Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  MAGA was already habituated to interpret civil disobedience on behalf of Black liberation as a threat. Those mobilizing across America were interlopers, Antifa, the terrorists Barr’s task force would expose. Hadn’t the media talking heads apologizing for these rioters just been insisting that everyone had to stay indoors to prevent the spread of coronavirus? They had been quick to demand a quarantine when it meant destroying the economy in a reelection year, MAGA reckoned, but not when Trump’s enemies were on the streets. The protests were not about justice, just as the coronavirus was not about public health: they were both part of the same power grab by the left.

  Tucker Carlson, the Iraq war cheerleader who styled himself an antiwar conservative after he came to see Iraqis as culturally unworthy, aimed the Forever War at Americans on his June 25 broadcast—the entire Forever War. Those in the streets, he stated, were “not protesters, not civil rights activists, not CNN contributors, but domestic terrorists.” He urged Barr to “change the course of this country’s future.” All Barr had to do was round up “the leaders of antifa tomorrow, along with every single person caught on camera torching a building, destroying a monument, defacing a church, and put them all in shackles and then frog-marc[h] them in front of cameras like MS-13, and call them what they actually are, domestic terrorists.”

  Barr needed little encouragement from Fox pundits. The attorney general took control with the determination of someone watching Trump’s reelection chances slipping away. He and his allies overruled career prosecutors to drop charges against Mike Flynn and reduce a recommended sentence for Roger Stone. Then, late on a Friday, Barr announced that he had accepted the resignation of acting U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York, who was investigating Rudy Giuliani and in whose jurisdiction a post-presidential Trump had considerable criminal exposure. Berman publicly stated he had never offered his resignation, and Barr had to temporarily appoint Berman’s deputy as the price of his exit. Yet Barr knew he had a reliable MAGA phalanx in Congress. When former Stone prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, a serving assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore, denounced Barr’s politicizing his office at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, a chorus of Republicans praised Barr for doing what Jim Jordan called “the Lord’s work” in purging the Security State of Trump’s enemies.

  Barr’s separate crackdown on the BLM protests was augmented by white supremacist vigilantes. Even before the protests exploded and Trump labeled Antifa a terrorist group, the FBI broke up what it said was a plot by three members of white supremacist group the Base to murder Antifa activists who had revealed their identities online. In the fall, the FBI arrested thirteen Michigan men, including some who had attended the anti-lockdown protests at the state capitol, on charges including conspiracy to kidnap the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Once the protests broke out, an actual violent group exploited the unrest. They were the Boogaloo Boys, dressed in a flamboyant mixture of tactical gear and Hawaiian shirts to advertise the casual enthusiasm with which they sought to spark a second civil war, something many Boogs expected to be a race war. The Boogaloo was a meme that became a movement. But some of its members who confronted the police even came to see that Black Lives Matter had a point and expressed ambivalence about law enforcement. Lurking underneath the Boogaloo was an extremist’s plea for closure, for an end to the Forever War that America had become for them. Except this one they expected to win.

  Unlike Antifa, Boogaloo Boys appeared in Barr’s first protest charges. One case in Nevada alleged that three Boys had brought Molotov cocktails to a BLM protest. All had served in the military, an indication that the Boogaloo had some appeal to current and former service members, further vindicating the onetime DHS analyst Daryl Johnson. Counterprotesters used their cars to run demonstrators down at least eighteen times in a single month, following the path set in Charlottesville by James Fields and before that by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Other violence was more intimate. In late August seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse drove from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot dead two protesters demanding justice for Jacob Blake, whom police had shot in front of his children, leaving him paralyzed. After the shooting, Rittenhouse walked past the police, who permitted him to leave—they had been passing out water bottles and showing their appreciation to Rittenhouse’s armed anti-BLM cohort, which saw itself as a police auxiliary—but he was later arrested in Illinois. Tucker Carlson defended Rittenhouse by saying he “had to maintain order when no one else would.” For months afterward, MAGA treated Rittenhouse as a hero and a martyr. Talking points for the Department of Homeland Security defended “Kyle,” who had gone to what it described as “the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.” Right-wing donors, including the former child actor Ricky Schroder, rallied to post his $2 million bail in time for Thanksgiving.

  On June 28, a BLM protest entered the Portland Place community in St. Louis to demand the mayor’s resignation. When marchers walked peacefully past the mock Renaissance palazzo of one of the mayor’s neighbors, out from the mansion emerged lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey. He, in a pink polo shirt and barefoot, waved an AR-15 to demand protesters “get out of my neighborhood.” She, also shoeless, leveled her handgun and screamed at them. “It was like the storming of the Bastille,” Mark told local reporters, claiming the protesters had forced entry into Portland Place, though video footage showed them walking through an open gate. The Republican National Convention gave the McCloskeys a speaking role, where Patricia warned, “What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country.”

