All in all, as of April 23, 2015, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that there have been thirty-eight intentional and unintentional Western drone deaths, which “include ten Americans, eight Britons, seven Germans, three Australians, two Spaniards, two Canadians, one Belgian or Swiss national, and now one Italian. There have also been four ‘Westerners’ of unidentified nationality.”9 And from there, it’s a mere baby step to bring the counterinsurgency back home onto American soil.
7
COUNTERINSURGENCY COMES HOME
IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF FRIDAY JULY 8, 2016, THE Dallas Police Department cornered a suspect believed to have shot and killed five police officers and wounded another seven officers and two civilians at a peaceful protest against police violence. The suspect, an army veteran named Micah Johnson, was negotiating with the police, exchanging gunfire, and claimed to have explosives on him. As the standoff wore on, Dallas police chief David O. Brown shifted gears. At his command, Dallas police officers carefully attached an explosive device to the arm of a robot and sent the robot in the direction of the suspect. Usually used to disable explosives, the tactical robot was turned into a robot-bomb. When it got sufficiently close to Micah Johnson, the Dallas police detonated the bomb, killing the suspect.1
The use of essentially a lethal drone in a civilian context on American soil was unprecedented. It raised a number of questions about police use of new drone technologies, about the increased militarization of the police, and about the proper boundary between policing and warfare. These questions were particularly salient because there was no indication that Johnson was tied, in any way whatsoever, to an international terrorist organization or to global terrorism. There was no suggestion he had any connection, other than being an army veteran, to the “war on terror.” Instead, Johnson was an “ordinary” criminal suspect believed to have committed multiple common-law felony homicides.
On one level, these were legal questions surrounding the reasonableness of using such military-style weaponry—specifically, a weapon that is designed to kill an enemy, rather than to demobilize or neutralize a common-law suspect—in the civilian policing context. There is no license to kill in the civilian context, as there might be under ordinary combat situations during wartime. The use of deadly force is permitted in very limited contexts in police encounters, and is tightly constrained by necessity. The reason, of course, is that there had been no trial or finding of guilt, and therefore the suspect was entitled to a presumption of innocence. Johnson may have been mentally ill and not legally responsible for his actions. There are any number of scenarios that could have exculpated him—which is why there are, for good reason, far greater restrictions on the use of deadly force in the civilian context. As a legal matter, the constitutional-law scholar Noah Feldman notes, “It would have been better to use a police shooter, who might have been able to wound or incapacitate the [suspect] without killing him, and might have been in the best position to determine whether killing him was legally necessary.”2
But the more pressing questions, for our purposes, are not narrowly legal, but instead larger political and strategic questions. The use of the robot-bomb in Dallas reflected a broader military turn in domestic civilian affairs, evident in the militarization of both policing equipment and strategy. Specifically, it illustrated a shift in domestic policing in the United States toward a counterinsurgency war paradigm. As Feldman remarks, “The step from the robot bomb to a drone strike is barely even incremental: morally and technologically, they’re basically the same.”3
The Dallas incident was a vivid illustration of the increasing domestication of the counterinsurgency warfare paradigm. Since 9/11, we have witnessed, in area after area, the government turn these methods back on its own citizens.4 Total surveillance was extended to the American population. Law-enforcement agencies monitored mosques and Muslims on American soil. Police forces were outfitted with counterinsurgency equipment and began to deploy counterinsurgency tactics. Policing, it turns out, has been a particularly conducive vector through which the counterinsurgency paradigm has moved from military and foreign policy to the domestic context. But the domestication has been far broader than just in the criminal-justice area—as we will see.
Counterinsurgency strategies seeped into the streets and homes of America. As a result of Department of Defense programs that distribute excess military equipment, millions of dollars’ worth of armored vehicles, military weapons, and tactical equipment reached local police forces across the country. According to the Washington Post, transfers through one such program, the Excess Property Program, increased exponentially since the war in Iraq. In 2006, the program was transferring $33 million worth of excess property to law-enforcement agencies; by 2013, that number rose to $420 million. In the first four months of 2014 alone, the agency made $206 million in transfers. Overall, the Excess Property Program transferred military equipment worth more than $5 billion since it began operating in the mid-1990s.5
Police forces across the country have stockpiled over 500 military-grade aircrafts, 44,000 night-vision devices, 93,000 assault weapons, 200 grenade launchers, and 12,000 bayonets. The Excess Property Program funneled to local law enforcement, over the period from 2006 to 2014, over 600 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAP), 475 bomb-detonator robots, 50 airplanes, 400 helicopters, as well as thousands of combat knives, night-vision sniper scopes, and camouflage gear.6 The total dollar value of this military equipment is staggering. According to the Congressional Digest, between 2009 and 2014, the federal government “provided nearly $18 billion in funds and resources to support programs that provide equipment and tactical resources to state and local LEAs [law-enforcement agencies].”7
Radley Balko traced the history of the gradual militarization of local police forces in his stunning book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. His conclusion there perfectly summarized our condition today: “Police today are armed, dressed, trained, and conditioned like soldiers.”8 This has been nowhere more evident than in the policing of protests.
