The third step, then, was to measure the success of the targeted information, to determine whether the information was received, opened, viewed, and clicked on. Here again, the center used the most cutting-edge methods of the digital advertising business, which had made it its mission to measure impressions and reception. After directing the enhanced third-party content to the targets that had been identified, the center measured in real time the reception of the information. This was a critical step where big data really mattered: it was not enough to simply identify targets, it was even more important to determine whether the targeted content was being opened and viewed. For this, the center contracted with private companies that did the data mining to parse the digital traces that the targeted users left behind.20
The idea was to mimic what the enemy did itself, which, apparently, was to copy the Google and Amazon approach. According to the head of the center, Michael Lumpkin, the strategy was to “emulate how ISIS goes after its followers”: “Usually it starts on Twitter, then it goes to Facebook, then it goes to Instagram, and ultimately, it goes to Telegram or some other encrypted, point-to-point discussion,” Lumpkin explains. “They are doing what Amazon does. They are targeting selected information to an individual based on their receptivity. We need to do the same thing.”21
In all this, the Center effaced, naturally, all the “Made in USA” labels. “The new center ‘is not going to be focused on US messages with a government stamp on them, but rather amplifying moderate credible voices in the region and throughout civil society,’ said Lisa Monaco, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations. […] ‘Recognizing who is going to have the most legitimate voice and doing everything we can to lift that up and not have it be a US message.’” The head of the Center, Michael Lumpkin added: “In the face of a nimble, adaptive opponent unconstrained by truth or ethics, our people are left swimming in bureaucracy, using outdated technology.”22 The idea behind the center was to update our technology and become more nimble.
And of course, it relied on all of us sharing all our information via social media and invasive digital technologies that feed what I call our expository society. As David Galula emphasizes in his 1963 memoirs, Pacification in Algeria, intelligence is “the key to success.”23 We must now understand our expository society as the essential underpinning of a new counterinsurgency paradigm of government. The approach of the Global Engagement Center captures perfectly these new digital techniques and algorithms—and how they blend, exploit, and deploy the latest and best practices of digital advertising and entertainment, subliminal messaging, and soft propaganda.24 And here, of course, the boundaries between counterinsurgency as foreign policy and counterinsurgency as domestic governance begin to crumble as more and more data is necessary for more effective data mining. As the battle against terror goes global, so do the populations to target—including our own.
The third set of measures was even more basic: terror. The most formidable way to win hearts and minds is to terrorize the local population to make sure they do not sympathize with or aid the active minority. When Paul Aussaresses described his brutal treatment of suspected FLN members and the torturous methods he used in Algeria—the gégène, the waterboard, the summary executions—the French general subsumed these practices under the rubric and chapter heading: La Terreur.25 “The Terror.” He knew what he was talking about. Since 9/11, the same idea has come to guide US foreign policy. Strategies like social spending and digital propaganda, in truth, are merely ornaments to a more basic and enduring structure of terror.
The brutality of counterinsurgency serves, of course, to gather information and eradicate the revolutionary minority. But it also aims higher and reaches further: its ambition, as General Aussaresses recognized well, is to terrorize the insurgents, to scare them to death, and to frighten the local population in order to prevent them from joining the insurgent faction. Today, the use of unusually brutal torture, the targeted drone assassination of high-value suspects, and the indefinite detention under solitary conditions aim not only to eviscerate the enemy, but also to warn others, strike fear, and win their submission and obedience. Drones and indefinite detention crush those they touch, and strike with terror anyone else who might even imagine sympathizing with the revolutionary minority. They display a mastery that appeals and seduces the masses. They legitimize the counterrevolutionary minority. Terror, it turns out, is what truly conquers and colonizes the hearts and minds of the masses. And in US foreign policy since 9/11, terror has served as a way of securing the submission of the passive majority, not just the active minority. Terror, in the end, is a key component of the third core strategy of counterinsurgency.
Since antiquity, terror has served to demarcate the civilized from the barbarian, to distinguish the free citizen from the enslaved. The free male in ancient Greece had the privilege of swearing an oath to the gods, of testifying on his word. The slave, by contrast, could only give testimony under torture. Torture, in this sense, defined freedom and citizenship by demeaning and marking—by imposing stigmata—on those who could be tortured. It served to demarcate the weak. It marked the vulnerable. And it also, paradoxically, served to delineate the “more civilized.” This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the brutality of counterinsurgency: to be civilized is to torture judiciously. This paradox was born in antiquity, but it journeys on. There is a striking passage in an interview with the French general Jacques Massu, notorious for having brutally commanded the Battle of Algiers, in which he compares the French torturers to “choir boys.” “I am not afraid of the word torture,” Massu explains, “but I think in the majority of cases, the French military men obliged to use it to vanquish terrorism were, fortunately, choir boys compared to the use to which it was put by the rebels. The latter’s extreme savagery led us to some ferocity, it is certain, but we remained within the law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”26 Torture was, in Massu’s words, “a cruel necessity,” but it apparently revealed, more than anything, how civilized the French were.
