Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Service in the wars turned into a preexisting condition for those veterans who had been exposed to the open-air burn pits of Iraq and Afghanistan. There, everything from furniture to human shit was disposed of in the flames, and the military insisted no one who breathed in the acrid smoke would suffer lasting harm. In reality, an army study never intended for public release found that exposure to the burn pits would likely lead to “reduced lung function or exacerbated chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, atherosclerosis, or other cardiopulmonary diseases.” When Elana Duffy, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran in New York, began developing shortness of breath and a high fever on March 18, she suspected she knew why. A Veterans Affairs hospital turned her away without so much as administering a coronavirus test, “largely because the VA is slammed,” Duffy explained. None of the two hundred thousand veterans who had signed up for the VA’s burn-pit registry, created precisely for situations like this, received any guidance about what special precautions to take.

  Coronavirus even had a General Shinseki. A navy captain named Brett Crozier helmed the USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of America’s eleven aircraft carriers, when a coronavirus outbreak threatened it in March. “We’re fucked,” a TR sailor told a reporter, at a time when about a hundred of the forty-eight-hundred-member crew, docked off of Guam, had contracted the virus. Crozier was astonished to see his chain of command move with insufficient urgency to offload the entire crew into separate lodgings. He recognized the source of its inaction: a reluctance to shut down one of the most visible manifestations of American power. At the Pentagon, which did not order a redeployment pause until March 25, Mattis’s successor Mark Esper emphasized “readiness” and insisted local commanders were better positioned to determine when to lock down. It was a position that suited Trump’s political interests. Like Shinseki before the Iraq invasion, Crozier shamed his superiors for treating his sailors as an afterthought. On March 3 he wrote: “[W]e are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single Sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily.”

  Rumsfeld humiliated Shinseki but did not strip him of command. The navy did both to Crozier. Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly—who would later claim to be sparing the navy another Eddie Gallagher–like debacle—flew to Guam to notify the sailors that Crozier was “too naïve or too stupid” for command. Defiantly, the ship’s crew saw their captain off by chanting Crozier’s name, and Modly eventually resigned. Even more shameful was Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations. Gilday stood by as Modly fired Crozier, then recommended Crozier’s reinstatement, only to reverse himself again after Esper refused. In June Gilday produced a report claiming that Crozier, and not the navy, had jeopardized the lives of the TR sailors. Meanwhile 1,273 sailors aboard the carrier contracted coronavirus, ten times more than at the point when Crozier tried to save them. On April 13, Aviation Ordnanceman Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr. died of COVID, a death Crozier had warned his superiors was preventable.

  As impeachment failed and coronavirus crested, liberals, panicked at the prospect of losing a winnable election by moving too far left, behaved as if it were 2004. In place of John Kerry, the Democrats chose as their presidential nominee Kerry’s friend, ally, and fellow Iraq war champion Joe Biden. Biden, who had worried that his opposition to the bin Laden raid would doom his late-life presidential ambitions, entered the race after younger faces failed to decisively claim Obama’s legacy. But in this contest, if Biden was Kerry, the unapologetic antiwar politics that Howard Dean championed was far more potent.

  The entire Democratic field—even Biden himself—now vowed to “end endless wars.” The ease with which Biden and the others took up the slogan spoke to how unclear its meaning had become. It represented a triumph of Obama’s legacy: making the War on Terror sustainable through making it sufficiently inconspicuous to split the difference with abolition. “We must maintain our focus on counterterrorism, around the world and at home, but staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention,” Biden wrote in the midsection of a Foreign Affairs essay outlining his foreign policy.

