Introduction
You live in a political landscape shaped entirely by the aftermath of September 11. You watch as unchecked state surveillance, executive overreach, and endless foreign interventions continually bleed into domestic police powers and political extremism.
Spencer Ackerman argues in Reign of Terror that the post-9/11 War on Terror built an open-ended apparatus of surveillance, torture, and state power that ultimately metastasized into domestic authoritarianism and the MAGA movement.
You will see how political elites built this machinery across decades. The book explores these questions:
- How did the response to the Oklahoma City bombing set the stage for modern domestic counterterrorism?
- Why did bipartisan consensus enable endless war and domestic surveillance?
- How did the techniques of foreign war return to suppress domestic dissent and fuel the January 6 insurrection?
1. The Oklahoma City Bombing Precedent
The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing demonstrated how American institutions deflected blame away from domestic white supremacy while creating legal frameworks to target non-white populations.
Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, and 19 of the victims were children. McVeigh modeled his truck-bombing plot on the white supremacist propaganda novel The Turner Diaries and sought shelter at Elohim City, an armed Christian Identity compound. Despite this, public and media discourse labeled McVeigh an anti-government loner and immediately cast unjustified suspicion on Muslims.
Following the bombing, Palestinian-born Oklahoma City resident Ibrahim Abdullah Hassan Ahmed was aggressively harassed, interrogated, and subjected to international travel restrictions despite never being a suspect. Law enforcement nationwide received 227 reports of harassment against Muslims.
When terrorism originated from white perpetrators claiming a shared national heritage, American institutions protected them from collective punishment. Timothy McVeigh was tried openly before a jury of his peers on June 2, 1997, when he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The legislative response avoided cracking down on white supremacists and instead established broad legal mechanisms to criminalize associations with foreign and nonwhite groups. The ACLU and gun activist Larry Pratt successfully rallied to prevent the 1996 legislation from broadly redefining domestic terrorism in ways that could selectively target political activists or churches. In April 1996 when the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed, a Los Angeles Times poll showed that 70 percent of the public feared the legislation would restrict American freedoms. Congress retained section 2339B to criminalize material support and donations to banned foreign terrorist groups.
2. The Legal Transformation of 9/11
American exceptionalism blinded the nation to the geopolitical consequences of its global dominance, framing the 9/11 attacks as an unprovoked assault on freedom rather than a reaction to foreign policy. The Security State and political leaders maintained that America set the terms for the world without being bound by them. When al-Qaeda struck, elites rejected any historical or political critique, claiming instead that terrorists hated American freedoms, thereby clearing the path for outward vengeance without self-reflection.
American exceptionalism and the AUMF handed the executive branch unchecked power to wage endless war, build mass surveillance systems, and institutionalize torture.
President George W. Bush told Congress that terrorists hate our freedoms, while literary figures like Susan Sontag faced intense public vilification and accusations of moral obtuseness for arguing that 9/11 was a consequence of specific American alliances and actions. The incineration of 2,606 people created the sweet smell over New York's skyline after the World Trade Center fell. Critics of Susan Sontag's moral critique cited an exaggerated death toll of 5,000 innocent Americans.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force served as a limitless blank check that handed the executive branch unchecked power to wage war without geographical or temporal boundaries. Crafted by White House and Justice Department attorneys Timothy Flanigan and John Yoo, the AUMF named no specific enemy and granted the president exclusive authority to direct military force against any nation, organization, or person he deemed responsible, effectively dismantling constitutional checks and balances. California Democrat Barbara Lee was the sole legislator to vote against the AUMF, warning that it was a blank check that would spiral out of control, while legal scholar John Yoo argued that precision was an obstacle and the president required maximum flexibility.
Federal law enforcement subjected immigrant and Muslim communities to mass roundups, secret detentions, and guilt-by-association frameworks under the guise of national security. The Justice Department and the FBI utilized immigration violations, material-witness statutes, and special registries to detain hundreds of individuals without charges or access to legal recourse, eroding constitutional rights for vulnerable minorities. Adham Amin Hassoun, a Palestinian man and refugee living in Miami, was detained on immigration charges and subjected to years of confinement and interrogations in an effort to force him to turn informant. In the eleven months after 9/11, the FBI's PENTTBOM investigation held 762 people on immigration charges. The NSEERS registry of noncitizen entrants from substantially Muslim countries eventually contained 84,000 people, and 14,000 Arabs and Muslims faced deportation proceedings after voluntarily registering in NSEERS.
