The Rhetorical Invention of America's National Security State 9781498505093, 9781498505086

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The Rhetorical Invention of America's National Security State

LEXINGTON STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC Series Editor: Gary C. Woodward The College of New Jersey This series provides thought-provoking and accessible analyses of the uses of language and media from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. In particular, this series examines how modern discourse is constructed and communicated in our distracted times. These books will provide depth and clarity about discourse more familiar than understood. The Rhetorical Invention of America's National Security State, by Marouf Hasian, Sean Lawson, and Megan McFarlane

The Rhetorical Invention of America's National Security State Marouf Hasian, Jr., Sean Lawson and Megan McFarlane

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hasain, Marouf, Jr. The rhetorical invention of America's national security state / Marouf Hasain Jr., Sean Lawson, and Megan McFarlane. pages cm. -- (Lexington studies in contemporary rhetoric) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-0508-6 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4985-0509-3 (electronic) 1. National security--Social aspects--United States. 2. Rhetoric--Political aspects--United States. 3. United States--Military policy. I. Lawson, Sean T., 1977- II. McFarlane, Megan. III. Title. UA23.H38 2015 355'.033073--dc23 2015019968

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

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The Rhetorical Origins of America’s National Security State Military “Science” and the Legitimation of Preventive War, Mass Surveillance, and Kill/Capture Counterterrorism The Department of Defense, the CIA, and the Legitimation of America’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” The Rise of America’s Special Forces and the Rhetorical Force Behind the Navy SEAL’s Raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad Cyber War, Threat Inflation, and the Securitization of Everyday Life The “Stress” of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Crews and the Biopolitical Normalization of America’s “Precise” Drone Attacks Overseas Edward Snowden, Agent Provocateur, and Overreactions of the NSA Anticipating the Future of America’s National Security State

Bibliography: Marouf Hasian, Jr., Sean Lawson, Megan McFarlane Index

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ONE The Rhetorical Origins of America’s National Security State

In Franz Kafka’s famous text, The Trial, a character by the name of “Joseph K.” awakens one morning to find that his cook has disappeared and that some gentlemen have arrived to arrest him. At one point, Kafka invites his readers to put themselves in the place of Joseph K. as he explains what his protagonist must have been thinking about as he surveyed his situation: Who could these men be? What were they talking about? What authority could they represent? K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force; who dared seize him in his dwelling? He had always been inclined to take things easily, to believe in the worst only when the worst happened, to take no care for the tomorrow even when the outlook was threatening. 1

By the end of The Trial, readers will find they are still not sure exactly what crime Joseph K. has committed. After watching him try to cope with the power of various legal representatives, this ambiguous tale ends with death, uncertainty, and preservation of state secrets. The opening of this dystopic story tells us something important about the arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable nature of today’s American national security state, and it signals the melancholy and tragic feelings of those who confront the banality of some of its procedures and reasoning. In this book, we illuminate the various rhetorical features of the national security state that are as Kafkaesque as the imaginary, dystopic worlds that were dreamed up by Franz Kafka. 2 We will explain how both the promoters of America’s national security state, as well as its victims, use textual and visual arguments as they debate about the morality and

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legitimacy of various features of the United States’ post-9/11 security imaginary. 3 Moreover, it will be our contention that national security states are entities that have many authors and countless purveyors, who sincerely believe that they and their neighbors need to be protected from myriad numbers of biopolitical threats. 4 Unlike many other authors who write as if the national security state was somehow conjured by lone “imperial presidents” abusing “unitary executive” theories of state power, we will argue that the American national security state was not produced by either a few of George W. Bush’s “Vulcans” or Barack Obama’s neoliberal war hawks. 5 Instead, it will be our contention that national security states have complex rhetorical functions and structures, as well many elite and public authors. We will argue that the production of a national security state is a communicative achievement, where technical, political, and cultural arguments are marshaled together to get the warranted assent of U.S. audiences who come to believe they need to live in securitized states. Many Americans have not only accepted, but have demanded, that they live in a heavily securitized state. Note the way that Vern Smalley talked about how to deal with Edward Snowden in a letter-to-the editor of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in January of 2014: Pardon Edward Snowden for leaking classified information? Are they kidding? Snowden signed a legally binding oath invoking a prison sentence and heavy fine if he should ever reveal the information to which he was given access. That information was so highly classified that revealing it would place America in grave danger and cost lives. . . . Normally, I’m not in favor of the death penalty and would much rather have the worst of the worst rot in hi-max prisons for the rest of their lives. However, Snowden deserves to receive his penalty in full view of others who would betray our nation. Maybe they would rethink before becoming traitors. By the way, the NSA is welcome to keep track of my phone calls any time it wants. I have nothing to hide. 6

For those who share these perceptual screens, 7 it is only our enemies, the forces of darkness, that need worry about the glaring spotlight that can be placed on individuals and communities by the gaze of the security state. Post-9/11 American audiences not only condone but expect that their Congressional representatives and Pentagon leaders will make sure that the state can spy, fight off cyber threats, and send drones to take out the Taliban or Al Qaeda “associates.” The national security state is thus made up of a myriad number of assumptions about terrorist threats, and it is maintained by allegorical stories and other figurations that publicly screen and track diverse threats to the “Homeland” that resonate with the majority of U.S. populations. 8 While some American dissenters may occasionally complain about some particular feature of the national security

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state, they will accept most of the communicative, forensic, and architectural frameworks that are used to explain why national security interests are of transcendent importance. Few Americans, for example, are willing to contemplate the possibility that the CIA or the NSA has too much power, that “we” are not at “war” with terrorism, that the United States should not intervene in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, or that it violates Pakistani sovereignty each and every time American “signature strikes” are used to take out unidentified suspects in Pakistan. 9 All of these argumentative premises become key fragments in constitutive rhetorics that are used to create, maintain, and circulate defenses of America’s national security state. Most of the debates that have been waged in public, legal, and technical venues about these topics involve discussions of how to wage America’s “new way of war,” and only a minority doubt the necessity of fighting a perpetual war against transnational terrorist foes. 10 Note, for example, all of the recent talk about the dangers of Chinese hacking, worries about ISIS fundamentalists, the success of Special Operations against pirates, and the circulation of hagiographic commentaries that celebrate the ways that private military contractors are helping U.S. military forces secure everything from embassies to the governments of “failed” states. FBI Director James Comey, who was interviewed by Scott Pelley of CBS News in October of 2014, argued that there “are those who’ve been hacked by the Chinese and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked by the Chinese.” As he celebrated the work of more than 34,000 vigilant members of the FBI, he went on to explain: I think of it as kind of an evil layer cake. At the top you have nation state actors, who are trying to break into our systems. Terrorists, organized cyber syndicates, very sophisticated, harvesting people's personal computers, down to hacktivists, down to criminals and pedophiles. . . . I mean, the money they have invested in this government since 9/11 has been well spent. And we are better organized, better systems, better equipment, smarter deployment. We are better in every way that you’d want us to be since 9/11. We’re not perfect. 11

This clever way of telling millions of television viewers about the myriad dangers of cyber threats invited domestic audiences to equate threats to banking, personal information online, child pornography, and terrorism all as threats to “national security” emanating from foreign lands. Comey’s contextualization of matters portrayed the FBI as an organization that looked more like the CIA than one created to track down individual criminals who crossed state lines. Stories like these rhetorically magnify the dangers that supposedly confront all Americans and help to legitimize massive spending on America’s national security state. At the same time, such articulations of disparate issues as national security threats serve to expand the scope of security issues and actors.

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“Security” is a protean term that can be linked to a host of issues. The strategic ambiguity or polysemy of the term means that it can be constitutively crafted so that it appeals to the perceptual needs of a diverse number of Americans, resulting in ever-broadening security agendas. 12 Far from rejecting the creeping securitization of everyday life, many have come to accept “that security can no longer be understood as the exclusive domain of the state.” 13 This extra layer of discursive legitimation results in not only expanding roles for traditional government security organizations, but also the rise of many new, privatized producers of security, from corporations to private citizens, journalists, and others, all of whom believe it is their duty to join the “hunt” for terrorists and the production of “security.” 14 We therefore join those critical scholars who have recognized the constructed and imaginative nature of national security states produced by willing publics and, therefore, turn our attention to the role of rhetoric in the “social production of the national security state.” 15 We examine some of the myriad ways in which, despite its sometimes Kafkaesque features, Americans welcomed and expanded their national security state in the years following September 11, 2001. American publics have increasingly seen the merits of securitizing many hot-button issues, from immigration to drugs and more, even sometimes accepting the “need” for preventative, military solutions to these seemingly intractable problems. 16 The Kafkaesque features of America’s national security state are maddening for those who try to critique parts of this massive, multi-layered edifice. For example, U.S. officials brag about the impact that the usage of drones is having on taking out “high-value” terrorist leaders and enemy networks, but then CIA spokespersons refuse to admit or deny the very existence of these very same programs. 17 Government officials use official declarations to convince federal judges that releasing photographs and videos of the death of Osama bin Laden would inflame the passions of Middle Easterners and threaten the lives of troops and citizens overseas, and yet the CIA is allowed to have a major say in the pre-production planning of influential movies like Zero Dark Thirty that are just as emotive. 18 When U.S. senators asked the National Security Agency how many Americans’ privacy was violated by the agency’s mass surveillance programs, the agency responded that revealing how many Americans it has spied on would itself violate those Americans’ privacy. 19 When defenders of Edward Snowden’s revelations ask for proof that his disclosures have caused any irreparable harm to American national security interests, their arguments are countered by patriotic commentators who argue that state secrecy demands that America not tell the world the names of those serving overseas who might be hurt by these disclosures. Given the fact that no officials know with any certainty when unauthorized disclosures of classified information might serve the public interest, then it becomes easier to rationalize the defense of laws against leaking

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secrets of national security states. 20 When organizations like the United Kingdom’s Reprieve, or Operation Pink, ask for any evidence of the “imminent” harm that supposedly comes from those targeted in signature strikes carried out by drone crews working for the Department of Defense or the CIA, they are told these organizations have no legal “standing” to ask for that type of information. 21 No wonder that journalists and others who confront this “military-industrial-media-entertainment” complex 22 have a difficult time drawing lines between the spread of problematic disinformation and the dissemination of more constructive, investigative reporting. What makes all of this even more complicated is the fact that the massive and multi-faceted nature of America’s “war machine” makes it difficult for critics to see the impoverished nature of some critiques that only assess one small part of this edifice. 23 The polysemic and polyvalent nature of America’s national security state—where political, economic, military, and social rationales become threads in a complex tapestry of argumentation—poses unique conundrums for those who want to interrogate many different dimensions of this complex discursive edifice. Often, critics who might be allies have unintentionally ended up disagreeing because they were defending one part of this edifice at the same time that they complained about some other feature of the U.S. security state. For example, critics who shook their heads and complained about President Barack Obama’s handling of the Guantánamo “black hole” for detainees sometimes turned around and vehemently defended the Obama administration’s pursuit of whistleblowers and other “treasonous” individuals. 24 Drone critics who might complain about excessive civilian casualties suffered during overseas “signature strikes” occasionally condone, and even try to legitimate, the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. Even those who believe that the American commander-in-chief is acting as an “imperial president” because of an alleged violation of the principle of governmental separation of powers may praise that same leader for using similar authority in other contexts. The formation and maintenance of America’s national security state needs to be viewed as a rhetorical accomplishment, something that involves the active participation of everyone from the president, to military members, to Hollywood directors, and many more in between. These are not simply matters discussed in White House Situation Rooms or prime time presidential speeches. A bevy of military bloggers, “milbloggers,” take to the Internet daily to spread the good news of the “war on terrorism” in a bid to win domestic hearts and minds in support of the war. 25 Films like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty help remind viewers that many women contributed to the raid on Abbottabad and the taking down of Osama bin Laden. After watching this type of movie, who has the temerity to question whether U.S. intelligence acted legally when they eliminated public enemy number one? Technical legal discourses

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reflect and legitimize themes in popular, public discourses as experts in “natsec” law and so-called “lawfare” argue that America must grudgingly violate the sovereignty of untrustworthy allies like Pakistan when they are “unwilling or unable” to chase those who allegedly threaten U.S. shores. 26 Even average citizens like Vern Smalley or Shannon Rossmiller take to newspaper editorial pages and, increasingly, the Internet to amplify the dominant discourse of the national security state or even to do their part to actively combat security threats online. 27 As we note throughout this book, at various times technical experts on national security topics, employees of think-tanks, law review writers, and others just happen to use their own specialties to arrive at related defenses of key features of America’s national security state. Audiences who produce and recirculate these types of rationales for living in a national security state rarely have any trouble papering over potentially contradictory positions, and within these American exceptionalist narratives there are strands of arguments that underscore the point that it is the inherent or cultivated character of Americans that makes them particularly trustworthy during times of war. For example, Congressional decision-makers and Pentagon officials can contend that they have the ability to craft fair and yet effective laws like the Authorization for Use Military Force (AUMF) that walk the fine line between the preservation of individual rights and the protection of state interests. Wise leaders, like President Obama and CIA Director John Brennan, can be trusted to put together the kill-lists of targets on “Terror Tuesdays” because these are moral leaders who have learned from Jesuits and others about the importance of “just wars,” and their orders are carried out by phalanxes of captains, colonels, and generals who can write about the efficacy and, therefore, legitimacy of precision-guided targeting or the savviness of CIA intelligence-gathering that guides the formation of the “disposition matrix.” 28 The chapters of this book do include investigations of texts and visualities that are produced by some of America’s civilian and military leadership, but what we wish to feature are the cultural, structural, and material dimensions of the national security landscape that go beyond a focus on the rhetoric of the great speakers and the memes that circulated in mainstream discussions of these issues. If we spent most of our time analyzing many of these Kafkaesque commentaries on abuse of detainees, targeted-killings, CIA black sites, intervention in Pakistan, mass surveillance, or cyber threats one might gain the impression that the national security state has become a normal and legitimate feature that needs to be accepted, controlled, and regulated. This, after all, is the type of discourse that Giorgio Agamben and others have anticipated, 29 that sidesteps domestic and international strictures by, for example, redefining torture to allow for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or where the killing of unnamed and unknown enemies is rationalized on the basis

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that their “patterns of life” fit some CIA or military profile collected from countless mosaics made from secretive information. We argue that national security states are produced and maintained by audiences who co-produce, accept, and recirculate some of the same American exceptionalist ideologies and arguments that appear in elite U.S. circles. In other words, rhetoric is not some static entity but a mobile and protean force, made of fragmentary flows and cultural signifiers that circulate both within, and across, porous spheres and boundaries. For example, when some of the military technicians who built Predator drones take pride in their work and talk and write about the improved precision of these machines and the omniscient abilities of the famous “Gorgon Stare,” this in turn forms some of the rhetorical resources that travel to the White House or to blog sites as technical commentary on precision warfare and is then tethered to moral arguments about the warfighting skills of those who can distinguish between friend and foe. 30 This, in turn, gains even more rhetorical force as arguments about drone precision appear in movies, law reviews, and other outlets that have no trouble creating the impression that many features of America’s national security state do not violate anyone’s domestic or international laws. With this in mind, the rest of this introductory chapter has been divided into three major segments. The first part seeks to contextualize post-9/11 developments within the larger genealogy of America’s national security state, while the second part extends this analysis with an overview of some of the key communicative characteristics of America’s national security state. The third, and last, segment provides an explanation of the rest of the book’s trajectory. 9/11 TRAUMAS IN THE GENEALOGY OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL SECURITY STATE Though there may be pervasive signs, symbolic and material, indicating that Americans today live in a national security state, this infatuation with securitization did not appear overnight, and ours is not the first national security state. As Aziz Huq insightfully observed, “national security” is a “social production” that “bears the hallmarks of a quintessential public good.” 31 As such, American national security has been produced and reproduced over the course of the nation’s history. The historical origin of America’s contemporary national security state is most often traced to the immediate post-WWII period and early days of the Cold War with President Harry Truman’s signing of the National Security Act of 1947, which created much of the national security bureaucracy that we have today, including the Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, and the Air Force. 32

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But America’s national security state has roots that run deeper even than the Cold War. Any rhetorical history that looks into the discursive and material origins of the American national security state also needs to take into account various colonial and neo-colonial features of contemporary geopolitics. For example, in their discussion of the “Dronification of State Violence,” Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter noted that “techniques analogous to the disposition matrix [are] as old as colonialism itself.” They continued, “[A]s Obama meets in the Situation Room on ‘Terror Tuesdays’ to discuss terrorist targets, he follows in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson, who used his Tuesday luncheons to decide on where to bomb in North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder.” 33 More recently, critics of the American national security state’s seemingly endless “war on terror” have pointed out that the nation has been at war for a stunning 214 of its 235 years of existence, suggesting that the United States has always been a security state. 34 As such, we are not arguing that the material and symbolic conditions that led to the rise of today’s national security state appeared ex nihilo after 9/11. We are arguing, however, that the events of 9/11 acted as catalytic rhetorical events that massively accelerated the pace of America’s development of this national security apparatus. Even a decade and a half after 9/11, the United States is a nation still traumatized by the open wounds inflicted in that attack. Americans willingly walk through airport terminals that are guarded by Homeland Security personnel and pay trillions of dollars for “overseas contingency operations” meant to take the fight to Taliban and Al-Qaeda enemies as we wage what some view as a perpetual war on terror. 35 Legislators have spent a decade passing intricate legislation expanding the wartime powers of state and federal branches of government. 36 Of course, many openly cheered when they heard about the demise of Osama bin Laden in 2011. 37 But the attack on Abbottabad did not end this “new American way of war,” 38 and each year U.S. publics hear about the need to counter the latest foreign cyber terrorist threat or a new “lone wolf” attack that allegedly “metastasizes.” 39 These dark images help insecure communities see the need for police and military surveillance at home and lethal targeting abroad. And so the national security state continues to expand. Even revelations of abuses by the nation security state have failed to stop its expansion. As Georgetown law professor David Luban has argued, more than ten years ago the Associated Press’s Charles Hanley, Salon’s Jen Banbury, and the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh all reported on the infamous abuses that took place in the detention facilities at Abu Ghraib and helped show that “torture was everywhere” and was not just an activity that was taking place in the “CIA’s secret prisons.” However, “none of these revelations seemed to make a dent in U.S. public opinion” 40 as poll after poll showed that many members of the public supported the usage of “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the

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questioning of detainees. Similarly, two years after the first reports of NSA mass surveillance based on documents provided to journalists by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and with new stories continuing to appear weekly, little has been done to reign in the agency. Meanwhile, the United States has opened a new front against a new adversary in the “war on terror,” ISIS in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, old and musty sedition laws that were passed during World War I to fight the Bolsheviks and later the communists of the “Red Scare” are dusted off and refurbished to provide the counter-terrorist legal weaponry that some believe is needed to protect the American Homeland. 41 Worries about warfare coalesce with concerns about “lawfare” as defenders of America’s national security state counter the efforts of the ACLU and other organizations that would defend the whistleblowing efforts of people like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. 42 But mass surveillance is only one part of the story. Rhetoric coming out of the Obama White House on the importance of transparency and accountability only highlights the conspicuous absence of some freedoms. As we hear about the supposed merits of using hunter-killer drones over the skies of Pakistan, back home hobbyists, academics, lawyers, and others resist government attempts to prohibit domestic drone use for journalism, agriculture, and other non-destructive purposes. 43 The microand macro- policing of populations brings to life both Jeremy Bentham’s and Michel Foucault’s old worries about panopticons in a host of rhetorical settings. 44 Concurrently, countless novels, television series, and movies mesmerize readers and viewers with textual and visual commentaries that put on display the need for a host of controversial counter-terrorist strategies. 45 These augment, and reiterate, what is already circulating in technical, legal, and other spheres. In this context, we need more than a “top-down” way of viewing the legal, the technical, the public, and the cultural aspects of America’s massive national security state. This is because the American national security state is both product and process. As product, most observers commonly identify it by pointing to its bureaucratic or organizational features. A number of authors have noted the emergence and expansion of increasingly powerful security bureaucracies, 46 “imperial” executives, 47 and the enlistment of numerous private actors, both organizations and individual citizens, 48 into the work of producing national security since World War II. It is a process that seems to have dramatically accelerated and intensified in the wake of 9/11 with a number of negative material consequences, from waste and fraud, to mass surveillance, to torture, and drone assassinations of dubious legality and effectiveness. 49 But the national security state is more than this. As an apparatus, it produces and is, in part, produced by rhetorics of security and insecurity. It not only produces “security,” both symbolically and materially, but also insecurity

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via rhetorics of securitization, a particular form of problematization focused on the identification of threats and exigencies to which the technologies, tactics, procedures, and strategies of the national security state are a seemingly necessary response. 50 In short, though securitization may be a “speech act,” just saying security does not make it so. 51 The national security state is a rhetorical product and the production of rhetoric is key to its process of legitimation. More than just elite individual and organizational securitizing actors are enlisted in this process. While many previous studies of this phenomenon have provided some needed insights by focusing attention on the role that key organizations and individual decision-makers have played in the rise of the national security state, especially the president, 52 this kind of approach has a more difficult time grappling with situations where audiences have given their warranted assent when they hear the clarion call of securitization rhetorics. We need more nuanced investigations that allow us to see some of the audience relationships, the perceived material realities, and the structures that enable and constrain the way that many social agents co-create America’s national security state. For example, we need to study how various national security rhetorics resonate with particular communities at the same time that we review the adept usage of the executive branch’s bully pulpit by imperial presidents, the corporate wielding of monetary influence by leaders of private security corporations, or the social agency of leading figures within the national security bureaucracies. In other words, researchers and readers still need a more comprehensive, rhetorical study that looks at both “top-down” and “bottom-up” ways of thinking about the origins of the national security state. As we will see in the chapters that follow, this kind of approach reveals that, in some situations, American elites and publics agree on the transcendent importance of an ideograph like “national security” while having very different—sometimes contradictory—ways of thinking about what to do about surveillance limits, detention, interrogation, transnational use of force, the funding of Special Forces, and drone attacks. Thus, we need to examine the acceptance or rejection of arguments about the morality and legitimacy of America’s national security state that go along the grain of dominant opinion, as well as go against the grain. While we appreciate the historic role that a vice president like Dick Cheney may have played in contributing to the circulation of post-9/11 threat inflation, and while we understand that a general like David Petraeus may have influenced the course of military thinking and the adoption of what are called “counterinsurgency” (or COIN) strategies in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, 53 we are convinced that readers also need to understand the vernacular origins of some of these arguments. We miss a great deal when they are not presented with the repetitiveness and the permutations of the arguments about the national security state that

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also circulate on milblogging sites, in educational hallways, in journalistic accounts, in the cineplex, and elsewhere. Though the technical weaponry used against America’s enemies may change, some rhetorical historicizing reminds us that the characterization of these “new” enemies looks eerily familiar. As Robert Ivie notes, the archetype of the barbarian has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks, and “America’s present war on terrorism is a variation on an old theme of defending civilization against savagery.” 54 In the chapters that follow, we demonstrate how similar, rhetorical figurations of known and unknown enemies are used to justify a host of network-centric warfare techniques, ranging from the Stuxnet cyberattack 55 to the waging of “counterlawfare” in an effort to defend the national security state by excoriating critics and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. The historical repetition of similar rhetorical figurations over time is an important contributor to American audiences’ desire for, and willing acceptance of, a national security state. But our approach also allows readers to see across various public, technical, and official spheres as elites, middle-level officials, and ordinary citizens all participate in the formation of the dense rhetorical structures that help with the legitimation of securitization rhetorics. This diachronic and synchronic decoding of securitization rhetorics is, we believe, a necessary part of any effective “deterritorialization” of them. 56 THE COMMUNICATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL SECURITY STATE Before outlining the remaining chapters of the book, we would like to lay out some of the key rhetorical strategies used to build, maintain, and defend the American national security state from would-be critics. We do so by focusing on characteristics related to who is authorized to know and speak about national security and how authorized speakers are able construct security and insecurity in ways that perpetuate the national security state. First, the American national security state engages in “boundary work” that serves the purpose of self-authorization to know and speak on matters of national security. 57 The national security state accomplishes this, in part, by working to shape and control the dominant symbolic frames used to determine what constitutes “expertise” about national security issues. Note, for example, the lack of critical news media coverage of former National Security Agency chief General Keith Alexander’s announcement that he is launching a consulting firm after spending some 40 years working for the military and the U.S. government. 58 Alexander spent years warning of supposedly dire cybersecurity threats, all while heading an agency that we now know worked to make cyberspace less secure, 59 experience which now affords him the opportunity to retool

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and reinvent himself as an “expert” who helps bring together public and private sector communities who have a vested interest in discovering, and then responding to, a host of real and imaginary cybersecurity threats, some of which his prior employer helped to create. Beyond the creation and maintenance of boundaries between expert and non-expert commentary, the national security state works to police who is able to speak and to know about matters of national security, expert or not. Indeed, what one says, to whom, and how can impact one’s status as expert insider or inexpert outsider. One example comes in the public relations battles waged over the status of those configured as either “whistleblowers” or “leakers.” As we note later in the book, whistleblowers are treated as patriots who followed America’s “rule of law” by speaking only to superiors inside traditional chains-of-command about potential legal violations, while “leakers” are configured as wannabe spies for speaking out—quite literally, to “outsiders” and “out” of turn. Therefore, “leakers” in this discourse do not deserve to be called “experts,” and certainly not “patriots,” despite their one-time status as national security insiders. Similarly, the CIA can decide that Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow can visit secret “vaults” at Langley to help them prepare for the filming of Zero Dark Thirty while government lawyers simultaneously chastise those who try to gain access to the pictures that were taken of Osama bin Laden during the Abbottabad raid. By their powers of self-authorization, “natsec” experts and organizations not only have the power to bestow upon themselves the authority to know, but also the authority to decide who among them can speak and who else outside their ranks is authorized to know, and what, about national security. Such boundary work not only occurs in the domestic, but also the international arena. That is, American “natsec experts” not only must work to maintain the fiction that they and their select delegates are the only ones qualified to know and speak about national security at home, but that members of the American national security state are the only true “experts” on security anywhere in the world. One example is found in the oft-asserted belief that U.S. national security experts are the only ones qualified to interpret international treaties, conventions, or agreements. The very formation of geopolitical “black holes” or “black sites” around the world served as emblematic evidence that the American national security state could control both the domestic and international interpretations of all sorts of laws. American defenders of the national security state wanted to privilege U.S. domestic laws. But, if they had to become the interpretative communities who parsed the words of international edicts, they could always do so in ways that highlighted the need for violent countermeasures in the name of fighting terrorism. So, since 9/ 11, some have argued not only for the extension of “unitary” executive powers for the American president but the legality of controversial enhanced interrogation techniques, rendition processes, indefinite deten-

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tion practices, and targeted killings that have raised the ire of many international audiences. Instead of following interpretations of international law that come from U.N. officials, European allies, or others, Americans turn to their own lawyers for self-serving legal rationales that focus on maintaining a U.S. “state of exception.” 60 International commentaries that emphasize restrictive interpretations of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and international humanitarian law (IHL) are discounted and replaced with selective readings that allow Americans the maximum amount of policing and militarizing powers. Alberto Gonzales, for example, once characterized the Geneva Convention as “quaint,” 61 and conservative American legal pundits worry about the “lawfare” that is produced by supposedly misguided members of NGOs that try to reign in national security state abuses. 62 Second, another important communicative characteristic of national security state discourse that is key to maintaining the boundary between serious national security experts and non-experts, and the authority that comes with it, is an ongoing effort to maintain the ethos of the national security state as comprised of self-restraining, transparent, and moral individuals who act only reluctantly and out of necessity. In fact, sometimes national security states can expand their structural and material power bases while appearing to engage in acts of self-restraint that allegedly restrict that state’s power. For example, note the way that the Obama administration trumpeted their release of four key memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush years and used to justify the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” while, simultaneously, the power of the CIA grows when Attorney General Holder informs journalists that few, if any, interrogators who followed those OLC guidelines would face prosecution. John Brennan, the current CIA director and former White House counterterrorism adviser, could comment on how he has followed “just war” theories and reigned in the abuse of the drone wars by having some mysterious “playbook,” but American audiences were not going to be allowed to see the specifics of that playbook because of the need to preserve national security interests. The performative act of appearing to follow the “rule of law,” and looking like one wants to be restrained, helps fend off domestic and international critics. Third, this performance of supposedly willing self-restraint is a response to, but also helps to produce, an environment in which there are few checks or oversight on an American national security state that so many have helped to coproduce and given their assent. Though members of the national security state like to underscore the ways that they stay within the boundaries that are set up by the nation’s “checks and balances,” there has been a growing number of critiques arguing that the American national security state lacks effective executive, legislative, judicial, and media oversight. In several chapters of this book, we note the

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ways that federal jurists rarely question the apparent wisdom of military personnel or Obama administration officials during wartime. In the executive branch, President Obama has not exercised that much civilian control over military affairs as his administration defers to the wishes of those who want to blur the lines that once theoretically existed between intelligence-gathering and military strikes. Former Director of the National Intelligence Dennis Blair has argued that the nation’s commanderin-chief has been “oddly passive” in reigning in drone strikes, and Blair avers that Obama has tended to “defer on drone policy to senior aides whose instincts often dovetailed with the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.” 63 Finally, legislators have continued to provide funding for and virtually limitless authorization for national security state activities, even in the wake of revelations of torture and mass surveillance. Indeed, some security state overseers, far from providing democratic oversight, are some of the national security state’s chief promoters. Similarly, the so-called “fourth estate,” the mainstream news media, no longer serves (if it ever did) as an effective check on the national security state. Instead, it more often parrots and amplifies dominant security state discourse. 64 These presses may interview several individuals in order to give the appearance of objectivity and fairness during particular debates, but when push comes to shove they rarely are willing to take on the hegemonic power of the national security state. For example, some reporters for the New York Times knew about President George W. Bush’s secret authorizations of domestic eavesdropping, but executive editors bowed to the wishes of White House administrators who asked them to withhold publication of these details. The impending publication of James Risen’s book State of War in 2006 65 forced the hand of the Times’ editors who belatedly published a story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. 66 Similarly, many mainstream papers lauded the supposed efforts of Jeh Johnson, President Obama, and others for supposedly taking action in early 2013 to end to the “perpetual” war against terrorism. But, as journalist and national security state critic Glenn Greenwald noted, while the media hyped the national security state’s new found self-restraint, the policies adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees. Does that sound to you like a government

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anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent? 67

Fourth, just as the national security state self-authorizes its members, demarcating the space of national security expertise from non-expertise, so too does it produce and reproduce the “needs” and “desires” for the “solutions” that only its members can provide. That is, the national security state not only produces security, but also insecurity. In an ironic twist, both the national security state’s successes and failures can result in a positive feedback loop of seemingly “needing” and desiring yet more security. The rhetorical crafting of states of “insecurity” is an inventional and performative accomplishment, and our discussion here is intended to complement the work of other communication scholars who have studied such topics as communal identification, vilification, 68 threat inflation, redefinition, dissociation, 69 and denial. One of the key ways that national security states maintain support for perpetual war is by emphasizing the supposedly indispensable nature of the public security services that are offered by military personnel, CIA intelligence-gathers, or contractors who “man” our nation’s ramparts. Sometimes both the visual image and the written word are brought together to try and convince various audiences that particular agencies have the expertise that is needed to guard the Homeland. One of Snowden’s leaked caches included a slide that was a part of an internal NSA presentation given in October 2001, at a time when that organization “ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” 70 The slide indicates that the NSA’s mission is to “provide and protect vital information for the nation” and indicates that collecting signals intelligence (SIGINT) is a significant part of protecting the Homeland. This function was considered to be so vital for the presenter that without that information—and by implication the NSA—“America would cease to exist as we know it.” These types of hyperbolic, self-serving rhetorics can be found in many of the discourses circulated by national security states, and this combination of the visual and the textual reinforces the message that “security” is of transcendent importance. Of course, the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is a result of a prior failure that is now used to warrant even more intervention. 71 And if ISIS should turn out not to be much of a threat, former CIA Director General David Petraeus (ret.) is warning that the Iranian militias fighting in Iraq against ISIS are already in line to be “the foremost threat” in the area once ISIS is gone. 72 But even national security state successes do not lead to diminished need for its services, but ironically, to more fear, insecurity, and a desire for more intervention. On one hand, raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden are cheered and seen as proof of the skill and effective-

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ness of America’s warriors and their “new way of war.” Note, for example, how national security reporter and media expert on all things Al Qaeda, Peter Bergen, wrote in April of 2013 about the success of the 2011 bin Laden raid, as well as America’s drone war: The emergence of a “military intelligence complex” has proved devastating to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The CIA drone campaign in Pakistan has killed many of the terror network’s leaders and largely eliminated Pakistan’s tribal regions as a key training ground for the group. . . Meanwhile, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has not only killed bin Laden, but also largely destroyed the vicious leadership of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate . . . 73

One can almost sense the jouissance that comes from victory and the pride that one can have in the dismantling of the networks of those who attacked Americans on 9/11. For policymakers and civilian audiences alike, accounts like these, alongside hagiographic, big-budget Hollywood blockbusters like Zero Dark Thirty, seem only to prove that the U.S. needs more, not less, of these actions. The president signaled as much in his announcement of bin Laden’s death, telling the American people, “Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must—and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad.” 74 Thus, two years after the “successful” raid, it was common to hear current and former officials and other members of the national security state warn that the death of bin Laden had not only not put an end to the terrorist threat, but rather, had caused it to “metastasize.” In response, they called for yet more U.S. military interventions around the globe, including more of the kind of Special Forces “kill/capture missions” that took out bin Laden. 75 Fifth, and finally, in these processes, the national security state opportunistically appropriates rhetorics and discourses of other national security states, as well as other areas of social life. Carl Schmidt once wrote about the need for emergency laws that would halt the abuses of Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War I, and Gorgio Agamben has theorized about how “camp” philosophies provide paradigms for thinking emergency states and states of exception. 76 As we noted earlier, since at least the time of the Roman conquests, pragmatic decision-makers have written about the need to protect civilizations from savages during times of civil or military emergencies, and these historical rationales have become the ideological drifts that can be selectively picked up by contemporary nation states that need to explain just why drastic, violent measures have to be taken against seeming implacable foes. Our generation obsesses over the “jihadists,” the fundamentalists of ISIS, and other groups that seem intent on forming Caliphates that look nothing like democratic city-states, and nations facing very different enemies can still poach off each other as they look through various legal or military

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archives for rationales that will help explain the righteousness of their cause. For example, when American lawyers and jurists were looking for precedents that illustrated the heuristic value of lethal strikes against enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen, they could use the arguments that had been circulating in Israeli courtrooms as Israeli lawyers and military leaders explained earlier the discriminating nature of their strikes against terrorist leaders in either Gaza or the West Bank. 77 Israelis had also had to write and talk about precision strikes, the use of human shields, and the IDF protection of Palestinian civilians, and now countless American lawyers could cite those cases and commentaries as they countered the claims of critics who claimed that an excessive number of foreign civilians were dying during American drone strikes. Finally, as we will demonstrate in the next chapter, national security states not only appropriate rhetorics, both contemporary and historical, from other security states, but also from other areas of social life, such as the national sciences, which further help to give their actions a patina of legitimacy by framing them as “natural.” THE TRAJECTORY OF THE BOOK AND A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE BOOK CHAPTERS In chapter two, we are interested in explaining the evolutionary nature of the military “science” that has helped legitimate what many have called America’s “preventive war.” As noted above, during the last several years, public and media attention has focused increasingly on the U.S. counterterrorism program, including drone strikes and Special Forces raids, and more recently, its policies and practices of mass surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency. It is tempting to see these two sets of practices, counterterrorism and mass surveillance, as distinct and unprecedented. It is also tempting to seek naturalistic and pessimistic explanations—i.e., they are the manifestations of the dark side of human nature, which leads those in power to always seek more power and, inevitably, to abuse their power. But this chapter argues that we should not give in to these temptations, for doing so prevents us from adequately understanding the emergence of these practices, including their genealogy and how they have been warranted by their proponents. Though it is instructive to analyze the public discourse of elites of national security, such as the president’s administrative discourse, it is important to understand the theories that are circulated by military and security professionals interested in world affairs, and for that reason in chapter two we put on display some of the strategies and doctrines for actions that emerge from the work of national security state bureaucrats. 78 For these professionals, the development of securitization knowledge, including of threats and possible responses, is seen as a scientific

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endeavor. What’s more, in constructing such knowledge, military and security professionals are fond of borrowing language and concepts from the preeminent sciences of the day. 79 Both as a practice to be mimicked and as a storehouse of knowledge from which to borrow, science serves as a rhetorical resource for the construction and legitimation of military theories, strategies, and doctrines. 80 The second chapter demonstrates that mass surveillance and kill/capture missions are not distinct practices, but rather, synergistic elements of the United States’ counter-terrorism strategy. It also shows that they share a great debt to a series of theoretical, strategic, and doctrinal developments made by military professionals over the last twenty-five years. 81 In turn, these developments have largely found their inspiration and legitimation in the sciences. In short, this chapter will demonstrate that mass surveillance-powered kill/capture is deeply imbricated with longstanding trends in U.S. military “science” and, by extension, the wider U.S. culture, which is part of what makes these practices such a potent (rhetorical) force. Chapter three extends this analysis by taking up the question of what legal or moral interrogation looks like in today’s global war against terrorism. Unlike previous studies that simply attack George W. Bush or Barack Obama’s administration’s ratification of the infamous “torture memos” that were authored by individuals like John Yoo and Judge Jay Bybee, this chapter asks how stakeholders like the Department of Defense and the CIA were able to distance themselves from allegations of torture and avoid prosecution in U.S. or international forums. As Scott Shane, David Johnston, and James Risen noted in 2007, after publics learned about the “unacceptable interrogation techniques” that were circulating in Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memos, “Congress and the Supreme Court” repeatedly intervened in ways that forced the members of the executive branch to drop their support of “the most extreme techniques.” 82 However, this did not mean that CIA operatives who used these techniques would be punished, nor did it mean that individuals who wrote these memos would suffer any major sanctions. Instead, the Barack Obama administration got immersed in a “device of imperial mystification” that Donovan Conley and William O. Saas have identified as “occultatio” where legalese, redaction, and stonewalling were used to exploit some of the accountability gaps that existed in America’s neoliberal democratic structures. 83 We argue that since 2004 key members of America’s national security state—including members of the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the U.S. military branches—have made it appear as though they have cleaned up their act and that they no longer engage in the type of reprehensible activity that the International Red Cross once characterized as “tantamount to torture.” Chapter three will thus provide some closetextual analysis that tries to explain the negotiations and rhetorical strategizing that has gone into the legitimation of “enhanced interrogation

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techniques.” Along the way, we show how some of these debates hide any nuanced discussions of what constitutes acceptable interrogations of today’s detainees. The fourth chapter will examine the various rhetorics that have been used to legitimize the U.S. military's move toward Special Forces. In this chapter we will provide some of the same type of analysis of professional bureaucratization that dominates chapter two, but here we want to show the ubiquitous nature of some of these rhetorics and we have purposely included more on how these securitization logics circulate in popular cultures. For example, we do not think that it is any coincidence that at the same time that the CIA has received massive infusions of tax dollars, our mainstream newspapers and cineplex spotlighted the valorization of the SEALs in the bin Laden raid. After the raid on Abbottabad, various public rhetorics emerged that told different versions of “what happened” during the raid, and diverse accounts included the White House's recounting of the story through the release of the Situation Room photograph immediately after the raid. 84 This allowed America’s audiences, who watched shows like Rock Center, to see how President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recounted their memories of the raid. 85 Talk of insecurities and securitization filled the mainstream presses and the blogosphere as American audiences were allowed to read countless accounts of how the national security state’s steadfastness contributed to the demise of bin Laden. For example, in his August 2011 account of the raid, journalist Nicholas Schmidle explained that a senior advisor to Obama compared the experience of watching the bin Laden raid behind-the-scenes to “watching the climax of a movie.” 86 This comparison to a movie should not be overlooked, for by the end of 2013, the feature film Zero Dark Thirty was released that told Hollywood's story of the bin Laden raid from the perspective of a female CIA agent and the SEALs. In addition to these narratives, a Navy SEAL named Matt Bissonnette (who went by the pseudonym Mark Owen) wrote a book about his experience in the bin Laden raid, titled No Easy Day, and a few days after the release of the book appeared on 60 minutes. While each of these stories contribute to a larger narrative about American exceptionalism, 87 we argue that they also functioned to legitimate the use of Special Forces in America's Way of War, and this in turn explained the need for a more nimble national security state. Chapter four also allows us to show that the national remembrances of victories has everything to do with the ways that we think about the tactics, the strategies, and the operational planning that goes into future overseas contingency operations. For example, through the memories of the raid, the Navy SEALs were celebrated as a force for good, and American publics could identify with that righteousness. Despite some contentions that the United States overstepped its bounds by keeping the