  Biden’s political revival was hardly the result of a foreign policy debate. But his return was all the more striking since Bernie Sanders had found his geopolitical voice, and it was proudly abolitionist—both toward the War on Terror and against the American exceptionalism that fueled it. In Foreign Affairs, Sanders decried the concept of a War on Terror. Not only did it fail on its own terms, providing terror networks “exactly what they wanted” in terms of attention, but it had created an opportunity for American nativism. “There is a straight line,” Sanders wrote, “from the decision to reorient U.S. national-security strategy around terrorism after 9/11 to placing migrant children in cages on our southern border.” In the Senate, Sanders, guided by his adviser Matt Duss, pushed through a resolution to extricate the United States from the Saudi war in Yemen that Obama had supported; Trump, revealingly, vetoed it. Sanders said he regretted his vote for the Afghanistan war, unlike practically every other politician who had voted for it. With the help of Duss, Sanders finally elevated ending the War on Terror to a central position within his revolution. When he tied or won the first three primary contests, it seemed as if the abolitionist moment had arrived.

  But the Democrats opted to regress to familiar 9/11-era patterns. After Biden secured the nomination, his allies dreamed of winning the endorsement of generals with the stature of a Mattis. By August, Biden had won the endorsement of a host of GOP-aligned Security Staters with deep legacies in the Forever War, such as Mike Hayden; Bush’s first director of national intelligence, John Negroponte; and Colin Powell. For his transition planning team, Biden elevated Avril Haines to helm the foreign policy and national security teams, a position from which she would proceed to director of national intelligence. Haines, who had worked for Biden in the Senate, was an archetypal figure in the Sustainable War on Terror. As an attorney on the Obama NSC, she chaired the group reviewing the drone strikes and was a force for their restriction—though never their abolition—and at the CIA, she effectively absolved the agents who spied on Dan Jones. Her Obama administration colleagues considered Haines among their most thoughtful, lawful, and civilized peers. Trump sought a War on Terror stripped of any civilized veneer. Biden, who helped construct that veneer, wanted it reinstated.

  The indifference, grift, dishonesty, incompetence, and distrust of expertise that characterized Trump’s coronavirus response were all familiar. It was how the Coalition Provisional Authority had governed Iraq. Now it was standard operating procedure for a government facing an escalating crisis at home. No one with power could be trusted as the foundations of daily life neared collapse. As allies like Palantir and Fisher Sand and Gravel cashed in, Trump blamed everyone else for his failure, even responding to a question about the slowness in acquiring test kits, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

  With discontent boiling over as the summer approached, Trump reached for the legacy of the 9/11 era in a different way. He aimed the weapons of the Forever War at Americans protesting for their lives and their freedom.

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  “WHILE NO ONE CONDONES LOOTING,” said Donald Rumsfeld, shortly after U.S. troops entered a Baghdad that was erupting into chaos, “on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who’ve had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime.”

  On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt for eight minutes and forty-six seconds on the neck of George Floyd, whom a convenience store owner suspected of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to buy cigarettes. It was part of an American police tradition, stretching back to white posses empowered by the Fugitive Slave Act, of executing Black people. Bystanders watched, filming, as Floyd, f
earing he was about to die, cried out for his deceased mother. When paramedics arrived, Chauvin did not rise from Floyd’s corpse for more than another minute. Floyd’s brother Philonise later told Congress, “I’m tired of the pain I’m feeling now, and I’m tired of the pain I feel every time another Black person is killed for no reason.”

  He spoke for tens of millions. The protests that erupted on behalf of Floyd—and Breonna Taylor, slain in her own home by Louisville police executing a no-knock warrant, and Ahmaud Arbery, shot by a white father and son while out for a jog in Georgia’s Glynn County—were unique in size and fury. The New York Times estimated that between 15 million and 26 million people mobilized in a single month, all without much organizational infrastructure or national leadership, all amid a global pandemic. That made the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 the largest mass movement in American history. The white reaction they prompted brought the War on Terror onto the streets like never before.

