Angry Planet - How 9/11 Led to a 'Reign of Terror'

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

The Forever War. It may be gone from Afghanistan but it’s not gone from our hearts. Our minds. Our souls. The body politic is riddled with the consequences of the last twenty years of conflict. The Department of Homeland Security is my go to. The first half of my life it didn’t exist. Now I am faced with the consequences of its disastrous policies on a daily basis.With us today is Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman is a journalist and war correspondent who has spent his entire career reporting one the Forever War. His new book is Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. It’s an excellent book. It has the feel of a journalist stopping midway through a career turning behind them and asking “What the fuck just happened?”Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Ah, the Forever War. It may be gone from Afghanistan, but... it's not gone from our hearts, our minds, our souls. The body politic is riddled with the consequences of the last 20 years of conflict. The Department of Homeland Security is my go-to. The first half of my life, it didn't exist. Now I am faced with the consequences of its disastrous policies on a daily basis. With us today is Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman is a journalist and war correspondent

who has spent his entire career reporting on the Forever War. His new book is Reign of Terror, how the 9-11 era destabilized America and produced Trump. It's an excellent book. It has the feel of a journalist stopping midway through their career, turning behind them and asking,

what the fuck just happened? Spencer, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thank you guys so much for having me. All right, so you've been on quite a few podcasts and shows. You've been on Seth Myers, you've been on the Chris Hayes podcast on MSNBC. I have to know, has anyone asked you to explain why Michelle Malkin bullied Duncan Donuts over something that Rachel Ray did?

Thank you very much for reading through to the acknowledgments of the book. This is, you know, very much a kind of brown M&Ms in the writer moment, seeing who stuck with it to be in. Nick Alespian did, but you are the second person. Only, only Nick so far. Okay, well, can you, I am fascinated. this as an entry point into kind of what I want to talk about. So can you, can you give us the brief explanation of who Michelle Malkin is? I know there's like just a wealth of stuff that we could talk about there, but who she is and why bullying over the Dunkin' Donuts thing? What, what happened? There was a period in the early 2000s when Laura Ingramham and Michelle Malk were

kind of like the likeliest contenders for the spot in conservative media that at that point and Coulter occupied basically just like very aggrieved telegenic nativist. Michelle Malkin went so far as to write a book justify Japanese internet in World War II in order to say that, well, you know, it wouldn't be so bad if we did that to America. Muslims, would it? That led to a weird circumstance around 2008, where, like, one of the least offensive celebrities possible, Rachel Ray from the Food Network, you know, who hasn't benefited from 30-minute meals if you're of a certain age?

She had an endorsement deal with Dunkin' Donuts. And so she cut a commercial in which she's on camera drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee and she's wearing a scarf that to Michelle Malkin looked just a bit too much like a Kaffia. That was enough to get Dunkin Donuts to pull the ad. This manufactured outrage over, you know, the wearing of a scarf that kind of looks like a kaffia, sort of summarized to me the subtext of the war on terror better than kind of most things I could think of. You kind of have, you know, everything in that moment. You have an unstated but. like glaringly obvious contention of, I guess, you know, collective responsibility applied civilizationally for an atrocity that would forever seek retribution. You had the expansion of this prerogative extended like light years beyond the point of absurdity where a celebrity

wearing a scarf that I really have to emphasize, like does not to any like normal person look like a kaffia, an unstated assumption that it's wrong if it did, but nevertheless carries with it such centurious force that a major corporation will decide the better part of financial valor is in making it clear you do not extend civilizational respect to people who might wear cafes. I don't remember this well enough. Was there an apology issued by Rachel Ray 2, something ridiculous like that? I don't think there was. I'm not sure.

If you want to give me two seconds and I'll Google it. Sure. Okay, give me one moment. I don't think, as I'm looking at it too, I don't think Ray ever said anything. Duncan... Yeah, Duncan makes this decision. Duncan makes this decision. And then Malkin writes a column afterwards saying how good Duncan Donuts is for respecting 9-11.

