Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Obama, the locus of much antiwar hope, entrenched the War on Terror, something excruciating to progressives. Brennan, whom journalist Glenn Greenwald and allies had blocked from becoming Obama’s first CIA director, became his third. Some of Obama’s transgressions the left hadn’t yet learned of, such as the prolonged NSA bulk surveillance or administration-supported efforts by the CIA to thwart congressional investigation of torture. Advisers to the president, meanwhile, lectured the left on what was realistic to protect national security. At his National Defense University speech on drone strikes, Obama grew testy at the disruptive Code Pink protester Medea Benjamin before congratulating himself for hearing her out.

  By the dawn of Obama’s second term, a cohort that included activists, attorneys, journalists, and concerned citizens who considered themselves leftists—along with some liberals—found themselves embittered by his presidency. It was conspicuous to them that the right, unlike the left, expanded its ambitions all throughout the 9/11 era. The left wing of the Democratic Party started to become more assertive, initially through warning about the institutionalization of Bush-era offenses like the PATRIOT Act, and then on to calling out Obama-era offenses like drone strikes. In the Senate Bernie Sanders voted against the inevitable PATRIOT Act renewal. But while his seminal 2010 filibuster against austerity described the coalescing war against the working class, Sanders did not draw it into a broader critique of a Forever War that redistributed to the military and the defense industry the wealth needed to address the growing precarity of working-class and even middle-class life.

  The Bush-era coalition of advocates for civil liberties, privacy rights, human rights, civil rights, transparency, immigrants, and refugees would now see Obama in court. They were respectable professionals, and they knew Sontag had been right all along. By culture as much as by interest, their vision of America came into conflict with the one the War on Terror presented. For many it felt uncomfortable to fight Obama—it had been righteous, patriotic, to oppose Bush—but he had made the Forever War truly forever. There were too few degrees of professional distance from the lawyer-heavy administration for the break with them to ever be total, so the breaks came to each of them as a matter of degree. Some were expressed on Twitter or on the legal national-security Lawfare blog, which was highly critical of the human rights lobby and wrote as the tribune of the Security State. It had that in common with the right, which considered the human rights coalition an adversary to defeat. Asserting that people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were entitled to legal redress prompted Keep America Safe’s vicious “al-Qaeda Seven” ad campaign. The right, as always, considered Obama a result of the left–libertarian coalition rather than an obstacle to it.

  Conflict between all these forces would have an impact on hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The venues for that conflict were fundamentally elite institutions: newspapers, courtrooms, legislatures. Activism from outside these circles opposing the war was rarely afforded respect by those within. Few news outlets considered Code Pink more than an annoyance during congressional hearings.

  The most impactful activism against the War on Terror came from within the Security State itself. It was not the result of the campaign that Comey waged against Bush White House counsel Alberto Gonzales at John Ashcroft’s hospital bed over whose legal argument more convincingly sanctioned bulk surveillance. It would come instead from low-ranking soldiers and intelligence contractors whose exposure to the war prompted them to expose it to the world.

  For violating a Security State oath of secrecy, they became public enemies. They would be made to suffer in prison, or face a choice of prison or exile. Their rare advocates in legal, political, and journalistic circles risked denunciation for taking them seriously. Hillary Clinton’s State Department spokesman, P. J. Crowley, resigned from his untenable position two days after denouncing the military’s cruel captivity of Private Chelsea Manning. Obama accepted the army’s assurances that Manning’s pretrial treatment—she was stripped nude at night and held in isolation for eleven months—was humane. The United Nations called it “at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture.” Even veterans who had turned against the wars often expressed disgust at Manning or NSA contractor Edward Snowden for acting dishonorably. Manning and Snowden were un-Trooped. Their service did not invest their whistleblowing with greater public respect. Instead, their whistleblowing cost them the post-9/11 public reverence accorded to military or intelligence service.

  Not all dissent from within the Security State took the form of whistleblowing. A former FBI counterterrorism analyst working for Senate Democrats spent six years in a windowless room, growing radicalized by what he discovered about the CIA. He was one of few people outside the agency to learn even a fraction of what Langley had done to at least 119 people at the black sites. Daniel Jones kept those secrets to himself while he documented bluntly and rigorously how the agency had committed brutality far worse than previously understood, and how the CIA lied to cover it up. He demolished the false narrative on torture the CIA had sold the public. For that, the CIA requested that the Justice Department prosecute Jones to distract from the espionage it had, in fact, committed against him.

  Manning, Jones, Snowden, and similar rejectionists from the Security State acted primarily out of an outrage at the War on Terror. They issued no manifestos. While their ideological affiliations might have been idiosyncratic, and divergent from one another’s, it was the left that embraced and championed them, not liberals, with the exception of Jones. Their revelations did more than any previous activism to usher in an era of exhaustion with the War on Terror. In that manner they reinvigorated the moral imagination of a left that would demand a politics of abolition.