  On May 28, Minneapolis demonstrators burned a police precinct station. New York City remembered its own Eric Garner, whom a police officer also suffocated to death over cigarettes, and ended its coronavirus-lockdown silence by flooding the streets. Cities across the country rapidly joined in. Incidents of looting, burnt cars, smashed windows, and other property damage were anecdotal compared to the millions who spent the next several weeks demanding an end to racist policing—as a thin wedge into a demand for an end to white supremacy. Police nationwide treated the protests as a challenge to their authority. The Saturday after Floyd’s murder, two NYPD vehicles drove through protesters on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue. The next evening, just south of Union Square, an officer drew his gun on a group who had made makeshift barricades on Broadway with trash and construction barriers. As terrified protesters frantically fled, at least three cops nightsticked one who had fallen. Yet for the first week of its coverage of the unrest, the media largely presented a narrative of protest violence, obscuring the Trump-encouraged police rampage underway.

  Trump passed the first Sunday of the protests in the underground bunker where Dick Cheney spent 9/11, despite never being in any danger. It forecasted his reaction. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, echoing an infamous police response to protesters in the 1960s civil rights movement. For generations, reactionaries had attributed demands for Black liberation to “outside agitators,” usually meaning left-wing radicals. But since Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the resistance to the nationalist right in places like Charlottesville, the perspective of conservative politicians and media to left-wing radicals had become more militant. Outsized in their imagination was antifascist action, or Antifa. In truth, antifascism was a movement rather than any form of hierarchical organization, but to Trump supporters like Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas that sounded like a Deep State excuse for “downplaying” an internal enemy. Antifa’s invisible org chart was, to them, little more than the latest version of leaderless jihad.

  Trump responded to the protests in the spirit of 9/11, declaring on May 31 that he was designating Antifa “a terrorist organization.” His decree was a legal and bureaucratic impossibility. America’s refusal to acknowledge its own white homegrown terrorists, even after McVeigh and Oklahoma City, meant there was no domestic terror statute to ban such a group, criminalize its associates, and dry up its money. Even if there had been, the formless Antifa could not qualify. But that could be a weapon in the hands of the administration: there would be no way to prove a suspect wasn’t Antifa. The legal category error around Antifa mattered less than the clear message that the administration was willing to use the power of the state to treat the left as terrorists. “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” wondered Trumpist congressman Matt Gaetz.

  It was Bill Barr’s moment. Months before, the attorney general had delivered apocalyptic speeches warning that “militant secularists” were on a campaign of civilizational “organized destruction,” assaulting Christianity so furiously that its end result would be to drain America of the “virtue” necessary for a free society. Now he had the opportunity to strike back. Barr announced that the Joint Terrorism Task Forces would train their considerable resources on “extremists, anarchists . . . agitators” taking part in the protests, to “identify people in the crowd, pull them out and prosecute them.” He told puzzled state governors that all the intelligence necessary for the coming prosecutions would flow through the JTTFs. David Bowdich, the FBI’s deputy director, concurred. In early June, in the face of what he called “a national crisis,” Bowdich rallied his agents to crack down on the protesters in Forever War terms: “When 9/11 occurred, our folks did not quibble about whether there was danger ahead for them.” But it proved difficult to cobble together prosecutable cases. With hundreds arrested in New York City, interrogators pressed those in custody for any connection to Antifa. Yet the first wave of twenty-two criminal complaints for violence in the protests included no mention of Antifa at all.

  Where law enforcement seemed inadequate, the military was available. During a June 1 conference call Trump demanded that state governors take a hard-line approach, including deploying their National Guard. If they refused to do so, he threatened, he would invoke the nineteenth-century Insurrection Act, which empowered him to order the military to suppress unrest. Esper told the governors that the military stood prepared to “dominate the battlespace,” by which he meant American cities, streets, and citizens. He would later brush off his comment as inoffensive military jargon.

