Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Asked if these efforts had been worth it, Stanley McChrystal, the former JSOC and Afghanistan war commander, replied, “It would be impossible to argue that it was. The outcome just hasn’t been positive enough to argue that. I think that we can never know a counterfactual, we can never know what would have happened if we’d gone in and done things differently, so I can’t argue it automatically would have been different. I think the things that were done were done with good intentions, mostly. But no. We just made so many fundamental mistakes in how we approached it that the question is, which again, you and I can’t answer, had we gone in with a different mindset, a totally different approach, which would have been more of a counterinsurgency approach, building through the state, would it have worked? I can’t say it would’ve, but I think it would have been a better approach.”

  Even after eighteen years of his ordeal, Hassoun thought he might be able to clear all this up if only Chad Wolf would talk with him. He had heard Wolf on the common-room radio talking about the injustice of George Floyd’s murder. Hassoun wrote him talking about the injustice that he was right now enduring, an injustice Wolf could end. Hadn’t Wolf been the one signing the six-month threat designations? Was it too much to expect he would read Hassoun’s letter? “Here people are slammed with stupid stuff for life and it’s a disgrace,” he reflected. “The greatest country in the world cannot reach a point where it can be a little bit civilized in its justice system.”

  And not only in its justice system. The War on Terror, not the nationalist fantasy Trump spun in his inaugural address, was the real American carnage. It turned foreigners into nonpersons—Anti-Iraqi Forces, Military-Aged Males, Detainees. When necessary, it could turn Americans into foreigners, all through turning citizenship into a border that it militarized. Those deemed no longer worthy of constitutional protections, like Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son Abdulrahman, could outrun the drones for only so long. The longer America viewed itself as under siege, the easier it became to see enemies everywhere. The longer America found itself unable to resolve its agonizing failure to achieve peace and victory, the easier it became to blame the vulnerable at home, to see Black liberation as terror, to see nonwhite immigration as terror, to see protesters as terror, to see liberalism as the handmaiden of terror, to see everything as terror except the apparatus it had constructed to inflict terror on men like Adham Hassoun. As the War on Terror became permanent, it was inevitable that those confronted with the agonizing refutation of American exceptionalism would look for a satisfying, violent resolution. The answers liberals offered were to call the War on Terror something else, reconcile themselves to a diminished “sustainable” version, and posture as if that was as good as ending the war. Liberalism, like the Security State, would always be shocked to discover that such permanence empowered those who wanted America not to be a global police force for undeserving foreigners, but a domestic one guarding the ramparts of American civilization.

  In late July 2020 the Trump administration and Adham Hassoun reached a deal. He could go free—but not in America. The arrangement suited Hassoun, who had grown weary of a country that would never have room for him anywhere but in a cage. He started a new life in Rwanda. It could hardly be considered a loss for the government. As long as the Justice Department didn’t fail in court, it wouldn’t have to foreclose on any Forever War authority. Retaining the war itself was more important than retaining any particular detainee. Accordingly, from his new Kigali home, Hassoun watched as Portland protesters were snatched off the street and put into vans. He recognized what he saw. “This is what America has become,” he said. “You started out doing it to people like me. Aliens and Muslims are vulnerable. Once the persecutors perfect their game, they move up to target citizens.” His disgust for the War on Terror does not extend to Americans. Hassoun “still considers the American people to be my people,” he said.

  Trump’s political coalition would never reciprocate that sentiment. But by the November election, MAGA did not consider millions of Americans to be their people, either. While the Democrats may have reached for their 2004 template against a hated Republican president, it turned out that Biden was not Kerry and Trump was not Bush. Trump lost the election, but the Democrats did not defeat MAGA. The head of the Texas Republican Party, Allen West—who, when he was an army lieutenant colonel, had an Iraqi policeman tortured—made the party’s slogan “We Are The Storm,” echoing a QAnon cry, and suggested that secession was a legitimate goal after the Supreme Court declined to overturn Trump’s loss. In Washington, where the Republicans gained House seats, one of the new GOP freshmen, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, was an outright QAnon believer who had called the previous Congress part of “an Islamic invasion of our government” and declared white men to be “the most mistreated group of people in the United States today.” When she took her oath of office on January 3, Greene wore a trump won mask to the Capitol.

  Greene reflected the general MAGA mood. Trump had learned another pivotal lesson of the War on Terror: failure was no more than an argument for escalation. He and his surrogates insisted that they had won the election, amplified it through their journalistic surrogates and across the surveillance-capitalism platforms of social media, and then set to work attempting to cobble together any evidence of mass voter fraud. It took them to absurd extremes—Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, performed Trump’s sort of intelligence collection by groundlessly asserting that Nevada had covered up its fraudulent votes—and court after court rejected the campaign’s allegations. But Trump’s relentless, manufactured insistence that the election was stolen from him led substantial portions of the right to believe it. In December, 18 Republican state attorneys general, supported by over 125 members of Congress, backed a frivolous Texas lawsuit to invalidate the election. Some of that support was cynical. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official wondered to The Washington Post. But there was also a sincere mood taking hold on the right that democracy itself was an obstacle to its agenda, as it empowered the wrong sorts of voters. “Democracy isn’t the objective,” tweeted Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, “liberty, peace and prosperity are.” No meaningful difference existed between a lost election and a stolen election. The only mark of a valid election was a right-wing victory. Anything else was a Flight 93 Election.

