“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner repeated eleven times before dying of asphyxiation from a chokehold under the weight of several NYPD officers on the streets of Staten Island, New York, on July 17, 2014. A month later, August 9, 2014, an unarmed eighteen-year-old young man, Michael Brown, was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. The fatal encounter lasted about two minutes, and was witnessed by over a dozen witnesses who testified variously that Michael Brown was surrendering, falling, turning around, walking back, or headed toward officer Wilson when he fired the twelfth, fatal shot. Two months later, on October 20, 2014, on the southwest side of Chicago, police officer Jason Van Dyke unloaded sixteen rounds of his 9mm semiautomatic service weapon into seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald. The shooting was captured by several dashcam videos, which show McDonald walking away from the officers as Van Dyke and his partner get out of their car with their guns drawn. Six or seven seconds later, Van Dyke starts firing. McDonald is fully spun around by the force of the bullets, and the video shows his body jerking and puffs of debris rising as officer Van Dyke continues to shoot him after he hit the ground. McDonald is fully on the ground, lying prone, for at least thirteen of the fifteen seconds the police officer is shooting.18
This epidemic of police shootings of unarmed civilians finally became visible as a result of a series of cellphone videos, dashcams, and surveillance footage that went viral on the Internet. The wave of police killings continued on and off camera, around the country, with the police shooting deaths of twenty-eight-year-old Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn stairwell on November 20, 2014; of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park on November 22, 2014; of fifty-year-old Walter Scott, shot in the back five times on April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina; of thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile, pulled over in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and shot seven times on July 6, 2016, while peacefully trying to explain his situation; of thirty-year-old Charleena Lyles, shot in front of her four children in Seattle, Washington, after calling the police on an attempted burglary on June 18, 2017; and the deaths in police custody of thirty-seven-year-old Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland, slammed on the pavement while being arrested, and of twenty-eight-year-old Sandra Bland, found hanging in her jail cell in Waller County, Texas, on July 13, 2015—all African American men and women.
A phenomenon that had been going on for years was finally exposed for everyone to see, over and over. Soon the Guardian and the Washington Post were keeping a tally of the police homicides reaching up to a thousand a year—police shootings that had fallen under the radar screen for years because of incompetent federal reporting requirements.
The wave of police killings was in itself evidence of the excessive lethality of policing in this country and of deep racial bias, both of which reflected elements of the domestication of military-style mentalities in law enforcement. But even more, the policing of the protests that accompanied the police killings fully reflected the deployment of counterinsurgency strategies at home.
In response to the police shootings, protesters around the country demonstrated in waves of marches, boycotts, Black Friday rallies, and die-ins. The protests, overwhelmingly peaceful, triggered a militarized police response the likes of which few could even have imagined. The shocking footage from Ferguson in the days following the police shooting of Michael Brown revealed the extreme degree to which our law-enforcement officials, now armed with military assault weapons, tanks, and armored vehicles, faced off against unarmed peaceful protesters as if they were insurgents.
The journalist Chris Hayes spent days broadcasting live the protests in Ferguson, and what he found there, essentially, was a military operation. “The police of Ferguson and St. Louis County mobilized as if for war,” Hayes wrote: “flak jackets, masks, helmets, camouflage, assault weapons, and armored vehicles. Men pointed their long guns at civilians who assembled for peaceful protest.” Hayes, who had reported from all around the country, said that he had never felt anywhere such a revolutionary atmosphere. Not because of the protesters, though. It was the way the police handled themselves that felt revolutionary, Hayes reported—or, I would say, counterrevolutionary. The police officers, Hayes observed, “fired tear gas canisters indiscriminately. Bands of armed cops in full combat gear chased unarmed peaceful protesters through the streets with guns raised.”19
The police force in Ferguson deployed a full military arsenal, including military assault rifles, sniper equipment, and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles—all familiar to us from images of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now deployed on Main Street USA. SWAT-team outfitted officers, dressed in marine pattern (MARPAT) camouflage, with their assault guns drawn, moved next to armored vehicles that looked like tanks with mounted high-caliber guns. Officers with the St. Louis County Police Department pointed their Mega AR-15 marksman and M4 rifles, their sniper Leupold long-range scopes, armored tactical vehicles, and acoustic riot-control devices at protesters. In their military helmets and goggles, with tear gas grenade launchers, twelve-gauge shotguns, long knives, and night-vision equipment, the police looked exactly like battlefield soldiers in the war on terror.20
The protesters were policed as if they were enemy insurgents in a war zone. Hayes recounts his days reporting from Ferguson: “At random I could take my microphone and offer it to a black Ferguson resident, young or old, who had a story of being harassed and humiliated.” The citizens of Ferguson told of being targeted, hassled, wrongfully arrested, and wrongly treated—continuing a pattern that had been going on for several years. “At any given moment a black citizen of Ferguson might find himself shown up, dressed down, made to stoop and cower by the men with badges.”21
