Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Shortly after reelection Obama considered strengthening the internal safeguards within the disposition matrix, his facsimile of due process. That prompted, the following May, the Presidential Policy Guidance. Holder and others had insisted that due process need not be a judicial process, and presented this as the alternative. Under its terms, any agency could nominate a “high-value target” for death or capture. Lawyers throughout the White House and the Security State would review a nomination, with the concurrence of a National Security Council attorney. The plan of action required specifying the counterterrorism “objectives to be achieved,” how long the underlying authorities would have to last, and the commandos, drones, or surveillance assets required. The proponents of any action had to reach a “near certainty” that the attack would not kill or harm civilians, but the terms of the policy suggested that they did not necessarily require positive identification to kill or, more rarely, capture someone. A guideline required merely “employ[ing] all reasonably available resources to ascertain the identity of the target.”

  The interagency committee handling “nominations” to the matrix was called the Interagency Disposition Planning Group. Reviewing its work was the Restricted Counterterrorism Security Group, composed of representatives from the departments of State, Defense, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security; the CIA; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the National Counterterrorism Center; and still-undisclosed others. The Security Group forwarded approved nominations to their departments’ deputy secretaries and directors. This senior council, called simply “the Deputies” in official documentation, considered strategic questions, weighing the virtues of the strike against foreseeable consequences to “broader regional and international political interests of the United States.” With a formal bias against the use of lethal force, the Deputies sent nominations up to the president—but not always to him. Obama’s order states that “as appropriate,” the life-or-death decision will be made by the president “or the nomination will be provided to the Principal of the appropriate operating agency for a decision, along with any views expressed by the President.”

  Obama unveiled the outline of these procedural changes in a speech at the National Defense University. He formally rejected the term “War on Terror,” heralding instead a new phase of “persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” He recognized that the implications of expanding an easy method of killing people were profound, but insisted that the course was legal, as much as it required a thorough review of each case by a secret internal process. Here was what Obama considered a sensible path that took into account the intense pressures he and his successors were likely to encounter as the result of their now-unnamed War on Terror.

  By then two years had passed since the death of Osama bin Laden. Having agonizingly outlined a lethal and carceral framework for a non–War on Terror, while obscuring the fact that mass surveillance was permanent, Obama imagined the day it all could end. But without bin Laden to anchor an argument, he portrayed resilience against overreaction as victory itself. “Victory,” he said, “will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ball game; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street; a citizen shouting her concerns at a president.” But all those things were already happening, and still the war ground on. Whatever profundity Obama aimed to invoke—the political courage in choosing normalcy over fear—collapsed under his cynical implication that ending the wartime footing that he had entrenched was the citizenry’s responsibility and not his own.

  After the killing of bin Laden, Ben Rhodes recalled, discussions began within the White House about envisioning an end to the War on Terror. Their guidepost was what Kerry said in 2004 about reducing terrorism to a nuisance. But those conversations came to a halt as the Arab Spring uprisings swelled in chaotic ways. “The Arab Spring hijacks everybody’s attention after the bin Laden takedown and, in some ways, for the remainder of the presidency. It gets tangled up with the War on Terror in unhealthy ways. Just the generalized appearance of chaos in the Mideast plays into the Republican politics of fear,” Rhodes said. Obama, however, chose to wage a war of regime change in support of one of those uprisings, resulting in state failure in Libya and, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, an hours-long assault on a CIA compound in Benghazi that led to the deaths of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

  “These sound like excuses. They are what they are. It’s certainly how it felt at the time,” Rhodes said. “You can break up the different pieces of this—drones, NSA, Gitmo—but to me, it’s just the continued hyper-securitization of U.S. foreign policy with terrorism at its center that is the essential problem.”

  The positive case for the administration, Rhodes continued, was that during Obama’s second term, “we are governing as an administration that is moving on. Obama’s talking a hell of a lot less about terrorism. He’s doing stuff like the Iran deal that is meant to signal a break from a certain mindset. He’s doing Paris and making climate change much more central to our foreign policy, the Cuba opening, we’re obviously focused on Asia and talking about that all the time. So we’re acting as if we’re moving on, but you’d be right to point out that even as we’re doing that, the [counterterrorism] apparatus is largely in place.” Obama’s second term did pursue a more progressive and ambitious agenda. But at the same time it led to a tendency among Obama’s coterie to see the War on Terror as merely an asterisk to his foreign policy legacy. It would soon be the only aspect of Obama’s foreign policy legacy to survive.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE RIGHT VS. OBAMA’S WAR ON TERROR

  2009–2013

  John Brennan’s hatred of al-Qaeda was visceral. As he spoke about the terrorists to a Washington think tank in May 2010, Brennan insisted they were not warriors but criminals, and the religious legitimacy they claimed was fraudulent. The Obama administration would not “describe our enemy as Islamists or jihadists, because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam,” which he viewed in the context of striving to overcome imperfection. “There is nothing holy, or legitimate, or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children,” Brennan declared, his voice rising slightly.