  With Congress on the brink of certifying the results of the electoral college, Trump called for his MAGA followers to assemble in Washington on January 6, 2021, for a demonstration to make legislators “Stop The Steal.” MAGA understood the implications of their leader’s message. Their online fora exploded with messages to show up in D.C. with guns. “Yes, it’s illegal,” said one poster, “but this is war, and we’re clearly in a post-legal phase of our society.” Mike Flynn, arriving in D.C., had already called for martial law to prevent Biden’s presidency; the day before the rally, he asked if Trump’s loyalists were ready to “bleed” for their freedom. That night, MAGA skirmished with local police, prompting fury that the cops, whom MAGA had so fervently defended, could show such disloyalty. “We don’t got your back no more! We’re the business owners! We’re the veterans!” one shouted. Angry MAGA devotees from around the country—some arriving by private jet—assembled the next day to hear Trump; amped by the unlikely motivational music of “Fortunate Son” and the 1980s pop of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” he told them to march on the Capitol. “You’ll never take back your country with weakness. You have to show strength,” he told them, deceitfully adding that “I’ll be there with you” on the procession to Congress. A rising MAGA senator who was objecting to the certification, Josh Hawley of Missouri, raised his fist in salute when he saw the protest advancing.

  With that, a MAGA mob, later estimated at around eight hundred people, stormed into the Capitol. Despite how thoroughly telegraphed the insurrection had been, the Capitol’s perimeter defenses were no match for the riote
rs, who forced down flimsy knee-high fencing and prompted Capitol police officers, not all of whom were in riot gear, to fall back to the building. It was no use. Overwhelming the police, people in body armor and red MAGA hats smashed through exterior windows with poles, entered the Capitol, and let in their comrades. Some officers fought to keep the mob out: One shot dead Ashli Babbitt, a QAnoner who was also an Afghanistan and Iraq veteran, as a crowd she was in attempted to breach a barricaded door. Another, Officer Eugene Goodman, an army infantryman in Iraq during the apocalyptic years of 2005–2006, heroically utilized his knowledge of the chamber’s layout to maneuver the mob away from legislators and may have saved the life of Vice President Mike Pence. But other cops took selfies with the insurrectionists, stood aside as they entered, and permitted all but fourteen insurrectionists to leave without arresting them. It would be unthinkable to afford Adham Hassoun such treatment, and Hassoun had never committed an act of violence.

  For over four hours inside the Capitol, men wearing things like camp auschwitz sweatshirts and carrying zip ties useful for taking hostages ransacked offices, smeared shit through the halls, and, underscoring the meaning of the day, unfurled Confederate flags. Panicked lawmakers and staff barricaded office doors with furniture and sheltered for their lives. One man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s office, which he was unaware was empty, carried a 950,000-volt stun gun. Many of the rioters—in the main, people accustomed to not being policed—posted and livestreamed their involvement in an insurrection that ultimately left five people dead.

  Unlike at the BLM protests of June, there was no phalanx of minimally marked Justice Department police to protect federal installations. Part of the reason was a conscious decision to avoid a replay of the crackdown. Washington mayor Muriel Bowser requested the D.C. National Guard on the streets, but not in an armed capacity, only to free up cops for crowd control. But the guard’s commander, Major General William Walker, accused Trump’s new Pentagon leadership of restricting his authority to respond to the Capitol Police’s call for backup early in the insurrection; Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, a War on Terror Special Operations veteran, denied impropriety but took three hours and nineteen minutes to get the National Guard to the Capitol. The result was that no real relief arrived for the Capitol Police. Its quickly fired chief, Steven Sund, sounded like Bush in blaming the attack on an intelligence failure. Sund claimed “nothing . . . including intelligence provided by FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and D.C. Metropolitan Police (MPD)” had indicated “a well-coordinated, armed assault on the Capitol might occur on Jan. 6.” That required ignoring weeks of calls by Trump to Stop The Steal and responses by MAGA pledging to show up in force.

  The insurrectionists themselves vindicated Daryl Johnson once again. Present at the Capitol were blackshirt gangs and militias, including the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys, whom a Wall Street Journal investigation reported were “coordinating, instigating and leading some of the most pivotal moments” of the riot. But most conspicuous within the crowd were the veterans. Of the first 176 people charged with crimes related to the insurrection, 22 had military experience. One of them was Larry Rendell Brock, a retired air force lieutenant colonel who had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Brock had carried flex cuffs, the sort used to subdue detainees by American police and servicemembers alike, onto the Senate floor. His plate carrier featured patches with the insignia of his 706th Fighter Squadron and the Totenkopf skull of the Marvel Comics vigilante killer known as the Punisher. Another was a former Navy SEAL named Adam Newbold, who posted a video boasting about “breaching” the Capitol, a term familiar from a generation of special operators forcing their way into buildings in pursuit of terrorists. A month earlier, he had posted that he would be prepared to stop a Communist uprising he considered imminent: “Once things start going violent, then I’m in my element.” The FBI swiftly questioned Newbold, who insisted he was nothing like those the SEALs hunted. “I am not a terrorist,” he told ABC News, later expressing remorse for his participation. An entire generation of war had taught people like Newbold that terrorists didn’t look or worship as they did.

