 In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the United States went to war with two countries, bombed four others, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures. Its policies also helped create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths. In Reign of Terror, National Security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized America and produced the Donald Trump presidency. He talks with Reign about how to stop the growth in government surveillance and interventionism underwritten by overblown fears of terrorism. Spencer Ackerman, thanks for talking to Reign. Thank you very much for having me. All right, so your book is Reign of Terror, How the 9-11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. What's the elevator pitch? The elevator pitch is that the 9-11 era, the war on terror, both in its culture and in its operations, is a doorway to the most nativist, most violent, and most racist elements of American history. That door opens under cover of national emergency, and once opened provides the historical forces unleashed a pathway to power. And what they accomplish in power, particularly at first, from an operational level is not just the wars themselves, but also the transformation of the American security apparatus, which from my perspective on 9-11 is already over mighty. But the creation, justification of outright unconstitutional actions, outright illegal actions, bulk surveillance at a scale never before seen in human history because of what now the technological opportunities were, indefinite detention, not just at Guantanamo Bay, but in, you know, battlefields and eventually the holds of Navy ships, torture, always illegal under U.S. law, and the transformation of immigration from a mechanism of making more Americans into a counterterrorism apparatus that both funded immigration enforcement, like it was counterterrorism, encouraged an attitude of immigration enforcement as counterterrorism and ultimately treated immigrants as threats to those Americans still here. It changes the presidency into something like an elected king. It treats opposition as the threshold of treason. It justifies its actions, most of which occur in secret, using euphemisms, enhanced interrogation is not torture, targeted killing is not anonymous assassination, and then outright lies. It accomplishes all of this while crucially, not naming an enemy and thereby allowing a sense of the enemy to arise that is understood civilizationally. So people who have no more than superficial association at best with the murderous fanatics of Al Qaeda, people who perhaps come from the same countries they do, people who perhaps worship, you know, one of the world's great religions, which Al Qaeda is exploiting, people who come from Muslim countries and so forth, as the threat, people who do not commit acts of violence, who do not plan acts of violence, and who instead, most often than not, are the victims of jihadist terrorism. Simultaneously, that choice for the war on terror ensures that white terrorism, terrorism undertaken by the far right, terrorism that considers itself acts of patriotism, of restoration against a disfigured and rapacious American government, are not going to be treated in these similar ways. I'm wrapping up. It's a long elevator. Yeah, I was going to say this is a space elevator. We're going to a skyscraper, and then what happens is the wars themselves become disasters, and for a certain part of the constituency that's been manipulated to understand the war on terror in these ways, the agony of being at neither peace nor victory, the agony of having an America that they've understood to be this global hegemon, this unipolar power with the ability and the right to shape world events as they wish to act and not be acted upon, is placed in this excruciating cognitive dissonance caused by the war on terror. They go searching for explanations, and Trump has them ready to go. They're violence on civilizational scales, unrestrained by political correctness, by the fecklessness of elites, either Democratic, Republican, or in the security state, and those elites that had created the war on terror and now factually allied against Trump do not understand how the patently of authoritarian possibilities that they created and they safeguarded all under a patina of lies could be manipulated to become its most authentic self under Donald Trump. Yeah, and we'll get to that towards the end, but I mean, part of his genius as a war is that he says, you know, America is not innocent. America commits crimes. America commits war crimes. We tend torture people. We have our past is not completely saccharine, and we are losing. So let's let's change something. I mean, he's revealing, you know, he's simultaneously calling for a return to American greatness and saying, you know what, we are also capable of horrible things in the name of our great ideals. That's right. And this is nothing new. This is a very deep current in American history. If you read the rise of the Jacksonians when they displace the political coalition that the founders create, this is kind of their shtick that, you know, what makes America great, what allows for all all manner of American wealth and power is not, you know, merely the virtue of America's ideas, allegedly, it's the ability of people to exercise extreme violence in order and operate under conditions of impunity in order to outwardly expand American power. And it doesn't matter who you kill in order to do that. Yeah, let's talk about continuities first. As we, you know, the book, by the way, one of its main contributions, I think, and this is giant for me, is that you recover a history that is not even really old. But I, you know, I would I was working every reason I was covering this stuff every day, every hour of every day as it was unfolding. And your book is an incredible treasure trove of all of these stories that were absolutely the most important thing in the world for it could be weeks at a time, but certainly hours and days. And we've forgotten them. So just the rich, thick history that you're giving of real time from 9 11 on. But I want to start with the continuities that you alluded to, the American security state and the surveillance state, you know, that gets encoded in the Patriot Act, a couple of, you know, shortly after the 9 11 attacks was nothing new. Can you talk a little bit about how what was going on in the 90s kind of was able to get weapon operationalized after 9 11, because of what happened and what what is the essential continuity before, you know, September 10th America and September 12th America. So just on the level of surveillance, and on the expansion of law enforcement powers, the important continuity begins after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when the FBI starts really beginning to look at American Muslims, who it fears have some sort of tie to the World Trade Center bombing, and find that their investigative aperture would be really great if it could expand. Because part of the problem is, these connections aren't