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raid a secret from Pakistan, most of the American public did not see the raid as problematic, but rather as a sign of the direction the military was and should be moving in—away from conventional forces and toward special forces that can get the job done well. One of the key questions, of course, is whether these particular actions by the national security state justify the potential breaking of a few laws. 88 In chapter four we also note how the valorization of the Special Forces and the CIA (which was also heralded as heroic in the retellings of the raid) contributed to their rising stature as major players in future military humanitarian interventionism. U.S. diplomats now had another “tool” in their metaphoric foreign policy tool kit, and we contend that the rhetoric surrounding the raid and the memories of it contribute to the developing security state by perpetuating the legitimation of the “perpetual,” neverending, or ubiquitous war. We even speculate that rise of the Special Forces, along with the adoption of COIN rhetorics and the usage of drones, enables the efforts of those who sense that we can fight a host of proxy campaigns. In chapter five we tackle the issue of how America’s national security state has dealt with the topic of “cyber war” and how various rhetorical strategies have contributed to threat inflation as various stakeholders work feverishly to show that corporations, military organizations, and everyday citizens need to be concerned with the everyday threats that are supposedly posed by cyberterrorists. There we show that a number of scholars from varying disciplines have pointed to the growing sense in Western societies, especially the United States since 9/11, that threats to national security are seemingly ubiquitous, even to the point of banality. 89 Terrorism is itself one such concern, which seemingly transgresses many traditional boundaries that once served as comforting anchors shaping our understandings of and responses to the world. But as chapter four demonstrates, the very physical embodiment of terrorists and terrorism can undermine this threat’s rhetorical force in the eyes of some critics—if bin Laden or enough top lieutenants are killed, the job of maintaining the fear of harm and desire for safety that legitimizes the national security state becomes more difficult. What is needed, rhetorically at least, is a seemingly ubiquitous threat that is simultaneously present but invisible, potentially as dangerous as a physical attack but not, itself, amenable to defeat through traditional, externally focused means of national defense, a threat that is everywhere and nowhere and, thus, requiring the national security state to be everywhere and nowhere too. Chapter five comments on the crafting of that non-traditional, “cyberwar” ubiquitous threat. There we argue that as advanced Western democracies have become more dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) of various kinds for practically all aspects of daily life, so too have they become more concerned about potential threats to/through cyberspace. 90 While we will point out that scholars

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have identified cyber war as a case of “threat inflation,” 91 our fifth chapter goes further and uses cyber war discourse as a window that lets us look at the rhetorical characteristics of threat inflation. It identifies six such characteristics, which include conflation of different threats into one, the use of hypothetical scenarios to raise the level of fear, the exaggeration of the effects of largely trivial events, the projection of U.S. actions onto others, piggybacking, and finally, overreactions in the form of exceptional measures by the national security state that transgress a number of boundaries, from foreign and domestic, to personal and national, and beyond, on a seemingly perpetual basis. In chapter six we put on display how the vernacular and elite conversations about the operational stress of drone crews is used to “humanize” the drone crews while rationalizing America’s usage of “precise” drone attacks abroad. Since at least 2005, foreign critics of America’s drone program have been arguing that U.S. targeted strikes and UAV attacks violate many key provisions of international human rights laws, including the laws of distinction, necessity, humanity, and proportionality. Organizations like The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Reprieve in the UK, and lawyers in Pakistan, circulate visual and textual material that focus attention on the disproportionate number of civilians who die during CIA or JSOC drone attacks. All of these claims help to undermine some of the arguments that have been presented by John Brennan and President Obama regarding the “precise” nature of drone attacks. While we understand why so much attention has been focused on the legalese that is circulated by administrators intent on legitimating aspects of these drone wars, we argue in chapter six that many Americans support drones for another reason—their newspapers help to humanize the efforts of the drone pilots by circulating biopolitical and thanatopolitical stories that show how pilots concentrate so hard on preserving human life in foreign lands that they suffer from “occupational stress” and PTSD. We agree with Frank Sauer and Niklas Schörnig when they argue that many in the West view killer drones as the “silver bullet of democratic warfare,” 92 and it will be our contention that since 2008, an increasing number of governmental, journalistic, and private studies have used these public health arguments to deflect attention away from the suffering of those who experience the drone attacks as some commentators highlight the trials and tribulations of remotely piloted aircraft crews. In chapter seven we unpack the various communications of the infamous “Snowden Affair.” Throughout most of 2013 Anglo-Americans were obsessed with arguing about the morality and legality of the revelatory actions of Edward Snowden, who was accused by some members of the NSA or CIA of engaging in traitorous behavior that threatened America’s national security interests. In a series of leaks, Snowden exposed how the National Security Agency was spying on many nations around the world, including allies and even American citizens in “the Home-

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land,” and we contend in this chapter that his actions acted as a catalytic event that rendered visible some of the taken-for-granted and hidden features of America’s national security apparatus. Snowden’s revelations followed in the wake of the trial of Chelsea Manning and the continued pursuit of Julian Assange, 93 but, as we note in chapter seven, some government investigators also started adding the names of journalists like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald to the list of alleged “traitors” who were threatening the national security state. While we are interested in explaining how various debaters in this controversy have vilified Snowden or valorized his efforts, our goal in this chapter will be to show how many American intelligence personnel felt they had to react to his revelations, which in turn, ironically, put on display the very repressive measures that Snowden’s supporters were writing about in the first place. The conclusion presented in chapter eight allows us to speculate about the future rhetorical trajectories of America’s national security state. This particular segment of the book will accomplish several tasks. It will summarize some of our findings and allow us to synthesize the materials that appear in the previous chapters, and it will provide some conjectures regarding the future contours of America’s national security state. We will argue that although European critics, NGOs, and others have been unable to derail some of the U.S. plans for targeted killings, they have subtly influenced the ways that Washington decision-makers and American publics justify some of the key features of the America’s national security state. For example, in chapter eight we note how foreign listeners are getting tired of hearing about unilateral justifications for military incursions into places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and we speculate that in the future U.S. arguers are going to emphasize the bilateral or multilateral nature of post-Obama overseas contingency operations. CONCLUSION By the time that readers reach the end of our book, we hope that they will have seen that there are a host of realpolitik and symbolic reasons why Americans have co-produced their own unique national security state. We contend that their beliefs in American exceptionalism have convinced many American audiences that they are unlike their fundamentalist Islamic enemies as they fight their GWOT. While U.S. contractors or military service personnel may occasionally have had to resort to “dark side” tactics in their interrogation of suspected terrorists, this is defended as something that is light years away from the beheadings performed by barbaric enemies that are circulated on the Internet. European critics who complain that America’s national security state might be violating inter-

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national humanitarian law (IHL) are summarily dismissed as naïve interlopers who do not understand the importance of preventive warfare. Similarly, detractors of NSA surveillance practices can be vilified for acting in traitorous ways. Most, if not all, nations circulate their own brands of exceptionalist rhetorics but not all of them possess the mineral resources, the economic wealth, and military wherewithal to put these ideologies into practice. As we write this book, new American generations—who never felt the psychological sting associated with the perceived loss of the Vietnam War and the “Vietnam Syndrome”—are being invited to believe that they have a unique mission to ensure that they are some of the twenty-firstcentury leaders who fulfill their “responsibility to protect” (R2P) obligations. 94 A casualty-averse national security state has learned the lessons of Mogadishu, and it makes sure that fewer and fewer photojournalists can take pictures of the coffins that come into Dover as it passes restrictive laws about the circulation of Abu Ghraib images or other threatening visualities that might be taken by combat-troops. Moreover, this particular state of exception is moving away from the usage of conventional warfighting operations and the usage of costly “shock and awe” tactics as it explains to mainstream presses why we need to be in places like the Philippines, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere in this “extraterritorial” battle. Again, our argument is not that the “Vulcans” who occupied the White House during the George W. Bush years were the primary or exclusive social agents who planned out some of the general contours of our developing national security state and then imposed these on a guiltless public. Nor are we claiming that members of the Obama administration were the ones who forgot their Constitutional vows when they failed to close Guantánamo or allowed the NSA to engage in warrantless mass surveillance. The development of America’s national security state was not dependent on the formulation of some conspiratorial plots in the Situation Room that involved plans to dupe the American public into believing that the “gloves needed to be taken off” in the War on Terrorism. Intelligence officials, for example, are not the only ones who complain about the decisions that were made by Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden. Many elite and non-elite actors alike have played a part in America’s national security state, the result of which is a co-created world that would have been recognized by Joseph K., and the unnamed bureaucrats that sought his trial.

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NOTES 1. Franz Kafka, The Trial, translated by Edwin Muir (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 7. 2. For an intriguing essay that argues that Kafka’s real-life experiences with judicial systems influenced his conceptualizations of “the law,” see Reza Banakar, “In Search of Heimat: A Note on Franz Kaka’s Concept of Law,” Law and Literature 22 (2010): 463–490. 3. For more on the concept of “security imaginary,” see Joelien Pretorius, “The Security Imaginary: Explaining Military Isomorphism.” Security Dialogue 39 (2008): 99–120. 4. For an example, see Colleen Bell, “Surveillance Strategies and Populations at Risk: Biopolitical Governance In Canada’s National Security Policy,” Security Dialogue 37, no. 2 (June 2006): 147–165, doi: 10.1177/0967010606066168. 5. The “Vulcans” were the team members of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisers. They included Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage. See James Mann The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). 6. Vern Smalley, “Letter to the Editor: Snowden a Traitor, Deserves Death,” Bozeman Daily Chronicle, last modified January 13, 2014, http:// www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/letters_to_editor/letter-to-the-editorsnowden-a-traitor-deserves-death/article_00d27af4–7c70–11e3–bdb6–001 9bb2963f4.html. 7. Obviously here we are explicitly extending the work of Kenneth Burke, who discussed the selective nature of screens as interpretative networks of beliefs in Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 45. 8. For more on the role that “public screens” play in the formation of salient image events, see John W. Delicath and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Movement.” Argumentation 17 (2003): 315–333. Although Delicath and DeLuca focus on how image events can be deployed by environmental activists, there is no reason why populist defenders of the national security state cannot also utilize some of these same tactics as they comment on everything from cyberattacks to the dangers posed by ISIS. 9. For a very typical defense filled with the conventional commentaries on terrorist “sanctuaries” in places like Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen, see Daniel L. Byman, “Why Drones Work: The Case for Washington’s Weapon of Choice,” Brookings, July/August, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2013/06/17-drones-obama-weaponchoice-us-counterterrorism-byman. 10. For an excellent materialist critique of these types of perpetual wars that takes into account some of those minority views, see Mark Duffield, Development, Security, and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 11. James Comey, quoted in “FBI Director on Threat of ISIS, Cybercrime,” CBSNews.com, last modified October 5, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-directorjames-comey-on-threat-of-isis-cybercrime/2014. 12. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis. (Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Pub,) 1998: 2–5; Didier Bigo, “When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe,” In International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security, and Community, edited by Morton Kelstrup and Michael Williams. London: Routledge, 2000. 171–204. 13. David Fieni and Karim Mattar, “Introduction: Mapping the Global Checkpoint,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (2014): 1. 14. Sean Lawson and Robert W. Gehl, “Convergence Security: Cyber-Surveillance and the Biopolitical Production of Security.” Paper presented at Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: An International Workshop, University of Toronto. 2011.

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15. Aziz Z. Huq, “The Social Production of National Security,” Cornell Law Review 98 (2013): 638–639. 16. Some of the leading “critical” theorists on the social construction of terrorism can be found in the Copenhagen’s school of securitization studies. For an example of how some of this analysis of the normative features of the national security state can be linked to immigration and other mobility issues, see Catherine Charrett, “A Critical Application of Securitization Theory: Overcoming the Normative Dilemma of Writing Security,” Gencat, 2009, http://icip.gencat.cat/web/.content/continguts/publicacions/ workingpapers/arxius/wp7_ang.pdf. 17. See Glenn Greenwald, “Obama DOJ Again Refuses to Tell a Court Whether CIA Drone Program Even Exists,” The Guardian, last modified February 14, 2013, http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/cia-aclu-drone-secrecy. 18. Moviefone Staff, “Zero Dark Thirty: Katheryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Given Secret Access by CIA for Bin Laden Film,” MovieFone, last modified May 24, 2012, http:// news.moviefone.com/2012/05/24/zero-dark-thirty-cia-access-kathryn-bigelow/, 19. Spencer Ackerman, “NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You.” Wired, 18 June 2012. Accessed 03/24/15. http://www.wired.com/2012/06/nsaspied/. 20. Jack Shafer, “Live and Let Leak: State Secrets in the Snowden Era,” Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2014, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140754/jack-shafer/ live-and-let-leak. 21. For populist examples of critiques of these legal standing issues in drone strike contexts, see the comments after Althouse, “The Justice Department Memo Detailing When the U.S. Can Use Drones to Kill Americans,” Althouse, last modified February 5, 2013, http://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-justice-department-memo-detailing.html. For an analysis of the drone wars by one of Code Pink’s founders, see Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (New York OR Books, 2012). For those who are interested in seeing CODEPINK’s website, see “New Book: Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control,” 2012, codepink.org, http://codepink.org/article.php?id=6064. 22. See James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 23. Here our discussion of the “war machine” is indebted to the work of Gilles Deleuze and others who have studied the post-structuralist features of the war on terrorism and the national security state. See, for example, Julian Reid, “Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism Against the State,” Millennium, 32, no. 1 (February 2003): 57–85. 24. Note, for example, the contrasting ways that a professor of law like Peter Margulies writes about the military tribunals of Guantánamo and his more moderate critiques of FISA surveillance policies in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Peter Margulies, “Dynamic Surveillance: Evolving Procedures in Metadata and Foreign Content Collection After Snowden,” Hastings Law Journal (2014). 25. Sean Lawson, “The U.S. Military’s Social Media Civil War: Technology as Antagonism in Discourses of Information-Age Conflict.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs (2013): 1–20. 26. Report of the Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: Timely and Decisive Response,” U.N. General Assembly Security Council, July 25, 2012, http:// www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/UNSG%20Report_timely%20and% 20decisive%20response%281%29.pdf 27. Lawson and Gehl, “Convergence Security.” 28. See Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times, last modified May 29, 2012, http:// files.digitalcitizen.info/nytimes.com/ObamaSecretKillList—NYT2012-05-29.pdf. 29. For more detailed discussion on the relevance of Agamben’s ideas regarding bios and states of exception for theorizing about security states, see Simon Hallsworth and John Lea, “Reconstructing Leviathan: Emerging Contours of the Security State,” Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 2 (May 2011): 141–157, doi: 10.1177/1362480610383451.

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30. For more on this faith in military precision and the omnipotent power of the “Gorgon Stare,” see Ellen Nakashima and Craig Whitlock, “With Air Force’s Gorgon Drone ‘We Can See Everything,’” The Washington Post, last modified January 2, 2011. 31. Huq, “The Social Production of National Security,” 638. 32. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1998; David Jablonsky, “The State of the National Security State,” Parameters 43, no. 4 (Winter 2002–2003), 4, 14. 33. Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter, “The Dronification of State Violence,” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2014): 212–213. DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2014.898452. 34. Danlos, “We’re At War! — and We Have Been Since 1776: 214 Years of American War-Making.” Loonwatch.com, 20 December 2011. Accessed 03/26/15. http:// www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/we-re-at-war-and-we-have-been-since-1776/. 35. For an intriguing social scientific study of the various financial costs of funding some of these campaigns, see Norrin M. Ripsman and T.V. Paul, Globalization and the National Security State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 36. See Matthew C. Waxman, “National Security Federalism in the Age of Terror,” Stanford Law Review (2012): 289–350. 37. Adam Rubin, “Phillies Crowd Erupts in ‘U-S-A’ Cheers,” ESPN New York.com, last modified May 3, 2011, http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/mlb/news/story?id=6463361. 38. For more detailed discussion of this “American Way of War” and some of the potential consequences that flow from adoption of these types of rhetorics, see Leila Hudson, Colin S. Owens, and Matt Flannes, “Drone Warfare: Blowback From the New American Way of War,” Middle East Policy 18 (2011): 122–132. 39. For a brief commentary that illustrates the ubiquitous nature of this national security discourse, see Chris Bray, “Street Legal: The National Security State Comes Home,” The Baffler 23 (July, 2013): 84–91, http://thebaffler.com/past/street_legal. 40. David Luban, “Remembering Abu Ghraib (1): Torture Everywhere and the Accountability Gap,” Just Security, April 28, 2014, http://justsecurity.org/9964/remembering-abu-ghraib-1-torture-accountability-gap/. 41. John W. Whitehead and Steven H. Aden, “Forfeiting ‘Enduring Freedom’ for ‘Homeland Security’: A Constitutional Analysis of the USA Patriot Act and the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Initiatives,” American University Law Review 51 (2002): 1081–1133. 42. For an overview of some of this lawfare disputation, see Mary-Rose Papandrea, “Leaker Traitor Whistleblower Spy: National Security Leaks and the First Amendment,” Boston University Law Review 94 (2014): 449–544. 43. One of us has co-authored work on this topic. See Cynthia D. Love, Sean T. Lawson, and Avery E. Holton, “News From Above: First Amendment Implications of the Federal Aviation Administration Ban on Commercial Drones, Mercatus Working Paper, September 2014, http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Love-CommercialDrone-Ban.pdf. 44. For an excellent discussion of the relevance of the works of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault for national security studies, see Mark Neocleous, “Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 131–149. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300301. 45. See, for example, Jeffrey Michael Clapp, The Confessional Turn, Postwar U.S. Literature and the National Security State (Irvine: University of California Press, Irvine, 2012); Timothy Melley, Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Steven Peacock, Reading 24: TV Against the Clock (NY: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 46. Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double Government. (New York: Oxford University Press), 2014. 47. Glenn Greenwald, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. New York: Working Assets Publishing, 2006; Savage, Charlie,

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Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007. 48. Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003; Priest, Dana. and William M. Arkin. Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2011. 49. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. New York: Nation Books, 2013; Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War At the Ends of the Earth. New York: Penguin Press, 2013; Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014; James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; Norrin M. Ripsman and T.V. Paul, Globalization and the National Security State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 50. This notion of “securitization” was introduced by Buzan, et. al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis. 51. Classical securitization theory draws from J. L. Austin’s speech act theory to describe securitization rhetoric as a performative speech act. See ibid., 26. Though this was an important start, we argue that a more nuanced approach informed by rhetorical studies is needed. 52. One of the best in this genre is Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security: From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 53. Note here the work of Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). 54. Robert L. Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005): 55–65, DOI:10.1080/0143659042000322900. 55. Ralph Langner, “Stuxnet’s Secret Twin,” Foreign Policy, November 19, 2013, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/19/stuxnets_secret_twin _iran_nukes_cyber_attack. 56. On the importance of deterritorialization for critical security studies, see Ole Waever, “The Constellation of Securities in Europe,” in Globalization, Security, and the Nation State: Paradigms in Transition, ed. Ersel Aydinli and James N. Rosenau (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 151–174. 57. Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science From NonScience: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American sociological Review 48 (1983): 781–95. 58. Darren Samuelsohn and Joseph Marks, “Ex-NSA Chief Keith Alexander Seeks Post-Snowden Second Act,” Politico, last modified May 8, 2014. 59. James Ball, Julian Borger, and Glenn Greenwald, “Revealed: How US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Internet Privacy and Security.” The Guardian, 06 September 2013. Accessed 02/28/15. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security; Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald, “How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘millions’ of Computers With Malware.” The Intercept, 12 March 2014. Accessed 02/28/15. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/; Bruce Schneier, “Quantum Technology Sold By Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturers.” Schneier on Security, 14 August 2014. Accessed 10/17/2014. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/08/quantum_technol.html. 60. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004: 6–9. 61. Howard Koplowitz, “Who is in the CIA Torture Report? George Tenet, Hassan Ghul and 6 Other Names to Know From Senate’s Declassified Investigation.” International Business Times, 09 December 2014. Accessed 03/24/15. http://www.ibtimes.com/ who-cia-torture-report-george-tenet-hassan-ghul-6-other-names-know-senates1745209. 62. Many of the most prominent proponents of “lawfare” blog regularly at the Lawfare Blog published by the Brookings Institute. See http://www.lawfareblog.com/.

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63. Dennis Blair, quoted in Greg Miller, “Under Obama, An Emerging Global Apparatus for Drone Killing,” The Washington Post, last modified December 27, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/under-obama-an-emerging-global-apparatus-for-drone-killing/2011/12/13/gIQANPdILP_story.html. 64. We will have more to say about this in chapter seven when we decode some of Snowden’s and Glenn Greenwald’s rhetoric. 65. James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006). 66. See Halpern, “Partial Disclosure.” 67. Glenn Greenwald, “The ‘War on Terror’-By Design, Can Never End,” The Guardian, last modified January 4, 2013, Paragraphs 4, 6, http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/jan/04/war-on-terror-endless-johnson. 68. For an example of a communicative study of vilification, note the work of Marsha L. Vanderford, “Vilification and Social Movements: A Case Study of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Rhetoric,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 75, no. 2 (May, 1989), 166–182, DOI: 10.1080/00335638909383870. See also Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner, “More Good, Less Evil: Contesting the Mythos of National Insecurity in the 2008 Presidential Primaries,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 279–301. 69. On dissociation, see Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). For an example of a communication study that extends this type of analysis, see John Lynch, “Making Room for Stem Cells: Dissociation and Establishing New Research Objects,” Argumentation and Advocacy 42 (2006): 143–156. 70. Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months of NSA Revelations, Says His Mission’s Accomplished,” The Washington Post, last modified December 23, 2013, paragraph 59, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edwardsnowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/ 23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html. 71. CBS DC, “Obama: Rise of ISIS ‘unintended Consequence’ of Iraq Invasion.” CBS DC, 17 March 2015. Accessed 03/18/15. http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/03/17/obama-rise-of-isis-unintended-consequence-of-iraq-invasion/. 72. Jeremy Diamond, “Petraeus: ISIS Isn’t Biggest Long-Term Threat to Region.” CNN, 21 March 2015. Accessed 03/24/15. http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/20/politics/petraeus-greatest-threat-iraq-isis-shiite-militias/index.html. 73. Peter Bergen, “Book Review: The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” The Washington Post, last modified April 5, 2013, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the-way-of-the-knife-the-cia-a-secret-army-and-a-war-at-the-ends-of-the-earth-by-mark-mazzetti/2013/04/05/88e073069af8-11e2-9a79-eb5280c81c63_story.html. 74. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Osama Bin Laden.” Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, 2 May 2011. Accessed 3/19/2015. https:// www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/02/remarks-president-osama-bin-laden. 75. For example, see former U.S. Ambassador John Price’s commentary in John Price “Bin Laden’s Death Hasn’t Stanched Metastasizing of Al Qaeda.” The Washington Times, 31 January 2013. Accessed 03/19/15. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/ 2013/jan/31/bin-ladens-death-hasnt-stanched-metastasizing-of-a/. 76. For an intriguing look at how art can be combined with biopolitics in some of Gorgio Agamben’s work, see Derek Gregory, “The Art of Homo Sacer,” Geographical Imaginations, last modified May 3, 2014, http://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/05/ 03/the-art-of-homo-sacer/. 77. For an excellent overview of Israeli national security cultures and some of the securitizing arguments that have been circulated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1978 Operation Litani and the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense, see Avi Kober, From Heroic to Postheroic Warfare: Israel’s Way of War in Asymmetrical Conflicts,” Armed Forces and Society (2013): 1–27, DOI: 10.1177/0095327X13498224.

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78. Didier Bigo, “When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe,” in International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security, and Community, Morten Kelstrup and Michael Charles Williams, eds. (London: Routledge, 2000), 171–204; Sean Lawson, “Articulation, Antagonism, and Intercalation in Western Military Imaginaries,” Security Dialogue, 42, no. 1 (February 2011): 39–56, doi: 10.1177/0967010610393775. 79. That second chapter argues that mass surveillance-powered kill/capture missions with drones and special forces are the latest manifestation of long-standing and deeply held U.S. defense community beliefs about the challenges and opportunities provided by information and communication technologies in a world whose volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and danger have seemingly intensified since the Cold War and 9/11. 80. Sean Lawson, Nonlinear Science and Warfare: Chaos, Complexity, and the U.S. Military in the Information Age, (London: Routledge, 2014). 81. Jon R. Lindsay, “Reinventing the Revolution: Technological Visions, Counterinsurgent Criticism, and the Rise of Special Operations,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 36, no. 3 (2013) : 422–53, DOI:10.1080/01402390.2012.734252. 82. Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen, “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations,” Spiegel Online, last modified October 4, 2007, http:// www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,509355,00.html. 83. Donovan Conley and William O. Saas, “Occultatio: The Bush Administration’s Rhetorical War,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 4 (July 2010): 329–350, DOI:10.1080/10570314.2010.492822. 84. See, for example, “File: Obama and Biden Await Updates on bin Laden.jpg, Wikipedia, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Obama_and_Biden_await_updates_ on_bin_Laden.jpg. 85. Rock Center with Brian Williams, “Inside White House Situation Room on Anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s Death,” Rockcenter.nbcnews.com, last modified April 27, 2012, http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/27/11416301-inside-whitehouse-situation-room-on-anniversary-of-osama-bin-ladens-death?lite. 86. Nicholas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2011, para. 29. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle? currentPage=all. 87. See Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Megan McFarlane, Cultural Rhetorics of American Exceptionalism and the Bin Laden Raid (New York: Peter Lang, 2013). 88. The legitimation of breaking the law in the name of some transcendent good abounds in popular culture, and especially in television. For example, the television series 24 often legitimized torture and breaking the rules in the name of the greater good of the nation and the need for expediency. Additionally, series like LOST showed torture as a last, but necessary, resort, and the series Scandal displays good people constantly breaking the rules and the law in order to do the right thing. 89. Didier Bigo, “Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance,” in Lyon, D. (ed.) Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006), 46–58; M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). 90. R. Deibert and R. Rohozinski, “Risking Security: Policies and Paradoxes of Cyberspace Security,” International Political Sociology 4, no. 1 (March 2010): 15–32, DOI: 10.1111/j.1749–5687.2009.00088.x. 91. On cyber war as threat inflation, see Myriam Dunn Cavelty, “Cyber-Terror— Looming Threat Or Phantom Menace? The Framing of the US Cyber-Threat Debate,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 4, no. 1 (2008): 19–36; DOI: 10.1300/ J516v04n01_03; Maura Conway, “Media, Fear and the Hyperreal: The Construction of Cyberterrorism as the Ultimate Threat to Critical Infrastructures,” in Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristensen, K.S. (eds) Securing the ‘Homeland’: Critical Infrastructure, Risk and (in)Security, London: Routledge, 2008), 109–29; Brito, J. and Watkins, T. (2011) “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,”

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Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 11–24, April; Myriam Dunn Cavelty, “As Likely as a Visit From E.T,” The European, 7 January 2011. Online. Available HTTP: http:// www.theeuropean-magazine.com/133-cavelty/134-cyberwar-and-cyberfear (accessed 7 January 2011); Sean Lawson, (2012) “Putting the ‘War’ in Cyberwar: Metaphor, Analogy, and Cybersecurity Discourse in the United States,” First Monday, 17 (7) (2012); and Sean Lawson, “Beyond Cyber-Doom: Assessing the Limits of Hypothetical Scenarios in the Framing of Cyber-Threats,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2012, OnlineFirst. On the idea concept of “threat inflation,” see A.T. Thrall, and J.K. Cramer, (eds) (2009) American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation Since 9/11, London: Routledge. 92. Sauer and Schőrnig,”Killer Drones,” 363. 93. On the role that leaks played before the Snowden revelations, see Rahul Sagar, Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 94. On the relevance of R2P for the planning of national security states, see Theresa Reinold, “State Weakness, Irregular Warfare, and the Right to Self-Defense Post-9/11,” American Journal of International Law 105 (2011): 244–286; Frank Sauer and Niklas Schőrnig, “Killer Drones: “The Silver Bullet of Democratic Warfare?” Security Dialogue 43, no. 4 (August 2012): 363–380, doi: 10.1177/0967010612450207.

TWO Military “Science” and the Legitimation of Preventive War, Mass Surveillance, and Kill/Capture Counterterrorism

In the last several years, public and media attention has focused increasingly on the U.S. counterterrorism program, including drone strikes and Special Forces raids, and more recently, its policies and practices of mass surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA). It is tempting to see these two sets of practices, counterterrorism and mass surveillance, as distinct and unprecedented. It is also tempting to seek naturalistic and pessimistic explanations—i.e. they are the manifestations of the dark side of human nature, which leads those in power to always seek more power and, inevitably, to abuse their power. 1 But in this chapter we argue that readers should not give in to these temptations, for doing so prevents us from adequately understanding the emergence of these practices, including their genealogy and how they have been warranted by their proponents. John Yoo, in his 2014 book, Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare, 2 may be summarily dismissive of some of the restrictive IHL frameworks that have built on the Charter of the U.N. as he paints hagiographic pictures of America’s “new system” of defensive and prevent measures, but we hope to show that cosmopolitan critics of both U.S. mass surveillance policies and current counterterrorism practices have much to tell us about the power of nation states. We will argue that a study of various bureaucratic rhetorics, as well as critical investigations of select “military science,” can inform the ways that we understand the selective nature of U.S. “preventive” warfare. 3 As we note in more detail below, talk of just wars, 4 imminent threats, the need for constant surveillance, and just the right “kill31

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chain” have occupied the attention of an increasing number of military experts and securitization think-tanks. This chapter argues that mass surveillance-powered kill/capture missions with drones and Special Forces are the latest manifestation of longstanding and deeply held U.S. defense community beliefs. More specifically, the supposed “new” GWOT involves a lot of old wine in new bottles, where today’s information and communication technologies are redeployed in a world whose volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and danger have seemingly intensified following the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As we noted in chapter one, though it is instructive to analyze the public discourse of elites who talk and write about national security, such as the president, it is important to understand that theories of world affairs, along with the strategies and doctrines for action that accompany them, emerge from the everyday work of military and security professionals who operate within the bureaucracies of the national security state. 5 For these professionals, the development of military scientific knowledge, or securitization theories, including of threats and possible responses, are seen as topics that are inherently scientific in nature, that ought to be handled by military scientists who have immersed themselves in the study of everything from quantifiable risk to the “lessons” that are learned from related psychological, social, cultural, and behavior studies. What’s more, in constructing such knowledge for America’s national security state, military and security professionals are fond of borrowing language and concepts from the preeminent sciences of the day. Both as a practice to be mimicked and as a storehouse of knowledge from which to borrow, military “science” and professional securitized studies serve as rhetorical resources for the construction and legitimation of military theories, strategies, and doctrines. 6 Later on, in other chapters, we will have more to say about drones and NSA’s role in containing the efforts of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, but for now we wish to emphasize the bureaucratic nature of some of the various aspects of the national security state that are parts of the dispositifs and assemblages that are produced by the professionals who talk and write about much more than just Snowden’s role in these affairs. This chapter demonstrates that mass surveillance and kill/capture missions are not distinct practices, but rather, synergistic elements of the United States’ overall counter-terrorism strategy. It also shows that they share a great debt to a series of theoretical, strategic, and doctrinal developments made by military professionals over the last twenty-five or more years. 7 We will argue that mass surveillance-powered kill/capture is deeply imbricated with longstanding trends in U.S. military “science” and, by extension, the wider U.S. culture, which is part of what makes these practices such a potent (rhetorical) force. Elites and publics who believe that they live in a state of insecurity and exceptional dangers are

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already predisposed to believe in the importance of having strong state powers that can respond to specific exigencies, but the persuasive power of these operative logics are magnified when they converge, reiterate, and coalesce in the scientific rhetorics that are purveyed by those who are convinced that finding the right military doctrine will ensure the success of America’s counterterrorism or counterinsurgency efforts. We begin with a discussion of the symbolic and material links that exist between metadata collection, mass surveillance, and drone strikes. KILLING PONIS WITH OUR LITTLE DRONEY There are two reasons why the connection between mass surveillance and targeted killing with drones might not be immediately apparent. First is that, until recently, when Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald teamed up to report on the connections between NSA mass surveillance and the U.S. drone program, 8 there was a slight shift in public attention in the wake of the Snowden revelations. For example, in the spring of 2013, there was a great deal of public attention, much of it critical, that spotlighted the aftermaths of U.S. drone strikes. As a result, President Obama gave a major speech in May 2013 seeking to clarify U.S. drone policy, and he vowed to decrease the number of strikes that were being carried out outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. But then, in early June, the first of the revelations of NSA mass surveillance were published that were based on the documents that were provided to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. As the revelations trickled out over the next several months, the public, policymakers, and news media were captivated, and, for a time, there was at least a slight decrease in media attention to drones. Second, the inability of officials to prove that mass surveillance has prevented specific terrorist attacks might lead us to believe that there is not, in fact, a clear relationship between mass surveillance and counterterrorism. Since the Snowden revelations, critics have asked officials to justify mass surveillance by identifying how many terrorist attacks they have prevented as a result. Initially, the Director of NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, claimed that bulk collection of telephone metadata contributed to the prevention of fifty-four terrorist attacks. But when pressed, the Deputy Director of NSA, John Inglis, later admitted that the program had only been critical to preventing one terrorist plot. 9 None of this prevented President Obama from also asserting during the fall of 2013 that we “know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany.” 10 The general idiomatic scopic regimes that underscored the importance of preventing, deterring, or pre-empting all types of ter-

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rorism could therefore be viewed through acts of “remote violence and surveillant witnessing.” 11 In the next several pages, we will demonstrate the close ties that exist between mass surveillance and targeted killing in what military professionals call “counter-network operations” and “global manhunting” against so-called “persons of national interest,” or PONIs. 12 We will argue that these practices are reflective of a highly influential philosophy of prevention. Understanding this philosophy is critical to understanding the ideological relationships that exist between defenses of mass surveillance and advocacy of targeted killing. As Scahill and Greenwald have recently noted, there is an intimate, even reciprocal relationship between NSA surveillance and U.S. counterterrorism operations. 13 Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States’ “war on terror” has served as the primary catalyst for the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) to collect ever greater amounts of information in an effort to “connect the dots” and prevent another 9/11-style attack on the United States. In theory, the collection of all of this metadata, when parsed and analyzed by experts, allows for the constitutive production of CIA mosaics that can be used to facilitate even more global man hunting. Similarly, U.S. counterterrorism operations have served as a source for facilitating intelligence-gathering. U.S. drones and special operations kill/capture teams, in addition to carrying out strikes against suspected terrorists, also gather intelligence that feeds back into the intelligencegathering and processing loops. Since at least 1992, the U.S. defense community has spoken of the need to create true “reconnaissance-strike platforms,” to shorten the “sensor-to-shooter loop,” and to make “every soldier a sensor,” that is, to reduce or even eliminate the boundaries between detecting and striking a target. 14 Drones and special operations kill/capture teams are, thus far, the apotheosis of that vision. Note how this supports the position that we took in chapter one, that spending so much time on how to carry out counterterrorist operations deflects attention from the propriety and legality of all of this in the first place. It also increases the number of social agents who can say that they played a major role in taking out the “bad guys.” Countless commentators have talked about the alleged novelty of these approaches, but Scahill and Greenwald were not the first to comment on the connections that existed between NSA surveillance and U.S. counterterrorism operation. In 2010, for example, Shane Harris, in his book, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, reported that as early as 2001, during the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the NSA provided terrorist location data to the American military that was based on communication intercepts. 15 The use of cell phone data in particular to “geo-locate” and then strike an individual terrorist suspect in late 2001 led to the creation of “Geo Cell,” a collaboration between NSA and the

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National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, whose motto was, “We track ’em, you whack ’em.” 16 Technological innovations worked hand-in-hand with counterterrorist ideologies as military specialists reported on the efficacy of their combined efforts. Perceptual victories help with securing of funding, and the public and elite demonstration of this capability drove a desire to collect even more of this type of data. Harris reports that the goal for U.S. intelligence officials like General Michael Hayden, then director of NSA, was to know more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. A type of military orientalism rose to the surface as military experts assured themselves, and others, that they knew more and more about the enemy’s culture, behavioral patterns, and network-centric warfare. Harris says, “But to accomplish that feat the NSA would have to collect more—a lot more—in places that had traditionally been out of bounds.” 17 From a critical rhetorical vantage point this allows us to see how many of those enamored with America’s technical prowess realized that they were skirting the limits of the legal and ethical limits of data collection, but the imperatives of war seemed to provide perceptual trump cards for those who understood the transcendent importance of military necessities. The very gathering of this information—and not just the content of the information—could be configured as NSA activities that justified the risks, even in cases where others might bring up questions of national sovereignty, individual privacy rights, comity, or the need for accountability or transparency. Many were convinced that national security states must be voracious consumers of metadata, and no other means could be found to keep track of mobile Al Qaeda or Taliban warriors. Through reporting on the Snowden documents, we would later learn that this included telephone metadata, Internet browsing history, emails, chats, Voice over IP (VOIP) calls, credit card transactions, and much more, some of the data that had to do with the domestic lives of American citizens. As long as any tangential link could be made to terrorism abroad, then all sorts of intelligence gathering could be condoned and funded at home. Interestingly enough, some of the first impacts of the NSA’s effort to collect more were felt in Iraq. In response to the growing threat from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Gen. Alexander vowed to collect every bit of Iraqi electronic communications data that he could find. One former intelligence official is quoted as saying, “Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack.’” 18 One result was NSA’s creation, in 2004, of what it called the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG) to support Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) kill/capture missions against “high-value targets” (HVTs) in Iraq. The system served to allow military and intelligence personnel to “fuse” vast amounts of information, from communications intercepts to captured documents to human intelligence, all in an effort to

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speed JSOC kill/capture missions. 19 One of the RTRG’s developers has described the system’s capabilities and use: Imagine that you are in Iraq. You have insurgents. They are on the telephone, making phone calls. That signal would be intercepted by ground [antennas], by the aircraft network and by the space network. If you’re smart enough to combine all that data in real time, you can determine where Dick is out there. He’s in block 23 down there, and he just said he’s going to place a bomb. That’s the real-time regional gateway: the ability to integrate the signals [for] geolocation. […][I]nformation…comes into a location where somebody can actually say…‘We have verification that this bad guy is in this location: Go and get him.’ 20

These commentaries on geolocations, data in real time, and imaginary insurgent practices may have convinced readers of the importance of having surveillance of a terrorist “Other,” but all of this obfuscated the ways that the NSA was collecting data during periods that had nothing to do with wartime situations. Yet for many of those who already placed their faith in the beneficence of the national security state, the mere possibility that the gathering of this type of data might save the life of an American soldier seemed to justify the collection of all sorts of metadata. Much of this talk of intelligence gathering hid the lethal power of the same nation state that had plenty of decision-makers who were just itching to take out bad guys. Jeremy Scahill, quoting journalist Mark Urban, reports that the location where the information arrived and where decisions to strike were made was the JSOC Joint Operations Center. Some JSOC operators referred to it as “the Death Star because of the sense that ‘you could just reach out with a finger, as it were, and eliminate somebody.’ Others who watched live the white splash of five-hundred-pound bombs on image-intensifier cameras referred to the screens above them as ‘Kill TV.’” The JSOC command center was known as “the factory” or “the shop floor.” General Stanley McChrystal was fond of calling the kill/ capture apparatus “the machine.” 21 All of this clinical language became a part of what Professor Kevin Jon Heller called “one hell of a killing machine.” 22 This type of nomenclature, that depended on the suturing together of lexicons related to NSA intelligence-gathering and drone technologies, created the impression that both high-value and “mid-level” targets had nowhere to hide. What added to the allure of all of this military jargon was the belief that scientific progress was helping with the development of more “precise” weaponry that would be more discriminating, and thus less objectionable to international communities. As with their initial experience using cell phone geolocation in Afghanistan, the lesson learned from RTRG’s use in Iraq was that feeding more and more data into the system led to better analysis, and this put on display “an ability to predict attacks

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60% to 70% of the time,” as one former U.S. counterterrorism official told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s the ultimate correlation tool. It is literally being able to predict the future,” the official said. 23 In theory, military scientists had helped provide a type of weaponry that was also less objectionable from a normative standpoint, and this in turn fueled the drive for more data collection. With endorsements like this, it is not surprising that the system was also deployed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, this time with the code name JESTER. 24 To cope with the glut of intelligence being collected in its efforts to track down and kill terrorists, the NSA created the Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell (CT MAC). One former intelligence official described NSA efforts, saying, “NSA threw the kitchen sink at the FATA,” the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. 25 The circulation of empirical information in the aftermath of these attacks could also be used to justify these collecting efforts. Based on the Snowden documents, it was argued that we know that NSA surveillance was key to helping with the killing at least one suspected terrorist, Hasan Ghul, in Pakistan. 26 Former director of both National Intelligence and NSA Mike McConnell summed up NSA capabilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally.” 27 Over time an increasing number of participants in these surveillance efforts could join the ranks of defenders of the NSA who thought that they were privy to information that escaped the attention of detractors. In the face of criticism of the NSA, some speculated that revelations of NSA’s role in drone strikes and kill/capture missions might finally justify NSA mass surveillance. Indeed, it has been reported that NSA surveillance has contributed to killing more than 3,000 people in Pakistan alone, 28 and this could all be configured as lethal strikes that prevented many future attacks on Americans, Pakistanis, or Coalition allies. One of the key issues, of course, is whether all of this was wishful thinking or whether there really was some direct, linear correlation between the collection of information from NSA mass surveillance and the taking out of thousands of the enemy. As noted above, officials, when pressed, have not been able to provide compelling evidence (publicly, at least) that these types of mass surveillance-enabled assassinations have prevented particular, imminent terrorist attacks. It is hard to believe that there have been enough imminent attacks to spark drone strikes killing more than 3,000 people in Pakistan alone, but this has not stopped either defenders of the NSA or drone advocates from talking and writing about the efficacy of “decapitation” of the enemy. This is why it is important to recognize that the philosophy of prevention underlying these kinds of strikes runs counter to some popular conceptions of prevention. When imagining the prevention of terrorist attacks, one might be tempted to recall scenes from the popular television

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drama 24. In this show, the hero, agent Jack Bauer, races about as an everpresent clock ticks down to an imminent terrorist attack that only he can prevent. There are specific bad guys planning specific and imminent attacks that must be prevented. This understanding of imminence and prevention is what is assumed when lawmakers, journalists, or others ask intelligence officials to justify mass surveillance by pointing to the terrorist plots they have helped to prevent. But this is not the understanding of these terms that has shaped U.S. counterterrorism practices in the wake of September 11, 2001. As a number of scholars have noted, though the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS 2002) used the language of “preemption,” the strategy it sought to implement was actually one of prevention. 29 For experts, prevention and preemption are, in fact, two different things, but in popular parlance these terms are used to describe the same phenomenon. When American lawmakers and others ask officials about preventing terrorist attacks, they are really asking about what experts call “preemption.” But U.S. counterterrorism strategy, since at least 2002, has been based on a philosophy of prevention. What’s more, there are at least two different types of prevention: prevention of imminence and prevention of emergence. If we put threats on a timeline, on one end we would have gathering, potential, or emergent threats, and on the other end we would have the realization of a particular threat or threats. However, between gathering/potential/emergent and threat realization would be that mysterious imminent threat. For critics of both drone strikes and mass surveillance by the NSA, the promiscuous use of “imminent” threats, and the conflation of prevention and preemption, serve as strategically ambiguous ways of not only hyping dangers but marshaling public support for what should be controversial programs. Prior to 9/11, there was a widespread belief that the world was newly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous in the wake of the Cold War’s end. 30 As such, there was a lot of talk in the U.S. defense community about creating a military that was flexible and adaptable, able to rapidly respond to new challenges. Even some of those who would later promote a national strategy of preventive use of force counseled in the years before 9/11 that the best the United States could hope for was rapid reaction to the unforeseen challenges that it would face. 31 So, one possible response to threats occurs after their realization, and that is rapid reaction to mitigate their effects. Moving a step to the left on our threat timeline, we have imminent threats. Such threats represent a clear and present danger, and action might be taken to prevent imminent threats from becoming threats that need preemptive action. A more traditional example might be a first strike against enemy tanks that are amassing on one’s borders. Jack Bauer hunting down an individual or small group as the clock ticks down to an impending attack is another.