  The senior U.S. attorney in D.C. pledged to aggressively prosecute the insurrectionists, including through “sedition and conspiracy” charges. But the first month’s worth of charges fit a template familiar to observers of CIA torture. They were all people who answered the call to Stop The Steal, not the powerful politicians who issued the call in the first place. Hawley and other lawmakers who stoked the lie that Trump won the election refused liberal demands for their resignation, and within weeks sat on oversight committees investigating the failures of the Security State—and only their’s—on January 6. The House impeached Trump a second time, this time with ten Republican votes, but in the Senate, Mike Lee argued that Trump deserved a “mulligan” for his incitement.

  Liberals and their Security State allies, restored to power in the Biden administration, reached once again for security solutions to a fundamentally political problem. Robert Grenier, a CIA Counterterrorism Center chief during the age of the black sites, argued that the insurrectionists represented an insurgency. “To remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and flourish,” as Grenier described the mission of the Afghanistan quagmire, is “the heart of what we need to deal with here.” A career prosecutor who helmed the Justice Department’s national security division under Obama, Mary McCord, advocated for new laws against domestic terrorism, including the power that Congress refused to grant after Oklahoma City: making domestic terrorism “an offense that people and organizations are prohibited from materially supporting.” It fell to the democratic socialists in Congress, chiefly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, to explain why that was unacceptable even beyond the plethora of existing laws available to prosecute the insurrectionists. “We should not lose sight of our disgust at the double standards employed against white protesters and Black ones, or against Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Omar, who had hidden on January 6 from a mob that had been cued to hate her. “But at the same time, we must resist the very human desire for revenge—to simply see the tools that have oppressed Black and brown people expanded.”

  Another liberal response was to take the opportunity to declare that January 6 turned a page in American history. Elissa Slotkin spent the Forever War as a CIA analyst of the Middle East, deploying three times to Iraq, and served as a senior official in Obama’s Pentagon. In 2018, she was elected to Congress to represent Michigan’s Eighth District, home to several of the militiamen conspirators charged in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. “The ‘post-9/11’ era, where our greatest threats to national security were external, is over,” Slotkin declared. Given the difficulty, after bin Laden, of finding a material circumstance to indisputably resolve the war, January 6 had a plausibility to it. But while Slotkin’s argument reflected the War on Terror’s exhaustion, it also displayed a familiar liberal formalism. She made no effort to locate the path to January 6 that the American response to September 11 had paved. Nor did Slotkin argue that because the 9/11 era was supposedly over, the extraordinary security powers that characterized the era ought to end as well. Behind the declaration of finality was, as ever, continuity. Forty men remained imprisoned at Guantanamo after Slotkin said the 9/11 era was over.

  Neither conservatives nor liberals wanted to face what nationalists and leftists knew: the War on Terror could sustain itself because of how deeply American it was. Its iconography, a gun wrapped in the flag, with a cross implied in the background, was no accident. It was there even before 9/11, at Oklahoma City, where Americans preferred blaming and then legislating against Muslims to recognizing that foundational American mythology bred terrorists like Timothy McVeigh. The reign of terror that America launched after 9/11 was familiar to nonwhites across four hundred years of American history, in both its violence and its insistence that such violence was for the ultimate
benefit of civilization. It ensured that America would pay any price for what would prove a futile, self-destructive war. Paying that price, in blood, was what America had always valorized, what it had always justified. The War on Terror fit within American traditions of settler colonialism, observed New York University professor Nikhil Pal Singh, as it was a “reengagement with the more primal terms of American race war and the fantasy of national social and economic regeneration through (frontier) violence.” Donald Trump saw the same thing. Except to MAGA, settler colonialism was how America made itself great. “You think our country’s so innocent?” he had sneered at Bill O’Reilly.

  After insisting that its role as a global hegemon bore no relationship to 9/11, America was left with a civilizational explanation for its generation-long sense of intolerable vulnerability. It could only understand the fanaticism of al-Qaeda, and then of ISIS, and whatever successor group emerges, through mass civilizational pathology. Jihadism was dangerous because it was so deeply rooted in Islam, Americans concluded. Islam attacked America because Islam was, in the final analysis, terror itself. Never would America acknowledge that the violent, reactionary dangers that it attributed to its enemies were also part of its own history. That was the meaning of Oklahoma City. It was the meaning of January 6. A white man with a flag and a gun, the man who had made America great, was not a terrorist. The 9/11 era said he was a counterterrorist. America had never been the sort of place that would tell him he was anything else. As the Forever War persisted, with Trump handing off to Biden a perpetual-motion engine of death powered by the worst of American history, its targets increasingly domestic and its final form still unachieved, it became increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.