It's refreshing, quote, it's refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic Jihad and its apologists. too many of them bend over backwards in the direction of anti-American political correctness. Again, over a scarf and a Dunkin' Donuts ad. Duncan Donuts yanks the ad, the statement that they made quoted by the Associated Press of May 29, 2008. They pull the ad over, quote, the possibility of misperception detracted from the ad's original intention to promote our iced coffee. This, okay, this, you, you, there's a lot of. of great stuff in this book. And there's a lot of great stuff in the acknowledgements. Thank you. There's, there's, there's this analogy that you used at the very beginning,

or in the acknowledgments rather, that you call, you called the book the We Didn't Start the Fire version of the Forever War. Can you briefly explain that analogy? I just, I mean, you're really poking right at my anxieties here. The, I wrote in the hope of I mean, look, I wrote that because, like, the process of, like, finishing a book for someone who already has, like, lots of experience with anxiety is a process of, like, trying desperately to anticipate all of the potential objections to the book. And, like, one of them that had been sort of sitting on my shoulder the whole time I'm writing this is, like,

I have a contractually mandated word count. Like, that's how books work. Like, after a while, like, the publisher who's agreed to publish this has agreed to publish it at a certain length. And beyond that, the publisher does not agree to publish this. And so I'm, like, finding myself as I'm writing a book whose tableau, you know, spans the world, though primarily is concerned with the United States, over a 20-year period. trying to just figure out the basic choreography of the book and worrying that like I'm dancing too fast like past all of the different aspects operationally, culturally, politically

of the war on terror that, you know, you sort of, you know, can think of it like, I don't know, Patriot at Guantanamo invading Iraq is a go. I don't want to actually do the thing. But like I'm just like shooting from place to place to place. or at least like that's what I hope I am not doing yeah well and also the the book comes out in August right it's not you you were writing about something you're putting kind of this capstone on this thing that is ongoing and is going to have a me and is going to have a major milestone did you have any idea when you were kind of towards the end of the writing of the book that it was going to come out in this environment where suddenly the everyone cared about Afghanistan

stand again? No, not at all. First off, the act of being a journalist who writes about the war on terror is like an act of learning and then accepting that no one gives a shit like you write. That like if anyone gives a shit at all, it's going to be real intermittent. The book was not supposed to come out in August. It was supposed to come out in the spring. But COVID's effect on all aspects of book publishing ended up occasioning this delay. The delay got us kind of close to the 20th anniversary of 9-11. And at that point, I sort of figured, like, I suppose that might, you know, attract some, some interest.

And then, you know, I think like five days after the book was published, Kabul fell. Congratulations on your magic powers. Thank you. I, you know, if it was, you know, this easy to attract attention to this subject, I don't know how it is that, you know, it took, you know, these powers 20 years to gestate, but here they are. All right. So I'll stop poking at your anxieties. I apologize. Let's go back to the beginning then. I thought this was a very interesting way to start this book. What is the worst terrorist attack in American history? Well, so I start the book with what was the worst terrorist attack in American history. at the time in which it happened, which before it was 9-11, was Oklahoma City, an attack where a white

supremacist named Timothy McFay kills 168 people, including 19 children, because he, like an entire infrastructure of white supremacist political violence around the country, is extremely upset that the federal government can no longer be counted to uphold white interest. as it once was. This, of course, is quite a dubious proposition. Nevertheless, McVeigh believes it strongly enough to commit murder on its behalf. And I start with Oklahoma City because to understand the war on terror, it's necessary to understand who the war on terror exempts and why, where the war on terror doesn't apply. And I wanted to speak. spend some time up top at the book, going through how, when, you know, looked at through the

