Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Yes, I know this book is incomplete.

  There’s not enough in Reign about the pivotal role of the media in manufacturing consent for the War on Terror. There’s nowhere near enough about the economic forces driving the war, both specific and structural. Ultimately, I found that attempting either analysis swallowed the actual narrative events of the war and still felt superficial. These subjects require books in their own right—particularly one I’m tossing around in my head called Capitalism and Terrorism. (That book is the forum to go into the U.S.–Saudi relationship and its place in all this, I found . . . after failing to get it into Reign satisfactorily.) I chose to attempt to do one thing well instead of three things badly.

  That leads to the second way Reign is incomplete. I had to make a lot of cuts. They were a function of Reign’s particular critique, as well as the unavoidable reality that I have a twenty-year palette of events and a contractually stipulated word limit. (Someone have me on their podcast to talk about Michelle Malkin bullying Dunkin’ Donuts because she was mad Rachael Ray appeared in a commercial wearing a scarf that looked kind of like a kaffiyeh.) Even after all those cuts, at all times writing this book, a voice in my head objects that I’m presenting the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” version of the Forever War. So if I didn’t dwell long enough on events you think are crucial, know that I tried, and please research and write your own versions that outdo mine.

  The third way Reign is incomplete is that much of what I write about remains an official secret. The façade of the War on Terror has been cracked, but we won’t know what the war truly was for decades. I frankly don’t think anything we discover will undermine the critique of Reign. I expect what we learn to reinforce my critique. Consider that at least eighteen hundred photographs of military torture have been barred from public release after a yearslong legal battle. Not even Dan Jones’s torture report could tell the story of CIA renditions, operations that we know applied to more people than the CIA directly jailed and tortured. Some aspects of the War on Terror are likely lost to history forever.

  The War on Terror has no shortage of excellent books about its component operations: surveillance (Dark Mirror by Bart Gellman, Power Wars by Charlie Savage, The Watchers by Shane Harris), torture (The Dark Side by Dana Priest), immigration (We Are All Suspects Now by Tram Nguyen, All-American Nativism by Daniel Denvir), detention (Guantanamo’s Child by Michelle Shephard), occupation (Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran), secrecy and its impact on the rule of law (Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arkin, Angler by Gellman, Power Wars again), and the wars themselves (Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill, Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid, Fiasco by Tom Ricks, Relentless Strike by Sean Naylor, Shatter the Nations by Mike Giglio, so many more). There’s no point in trying to write a better exploration of Dick Cheney than Gellman did in Angler, nor in trying to outdo Scahill in exposing Blackwater. This is an attempt at doing something a bit different: surveying the entirety of the War on Terror and its impact on America. Ironically, that makes it difficult to go into everything I would have liked. That’s probably also a function of the difficulty of writing about the previous twenty years, a period that’s too old for journalism and too young for history. But very soon will come a wave of critical and political reappraisal of the War on Terror, each with its own focus, whose critiques intersect with, challenge, and bolster Reign’s. Some of these projects I’m aware of and excited about. My fondest ambition for Reign of Terror is that it be one work among many to confront and destroy both the War on Terror and the conditions that created it.

  The writing of this book would have been impossible, in material and emotional ways, particularly in a pandemic, without the following people:

  Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord put up with me for entire years when I had bad, unsellable ideas for books and did not make her any money. Shortly after Thanksgiving 2018 I came to her to say I had finally found my book and needed her help to see if I could sell it or if I should resign myself to not being an author. She challenged me to refine what it was I was talking about and to civilize myself for the purpose of getting out of the way of the story I wanted to tell. So did Rick Kot at Viking, who steered this book to be what I needed it to be. He put up with a lot of random texts, unfocused phone calls, and tens of thousands of self-indulgent words in my drafts. I am grateful to have worked with an editor of his caliber. Special thanks go out to Viking’s Camille Leblanc, Louise Braverman, and Julia Rickard for their invaluable work making sure people see this book. My gratitude also goes out to Viking designer Lucia Bernard, production manager Fabi Van Arsdell, and managing editor Tricia Conley. Production editor Ryan Boyle put up with a lot of eleventh-hour changes, and I am grateful for his forbearance.