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The differences that exist between preventive and preemptive measures are more than a matter of semantics, because they carry along with them ideological baggage regarding the response that is warranted during times of war. In the wake of 9/11, we saw a shift towards approaches focused even further to the left on the threat timeline. The Bush administration’s NSS 2002 spoke of “gathering” threats, which are emergent, potential threats that are foreseeable but are not on the verge of being realized. This provided space for more aggressive warfighting because it assumed that nation states had an inherent right of self-defense that was recognized by the U.N., and if time was of the essence, and if your military scientists had detected an emergent threat, then in theory your military was authorized to respond to that threat before it became “imminent.” Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were an example of this type of threat, and members of the American public were not going to worry about the potential existence in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of chemical-biological weapons. While not (yet) an imminent threat, Iraqi WMD seemed at least a plausible, potential, foreseeable, future threat that the Coalition had to deal with. What’s more, the specter of threat realization in the case of WMD was so terrifying that preemption or prevention seemed the only viable responses; rapid reaction was out. But even preemption was ruled out as a too risky scenario. Officials worried that the time between detection of the imminent threat and its realization might not allow for preemption. Thus, this kairotic moment signaled the need for preventive action. Not all Coalition allies accepted this way of writing or talking about preventive measures, but the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 could be configured as an example of both preventing imminence and preventing emerging threats. In the first case, it was an attempt to prevent the movement of an emergent, “gathering” threat (Iraqi WMD) to turn into an imminent threat. But, more importantly, from the public explanations of some of those most intimately involved in the development of Bush administration foreign policy and military strategizing, as well as the text of NSS 2002 itself, we know that it was also an attempt to prevent the possibility of gathering/potential/emergent threats in the future. To the degree that an attack on Iraqi WMD could send a warning to other possible proliferators, and to the extent that a democratic, capitalist Iraq in the heart of the Middle East could help to change that region, military action against Iraq was also meant to help prevent the emergence of similar future threats. 32 All of this is obviously based on perceptions, and threats cannot be “gathering” or viewed as imminent if they never existed in the first place. This was the initial rationale for the U.S. invasion, as well as the “armed social work” counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy meant to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat after the rise of the insurgency. All of the

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American countermeasures were rooted in the philosophy of preventing emergence. 33 By now readers can understand why we think that American strategists were taking advantage of the rhetorical slippage that existed between prevention and preemption, emergence and imminence. Parsing of the terms that appeared in domestic jurisprudential texts, drone memos, or international codes often dictated how members of the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administration were going to rationalize their deployments of overwhelming force overseas. In the case of drone strikes and JSOC kill/capture missions against terrorism suspects, decision-makers realized that they needed to be all about preventing “imminence.” This was made clear in 2013 when NBC News obtained a copy of an Obama administration Department of Justice “white paper” that addressed the question of when it was legal to target American citizens who were suspected of working with al-Qaeda. In effect, the white paper redefines imminent to mean the opposite of what it normally means in international legal parlance. The white paper states that “an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” This “broader concept of imminence” is not only incredibly self-serving—it also flies in the face of the traditional ways that military experts talked about prevention and pre-emption. 34 A critical, ideological critique of the white paper reveals how this text was presenting an American exceptionalist way of conceptualizing the terrorist threats that were allegedly posed by individuals like Anwar AlAwlaki. This particular, idiosyncratic reading of this situation was necessary, the document posits, because the traditional definition, “which would require the United States to refrain from action until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself” by “heading off future disastrous attacks on Americans.” 35 This all magnified the threat, and the document invited readers to believe that time was of the essence. This makes the propagandist, Al-Awlaki, look like the embodiment of an imminent threat, and of course it is those who send down orders to drone crews that get to define what does, and does not, constitute that imminent threat. This creates even more headaches for both critics of mass surveillance or drone usage because this mixes and matches two different strategies of prevention that emerged in the same conflict, Operation Iraqi Freedom. One could argue that the two, in fact, work at cross-purposes. In particular, there is concern that efforts to prevent imminent attacks via the use of drone strikes and JSOC kill/capture missions actually work to undo whatever positive “military” results may have been achieved through COIN’s attempts to remove the conditions of possibility that allow for the emergence of new threats in the first place. In other words, some types of

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preventive warfare hurt the efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of Iraqi or Afghan populations, and this in turn fuels the possibility of having more imminent threats. We understand, of course, that some of those involved in the development and implementation of these strategies have expressed their doubts about the efficacy of these efforts. 36 In sum, we believe that it is clear that American strategists are convinced that mass surveillance is a key enabler of drone strikes and kill/ capture missions against suspected terrorists, and that this strategy is not about the Jack Bauer-style preemption of imminent attacks, but rather, the prevention of imminent threats, that are often defined temporally. Understanding the logic of preventive action helps, but as one critic of U.S. drone strikes has asked, “Why. . . do we think that targeting what we consider key terrorists with drone strikes will bring down their network as a whole?” 37 Understanding that mass surveillance-enabled drone strikes are reflective of a strategy of preventing imminence does not tell us how and why the U.S. defense community came to believe that this strategy was necessary for victory in the “war on terror.” It is to this question that we turn in the next two sections. KILLER BUTTERFLIES The United States’ counterterrorism strategy did not emerge out of nowhere. To one degree or another, it is an emergent effect of the theoretical and strategic variations that came before it. In those variations, nonlinear science, in particular chaos theory and complexity theory, served as a profoundly important formative factor for American planners. 38 The nonlinear science-inspired theory of the world and strategy to accompany it that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century can be found at the root of current U.S. counterterrorism strategy. That theory rests on a belief that the world, ourselves, and our adversaries all operate as complex adaptive systems, posing a unique combination of threats and opportunities. The strategic implications are believed to include a need to adopt network technologies and forms of organization, but also the necessity of preventive use of force, not only against other nations perceived as threats, but also against so-called “super-empowered” individuals and small groups. The term “nonlinear science” refers most commonly to chaos theory, complexity theory, network theory, and catastrophe theory. In recent decades, scientists have found that a wide variety of natural and social systems exhibit characteristics of chaotic, nonlinear, and complex adaptive behaviors. Though these systems exhibit a great number of characteristics, there are a few that have been of most interest to military theorists. Structurally, these systems are typically composed of a great number of interacting elements that are linked together in networks, as opposed to

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hierarchies. Behaviorally, they are prone to experiencing nonlinear effects. This means that incremental, small changes to the initial conditions of the system can result in disproportionate effects, either positive or negative. Colloquially, this is often called the “butterfly effect,” the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a major weather event like a tornado. Another nonlinear effect is the emergence of patterns or seemingly purposive, stable behavior via self-organization. These higher-level patterns and behaviors emerge from seemingly chaotic interaction of the elements at lower levels in the system and are largely unpredictable to the outside observer. 39 Current U.S. counterterrorism strategy embodies a nonlinear scienceinspired worldview that began to emerge during the 1980s and intensified during the 1990s. As early as the 1980s, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd drew from popular science texts, including early popularizations of nonlinear science, 40 in his development of the now widely accepted OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Attack) loop model of conflict and his advocacy for the adoption of maneuver warfare. Both the U.S. Army and Marine Corps adopted maneuver warfare doctrines during the 1980s. The authors of those doctrines commonly referred to the battlefield as complex and nonlinear, spoke of the need for thriving on chaos, and even exploiting chaos to cause cascading failures in the adversary. 41 Though the use of nonlinear science was only implicit among the developers of maneuver warfare during the 1980s, uniformed and civilian members of the U.S. defense community made increasingly explicit references to nonlinear science during the 1990s. This increasing interest in the sciences of chaos, complexity, and networks coincided with the end of the Cold War, the rise of the World Wide Web, and an increasing sense within the defense community that the world was newly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, or simply VUCA. 42 It also coincided with an explosion of popular press works on nonlinear science, 43 as well as works on the implications of networked information and communication technologies. 44 Conference conversations provide one key indication of the growing importance of nonlinear scientific thinking for military planners. Military nonlinearists who came together at a 1996 National Defense University conference on complexity theory and national security were in agreement that the international system operates as a complex system. 45 One individual who attended the conference, Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, was a key developer of the theory of network-centric warfare (NCW), the driving vision behind Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “military transformation” efforts, as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The NCW theory was based primarily on Cebrowski and his co-authors’ understandings of complexity theory as it had been applied to economics and business management. Using a term borrowed from the study of complex

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adaptive systems, Cebrowski explained that the international environment of the Information Age is subject to “system perturbations”—i.e. butterfly effects—as a result of the dense interconnectivity provided by the spread of networked ICTs. He said, A systems perturbation is essentially a vertical shock to the international system from which horizontal waves propagate. [ . . . ] It has a ripple effect and it is so disruptive that when it happens new rules are created, they mix with old ones, and a new reality is created. What is happening here is that propagation is related to the density of the medium. In the information age we have a[]…sufficiently dense medium where it can sustain the propagation of the perturbation. That is much of what we witnessed post–9/11. 46

This type of commentary on perturbations was supposed to help provide guidance to the military planners who were facing irregular foes who fought asymmetrical foes using diffuse, terrorist “cells.” But it was not just the international system that was seen as a complex system. America’s emerging adversaries were also increasingly described in these terms. In the late 1980s, and throughout the 1990s, members of the U.S. defense community showed increasing interest in non-state threats, terrorism and insurgency in particular. As early as 1989, a group of John Boyd’s followers theorized that new ICTs would empower nonstate actors to threaten states in a way never before seen, leading to the emergence of what they called “fourth generation warfare” (4GW). 47 In 1992, the leading RMA theorists, Krepinevich and Marshall, identified ICT-enabled non-state actors, terrorists and insurgents in particular, as “the most formidable threat the United States will face over the next 10–20 years.” 48 Several real-world experiences contributed to the spread of this fear during the 1990s, including the famous 1993 “black hawk down” incident in Somalia, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the Aum Shinrikyo’s use of nerve gas in a Tokyo subway in 1995. 49 By the end of the decade, there was a robust discussion of the pending threat from a new form of terrorism, mass casualty-inducing in its effects and global in its scope. 50 Fears that network-enabled, non-state actors could emerge from the VUCA international system to cause catastrophe were seemingly realized on September 11, 2001. For NCW theorists, Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were exemplary of network-enabled shifts in power’s distribution within the international system, but also of the system’s complexity and susceptibility to system perturbations. That is, groups like Al Qaeda are able leverage networked ICTs to cause global-scale system perturbations like 9/11. 51 Al Qaeda and 9/11 signaled the emergence of dangerous, networkenabled, “super-empowered” individuals and small groups. 52 The 4GW theorists, who had first warned of the rise of non-state actors, argued that understanding terrorist groups as complex adaptive

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networks was key to defeating them. 53 Likewise, the developers of the COIN doctrine implemented by the United States in Iraq in 2007 drew from nonlinear science to explain how terrorist and insurgent groups operated and how to defeat them. 54 The joint Army/Marine COIN manual, FM 3–24, advised that “systems thinking” was necessary for success because it "is based on the perspective of the systems sciences that seeks [sic] to understand the interconnectedness, complexity, and wholeness of the elements of systems in relation to one another.” 55 Together, NCW, 4GW, and COIN theorists drew a number of lessons from nonlinear science for effectively coping in a complex international system and combatting the emergence of dangerous, “super-empowered” enemies who are complex networks. As early as 2002, a leading military theorist advised that “it takes a network to fight a network.” 56 This belief was at the heart of Rumsfeld’s “military transformation” efforts, which meant the implementation of NCW, an effort led by Cebrowski as director of Force Transformation. If our adversaries were networkenabled, super-empowered groups that are complex adaptive systems, then Cebrowski argued that the U.S. military must “morph . . . to mirror the target set.” 57 Digitally networking the force, NCW theorists believed, would turn the military into a complex adaptive system capable of defeating terrorists via self-organization and “altering the initial conditions” of the complex, nonlinear battlespace of the “war on terror.” 58 As one officer in the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies wrote in 2009, the goal was to “meet complexity with complexity and attain victory.” 59 Though the technological initiatives associated with military transformation received the lion’s share of attention from outside observers, supporters and critics alike, NCW advocates in the Bush administration did not merely focus on technology. For them, NCW was also an “operating theory of the world and a military strategy to accompany it” 60 providing a “larger vision” of the post–9/11 global environment, as well as “a centralizing, ordering principle [for] the way defense is going to be used.” 61 As we noted in chapter one there are all different ways that military strategists can invent new terrorist enemies or inflate the power of their opponents, and in this particular case it became obvious that all of this talk of chaos and nonlinear science dovetailed with motivations of those who wanted to take the fight to terrorist enemies overseas. After all, if the entire world was chaotic and Al Qaeda was deploying adaptive networkcentric warfare, did it make sense for Americans to hunker down on the U.S. mainland and wait on the next 9/11 attack? All of this talk about nonlinear science meant that military planners, like Cebrowski, could now explain to listeners that “[d]eterrence now has to be based on prevention.” 62 Preventive use of military force, what NCW theorists sometimes called “deterring forward,” “rule-set exportation,” or “exporting security,” would allow the United States to “alter the

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initial conditions” of the complex system of global affairs, thereby “mastering system perturbations” and preventing the emergence of terrorist threats. 63 The preventive use of force against Iraq was a centerpiece of this strategy, the first step towards alleviating once and for all the conditions that NCW theorists believed contributed to the rise of globally networked, super-empowered terrorists. 64 Even though the COIN doctrine was implemented in Iraq after NCW failed to achieve the swift victory planners had predicted, COIN advocates still accepted the NCW vision of the world. Theorists like David Kilcullen and John Nagl, recognized as two of the leading counterinsurgent experts, saw in globalization and the spread of networked ICTs powerful enablers of super-empowered individuals and groups that threatened the United States. 65 These views made their way into the Army/Marine counterinsurgency (COIN) manual, 66 as did Nagl’s acceptance of the idea that true security would require using the U.S. military to alleviate the conditions that lead to the emergence of terrorist threats. 67 In places like Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy New England academics rubbed shoulders with veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraq Freedom, and talk of COIN policies and the need for deterrence was often linked to human rights concerns. The 2006 Army/Marine COIN manual, that was supposed to evidence a paradigmatic shift away from the violent “shock and awe” 2003 policies, echoed these views, and the authors of this text were asserting that defeating a global insurgency like Al Qaeda “requires a global, strategic response—one that addresses the array of linked resources and conflicts that sustain these movements while tactically addressing the local grievances that feed them.” 68 As COIN critic Andrew Bacevich noted, “when the manual referred to the ‘conduct of COIN operations anywhere in the world’, the word anywhere was synonymous with everywhere. [ . . . ] In the broken quarters of the world, many more Iraqs waited.” 69 The adoption of the manual was sold to both conservatives and liberals as a text filled with strategies and tactics for avoiding having to send more of America’s sons and daughters overseas, but the question was whether this type of “soft power” was going to embolden those who sought more overseas contingency operations. Not surprisingly, some of the same advocates who pushed for the need for unregulated NSA mass surveillance, or the continued usage of “extra-territorial” drone strikes, also worked at promoting the COIN manual as the text that would provide guidance for future military humanitarians. All of these COIN rhetorics could ideologically drift in a host of different directions, and within a matter of years it became clear that NCW, and then the COIN visions of “preventive” force, would not just be used against other nations that might threaten the American homeland. Individuals would be targets as well. As Cebrowski and his co-author, Thomas Barnett, explained in 2003, transforming into “a military of super-

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empowered individuals [capable of] fighting wars against super-empowered individuals . . . moves the military toward an embrace of a more sharply focused global cop role: we increasingly specialize in neutralizing bad people who do bad things.” 70 These lessons were not lost on those who wanted to take the fight to the enemy, but do so in ways that did not betray America’s martial values. These preventive wars had to be fought in ways that avoided the taint of another Abu Ghraib or Haditha. During the Iraq “surge” led by Gen. David Petraeus, JSOC perfected “manhunting” capabilities for kill or capture operations against individual “high-value targets” or “persons of national interest.” 71 These so-called “counter-network operations” relying on a high-tempo, iterative cycles of intelligence and operations were meant to “generate a lethal momentum that causes insurgent networks to collapse catastrophically.” 72 American publics were constantly reassured that not all denizens living in occupied lands would become the targets of these types of raids, and biometric data was collected in order to discriminate between friendly civilians and enemy foes. 73 All types of non-linear ideas and military sciences were used in convergent paradigms that assumed that the destruction of networks would lead to the “end” of major terrorist threats. Theorists of 4GW often shared similar views regarding the potential of America’s counterterrorist capabilities. For example, drawing explicitly from nonlinear science, Robb explained that, “you can collapse networks relatively easily.” 74 He argued that dense interconnectivity and “tight coupling” made complex networks susceptible to butterfly-effect, cascading failures. 75 Causing cascading failures was possible, he said, by attacking “the operation of the hubs” of the network, that is, the network’s most connected nodes. 76 Likewise, Hammes, a popular war veteran concluded, “We should be able to break terror networks into much smaller and less effective elements” via “the simultaneous elimination of multiple power nodes.” In a terrorist network, “power nodes” could include “key leaders” or other human or infrastructural nodes that allow the group to operate in a coherent, directed way. 77 In short, NCW, COIN, and 4GW theorists all drew from nonlinear science in their attempts to understand the unique challenges of the post–9/11 international environment and offer effective strategies for response. Though they certainly did not agree on everything, all agreed that the world and our adversaries operated as complex systems. They agreed that fighting a complex network required becoming a complex network oneself. At the same time they agreed that one could alter the initial conditions of a complex network as a means of preventing the emergence of new threats. Most importantly, they agreed that complex networks were susceptible to cascading failure, capable of being defeated, if “key nodes”—i.e. highly connected individuals—could be destroyed.

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Indeed, the supposed lessons of nonlinear science seemed to indicate that targeted kill/capture operations against individuals should be the preferred tactic for combatting complex terrorist and insurgent networks. These theories, and in particular the nonlinear science-inspired lessons found in them, remain key formative factors in current U.S. counterterrorism strategy. BIG DATA, VISUAL ANALYTICS, AND INFORMATION DOMINANCE Cascading failures, system perturbations, negative butterfly effects, vertical shocks—the emergence of these directed at our own systems was to be detected and prevented. Conversely, by targeting key nodes in the enemy network, these effects were to be courted as the key to collapsing those networks and delivering victory. But how would the United States detect the emergence of potential new threats in time to prevent their imminence or realization? How would it know which nodes were the key nodes to target in “counter-network operations”? The answer came from the emergent, interdisciplinary field of network science and, in particular, the tools and techniques of social network analysis. This science and its tools for visual analytics of big data promised to allow U.S. defense and intelligence agencies literally to “connect the dots” that some important people within the U.S. intelligence community believed had, in fact, been connected prior to 9/11, but then discarded because of misplaced privacy concerns. Determined not to repeat these mistakes, since 9/11, social network analysis has spread within the U.S. national security community. We would go so far as to argue that the science of complex networks is the science of kill/capture. Faith in the progress of America’s military sciences fueled speculation that the U.S. could take advantage of nonlinear science and social network analysis to harness global chaos to its own advantage. In his forward to the published proceedings from the 1996 National Defense University conference on complexity theory, the president of the university, Lt. Gen. Ervin J. Rokke, expressed hope that insights from “new sciences” could help the military come to grips with the VUCA, post-Cold War world. He wrote, “Complexity theory contends that there are underlying simplicities, or patterns, if we look for them. These provide us with insights, if not predictions and solutions.” 78 Though some presenters warned against the search for simplicities, predictions, and solutions in complexity, 79 other presenters promised exactly that via the application of nonlinear science to national security. 80 It is the latter interpretation of nonlinear science’s lessons that became dominant within the U.S. defense community, in particular, among NCW theorists.

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If the late 1980s and early 1990s saw an explosion of popular press works about, and subsequent military interest in, chaos theory and complexity theory, the early 2000s saw a similar pattern with the closely related field of network science. Physicist Albert Laszlo Barabasi’s bestselling book, Linked, is an example. In it, he acknowledged that scientists had come to the conclusion that much of the world operates as complex systems. But, he said, “complexity has a strict architecture,” which is the network. 81 Only by understanding networks could we understand complex systems like terrorism, the “emergence” of which was “ruled by the laws of network formation.” 82 In retrospect, he says that two factors made the early 2000s ripe for the emergence of network science. The first was more powerful computing capabilities and the rise of the Internet. Computing and Internet make network science possible by providing the computational power needed to analyze large data sets. But, more importantly, the Internet is an important source of the “big data” that fuels network science. The second factor was the realization that all networks have similar properties. Though different disciplines had studied networks in their own ways before, scientists began to realize that all networks—including social, biological, and technological—share similar properties. This spurred more interdisciplinary study of networks in general, but also increased interest in applying network science in new areas. 83 In the mid to late 1990s, a time of increasing concern over threats from non-state actors, terrorism seemed a particularly profitable new object of inquiry for network science. This sentiment only intensified following the attacks of 9/11. What’s more, network science fit well with methods of analysis already in use by intelligence and law enforcement for decades. So-called “traffic analysis” involved finding patterns in intercepted communications data—i.e. who called who, when, and for how long. But now, there was much, much more of such data and, for the first time it seemed, the computational and visualization power to do something with that data. Network science seemed to suggest that if enough of it were collected and analyzed, patterns could be detected as they emerged. Network science seemed to hold the promise of predicting, even controlling complex systems. 84 Several events in the opening years of the new century called attention to the potential benefits of network science applied to national security. First, in January 2001, two researchers from RAND, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, published their book, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. 85 It became a go-to source for understanding terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the circulation of this text helped to cement the idea that terrorist organizations are complex networks that can only be understood and defeated via the application of network science. Second, immediately following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, business consultant Valdis Krebs, who used

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social network analysis to study communication patterns within business organizations, turned his tools on the 9/11 hijackers. Using information about the hijackers provided from newspaper stories, Krebs used his InFlow social network analysis software to create a visual depiction of three levels of links among the named co-conspirators. His network maps seemed to confirm what news media was already reporting, that Mohammed Atta had been the ringleader of the plot. 86 Finally, the application of social network analysis principles, along with a new piece of visual analytics software, i2’s Analyst Notebook, was credited with allowing the United States military to capture Saddam Hussein in 2004. 87 In his 2003 book, Barabasi offered his own commentary on the application of network science to defeating terrorists, which seemed to support the emerging U.S. strategy in the “war on terrorism.” Like Cebrowski and Barnett, he saw self-organized, non-state actors taking advantages of existing global networks of information, travel, finance, etc., as the most dangerous threat facing the United States. 88 The 9/11 attacks were an example of an attack against a major network hub, he said. Yet, the complex system of American society and economy did not collapse, proving that the system was more resilient than terrorists had believed. 89 Nonetheless, network science had shown that if enough hubs, the highly connected nodes in a network, could be removed, then a network could suffer cascading failures. Thus, he posited “[T]he battle against al Qaeda will be won by crippling the network, either by removing enough of its hubs to reach the critical point of fragmentation or by draining its resources, preparing the groundwork for cascading internal failures.” 90 He implied, however, that this would not be a matter of just killing or capturing a few individuals. Taking out Mohammed Atta would not have prevented the 9/11 attack; nor would killing Osama bin Laden be enough to defeat Al Qaeda. Even though they are centrally connected nodes, there are other important hubs in the network that allow it to continue functioning. 91 But even taking out enough hubs to collapse Al Qaeda, he warned, would not be enough to win the war. Like Cebrowski and Barnett at that time, and advocates of “global counterinsurgency” just a few years later, Barabasi argued: If we ever want to win the war, our only hope is to tackle the underlying social, economic, and political roots that fuel the network’s growth. We must help eliminate the need and desire of the nodes to form links to terrorist organizations by offering them a chance to belong to more constructive and meaningful webs. No matter how good we become at winning each net battle, if we are unable to inhibit the desire for links, the prerequisite for the formation of these deadly self-organized webs, the net war will never end. 92

That is, in addition to warranting a targeted campaign to remove key nodes and, thus, collapse the Al Qaeda network, network science seemed

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to warrant the preventive use of force and a global counterinsurgency campaign meant to alleviate the conditions that lead to the emergence of terrorism in the first place. As readers might imagine, these types of confident statements resonated with military planners who were not only traumatized, but embarrassed by what happened on 9/11. Cebrowski certainly played an important role in spreading this vision at the highest levels of the Pentagon. But another individual has become even more famous for his faith in the power of social network analysis applied to large communications traffic datasets, Gen. Keith Alexander, who took over as director of NSA in August 2005. Alexander, who will appear in other parts of our book, has been at the heart of the mass surveillance scandal that has rocked that agency since the Snowden revelations began in June 2013. General Alexander was a respected American military leader, but he was also considered by many to be an expert in surveillance. Even before his ascent to become the head of NSA, Alexander had been associated with a little-known organization within the U.S. intelligence community, the Information Dominance Center (IDC), part of the Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) within the army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The IDC had been working for years to develop cutting edge data mining and visual analytics tools when Alexander took over command of INSCOM in 2001. In the fall of 1999, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had been given the order from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to map and then dismantle Al Qaeda. As Shane Harris reports, “Special Operations was given clear instructions: Identify the key players, roll them up, and bring down the network. It was more like a hit list than a blueprint for invasion. Death by dismemberment.” 93 The operation would be called “Able Danger.” The only problem was that SOCOM did not know who to put on their hit list. This is where the data mining and visual analytics tools being developed at the IDC would come into play. In February 2000, IDC began collecting information for SOCOM, which eventually totaled about 2.5 terabytes and included 16,000 names. 94 Twenty of those were eventually passed to SOCOM as suspected key players in Al Qaeda. More disturbing to the IDC analysts, however, was that they believed they had uncovered a terrorist plot inside the United States via the use of social network analysis on telephone call records. 95 But just as they began to uncover this potential plot, they were ordered by Pentagon lawyers to destroy the data “or go to jail” for violations of privacy laws. The reason: their data contained the names of a large number of U.S. persons. 96 Though the IDC analysts and their techniques were sidelined for a short time, in the wake of 9/11 they and their new tools would get a lot of attention. In 2001 Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander took over as the commander of INSCOM, and he took advantage of some of his connections. Alexan-

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der had been a friend of James Heath for years, and Heath was the chief scientist responsible for the development of the IDC’s data analysis and visualization tools. 97 Alexander quickly moved to start using the IDC tools once again, and he reached out to other agencies so that he could gather together even more data that might be analyzed. 98 Alexander got even more media attention in 2004 when some former IDC analysts told Pennsylvania Congressional Representative Curt Weldon that they had identified Mohammed Atta, the ring leader of the 9/11 attack, but that they had been ordered to destroy the data. Able Danger became the subject of national media attention and the focus of a Congressional hearing. Ultimately, other analysts did not recall ever seeing Atta in their analysis. The truth of Able Danger will likely never be known. But it became a powerful myth in the national security community, especially in the face of harsh criticism that it had failed to “connect the dots” prior to 9/11. 99 Not only did Able Danger seem to prove that it was possible to connect the dots through data mining and visual analytics—it also indicated that, perhaps, somebody already had. The NSA had already been experimenting with social network analysis of big data when Alexander took over in 2005. In 2005 and 2006, we learned for the first time about “warrantless wiretapping,” the NSA’s bulk collection of phone metadata. We also learned that they were doing social network analysis on this data in an effort to detect anomalous data that might clue them in to potential terrorist plots, just as the IDC analysts had believed they had seen indicators of emerging terrorist plots in 2000. 100 They were using mass surveillance of telephone metadata to feed what, internally, was called their “big ass graph,” a social network analysis chart with hundreds of thousands of nodes and links. 101 Some social network analysts, like Valdis Krebs, criticized this approach. He said that a valid method started with known bad guys, whose actions helped with the formation of graphs, and that this was better than simply trying to collect everything and then hope to find something valuable. 102 But the NSA explained that it wants bulk social network analysis to establish a baseline that can be used to see and detect the emergence of non-normal patterns. 103 That is, bulk surveillance and visualization of the data is about detecting the unknown unknowns. It’s about seeing unpredictable, emergent patterns from trillions of interacting elements. Despite these criticisms, and despite the fact that nonlinear scienceinspired theories and strategies were behind the disastrous invasion of Iraq, social network analysis tools and techniques only seem to grow more popular within the U.S. national security community. For example, given the fact that they, too, drew from nonlinear science and described insurgents and terrorists as complex adaptive networks, it should come as no surprise that social network analysis has emerged as a key tool for counterinsurgency. In fact, the joint Army/Marine COIN manual contains an appendix describing the basics of how to use social network analy-

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sis. 104 The individual who wrote the appendix was a key player in the effort to use social network analysis to capture Saddam Hussein in 2004, a key event that seemed to confirm to many defense professionals the promise of social network analysis as a military science. 105 This all helped to legitimate both the goal of pursuing high-value terrorists as well as the social networking that provided the means for tracking the bad guys. This all helps explain why there has been an explosion of interest in social network analysis, and why private and public institutions, as well as academic researchers, have devoted themselves to the application of these tools for use by the national security state. There are a number of companies providing social network analysis software with names like Analyst’s Notebook, Sentinel Vizualizer, Palantir, OneView Analyst, and Maltego for use by the military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has set up a Network Science Center, and there is no shortage of academic work coming out of this and other centers on the use of social network analysis and network science against terrorist threats. The IEEE, for example, has a series of conferences on Intelligence and Security Informatics. Many of the papers deal with using network science to figure out how to destroy terrorist networks, and they have been used in both surveillance and drone contexts. CONCLUSION The strategy of targeted killing with drones powered by mass surveillance has its roots in prior theories of information age warfare, which drew from nonlinear science to learn lessons seemingly requiring the use of preventive force against other nations, as well as “super-empowered” individuals and groups. Thus far, however, this strategy has not succeeded, but that has not prevented the circulation of perceptual beliefs that this is all helping “end” terrorism. Networked warfare against the Iraqi army did not prevent an insurgency. Regime change in Iraq did not lead to an era of democratic peace. COIN has not brought peace and stability to either Iraq or Afghanistan. Drone strikes killing thousands still haven’t managed to remove enough network hubs to cause the cascading failure of the Al Qaeda network and certainly did not bring an end of what looks like the emergence of a future of perpetual warfare. Nonetheless, these failed strategies are alluring because of the rhetorical force of military “science,” making them a part of American foreign and defense policy that is likely to exert an influence for years to come. By better understanding the intellectual and rhetorical resources that have coalesced in these strategies, we are reminded that they are neither natural nor inevitable. The same ground from which this disastrous strategy has emerged can be appropriated and used to learn other, more peaceful lessons. There are a couple of things to remember that can help

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us to do that. First, the U.S. has read into nonlinear science as much, or more, than it has learned from nonlinear science. As we have seen, many of these supposed lessons existed before the enlistment of nonlinear science. They are non-unique. Second, nonlinear science also provides just as many (if not more) reasons to believe that this strategy will fail and that a more peaceful, less interventionist strategy can succeed. There are as many, if not more, scholars who have seen in nonlinear science lessons that are just the opposite of those read into this science by the military. 106 Traditional rhetorical analysis of these kinds of epistemes, that explain the social agency of individual presidents, is certainly valuable when we are trying to understand the discursive terrains that lay the foundations of national security states. But, in this chapter, we hope that it has become clear that we can only learn and implement better lessons and policies if we first understand the complex networks of rhetorical resources that are harnessed by the professionals of national security who formulate the knowledge of, and range of responses to, the world that ultimately become the fodder for elite discourse. It is these types of bureaucratic, constitutive rhetorics that have helped convince so many Americans that their national security state can “end” terrorism. NOTES 1. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014. Kindle Edition), 68–70. 2. John Yoo, Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3. For a typical summary of these preventive war perspectives, see W. SinnottArmstrong, “Preventive War—What is It Good For?” In Pre-emption: Military Action and Moral Justification, ed. H. Shue and D. Rodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202–221, 221. Talk of preventive war is so popular today that pundits are even willing to comb the military archives and revise the ways that they think about the motivations behind other wars before the global war on terrorism. Note, for example, how discussions of preventive war are now linked to the actions of European states that reacted to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that some contend served as a “pretext” for morally problematic preventive war. Charles A’Court Repington, “A War to Prevent War,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2014/08/a-war-to-prevent-war/373459/. For a more general discussion of some of the historical, public diplomacy behind various types of preventive war rhetorics, see Karl P. Mueller et al., Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2006). Some contend that preventive war needs to be distinguished from “pre-emptive war” or “self-defense,” but many laypersons and civilian decision-makers often mix and match these phrases as they talk about surveillance, drones, night raids, bombing of terrorists, etc. For some basic overview of the broad number of issues that can be associated with “preventive war,” see Deen K. Chatterjee, ed., The Ethics of Preventive War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4. For an example of how conservatives can link together talk of “just war” with “preventive war,” see Daniel Larison, “Preventive War and Just War Theory,” The American Conservative, March 19, 2014, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/preventive-war-and-just-war-theory/.

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5. Didier Bigo, “When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe,” in International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security, and Community, ed. Morton Kelstrup, and Michael Williams (London: Routledge, 2000). 6. Sean Lawson, Nonlinear Science and Warfare: Chaos, Complexity, and the U.S. Military in the Information Age (London: Routledge, 2014). 7. Jon R. Lindsay, “Reinventing the Revolution: Technological Visions, Counterinsurgent Criticism, and the Rise of Special Operations,” Journal of Strategic Studies 36 (2013). 8. Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, “The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program,” The Intercept, February 10, 2014, accessed February 11, 2014, https:// firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/. 9. Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer, “Claim on ‘Attacks Thwarted’ by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence,” ProPublica, October 23, 2013, accessed June 2, 2014, http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-by-nsa-spreads-despitelack-of-evidence. 10. Barack Obama, quoted in Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer, “Is the NSA Really Preventing Terrorist Attacks?” Pacific-Standard, last modified November 19, 2013, http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/nsa-really-stopping-terroristplots-70159/. 11. Derek Gregory, “’Just Looking’: Remote Violence and Surveillant Witnessing,” Geographical Imaginations, October 1, 2014, http://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/ 10/01/just-looking-remote-violence-and-surveillant-witnessing. 12. Steven Marks, Thomas Meer, and Matthew Nilson,“Manhunting: A Methodology for Finding Persons of National Interest” (Naval Postgraduate School, 2005); George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Couner-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare (Hurkburt Field, FL: Joint Special Operations University, 2009); David. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 4–5. 13. Scahill and Greenwald, “The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program.” 14. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Office of Net Assessment, Department of Defense, 1992). 15. Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 165. 16. Dana Priest, “NSA Growth Fueled by Need to Target Terrorists,” Washington Post, July 21, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ national-security/nsa-growth-fueled-by-need-to-target-terrorists/2013/07/21/24c93cf4f0b1-11e2-bed3-b9b6fe264871_print.html. 17. Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, 165. 18. Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick, “For NSA Chief, Terrorist Threat Drives Passion to ‘collect it All,’ Observers Say,” Washington Post, July 14, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/for-nsachief-terrorist-threat-drives-passion-to-collect-it-all/2013/07/14/3d26ef80-ea49-11e2a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html. 19. Priest, “NSA Growth Fueled by Need to Target Terrorists.” 20. “Change Agent,” Defense News, October 8, 2010, accessed January 28, 2014, http:/ /www.defensenews.com/article/20101008/C4ISR01/10080311/Change-agent. 21. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013): 162. 22. Kevin Jon Heller, ‘One Hell of a Killing Machine,’ Signature Strikes and International Law,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 11, no. 1 (2013): 89–119, doi: 10.1093/jicj/mqs093. 23. Siobhan Gorman, Adam Entous, and Andrew Dowell, “Technology Emboldened the NSA,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http:// online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732349560457853529062744296. 24. Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010): 7.

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25. Greg Miller, Julie Tate, and Barton Gelman, “Documents Reveal NSA’s Extensive Involvement in Targeted Killing Program,” Washington Post, October 16, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ documents-reveal-nsas-extensive-involvement-in-targeted-killing-program/2013/10/ 16/29775278-3674-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_print.html. 26. Ibid. 27. Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 7. 28. Miller, Tate, and Gelman, “Documents Reveal NSA’s Extensive Involvement in Targeted Killing Program.” 29. William W. Keller and Gordon R. Mitchell, eds. Hitting First: Preventive Force in Us Security Strategy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). 30. Judith Stiehm, The U.S. Army War College: Military Education in a Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 31. Arthur K. Cebrowski, “President’s Forum,” Naval War College Review 2 (2000). 32. See Ch. 5 in Lawson, Nonlinear Science and Warfare: Chaos, Complexity, and the U.S. Military in the Information Age. 33. See Ch. 6 in ibid. 34. Quoted in emptywheel, “Im-Mi-nent: (Adj, Doj) 20 Months,” Emptywheel.net, February 4, 2013, accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/02/04/ im-mi-nent-adj-doj-20-months/. see also Kevin Jon Heller, “The DOJ White Paper’s Confused Approach to Imminence (and Capture),” Opinio Juris, February 5, 2013, accessed January 31, 2014, http://opiniojuris.org/2013/02/05/the-doj-white-papers-confused-approach-to-imminence-and-capture/. 35. Ibid. [Our emphasis] 36. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency, 221; David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, “Death From Above, Outrage Down Below,” New York Times, May 16, 2009, accessed February 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/ 17exum.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 37. Gary Anderson, “Why Obama’s Drone Strategy Won’t Work: Because That Ain’t No Way to Win a War,” Foreign Policy, November 21, 2013, accessed February 17, 2014, http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/21/why_obamas_drone_str ategy_won_t_work_because_that_aint_no_way_to_win_a_war. 38. Some of this complexity theory has even been used to explain how terrorist organizations can continue to function in the aftermath of “decapitation” of key leadership. See Antoine Bousquet, “Complexity Theory and War on Terror: Understanding the Self-Organising Dynamics of Leaderless Jihad,” Journal of International Relations and Development 11 (2011): 11–25. 39. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, N.Y.: U.S.A.: Penguin, 1987); Mitchell M. Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Albert Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means (New York: Plume, 2003). 40. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, CO: New Science Library, 1984). 41. Lt. Col. Huba Wass de Czege, “Army Doctrinal Reform,” in The Defense Reform Debate: Issues and Analysis, ed. Asa A. Clark (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Maj. Wayne M. Hall, “A Theoretical Perspective of Airland Battle Doctrine,” Military Review March (1986); United States Marine Corps, FMFM 1: Warfighting (Quantico, VA: United States Marine Corps, 1989). 42. Stiehm, The U.S. Army War College: Military Education in a Democracy, 6. 43. Examples include Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos; Murray Gell-Man, The Quark and the Jaguar (New York: W H Freeman & Co, 1994); John H. Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1996). 44. For example, see Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984); Alvin Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1993).