prism of what the war on terror is supposed to be by its own terms, which is to say agnostic to who commits the political violence, it is designed or it believes itself designed to confront. In fact, it leaves a tremendous amount of, that. The terrorism that is the oldest, most violent on American soil, certainly the deadliest, and the most rooted in American history intact, intact, untouched. The sort of terrorism that calls its practitioners patriots and portrays them as taking extreme measures to restore something essential that's been taken away from true Americans, by which it means white Americans, or those Americans devoted to a social order instantiated by a racial caste in which the benefits

of wealth, freedom, and flow hierarchically once hoarded amongst white elites, you know, further on down. And another reason that I wanted to start off doing this is that like once the parallels start being, you know, increasingly clear, you know, I'm starting. You know, I'm starting starting off in a terrorist training camp, you know, albeit a terrorist training camp that, like, media narratives don't often, and political narratives, call a terrorist training camp. I also was kind of in love with the idea of starting with a journalistic cliche, where a journalist kind of zoologically takes you on a tour of this scary, exotic place where violent young men, like in thrown-together fatigues, you know, do the monkey bars, while expressing like all of this noxious, typically misogynist,

violent rhetoric to sanctify violence. There are two things that really struck me. One is you take us through the terminology so well, you know, about the code words. And, I mean, I remember the Timothy McVeigh case. I mean, it was part of something I actually covered. And white supremacy was so far in the background. I mean, we talked about militias and militias and freemen and all that. And for some reason, they weren't white supremacist organizations.

They were something else. So, I mean, is the terminology, is that what's killing us? I would say that the euphemisms that the media and political figures put around McVeigh are there for precisely that reason, so that you don't see the essential continuity between what, you know, McVeigh does and what Osama bin Laden does, the ways McVeigh justifies his political violence and the way bin Laden, you know, on down the line, justify theirs. Because the essential point about what happens after 9-11 is that the United States defines terrorism not, terms of a thing that people do, but in terms of a thing that people, and our terrorism,

white American terrorism, is just not considered the same thing by virtue of what I suppose they would call American virtue. It's funny. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, like the 1990s specifically. Some of that is because I've been rewatching the X-Files. But it feels like our relationship. to this kind of stuff at the time was more focused on government reaction to it and more about, and maybe some of that is because I lived in Texas. I mean, it was a very specific media environment, but it was about like the over, like, oh God, look at the overreach here.

They mowed down this poor man's family on Ruby Ridge, and now they've set fire to this religious building in Waco. And it was about setting up yourself in opposition to the government, much less than it was about fighting the terror. terrorists in our midst. Well, and then you're also talking about the continuity. You're talking about the continuity with the terrorists, the terrorists, right? I mean, a foreign terrorist. But if there's a continuity with white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan, right? I mean, literally white terrorists.

Exactly. The continuities couldn't be clear. All right. So that's kind of your, the intro to the book. that then takes us into kind of everything that comes after that in 2001. Something I was thinking about as I was reading this, I wanted to, I've been asking everybody this lately because it's been 20 years and I have a bunch of young people in my life and it's interesting for me to collect these stories and share them with them.

What is your 9-11 story? Oh, man. This is going to go some places, so bear with me. I'm a native New Yorker, and I made the questionable decision to attend Rutgers University in New Jersey. And on 9-11, I woke up expecting to go cover campaign stop by the gubernator hopeful waiter governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevy, when he came to New Brunswick, which is where the Rutgers campus I attended was. And I went down into the living room of the house where I was living as a senior in college and seeing my roommates saw as they were watching.

television and quickly I saw why that was. And I was not able to make it to New York that day. And so I spent that whole day trying to get in touch with my family, get in touch with my friends, while all day thinking that there was a serious possibility that everyone I love was about to die. my family is overwhelmingly clustered in in New York and I didn't I had no idea what to do. I couldn't get into the city that that was just not a thing that would happen for until I wouldn't get there until Friday. But having no other idea of what to do, me and my friends put together the school newspaper edition that day.

