Front Burner - Trump, ICE and the impact of 9/11

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

This week will mark 25 years since the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Those attacks, by al-Qaeda, killed nearly 3000 people.What followed that tragedy was the 'War on Terror', characterized by a series of foreign wars and domestic security measures. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, detention and torture at Guantanamo Bay and countless other prisons, and a mass surveillance system designed to go after any perceived threat on American soil.Spencer Ackerman is a national security reporter who has spent pretty much his entire career covering the aftermath of 9/11 and five years ago he released his book, 'Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 era Destabilized America and Produced Trump'. He joins us to talk about how this continues to shape U.S. politics today. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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It does not appear that there's any kind of an effort up there yet. Now remember, oh, my God. Oh, my God. That looks like a second plane. Dirtle. I just see a plane go in. That just exploded. We just saw another plane coming in from the side.

Hi, I'm J.B. Plesson. Some people were. Jamie, I need you to stop for a second. There has just been a huge. explosion, we can see a billowing smoke rising. And I can't, I'll tell you that I can't see that second tower. They seem to have the north problem at the north tower, Peter. Let's look at the North Tower. Quickly, quickly. Oh, my God. The second tower. The second tower.

This week will mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Those attacks by Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people. It's hard to put it into words, and maybe one doesn't need to. What followed that tragedy was the war on terror, a series of foreign wars and domestic security measures. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, detention and torture at the Guantanamo Bay in Abu Ghraa prisons,

and a mass surveillance system designed to go after any perceived threat on American soil. Spencer Ackerman is a national security reporter who has spent pretty much his entire career covering the aftermath of 9-11, and five years ago he released his book, Rain of Terror, How the 9-11 Era destabilized America and produced Trump. He joins us to talk about how 9-11 and the war on terror-shaped U.S. politics over the last quarter century and how it continues today with ever-broadening implications. Spencer, it is a real real. pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for making the time. Thank you very much, Jamie. I appreciate in this time of binational tension you having an American on your show. Hopefully,

this can convince everyone that we're not, in fact, enemies. Yeah, everything's cool now. We're good. Okay. So for those of us that vividly remember that day, I think it can be hard to believe that September 11th, 2001 was 25 years ago. Those imagines have been kind of imprinted on people, not just the planes heading the Twin Towers, but the office workers jumping from the burning towers to their deaths, the firefighters and survivors all covered in debris, the clouds of dust that were proven to be extremely harmful in the years following. Just could you talk to me about how in the aftermath of September 11th, those images were discussed and also politicized in a way that kind of set the stage for everything that would

follow after? It's important to remember at the outset that very few Americans had any experience of watching one of their cities come under an airstrike. And as many thousands of airstrikes that America would inflict around the world in the subsequent 25 years would attest, when it's happening to you, when it's visible to you, the trauma really lingers, the fear, the horror, the sense of uncertainty is an epical, life-changing event. And that horror, that sense of violation, was very deliberately used by the architects of the war on terror to manufacture consent for the blood landing that was to follow. they were used to stoke feelings of bloodlust. What we have to do is take down those networks of terrorist organizations.

And as I say, I think this is going to be a struggle that the United States is going to be involved in for the foreseeable future. There's not going to be an end date when I'm going to say there. It's all over with. They were used to encourage a sense of violated innocence, of righteous victimhood that could be used to encourage the most. violent, the most aggressive, the most open-ended, the most resource-intensive war possible, predicated theoretically on adjudicating and responding to and, you know, preventing future such attacks.

Since September 11th, extremists using knapsacks, passenger cars, trains have killed hundreds more in places like Spain. We've witnessed the horror of terrorists taking Russia. children, hostages, resulting in the death of hundreds of children. I don't suppose

there's a mother or father in America or anywhere in the world who dropped a child off for the first day of school who did not wonder could that happen to them. The answer is

it could, which is why it is so important that in the global war on terror, we recognize that we have to fight this battle where the terrorists are.

We note with horror 25 years later, the report from the costs of war project from Brown University a few years ago that took a look at from an epidemiological sense. So looking not only at the direct casualties that the U.S. caused in the war on terror, that is to say people the United States killed, but also, the rippling epidemiological consequences that comes from the destruction of public health systems and so on. And that totaled the dead at between 4.5 and 4.7 million people. While we remember justly the 3,000 lives taken by Al Qaeda on 9-11, we have to keep in mind the staggering number exponentially more that America took in the name of avenging gun 11.

