Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Lights in CBP cells were kept on all night, much as CIA and Rumsfeld-era military detention used sensory bombardment as a mechanism for sleep deprivation. Guards would wake sleeping detainees to question them, like their Guantanamo counterparts, except now there could be no pretext of extracting urgent information from them. Dignity violations were a feature of immigration detention, as they had been for CIA and military detention. ICE detainees, many penned inside chain-link fences, wore orange jumpsuits reminiscent of those worn by Guantanamo prisoners. Guards were reported to have called them dogs. One who died in ICE custody in Florida was listed on his death report as having “vomited feces.” A senior ICE official in Maryland, Dorothy Herrera-Niles, emailed “a thought” to her colleagues in May 2018: “I think we should send all new border apprehensions to GITMO and detail judges and asylum officers down there. Maybe they can be removed directly from GITMO to El Salvador, etc. . . .”

  Women, men, and children were subject to rape and other sexual abuse. Gay and transgender detainees endured sexual and physical violence from other detainees. One ICE prison in Pennsylvania told a court it could not be held responsible for “consensual” sexual activity between detainees and its guards. As ICE guards in Florida restrained a female detainee who had fought with another, one straddled and rubbed his erection on her. They filmed her as she showered off Mace. During Trump’s first year in office there were 237 reports of sexual abuse in immigration detention, among 1,448 such allegations filed against ICE between 2012 and March 2018, according to the ACLU. A doctor known as the “uterus collector” allegedly performed hysterectomies on women detained at ICE’s privately operated prison in Irwin County, Georgia, according to a nurse turned whistleblower named Dawn Wooten.

  Richard Zuley, the Chicago police interrogator and navy reservist, was a forerunner in demonstrating how easily the abuses he visited on Black Chicagoans could be exported to Guantanamo. There was by now a considerable constituency for his methods. Whether at Guantanamo, the black sites, the border, the prisons of ICE, or the streets of Staten Island where the NYPD’s Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death, Trump’s allies, validators, and many of his voters typically saw themselves in the guards, interrogators, or officers, not in their typically nonwhite victims. The brutality was easier to justify when viewed as necessary, as National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton had contended, against the two-front civilizational emergency represented by Radical Islam and Latin American migration. Trump portrayed the people fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang as indistinct from MS-13 itself, much as he portrayed the people fleeing the violence of ISIS as indistinct from ISIS. Both flights for refuge were, in material ways, downstream effects of earlier destabilizing American military operations and deportation decisions.

  For years CBP had been detaining children who crossed the border without their parents—many fleeing violence in Central America—in what an Arizona Republic reporter called, during Obama’s presidency, “a juvenile prison camp.” John Kelly, retired from the marines and now Trump’s secretary of homeland security, went far further. He might have to take people’s children away, he told CNN barely a month after assuming his new position, “in order to deter movement along this terribly dangerous network.” The children would be fine, argued the man who once ran Guantanamo, as years of experience had ensured the government did “a very, very good job” of finding relatives in the United States—or placing the children in foster care.

  It would be another year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Kelly’s successor, Kirstjen Nielsen, unveiled Zero Tolerance, the official name for their policy of kidnapping. But the practice began under Kelly, whose functionaries thought seizing children and threatening their parents with prosecution “would have a substantial deterrent effect.” At least fifty-five hundred children, twice the number the Justice Department claimed in a court filing in 2018, were swallowed by a system that, despite Kelly’s assurances, made not the slightest effort at reuniting families. An inspector general’s report found instead that the system was unprepared to address the overwhelming trauma exhibited by ever-younger children who had no way of knowing if they would ever see their parents again. Children unfamiliar with the concept of anxiety attacks reported suffering chest pains that they described as feeling as if their hearts were hurting. They were penned into places like a converted Texas Walmart that housed fourteen hundred. A care worker who visited in July 2018 called it “very clearly a prison for children.” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham called it “essentially a summer camp.”

  Public revulsion at this policy, which had deep American roots in chattel slavery and native genocide, prompted the Trump administration to react with the closest thing to shame that it displayed in its four years in power. While the administration usually took pride in its cruelty, it denied that anything resembling child separation was taking place. “We’ve never had a policy for family separation,” Nielsen testified to the Senate in a lie soon disproved by internal documents. Protesters drove her out of a Mexican restaurant in Washington, prompting a wave of indignation on the right about the incivility of the left. The administration made a show of ending Zero Tolerance in June 2018, barely three months after its launch. DHS still took more than a thousand children from their parents after that.

  Asked in 2018 if the policy was cruel, Kelly replied that “the big point” was to disincentivize those mothers who “elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.” Their children would be placed in “foster care, or whatever.” By the end of Trump’s presidency, at least 545 children did not know where their parents were.