really significant. They, you know, we're talking about, you know, people who were around the same people, not people who were plotters, who the FBI didn't find, but that's an operational FBI assumption. And so it goes, you know, looking for opportunities. It finds one in the most perverse possible sense, which is after the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McFay, a white supremacist who is very familiar with the warren of white supremacist militant safe havens in the United States, the sort of things in Northeastern Oklahoma left untouched that the United States will, after 9-11, hector Pakistan for maintaining these sanctuaries and not going after the extremists in your midst. Meanwhile, this is exactly what the United States does. This is not something unfamiliar. This is something deeply familiar, but we're not allowed by the force of the interpretations provided to us after 9-11 to see those essential continuities. After this horrific terrorist attack, the worst at that point in American history, the FBI, Congress, and the Justice Department start looking for expansions of what's called material support law. Material support for terrorism is this emerging body of law. You can find it at, I think it's 2339, Alpha and Bravo of the U.S. Code, whereby penalties start increasing and accruing and accordingly investigative abilities start expanding in order to find and charge functionally criminalized people and organizations that provide something, that aids first a terrorist attack and then after Oklahoma City, a terrorist entity. Increasingly, after Oklahoma City, they change material support law in order to criminalize people who no longer have any connection with any active violence. They can be part of a nonviolent aspect of terrorism and still face similar culpability. All of this happens only toward terrorism that has a quote, foreign, unquote, nexus. The law responding to Oklahoma City, in other words, expressly made sure that it excluded domestic, which is to say white, which is to say far right, terrorism only focusing on foreign, which is to say Muslim terrorism. That is the bedrock that the Patriot Act starts building on top of within weeks of 9-11, adding not just to material support, particularly sentencing aspects, but also now expanding the ability of the FBI to collect records without probable cause warrants, often unilaterally served in something called administrative subpoenas or national security letters on third party businesses that host everyone's records. And this is where we really start getting into an exceptionally dangerous and long lasting criminalization of association, association being guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yeah, talk about how that plays out under Bush. In the months after 9-11 turning into years, let's talk first about the way in which the Bush administration kind of pushed the surveillance envelope or created an argued for and either one legislatively or just did what they wanted. Let's talk about the surveillance apparatus and the way that that affects Americans at home. And then let's talk about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But how did the Bush administration go about expanding the ability of the government essentially to do whatever it wanted in the name of fighting terrorism? So TLDR, the CIA and the National Security Agency, I guess you could say the FBI too with some important respects, get entirely out of the post 1970s, the post Watergate, a parcel of both laws and governmental norms that inhibited things like mass spying on American citizens. They do this in a variety of ways. Some are the Patriot Act. Others are something that one of the heroes of the hashtag resistance, the NSA and eventual CIA director, Mike Hayden, sets up at the National Security Agency, where he just decides to violate the Fourth Amendment at scale. He sets up something called Stellar Wind. Stellar Wind is a parcel, you might say a constellation of bulk surveillance activities. It collects for a very long time all Americans phone records. It collects all Americans international email and internet usage records. In particular, does so in such a way that no member of Congress except the gang of eight, the political intelligence leadership know about this at a time when this obviously would not be in any sense good if it happened. But in such a way that even an NSA draft inspector general's report from 2009 notes that if they had just asked Congress to do it, Congress probably would have done it. They just decide to violate the law instead because they feel that the president's authorities at times of war are such as in elected kings, where the legislative and judicial branches of government are more like consultative bodies. They can be ignored rather than being obliged, rather than the presidency being obliged to obey them. They also do things like mass roundups of particular immigrants with the dangle that if they inform on their neighbors, they might find a quicker pathway to citizenship. There are tremendous roundups in New York City and in the greater Washington area amongst the consequences of FBI overbearing scrutiny, particularly after they go after a false church-based imam on potential prostitution charges, is they radicalize a guy known as Anwar Allaki who will go on to become the most important al-Qaeda propagandist in English. So the war on terror not only unleashes these authoritarian possibilities that have less and less to do with actually stopping acts of terrorism than they have with expanding, basically winning an argument within certain elite circles about the nature of American power broadly and presidential power specifically. Yeah, can you speak to the question? This used to be brooded about a lot and it's kind of faded as the Patriot Act or its offspring have kind of passed into general whatever. Was there much useful intelligence gathered through these overstep boundaries? Did the government stop endless numbers or large numbers of terrorist attacks or anything like that? Or was this kind of like, well, they got a lot of information and they did certain things, but it had very little to do with keeping Americans safe from terrorism. The fact is, is that terrorism, particularly high profile terrorism like 9-11, is just not very widespread and not many American Muslims, the American Muslims who were most often inclined toward acts of violence were pushed toward those acts of violence by FBI informants. The basic problem that they confronted was that terrorism is not frequent enough to pose this sort of threat. And there's a lot of self-deception and a lot of outright lies. I was one of the reporters on The Guardian's reporting team for the Stoneman stories. And then, you know, if ever there was going to be internal documentation of real terrorist attacks that surveillance activities stopped, it would have been the motherfucking NSA. And guess what wasn't in that document, Trove? Instead, it showed how frequently American political leaders of both parties both lied and permitted the security apparatus to