportionate, militarized response to basic demands for racial justice brought international condemnation, including from the UN commissioner for human rights. Palestinians tweeted advice for Ferguson protesters to defeat tear gas clouds by running against the wind. In a rare move, Amnesty International sent human rights observers to an American city. One of them was thirty-four-year-old Mandy Simon. Simon had spent much of the 2000s fighting against the War on Terror. “For years, I had worked with colleagues at ACLU and Amnesty as we warned about the dangers of militarizing the police, and now we were watching a small midwestern police department with military-grade weapons roll up against its citizens,” said Simon. “To see those warnings manifest so clearly in front of our eyes was surreal and absolutely terrifying.”
The Ferguson and St. Louis County police got their arsenal from the Defense Department. Since the 1990s the Pentagon had operated a program known as 1033, which transferred surplus military equipment to police departments. Journalist Radley Balko described a 1033 program newsletter from 2011, a year when the military distributed a record $500 million worth of hardware, bearing the tagline “From Warfighter to Crimefighter.” It revealed that not only military equipment but military culture—or a facsimile of it—flowed down to police, validating their certainty that they manned the thin line between civilization and savagery. But even more valuable to police than the 1033 program were the counterterrorism grants distributed to cash-strapped precincts from the Department of Homeland Security. In fiscal 2014 DHS told Congress it planned to disburse $1.6 billion of such funding, which enabled purchases of BearCats by police from such unlikely terror targets as Fargo, North Dakota; Syracuse, New York; and Manchester, New Hampshire. Thanks to a 2007 law tacitly nodding at the reality that terrorism was rare, cops only had to spend “not less than 25 percent” of the money on “law enforcement terrorism prevention activities.”
Helping police make their quota was a cottage industry marketing anti-Islam training to them. Seminars offered by a former FBI agent, John Guandolo, reportedly instructed that mosques enjoyed no constitutional rights, as such Islamic centers were “potential military compounds,” and encouraged investigations into local ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In February 2012 Guondolo’s Strategic Engagement Group delivered a three-day-long instruction to Nashville-area police in such topics, just as the Murfreesboro Islamic Center expansion was proceeding. The course taught that under sharia, “non-Muslims must ultimately convert or submit to Islam or be killed.” NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly cooperated with a movie called The Third Jihad that accused Muslims of planning to “infiltrate and dominate” America. Kelly said he regretted his participation, two years after the department screened it for more than fourteen hundred officers.
Supplying military equipment and counterterrorism training to police followed the economic logic of permanent war. With the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan persisting, innovative hardware for them woul
d remain in development; with both reduced in manpower, priority, and budgeting, defense contractors sought new markets. The Department of Homeland Security was a consumer as well as a distributor. Customs and Border Protection flew unarmed versions of the Predator over the southern border. Those flights were pioneers of the homeward migration of the war’s technological innovations, particularly after the military’s drone budget plateaued around 2012. That year DHS took control of a military camera suite called the Kestrel. Mounting the 360-degree-capable device on tethered aerostats like the ones that once floated above U.S. bases in Afghanistan, DHS suddenly saw “miles [of border] with a single image frame,” an official enthused. A year earlier the Miami-Dade police bought a T-Hawk drone from the military contractor Honeywell after receiving the first FAA certification of any police department to operate one.
Drones were hardly the only Forever War technology acquired by police. Several bought a device called a Stingray, which spoofed cell towers, enabling it to siphon location and communicant data from connecting phones. It had previously been the sort of surveillance tool reserved for the NSA or the FBI. Journalist George Joseph soon found that police departments in Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Tallahassee “overwhelmingly” used Stingrays in “nonwhite and low-income communities.”
By the time Black Lives Matter galvanized people beyond Ferguson, a white backlash, much of it uniformed, knew how to characterize the movement. The sheriff of Georgia’s Gwinnett County, Butch Conway, said Ferguson protesters ignited a “firestorm” that “dehumanized police.” Speaking as if cops were at greater risk to suffer a “slaughter” than inflict one, Conway called the protesters “domestic terrorists with an agenda.” Fox & Friends interviewed a North Carolina police chief forced into retirement after calling Black Lives Matter activists terrorists. “It is a terrorist group, if you can march down the streets and you can call for the death of police officers and a race of people,” the ex-chief said. In Minneapolis the police union chief, Bob Kroll, denounced Black Lives Matter as a “terrorist organization” and not “a voice for the black community in Minneapolis.” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a cofounder of Black Lives Matter, titled her memoir When They Call You a Terrorist.
Black people had indeed experienced terrorism—from the planter aristocracy, from agents of the state, from white vigilantes—for the entirety of their existence in the United States, and for the supremacist reasons cited by Grandpa Millar at Elohim City. Now, after they had stood in the streets against BearCats and sniper rifles, a nativist–police alliance portrayed Black liberation as terrorism. To combat it, they had the same prescriptions for police as for the rest of the Security State during the War on Terror: brutality and impunity. They bristled as Obama’s Justice Department chipped away at that impunity through civil rights investigations of police departments, much as the CIA had resented the meager torture investigations. Their grievances channeled the politics of the War on Terror toward a new destination, a place more viscerally satisfying than the foreign wars, which had proven agonizing, humiliating, and disillusioning. There was an expanding set of enemies at home, and now there were new tools to confront them.
In Hong Kong, Snowden had warned that the architecture of mass surveillance was outpacing any hope of democratic control. Policy had already trumped law; STELLARWIND proved it. It would only be a matter of time before a malefactor took control of the White House and saw the possibilities that mass surveillance offered.