  The blitheness Kelly exhibited toward the fate of thousands of families was no obstacle to his reputation as one of the “Adults” around Trump. Centrists, liberals, marginalized anti-Trump conservatives, and others horrified by Trump hoped that the Adults would stop him from turning his nativist instincts into policy. They were inclined to view these retired military officers, all distinguished figures from the Forever War, as their allies within, surely opposed to Trump and offended by him. It was much the way Joe Biden had seen Colin Powell during the Bush administration: a check on the worst instincts of the president and an assurance behind policies that had their assent. James Mattis even received special dispensation from the Senate to become Trump’s defense secretary despite not having been out of uniform long enough. Flynn lasted less than a month as national security adviser—he was a general, of course, but was never respected by those who respected the Adults—and Trump replaced him with H. R. McMaster, the counterinsurgency hero.

  Many of their moves did constrain Trump’s impulses. McMaster banished the phrase “Radical Islamic Terror” from the National Security Council and fought a yearlong rearguard battle to push out Flynn’s residual staff. They included McMaster’s surgenik colleague Derek Harvey, a Defense Intelligence Agency Mideast analyst and a conduit to Harvey’s once and future boss, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster and Mattis used their influence inside the administration to maneuver the Forever War toward equilibrium—only with the violence intensified to a level that MAGA, whatever its supposed antipathy to the war, respected. Mattis called it “lethality,” as if the War on Terror had not been lethal for hundreds of thousands of people, and made it his mantra at the Pentagon.

  The outraged liberal #Resistance, as it came to be known in the increasingly online political environment, blurred, as ever, the distinction between resistance and complicity. The very Democrats who called Trump a unique threat to the republic were willing to grant him the same extensive surveillance powers they had allowed Bush and Obama. They saw themselves granting these authorities to the Security State, as if Trump himself were irrelevant. They voted for his astronomical military budgets and denounced his deviations from the national security norm that had mired the United States in unwinnable, agonizing conflicts
, which bred frustrations that Trump harnessed. Six Senate Democrats followed the lead of Brennan and Clapper in approving the CIA torturer Gina Haspel to become Trump’s second CIA director. The #Resistance was the next phase of liberal complicity in the War on Terror. It was determined not to miss an opportunity to align with the Security State now that Trump and the Security State clashed.

  On Mattis’s first day at the Pentagon, Trump visited to sign one of his first executive orders, banning entry to the United States to people from seven Muslim-majority countries. It was his first attempt at building a wall, and it trapped relatives on either side. Not even those who had served America during the Forever War were exempt. An Iraqi named Haydar, who had translated for the U.S. occupation behind Ray-Bans and a ski mask during the surge, had spent four years trying to obtain a visa from the American embassy when Trump slammed the door shut. “I know that executive order [is] just racist,” he said from Baghdad, days before he learned he would not be permitted to board his flight out. The cerebral Mattis, who had spent so long in the Middle East fighting alongside Muslim allies, grinned and applauded as the president signed the Muslim ban.

  But if Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, or any other Adult sought to constrain the Trump agenda, their service in the Forever War guaranteed them no more consideration than Haydar’s did. McMaster, owing to an insubstantial connection to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, became the target of anti-Semitic accusations in Breitbart that he was doing Soros’s bidding. A more shocking excommunication came when MAGA renounced McMaster’s replacement, John Bolton, a bellicose Bush veteran who had constituencies in neoconservatism and the Islamophobic wing of MAGA. After Bolton emerged as an obstacle to what he called a “drug deal” in which Trump sought to extort the Ukrainian president for a public accusation of corruption against Joe Biden, Lou Dobbs excoriated Bolton as “a tool of the left.”

  Trump’s institutional impediments in the Security State were, to MAGA, manifestations of a “Deep State.” Service in the wars could now be seen on the right as suspicious. It was an intensification of the same anger the neoconservatives had directed at the State Department and CIA for, in their estimation, obstructing the momentum of the invasion of Iraq. Worst of all were the corrupt intelligence barons, who MAGA believed had launched a “coup” to overturn Trump’s election by inventing the fake narrative of #Russiagate. For military validation, they had the example of the martyred General Flynn, whom they refused to believe Trump had wanted to fire. They saved their greatest disdain, however, for the FBI—Comey, Mueller, and their cronies—which had dared investigate Trump. It mattered not at all that many who were vituperating against the Deep State were people like Flynn, an intelligence chief; Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a Navy SEAL who made a fortune from the War on Terror; Harvey, an army colonel and intelligence analyst; Michael Scheuer, the founder of the CIA’s Usama bin Ladin Unit; and Nunes, who was privy to the government’s most sensitive intelligence. MAGA defined itself in opposition to the usurper Deep State. The course of the War on Terror was now determined by the conflict between these two forces.

  Since 9/11, the coalition now uniting under the MAGA banner had applauded the heaviest police, prosecutorial, and intelligence measures against Muslims, immigrants, and Black people. But now that Trump’s criminality had attracted the scrutiny of the Security State, MAGA claimed that invoking obscure laws or leveraging perjury to compel cooperation showed deep corruption within law enforcement. That was the key to the passion play of Mike Flynn, prosecuted for lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador that made him a subornable national security adviser. As with all nationalist movements, the license for impunity stopped where uncertain loyalty to the leader began. For men like Adham Hassoun, there would only be another cage, or worse. It would be the most coherent characteristic of the War on Terror in the Trump era, a time when the War on Terror became its most authentic self.