lie to the public about what this violation of American freedom at scale actually accomplished. Could talk a little bit. One of the real strengths of the book is that you go through, you know, the Bush administration and liberal and conservative complicity, Obama, Trump, et cetera. Particularly during the years of the Bush administration, focusing on, you know, national security and the need for overwhelming surveillance, like that kept the Republicans in power. I mean, the 2004 election when a lot of things were going south for Bush, you know, he essentially won it by saying this is about, you know, this is about 9-11. What was it for liberals or why were so many liberals in Congress and in the kind of elite culture? Why were they so willing to get, you know, and these are people who are baby boomers, people who were raised on, you know, the Vietnam War Watergate, the revelations in the 70s of the way that the NSA, the CIA and the FBI had completely abrogated all legal restriction on their abilities to surveil American citizens. Why was there so much liberal complicity with, you know, the post 9-11 surveillance state? Because the liberal complicity that we buy in large C is the complicity of the upper middle class. Liberalism is not leftism. It's leftism that emerges. It's socialism in particular, socialist traditions that I identify with that emerges from the, you know, the Watergate years from Cold War anti-communism with a thoroughgoing critique of, you know, the one that's kind of similar to the one you alluded to about the perfidies of the national security state, its relationship towards anti-democratic repression at home, the wellspring it provides for nativism and racism. And all of this gives me reason listeners in the service of capital. And it is liberals, however, who look at this and want primarily to identify with the technocratic elements of the American government, the expertise in places like the State Department, eventually the CIA, the military, and so forth, that see foreign policy as, you know, if they're, you know, from their perspective is, you know, the democratic elite. Something, you know, that can potentially destroy the coalition that does rely, in many ways, on leftists with nowhere else to go electorally. And also want to feel good about America until a good story about America. They see, they want out of the culture wars of the 1990s in particular, the unpleasantness between the Republicans and Bill Clinton. And that's why you see a tremendous number of liberal journalists in mainstream publications writing things about the virtues of war after 9-11, because war will, the war on terror in particular, will kind of revive a national unity and a sense of purpose, will reassert American power in a world that they believe the Twin Towers have proven, badly lacks it. It is a very old current in liberalism. You can trace it all the way back to, at the very least, the, I forget the restored bourbon king of France, I think it was Charles the Tenth, who invades and occupies Algeria. And Tocqueville, who apologizes and justifies at the same time of his liberalism, the glory of French empire. This is something that is very rooted in the United States and American liberalism as well. It is also the result of a kind of recredence of the Cold War, where national politics play very familiar roles on kind of players in national politics, play very familiar roles on a set that remains still dressed from the Cold War. And so there's a tremendous amount of liberal fear of this weaponized patriotism that they don't want to have inflicted upon them. The war on terror from the start is a right-wing political cudgel. And it's liberals who are already, particularly the wealthier they are, normally inclined towards a very defensive stance, rather than one that socialists and leftists wanted to put up after 9-11, which was one of resistance to these things. And I guess partly this is the difference between, say, a Bernie Sanders and a Hillary Clinton. As you're alluding in the Cold War, liberals were not, after the fact they were painted as unpatriotic and unwilling to fight the Cold War, but in fact, as Bob Dole built the Cold War. Yeah, Bob Dole, when he talked about Democrat wars in 1976 as a vice presidential candidate, he was pointing to people like FDR and LBJ as Cold Warriors, essentially, and willing to go anywhere and pay any price. There's a fun analog if you want to have time to get into it. If you read Dean Acheson's memoir, Present at the Creation, Acheson, whose Truman Secretary of State, who is, like the book promises from Jump, is one of the architects of the Cold War, writes with frequent irritation and disgust at people like Richard Nixon, who are playing anti-communist politics against him, and saying that the people who build the architecture of the Cold War are like Acheson's college of cowardly commies or something. I forget what the actual thing is. And Acheson, very revealingly, he's from a very patrician family, he's a banker, calls this in this book that was written around the Vietnam War era, the attack of the primitives. So there's already this simultaneous class prejudice that's expressed with that and against someone like Richard Nixon of all people, while simultaneously not understanding how the political forces that they are playing with are deeply dangerous and can be dangerous to them as well. And that's something we see from liberals all throughout the war on terror. This is just to get the audience to understand the hysteria of the moment. And this takes place in 2008. You mentioned in the notes to your book afterwards some of the things you left out, and there was one episode that I think is really telling. This had to do in 2008, Michelle Malkin, whose star has faded somewhat. She really emerged as a new media phenomenon in the early 20th century on the wake of 9 11, going so far as to publish a book defending internment of Japanese Americans. But in 2008, she attacked Dunkin Donuts and Rachel Ray, the cooking show host for a particular type of iced coffee ad. Can you discuss that episode a little bit and what that reveals about the kind of baseline hysteria that America was in after the 9 11 attack? So first, I think it's important to point out that what the episode shows is that like when we talk about a baseline hysteria, I don't believe, and I don't think the record shows that it's really an organic hysteria. It is a hysteria that results from years and years of journalistic and political elites pushing interpretations of the 9 11 attack in these civilizational directions. So that said, the hysteria is nevertheless real. I just don't want to suggest that the war on terror, which is always in a weak creation, is anything that bubbles up from below and creates a demand on politicians to respond to, which is their typical alibi for doing the things they do. Rachel Ray is the spokesperson, Rachel Ray from the Food Network, like one of the most inoffensive possible people in American public life, particularly in that era of the Food Network, which is just very... She's a