Their central blind spot emerged from the American exceptionalism at the heart of the War on Terror: the belief that the damage they inflicted abroad would not damage their own country. — 19: 254-256
The Security State had succeeded so thoroughly that America exercised its strength abroad while taking its own domestic safety for granted. America acted. As the global hegemon, it was not acted upon. That assumption was part of a civic religion, as old as the country itself, known as American exceptionalism: the prerogative that America, by destiny as much as by right, set terms for the world that it was not itself bound by, a global policeman’s doctrine of qualified immunity. — 34: 476-480
the Security State constructed what became known as the War on Terror. Its name reflected what both Sontag and Didion had diagnosed: exceptionalist euphemism that masked a boundless, direful ambition. — 47: 658-660
California Democrat Barbara Lee, who called the AUMF a blank check, begged her colleagues to “think through the implications of [their] actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.” She was the only legislator to vote against it. — 48: 670-672
Having abandoned the concept of a war against a specific terrorist organization, Americans would never be able to agree on when it could be won. If there was a moment the war was conceptually doomed, it was this. Opposing factions within American politics, as well as within the Security State, would never be willing to accept a rival’s definition. That would prevent the war from coming to an agreed-upon end. It would place an enormous burden on the military, especially, yet there is no record of any general or admiral significantly dissenting from this conceptual definition of the war. — 50: 701-705
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin warned that the FBI would now use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “as much as it can,” circumventing the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. On October 25 he was the only senator to vote against the bill, known as the PATRIOT Act. — 53: 751-753
Tenet told Bush and Cheney that Hayden would go to prison for what he had done. Cheney reportedly promised to post bail. In his memoir, Playing to the Edge, Hayden suggests that he owed his job to a stint in the White House alongside Tenet’s deputy. Now, he was the NSA’s director at perhaps the most important moment in its history. On authorization from Cheney, and armed with a legal memo from Cheney’s aide David Addington—with another from Yoo soon to follow—Hayden enlisted the major telecommunications companies and internet service providers to help the NSA collect Americans’ international communications data, from phone records to email and browser history, as well as domestic call records, in bulk. Doing so violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—a reformist 1978 law established to be the “exclusive means” for conducting foreign-intelligence interception within the United States—thereby rendering quaint Feingold’s fear that the FBI would overuse FISA. The program Hayden activated on October 6, STELLARWIND, was a secret for another four months even from the chief justice of the secret FISA Court. The other members of the court, save his successor as chief, would not learn about the existence of STELLARWIND until they read about it in The New York Times four years later. — 56: 786-796
Hayden later observed, “We kill people based on metadata.” — 57: 807-807
Colin Powell would not be the last eminence of the Security State to convince himself that his complicity in a disaster was in fact internal resistance to it. — 98: 1395-1396
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Democratic Party believed the substantial and unequally distributed wealth created during Bill Clinton’s presidency vindicated its decision to marginalize its left wing. Lacking firm ideological commitments after generations of loosening its ties to labor, increasingly divorced from the material conditions of the vast majority of Americans, and terrified of being on the wrong side of security issues, Democrats compensated with technocracy and institutionalism. No — 118: 1681-1685
“the vast majority” opposed the fanatics. Hearkening to a condescending liberal tradition two centuries old, one that justified brute military force, and one that gained extensive purchase in liberal intellectual circles for years after 9/11, Lieberman urged the United States to act in the name of such threatened Muslims, “who are being besieged by isolation and intolerance.” The emerging quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which the senator supported, were the result of Bush’s botched execution, not any conceptual arrogance. — 121: 1727-1731
George Packer, a leading liberal invasion advocate, lamented in The New York Times Magazine that the protesters couldn’t imagine that “the Iraqi people, while not welcoming the threat of bombs, might be realistic enough to accept a war as their only hope of liberation from tyranny. — 131: 1868-1870