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  THERE WAS MUCH SPECULATION about what Obama’s grassroots supporters would do once he was in office. One theory among young Washington-area progressive activists in the first months of his administration concerned the antiwar movement. The swell of antiwar anger—mostly focused on Iraq, rather than the entire War on Terror—that had risen since Bush’s reelection helped make Obama’s presidency possible. Under Obama, it fell apart.

  Obama’s election had settled the debate on the viability of the Iraq war. But liberal circles in 2009 accepted the justice of the Afghanistan war, which limited elite debate on its wisdom. Thanks to the trust Obama had among much of the progressive infrastructure, to say nothing of the distaste elite circles generally have for antiwar activists, those activists committed to the end of the War on Terror were always going to struggle. As Obama prepared to escalate in Afghanistan, Ilyse Hogue of MoveOn told the Times, “there is not the passion around Afghanistan that we saw around Iraq.” Obama would soon feel no meaningful constraint coming from an antiwar movement. At times, as in the National Defense University speech, he showed irritation with what remained of it.

  The progressive legal apparatus that had opposed Bush initially gave Obama a wide berth, while keeping its same focus. But Obama provided no end of disappointment. Almost immediately upon taking office, his administration contested habeas cases from Bagram and Guantanamo, undercutting what was supposed to be a pathway toward the goal of closing both detention facilities. Holder’s Justice Department retained the Bush-era opposition to a lawsuit brought by torture victims against aviation firm Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary that the CIA used as a renditions ferry. It used the same argument as its predecessor: discussing the case publicly would be too damaging to national security. Soon after, it refused to release a classified trove of Bush-era wartime detention photography on the grounds that what it recorded was so brutal that the resulting outrage could endanger deployed troops.

  Human rights attorneys wielding the Freedom of Information Act and discovery motions had already compelled government disclosures of torture. What they wanted was a reckoning modeled on South Africa’s post-apar
theid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Disclosure and accountability—a version preferred by Senator Patrick Leahy targeted all the Forever War’s detention and surveillance activities—would be the only way to ensure the United States would not return to torture. Obama made it unambiguous that no such thing would happen.

  In summer 2009 Obama disclosed Bush-era legal opinions on torture that he had repudiated. That would constitute the entirety of the time he spent looking backward instead of forward. Holder, his conscience troubled by torture, expanded the mandate of a special prosecutor he inherited, U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was examining the CIA’s destruction of torture videotapes. Now Durham would examine the brutality itself—but only to see if the CIA’s torturers surpassed the expansive permissions that the Justice Department provided in 2002. That approach treated illegal torture as a deviation, rather than a policy.

  It also aimed entirely at the practitioners of torture instead of those who ordered them to torture people. Politics preordained such a focus. Whatever crimes an administration may have committed, its successor would face a backlash for prosecuting them, something journalists considered the criminalization of political disagreement. The distinction didn’t matter to congressional Republicans, who warned of a witch hunt against the valiant interrogators of the CIA, or for Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who considered it political malpractice. “You only want to look back at a previous administration if you feel you really have to,” Holder ambivalently told an interviewer.

  Human rights groups that expected an ally in the White House were left asserting first principles against Obama. “So-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like mock executions and threatening prisoners with guns and power drills are not only reprehensible but illegal,” Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, said about Durham’s probe. Unsurprisingly, Durham ended his investigation in 2012 without bringing any charges. The Center for Constitutional Rights denounced how “once again, the United States has shown it is committed to absolving itself of any responsibility for its crimes over the past decade.” The center no longer saw a need to distinguish the agendas of Bush and Obama in the War on Terror. Obama complained in a 2009 meeting with civil libertarians that he found such rhetoric unhelpful. “Do we just release [Guantanamo detainees] and take the chance they blow you up? There’s only so much a democracy can bear,” he said. The Sustainable War on Terror had to undermine democracy in order to save it.

  The civil libertarians had hoped Obama would finally make the War on Terror respect the law. They watched in disbelief as Obama continued to make the law respect the War on Terror. Now a different form of resistance would bypass the courts entirely.

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  A UNITED STATES–BACKED IRAQ ARMY UNIT in Tal Afar, the town McMaster had pacified three years earlier as the surge’s proof of concept, took a handcuffed detainee into the street and shot him. It was an obscure atrocity that twenty-one-year-old Chelsea Manning watched from her classified-network terminal in Iraq in 2009. And it was one of innumerable “SigActs,” or significant activities, created by the war’s bureaucracy—records of notable, granular developments in both ground wars, as well as much other material. In her role as an intelligence analyst, it was Manning’s job to make sense of SigActs for the slice of eastern Baghdad where her unit operated. Back at Fort Drum, she had seen many others—“war porn,” she later called them—such as one recounting U.S. troops opening fire on a bus in Afghanistan and hitting fifteen people.