  * * *

  —

  OBAMA BUILT THE DISPOSITION matrix to guide his successor’s lethal decision-making as much as his own. Since his lodestar had been “a smart strategy that can be sustained,” as he put it in his final counterterrorism speech, the inheritance of the disposition matrix mattered. If the next president discarded it, then Obama’s Sustainable War on Terror would prove to have never in fact been sustainable, revealing Obama to have misread the political consensus. Obama made no move to restrict drone strikes or surveillance at scale as he prepared to hand power to a man who considered him a secret Kenyan Muslim usurping the White House.

  Trump, characteristically, had little interest in what he understood as idiotic bureaucratic constraints. Within days of taking office he approved a JSOC raid against an al-Qaeda target in Yemen that Obama had resisted. The raid’s mission, CENTCOM said, was to seize and exploit al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) documents. But the commandos’ tilt-rotor Osprey malfunctioned during the predawn incursion in the southern village of Yakla, and they emerged from a hard landing to incoming fire from panicked residents. The result was a dead SEAL, Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, and an estimated twenty-five Yemeni civilian casualties, including an eight-year-old girl, Nawar—the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki. Her grandfather Nasser, who had already buried his son and grandson, did not believe the Americans had intentionally killed Nawar. Trump immediately denied any responsibility for the disaster. “They lost Ryan,” he said of the generals who brought the raid to him for his approval.

  In his first year in office Trump declared much of Yemen and Somalia areas of “active hostilities,” a decision sought by the military, thereby placing them under battlefield rules instead of disposition-matrix restrictions. He delegated authority for lethal air strikes, drone or piloted, downward to regional and local commanders. Obama veterans comforted themselves that Trump retained their language regarding the need for a “near certainty” that strikes wouldn’t kill civilians. But the commanders, across multiple battlefields, knew what Trump wanted to see. In April 2017 a mountain near Jalalabad believed to contain a tunnel complex used by Afghanistan’s ISIS franchise buckled under the impact of the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the U.S. military. The GBU-43 “Mother of All Bombs” left a mile-wide blast radius and vaporized an estimated thirty-six people suspected of being ISIS militants. The previous month, air force statistics showed, U.S. warplanes released more ordnance on Iraq and Syria than at any time since the war resumed in 2014. An air war that gave meaning to “bombing the shit out of them” had begun.

  Trump hoped that this effort would unite him with the Security State. But days before his inauguration, Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and Alexander’s successor at NSA, Admiral Mike Rogers, issued an intelligence assessment stating that Russia had interfered in the election to aid Trump. Trump exploded, comparing the intelligence agencies to Nazis, but showed up at Langley the day after his inauguration with an olive branch. He did it his way, standing at the agency’s memorial wall to falsely boast about his inauguration crowd size, which unsettled several in attendance. But those listening to Trump more dispassionately heard a promise to stop the CIA from being “restrained” in the War on Terror. “You’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing,’ ” Trump claimed. “Radical Islamic terrorism—and I said it yesterday—has to be eradicated, just off the face of the earth.”

  To head the CIA, Trump appointed Mike Pompeo, whom a White House official described to The New Yorker as “sycophantic and obsequious” when it came to Trump. ACT for America beamed that Pompeo had always been a “stalwart ally,” just months after giving him its highest award. For his deputy, Pompeo made an inspired choice: Gina Haspel, the avatar of the CIA’s 9/11 generation, whom Brennan had stopped from running the clandestine service. In a signal of where Trump intended to move the war, Pompeo put Michael D’Andrea, who had run the CIA’s drone strikes and its black sites, in charge of planning operations against Iran. Pompeo showed that Trump was s
erious about unleashing the CIA, no matter how hysterically he tweeted against its former leaders. Nor was Pompeo shy about editing Trump. The president might have welcomed WikiLeaks’ campaign season alignment, but Pompeo, who had himself cited those leaks to chastise Clinton, declared WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service, foreshadowing the Justice Department’s long-awaited indictment of Assange. Trump’s expansive support for CIA counterterrorism could unnerve Langley. Once, as Trump reviewed footage recorded by a drone, he watched an agency target walking away from his home and family before the targeter opened fire. “Why’d you wait?” he asked.

  By November 2018, and to almost entirely no notice, Trump had launched at least 238 strikes, far exceeding the 186 drone strikes Obama ordered in his own first two years, the most intense bombing period for the drones before Trump’s own. There was even less transparency around the attacks than during Obama’s term, a stance codified in 2019 by executive order. Among the details it concealed was the effect of declaring Somalia a zone of active hostilities. With commanders needing less certainty to order a strike on a target, “that automatically opens up the aperture,” recalled the senior Special Operations commander in Africa at the time, army brigadier general Donald Bolduc. U.S. commanders in Somalia launched 35 drone strikes in 2017, two more than during Obama’s entire presidency, and followed up with 47 more in 2018. Bolduc observed that none of it—not the raids, not the drone strikes—made any real difference. “The big problem with this,” he said in 2018, “is that there’s no long-term success with this.”