With the election looming, Osama bin Laden observed the American landscape he had reshaped. His plan had “exceeded all expectations,” he gloated, thanks to the indefinite, expanding war. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda,’ ” bin Laden marveled in a videotape he released October 30, “in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.” Bush was showing the Muslim world the America that bin Laden depicted: both a bloodthirsty oppresser and a vulnerable one. The United States looked like a rampaging tyrant, ruling through fear and coercion, yet one which Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan were demonstrating could be defeated. Bin Laden explained his strategy as simply provoking America into being itself. Much as the Soviet Union had collapsed after the Afghanistan insurgency—which he neglected to mention had aligned him with the CIA—bin Laden said, “We are continuing this policy, in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A strategically targeted, persistent resistance to the enemy would provoke a reaction the enemy could neither sustain nor end. And the enemy was every American, he reminded his audience, as he held all Americans collectively guilty for the violence U.S. policy inflicted upon Muslim countries. Their ability to “prevent another Manhattan” was in their own hands, “not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush.” — 133: 1897-1909
Trump, an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers—Outerborough White Racist, Wealth Vampire, Dignity-Free Media Striver, and Landlord—considered quarantining the entire tri-state area. — 366: 5259-5261
Even after eighteen years of his ordeal, Hassoun thought he might be able to clear all this up if only Chad Wolf would talk with him. He had heard Wolf on the common-room radio talking about the injustice of George Floyd’s murder. Hassoun wrote him talking about the injustice that he was right now enduring, an injustice Wolf could end. Hadn’t Wolf been the one signing the six-month threat designations? Was it too much to expect he would read Hassoun’s letter? “Here people are slammed with stupid stuff for life and it’s a disgrace,” he reflected. “The greatest country in the world cannot reach a point where it can be a little bit civilized in its justice system.” And not only in its justice system. The War on Terror, not the nationalist fantasy Trump spun in his inaugural address, was the real American carnage. It turned foreigners into nonpersons—Anti-Iraqi Forces, Military-Aged Males, Detainees. When necessary, it could turn Americans into foreigners, all through turning citizenship into a border that it militarized. Those deemed no longer worthy of constitutional protections, like Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son Abdulrahman, could outrun the drones for only so long. The longer America viewed itself as under siege, the easier it became to see enemies everywhere. The longer America found itself unable to resolve its agonizing failure to achieve peace and victory, the easier it became to blame the vulnerable at home, to see Black liberation as terror, to see nonwhite immigration as terror, to see protesters as terror, to see liberalism as the handmaiden of terror, to see everything as terror except the apparatus it had constructed to inflict terror on men like Adham Hassoun. As the War on Terror became permanent, it was inevitable that those confronted with the agonizing refutation of American exceptionalism would look for a satisfying, violent resolution. The answers liberals offered were to call the War on Terror something else, reconcile themselves to a diminished “sustainable” version, and posture as if that was as good as ending the war. Liberalism, like the Security State, would always be shocked to discover that such permanence empowered those who wanted America not to be a global police force for undeserving foreigners, but a domestic one guarding the ramparts of American civilization — 389: 5595-5611
Never would America acknowledge that the violent, reactionary dangers that it attributed to its enemies were also part of its own history. That was the meaning of Oklahoma City. It was the meaning of January 6. A white man with a flag and a gun, the man who had made America great, was not a terrorist. The 9/11 era said he was a counterterrorist. America had never been the sort of place that would tell him he was anything else. As the Forever War persisted, with Trump handing off to Biden a perpetual-motion engine of death powered by the worst of American history, its targets increasingly domestic and its final form still unachieved, it became increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror. — 398: 5726-5731
Jesse in particular has taught me a lifetime’s worth about the programmatic aspects of and discipline behind creativity. — 403: 5794-5795
Women produce the lion’s share of exceptional national security journalism. This book is only possible because of pioneering, relentless journalists like Jane Mayer, Dana Priest, Laura Poitras, Carol Rosenberg, Sharon Weinberger, Marcy Wheeler, Muna Shikaki, Nancy Youssef, Kashmir Hill, Dara Lind—one of the foremost immigration journalists, who has been crucial in walking me through arcana I should have already understood—Aura Bogado, Alexa O’Brien, Emma Graham-Harrison, Janet Reitman, Raya Jalabi, Talia Lavin, Julia Angwin, Tram Nguyen, Kim Zetter, Hannah Allam, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Erin Banco, Kelly Weill, Laila al-Arian, Azmat Khan, Betty Medsger, and so many others. The foremost theorist of surveillance capitalism, the prophet who named it, is Shoshana Zuboff. — 404: 5804-5810