  Andrew Ackerman taught me to love to read and to never leave myself exposed in an argument. Some of my favorite memories are of being ten years old walking around Bay Ridge listening to my father talk about pre-Norman English history or Hobbes versus Locke. Or at least they were. Now I cherish hearing his excitement for a book I really did not think he would find compelling, even if I can’t convince him that executing Anwar al-Awlaki was wrong.

  When I was seven years old, I met my cousin Sky Cohen for the first time. I have no siblings, but suddenly I had a little brother. It occurs to me that my life right now resembles what my preteen self assumed it would be: a household composed of me, my wife, our children, and you.

  The person I admire most is Colin Asher, the singer of my teenage punk band and simply the most righteous person I know. When I was nineteen and Colin came back to New York for a summer after moving to California, we took one of the long walks we liked to take and I told him about interning at New York Press, which was the center of my world at the time. After I had gone on for long enough, Colin simply asked, “What is your journalism for?” I was mortified not to have an answer. Colin recently offered his own in the form of Never a Lovely So Real, his resurrection of the writer Nelson Algren. In that and in so much else, he inspires me.

  It was at New York Press where I met Daria Vaisman, my sister. Daria was the research editor at the paper, not much older than me, her employee, and taught me a lot about how shambolic a human being you can be if you’re also the wittiest and most erudite person in a weird alt-weekly newsroom. She is the sort of person I had hoped newsrooms cultivated, and being around her vindicated my decision to make this my life. I’m lucky she loves me, because I would not be equipped to withstand her. No one has believed in this project more or made me laugh harder. I miss reading aloud with you, and once we get the vaccines, we’ll hold each other’s babies.

  Laura Hudson is my best creative partner. I was a fan of hers before we came to work together at Wired, and I sheepishly told her that over a proto-Slack office messaging program. The first time we met in person I was under the twin emotional pressures of the Snowden leaks and the death of my mother. I can’t thank her enough for listening to me, throughout the years, and especially about Reign. Laura is one of the finest cultural writers and editors working, and I was afraid to show her parts of this book. I benefited so much from doing so.

  I briefly became a conservative after years of being unable to beat Sam Goldman in arguments about politics. Sam and our friend Jesse Cannon are people who possess iron determination and impossibly high standards, and these are things that punk rock rewards. To be friends with them required me to get on their level. We put on a two-day, thirty-band music festival before Sam and I were out of high school, and, as I am fond of recalling, for weeks during the lead-up, Sam and Jesse were not speaking to each other. Jesse in particular has taught me a lifetime’s worth about the programmatic aspects of and discipline behind creativity. Sam gave me the title of chapter nine—a dramatic improvement over my sorry idea to call it “9/11’s Virus.” I’m a much worse person in the best possible ways because of them.

  I’m going to talk at some
length about Michelle Shephard. As the national security correspondent of the Toronto Star, she fearlessly, rigorously, and without euphemism revealed Canada’s contributions to the War on Terror and many aspects of the wars in Yemen and Somalia. Among her towering journalistic achievements is the definitive investigative and narrative portrait of the ordeal of Omar Khadr, the grievously wounded teenager who had to grow into adulthood inside Guantanamo Bay. For this she received predictable misogynistic attacks. I first encountered Michelle over the course of a week at Guantanamo bookended by her fighting a snake and the military ordering her expelled because she wrote someone’s name that the Pentagon didn’t want printed. She won both battles. Michelle has been a hero of mine ever since, and I’m honored to call her my friend. I could not have written this book without her enthusiasm, support, and guidance. More than that: if Michelle had winced at Reign, it would have convinced me I didn’t really have anything here.

  That leads me to another point we need to acknowledge. Women produce the lion’s share of exceptional national security journalism. This book is only possible because of pioneering, relentless journalists like Jane Mayer, Dana Priest, Laura Poitras, Carol Rosenberg, Sharon Weinberger, Marcy Wheeler, Muna Shikaki, Nancy Youssef, Kashmir Hill, Dara Lind—one of the foremost immigration journalists, who has been crucial in walking me through arcana I should have already understood—Aura Bogado, Alexa O’Brien, Emma Graham-Harrison, Janet Reitman, Raya Jalabi, Talia Lavin, Julia Angwin, Tram Nguyen, Kim Zetter, Hannah Allam, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Erin Banco, Kelly Weill, Laila al-Arian, Azmat Khan, Betty Medsger, and so many others. The foremost theorist of surveillance capitalism, the prophet who named it, is Shoshana Zuboff.