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45. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski, eds. Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1997). 46. Arthur K. Cebrowski. “Network Centric Warfare and Transformation,” paper presented at IDGA Network Centric Warfare Conference, Arlington, VA. January 22, 2003. 47. William S. Lind, et al. “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette October (1989). 48. Krepinevich, The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment, 46–47. 49. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999); Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Henry Holt and Co.: 1999). 50. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 51. Cebrowski, “Network Centric Warfare and Transformation.” 52. Arthur K. Cebrowski and Thomas P. M. Barnett, “The American Way of War,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute 129 (2003). 53. Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004); John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007). 54. Brigadier Justin Kelly and Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, “Chaos Versus Predictability,” Australian Army Journal II (2004); Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, Countering Global Insurgency (Version 2.2) (2004); David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28 (2005). 55. Department of the Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2006): 4–3. 56. John Arquilla, “It Takes a Network,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2002, accessed February 18, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/aug/25/opinion/op-arquilla25. 57. Cebrowski, “Network Centric Warfare and Transformation.” 58. Arthur K. Cebrowski and John J. Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute 124 (1998); Cebrowski and Barnett, “The American Way of War”; Cebrowski, “Network Centric Warfare and Transformation.” 59. Lt. Col. Daniel Lasica, “Strategic Implications of Hybrid War: A Theory of Victory” Master’s Thesis, Command and General Staff College, 2009. 60. Thomas P. M. Barnett, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” Esquire, March 1, 2003, accessed March 1, 2003, http://www.esquire.com/ESQ0303-MAR_WARPR IMER?click=main_sr. 61. Thomas P. M. Barnett “A Future Worth Creating: Defense Transformation and the New Security Environment,” paper presented at Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., February 11, 2003. 62. Arthur K. Cebrowski. “The State of Transformation,” paper presented at Center for Naval Analyses, Crystal City, VA. November 20, 2002. 63. Thomas P. M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney Jr. “The Global Transaction Strategy,” Transformation Trends, 16 December 2002; Cebrowski, “The State of Transformation”; Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map, ; Arthur K. Cebrowski. “Speech to the Herritage Foundation,” paper presented at The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. May 13, 2003. 64. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map. 65. Kelly and Kilcullen, “Chaos Versus Predictability”; John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); David Kilcullen, “New Paradigms for 21st-Century Conflict,” eJournal USA: Foreign Policy Agenda 12 (2007). 66. Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, x, 1–3, 1–4, 1–16, 3–17.

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67. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam; Andrew Bacevich, “The Petraeus Doctrine,” The Atlantic, October 1, 2008, accessed October 1, 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/thepetraeus-doctrine/306964/. 68. Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, 1–4. 69. Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010): 196, 212. 70. Cebrowski and Barnett, “The American Way of War.” 71. Marks, Meer, and Nilson, “Manhunting: A Methodology for Finding Persons of National Interest”; Crawford, Manhunting: Couner-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare; Lindsay, “Reinventing the Revolution: Technological Visions, Counterinsurgent Criticism, and the Rise of Special Operations.” 72. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency, 4–5. 73. Spencer Ackerman, “Army’s Fingerprint and Iris Databases Head for the Cloud,” Wired, last modified May 30, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/05/army-biometrics-cloud/. 74. Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, 95. 75. Ibid. 102. 76. Ibid. 77. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, 287–88. 78. Alberts and Czerwinski, Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ii. 79. Robert Jervis, “Complex Systems: The Role of Interactions,” in Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ed. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1997); James N. Rosenau, “Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs,” in Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ed. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1997). 80. Alvin M. Saperstein, “Complexity, Chaos, and National Security Policy: Metaphors Or Tools?,” in Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ed. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1997); Steven R. Mann, “The Reaction to Chaos,” in Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ed. David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1997). 81. Barabasi, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means, 7. 82. Ibid., 8. 83. Albert Laszlo Barabasi, Network Science (Boston: Barabasi Lab, 2012): 8–9. 84. Ibid., 6. 85. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001). 86. Valdis E. Krebs, “Uncloaking Terrorist Networks,” First Monday 4 (2002). 87. Chris Wilson, “Searching for Saddam,” Slate Magazine, 22 February 2010, accessed 22 February 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2245228/. 88. Barabasi, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means, 8, 223. 89. Ibid., 122. 90. Ibid., 223. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 223–24. 93. Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, 116. 94. Ibid., 121, 123. 95. Ibid., 127–28. 96. Ibid., 129–32. 97. Ibid., 135.

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98. Shane Harris, “The Cowboy of the NSA,” Foreign Policy, September 8, 2013, accessed September 8, 2013, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/ the_cowboy_of_the_nsa_keith_alexander?page=full. 99. Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, 275–76. 100. Leslie Cauley, “NSA Has Massive Database of Americans’ Phone Calls,” USA Today, May 11, 2006, accessed February 23, 2014, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/ news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm. 101. Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, ; Harris, “The Cowboy of the NSA.” 102. David Axe, “NSA Sweep ‘Waste of Time,’ Analyst Says,” Defense Tech, June 11, 2006, accessed February 25, 2014, http://defensetech.org/2006/05/11/nsa-sweep-wasteof-time-analyst-says/. 103. Cauley, “NSA Has Massive Database of Americans’ Phone Calls.” 104. Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, 105. Brian Reed, “A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency,” Parameters Summer (2007); Conrad Crane, “United States,” in Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations and Challenges, ed. Thomas Rid, and Thomas A. Keaney (New York: Routledge, 2010); Wilson, “Searching for Saddam.” 106. For example, see Jervis, “Complex Systems: The Role of Interactions”; Rosenau, “Many Damn Things Simultaneously: Complexity Theory and World Affairs”; Chris Hables Gray, Peace, War, and Computers (New York: Routledge, 2005); Roger MacGinty, “Social Network Analysis and Counterinsurgency: A Counterproductive Strategy?,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 3 (2010).

THREE The Department of Defense, the CIA, and the Legitimation of America’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”

In chapter two, we provided readers with examples of how different parts of war machine assemblages sometimes converge for nation states that are interested in both surveillance and the unleashing of drone technologies, but in this chapter we focus in on how elites and publics rationalize the usage of just one small part of the “dark” arts of counterterrorism. As J. Cofer Black, who worked for the CIA between 1974 and 2002, would say about the CIA’s counterterrorism efforts, “This is a very highly classified area. All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.” 1 Taking off the gloves may appear to be an apt metaphor, especially for those of us who remember the green gloves that were worn by Charles Graner as he punched detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, 2 and that ideographic “iron fists, velvet gloves” have been a part of America’s civil rights, foreign policy, and militarized rhetorics. 3 Taking off the gloves carried connotations for would-be listeners, including the notion that scheming terrorists could not hide behind the provisions of the Geneva Convention or that the CIA was not going to have to abide by the traditional rules of warfare. Was Cofer Black also implying that Americans were willing to dispense what cultural critic Joseph Pugliese has called “useless suffering”? 4 Pugliese may have viewed the harsh interrogation of detainees in the aftermath of the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers as excessive punishment, but as we noted in earlier chapters, all kinds of money was thrown in the direction of programs that promised to help with the hunt for bin Laden’s minions. We believe that Pugliese does a masterful 59

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job of helping us understand the biopolitical, and thanatopolitical, nature of the activities of America’s nation state as it sought to rationalize this particular facet of the GWOT. At one point he noted that the “corpus of official texts—memos, legal briefs, and doctrines” that were produced post-9/11 allowed pain to be “commodified,” and “the body of the detainee becomes, in this economy of torture, yet another resource that can be mined and exploited for ‘high value’ information or data.” 5 In order to avoid the name-calling game of trivial pursuit, that fights for the right to call some of this “torture” or “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), this chapter gets into specifics because it provides readers with an understanding of the specific acts of the state that are being referenced in these discursive wars. We plan on putting on display what it meant for America to “take the gloves off” and how all of this was legitimated by policymakers and other stakeholders as they worked alongside the Department of Defense and the CIA as they collectively sought to defend the harsh techniques that were questioned by so many outside of the United States. 6 Throughout this chapter, we will argue that while Congressional legislators, members of the Barack Obama administration, Pentagon officials, and others have distanced themselves from allegations that they have engaged in torturous behavior, they still defend the use of some problematic forms of indefinite detention as well as the harsh interrogation of those detainees. In other words, by circulating stories about the closing of CIA black sites and by writing about the supposed “end” of the use of harsh interrogation techniques, many of these decision-makers have adopted a form of strategic communication that deflects attention away from the problems that we continue to face regarding renditions and other dehumanizing and degrading treatment of foreign foes. 7 In 2005, the U.S. Congress tried to respond to the domestic and international storm of protest by arguing that the nation was going to reaffirm the U.S. government’s commitment to “humane interrogation practices.” It passed the Detainee Treatment Act, 8 and although this legislative measure did not confer prisoner of war status on future terrorist detainees, it did apply the rules and principles of U.S. Army Field Manual to all future military interrogations operations. 9 Yet what were these principles, and what acts were allowed under the appendices that appear at the end of this manual? If torture is precluded, then what is allowed, and what Americans have had a say in ratifying the actions of those who decided whether these interrogation rules were moral, legal, and legitimate? These are the types of questions that are often papered over by the cacophonous noise of those who insist that our national security state does “not torture.” The passage of the Detainee Treatment Act legislation was supposed to send several signals, including the fact that the U.S. military wanted to distance their interrogators from some of the bad press that the CIA was

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receiving after the Abu Ghraib revelations. On January 22, 2009, President Obama signed Executive Order 13491, a move that theoretically halted the further use of the Bush administration’s EITs while extending the reach of the U.S. Army Field Manual to cover all U.S. interrogations— including those conducted by the CIA. 10 Given the fact that the Obama administration’s executive order was announced at the same time that nation’s commander-in-chief talked about plans for closing Guantánamo and the dismantling of some notorious CIA black sites, neo-liberals hailed Obama’s decision-making as evidence that America’s national security state was finally policing itself and reigning in “past” interrogation abuses. If President Obama’s decision-making actually reflected the will of the American people, then one would expect that his 2009 inauguration meant that those who participated in illegal interrogations would be put in the docks. An administration, after all, that prided itself on the watchwords of “transparency” and “accountability” might be expected to usher in a new age where those who followed Cofer Black’s admonition to take the “gloves off” now paid for their sins. But before any punishment could be meted out one had to participate in public rituals that explained all of this sinning, and Congressional leaders and members of the executive branch did everything in their power to shield those who had served the nation through their acts of interrogation that helped with networkcentric counterterrorism. Naïve, idealistic outside critics might think that the Obama’s election would lead to the dismantling of this war machine, but within a matter of months it became clear that the machine had a life and vitality of its own. For most Americans, those who carried out harsh interrogations were not sinners. If not saints, then they were at least realists who were willing to do the dirty work that others disdained. Few, if any, public or private figures involved in the running of the war machine have ever had to stand trial for any violations of domestic statutes against torture or any potential violations of international conventions or treaties that proscribed tortuous behavior. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, has refused to prosecute many of those who in “good faith” followed the guidelines found in the infamous Bybee and Yoo “torture memos,” 11 and the federal judiciary has found jurisdictional and substantive reasons for dismissing the lawsuits that have been filed against many former military personnel or contractors who have been accused of abusing foreign detainees. At the same time that Obama’s administration condoned massive surveillance and promoted the usage of drones, it had members who ratified the claims that circulated in the infamous “torture memos” that were authored by individuals like John Yoo and Judge Jay Bybee. 12 As we argue later in this chapter, psychological warfare could still be waged against countless recalcitrant detainees, from Bagram to

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Guantánamo, who refused to see the value of cooperating with their American interrogators. UNDERSTANDING THE IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS OF THE OLC MEMOS If anything, President Obama helped to legitimate the usage of many enhanced interrogation techniques when he created the impression that greater transparency could be linked to less objectionable interrogation practices. For example, in April of 2009, a firestorm of public protest erupted when several members of Obama’s administration decided that they were going to release four of the secret “torture memos.” Although senior CIA officials and Congressional leaders had been told that by the summer of 2003 the practice of “waterboarding” had actually come to an end, this did not signal the ending of interrogation practices, and we view this as simply a photo opportunity, that, for the most part, allowed the interrogation business to go on as usual. 13 The Obama administration—by releasing the memos and setting up several internal investigations—staved off other international and domestic calls for more substantive reform and prevented this purported end to waterboarding served as a condensation symbol for the ending of the “Bush” interrogation practices. This all obfuscated the fact that many harsh interrogation methods were still considered to be acceptable “techniques” that did not result in lasting physical or psychological damage to the detainees. Other scholars who have looked at these U.S. “torture” memos often focus on the supposed unreasonableness of the formalistic legal interpretations as they parse the words that appear in some of these documents, 14 but oftentimes these types of analyses assume that coming up with the “better” definition of torture or of the EITs is somehow going to help rectify the situation. This arhetorical and depoliticized way of approaching the interrogation debates completely misses the praxis of these situations where CIA or DOD interrogators want to view themselves as the victims of overzealous interventionism. For example, as Pugliese explains in his discussions of the doctors’ roles in circulating “epidemiologies of state bioterror” in many situations the detainees are expected to suffer pain, but this is “not-quite-death,” where interrogation sessions are conducted in ways that “veers to the edge of the abyss, only to be hauled back” by those who are “compelled to endure yet another sessions of torture.” 15 Like 24’s Jack Bauer or Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya, the contractors and members of the military who carried out these interrogations had securitized reasons for carrying out these performances. A review of the OLC memos and the defense of these memos will reveal some of the ambivalences that were felt by those who still considered harsh interrogation to be a necessary part of the GWOT. 16 From a

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rhetorical standpoint, what were called the “torture memos” were used to provide a patina of protection for U.S. interrogators who were already said to be violating many domestic and international codes. Did the Americans actually think that over time their defenses of waterboarding and other harsh techniques would persuade skeptics that they were wrong about bans on torture, or was all of this just preaching to the choir? While critics like Pugliese have written hundreds of pages of material on the pain that has been suffered by detainees at places like Guantánamo, those who wanted to take the “gloves off” wrote as if the lack of authoritative guidance before 2002 or 2003 was hurting a different set of beleaguered warriors, the interrogators who were doing their best to prevent another 9/11. If we follow the operative logics of detractors, the memos appear to trivialize the suffering of the enemy “Other,” but if we adopt the lens of those who used militarized frameworks, the interrogations appeared to be the lesser of two evils, activities that were much better than invading other countries or killing these detainees. The militarists can view the OLC memos as defensive texts that constructed a vision of the world where a select circle of trained interrogators, doctors, and psychologists were put on a tight leash as truths were extracted from recalcitrant terrorists who were doing the best that they could to avoid divulging secrets about terrorist network-centric warfare. On first impression, the OLC memos that were produced during the Bush administration years may appear to be nothing more than arcane documents that are filled with outdated legalese that was left behind by George W. Bush administrators, but we would argue that the cultural milieu that spawned these memos in the first place did not change. For many CIA operatives who worked away during these periods, these legal fragments were the jurisprudential “swords” and pragmatic “golden shields” that they needed that protected them from the lawsuits that might be filed by former detainees or other disgruntled parties who wanted them to have to appear before the International Criminal Court (ICC). 17 The crafting and early circulation of these memos within American intelligence communities also served another key function for America’s national security state—they helped establish social bonds as CIA agents and DOD interrogators realized that their superiors in Washington, D.C., were willing to guard their backsides. These written memos provided agents in the field with concrete evidence that despite any moral or legal qualms that they may have had about the propriety of their actions, they were conducting hazardous, but essential, work that would be rewarded by their bosses. This was no small matter, because literally thousands of FBI, CIA, contractors, and military personnel may have been involved in myriad interrogations in the aftermath of 9/11, and countless emails provide evidence of their anxieties and their need for administrative assu-

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rances that they would not have to appear in foreign docks for potential war crimes violations. The OLC memos were thus written in clinical and legalistic ways that tried to assuage the guilt of the CIA agents or contractors who may have felt that they were unprotected before the publication of the “torture memos.” Sadly, the OLC memos were not viewed as problematic texts that violated traditional Geneva Convention principles, but were instead crafted as rhetorical vehicles for explaining to the world the wisdom of American laws that reformed antiquated Geneva provisions. The memos were therefore exculpatory texts, and they were treated as pedagogical devices that provided the baseline for acceptable governmental behavior during the GWOT. Our ideological critique of these memos also discloses yet another rhetorical function of these interrogation memos—they served as symbolic devices for underscoring the legality of having a commander-inchief with strong executive powers. Yes, the memos discussed protocols that needed to be used for waterboarding or other harsh techniques, but these same texts made it clear that the members of the executive branch had the power and authority to determine what did, or did not, constitute torturous behavior. This allowed authors like John Yoo to put into practice ideas regarding preventive warfare and unitary executive power while he wrote about the adoption of this or that particular interrogation technique. For many years John Yoo had consistently argued that the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) 18 and the Congressional Detainee Act of 2005 were just some of the initiatives that threated to hinder the war effort, and he viewed these judicial and legislative texts as items that were produced by those who misunderstood America’s history. Moreover, he believed that those types of judicial or legislative texts were crafted by those who were theoretically encroaching on the inherent constitutional powers of the nation’s commander-in-chief. 19 As far as we are concerned, Yoo need not have worried, because most Americans shared his viewed on the need for necessity and they would have disagreed with the vocal minority of Yoo’s detractors who had problems with the promiscuous usage of EITs. At the same time, Obama administrators—and many members of the American public—made arguments that looked remarkably like the ones produced by John Yoo in those “torture memos,” and defending the infamous memos become performative acts that allowed one to put on public display one’s support for the CIA or DOD interrogators. FBI informants who were horrified by some of the CIA interrogation practices left us emails filled with complaints about detainee abuses, and although little of this led to any substantive reform, this created the impression that Obama administrators were more interested in the less aggressive strategies that were used by FBI operatives like the mythic Ali

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Soufan. In September of 2011, PBS’s Frontline interviewed Soufan, the famous interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest level Al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody, and Soufan argued that unlike CIA interrogators who used harsh methods, his knowledge of Arabic and his understanding of Middle Eastern culture allowed him to use the gentler means of persuasion that ultimately led to the revelation of information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the arrest of Jose Padilla in Chicago. “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” argued Soufan, 20 and audiences could conclude that the FBI techniques were the ones that were now being used to win over the hearts and minds of captured detainees. Was Soufan’s approach the one that was actually adopted by U.S. decision-makers as they argued about the legitimacy of particular interrogation techniques? When John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and the other authors of the OLC memos were crafting their documents they were doing more than just engaging in the drawing up of some individual’s “idiosyncratic hybrid” that brought together “enthusiasm for presidential power” with “disdain for international institutions.” 21 This tells us a part of the story, but these memos were also symbolic ciphers that reflected and refracted many of the ideological beliefs of those who defended the idea that this particular national security state should allow the metaphorical “gloves” to “come off.” Although a minority of commentators over the years have argued that the released OLC memos were simply “think” pieces that provided members of the executive branch with a range of plausible legal interpretations of applicable codes, precedents, and treaties, we contend that many decision-makers and researchers give them much more weight. 22 Harold Koh, for example, opined that the “OLC of the United States Department of Justice is the most important legal office in the U.S. government,” because it “authoritatively determines the executive branch’s legal position on matters not in litigation.” 23 Several years later, another legal scholar averred that the OLC legal memos helped “shape the contours of this country’s response” after 9/11. 24 One former Justice Department prosecutor once told Jack Goldsmith that it “is practically impossible to prosecute someone who relied in good faith on an OLC opinion, even if the opinion turns out to be wrong.” 25 This would become an incredibly prophetic statement, because few governmental or non-governmental interrogators have had to worry about legal culpability. In order to help readers understand just how those methods would be defended, the rest of this chapter has been organized into five subsections. The first portion of the chapter supplies readers with a general understanding of how various military scholars, legal experts, and political decision-makers have theorized about the dangers of “lawfare” and how this became a part of the broader rhetorical culture. The second segment extends these insights by showing how various FBI and CIA interagency debates about EITs in 2002 and 2003 forced the hand of the

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Department of Justice’s OLC as they struggled to provide written guidance. In the third section, we illustrate how the circulation of information about various internal and external critiques led to the production of several senior-level texts, including Caproni’s 2004 statement before the House Select Committee on Intelligence 26 and the filing of John Helgerson’s 2004 CIA Inspector General Report. 27 This is followed by a fourth part that illuminates how several influential members of the Bush administration’s “War Council” 28 —including Richard Cheney and John Yoo— reacted to the attempted dismantling of the secret CIA interrogation regime. Finally, in the concluding portion of the chapter, we explain how the U.S. Army Field Manual still allows for some reprehensible practices, and we explain how these early twenty-first-century debates about the OLC and lawfare continue to impact contemporary decisions that are made about acceptable behavior for those who help patrol America’s national security state. UNDERSTANDING “LAWFARE” AND THE RHETORICAL CULTURE THAT CONTRIBUTED TO THE CRAFTING, AND ACCEPTANCE, OF THE “TORTURE” MEMOS “Lawfare” is a term that has been around since at least the mid-1970s, and it connotes the idea that judicial processes have been misappropriated by those who would turn America’s laws against “her” national interests. 29 Within academic and military circles, most writers who comment on this subject credit Colonel Charles Dunlap, Jr. (later Major General Dunlap) with having coined the term, and, as early as 2001 it was used as a code word that signaled that a writer was going to be complaining about how interlopers were trying to put legal hurdles in the path of those who defended this nation’s shores. For example, Dunlap argued that anyone who had any “passing familiarity with ‘Clausewitz’” (a famous Prussian military theorist) or other strategists would realize that during times of war members of non-government organizations and other critics needed to refrain from undermining the government’s political support. This was because counterinsurgency histories taught us that the loss of public support during the Vietnam years had adversely impacted strategic “centers of gravity.” Those misguided “international lawyers” who helped enemy aliens were waging a type of pernicious “lawfare.” 30 When leftists, anti-war critics, international law analysts or anyone else unfairly used domestic or foreign laws against Coalition military personnel during wartime, then they were said to be aiding and abetting the causes of the terrorists. Not surprising, this not-so-veiled attack on critics of EITs could be used to valorize the efforts of the military or civilian interrogators who were allegedly risking their careers in the name of necessity.

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For many supporters of the Coalition Forces’ decisions to intervene in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom), lawfare was used as a descriptor that explained the collective actions of pacifists and other members of organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or the International Red Cross who harped incessantly about the supposed (mis)treatment and abuse of detainees. Jack Goldsmith would later rescind a few of the most controversial of the OLC memos, but he was still willing to inform readers of his book that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t just worried about Al Qaeda and their use of “asymmetrical legal weapons.” This Secretary was also concerned that he had to deal with “our very differently motivated European and South American allies and the human rights industry that supported their universal jurisdiction aspirations.” 31 Goldsmith summarized his arguments by observing that Donald Rumsfeld treated “lawfare” as if it was a new, but “potentially powerful check on American military power.” 32 The OLC lawyers and their superiors were thus symbolically battling those who flooded the courts with complaints about renditions, torture, homicide, and an assortment of other grievances. In theory, the critics who were politicizing America’s rule of law that was clogging up the courts were interfering with the strategic, tactical, or operational missions of the Coalition forces. Goldstein, a former White House consultant, explained how some of these maneuvers could be linked to the efforts of fanatical enemies because the “Islamist movement has two wings—one violent and one lawful. . . . Islamists with financial means have launched a “legal jihad,” filing frivolous and malicious lawsuits with the aim of abolishing public discourse critical of Islam and the goal of establishing principles of Sharia law . . . as the governing political and legal authority in the West.” 33 Goldstein was writing about the usage of defamation or access to information cases, and in some ways this was viewed as just the tip of the iceberg when it came to uncovering the enemy’s legal arsenals that could be found in our own backyard. These self-serving types of critiques of lawfare could also be used by defenders of hard interrogation techniques who did not want to have to deal with Monday-morning quarterbacking. In many ways these rhetorical characterizations of lawfare gained ideological traction within American national security circles because they seemed to have explanatory power in a world that was filled with Islamic fundamentalism and intransigent insurgents. In March of 2003, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations alleged that “lawfare, the latest of asymmetries” could be used to encourage peasants to file human rights suits with few grounds against military figures. 34 The intersection of globalization and the emergence of international law was said to have aided the cause of those who couldn’t win conventional battles against superior fighting forces. Note how the usage of these frames can be used

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to marginalize the arguments of those who believed that some U.S. policies were violating key tenets of international humanitarian law. Those who worried about “Islamic lawfare” or the judicial strategizing of the critics of the Bush administration often observed that it was the events of 9/11 that triggered America’s counterterrorist responses, but in many ways these commentators were recycling and extending arguments about the power of evil enemies and the magnitude of risk that had been around since the Cold-War era. Note, for example, how the authors of the CIA’s 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Manual 35 admonished readers to remember that if some interrogation subjects were ever released, they were “going to be able to cause embarrassment by going to the newspapers or courts.” 36 Changing political tides created anxieties in the minds of those who wanted reassurance that they were not going to be the victims of lawfare and hauled in front of international tribunals. As Goldsmith explained in 2007, the CIA operatives seemed to always be caught in the middle of factions who worried about too much aggression or too much timidity: The executive branch and Congress pressure the [intelligence] community to engage in controversial action at the edges of the law, and then fail to protect it from recriminations when things go awry. This leads the community to retrench and become risk averse, which invites complaints by politicians that the community is fecklessly timid. Intelligence excesses of the 1960s led to the Church committee reproaches and reforms of the 1970s which led to complaints that the community had become too risk adverse, which led to the aggressive behavior under William Casey in the 1980s that resulted in the Iran-Contra Affair and related scandals, which led to another round of intelligence purges and restrictions in the 1990s that deepened the culture of risk aversion and once again led (both before and after 9/11) to complaints about excessive timidity. . . . 37

Legal institutions—like the OLC—were supported to provide the CIA and other U.S. military organizations with the jurisprudential guidance that would help them avoid future scandals. Countering this lawfare thus became a top priority, especially for those who were worried about the potential trial of CIA operatives or DOD interrogators, and there was occasional evidence that those who carried out harsh interrogations might have to face a political storm of protest. It is “now conventional wisdom,” noted Professor Wendel in 2009, that “something went terribly wrong with the legal advising process in the previous administration, at least with respect to terrorism and national security issues.” 38 Former G. W. Bush administrators responded to this type of commentary by averring that this efficacious legal advising process was protecting those who ably served as the tip of the spear in places like Guantánamo, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Dennis Blair, the former Director of National Intelligence, talked about the potential political and

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military fallout that might come from the premature declassification and release of some interrogation memos. In a statement that he publicly distributed, Blair recalled the experiences of his Vietnam War years, when he served as a young Navy officer. At that time, reminisced the director, “public scorn” had been heaped on those who “served in the Armed Forces during an unpopular war.” 39 While Blair understood the importance of having fair and open debate that allowed publics to challenge the wisdom of “policies linked to wars and warfighting,” he was bothered by the “pain that would come” when those who served honorably “within legal boundaries” were now being subjected to secondguessing. 40 In a fragment that would be recirculated on thousands of Internet blog sites, Blair alleged that those who now read these released memos needed to remember the “context” of their creation. Blair wanted readers to remember that for months after 9/11 the nation did not have “a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with,” and the “CIA was struggling to obtain critical information from captured al Qa’ida leaders,” they “requested permission to use harsher interrogation methods.” 41 As far as Blair was concerned, the OLC memos made it “clear” that senior legal decision-makers judged the harsher methods to be “legal.” Blair’s relatively short statement contained a number of contestable claims, but perhaps the most famous line in this text hinted that these arguments were just small parts of much larger ideological conflicts. “These methods,” intoned the director, “read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing . . . . But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos and their guidelines.” 42 Former officials, who believed in the tenets of American exceptionalism, were miffed at the idea that naïve critics were trying to vilify the nation’s covert operatives. Given the fact that Blair was implying that there were once dark times that were not that sunny, perhaps critics need to go back in time and see how debaters about interrogations were discussing these issues in the early years of the GWOT. THE EARLY WAR YEARS, THE CRAFTING OF SOME OF THE FIRST “TORTURE MEMOS,” AND THE QUEST FOR MEANINGFUL “ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE” In the aftermath of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the public servants who worked for a variety of U.S. governmental branches found themselves having to make a host of legal decisions about how American authorities were going to interpret various laws of armed conflict, international laws, treaties, and domestic regulations. In a February 2002 memo that was sent out to the vice president, the director of Central

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Intelligence, and other senior officials, President George W. Bush made it clear that he wanted “humane treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda detainees.” While the nation’s commander-in-chief did not provide any concrete examples of what he regarded as humane interrogation, he nevertheless acknowledged that the U.S. would be bound by some of the rules that came from the application of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949. Like many of those who believed that this “new” preventive war had to be fought in novel ways, President Bush could not advocate the position that today’s warfighters needed to tinker with some of the provisions and principles of the Geneva Convention. For example, he emphasized the point that some portions of that Convention had been written assuming that the “High Contracting Parties” had “‘regular’ armed forces fighting on behalf of states.” 43 This implied that this Cold War text had been agreed to by parties that were thinking about World War II aggressions of national states and not non-state actors. President Bush expressly claimed that the “war against terrorism” had ushered “in a new paradigm,” and this in turn required “new thinking in the way of war.” As a part of this new thinking, he was going to rely on Department of Justice legal opinions as he used his authority under the U.S. Constitution to help establish policies that would ensure that detainees were treated humanely. 44 In a key portion of this memo that has everything to do with lawfare, Bush explained that the U.S. would hold states, organizations, and individuals responsible if they ever captured U.S. personnel. During the early phases of Operation Enduring Freedom, thousands of detainees were rounded up in Afghanistan, and some of those who were considered to be “high-level” detainees were transported to Guantánamo. When various teams of FBI, CIA, and Department of Defense interrogators began the process of debriefing many of these potential enemies, they realized that various agencies seemed to be operating under conflicting rules regarding the “best” means of extracting “actionable” intelligence. 45 Moreover, some FBI agents and CIA interrogators were convinced that they needed to use some of the more aggressive methods in order to get actionable intelligence, while their colleagues vehemently defended the use of more “rapport”-building techniques. Politicians, military strategists, intelligence experts, and interdisciplinary researchers disagreed among themselves about whether it would be the high-ranking political appointees in Washington, D.C. 46 or the career officers in charge of localized interrogations who were pressing for more information regarding the applicable rules and regulations that would govern these interrogations. Our critical approach, which invites readers to think of the structuralist and material parts of this request process, would note that many communities, from all parts of the chain-of-command, were simultaneously asking for legal legitimacy from members of the broader “rhetorical culture.” 47 Those at the top wanted assurances

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that the detainees actually were dangerous and possessed information, and those at the bottom of these command structures wanted assurances that they were not going to prison after inflicting pain on many of these detainees. A review of some of these formerly classified documents reveals that many of the social agents who were a part of this war machine often faxed copies of both types of requests for more information on “counterresistance techniques” that came from Bagram or Guantánamo, Miami or the Pentagon. For example, one 2003 memo that came from the commander of the U.S. forces at SOUTHCOM (U.S. Southern Command) was stapled to approval material that came from the desk of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. 48 Many of the mid-level staff judge advocates would later be shocked to find that their cursory reviews of some of the suggested “enhanced” or “aggressive” techniques, that were hurriedly crafted in responses to requests from superiors, would be taken as gospel and would ideologically drift into some of the most secret and controversial portions of these “torture memos.” In many ways, those who were living in some of these “zones of indistinction” 49 were expected to have the experiential knowledge that was needed to make these tough calls. Take, for example, the legal recommendations that were passed along from Diane Beaver, a lieutenant colonel who served as the staff judge advocate for Joint Task Force 170 in Guantánamo (GTMO). In October of 2002, she put together a short sevenpage memo entitled “Legal Brief on Proposed Counter-Resistance Strategies” that told superiors about the difficulties that confronted the DOD interrogators who had been trained to apply the Geneva Conventions (GC) that contained the “commonly approved methods of interrogation such as rapport building through the direct approach, rewards, the multiple interrogator approach, and the use of deception.” 50 She explained that the usage of these Geneva approaches appeared to be problematic because the detainees were able to communicate among themselves and they could “debrief each other about their respective interrogations.” This in turn created a situation where following some Geneva rules and principles interfered with necessitous intelligence-gathering and the interrogation “resistance strategies” were said to “have become more sophisticated.” 51 Here there is no talk of how the detainees might not have any actionable intelligence at all, that they may have been inadvertently picked up by mistake, or that the interrogators might be looking for non-existent terrorist networks or cells. Truth effects were confused with truths, and military expectations and prejudices guided what would we regarded as post-9/11 success or failure. In this Kafkaesque world of Guantánamo, everyone assumed that these were the “worst of the worst” and that their Jihadist training was being used to circumvent the efforts of beneficent and humane interrogators. 52

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Those who were assigned the task of writing the first drafts of the memos did their best to write texts that responded to the perceived realities of the situation. Lieutenant Colonel Beaver, who would later be called to Congress to testify about those halcyon days, argued that these problems were compounded by the fact that there was no “established clear policy for interrogations limits and operations at GTMO.” This judge advocate mentioned President Bush’s February 2002 directive about humane treatment, and then she proceeded to review some of the relevant international law and domestic rulings as she and her colleagues evaluated the legality of some of the “more aggressive techniques” that were sent her way. 53 Not surprisingly, Lt. Colonel Beaver did not conclude that these relevant laws and rules precluded the usage of harsh techniques. After all, wasn’t it possible to think of scenarios where detainees could suffer discomfort, and a little pain, and maybe even some embarrassment, and none of this could be configured as inhumane? As Lt. Colonel Beaver deconstructed some of the language of the Unites States’ Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. section 2340) she noticed that it seemed to define torture as the specifically intended infliction of severe physical or mental pain. Given the fact that the statute also defined “severe pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from [her emphasis]” the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of this type of harm, she concluded that the “proposed methods will not violate the statute.” 54 This cold, but clinical parsing of words made it appear as though only the acts of human monsters—who set out to abuse and harm detainees in ways that had nothing to do with trying to gather information for their country—were the only ones that need worry about potential violations of the U.S. Torture Statute. Moreover, this type of legal reasoning meant that even though one might be a monster and intend to harm detainees in a punitive manner, as long as this did not result in “prolonged” mental harm or severe physical pain then one had not technically violated the law. Lt. Colonel Beaver was also willing to do something that most of her superiors assiduously avoided—she was willing to spell out the exact acts that were the legal microscope. One of these approved enhanced interrogation techniques that she commented on involved the use of a “wet towel to induce the misperception” of suffocation, an act that was contextualized as legal—as long as it was done in the furtherance of “a legitimate national security objective.” All of this legalese added layers of potential hurdles for those who might want to accuse American warriors of torturing their detainees. Like many of those who worried about lawfare, Lieutenant Colonel Beaver suggested that it would be advisable that those who had to cope with the restrictions that could be found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCJM) should “have permission or immunity in advance from

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the convening authority, for military members utilizing these methods. 55 Our critical, ideological analysis leads us to conclude that Beaver’s suggestions of getting “advance” permission was considered to be a creative improvement on the existing paradigms regarding interrogation. This was because most of those who got into trouble for potentially culpable behavior usually looked for relief after engaging in potentially litigious behavior. This worry dovetailed with Blair’s concerns about Monday-morning quarterbacking. What Lieutenant Colonel Beaver could not have known is that several of President Bush’s advisers back in Washington, D.C., were also hard at work hundreds of miles away producing other secret memos for the CIA and the DOD. In August of 2002, John Yoo and Jay Bybee would craft what many would regard as two of the worst of all of the secret torture memos. One of the memos (known within the intelligence communities as the “standards” memo or the Bybee/Yoo I memo) conflated torture and inhumane behavior and suggested that only the physical or psychological pain that would be comparable to organ failure would constitute “torture” under U.S. counterterrorism law. The same 50-page text that would be signed by Bybee and drafted by Yoo opined that criminal liability that resulted from the transgressions of laws could also be avoided by evoking necessary defenses or arguing that these restrictive statutes were themselves infringements on the president’s commander-in-chief powers. 56 In other words, it was possible that many forms of abuse—including torture—might be legitimate and legal if they were deemed exceptional and necessary by the authorized commanders-in-chief. In some key passages that clearly anticipated that there would be critics of both the U.S. commander-in-chief’s decisions regarding “selfdefense” actions against Al Qaeda and the interrogators who used EITs, the authors of the “standards” memo had this to say about the nature and scope of OLC protection: The September 11 events were a direct attack on the United States, and as we explained above, the President has authorized the use of military force with the support of Congress. As we have made clear in other opinions involving the war against al Qaeda, the nation’s right to selfdefense has been triggered by the events of September 11. If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A [the torture statute], he [sic] would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States. . . . In that case, we believe that he [sic] could argue that his actions were justified by the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack. This national and international version of the right to self-defense could supplement and bolster the government defendant’s individual right. 57

In theory, both American domestic laws and select interpretations of international laws preserved the U.S.’s “right to self-defense.” As one

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might expect, there was little nuanced discussion of contrary interpretations of these laws, the nature of the limits of these supposed rights, or any discussion of what might be deemed unacceptable or illegal behavior besides tortuous acts. When all of this was put into practice, detainees were slapped around, chained to windows, bruised and beaten, threatened with rape, and hung up by hands and feet. 58 Some of these once-secret memos went into great detail outlining the procedures that were supposed to be followed in order to prevent any prolonged or permanent detainee suffering. A second memo by the same authors (Bybee/Yoo II, 2002) “memorialized” some of the oral advice that had been given in July of that year, 59 and in this document, John Rizzo, the acting general counsel for the CIA, was informed that attention grasps, walling, facial holds, facial slaps, cramped confinements, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, the placement of harmless insects in confinement boxes, and waterboarding could all be used in the interrogation of one high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah. 60 Evidence from other OLC memos that were sent to the CIA indicate that Abu Zubaydah would be subjected to waterboarding some 83 times in August of 2002, and later on another senior member of Al Qaeda would undergo 183 treatments during his first month of custody. 61 More than a dozen years have passed since the crafting of those torture memos, and to our knowledge, no CIA agent who supposedly followed the guidelines in these memos has had to worry about any substantive legal action—civil or criminal—that can be tied to those earlier interrogations. Our survey of major governmental investigative reports, OLC memos, non-governmental critiques, and related materials indicates that since the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan, many FBI, CIA, or Department of Defense interrogators participated in more than 20,000 interrogations of detainees. Information about the number of deaths that resulted from these various interrogations is sketchy at best, but several former intelligence analysts or high-ranking officials have estimated that somewhere between 50 and 125 detainees may have lost their lives during some of these “aggressive” sessions. 62 Interestingly enough, none of the infamous OLC memos—including some of the ones written about Abu Ghraib—mentioned any deaths. Redacted sections of the memos provide clues that these types of morbid, thanatopolitical fragments or reports may have been viewed as texts that contained state secrets, and this type of selective labeling, the control of communicative absences as well as presences, just added to the layers of patriotic arguments that could be used to shield interrogators. For a time it looked as though a vocal minority of security experts and military officers were going to vociferously complain and try to force compliance with the old strictures that could be found in the Geneva Convention, but they had to battle with those who worried that this

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would undermine the efforts of America’s warfighters. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to promote the idea that the military personnel working for the Department of Defense or the Judge Advocate General Corps (JAGs) were uniformly supporting the policies of the Bush administration, but we now know that not everyone wanted to be involved in the “dark side” of intelligence-gathering. 63 Throughout 2002 and 2003, a running ideological battle raged between those who wanted to follow the interrogation guidelines that could be found in traditional military codes of the UCMJ or FBI regulations and others who wanted to embrace the “alternative techniques” that came out of the offices of the OLC or the Secretary of Defense. This internal, bureaucratic wrangling contributed to the veil of secrecy that shrouded so many of these activities. For more than a year and a half, many of the “torture memos” were kept under governmental wraps, and only a few dozen political appointees, select members of Congressional intelligence committees, and senior military officers knew about their existence. Maintaining secrecy, after all, as we noted in chapter one, is a key weapon in the arsenal of those who fought against lawfare. All of this would change with the public circulation of a few OLC memos and the advent of the Abu Ghraib revelations. The Washington Post Leaks and the Growing Attacks on Lawfare The OCL classified several of the August 2002 memos, but in the June of 2004, Dana Priest of the Washington Post obtained copies of this first “Torture Memo” (Bybee/Yoo I) that was sent to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. 64 This memo was posted on that newspaper’s web site, and nine days later, the Bush administration had to confront the political fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal. Members of the White House decided that it might be prudent to at least declassify a few of these texts. How could one argue that the production of these OLC memos violated international humanitarian law? Peter Margulies contended that those who constructed the “lawfare paradigm” were advancing outlandish theories that marginalized the law that could be found in international treaties, statutes, and “jus cogens,” or the “fundamental customary international law.” 65 By privileging U.S. federal court and executive branch interpretations of the Geneva Conventions and other international laws or agreements, writers like Jay Bybee and John Yoo were acting as “true believers” rather than dispassionate Department of Justice advisers. For example, although the Bybee/Yoo I “standards” memo contained many assertions about the nature and scope of unitary executive power, it would be the redefinitions of “torture” that angered so many of those who read this OLC fragment. The 1984 Convention Against Torture (CAT) had been ratified by the U.S. with some reservations in 1994, and section 2340 of the U.S. Code defined torture as an “act committed by a

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person acting under the color of law specially intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering” that was not incidental to a lawful action “upon another person within his [sic] custody or physical control.” 66 Yoo’s critics wanted to argue that the overwhelming consensus of international commentators had interpreted this as an absolute prohibition against torture, and not some contingent fragment that needed to be relativized and analyzed on a “case by case” basis. Many of those who defended the ideological stance of the OLC writers argued that since contexts varied and exigencies changed, it would be naïve to stay with antiquated rules that were written at a time (i.e., pre-9/ 11) when “states” and not irregular forces were engaged in global warfare. Arguments about absolute prohibitions on torture theoretically played into the hands of zealous Al Qaeda fighters who could then take advantage of these “soft” policies. These were some of the asymmetrical weapons of the weak that were critiqued in the national security texts that were analyzed by Hartnett and Stengrim. 67 This, in turn, made it appear as if critics of EIT policies were inadvertently aiding the case of America’s enemies. In many ways these interrogation debates served as rhetorical vehicles that allowed American exceptionalists to parade the advantages that could be gained from the adoption of what were viewed as progressive, forward-looking laws. However, Professor Alvarez has argued that all of this focus on America’s rights of self-defense or unitary executive powers inverts the reasoning that circulated in international law communities since the time of the post-World War II Nuremberg trials. 68 The authors of the Bybee/Yoo I “standards” memo and similar texts implied that those facing criminal convictions could avoid having to face trial by relying on notions of self-defense, necessity, or the superior orders that came from empowered commanders-in-chief. 69 Even those who criticized the usage of EITs balked at the idea that interrogators should be put on trial in international venues, but this did not mean that American decision-makers couldn’t argue for some types of reformation. For example, in May of 2004, FBI agents were provided with “new” regulations that instructed them to simply walk away when they witnessed any overt detainee abuse. Valerie Caproni, one of the highest-ranking lawyers working for the FBI at that time, was asked to appear before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on July 14, 2004. She told members of Congress that all of her agents understood that it was FBI policy that “no interrogation of any individual, regardless of status, shall be conducted using coercive practices to extract information.” 70 Caproni noted that there was a long history of FBI involvement in the interrogation of prisoners, and she commented on how the FBI’s Academy and Legal Handbooks clearly stated that it was the policy of that agency that all special agents were to make no attempt to obtain a statement by force, threat, or promises. This meant that even if

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an unlawful combatant was taken into custody on the “battlefield of Afghanistan,” the agents were supposed to avoid using any interrogation techniques that involved any physical abuse, the threat of such abuse, or the imposition of severe physical or environmental conditions. 71 While Caproni acknowledged that there were “multiple schools of thought” regarding the best way of dealing with recalcitrant or hostile individuals, the FBI’s long years of experience had convinced the field agents that the usage of rapport-building techniques led to successful debriefings. 72 In one segment of her testimony, the FBI’s general counsel explained that if a “co-interrogator” was operating under different agency rules, then FBI personnel simply could not participate in the interrogation and they had to remove themselves from the situation. 73 Those FBI agents who removed themselves were also obligated to report these activities to their own chain-of-command, and senior FBI officials in turn had to record these incidents and send them along to the co-interrogators’ chain-ofcommand. Yet note how Caproni—like Soufan before her—still deployed militarist ways of thinking about post-9/11 events that fed right into the usage of aggressive “battlefield” ways of conceptualizing the fight against terrorism. Many FBI leaders—who knew about the importance of having “police” rather than “military” frames of reference—were leaving behind their domestic policing lexicons as they joined their CIA brothers and sisters and talked about the global “war” on terrorism. While Caproni did not go into any great detail about the exact scope and nature of “co-interrogator” abuse, it is now clear that for several years, anxious FBI agents had been collecting information for potential “war crimes files,” and these actions infuriated their fellow civil servants who were already worrying about the Jihadist use of America’s courtrooms. 74 The U.S. Justice Department eventually released a Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations outside of the U.S., 75 and this massive report chronicled the histories of various Department of Defense, CIA, and FBI programs. Many of those who wrote portions for this document were clearly not fans of the CIA EITs, but one finds little commentary on potential culpability. The DOJ report contained information on the interrogation of some of the high-value detainees—including Abu Zubaydah and Al-Qahtani— who were interrogated using the “alternative” interrogation models. 76 The authors of this review alleged that before and after the public disclosures of the Abu Ghraib “abuses,” 77 several FBI agents who were working in various military zones were expressing “significant concerns” about the use of aggressive interrogation techniques that included stress positions, dogs, and sleep deprivation, but there is no evidence that any of these “concerns” translated into any meaningful censure or accountability.