In Ferguson, Missouri, during the protests following the shooting death of Michael Brown in August 2014, the local police responded in a heavily militarized way. The police “employed armored vehicles, noise-based crowd-control devices, shotguns, M4 rifles like those used by forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, rubber-coated metal pellets and tear gas,” the Washington Post reported.9 The images of unarmed, unprotected protesters facing militarized tactical SWAT teams visualized the new dynamics of the militarized police.
Ordinary police forces and military units can hardly be distinguished any longer. And the military buildup of civilian police forces also resulted in an increased use of militarized tactics.
Alongside the tanks, military-assault rifles, and camouflage apparel, local police forces are increasingly deploying counterinsurgency practices learned in the villages and moats of Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilian law enforcement now regularly responds to 911 calls about suspicious persons with the exact same techniques that would be used in a raid in Iraq or Afghanistan. In part, this is due to the porous nature of police, military, and reserve personnel and training. Many police officers are in the reserves, and vice versa. In part, it is due to the dominance of the counterinsurgency paradigm in the law-enforcement imagination.
Police watch protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 13, 2014. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, reproduced by permission.)
Police face unarmed protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 13, 2014. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, reproduced by permission.)
A former infantryman with the US Army’s 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in Iraq, Alex Horton conducted countless counterinsurgency raids against suspected guerrilla fighters in Iraq. When he returned stateside, Horton accidentally found himself at the other end of the barrel. He had been temporarily placed in a model unit in his apartment complex while his rental unit was being repaired, and one evening he was suspected o
f being a squatter. Three police officers barged into his temporary unit, guns drawn, sweeping the place, backing into corners, pointing their weapons at him. “In the shouting and commotion, I felt an instant familiarity,” Horton wrote. “I had done this a few dozen times myself, 6,000 miles away from my Alexandria, Va., apartment… I had conducted the same kind of raid on suspected bombmakers and high-value insurgents.”10
The same techniques, the same movements, practically the same equipment. “Their tactics were similar to the ones I used to clear rooms during the height of guerrilla warfare in Iraq,” Horton observed. “I could almost admire it—their fluid sweep from the bedroom doorway to the distant corner. They stayed clear of one another’s lines of fire in case they needed to empty their Sig Sauer .40-caliber pistols into me.”
The counterinsurgency model has seeped into ordinary domestic policing. The result are scenes like this in homes and on the streets of heartland America, where the target is not a suspected bombmaker, but a suspected vagrant. In fact, the experience has become so commonplace in the United States that people began abusing the 911 system—out of vengeance or for a prank—by calling a SWAT team out on unsuspecting victims. The phenomenon has now entered the public imagination and has its own top definition in the urban dictionary: swatting is defined as tricking the police into sending a fully equipped SWAT team “to an unsuspecting victim’s home under false pretenses.”11 The phenomenon began around the same time as the war in Iraq, as more and more American towns began to have SWAT teams. By the mid-2000s, 80 percent of police forces in small towns with populations between twenty-five and fifty thousand had a military-style SWAT unit. And with those units came increased swatting. The New York Times reports that “the phenomenon is touching more and more lives in more serious ways.”12
Meanwhile, in 2015, North Dakota became the first state to authorize the use of armed drones by law-enforcement agencies. The weapons permitted must be “less than lethal,” according to the new law; but they can include Tasers, rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray. And, following the July 2016 robot-bomb incident in Dallas, a leading police research institute, the Police Foundation, released a 311-page report with guidelines to assist police departments in using drones in such a way, as its title suggests, “to Enhance Community Trust.”13
As suggested earlier, counterinsurgency logics have also seeped into the way that police officers think and imagine the world. By way of illustration, an editorial by a former St. Louis police officer and police reformer, Redditt Hudson, under the caption “I’m a Black Ex-cop, and This Is the Real Truth About Race and Policing,” declares: “On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.”