great minute. She's a great American 30 minutes giving every night of the week giving us good meals that are nutritious and tasty and can be done quickly. I've learned a lot about Rachel Ray. Yeah, Rachel Ray is a real American. She's on my Matt Rushmore. She's a spokesperson for Dunkin' Donuts, Sowing Ice Coffee. And in one of these ads, she's wearing... I wish I was making this up. She's wearing a scarf that kind of sort of could be confused for a kefir. Or, as Michelle Malkin calls it, the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Dunkin' Donuts pulls the ad. Because you might have warned something that an absolute like carnival barking racist clown would say is reminiscent of something that Arabs wear. Arabs who are coming to kill your grandmother. That is considered too politically controversial for a corporation like Dunkin' Donuts, which is acting in a certain... By the logic of the war on terror, the Dunkin' Donuts higher-ups are acting in a way that you might say is rational in the context of this deeper rationality, in the context of this persecution. And it also shows, and this is the last thing I'll say about it, like really in miniature what we would say today is that the war on terror's culture is a cancel culture. It's sensuous. It is devoted as a first principle to policing speech, to ensuring the absolute unacceptable, to deny respectability, to very wide swaths of interpretation about 9-11 and then about the war on terror. And it will operate civilizationally. And if you transgress from those boundaries, as a lot of people did, not even knowing they were doing so, the cancellation would come from it. And just to be clear, what Rachel Wei was wearing in those ads is something you can pick up on any street corner when it gets chilly in New York for five dollars. It's a scarf. It's a black and white scarf. It may look vaguely like something that Yasser Arafat wore at some point, but it's insane. And the rhetoric around that was that somehow Rachel Wei was either knowingly or unknowingly signaling to her al-Qaeda masters that demotude was upon us. And notice that when Malkin is talking, she's not even talking about al-Qaeda. Murderous Palestinian jihad. We've passed long ago, several exits ago, on the free way of the war on terror, was any real identification with either its activities or its culture with combating al-Qaeda. This was something that very quickly became far more civilizational and now has killed by the most recent estimate of the cost of war project at Brown University, a very analytically conservative estimate, 900,000 people. Let's talk about that jump from going after al-Qaeda or the people responsible, specifically responsible for 9-11 to this broad-based war on terror, which actually then has us occupying Afghanistan, invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, Iraq for years on end. Do you think that the categorical error of saying like certain people were responsible for 9-11, we need to find out who they were, take care of them and understand the larger context of what was motivating them. And obviously, we're not going to deal with that in America for a long time to come. But who were the people responsible to saying, okay, it is now, it is our entire countries, especially a country like Iraq, which, you know, if there is a war of choice, Iraq defines it for America. Do you think the Bush administration and their many enablers in Congress and in the press, did they fully, you know, did they understand that they were making a categorical switch from people who were responsible to 9-11 to something else? Or were they, I mean, were they being mendacious about that? Because this was a way of extending or continuing power for America, both domestically as well as abroad. No, I think they were both knowledgeable and sincere about what they were doing. It's a very important moment when Bush delivers his State of the Union address in January of 2002. That's really the moment where all of these months after 9-11, where Bush starts talking about how the war on terror is going to be long, it begins with al-Qaeda, but it doesn't end there and so forth, really finds its expression, its purpose. And that's the famous axis of evil speech, where he says, you know, Iran and Iraq, you know, states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil. North Korea is thrown in there so it doesn't see, you know, for window dressing. Despite the fact that North Korea is by far the biggest, you know, actual threat, you know, particularly from a nuclear weapons perspective. And so at that point, you know, you'll remember from the time that, like, this was not a subtle thing. This was not something that anyone, you know, missed the point about, that the war on terror is leveling up, that this was a deliberate decision by Bush justified by a lot of people, you know, liberals as well as conservatives. And it results importantly from all of this, you know, rhetoric that's placed around the war on terror from, you know, not just politicians, but intellectuals and journalists as well, that, you know, the war on terror is this inter-pervading enterprise. It gets the United States back together. It gives us grand purpose of a sense that we lacked in the 1990s. There are people who would write stupid shit like how, like, the 9-11 attacks meant it was the end of irony, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. And, you know, something like that is just not going to be satisfied with, like, you know, arresting the people who are responsible for 9-11 and bringing them to trial. It won't be satisfied with killing the people who were responsible for 9-11. And then ending it and then moving it on. It's looking for this kind of grand purpose that's part of the design. You know, only when, you know, it starts getting, you know, really real. And Bush has to, like, sell the invasion of Iraq. Does Bush start doing, like, the outright lie stuff about manufacturing a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda? Do you think, you know, he's recently dead so we can talk even more freely about him, but do you think that Donald Rumsfeld, I mean, there's a strong case, and anybody who watches the Errol Morris documentary interview with him, there's a strong case that Donald Rumsfeld was totally delusional. But did Rumsfeld believe what he said about various connections, or was he just lying? He was just lying. He was just lying. In this, do we know, like, is that in the service of a greater good? He wanted to invade Iraq. He wanted to demo more importantly than Iraq. This is all very abstract, because in an important way, the thing that I want to really convey after reporting on the national security state and the politicians around it for 20 years is that in really important ways, people who aren't them aren't people. People who the United States targets and kills, people who American power interacts with violently aren't really people. They're abstractions. I don't really know. I could find, you know, all number of euphemistic ways to put that, but what's the fucking point? Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, as well as George W. Bush, but in particular Rumsfeld and Cheney, wanted to prove certain points about American power, about the international order, who sets it, who is not bound by it, and how it ought to operate. That is the meaning of everything Rumsfeld and Cheney said, whether they actually thought there were, you know, genuine threats to emerge from, you know, al-Qaeda and so forth. I'll be charitable and assume they did. I have no problem with that. The fact of the matter is what they built in every particular killed and displaced. They killed hundreds of thousands of people, probably more. They displaced tens of millions. They immiserated so many more. They enriched the defense industry. The winners of the war on terror is basically America's version of state capitalism, which is an engine of death. It's the arms export industry. It's the defense industry. It's the surveillance industry. Those guys win the war on terror. I want to point out this spiel that you're on, which is very good, is also the grounds for a libertarian leftist coalition, because these are where these things come together. By the end of the Bush years, there's the non-insignificant issue of the financial crisis, financial collapse. We would argue, I think, about the reasons for that, etc. But there's that. But the war on terror, or certainly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been widely discredited. Something bad has happened. Obama, Barack Obama is elected. He wins the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton, in part, because he is somehow perceived as the peace candidate. And he talks about Iraq as a dumb war, and he doesn't really talk about Afghanistan. But once he's elected, he starts going about ultimately tripling troop strength in Afghanistan and creating what you call a sustainable war on terror. Talk a little bit about the moment when Obama takes over, and then what is he doing with the war on terror, both to reform it, but ultimately to extend it? First, there were reporters, myself on the left, Eli Lake on the right, who all throughout Obama's candidacy were writing about, on the one hand, this is the most anti-war candidate in very recent political memory. But on the other hand, when you actually look at what he's saying, there are very strong limits on how he would go about undoing the war on terror. Obama is against the Iraq war, and he's against torture. And everything else he's flexible. Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama was still saying that he would escalate in Afghanistan. He never, in fact, this is a misperception created by, I think, a lazy media. He never actually says the words good war. But nevertheless, he describes the war. Basically, one of these things is a horrific calamity, the Iraq war, and the other is a troubled, valorous enterprise that the United States may not wish to take up, but nevertheless has no choice of where to be safe from terrorism. Obama wants ultimately in office, after he votes to make permanent as a senator, once it looks like he might really be president, a lot of the NSA surveillance that he had previously criticized. Once in office, he seeks to make the war on terror less conspicuous. He wants to withdraw from Iraq. He nevertheless escalates in Afghanistan after receiving the advice that if you do this once, you can accomplish what the generals want accomplished, and then you can start withdrawing. But what he also wants is this apparatus that can ensure that he is not soft on terrorism, that can ensure that if there is a genuine terrorist threat, he is there to meet it. He doesn't accomplish this by, I think, what would make a lot more sense, dismantling the architecture of American power that violently dominates the Middle East and drives the reception to a violent response. He does it instead by constructing different violent responses that are just less visible, drone strikes, which he becomes synonymous with, the coalescing of NSA surveillance which left alone because of the way it operates will only expand, particularly as it becomes synonymous with 21st century capitalism and the data generation and then commodification and arbitrage that defines a lot of the information economy. And not just the information economy, but it's an adjunct to pretty much like Target is a data company. So all of that together, Obama codifies under what he believes is greater fidelity to the rule of law. In fact, what he does is assemble intelligence officials, lawyers, and uniform military officers along with senior political appointees that basically need to decide who lives and who dies. That is what's known as the disposition matrix. It's not lawful, it just has a lot of lawyers involved in it. And among the decisions they come to is that you can execute an American citizen without charge or without trial, provided that a security agency like in this case the CIA says it would just be too darn hard to apprehend. And I would suggest to you that this is really the legacy from a national security perspective of Barack Obama. The maintenance of what the philosopher Georgiou Agamben describes famously as a state of exception, but now entirely made respectable and with a legacy created for it, for liberals who will go on to maintain it. And we are seeing a lot of that right now, the Afghanistan withdrawal not good standing in the Biden administration. Yeah, Agamben, who's heavily influenced by Michel Foucault, is a prophet of both the war on terror as well as the COVID age. He got roasted early on when he critiqued certain measures that the state of Italy or the Italian government was taking. But he's somebody who everybody should know and read with special care, I think. Yeah, I don't want to co-sign for a lot of what he said. Oh, no, no, no. But I mean, but this is... But he's very, very, very prophetic about the war on terror as he said. Yeah, but the state of exception is, he argues essentially, and I think pretty persuasively that many liberal democracies get to a point where it is a constant state of exception. And somehow it is the overreach that actually legitimates the order, the limited government order you're trying to preserve by saying, we really need to do things differently now, just for a short period of time, but we keep coming up with ways to extend government overreach surveillance, things like that. So one of the things that's fascinating is that even as Obama was legitimizing or putting on a kind of firmer ground, whether it's legal or cultural or political aspects of the war on terror, you write about how the right though manages to keep getting to the right of him. And so you know what, Obama, this secret Muslim who may or may not be American, is actually not going far enough. How did that play out? So again, the wars by the time of Obama's presidency are disasters. They're exhausting. They were meant to demonstrate the might of America and in fact only demonstrate its weakness. And in that agony, for those who believe in American exceptionalism, there is a