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After the Abu Ghraib revelations some of the new leaders of the OLC were asked to either modify or rescind some parts of the Bybee/Yoo memos, and yet these writers still worked away at immunizing the interrogators. For example, Levin in 2004 would publicly distribute memoranda that contained broader definitions of torture and more conventional interpretations of torture statutes. 78 Yet what Levin and others often left intact was the legalese that would be used to defend the U.S. commander-in-chief’s unilateral decision-making, the use of secrecy to counter critiques of the EITs, and the focus of attention on the American commander-chief’s “inherent” right to reinterpret any Congressional or Court decisions that might impinge on executive prerogatives. Debates about the meaning of “abuse,” humiliation, or “torture” were configured as lawfare disputes that got in the way of more substantive wartime decision-making, and there was no commentary on the ending of any unnecessary administrative detentions. The next ten years witnessed a steady rise in both academic and public commentary on lawfare, and those who were bothered by Congressional investigations into detainee affairs or U.S. Supreme Court decisions on habeas corpus access could respond with commentaries on how these types of side-shows were hurting the missions of the Coalition fighters who were engaging in counter-terrorism. THE DEBATES ABOUT THE ETHICS OF THOSE WHO WROTE THE “TORTURE MEMOS” AND THE GROWING ATTACKS ON LAWFARE, 2005–2009 Most of the interdisciplinary scholars who have studied the actions of the OLC during these turbulent times have focused their attention on the decisions that were made by President George W. Bush, David Addington, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and other empowered decision-makers who walked the halls of the White House or Pentagon, but we contend that a review of many of the commentaries that circulated in public, military, and legal spheres between 2005 and 2009 illustrates the ubiquitous nature of many of these ideological arguments. 79 In other words, we argue that these decision-makers were indeed speaking for many American communities when they defended the usage of harsh interrogation of detainees—especially in cases where arguers could link the detainees to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole or 9/11. John Yoo has a point when he contends that the 2004 re-election of President Bush was a referendum on some of these practices, and many polls over the years provide just some of the evidence that indicates the popularity of the positions that were adopted by those who defended EITs. 80 Later on, movies like Zero Dark Thirty only added to the mys-

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tique—and the normalization of torture policies that many American visitors to the cineplex believe led to the death of Osama bin Laden. 81 Contrast these American defenses of harsh interrogations with the ideological markers that can be found in external, international commentaries on some of these wartime techniques. One global poll that was conducted in 2006 reported that some 59% of the people around the world would reject the notion that human beings should be tortured to elicit information, even in cases where that use of torture might save innocent lives. 82 These types of arguments provided either implicit or explicit critiques of the types of American exceptionalist arguments that we wrote about in chapter one. Interestingly enough, by leaving behind the notion that the world profited from the existence of absolute bans on torture or the use of coercive interrogation, those who were bothered by lawfare could argue that the very debate that folks were having about the meanings of some of these terms provided even more evidence of the wisdom of America’s case-by-case approach. In an interview with then Vice President Cheney, ABC News in 2005 was able to get an explanation of how the Bush administration justified the use of EITs: Now, you can get into a debate about what shocks the conscience and what is cruel and inhuman. And to some extent, I suppose that’s in the eye of the beholder. But I believe and we think it’s important to remember that we are in a war against a group of individuals, a terrorist organization that did, in fact, slaughter 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/ 11, that it’s important for us to be able to have effective interrogation of these people when we capture them. And the debate is over the extent to which we’re going to have legislation that restricts or limits that ability. 83

These typical commentaries represented the attitudes of those who supported the president’s use of signing statements, executive orders, or other documents that could reinterpret the meaning of potentially restrictive legislation, including the Detainee Act of 2005. While many defenders of the Bush administration argued that the CIA and the “Vulcans” possessed some empirical and secret information that guided their efficacious counterterrorism policies, 84 their detractors retorted that a tiny and insular “War Council” seemed to be overseeing dozens of errant wartime policies. 85 “Vice President Dick Cheney and his top aide David Addington,” wrote Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, had “pushed for a radical rewriting of American policies on such critical issues as surveillance and detention of terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, with virtually no oversight or input from Congress or the courts.” 86 Note, however, that we still get no sense of where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable interrogation practices.

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Throughout 2006 and 2007, a growing number of journalists, lawyers, and former interrogators started to demand that the OLC retract more of their memos, and some observers started anticipating the time when the International Criminal Court might prosecute these authors for war crimes. This was wishful thinking. More than a few of the OLC’s detractors started circulation of commentaries on the deaths and injuries that were suffered by those who survived detention at Guantánamo, Bagram, or Baghdad facilities, but this did not lead to any substantive change in American policy-making. For example, Joseph Margulies, who represented detainees at Guantánamo, started reporting that one of the high value detainees, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was so badly traumatized by his interrogations that he began talking to non-existing people. 87 One key question, of course, was whether the revelations about the usage of harsh interrogation in cases like this would end al-Qahtani’s detention or lead to the circulation of information about how the U.S. military or the CIA should be conducting the interrogation of detainees. Those who shared the ideological predispositions of those who carried out “alternative” interrogations claimed that the CIA operatives were highly trained professionals who knew how to operate effectively and safely on the “dark side,” but this was not the way that these agents were portrayed in some mainstream or a few alternative press outlets. For example, readers of the Boston Globe were told that the CIA and other democratic allies were the “real innovators” of “21st century torture,” because their modern repertoires included what Darius Rejali called “clean” interrogation techniques—those methods that left no physical marks. 88 Again, many liberals and cosmopolitans cite Rejali’s historical studies of torture and interrogation, but defenders of EITs can still argue that critics are conflating “torture” with “enhanced” interrogation. At other times, the pundits who objected to the usage of EITs tried to let readers know about the attitudes of former military, CIA, or FBI interrogators who appeared to be contrite or apologetic about their former involvement in these types of programs. For example, some added their voices to the chorus of protestors who were arguing about the inhumanity of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques. The former director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, told one writer for The New Yorker, “If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t image how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody’s definition, for me, it would be torture.” 89 One of the key unanswered questions, of course, is whether there were any situations where national security states needed to use that pain to their advantage. As one might expect, there were members of the United Nations who also joined the ranks of those who complained about alleged abuses of universal human rights. Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, alleged that waterboarding qualified as

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“torture” and that the U.S. violators of the United Nations Convention Against torture needed to be prosecuted. 90 Obviously, she was not talking about the need for any Article-32 type hearings or military courtsmartial that would have stayed within the U.S. military command structure, and her arguments about the prioritization of applicable statutes fell on deaf ears. Empowered American decision-makers who heard these lamentations about the OLC used a host of different countering strategies as they weathered these political and cultural storms. Sometimes OLC lawyers simply repudiated parts of the “torture memos” and tried to preserve some of the more consensual arguments that appeared in these documents. For example, one former CIA Director, Michael Hayden, implied that there was a difference between the legality of the waterboarding during the first and second terms of the Bush administration. 91 A few took the position that lessons had been learned, that the CIA Office of Inspector General was looking into matters, and that there were now regimes of regulated enhanced interrogation that reduced the number of unauthorized “abuses.” As we note below, many thought that using the U.S. Army Manual provided necessary redress. Again, one looks in vain for any detailed discussions of acceptable interrogation behavior, or any talk of prison sentences for abusers. Most of the time, neo-liberal Americans steadfastly refused to budge and saw all of this dissension as one more example of the dangers of lawfare. Over the years, John Yoo defended almost every single argument that he ever presented in the dozens of memos that he wrote for his superiors during his tenure at the OLC. Near the end of Bush’s second term, he continued to fight the good fight as he complained about the “novel theories” of his detractors. In an article that appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer entitled “Terror Suspects are Waging ‘Lawfare,’” he asked his readers to think back on the sacrifices that Abraham Lincoln’s soldiers made during the Civil War as they fought to preserve the Union. 92 He complained that by 2008 it seemed as though the American nation was losing the “unity and tenacity” that it needed to fight the enemy, and he bemoaned the efforts of those who were helping Padilla and the other terrorists who used America’s courts to wage war against the “intelligence agents” who were still succeeding in “disrupting the follow-ups to the 9/11 attacks.” 93 Some of the liberals who had failed at the ballot box and who failed to persuade both “the president and Congress” were now harassing the U.S. government as they facilitated the rise of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. “Lawfare,” noted Yoo, had “become another dimension of warfare.” 94 Yet what he failed to acknowledge was the ideological nature of his own critiques. One of the biggest spikes in press coverage of “lawfare” appeared in April of 2009, when members of the Obama administration announced that they were going to release four OLC memos (including Bybee/Yoo II)

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that detailed many of the specific methods that were used by CIA interrogators. Carafano of the Heritage Foundation argued that the president needed to dampen the calls for partisan witch-hunts, and he argued that U.S. government officials had a “solemn obligation to resist those who want to play political ‘lawfare’ with counterterrorism policies to advance constituent agendas.” 95 Rivkin and Casey went so far as to argue that if readers really studied all four of the memos on CIA interrogation methods, they would find that a “cautious and conservative Justice Department” had advised the CIA that they needed to stay within the boundaries of the law. 96 Far from being any “green light” for torture—an argument that was often used by Sands 97 and other detractors of these policies—the memos detailed what was actually happening in the field as the OLC advisers suggested “many measures” that would ensure that the interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation. Securitization theory and praxis merged as the OLC memos reflected the actual field practices of CIA or DOD interrogators who felt that they had spent months and years acting in the best interests of their nation. Perhaps the most resounding and open defense of the CIA’s usage of the EITs came from the pen of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who presented some pointed remarks in the address that he gave at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). A receptive audience of neo-conservatives and other backers were able to hear him explain that while he supported President Barack Obama’s decision regarding the suppression of some army abuse photographs, he was bothered by the fact that “campaign rhetoric” seemed to be getting in the way of accurate historicizing. He explained that he now could talk freely as a private citizen, and he wanted to comment on the “strategic thinking” behind the Bush administration’s national security decision-making. 98 Cheney admitted that his rendition of what happened had to be influenced by all of the talk of nuclear threats that swirled around Washington, D.C., in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and he reminded his listeners that he once had to watch a coordinated and devastated attack on the nation from an underground bunker at the White House. 99 Throughout his address before the AEI, the former vice president credited the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” with having prevented the deaths of “thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people.” 100 This type of assertion is difficult to defend or disprove, but it resonates with patriots already predisposed to believe that this type of intelligence-gathering had prevented another 9/11. Cheney reiterated the claims that had circulated in hundreds of OLC letters and memos, that the techniques that were used by trained intelligence interrogators were only used when alternative efforts failed. Moreover, he wanted to let his audience known that waterboarding had only been used on three of the terrorists, and one of these detainees—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)—was the “mastermind” of 9/11. 101 What he failed to mention,

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however, was the fact that many of the other enhanced techniques must have been used by literally thousands of FBI, CIA, and military personnel during the Bush administration years. Richard Cheney was making this presentation just weeks after the release of four key CIA memos, and he argued that what bothered him about Obama’s decision was the politicized and selective nature of these revelations. Why, asked the former vice president, wasn’t the new president also releasing the memos that contained the “content of the answers” that responded to queries about the efficacy of harsh interrogation? 102 At this point in his peroration the former V.P. conjures up a “history” filled with misguided terrorists who must have thought that they would be dealing with weak Americans who were wedded to the old idea that these detainees would be taken to federal courts were they would have the protection of full panoplies of citizens’ rights. Cheney let his audience know that these evil captors were in for a rude awakening: Maybe you’ve heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogation, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people. 103

Terror suspects’ resistance, in other words, in the face of exceptional American counter-resistance, was futile. Cheney couldn’t help using this forum as a podium for attacking the softness of the incoming president’s policies. Those who talked of dismantling the Bush programs, and those who criticized the usage of EITs, were now characterized by Cheney as engaging in “recklessness cloaked in righteousness,” 104 and he chastised those who filled the public sphere with euphemisms that hid the facts of war. Audiences in the room purportedly clapped as he explained that there was no American value that had ever obligated the nation’s public servants to “spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things.” 105 This was a clever way of implying that critics of EITs were exaggerating both the psychological and physical harms that were allegedly suffered by detainees who got the “enhanced” interrogation treatments. Richard Cheney was obviously not the only defender of the Bush administration’s aggressive counter-terrorist interrogation programs, and many of those who agreed with his framing of the Jihadist threats started to circulate other information that came from Justice Watch’s Freedom of Information requests. For example, in early November of 2009 this public interest group obtained several versions of a key CIA report that Cheney had requested, entitled Detainee Reporting Pivotal for War Against Al-Qa’ida (2005). 106 Cheney’s supporters argued that in the

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June 1 version of this CIA summary report, one finds the claim that detainee “reporting accounts for more than half of all HUMINT [human intelligence] reporting on al-Qa’ida since the program began.” 107 This opinion would be treated as an empirical fact that would go viral as milbloggers and others treated the CIA conjectures as securitization gospel. Although many parts of this 2005 CIA detainee report are redacted for purposes of national security, one can see how some might argue that KSM was a “crucial pillar of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.” 108 Readers learn that since early 2003 these particular interrogations had broadened and deepened the CIA’s understanding of some of Al Qaeda’s targets and the existence of other internal or external operatives. 109 The interrogation of Abu Zabaydah was used as a “baseline for the debriefing other senior detainees,” 110 and KSM’s questioning was said to have led to the revelation that other Al Qaeda operatives were working on producing anthrax. For those who shared this existential worldview, weathering the storms of abuse that came from the promoters of lawfare was worth the American sacrifices of the CIA if EITs had actually prevented some catastrophic terrorism. After all, as we note in a later chapter, wasn’t it possible that these CIA interrogation mosaics were the very keys to finding enemies like Osama bin Laden? The Lasting Rhetorical Power of Interrogation Ideologies in Today’s National Security State As noted above, there were no shortages of legal reformists and other citizens who hoped that the inauguration of President Obama would spell the end of the abuses of the OLC and the usage of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. For a few months after the new president took office, there were indeed signs that the commander-in-chief would dismantle some of the judicial scaffolding that undergirded the Bush administration’s counterterrorist interrogation program. President Obama talked about the release of new army photos of abuse, and he lauded the importance of transparency as he applauded the use of Freedom of Information Acts. For many of those who were once accused of engaging in lawfare, this seemed like a new beginning. Yet national security ideologies are not that easily dismantled, and as soon as the realpolitik of life started to factor into longitudinal wartime American decision-making, qualifications, equivocations, and reversals filled the mainstream media as President Obama sought to reassure the CIA and others that he was still interested in waging war on global terrorism. Obama reversed course and decided to stop the release of the army abuse photographs, and he did not dismantle all of the secret detention programs. While he closed some secret CIA sites, he did not stop all

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of the renditions, and as we note in several of our chapters, he escalated the usage of drones at the Afghan-Iraq borders. At the same time, President Obama defended the refurbishing of the rules that would be used for trials in front of military commissions. Now, of course, he too could wield the weapons that had been forged in the fires of OLC debates. He, too, could battle new forms of lawfare. By 2014, Congressional leaders were still debating with each other whether it was prudent to release the thousands of pages that legislative leaders had collected on interrogation policies and practices. 111 High-ranking officials who once testified before Congress that they considered waterboarding a form of “torture” nevertheless refused to countenance the idea of having any type of war crimes investigations that looked beyond the Bybee/Yoo paradigmatic framings of military or CIA culpability. Attorney General Eric Holder, in his Preliminary Review into the Interrogation of Certain Detainees, 112 told reporters that any prosecutorial probes coming out of the Department of Justice would not target any agents who in “good faith” had committed prohibited acts that were prescribed by the attorneys of the OLC. “The men and women in our intelligence community perform an incredibly important service to our nation, and they often do so under difficult and dangerous circumstances,” argued Holder, and “they need to be protected from legal jeopardy when they act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance.” He went on to conclude that he was making it clear that the DOJ would not be prosecuting anyone who in “good faith” had followed the OLC guidance on interrogation of detainees. 113 As critical communication scholars, we are intrigued by the practical consequences of having these types of negotiated compromises during the EITs debates that had been waged since 2004. As a practical matter, Holder was not just speaking for the Obama administration—his notion of letting bygones be bygones reflected the populist sentiments of American audiences who watched shows like 24. All of the CIA agents— and their employees and subalterns—who once may have used the “authorized” techniques of waterboarding, wall-slamming, stress positions, sleep deprivation—would now know that they would not have to face prosecution in either U.S. criminal courts or foreign courts. What is still up in the air is the question of whether Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and the other OLC advisers will also be shielded by the Holder decisions. 114 Perhaps the only individuals who need to worry about future prosecutions will be the few “rogue” agents (two or three by 2014) who may eventually be configured as the sadists who used a variety of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented methods.” During the next decade, we will occasionally be reading about the immoral behavior of those who threatened foreign detainees with revolvers and power drills, put pressure on a detainee’s carotid artery, staged mock executions, or warned a detainee that any future attack on the U.S.

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would mean that “We’re going to kill your children.” 115 But these acts will be characterized as events that violated the letter and spirit of the Yoo and Bybee OLC memos. This is Abu Ghraib redux. All of this testifies to the enduring power of key national security ideologies that were not just conjured up by former President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Steven Bradbury, Douglas Feigh, David Addington, or any other social agent who helped put some of these ideas into practice. These were co-produced by countless American audiences who also applauded, valorized, or at least tolerated the efforts of the CIA, who believed in “good faith” exceptions to some legal strictures, and the need for harsh treatment of high-value detainees. We are convinced that the discursive war that was waged against foreign, cosmopolitan, or international lawfare between 2001 and 2009 is still with us today, and it will remain a dense rhetorical form that will not be unpacked by those who have voluntarily assented to its truths. While many neo-conservatives like John Yoo may be the poster children of alleged “torture” and the condensation symbols for these ideas, a critical ideological analysis of the OLC memos illustrates how these memos simply encapsulated the more general cultural and martial ideas that were being circulated by many journalists, citizens, military interrogators and their political supporters. The arguments and tropes that circulated in these OLC documents linked together the actions of a Diane Beaver to the desires of the military interrogator who thought that administering EITs might help protect loved ones back home. These types of arguments resonated with many diverse audiences, who were united in the belief that far too many who misunderstand the need for the national security state were mollycoddling the foreign detainees. Weiner is surely on point when he contends that part of the reason that the OLC lacked so much accountability during the Bush administration years had to do with the fact that that organization consisted of lawyers who were “appointed by the President, in part because of a shared ideology.” 116 The problem, of course, is that this is yet another situation where you have all sorts of intelligence stove piping, 117 where secrecy replaces transparency. With the passage of years, the list of JAG officers, FBI senior officials, State diplomats, and other experts on intelligence who were kept out of the loop continues to grow. President Obama famously quipped that America had nothing to gain by spending time and energy “laying blame for the past,” 118 but this has not halted the clarion calls of those who vociferously disagree and believe that we need to engage in all sorts of acts of restoration. Restoration of the luster that surrounds our honorable military codes, restoration of international trust in American institutions, and restoration of the faith that there are limits to both the powers of a commander-in-chief and the strategic warriors who fight this nation’s “dark” campaigns.

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Members of the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility will in the future attempt to magnify the reforms and “lessons learned” that will come from the reprimanding of those who did not follow the strictures that can be found in the infamous “torture memos,” but as long as they continue to avoid critiquing these lawfare attacks they will reproduce the very rhetorical cultures that helped with the production and tragic transmigration of the EITs in the first place. What many journalists and lay persons don’t often notice is that after voluntarily ending the waterboarding of high-value detainees in 2003, the members of the OLC in 2008 argued that the U.S. president retained the power to authorize waterboarding and other discontinued alternative techniques in exigent circumstances, such “as when there is a ‘belief that an attack might be imminent.’” 119 Known as the “Jack Bauer” exception in elite circles, this legal qualification and loophole could be used even in situations where the president may be violating domestic statutes that proscribe torturous activity. As long as these permutations of unitary executive theories are carried along from generation to generation, the names may change, but the “torture lawyers” (Professor Sands) will remain. Dismantling or deterritorializing these harsh interrogation cultures will be no easy matter. General Michael Hayden, who served two years as the director of the CIA during the George W. Bush presidency, told audiences listening to Fox News on a Sunday in 2009 that all of these revelations presented Al Qaeda with a tactical advantage in that they could now prepare for the specific practices that were used by the CIA. “It describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond,” Hayden explained, and this was very useful for the enemy who now knew that Obama “had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques.” 120 Hayden, like President Bush before him, used the tale of Abu Zubaydah’s clamming up before the usage of EITs as an illustration of how things changed once the CIA took the gloves off. General Hayden alleged that after being water boarded, Abu Zubaydah gave up information that led to the arrest of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and that individual would later be charged with helping coordinate the 9/11 attacks. Elsewhere Hayden would co-author a piece with former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey that averred that “fully half” of the government’s information about Al-Qaeda’s structures and activities came from the use of “coercive interrogation.” 121 In 2009, Senator John Ensign of Nevada asked this key question: “Do we really think that having advanced interrogation techniques is something we don’t want to use if we find Osama bin Laden?” 122 All of this was incredibly prescient, because two years later the reported success of the Navy SEAL Team 6 raid on Abbottabad and the death of Osama bin Laden revived the question of whether EITs had helped the CIA formulate the mosaics that led to the assassination of the

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nation’s number one enemy. Pragmatic Americans, who are convinced that we are still at “war” with Al Qaeda and that the Homeland is constantly under siege, will continue to complain about any jurisprudential constraints or public policy decisions that are made regarding having less harsh interrogation practices. One unnamed former top official in President George Bush’s administration called the publication of some of the OLC memos “unbelievable” and then proffered one of the most famous examples of the threat inflation that we described in chapter one: “It’s damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama’s actions today, we are telling terrorists what they are. . . . We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. . . . Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring that they can never be used again—even in a ticking-time-bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake. 123 ” None of this explains why thousands of other detainees had to be interrogated as if they were high-value detainees, but it does put on display the insecurities, and the types of arguments, that resonate with those who continue to live in the traumatic shadows of 9/11. NOTES 1. J. Cofer Black, quoted in Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore, and Mike Wiser, “Top Secret America,” PBS.org, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-waron-terror/topsecretamerica/transcript-6/#number1. 2. Journalist commentary on Army Reserve Spec. Charles Graner’s wearing of green gloves can be found in Oliver Prichard, “Pa., Soldier Among Those in the Furor,” Philly.com, last modified May 7, 2004, http://articles.philly.com/2004–05–07/news/ 25382700_1_charles-graner-naked-iraqi-prisoners-soldier. 3. For a discussion of how discourse of gloves and fists have been a part of surveillance, human rights rhetoric, social movements, and the channeling of protest control, see Jennifer Earl, “Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse Control,” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (2011): 261–284. 4. Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of the Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. 5. Pugliese, State Violence, 1. 6. A nice overview of many of these external, international critiques can be found in Lisa Hajjar, “International Humanitarian Law and ‘War on Terror’: A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and American Doctrines and Policies,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 21–42. 7. Here we are of course extending the famous work of Kenneth Burke, who once argued that “any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.” A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), 59. 8. Detainee Treatment Act, Public Law No. 109–148, 119 Statute 2739 (2005). 9. Department of the Army, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, FM 2–22–3 (FM34–52), (2006). 10. Executive Order No. 13, 491, 74 Federal Register 4893 (January 22, 2009); Human Rights First, The U.S. Army Field Manual On Interrogation: A Strong Document in Need of Careful Revision, n.d., https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/ Army_Field_Manual.pdf.

The Department of Defense, the CIA, and “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” 89 11. See Jay S. Bybee, Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. Sections 2340–2340A (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Attorney General, August 1, 2002) [herein Bybee/Yoo I, “standards” memo]. Many commentators credit John Yoo for having drafted this version that was signed by Bybee. For the sake of convenience, some of these “torture memos” have been collected in Karen J. Greenberg, Joshua L. Dratel, and Anthony Lewis, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12. For some historical background that helps contextualize these “torture memo” debates, see Evan Wallach, “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 45, no. 2(2006/2007): 468–506. 13. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008). 14. For key background reading on the OLC and the importance of these memos for executive power, see Peter Margulies, “True Believers at Law: National Security Agendas, the Regulation of Lawyers, and the Separation of Powers,” Maryland Law Review 68, no. 1 (2008): 1–88; Ross L. Weiner, “The Office of Legal Counsel and Torture: The Law as Both a Sword and Shield,” George Washington Law Review 77, no. 2 (February 2009): 524–560.; Bradley Wendel, “Deference to Clients and Obedience to Law: the Ethics of the Torture Lawyers,” Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy 104 (2009): 58–70. 15. Pugliese, State Violence, 143. 16. For this particular chapter, we have used a purposive sampling of dozens of directives, reports, or major memos. Some of these texts were either leaked or released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that were filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Washington Post, or other organizations. In a few cases the Obama White House officially released about nine of these texts in 2009. Most of the memos that we have analyzed were between 8 and 80 pages in length, and several covered a number of issues related to national security state powers as they touched on the relevance of the Geneva Convention, executive powers during wartime, and the prioritization of particular military principles during wartime. 17. For examples of some of the formalistic, theoretical defenses that might be raised in response to some of this criticism, see Paola Gaeta, “May Necessity Be Available as a Defence for Torture in the Interrogation of Suspected Terrorists?” Journal of International Criminal Justice 2, no. 2 (2004): 785–794. 18. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006). 19. John Yoo, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). 20. Ali Soufan, quoted by Sarah Moughty, “The Beginning of ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,’” Frontline, September 12, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/the-interrogator/the-beginning-of-enhanced-interrogation-techniques/. 21. Peter Margulies, “The Detainees’ Dilemma: The Virtues and Vices of Advocacy Strategies in the War on Terror,” Buffalo Law Review 57, no. 2 (April 2009): 415. 22. In some situations the OLC memos are used as vehicles for White House commentaries on how other branches of government are encroaching on executive branch prerogatives. Douglas Kmiec, for example, has argued that the Department of Justice’s OLC opinions have served as the “legal adhesive” for an empowered “unitary executive.” Douglas Kmiec, D. W. (1993). OLC’s Opinion Writing Function: The Legal Adhesive for a Unitary Executive,” Cardozo Law Review, 15 (1993): 337–374. 23. Harold K. Koh, “A World Without Torture,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 43 (2005): 641–662, 645. 24. Weiner, “The Office of Legal Counsel and Torture,” 525. 25. Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 96–97.

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26. Valerie Caproni, Statement for the Record of Federal Bureau of Investigation General Counsel Valerie Caproni before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. July 14, 2004, http://balkin.blogspot.com/Caproni071404.pdf. 27. Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General, General Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities, September 2001–October 2003 (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2004). 28. Mayer, The Dark Side. 29. For a more detailed philosophical commentary on how “lawfare” brought together a convergence of theoretical concerns from two domains, see David Kennedy, Of War and Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 30. Charles J. Dunlap, J., Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Century Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: Carr Center for Human Rights, Kennedy School of Government, November 29, 2001), 14–15, http://www.duke.edu/~pfeaver/dunlap.pdf. 31. Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 59. 32. Ibid., 59. 33. Brooke M. Goldstein, “Welcome to ‘Lawfare’—A New Type of Jihad, Family Security Matters, April 14, 2008. Paragraphs 1–3, http://www.legal-project.org/article/ 241. 34. Council on Foreign Relations, “Lawfare, the Latest in Asymmetries,” Council of Foreign Relations, March 18, 2003, paragraphs 2–3, http://www.cfr.org/publications.html?id=5772. 35. Central Intelligence Agency (1983). Human Resource Exploitation Manual-1983, n.p. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/02–01.htm. 36. James Hodge and Linda Cooper, “Roots of Abu Ghraib in CIA Techniques: 50 Years of Refining, Teaching Torture Found in Interrogation Manuals,” National Catholic Reporter, November 5, 2004, paragraph 69, http://soaw.org/newswire_detail.php?id+557. 37. Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 163. 38. Wendel, “Deference to Clients,” 58. 39. Dennis C Blair, Statement by the Director of National Intelligence, April 16, 2009, page 1, http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20090416_1_release.pdf. 40. Ibid., 1. 41. Ibid., 1. 42. Ibid., 1. What Blair conveniently leaves out is the fact that there were many critics of these politics who objected to them during both dark and sunny days. At various times Colin Powell, Jack Goldsmith, Ali Soufan, and many others objected to various features of America’s interrogation regime that focused on the use of coercive interrogation and refuse to provide Geneva Convention-type protection to suspected terrorist detainees. 43. George W. Bush, Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees, 1 (Washington, DC: The White House, February 7, 2002). http://www.pegc.us/archive/ White_House/bush_memo_20020207_ed.pdf 44. Ibid., 1–2. 45. David Cole, “The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers,” New York Review of Books, 56, no. 15 (October 8, 2009), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23114. 46. See, for example, David Cole talking about the “case against” individual lawyers or the Sands book, which focuses on the social agency of the “torture team.” This glosses over the fact that many of these arguments circulated by empowered elites simply reflected and refracted American cultural desires that circulating within the broader Anglo-American cultures. Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 47. For more on the role that legal and public ideographs play in the formation of this “rhetorical culture,” see Celeste M. Condit and John L. Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

The Department of Defense, the CIA, and “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” 91 48. See Donald Rumsfeld, Memorandum for the Commander, U.S. Southern Command, Counter-resistance Techniques in the War on Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: The Pentagon, 2003), http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/03.01.15.pdf. 49. See Fuleur Johns, “Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception,” European Journal of International Law 16 no. 4 (2005): 613–635. 50. Diane E. Beaver, Memorandum for Commander, Joint Task Force 170, Legal Brief on Proposed Counter-resistance Strategies. Department of Defense, Joint Task Force 170 (Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, October 11, 2002), 1. http://www.defense.gov/news/Jun2004/ d20040622doc3.pdf. 51. Ibid., 1. 52. Here we are of course joining the ranks of others who have pointed out the Kafkaesque features of Guantánamo Practices. See Pratap Chatterjee, “How Guantánamo Becames Kafka’s Trial,” The Guardian, last modified April 25, 2011, http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-bayguantanamo-files; John Goetz, Mattiue von Rohr, Marcel Rosenbach and Britta Sandberg, “Kafkaesque Machinery of Suspicion: A Causal Relation with Truth at Guantánamo,” Spiegel Online International, last modified May 2, 2011, http:// www.spiegel.de/international/world/kafkaesque-machinery-of-suspicion-a-casual-relationship-with-the-truth-at-guantanamo-a-760127.html. 53. Ibid., 1. 54. Ibid., 4–5. 55. Ibid., 5. 56. William Ranney Levi, “Interrogation’s law,” Yale Law Journal 118 (2009): 1434–1483, 1445. 57. Bybee, Standards of Conduct, 45–46. 58. Pugliese, State Violence, 50–59. 59. Jay S. Bybee, Memo for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, Regarding Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Assistant Attorney General, August 1, 2002), http://fas.org/irp/agency/doj/olc/zubaydah.pdf. 60. Ibid., 1–2. 61. Stephen G. Bradbury, Memorandum for J. A. Rizzo, Senior Deputy General Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency, Re: Application of United States Obligations under Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture to Certain Techniques that May be Used in the Interrogation of High Value al Qaeda Detainees (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, May 10, 2005), 37, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture_archive/docs/Bradbury%20memo.pdf. 62. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogation Rules, Prepared testimony to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (Washington, D.C.: House Committee on Judicial Affairs, United States House of Representatives, June 18, 2008), http://judiciary.house.gov/_files/hearings/ pdf/Wilkerson080618.pdf. 63. For illustrative examples of some of the press coverage of these internal agency and interagency debates, see Dana Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons: Debate is Growing within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11,” Washington Post, last modified November 2, 2005, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR20051 10101644.html; Adam Liptak,“The Reach of War: Penal Law; Legal Scholars Criticize Memos on Torture,” New York Times, last modified June 25, 2004, http:// www.nytimes.com/2004/06/25/world/the-reach-of-war-penal-law-legal-scholars-criticize-memos-on-torture.html. 64. Dana Priest, “Justice Dept. Memos Says Torture ‘may be justified,’” Washington Post, last modified June 13, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A38894–2004Jun13.html. 65. Margulies, “True Believers,” 38.

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66. See “Torture,” U.S. Code, Title 18—Crimes and Criminal Procedure,” Section 2340A, Washington, D.C.: United States Code, 2006 edition), http://www.gpo.gov/ fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011–title18/pdf/USCODE-2011-title18-partI-chap113Csec2340A.pdf. 67. Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Anne Stengrim, “War Rhetorics: The National Security Strategy of the United States and President Bush’s Globalization-through-Benevolent Empire,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 175–205, doi: 10.1215/00382876–105–1–175. 68. José E. Alvarez, “Torturing the Law,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 37 (2006): 175–224. 69. Bybee, Standards Memo, 191. 70. Caproni, Statement for the record of Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2. 71. Ibid., 2. 72. Ibid., 4. 73. Ibid., 6. 74. See Mayer, The Dark Side. 75. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Washington, DC: Office of the Inspector General, 2008). For a journalist overview of some of the issues that were being presented by the Department of Justice, see Scott Shane, “Waterboarding Focus of Inquiry by Justice Dept.,” New York Times, last modified February 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/washington/23justice.html. 76. U.S. Department of Justice, A Review of the FBI’s, 67–102. 77. Ibid., xv. 78. Daniel Levin, Memorandum for James B. Comey, Deputy Attorney General, Re: Legal Standards Applicable Under 18 U.S.C. sections 2340–2340A (Washington, D.C., Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, December 30, 2004), file:///C:/Users/What/ Downloads/dojtorture123004mem.pdf. 79. For an overview of the role that spheres play in public argumentation, see G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument,” Journal of the American Forensics Association 18 (1982): 214–227. 80. As late as 2009, many polls were still showing that somewhere between 51 and 60 percent of the American public were willing to argue that the use of ”enhanced interrogation techniques” was sometimes justified, including the use of waterboarding. Chris Cillizza, “Some Call it Torture,” Washington Post, last modified May 18, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR20 09051702248.html. 81. Even before the circulation of Zero Dark Thirty, the bin Laden raid itself reignited the debates about harsh interrogations and torture. See John W. Schiemann, “Interrogational Torture: Or How Good Guys Get Bad Information With Ugly Methods,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 2 (March, 2012): 3–19, DOI: 10.1177/ 1065912911430670. 82. BBC World Service, “World Citizens Reject Torture, Global Poll Reveals,” BBC, last modified October 19, 2006, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa./articles/ btjusticehuman_rightsra/261.php. 83. Richard Cheney, “Interview by ABC News with Dick Cheney, Vice President, in Al-Asad, Iraq,” ABC News, last modified December 18, 2005, paragraph 24, http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051218–4.html. See also Richard Cheney, “Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute.” The Weekly Standard, last modified May 21, 2009, Retrieved from http://www.weekly standard.com/weblogs/ TWSFP/2009/05/text_of_cheneys_aei_speech.asp. 84. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004). 85. See Mayer, The Dark Side.

The Department of Defense, the CIA, and “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” 93 86. Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, “U.S. Attorney General Held Firm on War Policies,” New York Times, last modified August 28, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/ 08/28/world/americas/28iht–28gonzales.7281545.html?pagewanted=all. 87. Peter Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 86, 178. 88. Darius Rejali, “Torture, American Style: The Surprising Force Behind Torture: Democracies,” Boston Globe, last modified December 16, 2007, http://www.boston.com/ bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2007/12/16/torture_american_style/. 89. Lawrence Wright, “The Spymaster: Can Mike McConnell Fix America’s Intelligence Community?” New Yorker, January 21, 2008, 42–59, 53, http:// www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all. 90. Louis Arbour, quoted in Reuters, “Tactic Called Torture,” New York Times, last modified February 9, 2008, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E1D8123CF93AA35751C0A96E9C8B63. 91. Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Chief Doubts Tactic to Interrogate is Still Legal,” The New York Times, last modified February 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/washington/08intel.html?gwh=12A35B6E70A981429DE644AF5C5CBE0C. 92. John Yoo, “Terror Suspects are Waging ‘lawfare’ on U.S.,” Philadelphia Inquirer, last modified January 16, 2008, http://articles.philly.com/2008–01–16/news/ 25254993_1_jose-padilla-al-qaeda-dirty-bomb-attack. 93. What Yoo did not mention in any graphic detail was the fact that he himself was in the middle of a major lawsuit that had been filed by lawyers who represented Padilla and his mother. 94. Yoo, “Terror Suspects,” paragraph 4. 95. James J. Carafano, “Set the Record Straight: Publish All key Memos on CIA Interrogations,” Heritage Foundation WebMemo, April 23, 2009, 2, http://author.heritage/ org/Reserach/homelandsecurity/upload/wm_2406.pdf. 96. David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee E. Casey, “The Memos Prove We Didn’t Torture,” Wall Street Journal, last modified April 20, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/articles/ SB124018665408933455.html. 97. Sands, Torture Team. 98. Cheney, Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, paragraphs 6–8. 99. Ibid., paragraph 16. 100. Ibid., paragraph 23. 101. Ibid., paragraph 30. 102. Ibid., paragraph 28. 103. Ibid., paragraph 32. 104. Ibid., paragraph 38. 105. Ibid., paragraph 48. 106. Central Intelligence Agency, Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War against AlQa’ida, June 1, 2005, http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2009/nov/judicial-watch-obtains-new-cia-documents. 107. Ibid., i. 108. Ibid., 1. 109. Ibid., 2. 110. Ibid., 6. 111. See Reuters Staff, “CIA Torture Was Unnecessary, Senate Report to Conclude,” Huffington Post, August 1, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/01/cia-interrogations-911-senate_n_5643150.html. 112. Attorney General Eric Holder, Statement of Attorney General Eric Holder Regarding a Preliminary Review into the Interrogation of Certain Detainees, (Washington, D.C.: The United States Department of Justice, August 24, 2009), http://www.justice.gov/ag/ speeches/2009/ag-speech-0908241.html. 113. Ibid., paragraph 4. 114. Evan Perez, “Justice Likely to Urge No Prosecutions,” Wall Street Journal, last modified May 6, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB124157214390990085.