And when we were done, me and my closest friend at the paper. went to a friend of her place, a friend of hers, because they had weed. And so we spent like two in the morning on 9-12, something like that, like just getting high with these guys that they knew who were baggage handlers at Newark Airport. And so like, I'm smoking weed with these guys as like they're getting more and more agitated, talking about how extremely easy it would be to smuggle explosives into baggage that you would put, like, in the cargo hold of a passenger aircraft. So, you know, not a great day. I don't think anyone had a great day.

Right. But, okay, that is a good segue into what I want to ask next, which is, it feels like those five years immediately after that, we all, we lost our fucking mind. The country lost its mind. And the Michelle Malkin thing is like a piece of that that's at the tail end. But I, it's going back

and like again, on this anniversary, I've been going back and I've been looking at the media and really diving into like the politics that immediately followed. It was a very surreal time. Can you talk about the groundwork that was laid in those, like in that

immediate aftermath, politically, especially, and like how it said everything that came next. So it's easy to forget, but the creation of the war on terror from the authorization to use military force that truly makes, you know, global reprisal in the war, you know, an enduring, kind of never-ending, that is to say, not time-limited, not geographic, not geographic. graphically limited phenomenon, the creation of the Patriot Act, which expands criminalized association and law enforcement access to tremendously intrusive records of people's, you know, various accounts, whether, you know, their business records, their bank records and so forth. The creation of an indefinite detention legal regime, which would by January 2002 extend to the

opening of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the invasion of Afghanistan, the escape of Osama bin Laden into Pakistan. And the declaration that the United States' war doesn't end with al-Qaeda, but in fact continues and will now target entire states that the Bush administration deems targetable as part of the war on terror. All of that is four months. During those four months, George Bush enjoys approval ratings that are like we will just never probably see in our lifetime again. We're talking about like 90% approval ratings during this period because there is just this overwhelming atmosphere of righteous patriotic emergency that Bush and his allies are using during this time to cement presidency in a commanding position that we have to remember was granted to him

by a five to four vote on the Supreme Court. So you have this event used by the Bush administration, not as an atrocity, but as an opportunity. And Bush takes full advantage of that opportunity. I should also mention something else that happens during that time frame is the National Security Agency decides that the Fourth Amendment no longer applies to it and that it can take all Americans telephonic records, records of their communications overseas by phone or by internet, collect them and keep them for as long as necessary to exploit them. And a couple months later, the CIA will embark upon

a very wide-ranging program of incommunicado detention and torture. All of this happens very quickly. Yeah, it's wild to think now that we know about all this stuff because of things that came later, but those first four months, it was very, very rapid, and there was not a lot of discussion, and everyone pretty much fell in line. You know, all the politician except like one or two and the entirety of the news media, really. Well, and also entertainment. In entertainment. Remember, like we had that, what was it, week long program where Bruce Springsteen and everyone else came out and the rising concert. All the channels. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God. So back up what you're saying. I mean, it was every aspect of society. Yeah, and if you stepped out of

the orthodoxy, you were absolutely destroyed. Dixie Chicks being the classic example, right? Susan Sontag as well, every time I hear people talk about today's cancel culture. I just think that's a door. Yeah, you haven't, you haven't been canceled until you've had your books and CDs like burned at a church picnic, right? That's a whole different level. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We will be best. with Spencer Ackerman right after this. All right, thank you for sticking around Angry Planet listeners. We are back on with Spencer Ackerman talking about reign of terror.