tendency, particularly given the context of a war that is unleashed and legitimized all of these nativist impulses, to say that the war is internally betrayed, to say that the fault of the war is not the war. The fault of the war is not the thing itself. But you know, you start seeing this very early on in the Iraq war from people around the weekly standard who had supported it, who had said who become never Trumpers or in Tucker Carlson's case become Supreme Trumpers, who start to say that the problem with the Iraq war is the Iraqis. We are seeing a respectable version of that right now with Joe Biden blaming the Afghans for the Afghanistan war. It's really disgusting. I don't mean to say that only the right plays with those politics. My book extensively documents the liberals playing with those politics. I mean, to say that those politics exist and express themselves in these very familiar patterns because they are very deeply American, something that's in the firmware before we go politically to the left or the right. Even peeling it back a little bit, Obama's immigration policies or to the extent that you can say anything good about George Bush is that he was not the most anti-immigrant president of the 21st century because he's been followed by two who were worse on that. And again, you get this weird thing where Obama is deporting, arresting and removing record numbers of immigrants. And yet he is not doing enough and in 2008 Mitt Romney runs, or I'm sorry, 2012, Mitt Romney says, you know, this guy is not doing anything to get rid of immigrants. Yeah. So Obama, like the war on terror itself, is not understood by what they actually do. It's understood in a cultural sense and in a civilizational sense. Remember the most important thing about the rights reaction to Obama. Is really summed up by birtherism, which tells you a lot about the war on terror as well. It's this gigantic conspiracy theory, again, very familiar not only in the war on terror, but throughout American history. Very often I don't think we allow ourselves to understand like how deeply American conspiracy theories are, particularly in an era where elites over attribute conspiracy theories to these pathologically fucked up Muslim countries. But it is ironic that any anyway, you can cut that bit out. Obama is understood in certain quarters of the right as a secret Muslim that, you know, the anti black racism of birtherism is like right there on the package. And it's so obvious that it can tend to obscure how the war on terror is working there. What birtherism is telling you is that because Barack Obama is secretly a foreign Muslim, he's your enemy. Barack Obama doesn't have your interests at heart. Barack Obama is among the people who have been trying to kill you since 911. That makes any compromise. I mean, how could you possibly, if that is your critique of Obama? And remember, this is Donald Trump's critique of Obama. This is not something that doesn't enjoy purchase on the right. This either people with power on the right either wink at this or pretend it's not happening. Most often they accommodate it. And that is the meaning of what happens for the rights reaction throughout the Obama years that, you know, as the wars grow so horrific, you start seeking satisfaction closer to home. A cultural center in lower Manhattan becomes a ground zero mosque or a victory mosque. States controlled by Republicans around the country start trying to ban so called Sharia law. And just because there's an absurdity to that effort, we shouldn't recognize what's at work there, which is a deliberate attempt at curtailing Muslim civil rights and expanding the punitive aspects of the state into like the fundamental aspects of freedom that Muslims enjoy in America. This is what, and you know, then after ISIS happens, the migrant outflows from the war on terror lead to powerful political figures on the right. And not only the right, but you know, very often on the right, treating refugees from ISIS is indistinct from ISIS, which is exactly what we've been seeing in Afghanistan. Exactly. Refugees from the Taliban, including those who actually served the war effort as being no different from the Taliban. These are very well trod patterns in the war on terror because they're well trod patterns in American history. Just for the record, you don't think that criticizing or opposing Barack Obama is necessarily proof of racism? I mean, look, if it is proof of racism, I'm guilty of it. The whole middle section of my book, everything that I've reported throughout the Obama years was critical of Obama. What I have absolutely no patience with is any form of white supremacy. What I have absolutely no patience with is criticism of Obama based not on what he does, but on who he is. Right. Let's talk about in the time we have left, I want to talk about Trump and get to Biden and what, if the war on terror era is over, what comes next or how how do we work to make sure that it's over? With Donald Trump, what was his ultimate impact on the war on terror? Because one of the things that is interesting about Trump as a political figure is that he in many ways is baldly stating certain types of horrifying truths that people usually want gussied up. When he went on very five minutes into announcing he was going to be president, he started talking about how Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and the country is not sending its best. Kind of articulating crassly what probably a fair number of Americans actually believed or worried about. By the same token, he also called out the military industrial complex at various points. He is the one who said, we should get out of Afghanistan. We should get out of Syria. How do you summarize not who he is, which he's gone, but what is his ultimate impact on the kind of military industrial complex or the surveillance security industry in America? Well, Donald Trump's reputation for being against the war on terror is the result of paying attention to only what he says and none of what he does. In office, he escalates the war on terror across the board. He escalates in Afghanistan, which the only exception there is, and I write in the book that I think this is the most valorous act of a disgraceful presidency, he was willing to negotiate a withdrawal with the Taliban. He was the one who recognized that the Taliban was an ineradicable fact, something that both the Bush and the Obama administrations simply even went in the Obama administration's case they knew it. Simply did not do and went along out of political cowardice that can sign so many, not just Americans, but mostly Afghans to death. Remember as well, during the lead up to the war in Iraq, how the neo-conservatives fought so fiercely a battle not just of policy but of legitimacy with the CIA and particularly their intelligence analysts and the State Department and the uniformed military. Symbols of American power that supposedly by the logic of 9-11, which venerates the capital T troops, are supposed to be sacrosanct, but in fact they're not sacrosanct because their obstacles to what