The National Security Agency bypassed federal surveillance laws to build a massive digital panopticon that collected Americans' international and domestic communications data in bulk. Authorized by the Bush administration and backed by secret legal memos, NSA Director Michael Hayden launched the STELLARWIND program, enlisting telecommunications companies to harvest bulk metadata and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. NSA Director Michael Hayden activated STELLARWIND on October 6, 2001, secretly collecting bulk internet and phone records without the knowledge of the FISA Court until the program was exposed years later by The New York Times. In 2004, the CIA's investment arm provided a $2 million investment stake to the data-mining company Palantir.
The CIA and the Department of Defense institutionalized torture through secret black sites and military prisons, indemnified by legal opinions that redefined torture to avoid criminal liability. Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen designed interrogation regimens aimed at inducing learned helplessness through sensory deprivation, stress positions, and waterboarding. Justice Department attorney John Yoo issued legal memos setting the threshold for illegal torture at pain equivalent to organ failure or death. Gul Rahman froze to death in an unacknowledged CIA prison known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan after being subjected to sleep deprivation, total darkness, isolation, and cold water showers. Langley paid Mitchell and Jessen's enterprise $81 million over seven years, held a minimum of 119 men across its black sites, and recommended a $2,500 cash bonus for the CIA officer responsible for the Salt Pit after Gul Rahman's death.
The military established Guantanamo Bay as a legal black hole to detain suspects indefinitely outside the protection of federal courts or the laws of armed conflict. By designating Guantanamo as legally foreign to deny access to U.S. courts while treating it as U.S. territory to indemnify personnel, the military created a state of exception where abusive interrogation techniques migrated from the CIA black sites to military custody. Guantanamo interrogators subjected fifteen-year-old Canadian captive Omar Khadr to severe abuse, including hog-tying, solitary confinement, and using his body as a human mop after he was wounded in a firefight. The U.S. military wrote an annual check of $4,085 to Fidel Castro for the Guantanamo base, which Castro never uncashed, while holding an approximate detainee population of 800 people.
3. Political Complicity and the Iraq War
Both conservative ideologues and technocratic liberals constructed the ideological justifications and intelligence fabrications necessary to launch and sustain the catastrophic invasion of Iraq.
Attorney General John Ashcroft used the post-9/11 climate to initiate mass roundups and interrogations of thousands of young Muslim immigrants, establishing a template that branded domestic dissent and liberalism as threats to national security. In November 2001, Ashcroft instructed federal prosecutors and the FBI to question some five thousand recent male immigrants between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two. Prominent evangelical leaders filled the definitional vacuum of the War on Terror by characterizing Islam as a violent, competing religion and framing the conflict in stark moral and religious terms. At the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis in June 2002, former president Jerry Vines denounced Muhammad as a demon-obsessed pedophile and preached that Allah was not Jehovah.
The Bush administration systematically pressured and bypassed traditional intelligence agencies like the CIA and the State Department to produce false connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The Office of Special Plans was established in August 2002 to bypass the CIA by reinterpreting dubious or dismissed material to validate the desired war against Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell lent his unimpeachable national reputation to validate this specious intelligence case at the United Nations, convincing wavering elites to support the invasion. Colin Powell presented evidence to the UN, including a claim based on CIA torture of a captive named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda in chemical warfare.
Lacking firm ideological commitments after the Clinton era, centrist Democrats embraced technocracy and institutionalism to avoid appearing weak on national security after September 11. On October 11, 2002, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry all voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution, each citing different diplomatic or exceptionalist rationales. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security marked a radical shift by permanently placing immigration enforcement under the framework of counterterrorism and national security. In March 2007, an ICE raid on a New Bedford, Massachusetts, textile factory manufacturing military backpacks arrested 361 workers, leaving children behind without parents.
The chaotic military occupation of Iraq led to severe institutional failures and widespread prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, which the administration attempted to dismiss as the rogue actions of low-level soldiers. At Abu Ghraib, a detainee assessed to have significant intelligence value was sodomized with a police baton and photographed nude by two women guards while they threw a ball at his penis. The American invasion of Iraq provided motive and opportunity for violent jihadists, inadvertently transforming a brutal criminal named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into the leader of the world's most powerful al-Qaeda franchise. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian former gangbanger and criminal, formed al-Qaeda in Iraq and orchestrated attacks like the lynching of Blackwater contractors in Fallujah.