“A new leader will be elected. They’ll flip the switch, say that because of the ‘crisis,’ because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat,” Snowden said, “we need more authority. We need more power. And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it’ll be turn-key tyranny.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DECADENT PHASE OF THE WAR ON TERROR AND THE RISE OF TRUMP
2013–2016
At the dawn of Obama’s second term, the War on Terror, for all its supposed sustainability, reached a point of destabilization. The source of the instability was the war’s central feature: its endlessness. Protracted war gave rise to a successor organization to al-Qaeda that was more ambitious and more psychopathic. The Security State fought to preserve its authorities while it dealt with the legitimacy crisis prompted by Manning’s, Snowden’s, and Jones’s disclosures, and to keep the war itself on a path of equilibrium. It was aligned with Obama in deemphasizing the war, preferring other geopolitical priorities like climate change or great-power competition, even as both acquiesced to its escalatory pressures. Meanwhile, an embittered right increasingly came to view the war more as a civilizational struggle than as a series of specific battlefield campaigns. All of this rendered the War on Terror something elites no longer enjoyed engaging with but couldn’t imagine abandoning. What resulted was an exhausted, decadent phase of the conflict. It began with an attempt by desperate men to force their own end to the conflict.
Men who had been locked inside Guantanamo Bay for years, some having endured physical torture, nearly all enduring the mental torture of indefinite detention without charge, recognized there was no way out for them. Obama had pledged to close Guantanamo—never mind the fine print about Gitmo North and his acceptance of indefinite detention—but four years later, there they remained. The absence of hope became resolution. They decided to refuse food. Their deaths would testify to the injustice of their captivity.
The final straw came in February 2013, when guards took their Korans for “searches.” One detainee, Obaidullah, explained, “Eleven years of my life have been taken from me and now, by the latest actions of the authorities, they have also taken my dignity and disrespected my religion.” By June, at least 106 of the remaining 166 detainees were refusing food. Guantanamo was no longer a synecdoche for terrorism, torture, impunity, or broken promises. It was the scene of real human suffering, and the world once again paid attention.
Both the strike and the renewed focus on Guantanamo Bay caught the jailers off guard. Bill Lietzau, the Rumsfeld Pentagon holdover whom Obama had put in charge of detention policy, insisted the Koran searches were necessary to expose “improvised weapons” that had somehow been hidden within the pages. The solution that the military’s Joint Task Force–Guantanamo employed combined brutality with humiliation. Guards in riot gear seized skeletal detainees and bound them to infirmary beds with wrist and ankle restraints. Medical staff passed a feeding tube up detainees’ noses—sometimes lubricated with olive oil, creating a risk of inflammatory pneumonia—and down through their throats. A Yemeni striker, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, described “agony in my chest, throat and stomach.” The medical staff even inserted a catheter into Moqbel’s penis. As long as Obama was commander in chief, he felt obliged to defend the procedure. “I don’t want these individuals to die,” he said in April.
The measures the Joint Task Force took reflected their architect. John Kelly’s venomous comments about civilians were overshadowed by respect for his son’s death in Afghanistan, and after Bob Gates chose Kelly for his military assistant, his fourth star was assured. Within a year, Obama made Kelly head of the military’s Southern Command, responsible for delicate security and political relationships from Guatemala to Chile. But while the president rhetorically looked forward to the end of the War on Terror, Kelly vocally advocated fighting for as long as it took. Speaking in 2013 at the dedication of a marine regiment’s Afghanistan war memorial, Kelly predicted America would be at war “for years, if not decades to come,” something he said “may be inconvenient to some.” Kelly was not without insight about the nature of the war. After Fallujah and Sangin, he had no illusion of victory, only a determination to fight what he interpreted as a war of national survival. “It is not in our power to end it, but simply to fight it, until our murderous enemy, who hates us with a visceral disgust for everything we stand for, either gives up or we kill him,” Kelly said.
Few by now paid attention to Kelly’s
invective. Anyone discomfited by it gave him a wide berth, since he was the only four-star Gold Star parent. The result was that Kelly was in command of a wartime prison that Obama sought to close. He set to work breaking the hunger strike.
Kelly’s tactics became a debacle one predawn morning in April. A senior defense official recalled that Kelly had notified the Pentagon that an extraction was about to take place. Lietzau warned Kelly it would become a fiasco. Hunger strikers who had blocked surveillance cameras nevertheless awoke to find guards demanding they separate from their communal housing—a privilege for compliant detainees—and into individual cells. Told to lie on the ground, detainees instead threw water bottles at the guards. They grabbed broomsticks to keep the guards at bay and struck them when the opportunity presented. The Joint Task Force responded by firing rubber bullets in the enclosed space of a barracks, but the detainees managed, remarkably, to fend them off for hours.
When that failed to stop the protest, Kelly realized he could break the strike by denying the outside world information about it. By September he ordered an end to updating reporters on how many detainees were striking, simultaneously claiming that most had begun eating again. Kelly’s spokesperson explained the blackout as an effort to end a “self-perpetuating story.” Even calling the strike a “hunger strike” offended Kelly, who insisted on the absurd euphemism “Long-Term Non-Religious Fasting.” The detainees could not maintain public attention, their only asset, if Kelly cut off access to them. It turned out to be a far more successful tactic than brutality. Neglect favored the Guantanamo status quo, and over time Kelly expanded the press blackout throughout the wartime prison.
Reign of Terror Page 26