The judicious administration of terror is the hallmark of civilization. To be civilized is to terrorize properly, judiciously, with restraint, according to the rules. Only the barbarians tortured savagely, viciously, unrestrainedly. The civilized, by contrast, knew how and when to tame torture, how to rein it terror, to apply it with judgment and discretion. Compared to the barbarians—the beheadings of ISIS is a modern case on point—we are tame and judicious, even when we torture, not like those barbarians. And since 9/11, the judicious use of terror has been a key US strategy. In the end, terror functions in myriad ways to win the hearts and minds of the masses under the counterinsurgency paradigm of governing.
6
GOVERNING THROUGH TERROR
WATERBOARDING, INDEFINITE DETENTION, ISOLATION AND solitary confinement, drone strikes, the live entombing in coffin-size boxes and barbed-wire pens—these practices are, to be sure, strategic components of counterinsurgency warfare: they work well to extract information, to eliminate the radical minority, and to control the masses. In this sense, they serve well the three prongs of counterinsurgency theory. But there is more to it than that.
Terror is not only the thread that ties together the three core strategies of counterinsurgency, it also functions in myriad ways to advance counterinsurgency as a paradigm of governing—by producing the truth of the efficacy of terror, by legitimizing the regime of terror, by creating fear and discipline within the counterrevolutionary minority, and more. Terror does much more than expected. It produces a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
Terror, for instance, is what renders counterinsurgency theory so resilient, despite the fact that modern warfare rarely, if ever, has succeeded at the military level. Practically all counterinsurgencies ended in national independence for the insurgents and resounding failure for its architects. But counterinsurgency was perfectly resilient at the broader political level because its proponents could and always would argue that their defeat was attributable to
a lack of resolve. It was never the logic of counterinsurgency that failed, but rather the failure to follow through on that logic—the failure to be tough enough. Every time the counterinsurgency miscarried—in Indochina, in Algeria, in Vietnam—it was always because the military had not shown sufficient harshness to the insurgent minority. “We lost the war in Indochina largely because we hesitated to take the necessary measures or took them too late,” Roger Trinquier emphasized. “For the same reason,” he predicted, “we are going to lose the war in Algeria.”1 It was always a lack of sufficient resolve—a lack of sufficient terror—that proved to be the culprit. This resilience fueled the counterinsurgency paradigm.
Terror, it turns out, has always been a linchpin of counterinsurgency. Some advocates explicitly embraced it. Others tiptoed around it, conceding the power of terror but trying to ignore or avoid it. Yet it was always present, even as a shadow. It haunted the sham judicial inquest. It cast a shade over the torture memos. It was right there in the recognition that terrorism is the insurgents’ most effective tool. Or in the suggestion that no methods should be taken off the table. It was always there because, in the end, modern warfare is a paradigm of governing through terror.2
Now, terror is not an unprecedented component of governing, even if its role in the counterinsurgency model may be uniquely constitutive. It has been with us since slavery in antiquity, through the many inquisitions, to the internment and concentration camps of modern history. And there too, in each of its manifestations, it functioned at multiple levels to bolster different modes of governing. Looking back through history, terror has done a lot of work. Today as well. And to see all that terror achieves today—above and beyond the three prongs of counterinsurgency theory—it is useful to look back through history and recall its different functions and the work it has done. The reflections today are stunning.
This chapter—somewhat more historical and theoretical—will return, then, in some detail, to five episodes that reveal the work that terror has done historically, and how that work is refracted today in the counterinsurgency paradigm of governing. The ambition of this chapter is to show how important brutal excess, torture, and terror are to counterrevolutionary strategies. Much of this, but not all, will circle back to torture—where our discussion of post–9/11 US policy began, with torture-as-intelligence gathering, now torture-as-terror. But terror has other manifestations, which is why the broader category is ultimately the more fitting one today.
The first episode reaches back to antiquity, but represents a recurring theme throughout history: terror has often served to manufacture its own truth—especially in terms of its efficacy. “They all talk.” That is a constant refrain in so many texts on tortured interrogation. It is the opening scene of The Battle of Algiers. “He finally spit it out!” says the young interrogator. They all say it to Mohamedou Slahi. They say it to Henri Alleg. Not just once, but throughout: “You’ll answer, I promise you.” “Everybody talks. You’ll have to tell us everything—and not only a little bit of the truth, but everything!” “You’re going to talk! Everybody talks here!”3
Trying to convince a suspect that he will talk, telling him that he will—this is, of course, a psychological technique, but it is more than that. It is also a firm belief of counterinsurgency theorists outside the interrogation room. Roger Trinquier, for instance, insists on this in his televised debate with Saadi Yacef in 1970—and he is not, there, trying to soften up another suspect. Even the FLN apparently believed it, which is why it ordered its members to resist for just twenty-four hours, the amount of time necessary for other FLN members to go in hiding. Everyone says it, and everyone begins to believe it. It becomes, eventually, the truth of terror.