Following the failures of the initial occupation, military strategists and counterinsurgents recast the war through the surge as a technocratic reboot rather than abandoning the intervention. Colonel H.R. McMaster took the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar using presence patrols, serving as a proof of concept for the counterinsurgency doctrine that preceded the 2007-2008 surge. Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war as a distraction from counterterrorism, but firmly operated within the American exceptionalist consensus regarding the legitimacy of the broader War on Terror. During the 2008 presidential campaign, right-wing political actors and conservative media weaponized Islamophobia and xenophobia against Barack Obama through conspiracy theories about his middle name and heritage. At a 2008 McCain-Palin rally in Minnesota, an elderly attendee told John McCain she could not trust Obama because he was an Arab, prompting McCain to correct her by stating he was a decent family man.
4. The Sustainable War and Domestic Backlash
President Obama reoriented the War on Terror into a sustainable enterprise centered on lethal drone strikes rather than large-scale ground invasions.
You see the administration avoid the heavy costs of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by relying heavily on Predator drones for targeted killings. Internal technocratic frameworks like the disposition matrix govern this approach under the 2001 AUMF. Remote strikes treat force as precise while keeping casualties officially invisible.
On January 23, 2009, just three days into Obama's presidency, a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone in Pakistan's North Waziristan killed two uncles and a cousin of thirteen-year-old Faheem Qureshi, severely burning Faheem and altering his life forever.
The Obama administration protected the architects and perpetrators of post-9/11 CIA torture from legal accountability to secure the cooperation of the Security State. Attorney General Eric Holder empaneled prosecutor John Durham to investigate torture exceeding Office of Legal Counsel limits, but Durham brought no charges, leaving high-ranking figures entirely unpunished.
Faced with intense political backlash and entrenched bureaucratic resistance, the administration abandoned its pledge to close Guantanamo Bay and established the category of forever prisoners. In April 2009, after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell attacked plans to resettle Uighur detainees in Virginia, the administration immediately backed down, initiating a downward spiral that killed the closure initiative.
The Obama administration established the legal precedent that the executive branch may conduct extrajudicial executions of American citizens abroad without a judicial trial.
Department of Justice attorneys crafted secret legal justifications asserting that due process does not require judicial process in national security contexts. This enabled the targeted killing of American citizens classified as senior terrorist operatives when capture was deemed unfeasible.
In September 2011, a U.S. drone strike in Yemen killed American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and two weeks later another strike killed his sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Counterterrorism programs under Obama continued to disproportionately target Muslim communities through surveillance and profiling while failing to address domestic right-wing extremism. Programs like Countering Violent Extremism focused heavily on American Muslim communities as potential threats under the guise of deradicalization partnerships led by law enforcement. DHS analyst Daryl Johnson warned in 2009 that right-wing extremist groups could exploit economic crises and the election of the first Black president, but his unit was dismantled after conservative media objected.
The Obama administration's military escalation and counterinsurgency surge in Afghanistan failed to achieve strategic victory, resulting in heavy casualties, civilian devastation, and localized atrocities. In October 2010, Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn destroyed the villages of Tarek Kolache, Khosrow Sofla, and Lower Babur by dropping twenty-five tons of bombs to clear out suspected IED fields.
The killing of Osama bin Laden offered a historic opportunity to declare victory and end the post-9/11 era, but political fears prevented the Obama administration from dismantling the War on Terror apparatus. Following the announcement of bin Laden's death on May 1, 2011, hundreds of college students and citizens flooded Lafayette Park near the White House to celebrate patriotically.
Right-wing fury at Barack Obama was driven largely by racial animus, nativism, and conspiracy theories that framed his presidency as an illegitimate act of war against Real America. Conservatives criticized Obama for policy actions that actually maintained or expanded the security state, while framing him as weak or an appeaser.
The proposed construction of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero was successfully demonized by anti-Islam activists as a monument to terrorism, setting a template for political polarization. Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf intended the Cordoba House to be a multi-faith community space promoting pluralism. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer led the Stop Islamization of America campaign, organizing protests and falsely accusing Rauf of being a terrorist sympathizer.
The American right adopted a conspiracy theory of civilizational replacement, claiming that Muslims were waging a stealth jihad to subvert the Constitution and impose sharia law. Frank Gaffney and his Center for Security Policy published Sharia: The Threat to America and developed template anti-sharia bills introduced in multiple state legislatures.
In an effort to win Republican cooperation for comprehensive immigration reform, the Obama administration aggressively ramped up deportations and border enforcement. Customs and Border Protection agents boarded Amtrak trains far from any border to demand proof of legal citizenship from nonwhite passengers.
Years of mainstreamed Islamophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric culminated in domestic right-wing terrorist violence targeting innocent minority communities. Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist veteran with white-power band ties, opened fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people before killing himself.