Okay, something else I felt I'm very impressive about the book is how much of it is about the Obama administration, which I think is an incredibly important part of this story that doesn't get enough attention. I know that it's like three or four chapters kind of detailing the different aspects of how he oversaw the war and how he really, would you say, codified it? Yeah. Was that, sorry, can you kind of explain how his administration codified, codified as a word, standardized, maybe? The Obama approach to the war on terror, which is the subject of the middle third of my book,

is an approach that takes an abolitionist perspective on two aspects of the war on terror, the Iraq War and Torture by the CIA. and on all other aspects of the war, embraces those practices provided that they can put them inside a restraint of bureaucratic process that they convince themselves often because the people contributing so heavily to these decisions up to and including the president himself is an attorney. And this is viewed as a responsible way of preventing overreaction to, terrorist incidents, as well as making the architecture of the war on terror, what I call in the book

drawing on their language often sustainable, which is to say it can be continued in perpetuity. Its excesses are seen as deviations rather than manifestations of the policies itself. And when you approach such an enterprise with the sense that you can tame it, oftentimes what will actually happen is it tames you. You are the one accommodating it rather than it being an entity accommodating you, the person who's actually elected in this case in 2008 on a wave of anti-war, anger and dissatisfaction and disatisfaction and disaffirm. disillusionment. And rather than constraining the war on terror, this actually allows the war on terror growth, expansion in different ways. This becomes, this becomes essentially how Obama becomes how Obama becomes synonymous with drone strikes around the world. It is Obama who takes assassinations by remotely piloted aircraft and puts them in places on frontiers where they

had just never had opportunities before, not just Pakistan, not just Yemen, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but Libya, Somalia. And in the process of accommodating all of these existing war on terror practices and making them less conspicuous, ultimately that makes the war on terror truly forever. I'm just kind of curious how you define forever. Are we going to really be stuck with this shit for the rest of my life, the rest of your life? I don't accept that.

What I mean is that forever in the sense of indefinite, that absent and outside political force stopping these things. They will continue and just become more and more of the firmament of American foreign policy to borrow a phrase that Carrie Howley recently wrote in her excellent New York magazine article about the drone whistleblower Daniel Hale. I don't for a minute accept that this is a permanent state of affairs because if Americans organize and force their politicians into a binary choice between maintaining the war on terror and maintaining political power, I think the war on terror has quite a glass jaw. And people really do have the power to shut this down. I would also argue, given that it's the United States that did this,

not only to the rest of the world, but to itself, the United States has an obligation to shut it down. But do we have the will? I mean, do you see that coming from anywhere? even the best intention, meaning like maybe in this case the least warlike, everyone's afraid that at the least, if you don't get them over there, they'll come get us here, right? I mean, where's the political will? Well, and also with the war in Afghanistan over, over, do, is there even the, like, do people even know what's going on in the Horn of Africa, right? Well, certainly that is an enormous problem.

And that's where I think, you know, journalists like me are required to go, like, find that out and tell people. We'll find out if there's the political will to do this or there isn't. But I think too often politicians express a framework that suggests the war on terror is a grassroots phenomenon that they dare not deviate from because of some anticipated consequence. to come to them at the poll. That is a risible inversion of responsibility. The war on terror has always been an elite phenomenon. Foreign policy is amongst the least democratic aspects of American political life, and that's a long list.

And really, the people truly invested in keeping the war ongoing are not voters, their defense contractor contributors, and those are the interests that primarily have found the most receptivity amongst politicians, not those voters who, while they might have been manipulated sufficiently by those elites to support the wars in great numbers at their... We can see over time how rapid the erosion of support for those wars have been when the scale of their disaster becomes less and less deniable. People don't want to be constantly at war. No one I have ever encountered outside of Washington views these wars as desirable things. Some people might view them as you reference as tragic necessities. But even that I find is just less and less,

that was more of a position I encountered a decade ago rather than today. Certainly, I haven't really encountered that with any kind of, you know, fervor or conviction since bin Laden was killed. That was a decade ago. The war on terror has been going on longer after Osama bin Laden was killed than before. Thanks for cheering me up. Yeah, it's interesting because we had a guest on very recently, former diplomat who was talking about the same thing, that the war could have ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

You saw that as, you see that, I should say, as kind of an off ramp as well. I do. What I mean by that is that an underappreciated consequence of how the war on terror never names a specific enemy is that as a result, you will, as a result, you invite factional political dispute as to when the war on terror can be considered to have ended. Like, unless there is a specific enemy that either is or is not vanquished, then you start, like, lending yourself toward dispute about when the job is or is not done. And the only external circumstance that you can really see having the greatest inherent force where people would most intuitively say, oh yeah, now it's done, is the killing of bin Laden.