  What MAGA resented most about BLM was its demand to reckon with MAGA’s cherished past, during which white supremacy was understood to be either meritocratic or natural. They claimed cultural besiegement when protesters dethroned Confederate monuments, and vindication when the rage of the protests toppled granite statues of liberal heroes like Ulysses S. Grant. “Our history is being erased,” Matt Gaetz said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing about Zelinsky’s accusations against Barr. The historical reckoning even extended into the army, where retired officers backed by David Petraeus belatedly endorsed renaming bases honoring Confederate generals. A furious Trump vowed to veto any defense bill that required renamings, and Congress had to override his objection to pass the bill into law.

  A wartime attitude took hold. Protesters encountered white gun owners kitted out in “tacticool” gear like ballistic helmets, hard-knuckle gloves, and plate-carrier vests, playacting at being “warfighters.” By midsummer 2020, they had shown up at BLM protests some five hundred times, committing sixty-four incidents of assault and even six shootings that killed three people. Trump, invited to condemn white supremacist violence during a presidential debate, told one of the most prominent right-wing gangs, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by,” which the group cheered. Like Rittenhouse, such organizations considered themselves adjuncts to a now-infuriated police. Unlike Rittenhouse, the Fred Perry–uniformed Proud Boys had for years grown proximate to mainstream MAGA figures like Nunes, Carlson, and Roger Stone.

  One place police vented their rage was Buffalo. Martin Gugino, a seventy-five-year-old peace activist, approached a column of police during a march. One of them shoved him backward, fracturing his skull when he fell onto the concrete while they continued forward. Trump dismissed Gugino, who spent the next four weeks in the hospital, as an Antifa plant. All fifty-seven members of the Buffalo police emergency response team later resigned—out of disapproval not of their colleagues, but of officials suspending their colleagues. In Philadelphia, where protesters toppled the statue of infamous racist Mayor Frank Rizzo—and where Proud Boys and police had a warm relationship—a white-shirt cop named Joseph Bologna Jr. took a retractable baton to a protester’s head. When he was suspended, the police union sold bologna strong T-shirts. In North Carolina two middle-aged police officers were cau
ght on tape musing about “slaughtering” Black people in a second civil war. In Seattle, where protesters temporarily reclaimed part of their city from police, an officer in a gas mask was filmed encouraging his colleagues, “Don’t kill ’em, but push ’em back . . . hit ’em hard.” By then the NYPD union had endorsed Trump’s reelection.

  If the military was unwilling to suppress the protests, the Department of Homeland Security, the quintessential Forever War institution, was eager to take on the task. Alongside the U.S. Marshals Service, the department sent its tactical teams from CPD into Portland, the scene of sustained BLM protests, which had included vandalizing a federal courthouse. That was all the opening they needed. Barr and the DHS’s acting leader, Chad Wolf—whom the Senate never confirmed and who had advocated for migrant child separation—portrayed vandalism as insurrection. Their minimally identified agents, kitted out in camouflage, body armor, and gas masks, seized Portland protesters without probable cause and placed them into unmarked vans—a taste for native-born whites of what DHS had done to migrants for years. They fired rubber bullets at protesters’ heads, fracturing skulls, and doused them with pepper spray and tear gas. Their violence only prompted Portland protesters to escalate their nighttime resistance, sending firecrackers sailing into the federal courthouse, which the marshals and the DHS now held, leading one GOP congressman to compare the fireworks to IEDs. The marshals even referred to “violent extremists,” the Obama-era euphemism for terrorists, amid the protesters. Federal forces acted accordingly. The DHS created Iraq-war-like “baseball card” intelligence reports on arrested protesters and permitted its intelligence unit to “collect [intelligence] from incarcerated, detained, or arrested persons,” as if they were wartime interrogators. Oregon’s elected leaders demanded DHS withdraw its forces. Wolf indignantly refused. When Christopher David, a fifty-three-year-old navy veteran, approached the feds to ask why they weren’t “honoring your oath to the Constitution,” they broke his hand with batons.

  The response to all of this from Security State veterans was at first muted. “While I am not in a position to second-guess decisions being made on the ground in Portland,” said Jeh Johnson, the air force lawyer who was Obama’s final DHS secretary, “I do know that if the mayor, governor, and both U.S. senators questioned the deployment of additional DHS law enforcement personnel in their state, I would, too.” Trump reacted as he had always done in the absence of forceful opposition. In late July he announced the expansion of his crackdown against “crime” in “Democrat-run cities” to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Albuquerque. He knew how to package his response: this was his Surge. Sounding like Bush talking about Iraq and Obama talking about Afghanistan, Trump marshaled the language of the Forever War to bring that war to American streets: “This will be hard, painstaking work, it will take time, the tide will not recede overnight.”