  Manning came to learn that there was no place for her in the War on Terror. She had enlisted two years before, a nineteen-year-old hoping for “real world experience” and for the promise of money for college. In an army where service by openly LGBTQ people was formally banned, she was understood to be a man named Bradley and bullied by a homophobic roommate. Over several months in 2009, with the wars weighing on her mind, she realized the images the SigActs contained “could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” As the blank CD-Rs littering her secured workstation filled up with backups of SigAct records, she resolved to be the spark.

  Years later, after experiencing deliberately cruel military detention, Manning, in dress uniform, evenly recounted the events that followed. During her leave from Iraq at her aunt’s house in Maryland, she labored unsuccessfully to contact The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politico. She then decided to trust a group she knew only through IRC and Jabber chats, where she felt like a valued part of a community: the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

  Billing itself as an “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis,” WikiLeaks framed exposure as an ideological act, not just a journalistic one. Every powerful institution was a target to expose. Often they released government, corporate, and military secrets, even material digitally smuggled out of the Church of Scientology. Directing its media releases was the Australian Julian Assange, who was equal parts libertarian and authoritarian. As a young hacker, he chose the handle “Mendax,” a reference to Horace: someone who lies for noble reasons. Assange partnered with news outlets to promote WikiLeaks’ disclosures but deeply distrusted journalists, whom he believed layered narrative—subjective and often ignorant narrative—over events.

  Hovering over the WikiLeaks submissions form during a blizzard in January 2010, Manning composed a message about the tens of thousands of SigActs she was about to upload: “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.” When she sent it to WikiLeaks, she recalled, she felt a burden lift from her conscience.

  Manning’s resolve heightened after she returned to Baghdad. Her access to classified military networks extended to a State Department server that contained huge numbers of diplomatic cables. It was a real-time hidden history of U.S. foreign relations, kept secret despite many cables being marked unclassified, and one that recorded what Manning saw as a superpower imposing its will. Over 250,000 of the cables went to WikiLeaks. She also sent the group a video of a helicopter crew killing two Reuters employees in 2007 while speaking of them in dehumanizing terms. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare,” she later explained. It became a breakthrough video for WikiLeaks, which released it in April under the title “Collateral Murder.” Troves about Afghanistan, Iraq, and U.S. diplomacy were still to come.

  Manning would not be free to see their release. While chatting from Baghdad with a prominent hacker, Adrian Lamo, Manning revealed that she was WikiLeaks’ source for “Collateral Murder” and many forthcoming items. Although Lamo had donated to WikiLeaks, he quickly contacted the army. “I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” he told journalists Kim Zetter and Kevin Poulsen. The army’s Criminal Investigation Division arrested Manning that month and held her in Kuwait.

  Assange gave The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian an advance look at the ninety-two-thousand-document trove on the Afghanistan war ahead of his publication in July 2010, at the height of the Afghanistan surge. Incidents where U.S. forces fired upon civilians, known as “blue on white” events, were documented 144 times in the leaked material. Manning, now incarcerated and awaiting a military tribunal, had expected the SigActs leak to spark a debate over the war. She was wrong.

  While The Guardian, an explicitly progressive news outlet writing primarily for a non-American audience, presented the logs as documenting dehumanization, the dominant American reception to accounts of civilian deaths and other atrocities was indifference. In a typical comment, Gian Gentile, a retired army colonel and insightful counterinsurgency critic, predicted, “these wikileaks [sic] on Afghanistan will be front page for a day
or two then swept into the dustbin of history where the only folks interested will be wonks, experts, historians doing current history, and military bloggers.” Rarely did anyone shrugging off the revelations grapple with the implication that brutality committed by Americans and their proxies was unremarkable. Such reactions set the template for the quick American dismissal of a far larger and even more horrifying trove of SigActs from the Iraq war, such as the campaign of torture by U.S.-sponsored Iraqi security forces. The New York Times’s description of the 392,000-document trove was so anodyne—undermining its own coverage by assuring readers the documents “provide no earthshaking revelations”—that a blogger for BoingBoing, Rob Beschizza, coded what he called a New York Times Torture Euphemism Generator to shame the paper.

  WikiLeaks began to fracture as it racked up its greatest achievements. The organization did not take sufficient care to fully redact names of Afghan informants in the first batch of documents, and human rights groups from Amnesty International to the Open Society Foundations warned the group that it had imperiled vulnerable people. By September, with Assange vowing to press on with Manning’s Iraq disclosures the next month, WikiLeaks staffers revolted, fearful of compounding an error that horrified them. German tech activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg quit after big-picture disagreements with Assange over WikiLeaks’ future. Accompanying him was an important programmer known as The Architect, whose departure took WikiLeaks’ submission system offline. “Children shouldn’t play with guns,” Domscheit-Berg explained in a memoir. An increasingly dictatorial Assange, who faced a rape accusation in Sweden, took the resignations as disloyalty. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off,” he told one disaffected staffer.