  Brennan, so instrumental to the Sustainable War on Terror, was making what he considered a point in its service. He had spent long enough in the Middle East to speak Arabic and thought he understood how most Muslims practiced and understood Islam. “Jihadi” could be a term of honor; there was a reason Zawahiri had titled his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. “Islamist” could, to one degree or another, describe the political beliefs of tens or even hundreds of millions of nonviolent people. Calling bin Laden a jihadi or an Islamist tacitly gave bin Laden the legitimacy Brennan saw him usurp. The lived belief of millions, however unfamiliar to non-Muslim Americans, was a weapon against bin Laden’s drastically different interpretation of it. Brennan wanted to enlist that human experience in the Sustainable War on Terror.

  Brennan was the center of gravity of Obama’s War on Terror. But his views on Islam ensured the right would never view him as an ally. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer called Brennan’s perspective “insane,” since “our enemy is describing itself in those terms and to deny [that] is unbelievable.” The Washington Times editorialized that Brennan’s “view of Islam as a universally benign force may lead him to dismiss some of al Qaeda’s justifications for violence, which reveals willful ignorance.” An anti-Islam activist called Brennan’s remarks “the caliphate in the White House.”

  Obama had brought Brennan into his inner circle to benefit from Brennan’s counterterrorism credibility. Once he did so, the right refused to acknowledge that Brennan possessed any. However congruent their agendas were, Brennan would forever after be a target of the right’s contempt. Many respectable precincts of the ri
ght rejected Brennan’s choice as false, adopting an anti-anti-anti-Islam posture. The less respectable didn’t waste time pretending their civilizational contempt for Islam was anything else. Brennan, the CIA analyst, did not seem to recognize that the War on Terror, even Obama’s sustainable version, provided the war on Islam with every weapon, process, opportunity, and justification it needed.

  While Obama accommodated the War on Terror, conservatives saw him abolishing it, even surrendering. It was irrelevant that he did not prosecute torturers. What mattered was that the president persecuted the CIA with a Justice Department investigation premised on the “rights” of terrorists like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It was irrelevant that Obama retained indefinite military detention and military tribunals. He wanted Guantanamo Bay closed and to prosecute terrorists in courts as if they were common criminals. It was irrelevant that Obama deported millions of immigrants. What mattered was that he wanted their children to be citizens. It was irrelevant that Obama escalated in Afghanistan. He announced a date that that escalation would end. It was irrelevant that the drones he ordered killed Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, and others. By doing so he was declining to interrogate them, thus preventing America from knowing what the terrorists were planning. Obama had praised Islam in Cairo and then went on a “humiliating” foreign “apology tour.” The bottom line, Dick Cheney explained, was that “Barack Obama doesn’t believe in an exceptional America.”

  Some of the right’s criticisms had merit, as with Rand Paul’s filibuster. Others emerged from honest and irreconcilable policy disputes, as with McCain’s objection to the Iraq withdrawal. But only white supremacy can truly explain the depth of right-wing fury at Obama, given his innumerable symbolic and substantive reassurances to whites. It was not an accident that the principal conspiracy theory about him, birtherism, held that he was secretly a Muslim noncitizen. Literally and metaphorically, it not only denied the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency but reframed it as an act of war against what Sarah Palin had called Real America.

  Anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia were the rising forces on the right as the 2008 collapse brought on by neoliberal economics distributed precarity broadly and even upward. The condition of a permanent security emergency was all the opportunity necessary to fuse them. The War on Terror made birtherism urgent: a usurper, one of the enemy, held power. Nativist fervor, present and powerful throughout American history, first achieved its current twenty-first-century critical mass in Europe. But its American champions would quickly point to the “invasion” of Europe by Muslims. They warned that America was next to lose its culture.

  What Palin sparked, Donald Trump stoked. Trump had long been familiar with the power that the media held to manufacture reality. By the time Obama became president, Trump hosted a popular reality TV show in which he portrayed a leader. Contestants clashed ruthlessly to demonstrate their value to him. Now, before the army of reporters he could easily summon, Trump insisted the president was hiding his birth certificate—a document that Obama had in fact produced three years before—and claimed his “investigators” were combing Hawaii to find it. “He may have one, but there is something on that birth certificate—maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim, I don’t know.” He portrayed himself as the only one brave enough to stand up for the law: “You are not allowed to be a president if you’re not born in this country.”

