The War on Terror Approaches Its Final Form

ICE executes the nonwhite while the White House and State Department look to declare the U.S. left a Foreign Terrorist Organization. We've been heading here since 9/11

Edited by Sam Thielman

IN REIGN OF TERROR, the introduction ends with the following warning: 

Until the entire War on Terror is abolished—not only the foreign military deployments, but the broader entrenched architecture of surveillance, detention, immigration suppression and the rest—it will propel itself toward greater domestic destabilization. Inertia alone is sufficient to power it. We should not assume the War on Terror has reached its final form. If the United States is ever to recover from the destruction it unleashed not only on the world but on itself, and primarily on its most vulnerable, it must first understand the post-9/11 era as nothing other than a reign of terror. 

This week we got a preview of the War on Terror's final form. 

On Monday, on the heels of last week's ICE execution of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston (who, contrary to an FBI search warrant, did not have drugs in his car, according to the Harris County district attorney; not that drug possession warrants execution), ICE killed 25-year old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero's killer has been identified as David Brouillette—identified, astonishingly, by his ex-wife. The Associated Press yesterday released an extensive Brouillette profile that reports he had an extensive history of both mental illness and domestic violence. 

Brouillette's own family spoke about how he was the last person who should have the power of life or death over someone else. The AP also reported that Brouillette had soldiered in Afghanistan in the post-surge period of May 2012 to February 2013. While he's listed as a human-intelligence collector—which can mean interrogator, but the piece doesn't elaborate and I haven't done any additional reporting—someone whom the AP identified as an "immediate relative" comments: "Afghanistan destroyed him -- trained him to be a killing monster, a machine. They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine." 

The picture emerging from Brouillette's profile is someone who never should have been put in uniform. But that wasn't how the military saw it. According to his relative, recruiters initially rejected him "because of his mental health diagnoses," but then they did something horrifically irresponsible. "[R]ecruiters encouraged him to go off his medications for a year and reapply, which he did." 

According to the timeline in the AP story, which has Brouillette entering Army National Guard service in November 2007, Brouillette's recruitment occurred during the stop-loss era, a time when the operational tempo of the Iraq War was so intense and recruitment so difficult that the military both lowered recruitment standards and extended servicemembers' tours involuntarily. Recruiters like those encountering Brouillette were incentivized to get whomever they could into uniform, regardless of their fitness to serve. Nearly 20 years later, the surge in ICE recruitment did the exact same thing. If this one-man imperial boomerang killed someone in broad daylight in a quiet town in Maine, what did he do in Afghanistan?

Then, on Thursday, Secretary of State and Viceroy of Venezuela Marco Rubio convened an international conference designed to lay the narrative and policy cornerstones to finally designate the broadly-defined "left" to be an international network of terrorists. Foreign Terrorist Organization designations will open the full panoply of War on Terror options against anyone, citizen or otherwise, whose political speech, financing and activity they wish to suppress. 

They have options short of such designations, as the United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain is learning, as the Prairieland ICE protesters learned, and as former FBI counterterrorism special agent Terry Albury explained to FOREVER WARS readers in an interview about NSPM-7 last year. But the administration dipped a toe into these waters last November when designating four marginal left-wing organizations to be Foreign Terrorist Organizations. While you can be certain there are intelligence officials tasked with connecting domestic liberal and left groups to those organizations, Rubio pledged at the conference that more Foreign Terrorist Organization designations are coming. White House Counterterrorism Czar Sebastian Gorka—breathe that in—wants, per the Washington Post, "foreign terrorism labels for antifa to justify going after Americans with links to the movement, a loosely knit association of far-left activists who militantly oppose fascism and right-wing ideologies."

The absurdity of collapsing the chasm of distinction between your local DSA chapter and al-Qaeda is self-evident. So is the idea of a united international left, much to my chagrin. About the only true statement Rubio made at his conference was: "Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream or, worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy." Where would anyone get that idea?

But absurdity, as many people have already learned over 25 years of the War on Terror, does not stop an asset freeze or an FBI raid. From Trump's talk of political retribution on the campaign trail to the attempt to criminalize nonprofits to the issuance of NSPM-7, this is how those who became MAGA have long wanted to wield the War on Terror: as a weapon to intimidate, jail and kill challenges to their pursuit of enduring political and economic power, which in their case is the pursuit of as white an America as possible. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pledged to expand his departments' "efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance. We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, where charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign influence activity." Organizations supporting Palestine will doubtless be a focus. 

White House homeland-security adviser Stephen Miller, an architect of the ICE surge, warned that the left dreams of the gulag. This after Miller's White House colleague, border czar Tom Homan, promised on Wednesday that "there's going to be more bloodshed unless [Democrats] shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted." Over the past 18 months, 52 people have died in ICE's... camps that concentrate people together. (Being in the United States without proper documentation is a civil violation, not a criminal one, and certainly not a death sentence; ICE is a lawless agency.) "When the leftist — who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice — protests that we are violating his rights, understand the he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him," Miller said at the conference. "We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization." Notice as well the convergence of Miller's rhetoric with those of the ascendant surveillance-capitalist potentates, whether it's Alexander Karp armoring Palantir as a knight in service of Western Civilization or the guy from Flock calling those who destroy his manhunting cameras "terrorists." 

The War on Terror had what I call its Decadent Phase in the early and mid-2010s. We are in a new phase of its varied assault on what remains of and passes for American democracy. Every day this apparatus is permitted to exist is another day when someone is sacrificed to it. But regimes confident in their durability do not act this way. Regimes seized with the tenuousness of their grasp on power do. Abolition is the floor, prosecutions are the stairs and liberation is the ceiling. 

IN IRAN YESTERDAY, U.S. strikes deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure: "bridges, water facilities, food silos" and railways, al-Jazeera summarizes. Trump said he would save "the energy targets for last." Perhaps this brings Rubio's other recent initiative, the destruction of the International Criminal Court, into clearer focus. 

JULIO ANTA, a comrade and a hell of a comic-book writer, has a new series coming in September from Boom! Studios called, amazingly, No Gods No Masters. It's illustrated by his longtime collaborator Jacoby Salcedo and described as a story of three teens confronting the kaiju apocalypse—but, knowing Julio, it'll also be an incisive critique of capitalism. Go tell your local comic store to reserve your copy of No Gods No Masters #1 by next Monday, July 27, the all-important Final Order Cutoff date. Yes, the economics of comics are absolutely fucked and they require you, the reader, to take more affirmative measures to secure them than do any other entertainment medium. But I have faith in your desire to be awed.