the war on terror has as its interests is articulated by the most fervent of its architects. This is a prelude to where Donald Trump will go. It's a prelude that we were talking earlier about Richard Nixon and anti-communist attacks on these technocratic and capital R rational elements of Cold War, liberalism. This is a very, very, very old pattern visible especially in mid to late 20th century American history, where the public respect reserved for those in whose name the war on terror is being fought is entirely expendable when those people from that background prove to be obstacles to the enterprise. Trump's innovation is that the enterprise here doesn't need to be America, it just needs to be him and his faction. So surveillance on him because of his rampant criminality is corrupt cops gone mad trying to rob you of your political power, not Trump of his own wealth and freedom. And accordingly obstacles to Trump's agenda can be dismissed that way. They also have the benefit of being obstacles to the erosion or rather they also have the benefit of being manifestations of what remains of the rule of law. And if you get rid of those things you're getting two for the price of one if you're someone like Trump. Now remember surveillance you can read this in every single year of the ODNI's reports about surveillance that they put on their tumbler which Marcy Wheeler felicitously calls icon the record. Surveillance on everyone else expands under the Trump administration the FBI sifts through for an entire year keeps the secret sifts through Americans collected data that the NSA has stored with entirely without a warrant in violation of the rule of the few rules that it has to certify to a secret surveillance court. So already we're very, very far down the road of like, you know, an undemocratic surveillance enterprise responsive, you know, practically speaking to no representative body. All of that, you know, accelerates under the Trump years the drone strikes accelerate. No matter, you know, Trump is playing very good politics because of the unpopularity of the war on terror when he says we need to get out of Afghanistan, we need to get out of Syria, but then he doesn't do it. No one, you know, there's a war in Somalia right now. It is old enough for a kinsen year. Congress has never so much as studied a war that's 15 years old. No administration fights the war in Somalia as intensely and as bloodily as Donald Trump does. And that's entirely overlooked. I guess here's a question as we talk about Biden and what comes next or where we're at. But you know, there's no question that Trump to broad swaths of America, possibly even his own supporters. But let's say there's 40% of that through 60% of people who are against him. Does he delegitimate did he delegitimate the American intelligence service and the surveillance state as well as the, you know, the political apparatus by shitting on it so much as well as then enacting a bunch of kind of insane policies. And I guess that's one question. And the other is, what is the role of public opinion in any of this? I recently talked with Steven Wertheim, historian who talked about the rise of military supremacy as the ultimate goal of American foreign policy starting in the World War II era. And he talked a lot about Walter Lippmann, who was an architect of that. And Lippmann, of course, is famous for saying, you know, the public doesn't know anything, but it doesn't really matter because the public doesn't really influence anything. What I guess at the end of the Trump presidency, you know, the presidency is held in very low esteem. American government is held at record low esteem. Congress, you know, you go through all of this. Nobody is feeling good about the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, anything like that. Does that matter at all? Or is that really, you know, interesting, but that's not where the decisions get made? Well, I think it matters. But it matters. You know, when we look at what the substance of the criticism of the CIA, the FBI, the security state is, because the criticism that emerges on the right is that this is an out of control criminal enterprise because it goes after the people I don't like and leaves alone, seemingly, the people I like. Let me continue. Not because this is an enterprise that is violating the Constitution on everyone at scale. Those are two very different propositions. I think there is an impulse amongst I think well intentioned people on the right who do hold the right, in my opinion, critique of the security state to want to leverage that extant anger in order to, you know, roll back the security state. The trouble is, I don't think you get there from here. Right. So it's that those people are saying like, you know, what's wrong with the national, you know, the security state is it spying on Donald Trump for bad reasons? Not that it is doing that to everybody else. And especially dark people overseas or who are running my literally guess. Because like they don't, you know, look, Section 702 of Pfizer, the most important wellspring of warrantless surveillance, of overbroad surveillance, of bulk surveillance, of anti-constitutional surveillance gets renewed under Trump. He goes through an amazing shambolic day whereby he's against renewing 702 before he favors it, but he favors it in a tweet that says, oh wait, someone told me that this is just about foreigners. Go ahead and vote for it. And that's what happens. I don't think that is remotely the kind of politics that can abolish the war on terror. That's the Trump's the Trumpist's problem with the deep state is that they don't control the deep state. Trump's actions in the particularly the intelligence field with his purges and so forth, the creation, you know, the rise of wick spittles, cronies like, you know, clowns like Rick Grinnell and John Ratcliffe, they're not there to combat a deep state. They're there to build one. So let's talk about Biden. Biden emerged in the Obama administration. There were hints of it that he was anti-Afghanistan, that he had rethought his foreign policy position as one, you know, for much of his career, he was interested in kind of projecting American force to something else. He's the one who got us out of Afghanistan, however, you know, poorly run, you know, the withdrawal might have been. Where is he, do you think, or where do we go in the war on terror with Joe Biden ostensibly manning the ship? Well, one of the things that struck me is that the way Biden has made such a strident argument for withdrawing from Iraq, appropriately so, I believe. Afghanistan. Yes, thank you. One of the things that struck me is how, in my view, appropriately, stridently, Biden has argued for and stuck with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It has been interesting to watch him use war on terror abolitionist language, but at the same time, that abolition is limited to ground troops in Afghanistan simultaneously as a way, you know, something very familiar from, you know, Obama's, you know, departure from Iraq, simultaneous with escalation