The War on Terror in Minnesota (ft. Jordan Uhl & The Intercept)

A lot of you have been asking me for this. Here it is, in podcast form

Edited by Sam Thielman

FOR THE PAST MONTH, readers and assignment editors have been asking me to trace the roots of what we're seeing unfold in Minnesota to the War on Terror. Makes sense. It's a true story, and telling this particular true story is sort of my thing at this point. 

I've been writing versions of that story for the newsletter, and also in pieces that other outlets are preparing to publish. But my pal Jordan Uhl reached out recently and asked if I could walk listeners of The Intercept's Briefing podcast from 9/11 to Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Liam Ramos. Apologies to a certain news organization that asked me to do this same thing right after I had said yes to Jordan. But I have a feeling this is going to be something of an expanding story in 2026. 

You can listen to our interview on all podcast platforms, or here—where, for those who'd prefer to read this account, The Intercept has run a transcript. I am probably not as professional as I should have been. At several points in our conversation, I grew emotional. It is what it is. The advancing collapse of freedom in this country is worth being emotional about. For instance: 

What we’re seeing is something we can’t turn away from, and I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.

As Stephen Semler writes about congressional Democratic machinations over the still-pending Department of Homeland Security funding bill, none of their plans to reform the unreformable "involve reducing ICE funding." This is the Democrats telling you that they're fine with you being shot dead in the street by ICE as long as they do it with their faces showing and the bodycams running. When the snuff video of you or your loved one circulates, they'll shake their heads regretfully before disciplining their presumed voters against rudely demanding abolition. They were already fine with your neighbors being disappeared and herded into disease-ridden, medically neglectful concentration camps far out of sight, where at least 32 people died just last year. Last week, the excellent news organization L.A. Taco reported that people ICE has caged inside San Diego's Otay Mesa camp are wrapping lotion bottles in notes for the outside world and throwing them -- "across a cement wall, two barbed wire fences each around twelve-feet high and separated by about five feet of gravel, and ten additional feet of road" – to people keeping a vigil there. "We are all constantly sick," one such note reads.

This is what we're talking about: the administration is seeking to swiftly remove five-year old Liam, whether to Ecuador or to a different country where Liam's family might apply for asylum. Are they afraid of a five-year old, or are they afraid of what a five-year old will say about his capture and detention over a thousand miles from home? The ICE family-detention center Liam was taken to, Dilley in south Texas, had a measles outbreak earlier this month, while the boy was there.  

On the streets of Minnesota, where only real "deescalation" is amongst credulous newsroom editors ready to move on, ICE is dressing up as electricians, purchasing fake license plates at antique shops and outfitting themselves in construction gear, all to facilitate surveillance and kidnapping operations. If you don't like that I keep calling ICE a death squad, understand that they are employing secret-police methods in plain sight, and they're stupid about it. ("Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is dressing up as one," an organizer tells the Associated Press.)

Soon we will see the texts from the gleeful Border Patrol agent who boasted of shooting Marimar Martinez in Chicago before the administration lied about her being a terrorist. "I don’t know why the United States government has expressed zero concern for the sullying of Ms. Martinez’s reputation," Judge Georgia Alexakis said last week. I do. 

If any parallels present themselves to the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, the distinguished war correspondent Janine di Giovanni published an op-ed in The Guardian stating plainly that what the U.S. and Israel are each presently engaged in should be understood as state terror. "Good men and women look away," she writes, knowing what she's writing about, "fearful they will lose jobs, visas, publishing contracts, social standing." 

Don't look away. What you stand to lose tomorrow will be so much greater than what you stand to lose today. But if you're reading this newsletter, I suspect you don't need to be told what you will lose, because you are already seized with what your neighbors have already lost. All of us together are stronger than they will ever be. That might not be a very professional thing for a journalist to write, but fuck it. 

THE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accuses Gabbard of suppressing a report for political purposes. It separately accuses her office of failing to report a potential crime, also for political purposes. The subjects of both circumstances remain unknown, certainly to me. CBS is reporting that they involve "highly-classified details about a National Security Agency intercept of a call between two foreign nationals who discussed a person close to President Trump." Today Gabbard's office is warning the whistleblower's lawyer not to brief Congress, a threat of prosecution hovering in the background.

IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a good book about Iran, this weekend I read The Long War on Iran, an essay collection from Behrooz Ghamari. Ghamari, an academic whom the Islamic Republic once jailed in Evin as a political prisoner, presents an understanding of Iran that you can't really get from Americans. Not only does he demystify the load-bearing structures of Iranian politics, he provides an excellent narrative of American politics from the perspective of an Iranian. You can read these essays in a day. Tyler Hicks interviews Ghamari for Inkstick here.