  If Michelle Shephard is the real-life Lois Lane, Janine Gibson is the real-life Perry White, as I learned less than a week into working for her. On a phone call hours before we published the first Snowden story, I listened as some of the most powerful men in the Security State told Janine to stop and asked to speak with her manager when she made clear that she wouldn’t. When all that failed, one of them raised his voice at her, telling us we would have blood on our hands if we published. To be honest, I spent much of that phone call expecting her to fold, because much of my experience of working with editors had accustomed me to expect them to back down to power. But that was because I did not yet know Janine Gibson. Once we ended that call, I knew that I would do whatever she told me to do for as long as she told me to do it. She captained the most important story in the world and it was my privilege to play a part. It’s a tragedy for the public in a time of global crisis that Janine isn’t the editor of The Guardian. To paraphrase Jack Kirby, journalism will break your heart.

  Whatever I’ve been able to achieve as a reporter is because of Noah Shachtman. Before I ever worked for him, Noah would GChat me for feedback on sections of his latest magazine piece, which would inevitably start out with widescreen accounts in media res of being pinned down with marines in Afghanistan and waiting interminably for air support to materialize. Whatever I would be writing would immediately seem nowhere near as vivid. When I started working for him at Wired, I failed again and again. My first couple FBI Islamophobia stories were so horrendously written that Noah had to take control; that National Magazine Award really is his as well. Noah (and John Abell) stood by me when The Daily Caller launched a chickenshit attempt at canceling journalists, including myself within weeks of starting at Wired. The most rational thing to do was to get rid of me, and he didn’t. That’s who he is and who he’ll always be, and it’s why there is an entire alumni network of reporters and editors who are forever loyal to him. If that wasn’t enough, Noah is one of the last editors who put in the work as a reporter—a freelance reporter—before making the transition. No one has ever believed in me like Noah has, no one has ever pushed me as hard as he does, and I’ll never be able to repay him. He is journalism’s Patrick Ewing.

  Every single day, for more years than I can remember, I’m guaranteed to talk to two people outside my family: Adam Serwer and Matt Bors. I was talking with them when I came up with this book, and they encouraged me to write it. They have been beside me during the journalistic and mental-health journeys of writing Reign of Terror, which is to say that they have put up with a tremendous amount. Imagine my luck at being able to call upon the talents of both the foremost political essayist and the foremost political cartoonist of our era. Imagine how much you have to prove when your closest friends coined The Cruelty Is The Point and We Should Improve Society Somewhat. To miss the excellence they consistently produce is to risk misunderstanding our present crises. I owe this book to them.

  Sam Thielman, my work-husband at The Guardian, gave me invaluable guidance about his evangelical Christian faith. University of Wisconsin historian Suzanne Desan generously found the Alfred de Vigny quote for the epigraph. It won’t ever stop being wild to me that I rambled through my book and the troubles I had writing it with Sam McPheeters, whose lyrics I quoted in my high school senior yearbook. Three cartographers lent their expertise to my attempt to find an American base of comparison for the area of tribal Pakistan that U.S. drones attacked: thanks to Eben Dennis, Graham Twibell, and David Maye. I’m also grateful for conversations I’ve had related to this book with scholars like Nikhil Pal Singh, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Jason Stanley; and with dear friends like Sasha Acosta-Cohen and Ryan Simons. Most importantly, thanks to everyone who ever trusted me to tell their stories. Whenever I have succeeded, it is because I stayed true to the legacy of my late mother, Bette Cohen, and whenever I have failed, it is because I lost sight of her.