  Trump’s celebrity legitimized the white backlash. New Yorkers were well aware that he had played this role before. In 1989, Trump called for the execution of five Black teenagers the police had coerced into falsely confessing to a brutal rape. “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police,” read an ad Trump placed in the New York papers. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” Yusef Salaam recalled to The Guardian what he felt as a fifteen-year-old defendant reading those words: “I knew that this famous person calling for us to die was very serious.” When the five, who grew up in prison, were freed and won a $41 million settlement with the state, Trump refused to concede their innocence.

  He did so knowing that the force of his persona would intimidate establishment journalists, who were already disinclined to label something “racist.” “Even respected liberal commentators have given Trump something of a pass for the racial tension animating Birtherism,” observed journalist Ari Melber. All this made Trump, flirting with a presidential run, a tribune of the rising nativist tide. Mitt Romney, the Republicans’ eventual nominee, pursued and won Trump’s endorsement. “You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me,” Romney said when questioned about Trump’s racism.

  Obama’s illegitimacy was, as Brennan was the first to learn, a powerful tool to discredit obstacles to a right-wing agenda, even those that patriotism typically rendered sacred. What began with the Bush-era right denouncing the State Department and CIA over Iraq became something more existential. David Petraeus was not exempt from such treatment, as he learned when he attempted to dissuade a Florida pastor from burning the Koran. Frank Gaffney, the head of an Islamophobic think tank, said Petraeus performed “a kind of submission” to Islamic sharia law. Mueller’s FBI was another target, for removing the anti-Islam counterterrorism training. Through insufficient fealty to a civilizational war, demonstrated through proximity to an illegitimate president, a Security State could become a deep state. But there could also still be heroes in uniform—those who guarded the border, who hunted illegals, who gave terrorists what they deserved—who could be trusted to save America.

  Reacting to Obama, conservatism took specific intellectual and institutional steps toward the nationalism that would soon consume it. Far from Washington, in states like Tennessee and Oklahoma, right-wing legislators introduced bills to stop the nonexistent prospect of sharia achieving legal parity with civil law; twelve such “anti-sharia” laws passed statehouses during Obama’s presidency. In Washington conservative lawmakers held hearings on the loyalty of American Muslims. A funding network pumped tens of millions of dollars into right-wing political channels to fund “education” about the threat from Islam, through organizations like the Clarion Fund, ACT for America, and Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. A new media infrastructure, shaped by Andrew Breitbart’s red-faced racist anger at Obama, peddled endless accounts of the immigrant and Muslim threats alongside verticals about “Black crime.”

  All this white anxiety existed in extreme disproportion to the actual existence of Islamic terrorism in America. In 2010 Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation found that a decade after 9/11, Americans did not remotely suffer the levels of terrorist violence that they had in the 1970s, which saw “a level of terrorist activity 15 to 20 times that seen in most of the years since 9/11, even counting foiled [post-9/11] plots as incidents.” Jenkins delicately concluded, “A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced.” But by now the point was not anything Muslims did. It was everything Muslims were. And not only them.

  The ascending right-wing coalition considered Obama’s “violent extremism” euphemism far more offensive than Bush’s “terrorism” label. It proved he was not only out to conceal his complicity with America’s enemies but that he would dare to equate them with white people. “Radical Islam” or “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” their preferred definition of the enemy, and its more respectable variants had had just enough deniability—a step shy of calling Islam itself terrorism, but only one step. They sought to charge the gates of respectability and reclaim power. Their first mission of redemption was fought on the soil that 9/11 had sanctified with blood.

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  IN THE OLD SPANISH CITY OF CÓRDOBA, Islam had built a European pluralism that anticipated cherished American values. Faisal Abdul Rauf considered it a place America would embrace. The lessons of an ancient city, the New York imam thought, could help resolve
the post-9/11 crisis afflicting both America and Islam.

  Founded in the eighth century, Córdoba was the intellectual center of Europe, a haven of tolerance, education, and achievement. The wealthy city, centerpiece of a breakaway Umayyad emirate, attracted and nurtured Christian, Jewish, and Islamic scholars and cosmopolitans. Founding ruler Abdel Rahman I, who had fled the dominant Abbasid caliphate, wrote wistful poetry about being a refugee. A citywide midsummer festival celebrated John the Baptist.

  But over centuries, under the stresses of internal political fracture and external war, Córdoba’s multiculturalism broke down. In his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America, Rauf hailed native son Moses Maimonides, the titan of Jewish philosophy and theology. Maimonides, however, fled Córdoba when the conquering Almohad dynasty revoked protections for dhimmi—Jewish and Christian minorities—and persecuted Spanish Jewry, even separating children from their parents.

  Rauf considered American history a narrative of progressive triumph over such prejudices. After Pakistani jihadis murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being Jewish, Rauf delivered a moving address to the Upper West Side’s B’nai Jeshurun congregation. He told Pearl’s grieving father, Judea, “Today I am a Jew. I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.”