Manufacturing truth: that is, perhaps, the first major function of terror. It is the power of terror, especially in the face of ordinary men and women, of humans, all too human. It has been that way since the inquisitions of the Middle Ages, and before, since antiquity. On this score, little has changed.
In her book on slavery in Greek antiquity, Torture and Truth, Page duBois argues that the idea of truth dominant today in Western thought is indissolubly tied to the practice of torture, while torture itself is deeply connected to the will to discover something that is always beyond our grasp. As a result, society after society returns to torture, in almost an eternal recurrence, to seek out the truth that is always beyond our reach. In ancient times, duBois shows, torture functioned as the metaphorical touchstone of truth and as a means to establish a social hierarchy. In duBois’s words, “the desire to create an other and the desire to extract truth are inseparable, in that the other, because she or he is an other, is constituted as a source of truth.” Truth, in sum, is always “inextricably linked with the practice of torture.”4
DuBois opens her book with an etymological discussion of the Greek term for torture, basanos—which referred to the touchstone that was used in ancient practice to test the mettle of gold, a practice of the money changers. DuBois shows how, in antiquity, the Greeks believed that the torture of a slave was the preeminent source of attaining truth and served as the best and most reliable proof. “The evidence derived from the slave’s body and reported to the court,” duBois writes, “is considered superior to that given freely in the court, before the jury, in the presence of the litigants.” Slave torture produced truth of such a high quality, in fact, that torture achieved the triple functions of demarcating freedom, of instantiating social order, and of fulfilling the search for truth. Truth, duBois argues, “resides in the slave body.”5
In this sense, slave torture in antiquity became the touchstone of truth: the ultimate test of the veracity, of the metal, of the genuineness or authenticity of what was said. As duBois suggests, “The Greeks first use the literal meaning for basanos of ‘touchstone,’ then metaphorize it to connote a test, then reconcretize, rematerialize it to mean once again a physical testing in torture.”6 There is, oddly, an uncanny similitude between the actual operation of the basanos—the tool itself—and the operation of torture: with the tool, the Lydian stone, one rubs gold against the slate, physically ripping pieces of the gold off to see the color of the mark made and left on the slate. Physical torture, it seems, mimics that physical act: it is a rubbing of the physical body against all kinds of tools—in ancient times, the rack or water, still today the wall slam, the slap, the waterboard, the electrical charge—in order to see the truth. The metaphor of scraping the body, like one scrapes gold, to see the residue of truth, is haunting.
Even more, terror produced social difference and hierarchy. The limits on torture in ancient societies served to define what it meant to be among those who could be tortured—what it meant to be a slave or to be free. In ancient times, the testimony of a slave could only be elicited, and only became admissible in litigation, under torture. Only free male citizens could take an oath or resolve a controversy by sermon. The rules about who could be tortured in ancient times did not just regulate the victims of torture, the rules themselves were constitutive of what it meant to be a slave. The laws demarcated and defined freedom itself—what it looked like, what it entailed.
Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex has captured our imagination for centuries on questions of fate and power. But it is perhaps on the question of terror and truth that the play turns. At the climax of Sophocles’s tragedy—at the pivotal moment when truth finally emerges for all to see and to recognize—there is a scene of terror. The shepherd slave who held the knowledge of Oedipus’s ancestry is threatened with torture. And that threat of torture alone—at the culmination of a whole series of unsuccessful inquiries—produces the truth: torture provokes the shepherd’s confession and that allows Oedipus to recognize his fate. But more than that, torture reaffirms the social order in Thebes—a social order where gods rule, oracles tell truth, prophets divine, fateful kings govern, and slaves serve. It is, ultimately, the right to terrorize that reveals Oedipus’s power and the shepherd’s place in society. Torture constitute
d servitude: only those who could not swear an oath had to be terrorized. But it also returns the gods and prophets to their rightful place.
In a similar way, terror today produces its own truth—about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting truth, about its effectiveness in subjugating the insurgents, about the justness of counterinsurgency.
Second, terror—or more specifically the regulatory framework that surrounds terror—legitimizes the practices of terror itself. This may sound paradoxical or circular—but it has often been true in history. The structures that frame and regulate the administration of terrorizing practices have the effect, unexpectedly, of legitimizing the use of brutal methods and the regimes of terror.
The strict Justinian codification of the use of torture on slaves in Book 48 of the Digest served to inscribe the practices of terror within law, in a process that would simultaneously contain the barbarity of these extreme practices and empower the authorities that oversaw them. The extreme nature of torture, once brought within the fabric of the law, concentrated power in the hands of those who had the knowledge and skill, the techne, to master the brutality. The Justinian codification served as a model to later codifications during the early Middle Ages and to the practices of the Inquisition.
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