  In the fall of 2007, legislation to legalize much of STELLARWIND was moving on Capitol Hill, and I was following it for Talking Points Memo. Some development occurred late on a Friday afternoon and I needed a civil-libertarian reaction voice in my writeup. I called the press office of the ACLU’s Washington outpost. The woman who answered said she’d have one of their lobbyists get back to me by my deadline, but before I left, she asked me if my ringtone was really “Guns of Brixton” by the Clash, as she had read on the internet. Surprised, I said it was, and she told me how much she also liked the Clash, and before I could stop myself I mentioned that I have a Clash tattoo. Mandy Simon dedicated her life to demanding justice for the War on Terror at the ACLU, the American Constitution Society, and Amnesty International. This is the legacy she provides for our two children. Somehow the thing in this world I hate the most gave me the people I love the most.

  NOTES

  Introduction: Neither Peace nor Victory

  Miller’s last-minute elevation: Spencer Ackerman, “Mark Esper, Who Flinched at Military Crackdown, Out at Pentagon,” Daily Beast, November 9, 2020. Spencer Ackerman, “Infamous MAGA Figures Flood into Purged Pentagon,” Daily Beast, November 10, 2020. Official biography of Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller, www.defense.gov/Our-Story/Biographies/Biography/Article/2111192/christopher-c-miller, accessed December 4, 2020.

  Senator Tammy Duckworth: Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, “A Cadre of Top Trumpists Is Pushing for Full Afghanistan Withdrawal,” Daily Beast, November 17, 2020. Statement of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, “Duckworth Releases Statement in Response to Trump Administration’s Plan to Withdraw Troops from Afghanistan and Iraq,” press release, November 17, 2020, www.duckworth.senate.gov/news/press-releases/duckworth-releases-statement-in-response-to-trump-administrations-plan-to-withdraw-troops-from-afghanistan-and-iraq.

  Trump’s accelerated bombing: Spencer Ackerman, “Trump’s Afghanistan Airstrikes Increased Civilian Deaths by 330 Percent, Brown Costs of War Study Shows,” Daily Beast, December 7, 2020.

  Howard Stern’s radio show: Donald Trump on The Howard Stern Show, September 11, 2002, soundcloud.com/buzzfeedandrew/trump-on-the-howard-stern-show-on-sept-11-2002#t=0:00, accessed August 9, 2020.

  suspend the Constitution: Spencer Ackerman and Kelly Weill, “ ‘When the Bombs Fall, the Blood Is on Mike Flynn’s Hands’: Retired Offic
ers Blast His Calls for Martial Law,” Daily Beast, December 2, 2020.

  “A perpetual war”: Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the National Defense University,” May 23, 2013. Transcript available at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university.

  conducting widespread surveillance: Tim Elfrink, “Police Shot Portland Slaying Suspect without Warning or Trying to Arrest Him First, Witness Says,” Washington Post, September 10, 2020.

  Aimé Césaire observed: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950), medium.com/religion-bites/discourse-on-colonialism-by-aim%C3%A9-c%C3%A9saire-793b291a0987, accessed December 3, 2020.

  Prologue: The Worst Terrorist Attack in American History

  “led the American radical right”: This account of Elohim City is drawn from Somer Shook, Wesley Delano, and Robert W. Balch, “Elohim City: A Participant-Observer Study of a Christian Identity Community,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 2, no. 2, April 1999. Tony Reinhart, “Suspicion Surrounds Sect Leader,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, May 9, 1997. Unbylined, “City of Secrets: Separatist Group at Elohim City, Oklahoma, May Have Ties to Timothy McVeigh and Other Anti-Government Extremists,” Dateline NBC, May 30, 1997. Deborah Hastings, “Elohim City on Extremists’ Underground Railroad,” Associated Press, February 23, 1997. Gustav Niebuhr, “A Vision of an Apocalypse: The Religion of the Far Right,” New York Times, May 22, 1995. Unbylined, “Changing of the Guard,” Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, August 29, 2001. Also see the FBI’s declassified file on Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, which references Millar and Elohim City. The file includes a May 2, 1985, memo from an FBI official, J. W. Hicks, who laments that the FBI/ATF search on the CSA compound was shoddy: “[A] more careful processing of the crime scene would have produced a great deal more information regarding the CSA and its affiliates,” vault.fbi.gov/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword%20The%20Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword%20The%20Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20Part%201%20of%202/view, and https://vault.fbi.gov/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword%20The%20Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword%20The%20Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20Part%202%20of%202/view, accessed September 5, 2019.