And I mean, people will remember, I think, that very famous speech that Bush gave on September 20th, right, where he declares the war on terror. Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking who attacked our country. The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda. But he also says, Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. Talk to me a little bit more.

more about why, like, by going after not just the people directly involved with the September 11th attacks, or Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but this broader target, like, what does his administration set out to do, essentially? They set out to use 9-11 as a justification for the expansion of American military power and ultimately hegemony over the Middle East on the presumption, and really around the world, but focusing primarily on the Middle East, South Asia, the Muslim world, by taking the interpretation that 9-11 happened not because of the extractive and exploitative strategies that the United States had employed in the Muslim world.

But instead, a dangerous and provocative insufficiency of American military power that the war on terror would instead showcase, implement, and institutionalize. In that address, Bush justifies the invasion of Afghanistan, not because of Al-Qaeda's support for the Taliban, but also by framing it as a liberatory war for the people of Afghanistan, who he describes as brutalized and starved under Taliban rule. He says women are unable to go to school, that people could be jailed for owning a television. And he describes, it is like Al-Qaeda's vision for the world. Americans are asking, why do they hate us?

They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. This framing of the war being between, I guess, like, our way of life and theirs, what does it do for the U.S.'s sense of purpose, right? And in the world from that point on, you think? What it does is it provides a liberal veneer on the unchecked use of violence as the primary organizing principle of American foreign policy. On my orders, the United States military has begun to... strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime

in Afghanistan. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selective targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. Much like previous liberal empires, previous iterations of American foreign policy in the years after World War II, it's meant to put a human face on an inhuman face. human action. It's meant to seem like the war on terror is a liberating force and not an occupying force. It's a lot. Housing crisis isn't just about housing. It's also about democracy, dignity, identity, security,

and who counts and who doesn't. In this year's CBC Massey lectures, housing and human rights expert Leila Nifarha explores the rise of Housing Inc and our collective fight for home. Join us on September 8th at Kerner Hall in Toronto. For information on how to get tickets, go to cbc.ca.ca. slash masses. There was a fair amount of buy-in from the American public and the U.S. allies for the war in Afghanistan, Canada being one of them. But then, of course, came the invasion of Iraq in 2003. the administration worked hard to push the narrative, that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda and that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which of course was not true.

Oh, the reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Simply stated there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. In the years since, these wars in the Middle East, particularly the war in Iraq, have been credited with contributing to the rise of even more Islamic extremism, especially the rise of ISIS.

You know, as someone who was covering these wars up close and having been to the region as part of your reporting, can you just paint a picture for me of what you think happened on the ground that actually led to the proliferation of terror rather than the eradication of it. I'd be happy to do that, but I want to challenge an aspect of your premise. Sure. The war on terror did not emerge from popular demand. The war on terror, especially in its coalescence in the weeks and months after 9-11, was something that we would understand today as a cancel culture.

It was a very centurious. climate. In some ways, it remains that way. You can see the fissures today when people try and historicize 9-11, but especially then. I want to point to a really important example, Susan Sontag, one of the most important American public intellectuals of the late 20th century, I think like two weeks or so after 9-11, she published a very short commentary in the New Yorker magazine that simply asked Americans to understand 9-11. as situated within a historical context of American policy in the Middle East. She didn't come within spitting distance, right, of saying that 9-11 was deserved in any possible way.

She was very gingerly in an already centurious climate trying to articulate how 9-11 happened, how there was an understandability to this atrocity. and because of the implication that it would happen again, unless America changed its policies, she was driven from public life. That was a completely unacceptable perspective to express after 9-11. She's hardly the only example of that happening in mass media. What that led to was a narrowing of the respectable and showcased interpretations of 9-11 that were constrained only. on the question of adjudicating how much war was desirable and was necessary,

but never that an alternative response to 9-11 was possible. Now, to answer your question, I've been on the ground throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I certainly didn't spend nearly as much time in either places many of my colleagues have, but I did see what the wars were with my own eyes on multiple occasions. in both places. And it was scenes of horror, scenes of scenes of, scenes in which when you talk to the people

who were simply trying to survive the war, the deep anxieties, pressures, and impossible circumstances of life under occupation and life under-perforfeiture, perpetual wartime put both civilians and often soldiers in impossible situations in which no victories were possible, but imperial policing would persist nevertheless. You could possibly prevail in skirmishes with so-called insurgents, a term that flattens a wide variety of

perspectives on why people resisted the United States that range from being an active member of an al-Qaeda affiliate or a Taliban affiliate to simply wishing to defend your life, your home, and your family from a foreign invader. But outside of that, you could, especially when you saw, as I did, the prisons. So I've been to Guantanamo Bay, but I've also been to the prison. first known simply as Bagroom because it was on the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, but then kind of cleaned up post-Abu Grave as the detention facility at Parwan. It was still nevertheless in the same place. And also at a U.S. sponsored police station in West Baghdad.