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115. Cole, “The Torture Memos,” paragraph 1. 116. Weiner, “The Office of Legal Counsel and Torture,” 529. 117. For more on other examples of stovepiping, see Gordon R. Mitchell, “Team B. Intelligence Coups,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 144–173. 118. Barack Obama, quoted in Mark Mazetti and Scott Shane, “Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the C.I.A.,” The New York Times, last modified April 16, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html. 119. Greg Miller, “Waterboarding is Still an Option: The White House Calls the Technique Legal, Stunning Critics,” Los Angeles Times, last modified February 7, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/07/nation/na-torture7. 120. Michael Hayden, quoted in Joshua Brustein, “Former C.I.A. Director Defends Interrogation,” New York Times, last modified April 19, 2009, paragraphs 3–5, http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/us/politics/20CIA.html. 121. Brustein, “Former C.I.A. Director Defends,” paragraphs 15–16. 122. Senator John Ensign, quoted in Brustein, “Former C.I.A. Director Defends,” paragraphs 15–16. 123. Mike Allen, “Obama Consulted Widely on Memos,” Politico, last modified April 16, 2009, paragraph 6, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21338.html.

FOUR The Rise of America’s Special Forces and the Rhetorical Force Behind the Navy SEAL’s Raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad

On the night of May 1, 2011, Americans watched President Barack Obama address the country live on television, beginning with the statement, “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” 1 Just shy of ten years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City, Americans were finally informed that this elusive enemy leader had not only been captured; he had been killed. This event in many ways represented belated justice for a country that still grieved over the tragic day in its history that still felt so fresh in so many peoples’ minds. It also served as a point of transition that solidified America’s future way of war. Among the reactions to this significant accomplishment were celebrations of the bravery and the skills of SEAL Team Six, the community of specialists who were credited with taking out America’s top enemy. This all added to the rhetorical ethos of the U.S. military’s Special Forces and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that supervised the raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. 2 As a result of the perceptual successes of the raid, public interest in the use of Special Forces grew, and the failures of Tora Bora were left behind, as nearly everyone was eager to hear more details about the raid. If there ever was a defining moment where defenders of the national 95

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security state could point with pride to their alleged counter-terrorist successes, this was it. From its inception, the JSOC remained very secretive, and before the debates about the drones or the raid on Abbottabad, it was a relatively unknown organization that had many members who worked under the radar. Few American citizens had heard about the JSOC, and even fewer were aware of the role that it played in organizing night raids or coordinating efforts with the CIA. 3 It was not until after the bin Laden raid, when various narratives of the mission were told to the public, that the JSOC was exposed and celebrated. Within a matter of months, the JSOC would be configured by America’s mainstream press as a center of covert operations that brought together the elite fighting forces of the Navy, the army, the marines, and the air force. The JSOC, and any other American unit that tied itself to the raid on Abbottabad, enjoyed basking in the reflected glory that came from being associated with the demise of Osama bin Laden. Despite some contentions that the U.S. overstepped its bounds by keeping the raid a secret from Pakistan, most of the American public did not see the raid as problematic, but rather as a sign of the direction in which the military was, and should be, moving. The lethal and nimble warriors who worked under the tutelage of the JSOC were the vanguards of twenty-first-century post-human network centric warfare, where mobile Special Forces would board stealth helicopters as they surprised enemies and avoided civilian casualties. This was the stuff of legend, the apotheosis of asymmetric warfare, and the very secrecy of the JSOC or the Navy SEALs just added to their mystique. As we noted in chapter two, counterinsurgency operations (COIN) doctrines battled with competing counterterrorist paradigms for elite and public attention, and the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound spotlighted the potential benefits that might come from risky, yet potentially profitable, moves away from the use of conventional forces and toward the adoption of more special forces missions. After all, didn’t they just show that they could get the job done—even if this meant that they were technically breaking a few laws? The valorization of the Special Forces and the CIA (which was also heralded as a heroic organization in the retellings of the raid) contributed to the validation of the beliefs of those who were sure that both communities should have a larger role to play in the future of American diplomacy. The raid on Abbottabad would become an image event that seemed to provide visual and empirical evidence that the massive amounts of money that were being funneled into CIA and JSOC coffers was money well spent. In this chapter, we will argue that the rise of the JSOC is an often overlooked, but important part of the rhetorical invention of the nation’s security state, and, as usual, there is a multi-layered genealogy behind this rise. The history of JSOC predates the bin Laden raid by approxi-

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mately three decades. 4 The public and elite faith in the efficacy of these missions was not something that developed overnight. Many journalists who would cover President Obama’s tracking of the bin Laden raid in the White House Situation Room would comment on the risks that he and his administration were taking, but this was not the first time that American publics or military experts had worried about the dangers associated with these types of elite missions. For example, after the failed attempt to rescue 53 American hostages from a U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1980 (the mission now widely known as Operation Eagle Claw), embarrassed Pentagon officials sought ways of fetching good from evil as they tried to learn from their mistakes. It was during this period of time that the specific organization of special forces known as JSOC was formed, 5 and this “subunified command” part of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM, or SOCOM) was given the task of focusing on counterterrorism missions. Over time American publics would learn that the JSOC would be composed of Delta Force, Intelligence Support Activity, United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU formerly SEAL Team Six), 24th Special Tactics Squadron, and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and 75th Ranger Regiment. 6 This was an incredibly impressive list of elite military communities, and those who brought them together were convinced that these were the individuals who should play a major role in the dismantling of Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations. Before the celebrations that followed in the wake of the raid on Abbottabad, the JSOC and America’s special forces had many initial successes, but they also suffered some major setbacks. Some of these setbacks included the failure of the Black Hawk helicopter in Somalia in 1993, a mission that was in the minds of almost everyone involved in the bin Laden raid in 2011 when one of the helicopters experienced difficulties. 7 The distances that had to be covered, the terrains that had to be crossed, and the dangers associated with mechanical failures all contributed to the risks that were associated with these types of Special Forces raids. In many ways, it could be argued that Operation Enduring Freedom provided the geographical backdrop that would be needed for the resurrection of the JSOC and the fighting faiths of those who believed that ultimately it would not be armies of conventional forces that would defeat Jihadists but the counterinsurgents who could carry out strikes within a relatively short period of time. The JSOC seemed to be the perfect command structure to supervise those types of raids, and, even though they had been around for decades, it was only in recent years that publics witnessed the reinventions that contributed to that organization’s rise in status and reputation. Many credit former Army General Stanley McChrystal, who took over in 2003, for the rise in use, visibility, and success of the U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. 8

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General McChrystal should be given credit for helping with the rise of JSOC, but we need to remember that depending on the mission, the command may have as many as 25,000 troops available for campaigns and that this is much higher than the 1,800 who were around prior to 9/11. 9 Congressional leaders and Pentagon officials had to be convinced of the need to pour money into the JSOC, and they were persuaded; overtime the JSOC grew into a large operation that had its own drones, reconnaissance planes, dedicated satellites, and intelligence division. 10 Readers may be shocked to learn that SOCOM now is composed of approximately 66,000 people, which includes both military personnel and civilians, and this command has a budget of $10.5 billion, which is a number double that of 2001. 11 We are of course persuaded that none of this would have happened if publics and elites were not convinced that these were the best of the best, the special forces that could take on most of the counterterrorist missions. In this chapter, we argue that the rhetorical force behind the bin Laden raid greatly contributed to the rise of America’s Special Forces and their increased use in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). While there will be countless milbloggers and others who valorize their efforts, we are convinced we need to be more self-reflective, and we invite readers to think about the long-term consequences that might come from the increased usage of the JSOC and these Special Forces. For example, is it possible that the perceived successes of these warriors emboldens those who are willing to engage in “extra-territorial” warfare in places like Yemen or Pakistan? Does the deployment of these forces raise any new questions regarding jus in bello (modes of war) principles? 12 What are potential adverse impacts that the use of increased Special Forces might have on foreign diplomacy? How do public memories and representations of the Special Forces alter geopolitical landscapes or mediascapes? What role has the valorization of these warriors by the American public played in defining the nature and scope of current overseas contingency operations? Obviously, for us, the rhetorical culture that swirls around the JSOC and the Special Forces is a key part of our investigations, which in large part includes popular culture texts. It has been argued that media and politics co-construct each other, and this recursive relationship has material impacts. 13 As Kumar and Kundnani opined, “Writers and commentators have often noted the ways in which cultural products have been shaped by the War on Terror agendas of politicians, the CIA, and the Pentagon. Less examined, however, is the part played by the culture industry in furnishing the security establishment with the cultural imagination needed to meet its goals through” media productions. 14 It is with this in mind that we take a slightly different approach in this chapter and supplement our analysis of military and legal texts with critiques of some of the representations of the Special Forces and the CIA

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that circulate in America’s popular culture. We do this by extending the work of Roger Stahl and others who remind us that the assemblages that make up our national security state can be cobbled together in diverse venues. In 2003, the term “militainment” appeared in the academic literatures as a way of describing what had come to be known as the militaryentertainment complex. 15 As Roger Stahl explained, militainment could be defined as, “entertainment with military themes in which the Department of Defense is celebrated.” 16 We would extend this analysis and argue that the CIA has grown to the point where it, too, should be included in these types of studies, but for our present purposes we want to underscore the ways that military persuasion and Hollywood goals have converged to help garner public support for the JSOC and the use of Special Forces. 17 Indeed, we argue that the increase in the number of Special Forces, as well as the increase in positive media attention about them, not only helped spread information about these military operations, but functioned as a quasi-public relations campaign that helped with the very formation of these entities. More specifically, militainment helped with the constitutive creation of JSOC. We will begin our analysis with a discussion of the rise of U.S. Special Forces, and then we will analyze the secretive nature of Special Forces operations. In those sections we will draw from examples of various celebrations of the bin Laden raid and we will show how various massmediated events represent the JSOC and General McChrystal’s efforts. Ultimately, in the last portions of the essay, we will contend that the rhetoric surrounding the raid, and the memories of it, continue to contribute to the developing security state by perpetuating the legitimation of ubiquitous and perpetual warfare. In the same ways that the surveillance and drone bureaucracies that we mentioned in chapter two contributed to preventive war ideologies, all of this talk of Special Forces provides yet another example of the successes that would come when the JSOC was allowed to manage and control everything from drones to night raids. Indeed, these forces are the U.S. answer to the “super-empowered” individuals and groups about which Cebrowski and Barnett had warned and the result of the U.S. military’s effort to “mirror the target set.” THE RECENT RISE OF THE JSOC AND GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL As we stated in the introduction to this chapter, there is a burgeoning interest in maintaining the operational health of the Special Forces, and we have witnessed a significant increase in their numbers since 9/11. Although it may seem like a reaction to the singular event of the terrorist

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attacks in September of 2001, the increase in the numbers of Special Forces can be attributed to many diverse factors, including the ways that we conceptualize enemy motives, our configuration of network-centric warfare, the focus on Counterinsurgency Operations (COIN) narratives, and the irregular nature of much of their work. In intriguing ways the very unconventional nature of the tactics, the clothing, and even the laws that supposedly applied to these types of Special Forces raiders captivated American audiences. As Schmitt, Mazzetti, and Shanker explained, the increasing amount of scattered threats around the world—as opposed to centralized dangers in specific countries and/or locations—“are making the US turn increasingly to Special Forces.” 18 Barry similarly explained that one “facet of a more general military trend” in the United States is the “increasing employment of special forces for operations that carry the greatest military and political risk.” 19 Alleged existential threats from savvy terrorists continued to occupy the attention of Hollywood producers and mainstream media outlets, and America’s Special Forces seemed to be the go-to guys that could take on the most dangerous and most important counterterrorist tasks. Indeed, it has been noted that conventional forces did not, and could not, get the job done when Americans wanted to hear about the rhetoric of “mission accomplished” in Afghanistan. 20 Porch explained that in recent years, the US has experienced “disappointing results of large-scale military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” and he was convinced that these disappointments have further propelled and promoted the ascendancy of Special Forces. 21 Yet as we noted above, it was not these current lapses, but past failures, like the failed attempt of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, that would be cited by contemporaries who wanted to write and talk about the formation of JSOC. 22 Maybe they wanted to avoid embarrassing their compatriots, or they may have wanted to avoid discussing twenty-first-century failures, but for whatever reason, the rise of the Special Forces was said to have been inextricably linked to what happened after President Jimmy Carter went after the hostages that they said were the “victims of terrorism and anarchy.” More than once General Stanley McChrystal, who took over JSOC in 2003, explained that the revitalization in the use of special operations was sparked by the failure of that mission. 23 Despite being used and optimized for hostage-rescue and counter-terrorism missions, the role of JSOC gradually grew over time to be what it is today. Stanley McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976, and he served in the Special Operations forces by way of the Army Rangers. 24 Initially, when McChrystal was assigned to take command in Afghanistan in 2003, he and his team followed conventional paradigmatic ways of thinking about counterterrorism against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. For example, McChrystal’s officers attempted to get their bearings and gain a better understanding of Al Qaeda by mapping their organizational military

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structure, like he had learned to do with his multiple years of elite military experience. However, McChrystal and his team soon discovered that Al Qaeda was not centrally organized and that their communication happened laterally, working “without a rigid—or tangible—chain of command.” 25 It became starkly evident that the theater of war was changing, and the U.S. needed to adapt. The fear of defeat is a powerful motivation for change, and military theorists, scientists, and planners began to articulate the position that they needed to think about decentralized enemy forces if they hoped to “win” the wars in places like Afghanistan. As Bousquet explained, the U.S. armed forces were being out-networked by jihadist networks and insurgent movements. 26 This, for many, was a new form of warfare, and one quite difficult for a U.S. military that was traditionally oriented to think about enemies that respected order, hierarchy, and predictability. As General McChrystal explained, “It was only over the course of years, and with considerable frustrations, that we came to understand how the emerging networks of Islamist insurgents and terrorists are fundamentally different from any enemy the United States has previously known or faced.” 27 In reaction to this realization, McChrystal advocated that the U.S. military work to become a network itself, in order to fight a network with a network. This reinvention would be the beginning of the recent rise of the use of America’s Special Forces. It was also the type of doctrinal and paradigmatic shift that allowed the JSOC to seize command and control of drone operations, night raids, and other irregular types of warfare. The more that the enemy seemed to be using non-conventional warfighting strategies and tactics, the more that rhetors like McChrystal could ask for the funds that were needed to bring together the elite fighting units from all of the military branches. General McChrystal, like David Petraeus, understood that Americans had no interest in repeating the mistakes of the past, and these military leaders often selectively combed through the military archives so that they could study the “lessons learned” that might come from the survey of previous engagements. Vietnam provided obvious parallels. In his 2013 memoir, My Share of the Task, McChrystal discusses the development of Special Forces operations under his command. This book, dubbed “the best high-level insight into the role of special forces in the twenty-first century available in print,” 28 gives the public access to McChrystal’s thoughts, his experiences, and the supposed rationales that were behind his decisions and his displays of how “US Special Forces grew from their post-Vietnam nadir into the large, well-resourced organisation that killed bin Laden.” 29 Like any astute general, McChrystal used these historical lessons as a rhetorical vehicle that would rationalize the spending of more money on key efficacious counterterrorist projects in Afghanistan. As McChrystal explained in his book, “The calamity of Desert One was not a failure of

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political or military courage. The failure occurred beforehand when the military failed to build and maintain the force necessary to accomplish these kinds of missions.” 30 Likewise, he and his team were quickly realizing that the U.S. military’s use of conventional war tactics was not building or maintaining the force that was necessary to accomplish missions against a networked enemy. This, in other words, was no time for massive cuts in the budgets or organizations like JSOC. At the same time that military planners were singing the praises of the Special Forces, academicians were writing about the need for a paradigm shift that would help with the dismantling of enemy networks. A few years before General McChrystal caught the attention of many mainstream journalists, Cebrowski and Garstka drew from the shifts that they were noting in society and technology and argued that there should be a shift toward more network-centric warfare. 31 Others noted how changes with information technology and political economies would inevitably change warfare. For example, in 2002, a year prior to McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, Duffield argued that “network war now defines the global predicament.”’ 32 McChrystal continued to examine the network style of the Taliban and realized that in some ways their organizational structure was brilliant. 33 He wanted to emulate the best of these efforts, so the Special Forces had to also adopt network warfare. 34 As the GWOT dragged on, more and more pundits talked of wars of attrition and the problems with conventional warfare, and McChrystal memorably assumed that the enemy was posing a “uniquely 21st-century threat” because it was “more network than army.” 35 Nation-states were no longer the main enemies, and contemporary insurgent leaders posed threats because they could live off the land and because they lived among the local populations. The new threats that were identified during this discovery of networked warfare meant that a total overhaul, or reconfiguration, of the U.S. military was now necessary, and military strategists recommended moving away from utilizing large armies to fight and/or invade enemy countries and toward “using more efficient and agile networked forces to disrupt and take down irregular and networked opponents anywhere in the world.” 36 From an ideological perspective, it did not hurt that military strategists were saying this at the same time that the Obama administration was congratulating itself after the withdrawal of most troops from Iraq and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan. As we noted in chapter two, all of this talk of preventive war was linked to expertise on non-linear planning and strategizing. Chaos had to be embraced, no longer seen as a threat that must be avoided at all costs, but “as the very condition of possibility of order,” what Bousquet calls “chaoplexic warfare,” or network warfare based in scientific understandings of chaos and complexity. 37 Younger generations of military officers, who understood the power of satellite communication, the tracing of

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geocities, strategic communication, and the persuasive functions of the Internet, quickly became enthusiasts of this new chaoplexic warfare. In the initial stages of moving toward network warfare, it became clear to General McChrystal that the United States would have to significantly change its military organizational structures as well as its strategies and tactics. As he explained in his memoir, “We needed better organizational and personal linkages with conventional forces, as well as other agencies of the US government. We’d have to open up more, educate conventional leaders about what we did, and importantly, we had to avoid even the approach of elitist attitudes or arrogance.” 38 He had realized that the U.S. was fighting in compartmentalized ways, with each group doing its assigned tasks and little communication between the various commands involved. More particularly, McChrystal felt that the JSOC was lacking in bandwidth (in which to communicate quicker and more efficiently between different groups involved), intelligence (through information shared with the government’s intelligence agencies), and interrogation. 39 He set out to acquire all three and better integrate JSOC with conventional forces. His goal was to rebuild “an obscure military entity into a lethal, agile, secretive and highly networked command—essentially, the United States’ very own al-Qaida.” 40 Ackerman claimed that McChrystal’s refined JSOC became the “most potent weapon” the U.S. would come to have against terrorist threats. 41 Again this prompts us to ask these questions: Did these types of fighting faiths embolden those who believed in different types of American exceptionalist strengths, to the point where they were now willing to send “culturally-sensitive” troops to do battle in places far away from traditional battlefields? Was all of this talk of decentered and chaotic warfare a strategic way to not only magnify the power of invented enemies, as well as a brilliant way to justify massive expenditures on the JSOC and Special Forces? Talk of communication issues in the war against terrorism was not taking place in a political vacuum. It was said that the poor bandwidth that the military had in Afghanistan did not allow it to communicate very well, especially in situations where the military communities needed to talk to each other in “real” time, a necessary component for a networkcentric style of warfare. 42 As McChrystal explained, “A true network starts with robust communications connectivity, but also leverages physical and cultural proximity, shared purpose, established decision-making processes, personal relationships, and trust.” 43 In response to this problem, McChrystal spent his commander’s discretionary fund on purchasing increased bandwidth so that each part of the missions could communicate with each other, sometimes in real-time during missions. 44 Congress was constantly besieged with requests for more funds for myriad types of covert operations.

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Fighting on chaotic fronts meant that Americans had to set aside their traditional interagency rivalries in order to unite and take advantage of the improved bandwidth and other changes that were in the air. McChrystal reached out to intelligence agencies, with a particular focus on the CIA. 45 He knew that the intelligence the CIA gathered would be instrumental in the fight against terrorism, so he worked to gain that organization’s trust of the JSOC, something that had not existed prior to McChrystal’s command. 46 After McChrystal formed a relationship with the CIA, joint missions between the two groups were common, with one of the most well-known examples being the bin Laden raid. McChrystal also made use of various forms of surveillance: airborne surveillance (both from drones and manned aircrafts) as well as plainclothes Special Forces working on the ground. To help with this work, he recruited satellite analysts from the “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, regional experts from the State Department, and surveillance specialists from the National Security Agency.” 47 All of this expanded the ever-widening circumference of those who would now become stakeholders in morphing counterterrorist activities. Many Anglo-American advocates of counterinsurgency policies praised these efforts, and they argued that this was exactly what was needed if the U.S. had any hope of winning battles in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Military experts as well as journalists reported on how McChrystal’s work got results. Andrew Exum, an Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, explained that the JSOC became “arguably the single most integrated, most truly joint command within the military.” 48 Exum was both a wellrespected analyst as well as popular milblogger, and his words carried weight. All of this discourse not only hyped McChrystal’s social agency, but added to the credibility of those who sought to move away from “whack-a-mole” projects to network-centric warfare. To be sure, it was a difficult task set before McChrystal, who sought to marry traditional understandings of warfare with new understandings of the so-called twenty-first century network style of warfare. Pet paradigms, reputations, and large-budgets were at stake as various communities within the U.S. military debated about how to fight America’s “Way of War.” Adopting McChrystal’s approach would involve attempting to achieve high levels of knowledge, speed, and accuracy in a very chaotic, fast-moving, and quickly changing theater of war. As McChrystal explained, this new counterterrorism operation was called, F3EA: find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze. The idea was to combine analysts who found the enemy (through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance); drone operators who fixed the target; combat teams who finished the target by capturing or killing him; specialists who exploited the intelligence the raid yielded, such as cell phones, maps, and detainees; and the intelligence analysts who turned this raw infor-

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mation into useable knowledge. By doing this, we speeded up the cycle for a counterterrorism operation, gleaning valuable insights in hours, not days. 49

This all sounded very open, clinical, precise, and organized, but what it hid was the amount of artistry and invention that went into the selection of who would be characterized as a terrorist, how one distinguished between civilians using these same cells, and ideological apparatus and dispositifs that were used to determine just what was, and was not, “usable” knowledge. The secrecy of the JSOC and CIA raids and drone attacks made it difficult to second-guess the annihilation of the enemies who were killed by this killing machine, because the dead could tell no tales and the living had no way of knowing very much about this type of network-centric warfare. We are obviously not the first critics who have noticed some of the strategic ambiguity that is swirled around all of this talk of F3EA. This strategy was not without its critics, such as Kundnani, who argued that F3EA, in “plain language,” meant “find people and kill them.” 50 Yet, many observers were convinced that this new type of warfare got results. For example, in June of 2006, JSOC killed Al Qaida’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which was a huge victory for the U.S., and this validated McChrystal’s new networked structure of Special Forces. 51 Given the fact that bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora years earlier, wasn’t this a redemptive act that showed the wisdom of staying the course and continuing to believe in the expertise of America’s finest? Cultural critics have commented on both the “virtual” and “visual” features of contemporary Western warfare, 52 and allowing others to “see” some parts of these new American military efforts created performative opportunities for those who wanted to take the fight to the enemy. This new network mindset and formal implementation meant that moving forward there would be video streaming for anyone who was involved in the operation. There could now be continuous communication during the raid in addition to the live video feed, and U.S. civilians as well as military viewers were convinced that they had the ability to send any intelligence found at the raids electronically to intelligence officers in other geographic locations in real time. McChrystal argued that this allowed for a much more effective armed forces, since information and intelligence found at one raid location could (and has) lead to another location the same night, instead of days or weeks later. In other words, this meant that any actionable intelligence that was found during any one engagement—like a night raid—could immediately be included in CIA or DOD mosaics that could then be used to find the next target for remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPA). This meant that there was a significant demand for Special Forces operations, and McChrystal claimed that in addition to increased speed of operations and follow-up

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missions, “both our precision and our success rate rose dramatically” as a result of the new warfare. 53 Americans may have celebrated the fact that this alleged precision helped with the kill-chain and they could talk about the successful “taking out” of enemies, but it was of course assumed that they knew that their targets were terrorists and the JSOC had the legal and moral right to kill or capture these individuals. Yet, not everyone was enamored with the way that General McChrystal and others were using their military science to determine particular success rates. Many have reported that the high tempo raids are only approximately 50 percent accurate in hitting the correct targets 54 and that this percentage of accuracy was then translated into acceptable measures for declaring this was precision warfare. Granted, this might be better than indiscriminate “area” bombing, but all of this commentary hid the ideological nature of the military calculus that was being used to determined what was, and what not, precision warfare. While military commanders might consider this 50% to be a good rate, we, along with others, wonder how some members of the public would feel when they understood the calculus behind this opinion. 55 Additionally, as noted in other chapters, there is little tangible information on the exact numbers of civilian casualties that die during some of these JSOC or CIA attacks, which raises questions about what an increase in precision and success actually means. In other words, what was the rate before, and should the rate today be considered good based on relative standards, or on a stricter, more objective standard? This in turn begs the question of whether these organizations are also implying that there is an acceptable ratio of civilian casualties that should be condoned during raids that are carried out to kill “the bad guys.” Much of the attention that has been lavished on the JSOC in recent years has to do with this organization’s involvement in controlling drone attacks, and many see the bin Laden raid as a typical mission that is the type that supplements the larger-scale drone agendas. Steve Niva argues that drones are merely a synecdoche for a much larger issue, which is “the expanding system of a high-tempo regime of targeted strikes, special operations forces raids, and detention practices that are largely unaccountable to the public and draped in secrecy rules.” 56 From our critical, ideological vantage point we sense some of the contradictory goals and impulses at work here. On the one hand, some might contend that the many layers of vetting that take place before the killing of high-value terrorists shows the democratic brakes that can be put on some missions, while at the same time others are not concerned with these brakes and are simply interested in the killing of the enemy as quickly as possible. Indeed, for a network style of warfare to be efficient and effective, it must be decentralized and act swiftly. However, at the same time, there are concerns that the lack of accountability could lead to

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Special Forces operations becoming part of “an executive assassination ring” that effectively abrogates the United States’ ban on assassinations. 57 In order to craft coherent, and populist defenses of the JSOC and CIA funding, advocates like General McChrystal have to gloss over some of these cross-purposes and conundrums associated with these missions as they concentrate on showing how they “find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze” terrorist information. In a host of ways it could be argued that General McChrystal, and others who support this way of thinking about network-centric warfare, are doing exactly what civilian decision-makers and members of the public are expecting them to do in order to help with the securitization of our nation state. If we go back through the mists of time, we will discover that our post-9/11 rhetorics were filled with talk of the need for both overt and covert counterterrorist measures. Recall that the Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed on September 14, 2001, stating the president was “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force” to pursue anyone believed to be involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 58 President Bush also signed a Presidential Finding, which authorized covert activities by the CIA and other government agencies that could now capture or kill those behind the 9/11 attacks. 59 Again, as we note in chapter one, this was not restricted to FBI efforts using domestic powers as they tracked down 19 perpetrators—all of this was securitized and militarized as President Bush and others declared a “global” war on terrorism. Overtime, the growth of the JSOC was accompanied by the development of more sophisticated technologies as well as the addition of an increasing number of lists of invented enemies. Essentially, Niva explained that “JSOC was given the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list and then to kill or capture them without notification,” which gave tremendous power with little accountability. 60 As Schmitt, Mazetti, and Shanker explained, if a network is to be elastic and agile, it will not also be accountable. 61 In other words, there are pragmatic and realpolitik reasons why the military and intelligence communities want the “gloves off,” and they do not want to be encumbered by those idealists who do not understand the nuances and intricacies of today’s network-centric warfare. Talk of real time, drone technologies, and the elitism of the Special Forces became entangled in political and legal debates about accountability, “extra”-judicial or “extra”-territorial killings and the dangers that confronted non-combatants caught in the cross-hairs or crossfires of these new, chaotic battles. The necessity of quick action appeared to open the door for increased civilian casualties, and some critics complained that, in many ways all of this was making the United States appear more like its enemies. This new way of operating has allowed the clandestine missions to mostly escape public scrutiny and accountability, because most of the

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focus has been on the national security issues of drone strikes. Was Niva representing the views of a vocal group of academic dissenters, or did this represent the views of most Americans? We contend that the valorization of the Special Forces, and the circulation of hagiographic tales about the JSOC, puts on graphic display how mainstream journalists—even as they critique these groups—can’t help but treat them as the future of America’s Way of War. This may be some of the reasons why elite special operations forces have tripled since 2009, and Shanker and Rubin reported that in 2010 the Special Forces and CIA combined for approximately five raids a day, mostly in southern Afghanistan. 62 All of this infuriated the denizens of Afghanistan, but talk of the successes of these raids played well in AngloAmerican communities who did not want to believe that they would be the latest victims of this mythic “graveyard of empires.” 63 The growth of the JSOC was also taking place during periods when military analysts and civilian public servants were talking about the dangers of “low” or middle level Al Qaeda functionaries, Taliban allies, Al Qaeda affiliates, or other terrorists. Part of the reason for this increase in coverage of the JSOC had to do with the recognition that instead of just targeting so-called “high-value targets,” anyone who might possibly be contributing to the Taliban war effort (as part of the network) was also targeted. Socially network with the wrong person, constantly visit the house of someone who was on a CIA list, go to a particular funeral, and you too might end up on a terrorist list. This significantly increased the number of potential enemy targets. 64 Between 2009 and 2010, for example, the raids increased from 20 to almost 250 raids per month, and by the summer of 2010 the number was up to 600 raids per month. 65 As the raids have increased, so too have celebrations of JSOC’s successes, and it is noteworthy that the public celebrations of the bin Laden raid served to underscore and legitimize the use of Special Forces as a major component of the U.S. fight against terrorism. Most notably, these representations focused, whether explicitly or implicitly, on the networked nature of the Special Forces and the need for increased intelligence and surveillance in order for U.S. and world citizens to understand the malevolent nature of morphing threats, as well as the prowess and martial virtue of those who tracked them. The Mass-Mediated Coverage of the Bin Laden Raid and the Popular Valorization of the JSOC Many milbloggers, veterans, military historians, and military experts knew about the JSOC before the raid on Abbottabad, but it would be mainstream reportage of bin Laden’s death that solidified the public reputation of the Special Forces. Each generation needs its heroes and villains, and there is little question that the Navy SEALs, and the JSOC, have

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become a part of the collective memories of those who want to recall, and reflect on, counterterrorist successes. Oftentimes investigative reporters, who seemed to scoop others interested in these events, became the parrhesiastic players in these truthtelling, mediated events that situated some of these raids on terrorists. For example, during the fall of 2011, three months after the bin Laden raid, an article appeared in The New Yorker magazine that was written by a Washington journalist, Nicholas Schmidle. Schmidle’s account of what happened on the night of the raid is a supposed unvarnished tale that provides readers of The New Yorker with an inside glimpse that allows the general public to this mission from the perspective of the Navy SEALs. After it was published, interest in the story grew exponentially. 66 Schmidle was interviewed by PBS, NPR, Charlie Rose, and CNN before the article was officially released. 67 By August 11 of that year, it was the second most-emailed article for The New Yorker; over 60,000 people had recommended it on Facebook; and over 2,500 tweets had referred to it on Twitter. Milbloggers must have sensed the importance of having this many people interested in what the JSOC had accomplished during the raid on Abbottabad, and they too joined the chorus of those who sang the praises of the story. For example, the Blackfive military blog stated it “has been described to us by those in the know as the most accurate and excellent piece about getting Bin Laden to date.” 68 “Those in the know” were obviously those who were still fighting on the ground in places like Afghanistan or those who once served in combat, and this recursively helped the stature of both Schmidle and the Navy SEALs. We would argue that in many ways Schmidle’s essay was itself a rhetorical fragment that reflected how many Americans wanted to think about the dangers that were posed by elderly leaders of Al Qaeda like bin Laden and that the detailed discussion of the technology and weaponry that was said to have been used on the raid meshed perfectly with what journalists and others were already saying about network-centric warfare and America’s preparations for those conflicts. Schmidle’s story gained credibility because his account was much more than just his own musings on this raid—it was purportedly based on two dozen interviews with knowledgeable parties who had military ties and was said to be a “gripping account packed with new and compelling details,” 69 that had not yet been revealed. Initially, this was regarded as one of those “definitive” accounts of the raid, and it valorized the efforts of the Navy SEALs. Schmidle made it clear that much of his information came from debriefings of the Navy SEALs following the raid, and he must have talked to someone in the know as he described in minute detail the activities of the two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, the weapons that were used by the DEVGRU, the movements of those who threatened the Americans, and even the

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reactions of the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and the others who lived with bin Laden. Indeed, Schmidle’s account achieved a type of “hyperreality” because it was written in such detail that audiences were led to believe that it was an accurate “behind the scenes” narrative. 70 While much of Schmidle’s celebratory retelling of the events of the raid tended to focus heavily on the valor, bravery, and heroism of the Navy SEALs, he also mentioned the role of the White House and President Obama as they agonized over the making of the final decision that greenlighted the raid. Schmidle described the Situation-Room-turnedwar-room, and he wrote about how a video link was set up to connect the Situation Room to CIA headquarters and the team in Afghanistan. 71 Brigadier General Marshall Webb, who is an assistant commander of Joint Special Operations Command, sat in an adjoining office and set up the only video feed with “real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad.” 72 When Leon Panetta announced that the Black Hawks were approaching Abbottabad, Obama moved to watch the live video feed with Webb, as did anyone else who could fit in the room. This scene, combined with the details that Schmidle gives of the SEALs, their equipment (including night vision goggles), and the mention of a live feed with the CIA in Afghanistan, helps the audience visualize the various nodes in the new networked warfare that worked together seamlessly to execute a successful mission. This type of interpolation or performative invitation, we contend, created a situation where readers could feel some of the pride, as well as the jouissance of battle as they read about the demise of Osama bin Laden. Given the decade-long search for this demonic figure, this was a defining movement in the production of counterterrorist archives. A cascade of books, interviews, and visual commentaries on the raid followed in the wake of the publication of Schmidle’s essay. For example, a former Navy SEAL (Bissonnette) who was on the bin Laden raid wrote a book under the pseudonym “Mark Owen.” The book, called No Easy Day, 73 was co-written with journalist Kevin Maurer, and it was released in the fall of 2012. This particular book claimed that the authors would now tell the “true” story of the bin Laden raid from a SEAL’s point of view, and they described their work as an “important historical document” 74 as well as an “exciting, suspenseful account.” 75 The memoir received many positive reviews. 76 The publication of Mark Owen’s book also provided audiences with the chance to read differing accounts of how the JSOC had contributed to the raid. When it debuted, it topped USA Today’s bestselling list, and in its first week sold one million hardcopies, not including e-books. 77 Owen’s account gives a behind-the-scenes narrative even more extensive than Schmidle’s and explains how the CIA briefed his team, using a detailed model of the bin Laden compound to explain the geography of

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the mission. Interestingly enough, like McChrystal before him, Owen seemed to have sensed that he needed to talk about the nature and scope of the military organizations that were behind many of these raids. Owen’s account of the bin Laden raid does not focus completely on the goals and actions of the Navy SEALs. As he explains, the raid would not have happened without the help of other government organizations, especially the CIA, which discovered bin Laden’s whereabouts via a tapped phone conversation of his courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. 78 The intelligence agency soon discovered the compound, and they started to hone in on the activities of a person whom they believed to be bin Laden—a man who would pace for hours in a courtyard of the house. Owen explains how he talked to a CIA analyst, “Jen,” on the plane ride to Jalalabad. Jen had been working on finding bin Laden for over half a decade and informed Owen that she was 100% certain bin Laden was at the compound. 79 From a rhetorical vantage point, Owen’s inclusion of the role of the CIA helps expand the number of Americans involved in the planning or carrying out of the raid and provides yet another medium that could be used to emphasize how America’s new way of war had to involve network warfare. The real and the surreal blended together as moviegoers could see how the militainment industry represented for them their own beliefs regarding the successes of the Navy SEALs and the JSOC. A film about the bin Laden raid, Zero Dark Thirty (ZD30), was released in selected theaters at the end of 2012 and universally in January 2013. As yet another mediated version of the bin Laden raid, ZD30 was the top-grossing film the weekend of its nationwide release in January 2013. 80 Zero Dark Thirty’s contextualization of the bin Laden raid differed from the Schmidle and Bissonette accounts in that this filmic depiction told the story from the point of view of the CIA. Whereas the U.S. public had heard about the CIA’s role via stories told by journalists, 81 former SEALs, 82 and those in the White House, 83 ZD30 highlighted the role of the intelligence organization, and it did this by emphasizing the years of work that went into the raid before the months leading up to it. This shifting of attention toward the CIA was a stroke of pure creative genius, because this was something that many members of the public had already been demanding since May of 2011. Anglo-Americans enjoyed contemplating the reality of these types of filmic representations, and just as Schmidle’s and Owen’s stories could be marketed as truthful and authentic, ZD30 was packaged as a commodified representation of “what happened” before and during the Abbottabad raid. For example ZD30 contains several frames that help audiences follow the film’s time compression of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, and at the very beginning of their viewing, audiences in theatres are informed that what they are about to see is “Based on First Hand Accounts of Actual Events.” 84

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What all of these various accounts verify is the existence of a hegemonic, American exceptionalist way of thinking about the raid, even as they invite readers or viewers to disagree over the details. Owen claimed in his book that “how the mission to kill Bin Laden has been reported” was “wrong” and that he was motivated to write his book so that he could tell the “true story” about the “men at the command who willingly go into harm’s way.” 85 Yet all of these textual and visual framings have convergent epistemic vectors of meaning as they point to the various actors who were involved in this successful, new example of networkcentric warfare of Special Forces. All of them, in their own ways, highlight the fact that this was not an incident that involved the labor of just one team, and we are invited to reflect on how this great national achievement came about because of the work of many parties who set aside their differences as they worked together on a common goal. All of this served to valorize and legitimize the new way of network warfare that was dependent upon Special Forces. AMERICA’S NEW APPROACH TO WAR One of the primary ways in which the rise of Special Forces, and JSOC, has been given legitimacy and its actions normalized is through mediated representations in popular culture. We, along with others, argue that media interest in Special Forces and their operations, or militainment, 86 was “amplified to a new level by the 2011 US raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed.” 87 The emphasis on the valor and heroism of Special Forces operations was imperative, given questions that also began circulating after the raid regarding the raid’s legality and intentions. 88 Contradictory reports circulated about whether or not the mission was a kill/ capture or simply a kill mission, 89 which forced military officials like McChrystal to respond that although Special Forces did kill many terrorists, they “were not death squads.” 90 All of these types of defenses of the JSOC or the Special Forces follow key, and discernible, patterns of counterterrorist argumentation. Defenses of the raids conducted by these communities, in the wake of the bin Laden mission, have taken the form of scholarly inquiry, interviews, military “lessons learned” documents, and speeches, and they often underscored the importance of the Special Forces, the Global War on Terrorism, and the primacy of national security interests. Scholars Jarvis and Holland conducted a discursive analysis of over one hundred linguistic texts—including speeches, interviews, and press briefings produced by the White House, U.S. intelligence community, and the Department of Defense—and they discovered a pattern in the consistent legitimization of the use of Special Forces and the death of bin Laden by focusing on the GWOT’s certainties of terrorism, heroism, and justice in the

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name of national security. 91 Their analysis revealed that most of the discourse following the raid revolved around the professionalism of the Special Forces and their courageous and precise execution of the mission. Indeed, the Obama administration framed the bin Laden raid as “‘the most significant victory’ and ‘greatest achievement’ of the war on terror to date,” emphasizing that bin Laden’s death increased national and global security. 92 With all of the work being done to frame not only bin Laden’s death as justified, but the need for increased Special Forces as necessary, it is not surprising that popular culture representations have emerged that celebrate Special Forces and the means that are deemed necessary to protect the national security state. A marine officer who works in the film industry argued that, “the majority of Americans today obtain their information about the US military through entertainment products such as movies.” 93 Kumar and Kundnani argue that, “Government agencies have a long history of influencing cultural representations and determining how the public understands the work of the national-security state.” 94 They explain that in this era of militainment, filmmakers and television producers are incentivized to work with government agencies because “in exchange for handing over some editorial control” they are given access to shoot on location, use government personnel as extras, and have access to technical consultants at a much lower production budget. They continue that, “This leads to a system where film and television become arteries through which the national-security state circulates its latest obsessions.” 95 Indeed, the creators of the television series Homeland have been documented visiting the CIA and the producers of ZD30 were accused of working with insiders in the White House to gain access to DOD and CIA information. 96 All of this is a multidirectional and mutually reinforcing relationship. While it is often said that Hollywood is influenced by external reality, it has also been argued that reality is influenced by Hollywood, because films and television are quite inventive in the way that they depict the security threats that they conjure up. They also have creative ways of solving those problems. Indeed, as we implied in chapter one, they are some of the social agents who are involved in the co-production of national security rhetorics. 97 Even though all of this imagining is happening thousands of miles away from places like Afghanistan, “Hollywood became as significant as Arlington, Fort Meade, and Langley in the landscape of the US nationalsecurity state.” 98 This reciprocal relationship between popular culture and national security threats works to legitimize and normalize the national security state and the strategies and tactics that are deemed necessary to move forward in America’s new way of war. 99