During these and other protests around the country, all the excess equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan was on display—machine guns, ammunition magazines, camouflage, night-vision equipment, silencers, concussion grenades, armored cars, and even aircraft, giving the impression of a country under siege. Hayes recounted that elsewhere, in Cleveland, a large sign, displayed at a police station, designated the area as a “forward operating base”—a military term that refers to “a small, secured outpost used to support tactical operations in a war zone.” As Hayes noted, that expression “captures the psychology of many police officers: they see themselves as combatants in a war zone, besieged and surrounded, operating in enemy territory, one wrong move away from sudden death.”22
In his masterful account A Colony in a Nation, Hayes argues that the United States has created a colony within the nation—a colony comprised of the poverty-stricken minority neighborhoods in the country. Hayes traces our new style of policing in municipalities like Ferguson back to the revenue-seeking, heavy-handed policing of the English royalists in the American colonies. Hayes suggests that we have created in the very midst of our nation, in his words, “a territory that isn’t actually free.” It is a territory where policing takes on the character of an occupation. An occupation that requires constant vigilance. “The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class.”23
This idea of an occupied territory, of a colony within a nation, resonates perfectly with what we have witnessed in terms of the domestication of the counterinsurgency. I would just push the logic further: we have not simply created an internal colony, we have turned the nation itself into a colony. We govern ourselves through modern counterinsurgency warfare as if the entire United States was now a colonial dominion like Algeria, Malaya, or Vietnam.
While local police forces have been turning protesters and African American residents into insurgents, the federal government has been deliberately creating an active minority consisting of practically all American Muslims.
Only seven days into his presidency, President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily ending travel into the United States by nati
onals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The executive order effectively banned many American residents of Muslim religion, living in the United States with a green card or a work or educational visa, from returning home to the states from abroad or from leaving the country since they no longer had permission to reenter. The executive order was written in a broad manner that, on its face, applied to US green card holders as well from any of those seven predominantly Muslim countries. The executive order quickly became known as the “Muslim ban” because Trump, during his campaign, had expressly said he would ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Specifically, the executive order Trump signed on January 27, 2017, Executive Order 13769, banned outright for 90 days the entry into the country of any individual from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—whether permanent residents of the United States, immigrants, or nonimmigrants, such as those on work or educational visas.24 The executive order also had a number of other provisions targeting refugees and Syrians especially. The order imposed a 120-day moratorium on the entire US Refugee Admissions Program. And, proclaiming that “the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States,” the order also suspended indefinitely their entry into the country. The order also limited the number of refugees who could enter the country in 2017, down from 110,000 to 50,000, proclaiming that “the entry of more than 50,000 refugees in fiscal year 2017 would be detrimental to the interests” of the country.
Trump’s Muslim ban effectively excluded from this country many American residents of Islamic faith who were legal residents in the United States and had lived here for years, but were traveling abroad at the time. It also detained and prevented many American Muslim residents from traveling outside the country since they could no longer reenter the states. It simultaneously created and targeted a supposed “active minority” of dangerous American residents. Dr. Amer Al Homssi, for instance, a young Syrian doctor on a residency at the University of Illinois in Chicago who had traveled to the United Arab Emirates to get married, saw his J-1 visa revoked and cancelled at the border and was excluded on January 29, 2017, from returning home to the United States.25 Many others suffered the same plight, with more than 900 persons denied boarding, more than 200 denied entry once they landed, and, eventually, around 1,600 US green-card holders being granted waivers in the days immediately following the executive order.26
Trump had made very clear his intent: to ban and exclude Muslims from the United States. On December 7, 2015, at a very early time in his campaign, Trump issued a press release declaring:
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing “25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad” and 51% of those polled, “agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.” Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won’t convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.27