And these places were teeming with people in really kind of frighteningly, I would just simply say inhuman conditions, the overcrowding, but also the inability to know when you would get out, how you could even get out of a foreigner's prison in which you were presumed to have no rights and no remedies would be available except the prerogative of the occupier. They knew we'd be upset if they disrespected the Koran,

so they'd throw it in the toilet. I spent almost a year here. It was a scary place. Bagram was a place of utter cruelty and barbarism. My legs are still weak and in pain. They yanked my private parts with a cable. I was bleeding from it for almost six years. No matter how many times we said we didn't do the crime,

they were torture until the prisoners said yes. American girls would come, dressed in bikinis, to take us to the toilet. They made us watch sexually explicit films, and we weren't allowed to look away. We were sleepless. Our interrogations were almost 10 to 12 hours. Now, I think it's no accident that a whole lot of people who ended up joining al-Qaeda or joining ISIS, starting from the OG al-Qaeda second-in-command, I'm in El Zweri, to the first leader of ISIS, al-Baghdadi, to the current president of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara. all of them spent extensive time in either American detention camps in the sense of the latter two or the prisons filled with torture of U.S. allies in Egypt and Jordan.

There is a really direct pipeline. This won't happen for everyone. But the experience of being imprisoned really has a very often radicalizing effect on on people. And it's, it's not to excuse it, but it's not surprising that you would see such formerly detained and tortured people in that leadership cohort. And of course, the war on terror was carried out domestically too, right? It's also in that same speech that Bush gave on September 20th. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight I announced the creation of a cabinet-level position reporting directly to me, the Office of Homeland Security. By January 2003, the Department of Homeland Security is launched. And it was this massive reorganization

of government with the primary goal of preventing terrorist attacks in the U.S. And now the DHS is far more focused on immigration enforcement, which I want to talk to you about. But at the outset, how did the Department of Homeland Security establish widespread practices of surveillance in the name of counterterrorism? So oftentimes with ICE running a buck and kidnapping our neighbors and killing people in the streets, there's often a kind of interpretation that this is the war on terror coming home. This is wrong. The war on terror was always home. One of the animating sentiments on the right after 9-11, was outraged over how the 9-11 hijackers came into the United States legal.

Our government now is a chance to improve this country. Perhaps, and I say perhaps, our borders will finally be secured and our immigration policies tightened. Again, we need this to protect Americans from terrorists, drugs, and crime. The failure to secure the borders of the USA as one of the federal government's greatest failures. This was from the outset a war on terror that would always focus on immigration restriction. And then from there, it's a very short step to viewing, as happened again, right after 9-11, a social interpretation that the terrorists are already inside the United States and they're your neighbors. They're the Muslim communities around the United States.

These communities were said frequently and throughout the 25 years since to be incubating terrorism, to be incipient terrorists themselves that required relentless scrutiny. At the same time, the creation of ICE, which happened in 2003 with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, you had all of this extensive architecture of government surveillance, which was greatly expanded by the Patriot Act of late 2001, a gigantic seminal detention investigation and surveillance bill that most people in Congress who signed it didn't bother read. This legislation is essential not only to pursuing and punishing terrorists,

but also preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones. The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers pose, by modern terrorists, it will help law enforcement to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike. Always that was going to be used against immigrants. It was going to be used against non-white immigrants. And it was not really going to take much care in distinguishing legal from illegal immigrants, quote unquote.

It's really important to remember, as I reject the term illegal, that, Being in the United States without the proper documentation is a civil and not a criminal violation. This distinction went out the window after 9-11 and ever since because the presumption was immigration was a national security issue. It was not going to be the process to make more Americans. It was going to be a way of distinguishing, this is the warrant terror I'm talking about, so-called real Americans from so-called, conditional Americans, Americans whom the United States government had no obligation to protect, but a mandate to persecute. That was what the incipient apparatus of immigration enforcement that's become fully empowered today emerged from. Tell me more about how the war on terror

laid the groundwork for Trump's use of ice today. So in a variety of ways this happened. First, The first ice raids didn't happen under the second Trump administration. They didn't happen under the first Trump administration. They happened under the Bush administration. They happened primarily at workplaces employing undocumented workers. This happened at slaughterhouses. This happened on farms. This ran through communities, including in New England,

where you had the first waves of ice-en-forced child separation, where children would be forced to take refuge from these raids and emerged from them not knowing where their parents were. That was often out of sight. Back then, it took a while for ICE to develop the political constituency that eventually it would stoked by nativist politicians. The second thing that happened was that the surges in Iraq and then Afghanistan began to wane. And so all of this military technology, particularly surveillance technology, that had been