5. Whistleblowers and the Domestic Police State
Brave insiders exposed massive digital surveillance programs while the security state's military hardware and tactics flowed inward to crush domestic civil rights protests.
Progressives and antiwar advocates grew deeply embittered as President Obama institutionalized and expanded Bush-era counterterrorism policies rather than dismantling them. The Obama administration retained provisions like the PATRIOT Act, continued drone strikes, contested habeas corpus cases for detainees, and shielded intelligence officials from legal accountability for torture.
Obama grew testy at a National Defense University speech when interrupted by Code Pink protester Medea Benjamin, and his administration blocked human rights lawsuits against rendition-associated aviation firms like Jeppesen Dataplan.
The most significant pushback against the War on Terror came not from external mass protests, but from low-ranking insiders and analysts who risked imprisonment to expose state abuses. Insiders like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Senate investigator Daniel Jones experienced ideological crises upon witnessing state brutality and mass surveillance, leading them to leak classified records or compile exhaustive documentation exposing official lies.
Daniel Jones spent six years in a windowless room documenting how the CIA tortured at least 119 people at black sites and systematically lied to the public to cover it up.
Private Chelsea Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic records to WikiLeaks in an effort to spark a domestic debate on the human cost of asymmetric warfare. Manning utilized her classified network terminal in Iraq to download significant activity logs, diplomatic cables, and operational videos, which she transferred to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks before facing arrest and harsh pretrial detention.
Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video showing a helicopter crew killing two Reuters employees in 2007, along with massive caches of Iraq and Afghanistan logs.
The 2008 FISA Amendments Act institutionalized mass digital surveillance by leveraging the data empires of Silicon Valley tech giants under programs like PRISM. Section 702 of FISA compelled internet and telecom giants to provide the NSA with access to massive user data stores, transforming bulk surveillance into a core government function symbiotic with commercial data harvesting.
The NSA gained legally compelled access to Microsoft servers in September 2007, Google in January 2009, Facebook in June 2009, and Apple in October 2012.
6. The Insurrection and the Culmination of Terror
Donald Trump fused the violent machinery of the War on Terror with white nativism, culminating in family separations at the border and the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
You can trace how techniques developed for CIA black sites and military detention migrated into the domestic immigration enforcement system under the Trump administration. CBP intake cells known as hieleras subjected migrants to frigid temperatures, sleep deprivation through constant lighting, and indignities reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay, resulting in severe trauma and deaths such as that of toddler Mariee Juarez.
Nineteen-month-old Mariee Juarez caught a respiratory infection after being held in a CBP hielera and an ICE-contracted facility in Dilley, Texas, and died two months later.
The Zero Tolerance policy systematically separated thousands of migrant children from their parents as a deliberate deterrent mechanism. At least 5,500 children were separated from their families, and by the end of Trump's presidency, at least 545 children remained with unknown parent locations.
The January 6 Capitol insurrection was the culmination of Trump's post-election Stop The Steal campaign, drawing heavily on veterans, militias, and the normalization of political violence forged during the War on Terror. On January 3, 2021, newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wore a trump won mask to her swearing-in ceremony in Congress.
10 Key Ideas
- The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing demonstrated how American institutions deflected blame away from domestic white supremacy while creating legal frameworks to target non-white populations.
- American exceptionalism and the AUMF handed the executive branch unchecked power to wage endless war, build mass surveillance systems, and institutionalize torture.
- Both conservative ideologues and technocratic liberals constructed the ideological justifications and intelligence fabrications necessary to launch and sustain the catastrophic invasion of Iraq.
- President Obama reoriented the War on Terror into a sustainable enterprise centered on lethal drone strikes rather than large-scale ground invasions.
- The Obama administration established the legal precedent that the executive branch may conduct extrajudicial executions of American citizens abroad without a judicial trial.
- Brave insiders exposed massive digital surveillance programs while the security state's military hardware and tactics flowed inward to crush domestic civil rights protests.
- Donald Trump fused the violent machinery of the War on Terror with white nativism, culminating in family separations at the border and the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
- Federal law enforcement subjected immigrant and Muslim communities to mass roundups, secret detentions, and guilt-by-association frameworks under the guise of national security.
- The military established Guantanamo Bay as a legal black hole to detain suspects indefinitely outside the protection of federal courts or the laws of armed conflict.
- Years of mainstreamed Islamophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric culminated in domestic right-wing terrorist violence targeting innocent minority communities.