  It was inevitable that Trump would stoke his base’s resentments. Black Lives Matter was guilty of “Treason, Sedition, Insurrection,” he tweeted. In mid-June he announced a rally, his first since the appearance of the coronavirus, to be held on Juneteenth, the commemoration of Black liberation. It would be held in Tulsa, where ninety-nine years earlier a white pogrom had destroyed the city’s Black Wall Street. Trump ultimately pushed the rally back from Juneteenth by a day. But the unsubtle message here was that Trump, who had been robbed of adulation by the pandemic, was returning to the city in triumph on a symbolic day. Days before, he actively encouraged violence among his supporters in the police department and among civilians. “Protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes” needed to “please understand” that they would face a “much different scene” than they had before. But while his campaign boasted of an anticipated record turnout, only eighty-six hundred showed up for the rally. Trump had to cancel a planned speech to an overflow crowd. No violence marked Tulsa. Lack of interest, which for Trump was a toxic reception, did.

  Still, at a sparsely attended BOK Center, the president vented MAGA’s expanding grievances. He mocked coronavirus as the “Kung Flu.” The “unhinged left-wing mob . . . trying to vandalize our history” was another target. Trump portrayed it all as a war for civilization now underway. A toppled statue of Confederate general Albert Pike was a “beautiful piece of art.” Black Lives Matter wanted to “demolish our heritage” and replace it with their “new oppressive regime.” Trump spoke for the police and “our great people from ICE,” and against enemies like Ilhan Omar, who “would like to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia.” He reminded Tulsa that he had brought about the deaths of both Baghdadi and Qassem Soleimani. While promising to keep out of “foolish, stupid, ridiculous foreign wars,” Trump added that he would “never hesitate to kill America’s terrorist enemies.” They were now found closer to home. Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: the terrorists were whomever you said they were.

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  AS CORONAVIRUS SPREAD THROUGH BATAVIA, Adham Hassoun grew reflective. Now fifty-eight, he had spent his middle age in one or another American prison, because he refused to become an informant, because he helped an unfortunate-seeming Jose Padilla remake himself in Egypt, because the PATRIOT Act allowed it. When his time grew short in the general population at Marion, where he felt the freest he had anywhere in captivity, Hassoun allowed himself to be goaded into challenging someone to fight him. The fight didn’t happen, but his friends were angry he had jeopardized what they assumed would be his freedom. “I’m Palestinian and hardheaded,” he explained. He kept his sanity in prison by knowing he hadn’t dishonored himself.

  Coronavirus threatened more than Hassoun’s health. It delayed the all-important evidentiary hearing at which the Justice Department and DHS would have to present their case that Hassoun was actually the threat they claimed he was. His habeas judge, Elizabeth Wolford, kept ruling in his favor. Over the government’s objections, she refused to permit FBI agents to summarize what their informants told them, and instead compelled the Justice Department to produce their witnesses for testimony and cross-examination. But the outbreak of the virus resulted in the April hearing getting postponed until June. Hassoun, steadying himself, remembered how often he had thought himself close to freedom. “I won’t believe it until I see the sky above me and breathe the air and no one tells me to put my jumpsuit on,” he said.

  Wolford gave the Justice Department a simple mandate: prove that Hassoun posed a threat to the United States. Instead, in May, after the defense team confronted the government about the shattered credibility of its lead witness, the prosecution informed Judge Wolford that Hassoun was to be released on restrictions, pending the approval of DHS, which never manifested. That was a last chance for a face-saving exit. In June, prosecutors belatedly revealed that their witness, jailhouse informant Shane Ramsundar, had given near-identical testimony about another prisoner earlier. Wolford issued a scathing ruling striking his and another informant’s testimonies and threatening sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct. In response the Justice Department conceded it could not meet what it called the “burden” Wolford had imposed and filed a motion to scrap the evidentiary hearing without a contest.

  While the government’s latest case against Hassoun had collapsed, its compulsion to imprison him had not. It petitioned Wolford to stay Hassoun’s release while it appealed her decision. During a Zoom hearing, Wolford noted the awkwardness of ruling on a stay of release after she had rejected the entire case for keeping Hassoun imprisoned. Hassoun immediately agreed to a monitored release in the custody of his sister. But the administration was still unwilling to permit Hassoun to leave Batavia until it had exhausted all its options. None of its appeals depended on an alternative reading of its fabricated evidence. The government instead wanted a higher court to rule that it was not required to meet basic thresholds of admissibility, to include thresholds of witness credibility, against a man it had once convicted on a
terrorism offense.

  Everywhere Hassoun turned, the War on Terror created an obstacle to his release. Hassoun never would have been imprisoned had the government not lowered the standards for criminal association. The climate of fear ensured his conviction. But even with the material-support and conspiracy charges brought against him thanks to the PATRIOT Act, he had served his time. Now, three years into post-conviction detention, the government was unwilling to let Hassoun go free even after conceding its residual case against him couldn’t withstand judicial scrutiny. The permanent, carceral impulses of the War on Terror inclined the government to reach again for its favorite tool: impunity. All it needed was a sufficiently submissive court to declare that judges had to stay out of the government’s way on national security matters. The courts had obliged so often since 9/11.

  The anxiety dream America made out of Adham Hassoun’s life was one scene in an endless nightmare. In response to 9/11, America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people—a full total may never be known—terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime, and declared most of its actions to be legal and constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations. Through it all, America said other people, the ones staring down the barrel of the War on Terror, were the barbarians.