How can one begin to describe a world that no longer exists to an audience of young people who never experienced it? This was Professor Eric Fleury’s first question to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Spencer Ackerman, looking out at an audience that, save for the few professors in the crowd, was born into a post-September 11, 2001 world. Hosted by the Government and International Relations Department, the event on Monday, February 17, drew in crowds of students and faculty to hear about Ackerman’s 2021 book “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”
The book tracks the development of U.S. policy that would become the war on terror from the days after 9/11 up until the immediate ‘post-Trump’ world it was published in. In order to understand the gravity of our country’s shift into surveillance and counter-terrorism, he argued, young people must be able to recognize the ways in which our world is so different and believe that this relatively young post-9/11 world can be rolled back. For instance, Ackerman described how prior to the U.S.’s escalation, we took for granted that certain rights, such as the right to not be subject to torture, were inalienable and not debatable.
Even the term ‘war on terror,’ Ackerman said, is purposefully vague and manufactured to be able to be infused with whatever meaning best fits the country’s current situation, articulating that “the handmaid of propaganda is euphemism.” As a journalist, he described his fight to call things what they are, particularly in addressing techniques of torture, like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, and much else used by the CIA, as torture, rather than ‘enhanced interrogation,’ or ‘stress positions,’ as the Bush administration advertised them. In visiting Iraq and countries in similar situations throughout his career, he offered new perspectives to the audience on how to think about our country’s global presence. To paraphrase his words– the U.S. experienced a single day of terror and air strikes, and in return, have inflicted decades of that same horror onto faceless people across the globe.
In the U.S., we experience atrocities like air strikes and bombings as media events, which dissociate us from the horror we see– we can turn it off and disconnect from it. Ackerman describes the role of a journalist as this phenomenon lived and magnified– the reporter can leave the scene and go home, but the people being interviewed can’t leave their situations. This dissociation can get dangerous: by removing the perpetrators from the crimes, the crimes become not ‘as bad.’ Ackerman used the example of interviewing CIA employees on instances of torture, whereupon forming relationships with and humanizing the perpetrators, it becomes policy for journalists to begin to describe torture and violence as things palatable to those that conducted them, like the example of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation’ detailed above.
These issues aren’t simply issues of the early 2000s, Ackerman reminds us. U.S. involvement in destabilizing foreign countries and our operations of ‘black sites’ and overseas military bases perpetuate the same horrors of the war on terror that are starting to seem antiquated to some minds. In fact, Ackerman sees the war on terror as the same as it has been, only under different guises– President Donald Trump, he says, can offer people “socially satisfying retaliation for pent-up anger.” His policies are easy for people to get behind and easy for his government to carry out– it’s simpler to manufacture islamophobia and hate domestically than to carry out counter-insurgency abroad, and it’s simpler to demonize immigration than to acknowledge our military presence in other countries that drives refugees to us.
Ackerman also spoke extensively on the current situation in Gaza and his perspective as a Jewish man who has written considerably on the counter-terrorism training that police departments in the U.S. receive from the Israel Defense Forces, and the development of the U.S., post-9/11, as modeled on Israeli surveillance tactics. A moral core of his talk came from prompting the audience to rethink how we view terrorism and terrorists as monolithic concepts– as in Gaza, which he described after 2005 as “an open-air concentration camp,” he asks us to question what happened in Gaza before October 7, 2023 to encourage Palestinians to “break out and militarize,” and what has to be done to a country to drive its people to form violent and militant organizations.
For his next book, he is interviewing Majid Khan, a Pakistani immigrant and American resident who joined Al Qaeda after the second Palestinian Intifada and was detained and tortured for nearly two decades, including at a CIA black site in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ackerman reiterated what Khan had expressed to him before, in that the current violence being waged in Gaza will create thousands of more people like him, who will see militarization as the only solution for the harm they have received. As he explained multiple times throughout the event, terrorism indiscriminately targets people who cannot change the everyday realities of the people carrying out the attack (in the examples of 9/11 and Oct. 7) – but for the people carrying it out, this is the only way to balance the scales of terror that they experience in their daily lives.
The question for the audience there and all of us in the U.S. is, then, how we can understand the failures of counter-terrorism and how we can return to the pre-9/11 world that– though not perfect, Ackerman reminds– seems to us to be a mythical world hypothetically free from constant war or surveillance. He had many answers, but the first was: organize. Collective action, labor organizing, and pushing each other to mass resistance is the only effective strategy left for us to try to return to a most just and equal world, Ackerman says. Journalists should be mindful of what they’ve been programmed to say– it can’t only be after such horrific revelations as with Abu Ghraib that the media’s eyes open, and we shouldn’t allow mainstream media to become even less effective than it already is. We can learn to use social media to organize and inform, while being aware that social media is not public media, as has become apparent in the TikTok ban– one Ackerman attributes to the app’s use in broadcasting footage of horrific conditions in Gaza– and in current censorship on the app X, formerly known as Twitter.
Coming to respect each other and seeing each other as human beings, despite all we’ve been taught to know, is key. Particularly in journalism, Ackerman says, having integrity means making an effort to meet people where they are– it means having respect for the people you’re speaking to and their personal senses of history, and valuing and acknowledging the intelligence of others in places where the U.S. has learned to dehumanize. He described to us, at the very end, how even he, during the initial invasion of Iraq, “felt very acutely the rage and willingness to accept war after 9/11– that residue in your mind, the seed of reaction.” As humans, and as U.S. citizens, he described, we all believe we’re immune to propaganda, but “we shouldn’t ever think that we don’t have that residue in our minds.” After decades of constant war and the rabid desire for counter-terrorism looming globally, the only productive thing left for us to do is to think of each other as humans and not the “nebulous threats” that we have been conditioned to see.