  During a protest that turned chaotic near the White House on the first weekend of the demonstrations, someone set a fire in the basement of the cherished St. John’s Church. Trump used it as an opportunity for an operation spearheaded by Barr against a peaceful protest at Lafayette Square hours after the president’s call with the governors. As Trump threatened at a press conference to use violence, Barr ordered the U.S. Park Police, backed by D.C. national guardsmen, to advance on the crowd that had gathered between Trump and the church. Panicked protesters fled an unprovoked burst of rubber bullets, pepper balls, and tear gas. The White House initially attempted to argue that the police never fired tear gas, but the Park Police later acknowledged using it. D.C. national guardsmen, all locals, reported agonizing over their forced complicity and felt compelled to defend the protesters. “I felt that we were more protecting the people from the police,” said Specialist Isaiah Lynch.

  Trump and his coterie strutted to the church. There, he waved a Bible and grinned for the cameras, pantomiming as a defender of a besieged Christianity. Accompanying him was not only Esper but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, army general Mark Milley, dressed in his camouflage combat uniform. The Pentagon would later tell reporters that Milley thought he was going to inspect the guardsmen. But the chairman had sent an unmistakable message of military support for the crackdown Trump threatened. Trump had even said Milley, who by statute is not in the chain of command, was “in charge” of the government’s response, something he quickly forgot. Yingling, who served under McMaster at Tal Afar more than a decade earlier, said Milley had “knowingly, willingly betrayed his oath.”

  With Milley’s complicity, a week of chaos descended upon Washington. A D.C. Guard helicopter flew threateningly low over a nighttime crowd of protesters, a war-zone technique of “rotor washing” away a crowd with noise, dust, and fear. Trump persuaded allied governors to loan him some national guardsmen. The day after Lafayette Square, the Pentagon deployed an infantry battalion from Fort Bragg, dubbed Task Force 504, just beyond the Washington city limits. An army regiment in northern Virginia was issued bayonets in the event it was ordered into the city. Residents soon began to notice uniformed masked police massing around federal buildings, often without any identifying insignia. It took days to discover that Barr had essentially assembled a militia. An estimated thirteen hundred members of the Bureau of Prisons, Park Police, and loaned
Homeland Security personnel from components like CBP became newly deputized U.S. marshals, under the ultimate command of Barr’s Justice Department. In the city’s northeast neighborhoods people spotted what they assumed was a drone overhead. It turned out that Washington was one of fifteen cities consumed by protests where CBP had flown drones and even manned surveillance flights.

  Applauding it all was Trumpist senator Tom Cotton. While a lieutenant in Iraq, Cotton had demanded that Times journalists be imprisoned for exposing part of STELLARWIND. Now he advocated for the military to disperse the protests and give what he called “no quarter” to “antifa terrorists” and other protesters. The Times gave Cotton op-ed space to develop his ideas about using the military to suppress Americans. It prompted an internal backlash that yielded the resignation in disgrace of the Times opinions editor. Elite media recriminations tended to bemoan an allegedly censorious culture within mainstream journalism rather than that culture’s willingness to permit a sitting senator to legitimize uniformed violence against nonwhite and left-wing protesters.

  Then came a sudden backdown. Esper, a West Pointer seemingly pushed to the breaking point of his cronyism by Lafayette Square, announced on June 3 that he now opposed using the military against the protests. His public dissent ruined his standing with Trump. Before the week was over, a large group of retired generals and admirals, all figures marked by the War on Terror—including JSOC’s Bill McRaven and Tony Thomas, John Allen, Mike Mullen, and Vincent Brooks—denounced Trump for threatening to use the Insurrection Act. Chief among them was Mattis, who finally broke his silence to denounce Trump as a threat to the Constitution. After Mattis unsubtly implied that Milley had disgraced his uniform, the chairman apologized days later for appearing in Lafayette Square alongside Trump. By mid-June, Task Force 504 demobilized, the National Guard stood down, and Barr’s posse disappeared from the city streets. In its place came an investigative task force Barr convened to hunt and prosecute “anti-government extremists.” While the Pentagon saw its moral authority in jeopardy, Barr continued to wield law enforcement against what he viewed as a rising left-wing threat.