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SECRECY Yet, despite the many stories that emerged after the bin Laden raid, as well as the various mediated representations, the current prevalence and frequency of Special Operations raids still is not publicly known. When the bin Laden raid was announced and celebrated, the public had no reason to believe it was just one of multiple raids that were carried out that night. Indeed, likely the only terrorist name that most Americans knew was Osama bin Laden. The increasingly secretive and targeted kill-orcapture operations are largely invisible from media coverage, and therefore much of political accountability. 100 Steve Niva explains that the major problem with this new type of warfare is that it can morph into a “permanent policing operation” that is free from accountability and does not deal with the political issues that initially produce the threats. 101 Kundnani even went as far as to state that during Obama’s first presidential term, his “primary achievement in national security policy was the creation of silence.” 102 The new form of warfare is touted as a “normal and ongoing function of state governance” such as tax collection, law enactment, and mowing the lawn. 103 Because of the way it is framed, the public is made to believe that this new form of warfare provides increased national security. Indeed, the “shadowy form of military engagement” is now a “primary theatre of contemporary American warfare.” 104 Secrecy is not something that is considered to be problematic, but rather an essential part of the toolkit of those who have to fight nefarious enemies. Niva, who calls the new style of warfare “shadowy operations,” explains that although “the targeted killings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and the US-born Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen briefly thrust this shadow war into the public spotlight, these operations are merely the visible trace of a dense matrix of highly secretive operations that occur on a daily basis across the globe.” 105 Nicholas Schmidle reiterated this in his piece in The New Yorker the August following the bin Laden raid, when he explained that his research and interviews led him to the understanding that the bin Laden raid was one of thousands of raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years. 106 In fact, the night of the bin Laden mission, there were twelve other special operations missions, and those missions alone captured or killed fifteen to twenty targets. 107 Aside from Afghani critics of many of these raids, relatively few critics bother to think about the legal, moral, or military importance of those thousands of other raids. Interest in the success of the bin Laden raid has deflected attention away from the civilian casualties that have been suffered during the other night raids. Until the appearance of Schmidle’s article, many in the public were likely unaware of how prevalent Special Forces missions were for the United States. Even with Schmidle’s article, complete understanding of

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the worldwide presence of Special Forces operations is likely still underestimated. In fact, Priest and Arkin explained that JSOC leaders, when they celebrated the success of the bin Laden raid, not only congratulated themselves for taking out America’s greatest foe, but also measured success by the amount of the publicity that they were receiving after the raid on Abbottabad, because before that time “few people knew their command, based in Fayetteville, N.C., even existed.” 108 The public representations of the growth of the JSOC thus lagged behind the actual increase in the funding of that agency. The Bush administration had started the initial process of adding to the ranks of the Special Forces, even before McChrystal’s efforts there had highly secretive efforts at promoting the networked warfare that would begin to replace conventional battlefield planning. According to Niva, the Obama administration that entered the White House worked toward the formation of an even less visible and less public war, so that it could be specifically directed at networked, non-state, irregular opponents, such as Al Qaeda. 109 While many may find the secrecy of such operations problematic in terms of governmental transparency, Barry explains that the elite nature of the Special Forces, combined with the “blankets of secrecy . . . has a magnetic attraction for journalists and authors,” 110 and, we would add, television and film producers. In many of today’s filmic representations, the covert actions of the Special Forces are portrayed as fighting that is less bloody and less problematic, and these martial mythologies often imply that those who wage this type of warfare are “smarter” because of the involvement of elite forces and intelligence officers who work for top U.S. government agencies. 111 Indeed, this so-called smarter type of warfare, that necessarily has secretive components, has been represented in various popular media, including Fox’s 24, ABC’s Scandal, and Showtime’s Homeland. The highly popular 24 focuses on the activities of special agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) who works with the Los Angeles Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU). Jack’s skills as a special agent are remarkable; he often outsmarts his opponents—rarely does anything surprise him, he is an expert at killing bad guys and defending himself, and he even has an above-average knowledge of computers and their software and hardware. Jack is represented as a patriot through and through, and as the seasons of viewership progress, the audiences learn not to doubt his patriotism or his loyalty to the United States of America. There may be signs that he is walking along a razor’s edge of morality and legality as he carries out his missions, but his goals supersede the ends that he has to use in order to protect his own national security state. Because of Bauer’s extreme allegiance to the U.S. and his skills as a special agent, he often finds himself as the target of major terrorist plots. Oftentimes, the terrorists are either working inside CTU, or his enemies

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have recruited agents within CTU to work for them. As a result, Jack often has to operate in secretive ways, and we are privy to the fact that he only trusts a few people. Because the audience is aware of Jack’s plans (most of the time), and because the audience knows that Jack has the best interest of the country in mind, the secrecy that is portrayed comes across as a necessary solution to dangerous situations. In cases such as these, Jack often recruits people he trusts to secretly help him, putting all of them at risk when they have to break the law in their attempts to save the country. In some cases it appears that the producers of 24 want to take advantage of the popular resonance of what are called “ticking-time-bomb” scenarios. For example, Bauer, during season four of 24, has to cope with the existential terrorist threat that is posed by the melting down of U.S. nuclear plants. Again, secrecy is of utmost importance in order to maintain order in the country. While Bauer was trying to contain this threat, government officials said nothing to the public. The rationale was that while the special agents and the intelligence agencies were working on the problem, it needed to be kept out of the purview of the public in order to prevent chaos, riots, and unnecessary violence. Viewers get to see how CTU, as well as the White House, worked to contain the threat through secrecy, and the mediated representation legitimized the secrecy of the actual White House and special operations. These types of representations allow American viewers to see the need for a host of things—the strong unitary executive powers of a nation’s commander-in-chief, the existential risks that are posed by all sorts of terrorists, and the dangers that confront those who allow in too much transparency or accountability. Various types of militainment are thus used to echo and reinforce the prevention messages that circulate in professional circles (see chapter two) as well as the military messages about network centric warfare that are purveyed by leaders like General Stanley McChrystal. Even mediums that meld together romance with dramatic action can be used as rhetorical vehicles for counterterrorist messages. In the current popular television series Scandal, secrecy is often highlighted as a way to maintain the public’s faith in the government and as a tool that helps maintain the stability of the Republic. The series premiered in 2012, and it is primarily based around the activities of Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and her team of lawyers in Washington D.C. In theory, they help high-profile clients handle major personal crises. Scandal is filled with some subtle, and not so subtle, defenses of Special Forces activities. Audiences are told that Olivia Pope was the former White House Communications Director and that she has close ties with the White House, including an on-again-off-again affair with the president. As a result, much of the show also revolves around the politics

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surrounding the president and presidency, and we get to see how the Oval Office handles various threats. Scandal has won several awards, and the show receives higher ratings every year. 112 Despite its fictional nature, Scandal, like many mass-mediated creations, denies its own artifice and gives the impression that the show reflects reality. 113 For example, during the third season of the show, the advisability of maintaining the secrecy of the Special Forces becomes the focus of attention. In the third episode of that season, a woman named Mary Nesbitt (Cynthia Stevenson) visits Congressman Jim Struthers (Mark Moses) in his office in Washington, D.C., with a bomb strapped to her body, and she is shown holding the trigger in her right hand. Nesbitt explains that FBI agents killed her son because he was a terrorist, but the details of his death remained classified. She is unwilling to believe that her son was a terrorist. Although she has written to her congressman numerous times, she has yet to receive an answer, so she decided to pay him a visit, with the threat of blowing him up, along with herself, if he could not explain the details of her son’s death. Audiences are left to ponder the rationality or the irrationality behind this terrorist attempt, but there is no disputing the ontological existence of the threat itself. This episode highlights the interactions between Nesbitt, Olivia Pope (the show’s protagonist has come to help with negotiating the situation), and the White House. Nesbitt, Pope, and Struthers are trapped in the Congressman’s office for over ten hours as negotiations are conducted between Nesbitt, the White House, and the SWAT team. As the situation intensifies, President Grant (Tony Goldwin) finally calls Olivia and explains to her that Mary’s son, Chris Lawrence, was a CIA agent who had worked for years to become embedded in Al Qaeda. The FBI killed him by mistake, not knowing that he was an undercover CIA agent, but if his mother found out the truth, it could compromise the other 57 agents that Chris embedded in Al Qaeda. If the other agents’ true identities were discovered, they would likely be tortured and killed. For this reason, ultimate secrecy was of the utmost importance, not only for the lives of the 57 other agents, but for national security. This episode rhetorically reiterated the importance of maintaining secrecy, recognizing the dangerous job of Special Forces, and need to appreciate the virtue of the Special Forces as they carry out their missions. Finally, the television series Homeland works to naturalize the functions of the national security state in the Obama era—read: “smart” warfare—through its portrayal of secret surveillance. 114 As Kumar and Kundnani explain, Homeland’s creators, Alex Ganza and Howard Gordon, previously collaborated on 24 during the Bush administration and have now collaborated on this show during the Obama administration. 115 Indeed, the authors further argue that Homeland is a production that serves to furnish the “security establishment with the cultural imagina-

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tion needed to meet its goals” such as support for secrecy and the need for increased surveillance. 116 Similar to 24, Homeland centers around the constant threats to the U.S. that could be internal and external, which allows for the justification of increased domestic security and the need for agents like the protagonist Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a CIA analyst. (It is said that the same analyst that was portrayed in ZD30 also inspired Carrie’s character. 117) Also like 24, Mathison often has to conduct her own rogue missions, including the time when she implemented extensive surveillance on Brody (Damian Lewis) in the first season because she suspected him of terrorist activities. 118 In the end, her hunch was correct. In these cases, secretive work, classified information, and invasive surveillance are justified for counter-terrorism purposes, and this “not only sells the public on the notion that the War on Terror has become a permanent state of emergency,” but makes the point “that educated, sober, ethical, and smart people are in charge and that we should trust them to guard us.” 119 These imaginative tales supplement the “trust us” rhetorics that are produced by empowered decision-makers. THE WHITE HOUSE DECISION-MAKERS AND THE HEROISM OF PRESIDENT’S CABINET Given all of the media attention that swirled around the Special Forces after the raid on Abbottabad, who could blame the members of the White House when they tried to show the world their own heroism as they make the allegedly “tough” decisions that put these warriors in harm’s way? After all, someone had to make sure that this would not turn into another unmitigated disaster, like Jimmy Carter’s Operation Eagle’s Claw. The visual documentation of the night of the raid in the White House has served to reinforce specific memories of that night and the importance—and the necessity—of deploying Special Forces in key situations. The very night of the bin Laden raid, an image that was taken by White House photographer Pete Souza quickly went viral and would later gain iconic status when it was captioned as “The Situation Room Photo” (see Figure 4.1). Aside from a few facts that were released early on about this raid, this image was the only information available immediately following the raid about what happened that night. The Situation Room “metaimage” 120—that purportedly gives an apparent insider’s look at what happened at the White House the night of the raid—is turned into a taken-for-granted acceptance of the violence that happened in Abbottabad, and it serves as a visual chronicle of this image event. 121 Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are depicted sitting around a table, eyes trans-

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fixed on the screen in front of them that provides a live feed of the raid. Obama appears to be pushed away from the table, back in the left corner of the photograph, leaning forward in his chair, eyes focused, jaw clinched. Surrounding the table in the apparently compact room, are other advisors, assistants, and counterterrorism officials who crowd in, vying for an angle to see the screen. Within hours after Americans learned about the raid, there were more than 600,000 views of the photograph on the White House’s Flicker website, and it was estimated that some of these White House photos were receiving as many as 13,000 views per minute. 122 All of this was happening so quickly that it was said that the Situation Room photograph was viewed by almost 1.5 million viewers within 24 hours. 123 However, from the vantage point of ideological critique, all of this was much more than the chronicling for the White House archives of the personages who were in the Situation Room that day. This was also a specific type of politicized photo opportunity, where the aesthetic powers of photography were brought to bear as visual weapons of counterterrorist warfare that underscored the resilience of the American leadership as well as the heroism of the Navy SEALs. White House advisers, after all, had risked their political capital when they supported this type of aggressive warfighting that would take out the nation’s top enemy. While the

Figure 4.1. “The Situation Room,” taken by Pete Souza, May 1, 2011 Courtesy: The White House Flickr Account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/ 5680724572/

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SEALs had to (or should) remain anonymous, the Situation Room image captured the civic leaders and generals who supervised the mission, and gave the impression that they were apparently witnessing the raid live via video feed. 124 Although later deemed inaccurate, 125 this was what people remembered from the photograph. For us it matters a great deal what the public remembers about what happened. Many still believe that the Situation Room photo portrays prominent White House leaders watching the bin Laden Raid live via video feed and some of the heroism of the Navy SEALs have been migrated over to discussions of the heroism of the White House advisers. This type of ideological drift has contributed to situations where these heroic successes are reprised in other media performances. One such example is the television series Scandal and the ways it consistently lauds the use of Special Forces in lieu of precision air strikes or other means, especially during the second season. For example, President Grant is recovering from an assassination attempt that resulted in a bullet wound to his head. While he was recuperating, Vice President Sally Langston (Katherine Burton) took over presidential responsibilities and had planned on conducting precision air strikes to deal with Sudan’s genocide atrocities. However, President Grant returns to work before the decision is finalized and, though still recovering, resists the use of airstrikes and instead advocates for the use of a SEAL team. He argues that precision air strikes are not precise enough to limit collateral damage, and argues that a SEAL team should be sent to capture and kill the East Sudan leader. Not everyone agrees with the president’s decision, fearful that the wound on his head from the assassination attempt had more of an internal than external impact and may affect his decision-making. In this scene, two major points should be noted. First, because “entertainment . . . tells particular stories in a way that privileges some people and points of view over others,” 126 precision airstrikes, or the use of drones, is vilified, and a discussion about their inaccuracy and inability to truly account for civilian casualties is emphasized. This mirrors current discussions in the public realm, as was discussed earlier in this chapter. Interestingly, in this particular instance, the depiction of drone strikes functions to valorize Special Forces operations. Specifically, the most prominent mission the public remembers is the bin Laden raid, which was precise and accurate, and seemingly all causalities were accounted for. This type of attention also keeps the “shadowy operations” 127 that include 600-plus Special Forces Operations each month hidden and only singular events visible. Second, the use of Navy SEALs specifically (when there are multiple groups that compose JSOC), relies on public memories of the bin Laden raid and its success. In the end, despite skepticism of the president’s decision, the SEAL mission is successful. The president announces on national television that a U.S. Navy SEAL team “parachuted into east Sudan and captured its

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President,” and that there were no American casualties, and “several” Sudanese causalities, “all non-civilian.” 128 The president’s announcement serves to recognize that he made the correct decision in the television series (since there were fewer casualties and the east Sudan president was captured) and also works to communicate to the show’s audience the effectiveness of utilizing Special Forces. The use of SEAL teams means fewer troops on the ground as well as more precision in making sure that only the “bad guys” are hurt. Encouraged by this success, a few episodes later, SEAL teams are once again called upon. In episode fourteen, undercover CIA operatives have been captured in Kashfar (a fictional Middle Eastern country). President Grant is informed that the National Security Agency has “picked up chatter from a small city in the northeast” where it believes the hostages are being held. 129 After hearing this, without hesitation President Grant orders for a SEAL team to be sent in to rescue the hostages. Although his chief of staff asks that they take a breath to consider other options, the president moves forward with using Special Forces, explaining that the Kashfari government does not—and cannot—know about the secret CIA operatives working in their country. This, of course, brings back memories of the bin Laden raid, when the U.S went into Pakistan without Pakistan’s knowledge in order to capture bin Laden. The raid begins with a scene that is reminiscent of the Situation Room photograph, and reinforces narratives that the White House watched a live feed of the bin Laden raid. President Grant is seated in the Situation Room at the head of the table, surrounded by other White House officials. All of them are watching a large screen on the opposite side of the room from President Grant that is projecting a live feed of the SEAL operation. Everyone in the room is tense as they watch the SEALs via night vision cameras walking through the rooms looking for the hostages. As the SEALs approach the room where the hostages are believed to be held, they find it empty. Although at first this appears to be a result of the president’s rash decision-making and overuse of Special Forces to solve every problem overseas, it is soon discovered that there is a mole who leaked the plans of the raid to the terrorists. This serves to reinforce the notion that the use of Special Forces was the correct decision, and that any failure of a mission rests elsewhere. As a result, in episode sixteen, President Grant conducts yet another SEAL mission, this time completely top secret from nearly everyone in the White House in order to ensure that the mole does not foil the plans again (once again emphasizing the importance of secrecy). When the raid is under way, the audience sees the president and his cabinet surrounding a table in the Situation Room, watching intensely as the SEALs enter a building in search of the hostages. As the SEALs clear each room, the tension thickens. Anxiety is visible on the president’s and others’ faces. The SEALs enter the final room to find the hostages. President Grant and

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the others watching the feed exclaim in excitement, pumping their fists and giving hugs. Later that night, President Grant announces on national television, “The SEAL team executed their mission without a single American casualty.” 130 During this scene many audience members may feel as if they are reliving the night of May 1, 2011, sitting in the Situation Room with the president watching the events of the bin Laden raid unfold. The SEALs’ success not only bolstered confidence in President Grant’s decisions among his peers and the American public, but it functions as a reinforcement of the efficacy and success of using Special Forces in general. Whether in a fictional television series or a real-life situation like the bin Laden raid, the emphasis on zero or very few American casualties strengthens support for such operations, especially for a war-weary U.S. public. Indeed, media can set the agenda for how people believe social problems should be handled or understood, and this is one example. 131 CONCLUSION: SPECIAL FORCES AND THE FUTURE OF WAR In this chapter, we have discussed the rise of JSOC and network warfare in the United States and the various ways that the use of Special Forces has been celebrated and represented in the public sphere. More specifically, we argued that the prominent visual chronicling of the bin Laden raid and its valorization of SEALs played on audiences’ sense of patriotism and their emotions. Additionally, we have argued that part of the reason that all of this resonates with so many is that this promising use of JSOC forces may mean fewer boots on the ground, and more specialized, precise attacks which is very much welcome. To be sure, Special Forces are a continuing part of the future of America’s Way of War. Whether they supplement drone airstrikes, or are secretly becoming a major form of defense, there is an increasing move toward using fewer (visible) troops to accomplish the same means. For example, in June 2014, President Obama stated that he planned to deploy 300 troops to Iraq to aid the Iraqi army. 132 Many initially were taken aback by this, considering his promise to continue to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but Obama promised that the role of these troops was to “aid the Iraqi army” as advisers and not as combatants. 133 The troops were to conduct surveillance, gather intelligence, and help train the Iraqi army to become independent. Translated: We are sending in the Special Forces. Then, on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11 in September 2014, President Obama addressed the country during prime time, stating that with the building problems and violence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the U.S. was going to respond by sending an additional 475 U.S. service members to “support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with train-

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ing, intelligence and equipment.” 134 Again, these troops were not being deployed for combat missions, so that the U.S. would not get dragged into another never-ending war. Instead, these were Special Forces whose mission is purely based on intelligence and advising. By making this declaration, President Obama confirmed that this would “be a significantly different kind of war,” 135 and one that followed in the new way of networked warfare that the United States finds itself fighting. However, despite Obama’s consistent guarantees that there will be no combat missions involved in the deployment of these troops, we cannot help but think of the arguments made by Niva and others, who stressed that in addition to the visible and apparent war, there is another war that is “disappeared” from the public eye and composed of “shadowy operations.” 136 The danger associated with such a shadowy war is that it raises concerns regarding the absence of public scrutiny as well as accountability. Over time America’s secretive Special Forces operations that are deployed in the name of national security may signal the advent of widespread, frequent, and secretive attacks. In this case, we see life imitating art, and one more indication of how reality and entertainment co-constitute each other. 137 Special Forces missions and network warfare take place outside of Hollywood, but they also reappear in various guises on television shows like 24, where, within a 24-hour period, Jack Bauer and his team interrogate multiple suspects in multiple geographic regions based on intelligence they discover in real time. One of the key issues, of course, is whether members of the JSOC are breaking international rules and principles when they violate Pakistani air space in order to “get” their terrorists. It is common for Bauer to break rules and laws—those of his Counter Terrorism Unit, the United States, and International—in the name of national security. It may take some time before we know whether Jack Bauer’s antics are reflections and refractions of actual transgressions that are committed by those who are living in the dark side of counterterrorism. Indeed, the United States is put in a difficult position where secrecy and the promiscuous use of EITs are deployed in ways that seem to contradict other American values having to do with democratic governance and transparency. In order to claim success when networks fight other networks, one has to fight ruthlessly, and this mimicking the enemy’s style of warfare may make us appear to be more successful, or it may just make us look more like a configuration of our enemies. As Friedrich Nietzsche once famously asserted, when you look into the abyss, sometimes the abyss looks back into you. 138 All of this ruthlessness becomes even more destructive if there is no perceptual “end” to this counterterrorist pursuit of monsters. The most dangerous part of this new type of war, Niva warns, is that there is no end in sight. Indeed, even General McChrystal once said, “You can kill

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Taliban forever. . . . Because they are not a finite number.” 139 In traditional understandings of wars, it is countries pitted against each other, and when one side surrenders, the other wins and occupies the territory. However, in the age of network warfare, the danger is that there will be a war without end. Instead, there will be a “global and possibly permanent policing operation that is focused on managing risks and preempting potential challenges through continuous surveillance and strike operations across diverse geographies, which undermines norms of sovereignty and blurs the distinction between war and peace.” 140 Ackerman further noted that, although the White House’s top counterterrorism advisor declared Al Qaeda was supposedly “shattered and irrelevant,” after the bin Laden raid, “the U.S. has to keep fighting shadow wars—endlessly— to make sure it stays that way.” 141 Is all of this chasing of terrorist monsters by the JSOC a type of creative destruction that maintains the hegemonic powers of those who claim to have the expertise to fight this network centric warfare? The war has become one focused on killing more and more people in the name of national security, with potentially little gains. As Priest and Arkin explain, wars are not simply about killing “enough of the enemy,” 142 and in network warfare, there are many ways of framing either victories or defeats. Indeed, although the mission that killed bin Laden was, and still is, celebrated as a major victory in the GWOT, many have also warned that it was not a signal of the end of the war, as may have initially been believed. For example, Jarvis and Holland argued that, while the bin Laden raid “represented a significant step towards US and global security, Americans and their allies should be ‘under no illusion that killing bin Laden removes the threat entirely.’ In short, the US was ‘not done going after terrorists.’” 143 While we would bicker with Jarvis and Holland on their claims that bin Laden’s demise was a “significant step,” their other commentary on the perpetual nature of this conflict seems to reflect elite and public opinion. Critics like Jeremy Scahill have an even bleaker understanding of the raid. He argued that U.S. actions, including the bin Laden raid and other Special Forces operations, actually create more enemies to the U.S. and aid in the recruitment efforts of Al Qaeda. 144 What the public is not told is that this type of warfare makes it difficult to ever truly win a war and may actually perpetuate a war without end, the opposite of what many Americans believe it will accomplish. Instead, war and violence will not cease, but be managed through the ever-increasing use of Special Forces. And this is why public narratives and media celebrations of the Special Forces are in need of constant critique. Some observers, like Ackerman, have even questioned Obama’s decisions to use Special Forces. As he stated, “The charitable way to put it

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is that the Obama administration is being cautious. The uncharitable way is that it doesn’t know how to end the war.” 145 To be sure, this new way of war is one of blurred lines and questionable ethical and moral decisions, and this tension is often represented in popular media such as 24 and Scandal, where at times good people have to do bad things for the greater good. In these cases, popular culture representations serve as public relations campaigns for the government, or as Löfflmann argued, a “political practice by DoD.” 146 These popular culture depictions of the moral and ethical struggles of some of the most powerful people (who have the intentions of national security in the forefront of their minds) serve to legitimize and to normalize targeted killings (instead of “assassinations”). Although some like Scahill and Kundnani highlight the actions of governmental officials who produced kill lists that led to cover-ups of civilian deaths (including two pregnant women whose deaths were supposedly hushed up), 147 we would augment this by underscoring the many representations that circulate in popular cultures that work to negate public criticism, celebrate Special Forces, and garner support for America’s new networked way of war. 148 NOTES 1. “Osama Bin Laden Dead: Obama Speech Video and Transcript,” Huffington Post, May 2, 2011, para. 1, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/02/osama-bin-ladendead-obama-speech-video-transcript_n_856122.html. 2. For helpful overviews of how various pundits talk about the importance of Special Forces, see Linda Robinson, “The Future of Special Forces: Beyond Kill and Capture,” Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2012. 3. “SEAL Team Six: Overview,” Military.com, accessed September 8, 2014, http:// www.military.com/special-operations/seal-team-6.html. 4. Ben Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11,” Survival 55, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 159, doi:10.1080/00396338.2013.841826. 5. Sean D. Naylor, “A Triumph for JSOC,” Defense News, May 9, 2011, http:// www.defensenews.com/article/20110509/DEFFEAT06/105090325/A-Triumph-JSOC. 6. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September 2, 2011, sec. National Security, para. 13, accessed August 15, 2014, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-secret-america-a-look-at-themilitarys-joint-special-operations-command/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html; “Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC),” Text, Military.com, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.military.com/special-operations/jsoc-joint-special-operations.html. 7. For the most popular telling of the tale of what happened in Somalia see Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Penguin USA, 2000). 8. Naylor, “A Triumph for JSOC.” 9. Priest and Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” para. 7–8. 10. Priest and Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command.” 11. Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti, and Thom Shanker, “Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces,” New York Times, February 12, 2012.

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12. See, for example, Deborah Pearlstein, “Getting the CIA Out of the Drone Business,” Opinio Juris, last modified March 21, 2013, http://opiniojuris.org/2013/03/20/getting-the-cia-out-of-the-drone-business/. 13. Georg Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security,” Critical Studies in Security 1, no. 3 (2013): 280–94, doi:10.1080/ 21624887.2013.820015. 14. Deepa Kumar and Arun Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security,” Jacobin, November 13, 2013, para. 3, accessed September 17, 2014, https:// www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/homeland-and-the-imagination-of-national-security/. 15. Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2009). 16. Ibid. 17. Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” 18. Schmitt, Mazzetti, and Shanker, “Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces.” 19. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11,” 159. 20. Spencer Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied Al-Qaida to Kill It,” Wired, September 9, 2011, accessed August 15, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2011/09/mcchrystalnetwork/all/. 21. Douglas Porch, “Expendable Soldiers,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 25, no. 3 (May 4, 2014): 696–716, doi:10.1080/09592318.2014.893974. 22. Arun Kundnani, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield,” Race & Class 56, no. 1 (July 1, 2014): 95–99, doi:10.1177/0306396814531709; Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (New York: Berkley Trade, 2005). 23. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11”; General Stanley A. McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir, First Edition (New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2013). 24. Dexter Filkins, “Stanley McChrystal’s Long War,” The New York Times, October 18, 2009, sec. Magazine, accessed September 16, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/ 10/18/magazine/18Afghanistan-t.html. 25. General Stanley A. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network,” Foreign Policy, February 22, 2011. 26. Antoine Bousquet, “Chaoplexic Warfare or the Future of Military Organization,” International Affairs 84, no. 5 (2008): 915–29. 27. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network,” para. 5. 28. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11,” 168. 29. Ibid., 162. 30. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 36. 31. Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John H. Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” Proceedings 124, no. 1 (1998), http://www.usni.org/ magazines/ proceedings/1998-01/network-centric-warfare-its-origin-and-future. 32. Mark Duffield, “War as a Network Enterprise: The New Security Terrain and Its Implications,” Cultural Values 6, no. 1–2 (2002): 153. 33. Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied Al-Qaida to Kill It.” 34. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network”; Bousquet, “Chaoplexic Warfare or the Future of Military Organization.” 35. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network,” para. 3. 36. Steve Niva, “Disappearing Violence: JSOC and the Pentagon’s New Cartography of Networked Warfare,” Security Dialogue 44, no. 3 (June 1, 2013): 198, doi:10.1177/ 0967010613485869. 37. Bousquet, “Chaoplexic Warfare or the Future of Military Organization,” 923. 38. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 52. 39. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11.” 40. Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied Al-Qaida to Kill It,” para. 1. 41. Ibid.

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42. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network.” 43. Ibid., para. 18. 44. Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied Al-Qaida to Kill It,” para. 16. 45. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11,” 165. 46. Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied Al-Qaida to Kill It.” 47. Ibid., para. 16. 48. Ibid., para. 18. 49. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network,” para. 21. 50. Kundnani, “Dirty Wars,” 96. 51. Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied Al-Qaida to Kill It.” 52. Caroline Holmqvist, “Undoing War: War Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare,” Millennium 41, no. 4 (June 2013): 535–552, doi: 10.1177/ 030582981348335. 53. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network,” para. 25. 54. Thom Shanker and Alissa Rubin, “Quest to Neutralize Afghan Militants is Showing Glimpses of Success, NATO Says,” New York Times, June 28, 2010, sec. World / Asia Pacific, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/ asia/29military.html; Niva, “Disappearing Violence”; Priest and Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command.” 55. Priest and Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” para. 44. 56. Niva, “Disappearing Violence,” 199. 57. Eric Black, “Investigative Reporter Seymour Hersh Describes ‘Executive Assassination Ring,’” MinnPost, March 11, 2009, para. 1, http://www.minnpost.com/ericblack-ink/2009/03/investigative-reporter-seymour-hersh-describes-executive-assassination-ring; Niva, “Disappearing Violence.” 58. (107th Congress, 1st Session. S. J. RES. 23 SEC 2 (a)) 59. Niva, “Disappearing Violence,” 191. 60. Ibid. 61. Schmitt, Mazzetti, and Shanker, “Admiral Seeks Freer Hand in Deployment of Elite Forces.” 62. Shanker and Rubin, “Quest to Neutralize Afghan Militants Is Showing Glimpses of Success, NATO Says.” 63. Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009). 64. Niva, “Disappearing Violence.” 65. Gareth Porter, “How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate ‘Killing Machine,’” Truthout, September 26, 2011, para. 11–12, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3588-how-mcchrystal-and-petraeus-built-an-indiscriminate-killing-machine. 66. Nicholas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2011, accessed April 1, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/ 110808fa_fact_schmidle. 67. Steve Inskeep, “Details of the Bin Laden Raid, Recounted by the SEALs : NPR,” NPR.org, August 1, 2011, accessed April 25, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2011/08/01/ 138884570/details-of-the-bin-laden-raid-recounted-by-the-seals; Ray Suarez, “Advanced Technology, Old-Fashioned Tactics Helped Make Bin Laden Raid a Success,” PBS Newshour, August 1, 2011, accessed December 19, 2012, http://www.pbs.org/ newshour/bb/military/july–dec11/binladen_08–01.html; Brian Todd, “The Last Seconds of Bin Laden’s Life—CNN.com Video,” CNN Video, August 2, 2011, http:// www.cnn.com/video/bestoftv/2011/08/02/exp.tsr.todd.bin.laden.raid.cnn. 68. Blackfive, “The Best Article on Getting Bin Laden,” Blackfive.net, August 2, 2011, para. 1, http://www.blackfive.net/main/2011/08/the-best-article-on-getting-bin-laden.html. 69. Paul Farhi, “Journalist Details Raid on Bin Laden Camp,” The Washington Post, August 3, 2011, sec. C–1, para. 1–7.

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70. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002). 71. Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden,” para. 25. 72. Ibid., para. 26. 73. Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, First Edition (Dutton Adult, 2012). 74. Tony Perry, “‘No Easy Day’ Is a Compelling Account of Bin Laden’s Killing: Book Review,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2012, para. 5, accessed September 22, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/05/entertainment/la-et-mark-owen20120905. 75. Janet Maslin, “‘No Easy Day’ by Mark Owen Tells of SEAL Raid on Bin Laden,” New York Times, September 2, 2012, sec. Books, para. 4, accessed September 22, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/books/no-easy-day-by-mark-owen-with-kevinmaurer.html. 76. Although it was also described as “tacky” by some reviewers, who felt that Bissonnette’s jabs at President Obama at the end of the book were unnecessary. 77. Bob Minzesheimer, “‘No Easy Day’ Bumps 20-Week ‘Grey,’” USA Today, September 12, 2012, sec. 1–D. 78. Ibid., 164. 79. Ibid., 184. 80. Ray Subers, “Weekend Report: Controversial ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Claims Top Spot,” BoxOfficeMojo, January 13, 2013, accessed September 22, 2014, http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3609&p=s.htm. 81. Adrian Brown, “Bin Laden’s Death: How It Happened,” BBC, June 7, 2011, sec. South Asia, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13257330; Joshua Foust, “The Schmidle Muddle of the Osama Bin Laden Take Down,” Registan, August 4, 2011, accessed June 29, 2012, http://registan.net/2011/08/04/the-schmidle-muddle-ofthe-osama-bin-laden-take-down/; Chuck Pfarrer, SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (St. Martin’s Press, 2011); Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden.” 82. Owen and Maurer, No Easy Day. 83. “Inside the Situation Room: A Guided Tour,” Rock Center with Brian Williams (MSNBC, May 4, 2012); Rock Center with Brian Williams, “Inside White House Situation Room on Anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s Death,” Msnbc.com, April 27, 2012, accessed December 19, 2012, http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/27/ 11416301-inside-white-house-situation-room-on-anniversary-of-osama-bin-ladensdeath. 84. Richard Corliss, “Zero Dark Thirty: The Girl Who Got Bin Laden,” Time, November 25, 2012, para. 1, http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/25/zero-dark-thirtythe-girl-who-got-bin-laden/. 85. Owen and Maurer, No Easy Day, 299. 86. Stahl, Militainment, Inc.; Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, First Edition (Metropolitan Books, 2009). 87. Ben Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11,” Survival 55, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 160, doi:10.1080/00396338.2013.841826. 88. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11”; Lee Jarvis and Jack Holland, “‘We [for]got Him’: Remembering and Forgetting in the Narration of Bin Laden’s Death,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies, January 10, 2014, 0305829813516527, doi:10.1177/0305829813516527. 89. Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, First Edition (Dutton Adult, 2012); Damien Van Puyvelde, “Mark Owen (with Kevin Maurer), No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden: The Autobiography of a Navy SEAL,” Intelligence and National Security 28, no. 3 (June 2013): 449–52, doi:10.1080/02684527.2012.735076; Nicholas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden.”

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90. General Stanley A. McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir, First Edition edition (New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2013), 191. 91. Jarvis and Holland, “‘We [for]got Him.’” 92. Ibid., 438. 93. Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” 94. Kumar and Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security.” 95. Ibid., para. 9–10. 96. Noah Shachtman, “Bin Laden Raid Became Re-Election Mission, SEAL Book Says,” Wired, August 29, 2012, para. 6, accessed September 22, 2014, http:// www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/bin-laden-book/. 97. Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” 98. Kumar and Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security,” para. 13. 99. Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” 100. Niva, “Disappearing Violence.” 101. Ibid., 185. 102. Kundnani, “Dirty Wars,” 95. 103. Niva, “Disappearing Violence”; Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden.” 104. Niva, “Disappearing Violence,” 186. 105. Ibid. 106. Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden.” 107. Ibid. 108. Priest and Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” para. 4. 109. Niva, “Disappearing Violence,” 196. 110. Barry, “Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11,” 159–160. 111. Kundnani, “Dirty Wars,” 95. 112. The Deadline Team, “Full 2013–2014 TV Season Series Rankings,” Deadline, May 22, 2014, accessed September 10, 2014, http://deadline.com/2014/05/tv-season-seriesrankings-2013-full-list-2-733762/. 113. Stephanie Greco Larson, Media & Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006). 114. Kumar and Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security.” 115. Ibid., para. 2. 116. Ibid., para. 3. 117. Kumar and Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security.” 118. Alessandra Stanley, “‘Homeland,’ Starring Claire Danes, on Showtime—Review,” New York Times, September 29, 2011, sec. Arts / Television, accessed September 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/arts/television/homeland-starringclaire-danes-on-showtime-review.html. 119. Kumar and Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security,” para. 34. 120. Parry-Giles and Trevor, Constructing Clinton. 121. Alan Silverleib, “Obama on Sunday: A Photo for the Ages?,” CNN, May 3, 2011, accessed October 22, 2014, http://articles.cnn.com/2011–05–03/politics/iconic.obama.photo_1_barack-obama-white-house-situation-room-national-securityteam?_s=PM:POLITICS. 122. Jolie O’Dell, “White House Releases Situation Room Images From Bin Laden Raid [PICS],” Mashable, May 2, 2011, accessed December 19, 2012, http://mashable.com/2011/05/02/situation-room-pics/. 123. Josh Wolford, “Situation Room Bin Laden Raid Photo Will Be Most Viewed Image on Flickr,” WebProNews, May 4, 2011, accessed April 1, 2012, http:// www.webpronews.com/situation-room-bin-laden-raid-photo-flickr-2011–05.

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124. Kennedy, “Seeing and Believing: On Photography and the War on Terror,” 263; Ian Drury, David Williams, and Sam Greenhill, “Obama Watched Bin Laden Die on Live Video as Shoot-out Beamed to White House,” Mail Online, May 3, 2011, accessed December 19, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1382859/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-Photo-Obama-watching-Al-Qaeda-leader-die-live-TV.html. 125. Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, quoted in Michael Winter, “Panetta: Obama Did Not See Bin Laden Being Killed,” USATODAY.COM, May 3, 2011, para. 1, accessed December 19, 2014, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/ 2011/05/panetta-obama-did-not-see-bin-laden-being-killed/1. 126. Stephanie Greco Larson, Media & Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 15. 127. Steve Niva, “Disappearing Violence.” 128. Scandal, Season 2, Episode 11, 27:25. 129. Scandal, Season 2, Episode 14, 25:05 130. Scandal, Season 2, Episode 16, 34:11. 131. David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1992), 80. 132. P. Nash Jenkins, “The First U.S. Special Forces Have Arrived in Baghdad,” TIME.com, June 25, 2014, accessed September 11, 2014, http://time.com/2920342/firstus-special-forces-arrive-iraq-baghdad/; Aljazeera, “US Military Advisers Set up Base in Baghdad,” June 25, 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/06/usmilitary-advisers-set-up-base-baghdad-2014625599130768.html. 133. Jenkins, “The First U.S. Special Forces Have Arrived in Baghdad,” para. 2. 134. Barack Obama, “Transcript of Obama’s Remarks on the Fight Against ISIS,” New York Times, September 10, 2014, para. 11, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/ world/middleeast/obamas-remarks-on-the-fight-against-isis.html. 135. Peter Baker, “New Military Campaign Extends a Legacy of War,” The New York Times, September 10, 2014, para. 2, accessed September 11, 2014, http:// www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/extending-a-legacy-of-war.html. 136. Steve Niva, “Disappearing Violence.” 137. Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” 138. David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 139. Filkins, “Stanley McChrystal’s Long War,” sec. IV. 140. Niva, “Disappearing Violence,” 199. 141. Spencer Ackerman, “White House: Al-Qaida Is Toast (As Long As These Shadow Wars Last Forever),” Wired, June 29, 2011, para. 1, accessed September 17, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2011/06/white-house-al-qaida-is-toast/. 142. Priest and Arkin, “Top Secret America” para. 43. 143. Jarvis and Holland, “We [for]got Him.” 144. Trudy Bond, “Dirty Wars: Peace Psychologists and the Need to Confront Reality: A Review of Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 19, no. 4 (2013): 423, doi:10.1037/a0034614. 145. Ackerman, “White House,” para. 12. 146. Löfflmann, “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” 147. Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books, 2013); Arun Kundnani, “Dirty Wars.” 148. Bond, “Dirty Wars.” Kundnani, “Dirty Wars.”