created for the overseas wars now needed new markets. And those markets came domestically. They came under grant programs that have been part of the Department of Homeland Security from the start, the idea that the government would basically fund state and local law enforcement to purchase equipment that militarized those organizations substantially from the surveillance equipment that was previously reserved for war zones to military kit and armored vehicles that became features of communities like Nashua, New Hampshire, that were never going to have a terrorist event happened there. When we had the protests against the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, we saw all of that equipment that was previously reserved for war zones

being used on Americans protesting racist police. So the police are now bringing out these heavy armored vehicles. You can see it's a Lenko armored truck. This is something that's designed for basically conflict zones to fight in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. This is an extraordinary display of force, to be honest. I mean, these guys are armed to the teeth. There's more riot police arriving behind them. This is a crowd of just a few hundred people and it's been completely peaceful all of the news. The guys on top of these vehicles are actually training high-powered weapons on members of the crowd here. With that foundation, immigration enforcement by degree became more like, you know, in terms of both presentation, in terms of legal impunity, in terms of military equipment, increasingly normal aspects of how America treated immigrants and the process of immigration. This was a slow but steady process fed by Democrats as much as Republicans that has emerged in a way that was very predictable as this was happening in precisely the direction predicted where ICE is slouching toward its destiny as a militarized death squad.

that I would just really encourage listeners to pay attention to the more recent movement in the United States to try and legally overturn birthright citizenship. And at that point, the government will decide who's the citizen and who is not, whose citizenship is reversible and whose never is. And that apparatus, should it still be permitted to exist, will target all of that expanded demographics. and more and more people will fill the ICE prisons and more and more people will be thrown out of the United States. If you think you're safe now because you have American citizenship, think again unless you abolish ICE, unless you break up the Department of Homeland Security, and unless you repeal the at first emergency authorities that comprise the war on terror that have now just simply become permanent features of American political, legal, and social life. Related to that, this administration has NSPM 7, right?

The White House directive supposedly targeting domestic terrorism and other related measures, too. This administration has labeled Antifa and several leftist activists and non-profits as potential domestic terror threats. President Trump issued a directive that directs for the first time in American history all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together. to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. I just wonder if you could expand on that point you were making, like, if you think you're safe. Are more Americans at risk of being caught in its crosshairs than ever, I think is the question that I want to ask you. Yes. And I want to start off my answer by saying that a focus on, that does not excuse or legitimize ISIS' prior focuses. I don't want to say that it's only a problem

now because, to put it bluntly, now white Americans are in ISIS crosshairs. It does, however, point out and implicate in a way that deserves reflection the complicity of so many of us with allowing this system to persist after 9-11, and we might think of it that way as we go into the answer that your apt question deserves. NSPM 7 seeks to criminalize and essentially render into a national security threat the American left. The language is not just broad, but it's absurd. It talks about gender extremists as potential terrorists. It reflects how the authorization to use military force after 9-11, the wellspring of the war on

terrorist overseas manifestations is also extremely broad and not directly targeting those who might have committed the actual atrocities themselves. And that's by design. The point is to cause political terror to stop the emerging popular organization against this agenda that you can see animating millions of Americans around the country who have just simply had enough of politics as usual here. All of the trajectory of the war on terror is about expansion of potential targets. The more frustrated the architects and practitioners of the war on terror have become with their inability to accomplish their initial missions. The wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan are unambiguous failures, the regime change in Libya, an unambiguous failure. I think a lot of people would look at the presence of an al-Qaeda former commander running Syria as a gigantic failure. It's less spoken about, but for the last nearly 20 years, the U.S. has been bombing Somalia. Clearly, if a war has been going on for that long, it's not one. It's only to be maintained as an imperial policing. The point I'm trying to get at is with all of this war and with all of this normalization of it, it doesn't resolve anything. It can't because it's the wrong mechanism applied to the problem, which is a political problem, an economic problem, and a problem of imbalances of power. Instead, it can only provide a militarized,

securitized response to that. And as the far right in America experiences a fear of losing power and a fear of a growing, particularly socialist left in America, they will respond with the mechanisms of the war on terror. Why will they do that? Because they've worked and because there's not been accountability for all of the death, destruction, and illegality of the war on terror here in the United States. People have not gone to jail for this. People rarely lose their jobs for this, and so on and so forth. And when something is working, those who wish to keep it so have every reason, every incentive to use those same tools on more and more people. Spencer, this was great. Thank you.

Thank you, Jamie. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Plessam. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.