Three Hops To Your Doom

Edited by Sam Thielman 

"SECRETARY OF WAR" PETE HEGSETH—and I happen to think the War Department appellation appropriately strips the veneer off the enterprise, though if we wanted to go all the way, he would be Secretary of Imperial Policing, since that's what the U.S. means by war—posted the following on Saturday: 

Beneath Hegseth's lies and propaganda is this truth: treating Venezuelans, Colombians, maybe Mexicans and others "EXACTLY how we treated al-Qaeda" is a pledge to kill them indiscriminately. The War on Terror that shaped Hegseth's adult life and career has as a distinguishing characteristic a willingness to target, detain and kill huge numbers of people who were never al-Qaeda, secure in the political knowledge that elite opposition would never assert the humanity of the people whom successive administrations branded terrorists. Abolition is the only answer for the War on Terror, for its alternative is the expansion we are currently seeing, whether at home from ICE/CBP, or abroad with Trump's Caribbean naval buildup. 

Elite outlets that deplore Trump were happy to accept and promote the big lies of the War on Terror that operated as proof of concept for the big lies of Trump. They derided the now-manifested reality that the War on Terror would expand to include many new targets, including some unimaginable in the fall of 2001. What Trump has done, they enabled, and I hope they enjoy the fruits of the world they made during the War on Terror. I know John Yoo is looking for the guy that did this.

Trump, recognizing on some level that the War on Terror made the president into an elected king, isn't going to bother with what little remains of Congress' constitutional grant of warmaking powers. While Hegseth enthuses about the war his department is waging, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel's T. Elliott Gaiser told a congressional briefing last week that it's not war at all, since doing so invites legislative authority over it. And while I recognize that the lesson of the Iraq "debate" in 2002 is that Democrats will turn a demand for the constitutional order into empty proceduralism that results in approval for an illegal and disastrous war, I, for one, think the constitutional order still matters, if only as a measurement of how far away we are from constitutional governance. Say what you will about the tenets of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, dude, at least it's an authorization. It was a real bad idea to have the OLC usurp the powers of the judiciary while the White House usurped the warmaking powers of Congress! 

Exactly how many people will be targeted as Trump launches an unambiguous military aggression to overthrow the socialist regime in resource-rich Venezuela (And maybe the left-wing regime in Colombia as a stretch goal! Who knows? Certainly not Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard) is unknown. A Democratic lawmaker described a Pentagon briefer asserting that the military "did not need to know the identities of those being targeted in the attacks or whether those killed had been trafficking drugs," in the Washington Post's paraphrase. Whatever the briefer's protests, those are the rules of the Signature Strikes that the CIA conducted in Pakistan and elsewhere during Obama's presidency: killing without needing a positive identification of a specific target, only an observed "pattern of life" commensurate, according to some bureaucratic formula, with militancy. And there is another heritage of the War on Terror at work: 

"What they told us is they have to show a connection to a designated terrorist organization or their affiliate, and as long as they can show that connection, they believe they are authorized to strike," Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) said in an interview.

But such connections could be as much as "three hops away" from a known drug trafficker, Jacobs told reporters after the briefing.

"Three hops away" borrows from surveillance terminology that I became intimately familiar with when working on the Edward Snowden NSA trove. It's a dragnet that attempts to masquerade as painstaking discrimination in choosing targets. 

Imagine you're a "known drug trafficker." You order DoorDash one evening. Your message with your driver is one hop. Everyone that driver messages or receives a message from is a second hop. Everyone they message or receive a message from is a third hop. All of those people, per Jacobs' summary of this briefing, can be marked for death, and you'll notice that's a huge number of people. Those on the second or the third hop, and often the first, have no meaningful connection to the alleged target. A war predicated on this degree of targeting does so in order to preemptively launder indiscriminate killing into the rigorous result of metadata analysis.

We're watching in real time as the wages of the War on Terror are paid to one of the U.S.' longest-claimed spheres of influence. History is not merely repeating, it's folding in on itself to compound its atrocities. If this is normalized, what next? 

404 MEDIA REVEALS there is no opting out of ICE and CBP's facial-recognition app Mobile Fortify. They're not content to monitor your social media for "deportable" speech, they need to retain your face for 15 years once they scan it at traffic stops and protests. All this will be done by a cohort recruited using white-nationalist messaging and flush with more cash than most militaries. 

THE FORMER TOP ISRAELI MILITARY LAWYER, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, has been detained in connection with the leak, of IDF personnel raping Palestinians in the Sde Teiman military prison. Haaretz further reports that Tomer-Yerushalmi was permissive in her oversight of the myriad war crimes that IDF soldiers themselves posted. Nevertheless, the present Israeli government considers the leak worse than the rape. I will have much more to say about this in THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN, but sexual violence is all over the War on Terror and its Israeli-occupation uncle.  

Meanwhile, Democracy Now! Tallies 236 Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israel during the "ceasefire." 

ON THURSDAY AT 7PM, come to Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg for a reading that will include an excerpt from the aforementioned THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN. And huge congratulations to its estimable editor, Helen Rouner of Penguin, whom Publisher's Weekly named its PW Star Watch Superstar of 2025! 

Two of Rouner’s acquisitions were published this year to critical acclaim: Michael Clune’s debut novel, Pan, which in a starred review PW described as “evocative and erudite” and a “staggering coming-of-age saga,” and Lauren Christensen’s memoir Firstborn, which in another starred review PW called “a stunning achievement.” Rouner’s next release will be historian Christopher Clark’s study of a 19th-century Prussian sex cult, A Scandal in Königsberg (Mar. 2026). She’s also in the early stages of editing a book by Spencer Ackerman with the working title The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan. “It’s an extraordinary work of investigative journalism,” she says, “Spencer is reporting in a way that I think few journalists have the means or ability to in the environment that we’re in.”

It's my honor to be edited by Helen, an editor so ideal for me specifically that we had a meeting about the book at a Yankee game last year.

CAN WE TALK COMICS FOR A MOMENT? Readers of FOREVER WARS will enjoy a forthcoming series from the relaunched Vertigo imprint of DC written by Chris Condon and drawn by Jacob Phillips, the team behind That Texas Blood at Image Comics. Their latest, The Peril of The Brutal Dark, is a hard-boiled archeological thriller whose first issue I got to read early. If you liked my Iron Man series, what Chris did with Green Arrow is also going to be up your alley, so go ask your local comic-book shop to reserve you a copy of The Peril of The Brutal Dark #1, coming in February. 

Also, you know what'll be out in time for the holidays? Iron Man, vol. 2: The Insurgent Iron Man, written by me, with art from Julius Ohta, Alex Sinclair, Guiu Vilanova, Michael Dowling and Michael Atiyeh, and letters by Joe Caramagna. Preorder today! Seriously, I need to earn some money off the collection; plus, I'm proud of this story, a tale of resistance to empire, blowback and a little bit of redemption, all of it tying in (accessibly!) to the One World Under Doom crossover. 

FINALLY, listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates talk about integrity and complicity.