These are precisely the foundational principles of counterinsurgency theory. And they are not just this officer’s intuitions. They represent the wisdom of experts who, as the editorial notes, have “trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force.” The obvious danger, from this perspective, is that the rogue minority will taint the 70 percent who could go either way—especially because, as Hudson notes, “that remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department.” Everything turns, then, on those passive masses and protecting them against the corrupting influence of the rogue minority and its “outsize influence.”14
The logic of an active minority being responsible for the vast majority of the problems recurs in a wide range of law-enforcement areas. A small minority of police officers conduct the vast majority of arrests. A small minority of cops are responsible for the majority of complaints of police misconduct. A small minority of homeless individuals account for the vast majority of hospitalizations and homeless incidents. In the words of a leading police administrator, there is only a small minority of dedicated and hardworking police officers and “those 10 percent do 90 percent of the work.”15 And the same holds true “among the bad guys” as well, he tells us. There is a small minority of young men responsible for the vast majority of violent crime. The list goes on and on. And in all of them, the foundational elements of the counterinsurgency rationale are there, often in a subliminal way, infusing the way that we imagine the world.
The domestication of counterinsurgency strategies started early, in the 1950s and 1960s, and predominantly in the context of policing and law enforcement. Although it accelerated and became widespread after 9/11, it first made its appearance at exactly the time when these tactics were being developed and refined in Vietnam.
The operations of COINTELPRO—the Counter Intelligence Program developed by the FBI in the 1950s to disrupt the American Communist Party, and extended into the 1960s to eradicate the Black Panthers—took precisely the form of counterinsurgency warfare. The notorious August 1967 directive of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters”;16 the police raids on Black Panther headquarters in 1968 and 1969; the summary execution of the charismatic chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton; the first SWAT operations carried out against the Panthers in Los Angeles—these all had the trappings of modern warfare.
Hoover’s FBI targeted the Panthers in a manner that drew on the foundational principles of counterinsurgency: first, to collect as much intelligence on the Black Panther Party as possible through the use of FBI informants and total surveillance; second, to isolate the Panthers from their communities by making their lives individually so burdened with surveillance and so difficult that they were forced to separate themselves from their friends and family members; third, to turn the Panther movement into one that was perceived, by the general population, as a radicalized extremist organization, as a way to delegitimize the Panthers and reduce their appeal and influence; and ultimately, to eliminate and eradicate them, initially through police arrests, then through criminal prosecutions (for instance, of the New York 21) and justified homicides (for instance, of Bobby Hutton in 1968 and others in Los Angeles), and ultimately by fomenting conflict and divisiveness within the party, especially between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver in 1971.17 The logics of counterinsurgency could be heard clearly in Hoover’s notorious memo from March 1968 setting out the very objectives of COINTELPRO: to “prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them to […] both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy,” and to “prevent the long-range growth of militant black organizations, especially among youth.”18
Similarly, the armed takeover of the Attica Prison by the New York State Police troopers during the Attica uprising had all the trappings of a counterinsurgency operation, as Heather Thompson documents in her book, Blood in the Water. There too, the political leaders, especially Governor Nelson Rockefeller, portrayed the inmate population as a radical fringe minority. Rather than pursue further negotiations and allow them to gain momentum, Rockefeller opted to annihilate them through a military-style operation that ultimately killed thirty-three inmates as well as ten correctional officers. The assault on Attica and the repression of other prison revolts in the early 1970s had precisely the effect that counterinsurgency operations aim at: to separate and isolate the radical minority from the general population—literally, here, the general prison population—and then eliminate them.
The domestic use of counterinsurgency strategies continued sporadically over the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, for instance, the Philadelphia Police Department used a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter to drop two bombs on the compound of a black-liberation organization called MOVE, resulting in the death of eleven members, including five children and the leader of the movement, John Africa. The resulting fire destroye
d around sixty-five row houses in the neighborhood. As Time magazine reported, “It looks just like a war zone.”19 In 1993, the ATF, FBI, and Texas National Guard mounted a raid on the Branch Davidian compound that resembled another counterinsurgency attack—resulting in the deaths of eighty-seven men, women, and children. Throughout the 1980s, the United States experimented with the domestication of counterrevolutionary practices in Central America, especially with its covert support of the Contras in Nicaragua. And there were similar domestic uses of counterinsurgency in other countries as well, notably by the British government during the struggle against the Irish Republican Army. There too, counterinsurgency strategies developed and refined in the colonies—in Palestine and Malaya—were brought back home to repress insurgents and minorities favoring Irish independence.
The Counterrevolution Page 13