of drone strikes and escalation in Afghanistan, is that he reserves the right to surveil and bomb Afghanistan at will. So, you know, the new euphemism we're learning is an over the horizon capability, which is to say drone strikes and on other occasions, commando rates. He makes a point of saying in his Afghanistan withdrawal speeches that the problem with the Afghanistan war, when it's not, you know, Afghanistan themselves, is that it distracts us from the counterterrorism challenges of today with the counterterrorism challenges of yesterday. And that's a dangerous, you know, sign that Biden will cease an abolitionist perspective on the war on terror, take it no further, leave the rest of it intact and return to the kind of Obama era pattern of a less conspicuous war, which probably shouldn't surprise us because every single person in the Biden national security apparatus in positions of influence are the veterans of Obama's sustainable war on terror. You know, towards the end of the book, you write and I'm paraphrasing, but you talk about how, you know, part of the reign of terror, the war on terror mentality is that the longer America sees itself as under siege, and we've defined things in a way, so we're always under under siege. There is always an enemy somewhere out there, maybe deep in America hiding in a mosque somewhere, or overseas that is going to get us. So we're under siege, but the longer we're under siege, the easier it is to see enemies everywhere. This also is an old American kind of mentality and trope. What do we do to snap out of that, to get out of that? Because if we are waiting for the next real or imagined attack, and then we're going to respond, you know, the way that we are because we're nervous and anxious, we can never really get out of it. How do we end that kind of worldview? My answer may not be your answer, but my answer is sorry. Yeah, I understand it's raising the minimum wage and, you know, all of that, but no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not, I don't believe we don't start the raising minimum wage where that's hardcore wealth. Yes. But I'm not about that. My answer is solidary. I think elite politics has proven over the past 20 years that it will only perpetuate the war on terror. People have to organize with one another to force their politicians into a binary choice between maintaining their political power and maintaining the war on terror. We already have had very hopeful signs of how this work is extremely difficult, but it can win. The reason why both Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden play anti-war politics when it's time to get people's votes is because on a certain level, they understand that the American people, regardless of what they stand on, everything else, do not want to be permanently at war. They do not want to police the globe. They do not want to set up, you know, we have very different understandings probably of certain aspects of American foreign policy, that's fine. But they don't want to set up a system of domination that forces them to remain in positions. Well, I shouldn't say force, that's always a choice, but makes elites on autopilot remain in this extractive, exploitative, violent condition. And the thing that has always changed aspects of American history that function like that is agitation and mass from below. That's the only thing that's ever, frankly, made America great. The only thing that has ever redeemed America is movements from the American people that force their leaders to act in ways that strengthen the bonds of peace and social solidarity. And we have a choice to make. And we don't have much time to make it. But I think if we actually make that choice, and we can unite and stay united, then we win. One of the issues that people have come together, and I think you see this on the libertarian side of things, and I'll say the libertarian right, I don't consider myself part of the right, but no reason to kind of be fastidious right now. On the libertarian right and on the progressive left over police reform and criminal justice reform and what now you see that you see it in foreign policy occasionally so that somebody like Ron Paul in the early 2000s emerges as a vocal critic of empire along with people like a Bernie Sanders. Are there other issues that you think that people progressives and libertarians can kind of start to build up, you know, a coalition that works at least long enough to generate that type of whether it's in the streets or, you know, just in media to actually force the major parties to nominate anti-war on terror candidates for high office. As long as, you know, I've been reporting on this stuff, I've also been reporting on the anti-surveillance coalition of libertarians, progressives, socialists. And, you know, you know, my wife used to work for the ACLU and, you know, one of the things she always would say, and she knew this because of, you know, her work in coalition politics against the war on terror, is that you can't, on Capitol Hill, do anything to restrain the war on terror without forces on the right. It's just a fact. Like with the survey, the anti-surveillance coalition, I think, you know, you really do have, you know, opportunities to expand that outward, I think, you know, libertarians and progressives, certainly libertarians and socialists, would be very into the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security and use the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security to really make a kind of statement about what is and is should not be considered respectable for American policy, for the architecture of the American government to conduct in terms of not just persecution of undocumented people in the United States, but the massive windfalls that the Department of Homeland Security provide far more than the Pentagon to, Bradley Balco has written about this rather compellingly, funding the militarization of police around the country. That's, you know, those are just like two, you know, quick things, you know, off the bat, but I think like, you know, for those who believe as we do that the war on terror is an urgency that cannot be allowed to persist, to become permanent and to further deface the United States in an anti-democratic direction. I think this is a real moment. I think that it won't happen without struggle, it won't happen without organizing, it won't happen without effort. It certainly won't happen, you know, by the, you know, good races of the Biden administration, a Democratic-controlled Congress or anything, you know, generating exclusively from elite politics. But I think the war on terror has shown itself as a political enterprise to be so fragile and so manipulable that politicians can easily be made to fear aligning with it, not just be made to fear its supposed Taoismatic power. All right, we're going to leave it there. Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror, had the 9-11 era destabilized America and produced Trump. Thanks for talking to reason. Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.