But in order to do that, the actual politicians in charge of that operation need to make or needed to have made an affirmative case. that what they have done successfully avenges 9-11. And the job now is to stop doing this stuff that we don't need to do anymore. And Barack Obama does the opposite of that. He frames the killing of bin Laden not as the end of something, but as a milestone on a road to nowhere. While, you know, it's worth going back and listening to his speech that night and to press conferences the next day, because the indefinition is really on display. They don't have a better answer for when the war on terror is offered.

And it seems significant to me as an observer of it that one isn't really significantly demanded of them. And so you squander not just the opportunity that killing bin Laden presents, but the entire purpose of killing bin Laden. I think that's the end, right? That's the, that's the kind of... Well, yeah, I mean, sadly it's not. But yeah, that is the kind of despairing note that we like to strike at the end of an angry planet. We'd like to end on down notes. Jason, do you have anything else?

I mean, the only thing... Yeah, no, the only thing I'm curious about just comes right off what you were talking about. Was it just general dynamics that led Barack Obama to continue this? No, certainly not. Absolutely not. This was more of a... of how Barack Obama not just saw American exceptionalism operating, but how Barack Obama kind of approaches the world, which is to say, studious, prone to nuance, allergic to certainty and to

ideology to the point of denying that one is at work in his own thinking, which is to say, like very typically liberal. And that prism is the way like he and many others around him, who I've covered for a long time, then approach all of the choices that are, you know, shaped in derivative form of interests like, you know, the one you mentioned from the defense industry. But it's kind of only through choosing to accept that prism. that Obama sees the limits of the choices before. And that kind of what I think is kind of the great tragedy of his presidency. What do you make of the argument to that he was protecting his right flank and attempting

to protect himself from criticism from the Republicans? I think all of that is like just demonstrably true as a matter of political calculation. but it's also an excuse. It is a justification for not confronting those forces that will absolutely demagogue retrenchment, let alone abolition, in the war on terror. It's exactly the reason that Joe Biden today is not challenging the hysterical descriptions by the right of Afghan refugees from the Taliban, who, remember, are exclusively people who served Western interests during the war as being indistinguishable from the Taliban. As long as liberalism refuses to fight on these terms and say that, in fact, the propositions that we're confronting are pure demagogory,

and we don't have to listen to it and we don't have to credit it and its results are always everywhere a human disaster, then they are going to keep on recurring and accordingly form this feedback loop of justification where, well, you've got to protect your right flank. You can't, you know, challenge this stuff, you know, too aggressively. I, you know, I personally think liberalism is simply not equipped to deal with nativism, not simply in the final analysis, equipped to either recognize it and certainly not equipped to recognize its role in the dialectic that fuels it. So I don't really presume that, you know, much of that will be chained. Let me stop. Let me stop there and just say, like, I don't count on liberalism changing.

But I do think that liberalism will have increased amount. of pressure put on it, not just from the nativist right, but from a socialist left that does recognize that the only way to stop the emergency that the war on terror poses, not only to human beings, but to human freedom, is through complete abolition. If I can quote space balls from Mel Brooks, do it up. Evil will always win because good is strong. Stupid. Spencer Ackerman.

The book is Rain of Terror. It's out now, and it is excellent. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and putting up with us. Hey, thank you so much, guys. Really had a great time. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell.

It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we are on Substack, Angry PlanetPod.com or AngryPlanet.com. You go there, sign up. a month, get a commercial free version of the mainline show and two bonus episodes. Again, that's at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until.