Shortly after making this campaign pledge, Trump drew a comparison between his proposed Muslim ban and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, stating that the president at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “is a president highly respected by all” and “did the same thing.” When asked about his statements about the Muslim ban at the sixth Republican presidential debate on January 14, 2016, Trump responded that he would not take any of it back and stated, in a clear reference to Muslims: “Look, we have to stop with political correctness. We have to get down to creating a country that’s not going to have the kind of problems that we’ve had with people flying planes into the World Trade Centers, with the—with the shootings in California, with all the problems all over the world.” The following summer, on June 14, 2016, Trump again repeated his pledge to ban all Muslims entering the United States until “we as a nation are in a position to properly and perfectly screen those people coming into our country.”28
As soon as he received the Republican nomination, Trump started to sanitize his language when discussing his anti‐Muslim policies, but he continued in the same vein. He now said he would stop immigration “from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism,” while admitting that this was pure veneer intended to avoid controversy. In an interview on NBC, Trump admitted, “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. Oh, you can’t use the word Muslim… And I’m OK with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim.” Immediately following the Republican National Convention, on July 24, 2016, Trump was asked whether he was “backing off” on his Muslim ban, and responded, “I actually don’t think it’s a pull-back. In fact, you could say it’s an expansion.”29 In a speech a few days later on August 15, 2016, Trump spoke about the problem of screening immigrants because the United States admits “about 100,000 permanent immigrants from the Middle East every year,” and he suggested a screening test to exclude any immigrants “who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.”30
The evidence is overwhelming: President Trump was targeting Muslims, including American residents. Not only had Trump proclaimed he would do as much during his campaign, but the original language in the order relating to the 120-day freeze was written in such a way as to privilege Christian over Muslim refugees from Muslim-majority countries. The order declared that, following the 120-day freeze on refugees, the secretary of state would “make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” And in fact, only hours before he signed the Muslim ban on January 27, 2017, Trump stated that his executive order was “going to help [persecuted Christians].”31 The next day, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was then being considered for an appointment in the Trump administration, admitted to the press that, after Trump had originally announced his Muslim ban, he, Giuliani, was asked to “show [Donald Trump] the right way to do [a Muslim ban] legally.”32 Giuliani then put together a team to achieve a ban without naming Muslims.
The Muslim ban formed part of a larger campaign to transform Muslims into an active minority. During his presidential campaign, President Trump also accused Muslims at home of not being sufficiently patriotic and failing to report threats to American law enforcement. As noted earlier, he also suggested that the government should monitor mosques and Muslim communities, and even possibly register American Muslims in a government database. He even suggested the possibility of issuing special identification cards for Muslims noting their religious faith.33
In effect, President Trump turned Muslims in the United States into a phantom insurgency. And he never let up. Confronted with adverse legal rulings, Trump first issued a revised Muslim ban in March 2017, then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, ultimately persuading the justices to allow the Muslim ban to go into effect with regard to individuals from six predominantly Muslim countries who have no close family or institutional ties to the United States and then revised the Muslim ban again in September 2017.34 In the process, Trump laid the groundwork for the exclusion and stigmatization of Muslims—both Americans and foreigners.
These incidents—large and small, but all devastating for those targeted—also serve another objective of the domesticated counterinsurgency: to make the rest of us feel safe and secure, to allow us to continue our lives unaffected, to avoid disrupting our consumption and enjoyment. They serve to reassure, and also, in demonizing a phantom minority, to bring us all together against the specter of the frightening and dangerous other. It makes us believe that there wo
uld be, lurking in the quiet suburbs of Dallas or Miami, dangerous insurgents—were it not for our government. And these effects feed into the third prong of a domesticated counterinsurgency.
There are some counterinsurgency theorists today—I would describe them as proponents of a leaner antiterrorism approach—who advocate against the larger project of winning the hearts and minds of the general population. These proponents of leaner antiterrorism argue, against the more traditional counterinsurgency theorists, that we need to take a more limited approach that simply focuses on targeting suspected terrorists, like the Khan family. They prefer to avoid getting involved in social investment or hearts and minds—and favor, for instance, terrorism prosecutions at home or limited drone strikes abroad to eliminate identifiable terrorist suspects.35
We had seen earlier, within counterinsurgency theory, similar debates between population-centric and enemy-centric theorists. The enemy-centric approach tended to be the more brutal, but more focused. The population-centric favored the more legal and social-investment approaches. I argued then that they were just two facets of the same paradigm.
Here the debate is between population-and/or-enemy-centric theories versus individual-centric theory. But here too, I would argue, this is a false dichotomy. Again, these are just two facets of the same thing: a counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare with three core strategies. Like the population-and/or-enemy-centric theories, individual-centric theory naturally entails both incapacitating the individual terrorist or insurgent—eliminating him and all of the active minority—and preventing or deterring his substitution or replacement.
The Counterrevolution Page 17