FIVE Cyber War, Threat Inflation, and the Securitization of Everyday Life

A number of scholars from varying disciplines have pointed to the growing sense in Western societies, especially the U.S. since 9/11, that threats to national security are seemingly ubiquitous, even to the point of banality. 1 As we noted in chapter one, “terrorism” is itself one such concern, which seemingly transgresses many traditional boundaries that once served as comforting anchors shaping our understandings of and responses to the world. But as chapter four demonstrated, the very physical embodiment of terrorists and terrorism can undermine this threat’s rhetorical force in the eyes of some critics because if bin Laden or enough top lieutenants are killed, the job of maintaining the fear of harm and desire for safety that legitimizes the national security state becomes more difficult. What is needed, rhetorically at least, is a seemingly ubiquitous threat that is simultaneously present but invisible (see chapter two), potentially as dangerous as a physical attack but not, itself, amenable to defeat through traditional, externally focused means of national defense. This is a threat that is everywhere and nowhere and, thus, requiring the national security state to be everywhere and nowhere, too. This chapter uses the case of so-called “cyber war” to illustrate the emergence of such a threat. As advanced Western democracies have become more dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) of various kinds for practically all aspects of daily life, so too have they become more concerned about potential threats to and through the infrastructure upon which they rely—i.e., threats to/through cyberspace. 2 But several scholars have identified cyber war as a case of “threat inflation.” 3 Here we use critiques of these cyber war discourses as windows into the rhetorical characteristics of threat inflation. The chapter identifies six 131

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such characteristics, which include the strategic use of ambiguity to conflate different threats into one, the use of hypothetical doom scenarios to raise the level of fear, the exaggeration of the effects of largely trivial events, piggybacking on the fear caused by natural disasters and terrorist attacks to promote fear of cyber war, the projection of U.S. actions onto others, and finally, overreactions in the form of increasing militarization of cyberspace. SECURITIZATION AND THREAT INFLATION Critical observers from a number of fields, including security studies, rhetoric, and cultural studies, have noted the tendency in Western societies to identify an increased number of issues as national security issues, or even as war. 4 While the move in Western nations to “widen” the national security agendas beyond traditional political-military issues was initially largely the concern of academic security analysts, national security professionals have also happily applied the security label to a whole host of issues that would not normally have been considered national security threats. 5 These have included a number of so-called “new threats” related to environmental degradation, poverty, health, immigration, and technology. The supposed threat of cyber war, the focus of this chapter, is “emblematic of new threats in general.” 6 Critical scholars have focused to a great degree on security rhetorics and discourses in their attempts to understand the emergence and implications of this growing concern with a seemingly expanding number of new threats to national security. Perhaps the most influential of these approaches has emerged from the critical constructivist tradition in security studies. 7 “Securitization theory” begins with the observation that what counts as a security threat is not predetermined. Rather, the identification of security threats is the product of a particular kind of political discourse that involves a “securitizing actor” who identifies “threat subjects” and “referent objects.” That is, political elites, security professionals, and experts often take the lead in security discourses identifying who is threatening what and, in turn, proposing responses and raising the call to action. 8 This work has yielded a number of important insights and raised a number of serious concerns. That the new threats are often characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding subjects, objects, means, and impacts is perhaps the most important insight. In the rhetoric of new threats, it often remains unclear who it is that threatens; what it is that is being threatened how; and with what potential impact. This is a result of the fact that empirical evidence for, or real-world experience with, these threats is often ambiguous or nonexistent. In most cases, the worst imagined impacts are as-yet unrealized risks. 9 Thus, a tendency toward possib-

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ilistic thinking and a logic of precaution can dominate response efforts. 10 Additionally, the widening of security agendas has resulted in the convergence of internal and external security concerns, along with the convergence between the roles and responsibilities of military and police, but also between public and private producers of security. 11 The ambiguity and possibilistic thinking characteristic of the securitization of new threats has resulted in increased concern over the possibility of “threat inflation,” which is “the attempt by elites to create concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify.” 12 The U.S.’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 under what turned out to be false pretenses is the primary impetus for those who express concern over the possibility and dangers of threat inflation. 13 In that case, we were exhorted by securitizing actors like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to worry about the dangers posed by “unknown unknowns” and reminded that, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” 14 But in the absence of evidence, Secretary Rumsfeld has said in retrospect, “You can only know more about those things [unknown unknowns] by imagining what they might be.” 15 Those imaginings tend to be of the most frightening possible scenarios, which, in turn, come to drive policy making toward precautionary or preventive action. As President Bush warned in October 2002, “we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” 16 Thus the need for the preventive measures that we discussed in chapter two. Having been identified as “emblematic of new threats,” 17 a number of scholars, journalists, and even some security professionals have identified cyber war as an example of threat inflation. Even scholars who take cyber security issues seriously readily acknowledge that the threat of cyber-attacks that approximate traditional warfare is “hyped,” “exaggerated,” “as likely as a visit from E.T.,” 18 a “myth,” 19 and a “bogeyman.” 20 One scholar has proclaimed flatly, “cyber war will not take place.” 21 Others have noted the lack of “disinterest” among those raising the alarm about the possibility or cyber war. Brito and Watkins note the role of a growing “cyber-industrial complex” that drives fear of cyber war for its own gain. 22 Years before his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on NSA surveillance, journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald pointed to the conflicts of interest surrounding one of cyber war’s chief proponents, Mike McConnell, the former Director of National Intelligence-cum-Executive Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton, a major provider of cyber security and intelligence services to the U.S. government. 23 Even some security practitioners have argued that cyber war is a “farce” 24 and has been “hugely hyped.” 25 As such, we contend that cyber war discourse provides a valuable window into the rhetorical characteristics of threat inflation. Based on an analysis of a variety of textual fragments from cyber war discourse, including government documents, speeches and other public statements

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from officials and non-government experts, op-eds, news reports, and more, we identify six such characteristics. These include conflation and the use of strategic ambiguity, the reliance on hypothetical scenarios and possibilistic thinking, exaggeration, piggybacking, projection, and overreaction. After providing an overview of the historical development of cyber war discourse in the next section, we then examine the role of each of these characteristics in U.S. cyber war discourse. THE EMERGENCE OF CYBER WAR Concern with cyber security in the U.S. dates to the 1980s and was focused initially on the possibility that foreign intelligence agencies could exploit the United States’ growing reliance on networked information and communication technologies (ICTs). 26 Beginning in the 1990s, however, cyber-threat perceptions experienced a profound shift in identified subjects and objects. For many policy makers and security professionals, the end of the Cold War seemed to result in the emergence of a more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous international system marked by an array of social, economic, and environmental issues representing possible threats to security. 27 Among those threats were what some referred to as “exotic threats,” “new threats,” or “new terrorism,” such as WMD terrorism, agro-terrorism, and cyber-terrorism. 28 A number of high-profile terrorist attacks in the early to mid-1990s exacerbated these fears, including the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In each case, terrorists targeted critical civilian infrastructure related to finance, transportation, or the delivery of government services. Thus, during the 1990s, the cyber-threat perception focused on foreign intelligence agencies stealing government secrets was replaced with a one focused on the possibility of terrorist cyberattacks against civilian critical infrastructures. 29 As the subjects of cyberthreats shifted to terrorists bent on mass destruction for its own sake and the object of cyberthreats shifted from government secrets to critical infrastructures, concern about the possible impacts of cyberattacks were greatly heightened. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1990s saw the emergence of fear over “shut-down-the-power-grid scenarios” and “cyber-doom scenarios.” 30 These hypothetical scenarios typically involve cyber-attacks against power, communications, and transportation systems leading to traffic accidents, plane crashes, colliding trains, nuclear meltdowns, and disruption of military command and control. 31 These scenarios were not only popular in the media, but were also featured in official documents like the 1997 report of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection. 32

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Though there were a number of shifts in assessments of the primary subject of the cyber threat during the administration of President George W. Bush, 33 critical infrastructure retained its place as the primary object of concern. 34 As such, the primary policy responses during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were dominated by civilian law enforcement and the promotion of so-called public-private partnerships. 35 Although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to a brief decline in U.S. public policy discussion of cyber threats, a number of high-profile cyber attacks since 2007 have led to renewed interest. These have included two large-scale cyber attacks, one against the country of Estonia in 2007 36 and the other against the country of Georgia in 2008, both of which are widely believed to have been the work of state-sanctioned Russian hackers. 37 In January 2010, Google’s claims to have been the target of a Chinese cyber attack received a great deal of press attention and were featured prominently in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on “Internet Freedom.” 38 Finally, speculation surrounding the Stuxnet computer worm, which we now know was a joint United States-Israeli effort to deliberately sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, helped to heighten concern about cyber security. 39 In this context, the new threat subject is said to be a state/non-state hybrid epitomized by the rise of so-called “patriotic hackers.” Perhaps more significant, however, is the unseating of critical infrastructure as the primary object of prospective cyber-threats. The first indication of this shift appeared in the December 2008 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, which asserted that In 1998 [sic], a presidential commission [PCCIP] reported that protecting cyberspace would become crucial for national security. In effect, this advice was not so much ignored as misinterpreted—we expected damage from cyber attacks to be physical (opened floodgates, crashing airplanes) when it was actually informational. 40

The report defined “informational damage” as theft of intellectual property and government secrets. It argued that “the immediate risk lies with the economy” and that the U.S. has already suffered from the theft of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property and government data. It warned that “America’s power, status, and security in the world depend in good measure upon its economic strength; our lack of cybersecurity is steadily eroding this advantage.” While it acknowledges the potential for cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, it provides the caveat that “depriving Americans of electricity, communications, and financial services may not be enough to provide the margin of victory in a conflict, but it could damage our ability to respond and our will to resist.” 41 While informational threats are presented as having already been realized and

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as having had identifiable impacts, infrastructural threats are framed as still unrealized and of uncertain potential impacts. General Keith Alexander, former commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, has acknowledged that the CSIS report “really set the foundation for crafting this administration’s strategy for cyber and security.” 42 An examination of key Obama administration policy documents and statements by administration officials supports Gen. Alexander’s assessment. Like the CSIS report, these documents and statements focus primarily on the negative economic impacts of stolen intellectual property and government data. This was the case, for example, with the White House Cyberspace Policy Review, which referenced the CSIS report on its first page and followed its lead in framing the cyber threat in terms of intellectual property, government data, and economic competitiveness. 43 This framing has served as the foundation of the U.S.’s vision for global “Internet freedom” and norms of international behavior in cyberspace. Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned in her January 2010 speech on “Internet freedom” that “[o]ur ability to bank online, use electronic commerce, and safeguard billions of dollars in intellectual property are all at stake if we cannot rely on the security of our information networks,” critical infrastructure went unmentioned. 44 Similarly, “respect for property,” including “respect for intellectual property rights, including patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyrights,” was listed as a key principle upon which to build international norms of cyberspace behavior in the administration’s May 2011 International Strategy for Cyberspace. 45 While protecting critical infrastructure was identified as a policy priority, 46 economic priorities were identified first and foremost. With this focus on informational, economic aspects of cyber security, revelations from the leaks of Edward Snowden that the U.S. intelligence community has contemplated engaging in cyber attacks against foreign firms to collect information for U.S. corporations should, perhaps, not come as a surprise. 47 RHETORICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CYBER THREAT INFLATION Despite decades of concern from policy makers, it is notable that we have yet to experience the kind of worst-case, shut-down-the-power-grid-style events that they have warned about so often. In fact, as noted above, the focus of concern has seemed to shift recently, away from critical infrastructure and toward government and corporate information. And yet, the United States has created a military Cyber Command and has engaged in offensive cyber attacks of its own. We are left to wonder not only about how it is that cyber threats made it successfully onto the political agenda in the first place, but how they have managed to remain

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a concern for so long, even as the severity of the supposed threat decreases while the response becomes more militarized. We can shed some light on these questions by examining some of the key rhetorical characteristics of the U.S. cyber war discourse. The Appealing Fear of Unknown Unknowns Cyber threat perceptions are characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty at almost every level, which turns out to be a rhetorical strength rather than a weakness. Obama administration cyber threat perceptions are but the latest demonstration of the rather dramatic and sudden shifts that can occur in what officials perceive to be threatened and by whom. With the end of the Cold War, cyber threat perceptions tracked along with changes in threat perceptions more generally, from state to nonstate threats. Then, in the early days of the George W. Bush administration, state actors suddenly replaced non-state actors as the main source of supposed cyber threat. Just as quickly, however, in the wake of 9/11, nonstate actors returned to center stage with officials expressing concern over the possibility of terrorists conducting cyber attacks against critical infrastructures. In the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, state actors once again made an appearance as the supposed source of cyber threats, this time with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq making the list of states with a cyberwar capability. 48 Finally, as noted above, the inauguration of President Barack Obama saw yet another shift in cyber threat perceptions, from a focus on infrastructural to so-called “informational” threats. What’s more, officials and experts often lump a number of threat subject-referent object combinations under generic terms like “cyber attack,” “cyber threat,” or even “cyber war.” Such terms are “misguiding and inappropriate” because they make the threat seem both monolithic and more dangerous than it really is. 49 That is, conflation serves the cause of threat inflation. But, as James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has noted, there is not one “cyber threat” but many, including crime, espionage, and potential threats to critical infrastructure. While conflating these problems allows cyber war proponents to make a seemingly stronger case for action, they also make an effective response more difficult by implying a one-size-fits-all solution to quite different problems. 50 This conflation of different cyber threats into one is an example of what Van Evera calls “monolith thinking,” which is common in cases of threat inflation. For example, during the Cold War, the United States tended to see all states in the Soviet sphere of influence as sharing the Soviets' bellicosity, thus making it seem that the United States faced more adversaries than it actually did. Similarly, the assumption that client states share the leader’s views and intentions makes the leader seem stronger than it is. United States officials made a similar argument about

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Iraq and al-Qa’ida in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, seeing the two as allies when they were, in fact, enemies. 51 There is evidence that cyber war proponents recognize the rhetorical value of ambiguity and deploy it strategically when considering possible responses to cyber threats. For example, Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, has suggested, “We want to retain some strategic ambiguity, but at the same time we need to be able to make the case that there are certain attacks that predicate a response.” James Lewis suggested that Pentagon officials have adopted this view, saying, “When I talk to people at the Pentagon, I don’t find confusion over what’s an attack and what’s not. But I think they don’t want to lay all that out clearly either.” 52 There is evidence to suggest that he is correct in his assessment. Asked in 2010 what kinds of cyber attacks might provoke a military response from the United States, an unnamed official in the Obama administration refused to answer, saying instead, “Like most operational things like this, the less said, the better.” 53 When the Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace was introduced in July 2011, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III, who played a leading role in the strategy’s development, also refused to define what counts as “cyberwar” because he believes that “there is some value in keeping it somewhat ambiguous, as a deterrent.” 54 Thus, it is not merely that cyber threats are ambiguous and uncertain by nature, but also at least partly by design. Though officials have not admitted the same use of strategic ambiguity in their diagnoses of cyber threats as they have in discussions of possible responses to those threats, it seems clear that ambiguity has been productive nonetheless. Rapid shifts in threat perceptions like those seen in the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq not only contribute to the ongoing ambiguity of cyber threats, but also benefit from that ambiguity. Cyber war’s ambiguity endows it with a flexibility that allows officials to use it to bolster claims for other threats, whether those are threats posed by al-Qa’ida and Iraq, or, more recently, China and Iran. 55 Additionally, as we saw in the case of Iraq, not only is it difficult for critics to disprove the existence of such shifting and ambiguous threats, the unknown itself can be a chief cause of fear and a motivator of action. Once actors have accepted the inevitability of a danger’s realization, any remaining ambiguity, uncertainty, or even a distinct lack of supporting evidence can have the effect of heightening, rather than diminishing, their fear. As David Wall explains, we come to expect a danger like cyber war “to exist regardless of whether it actually does, and we are shocked, and even panic, when we do not find it!” 56 Or, as Gabriel Weimann has observed, “An unknown threat is perceived as more threatening than a known threat.” 57

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Hypothetical Doom Scenarios Another rhetorical characteristic of cyber war discourse in the United States that has the effect of promoting fear is the rampant use of hypothetical doom scenarios, what some have called “cyber-doom scenarios,” “shut-down-the-power-grid scenarios,” or “super-hacker stereotypes.” 58 Despite the fact that threat perceptions centered on cyber attacks against critical infrastructure have been replaced with ones focused on so-called “informational” threats, various current and former government officials, civilian experts, and journalists continue to rely upon hypothetical stories about cyber attacks that disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure, including attacks against the electrical grid leading to mass blackouts, attacks against the financial system leading to economic losses or complete economic collapse, attacks against the transportation system leading to planes and trains crashing, attacks against dams leading floodgates to open, or attacks against nuclear power plants leading to meltdowns. Such stories are meant to serve as cautionary tales that focus the attention of policy makers, media, and the public on the issue of cyber security. 59 Examples of the use of such scenarios abound. As early as 1994, futurist Alvin Toffler warned that cyber attacks targeting the World Trade Center could crash the U.S. financial system. 60 In his 2010 book, former White House cyber security advisor Richard Clarke presents a scenario in which a cyber attack destroys virtually every U.S. critical infrastructure system in only fifteen minutes and kills thousands of people. 61 A report from the Hoover Institution has warned of so-called “eWMDs” 62; the FBI has warned that a cyber attack could have the same impact as a “wellplaced bomb” 63; and official DoD documents refer to “weapons of mass disruption,” implying that cyber attacks might have impacts comparable to the use of WMD. 64 John Arquilla, one of the first to theorize cyber war in the 1990s, 65 has spoken of “a grave and growing capacity for crippling our tech-dependent society.” 66 Finally, some have even suggested that cyber attack could pose an “existential threat” to the United States and all of “global civilization.” 67 News and entertainment media contribute to threat inflation in a number of ways, one of which is the perpetuation of sensationalism and doom scenarios. 68 This has been the case with cyber war as well. For example, in 1999, Fox News ran an hour-long special called, “Danger on the Internet Highway: Cyberterror.” 69 More recently, in 2010, CNN ran a special called “Cyber Shockwave.” This televised “war game” where the players were former government officials implied that a worm spreading among cell phones could eventually lead to serious disruptions of critical infrastructure. 70 In 2014, the National Geographic Channel ran a program called “American Blackout,” a fictionalized “documentary” account of the chaos that would result if the power grid crashed as a result of cyber attack. 71

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Various factors in American society and politics, including separation of powers, political polarization, a disinterested public, and news media that thrive on sensationalism all help to explain why officials and experts might rely on doom scenarios to generate enough concern to motivate a response. 72 Of American cyber war discourse, James Lewis notes, “appeals to emotions like fear can be more compelling than a rational discussion of strategy.” 73 Indeed, as the dominant cyber threat perception increasingly focuses on less dramatic events like theft of intellectual property, cyber-doom scenarios could become even more essential for motivating a response. 74 But the reasons for cyber-doom scenarios’ effectiveness are also the source of their danger. They are examples of the kind of “possibilistic”— as opposed to “probabilistic”—thinking that we witnessed in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. This way of thinking focuses primarily on the “worst cases” that could possibly happen to us as a way of structuring our thought about security and risk. 75 When such scenarios are repeated by officials and experts, and even made to seem real through media dramatizations, they come to seem more salient than they really are. Policy makers, the media, and the public come to focus on the possible—or even the merely imaginable—at the expense of the probable, what Cass Sunstein has called “probability neglect.” While the use of such scenarios might be effective at motivating a response, unfortunately, the kinds of responses that usually flow from this way of thinking tend to be hawkish and preventative, sometimes resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies—i.e., causing the kind of scenario one wished to prevent in the first place (see the “projection” and “overreaction” sections below). 76 Again, one need only think of the U.S. experience in Iraq. While the invasion was partly predicated on fear that Saddam Hussein was conspiring with Islamic extremist groups like al-Qa’ida—a fear that turned out to have been unfounded—the United States finds itself a decade later fighting Islamic extremists who have taken root in the chaos left in the wake of U.S.-imposed “regime change.” Exaggeration Exaggeration has also been an important characteristic of U.S. cyber war discourse. 77 At one level, of course, doom scenarios are a form of exaggeration. They use hypothetical imaginings to exaggerate the possible impacts of cyber attacks that have not yet occurred. But we can also observe instances in which the impacts of actual cyber attacks that have occurred have been exaggerated. In fact, the actual impacts of several of the most prominent examples of cyber attacks have been exaggerated. Nonetheless, these events have served as “focusing events” 78 or “signal events” 79 used by officials and media to highlight the supposed dangers of an inevitable or even ongoing cyber war.

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Perhaps the most prominent example of a “signal” cyber attack incident whose actual impacts were greatly exaggerated is the 2007 attack in the small, Baltic nation of Estonia. The attack occurred in the spring of 2007 after a Soviet-era war memorial statue in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, was moved, sparking outrage on the part of Russians. In response, attackers, who most observers presumed to have been Russian, launched denial of service attacks against bank, government, commerce, news, and other websites in Estonia. 80 Amit Yoran, former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division, has pointed to this event to support his claim that a “cyber- 9/11” has already occurred, “but it’s happened slowly so we don’t see it.” 81 Yoran is not alone in seeing the 2007 Estonia incidents as an example of the cyber doom that awaits if we do not take cyber threats seriously. The speaker of the Estonian parliament, Ene Ergma, has said, “When I look at a nuclear explosion, and the explosion that happened in our country in May, I see the same thing.” 82 In reality, however, the cyber attacks on Estonia did not resemble what happened on September 11, 2001, as Yoran claimed, and certainly not nuclear warfare as Ergma claimed. In fact, a scientist at the NATO Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), which was established in Tallinn in response to the 2007 event, has written that the immediate impacts of those attacks were “minimal” or “nonexistent,” and that the “no critical services were permanently affected.” 83 Security expert Bruce Schneier went even further in his keynote address to the first Conference on Cyber Security held at the CCDCOE in June 2010: We’re a species of storytellers. . . . We respond to stories much more than data. One of the reasons the Estonian cyberwar was so evocative, it was a very powerful story that was told again and again and again and has become sort of part of the cyber security dialog. And there’s not a lot of people saying, “Wait a second, if that’s what war looks like, it’s pretty good.” It’s kind of like an invading army coming into your country and then getting in line at the motor vehicles bureau so you can’t renew your driver’s license. It’s not really what I think of when I think of war. 84

This, however, does make nice securitization melodrama. But exaggeration has not been unique to the Estonia event. Other cyber attacks used by officials and media to raise concern and motivate a response to the prospective threat of cyber war have been exaggerated. For example, during and following the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, many observers focused on the cyber attacks that accompanied the invasion. 85 And yet, few would assert that those cyber attacks had any determinative effect on the outcome of that war. The Georgian forces were no match for the Russians; the outcome was never in doubt. Likewise, though the joint U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear facilities

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was initially portrayed as both effective and a harbinger of the dangerous new world of cyber threats, subsequent analyses of that attack by scholars and security professionals have revealed the attack to have been largely ineffective at halting the Iranian nuclear program and, as a result, an example of how difficult it is to carry out an effective cyber attack against physical targets in the real world. 86 Piggybacking In addition to promoting fear via events that have not occurred (doom scenarios) and the exaggeration of the impacts of events that have occurred, cyber war proponents have attempted to “piggyback” on the fear raised by non-cyber events like terrorist attacks or natural disasters to bolster their case for action to secure the nation against a coming cyber war. This tactic is particularly egregious because, to date, no cyber attack has come remotely close to causing the kind of human suffering and destruction of property caused by the disasters upon which cyber war proponents attempt to piggyback. Previous military and terrorist attacks serve as one kind of event upon which cyber war proponents attempt to piggyback when making their case. For example, in the last section we encountered Amit Yoran warning of a possible “cyber 9/11,” in this case piggybacking on the fear caused by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Yoran is by no means alone. John Arquilla, one of the top cyber war theorists, has said that a “cyber 9/11” is a matter of if, not when. 87 Former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who has claimed that we are already in an ongoing cyber war, 88 has even predicted that a cyber attack could surpass the impacts of 9/11 “by an order of magnitude.” 89 More recently, former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, was fond of warning about the possibility of a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” 90 Cyber war proponents have also used the advent of natural disasters as an opportunity to warn of the potential impacts of cyber attack. For example, in 2010, the former head of the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union compared the impacts of prospective cyber attacks to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed roughly a quarter million people and caused widespread physical destruction in five countries. 91 In 2011, David Rothkopf, CEO and editor of the FP Group, which publishes the influential Foreign Policy magazine, used the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which resulted in untold destruction and loss of life, including the Fukushima nuclear disaster, to promote fear of cyber war. This horrific disaster, he said, “may, in a way, be yesterday’s news” and lamented that it had “obscured” instead of “amplified” testimony about the threat of cyber war that very same week by General Keith Alexander. 92 Similarly, in 2012, former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano used the event of Superstorm Sandy to deliver a warn-

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ing about “the urgency and the immediacy of the cyber problem; the cyberattacks that we are undergoing and continuing to undergo cannot be overestimated.” 93 Projection In other instances, even if the incidents to which cyber war proponents point are real and actually related to cyber conflict, we have seen a tendency to attribute to others the very actions undertaken by the United States itself. That is, cyber war proponents point to specific incidents or types of malicious cyber activities perpetrated by the U.S. as a means of raising fear of cyber Others. After years of being warned about the malicious intent of such adversaries, from the Chinese, to the Russians, to the Iranians, and even unspecified, generic hackers and criminals, we have learned in the last two years that the United States is perhaps the biggest perpetrator of the very behavior it has projected onto others. Once again, Stuxnet is a prime example in this regard. For years, current and former U.S. government officials had used the example of Stuxnet to warn that cyber attacks against critical infrastructures posed a uniquely dangerous threat to the United States. In August 2011, former CIA counterterrorism official, Cofer Black, warned the audience at the Black Hat hacker conference that the United States was not taking the threat of cyber attack seriously enough, just as it had failed to appreciate the threat posed by terrorism in the years leading up to the attacks of September 11, 2001. In addition to pointing to recent reports at that time of a massive campaign of cyber espionage supposedly carried out by the Chinese, Black also identified Stuxnet as “the Rubicon of our future.” 94 Similarly, in the wake of Stuxnet, former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden said, “someone crossed the Rubicon.” Of course, we now know that this signal cyber event that served to focus so much attention on the supposed threat to the United States was itself perpetrated by the United States. 95 This revelation even resulted in criticism from some prominent cyber security proponents who are otherwise sympathetic to the cyber war message. Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, wrote in the wake of the Stuxnet revelations, “The message to the US private sector therefore seems to be that they need to be regulated because they are not protecting themselves sufficiently against a weapon designed and launched by their own government. The arsonist wants to legislate better fire codes.” 96 At the time that Healey claimed that the United States was creating the weapons being used against its own private sector, these claims could have been seen as a bit of hyperbole. But, as we have since learned, they were not. Reporting on the documents disclosed by Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA has worked systematically and for years to undermine the very security standards and technologies that individuals

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and organizations in the United States and worldwide use to keep their information secure. The NSA has also spread so-called malware, viruses and Trojans, to tens of thousands of computers worldwide, with plans to spread even more. 97 Likewise, U.S. officials have warned constantly of economic espionage from the likes of China and others. In September 2010, for example, then-director of the NSA General Keith Alexander, compared economic espionage to looting by a conquering army, warning that the United States’ lead in technology and its very economic survival were at jeopardy as a result of cyber attacks. 98 Though it has denied for years that it engages in these kinds of economically-motivated cyber attacks, we now know that the United States has engaged in cyber economic espionage, even contemplating engaging in such activity for the benefit of U.S. corporations, precisely the activity for which it has not only chastised, but even criminally indicted Chinese officials. 99 Overreaction Finally, in this environment where the diagnosis of cyber threats is marked by ambiguity, doom, exaggeration, and fear, it is perhaps not surprising that officials and experts have proposed responses that are also marked by hyperbole. This has involved calls for solutions that, if enacted, would be out of all proportion to the real threats faced. What’s more, these kinds of overreactions have gone beyond “mere rhetoric” to include the enactment of actual policy measures. One example of overreaction can be found in former Senator Joseph Lieberman’s calls for the creation of a so-called “Internet kill switch.” 100 Indeed, this episode provides examples of several of the characteristics identified above. In June 2010, Senator Lieberman and two co-sponsors, Senators Susan Collins and Tom Carper, introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. In an op-ed published at the time of the bill’s introduction, the senators argued, “We must ‘arm’ the cyberspace battlefront” by “giv[ing] the president the authority to implement emergency measures in selected areas of our nation’s most critical infrastructure—to preserve networks and assets essential to maintaining our way of life.” 101 Asked whether these emergency measures included shutting down the Internet, Senator Lieberman said in an interview that same month, We need the capacity for the president to say, Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country. . . . Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too. 102

The senators used hypothetical doom scenarios, in this case hackers opening the floodgates of the Hoover Dam and killing thousands, to justify such emergency measures, even though the Bureau of Reclama-

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tion noted that such a scenario was impossible because the dam is not connected to the Internet. 103 In the end, however, it was the projection, and not the reliance on doom scenarios, that doomed the legislation. After years of officials demonizing the Chinese for filtering and censoring the Internet, Senator Lieberman’s suggestion that the president be given a similar kind of power only provided fuel for critics. Then, in February 2011, during the midst of the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak responded by cutting off the Internet to the entire country. Critics charged that Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Carper meant to give the president the same power in the United States, an accusation that the senators felt the need to deny in a public statement. 104 Ultimately, the legislation failed. Senator Lieberman continued to push for cyber security legislation until his retirement, however. In doing so, he and his colleagues continued to rely on doom scenarios, as well as analogies to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. 105 Even more alarming is that we have seen serious and sustained calls for the use of military force in response to cyber attacks, some of which have amounted to little more than digital vandalism. The response by one lawmaker to a series of denial of service attacks on U.S. and South Korean government, commerce, financial, and media websites over the weekend of July 4, 2009, is illustrative. Representative Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee at that time, called for a “show of force or strength” to send a message to the North Korean government, who he was confident had carried out the attacks. As it turns out, however, those attacks had little if any impact on most of the targeted websites. A year after the attacks, investigators concluded that North Korea was most likely not responsible for the attacks after all. 106 Unfortunately, this is not the only example of calls for military response to cyber attack. As early as 2004, the National Military Strategy of the United States of America identified cyber attacks as a type of “asymmetric” threat that “may rely more on disruptive impact than destructive kinetic effects”; that is, they have not resulted in physical destruction, injury, or death. Yet, the strategy document advocated the preventive use of military force against adversaries believed to be undeterred from acquiring such capabilities. 107 In 2009, head of U.S. Strategic Command asked, “[D]o cyber attacks require a cyber response, or should the President order a live weapon reply? [. . .] Does it matter if it’s an attack on the economy, where there’s little physical damage, there’s just disruption?” 108 In 2011, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege, a co-chair of the CSIS Commission on Cyber security for the 44th Presidency, an important shaper of Obama administration cyber security policy, argued for developing retaliatory capabilities that are not limited to in-kind, cyber responses but could include response with physical force: “If we can trace the source of a cyber attack to a cave in the Hindu Kush mountains,

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America’s response could come in the form of a hellfire missile.” 109 That same year, an unnamed Pentagon official involved with the development of the official Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace said, “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.” 110 Even nuclear retaliation has been identified as a possible response to cyber attack. In 2009, a review of U.S. military doctrine publications indicated that nuclear retaliation was a possible response to particularly destructive cyber attacks, a possibility that Obama administration officials would not rule out. 111 A year later, conservative lawmakers and pundits criticized the president’s revised Nuclear Posture Review document because they believed it removed nuclear retaliation as a possible response to cyber attack. 112 Though we have yet to see the use of conventional or nuclear strikes in response to cyber attacks, we have seen the military taking an increasingly central role in U.S. cyber security. The militarization of U.S. cyber security policy increased sharply in June 2009 with the creation of the U.S. Cyber Command, a military command headed by the director of the NSA and housed at the NSA’s Ft. Meade headquarters. 113 A year later, in July 2010, reports of an NSA program called “Perfect Citizen” meant to extend the agency’s cyber security protections to private companies raised concerns about militarization, especially since a leaked email from a contractor working on the project said, “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.” 114 In 2011, the Department of Defense released its Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, which identified cyberspace as a military domain on par with air, land, sea, and space. 115 Even with these developments, some inside and outside the military were calling for the military to play an even larger role in national cyber security, including Senator John McCain and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace. 116 In August 2012, the Washington Post reported: The Pentagon has proposed that military cyber-specialists be given permission to take action outside its computer networks to defend critical U.S. computer systems—a move that officials say would set a significant precedent. . . . The proposed rules would open the door for U.S. defense officials to act outside the confines of military-related computer networks to try to combat cyberattacks on private computers, including those in foreign countries. 117

Two months later, James Lewis, a leading cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the Department of Defense was effectively taking over U.S. cyber security. 118 Finally, beginning in the spring of 2013, reporting on the NSA based on the documents leaked by Edward Snowden made it abundantly clear that in terms of U.S. government cyber security activities, the scope of the NSA’s involvement is unmatched. 119

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CONCLUSION Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have noted the widening of security agendas in many Western nations, a tendency that has only intensified in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the labels “security” or even “war” are applied to ever more issues, these scholars have noted the emergence of a “culture of fear” increasingly preoccupied with preventing the realization of the worst possible scenarios, regardless of their likelihood. This tendency has raised concerns about the possibility of threat inflation. In this chapter, we have argued that cyber war is another case of threat inflation, one that exemplifies a number of rhetorical characteristics found in other instances of threat inflation, but which also points us to other, previously overlooked characteristics. These include the strategic use of ambiguity generated via a constantly shifting narrative about who threatens what in/through cyberspace and the conflation of a number of very different types of malicious action in cyberspace into one undifferentiated, monolithic threat. They also include the use of hypothetical doom scenarios by officials, experts, and media to motivate a response where one might otherwise be impossible. We have also seen the exaggeration of the impacts of the cyber incidents that have occurred, as well as attempts by cyber war proponents to capitalize on the fear generated by non-cyber events like terrorist attacks and natural disasters. We have even seen the use the kinds of actions conducted by the United States itself used as evidence of the cyber threat facing the United States. Finally, the proposed and actual responses offered by officials and experts have been equally hyperbolic and characterized by a dangerous militarization of cyberspace. NOTES 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004); Didier Bigo, “Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance,” in Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, ed. David Lyon (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006). 2. Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “Risking Security: Policies and Paradoxes of Cyberspace Security,” International Political Sociology 4 (2010): 15–32. 3. On cyber war as threat inflation, see Myriam Dunn Cavelty, “Cyber-Terror— Looming Threat Or Phantom Menace? The Framing of the US Cyber-Threat Debate,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 4 (2007); Maura Conway, “Media, Fear and the Hyperreal: The Construction of Cyberterrorism as the Ultimate Threat to Critical Infrastructures,” in Securing the ‘Homeland’: Critical Infrastructure, Risk and (in)security, ed. Myriam Dunn Cavelty, and K. Søby Kristensen (London: Routledge, 2008); Jerry Brito, and Tate Watkins, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,” Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 11–24 April (2011); Myriam Dunn Cavelty, “As Likely as a Visit From E.T.,” The European, January 7, 2011, accessed January 7, 2011, http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/133-cavelty/134-cyberwar-and-cyberfear; Sean Lawson, “Putting the ‘War’ in Cyberwar: Metaphor, Anal-

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ogy, and Cybersecurity Discourse in the United States,” First Monday 17 (2012); Sean Lawson, “Beyond Cyber-Doom: Assessing the Limits of Hypothetical Scenarios in the Framing of Cyber-Threats,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics OnlineFirst (2012). On the concept of “threat inflation,” see A. Trevor. Thrall and Jane K. Cramer, eds. American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation Since 9/11 (London: Routledge, 2009). 4. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Pub, 1998); Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 5. Didier Bigo, “When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe,” in International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security, and Community, ed. Morton Kelstrup, and Michael Williams (London: Routledge, 2000): 193–94. 6. Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics: U.S. Efforts to Secure the Information Age (New York: Routledge, 2008): 5. 7. Columba Peoples and Nick Vaughan-Williams, Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2010). 8. Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis; Dunn Cavelty, “Cyber-Terror—Looming Threat Or Phantom Menace? The Framing of the Us Cyber-Threat Debate.” Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics: U.S. Efforts to Secure the Information Age. 9. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 5–6. 10. Frank Furedi, “Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment,” Erasmus Law Review 2 (2009); Cass R. Sunstein, “Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2002). 11. Bigo, “When Two Become One”; Didier Bigo and Rob Walker, “Global-Terrorism: From War to Widespread Surveillance,” in Warlike Outlines of the Securitarian State: Life Control and the Exclusion of People, ed. Gabriela Rodriguez Fernandez, et al. (Barcelona: OSPDH - Universitat de Barcelona, 2009). 12. Jane K. Cramer, and A. Trevor Thrall, “Introduction: Understanding Threat Inflation,” in American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation Since 9/11, ed. A. Trevor Thrall and Jane K. Cramer (London: Routledge, 2009): 1. 13. Ibid. 14. Donald H. Rumsfeld, “DoD News Briefing - Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers,” U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, February 12, 2002, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636. 15. Errol Morris, The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld, directed by Errol Morris, (2014; New York: Radius-TWC, 2014), DVD. 16. George W. Bush, “President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat: Remarks By the President on Iraq,” (speech at Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati Union Terminal, Cincinnati, Ohio. October 7, 2002). 17. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 5. 18. Ibid., 4–5; Dunn Cavelty, “As Likely as a Visit From E.t.” 19. Erik Gartzke, “The Myth of Cyberwar: Bringing War in Cyberspace Back Down to Earth,” International Security 38 (2013). 20. P. W. Singer, “The Cyber Terror Bogeyman,” Armed Forces Journal, November 2012, accessed November 2012, http://armedforcesjournal.com/2012/11/11530198. 21. Thomas Rid, Cyber War Will Not Take Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 22. Brito and Watkins, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy.” 23. Glenn Greenwald, “Mike Mcconnell, the Washpost & the Dangers of Sleazy Corporatism,” Salon.com, 29 March 2010, accessed 29 March 2010, http:// www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/29/mcconnell. 24. William Blunden and Violet Cheung, Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, & the Malware-Industrial Complex (Waterville, OR: Trine Day, 2014), Kindle edition.

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25. Bruce Schneier, “Threat of ‘Cyberwar’ Has Been Hugely Hyped,” CNN.com, 07 July 2010, accessed September 13, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/07/ schneier.cyberwar.hyped/index.html?_s=PM:OPINIO. 26. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 41. 27. Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis; Judith Stiehm, The U.S. Army War College: Military Education in a Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 28. Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorist Targeting: Tactics, Trends, and Potentialities,” (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 29. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 103; Conway, “Media, Fear and the Hyperreal: The Construction of Cyberterrorism as the Ultimate Threat to Critical Infrastructures.” 30. Conway, “Media, Fear and the Hyperreal: The Construction of Cyberterrorism as the Ultimate Threat to Critical Infrastructures”; Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 2; Lawson, “Beyond Cyber-Doom.” 31. Conway, “Media, Fear and the Hyperreal,” 113–14. 32. Robert T. Marsh, Critical Foundations: Protecting America’s Infrastructures: The Report of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (Washington, D.C, The White House, 1997): 17–18. 33. Ralf Bendrath, “The Cyberwar Debate: Perception and Politics in Us Critical Infrastructure Protection,” Information & Security: An International Journal 7 (2001); Ralf Bendrath, “The American Cyber-Angst and the Real World–Any Link,” in Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship Between Information Technology and Security, ed. Robert Latham (New York: The Free Press, 2003); Gabriel Weimann, “Cyberterrorism: The Sum of All Fears?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28 (2005): 133–34. 34. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 90. 35. Johan Eriksson, “Cyberplagues, IT, and Security: Threat Politics in the Information Age,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 9 (2002); Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics. 36. Stephen Blank, “Web War I: Is Europe’s First Information War a New Kind of War?,” Comparative Strategy 27 (2008); Gadi Evron, “Battling Botnets and Online Mobs: Estonia’s Defense Efforts During the Internet War,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 9 (2008). 37. Stephen W. Korns and Joshua E. Kastenberg, “Georgia’s Cyber Left Hook,” Parameters Winter (2008); Jim Nichol, Russia-Georgia Conflict in South Ossetia: Context and Implications for U.S. Interests (Washington, D.C, Congressional Research Service, 2008); John Bumgarner and Scott Borg, “Overview By the US-CCU of the Cyber Campaign Against Georgia in August of 2008,” US-CCU Special Report August (2009). 38. Hilary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks on Internet Freedom,” speech at The Newseum, Washington, D.C., January 21, 2010. 39. Elinor Mills, “Symantec: Stuxnet Clues Point to Uranium Enrichment Target,” CNET News, November 15, 2010, accessed November 15, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/ 8301–27080_3–20022845–245.html; James P. Farwell and Rafal Rohozinski, “Stuxnet and the Future of Cyber War,” Survival 53 (2011); Dennis Fisher, “Using Stuxnet and Duqu as Words of Mass Disruption,” Threat Post, October 20, 2011, accessed October 20, 2011, http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/using-stuxnet-and-duqu-words-mass-disruption-102011; Jon R. Lindsay, “Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare,” Security Studies 22 (2013). 40. Rep. James R. Langevin, et al., Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency (Washington, D.C, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008): 12. 41. Ibid., 13. 42. General Keith Alexander, “U.S. Cybersecurity Policy and the Role of U.S. Cybercom,” speech at Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 3, 2010.

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43. The White House, Cyberspace Policy Review: Assuring a Resilient Information and Communications Infrastructure (Washington, D.C., The White House, 2009). 44. Clinton, “Remarks on Internet Freedom.” 45. The White House, International Strategy for Cyberspace: Prosperity, Security, and Openness in a Networked World (Washington, D.C, The White House, 2011): 10. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. Glenn Greenwald, “The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations,” The Intercept, September 5, 2014, accessed September 13, 2014, https:// firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use-economic-espionagebenefit-american-corporations/. 48. Bendrath, “The Cyberwar Debate”; Bendrath, “The American Cyber-Angst and the Real World–any Link”; Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics; Weimann, “Cyberterrorism: The Sum of All Fears?,” 133–34. 49. B. Valeriano and R. C. Maness, “The Dynamics of Cyber Conflict Between Rival Antagonists, 2001-11,” Journal of Peace Research 51 (2014): 349. 50. James A. Lewis, The Cyber War Has Not Begun (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010). 51. Stephen Van Evera, “Forward,” in American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation Since 9/11, ed. A. Trevor. Thrall and Jane K. Cramer (London: Routledge, 2009): xiv. 52. Chris Carroll, “Congress Demands Cyber Details While DOD Aims for Ambiguity,” Stars and Stripes, July 21, 2011, accessed July 21, 2011, http://www.stripes.com/ news/congress-demands-cyber-details-while-dod-aims-for-ambiguity-1.149790. 53. John Markoff and Thom Shanker “In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent.” New York Times, January 25, 2010. Accessed January 25, 2010, https:// www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/world/26cyber.html. 54. Carroll, “Congress Demands Cyber Details While DOD Aims for Ambiguity.” 55. Michael Stohl, “Cyber Terrorism: A Clear and Present Danger, the Sum of All Fears, Breaking Point Or Patriot Games?,” Crime, Law and Social Change 46 (2007). 56. David S. Wall, “Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge About Cybercrime,” Information, Communication & Society 11 (2008): 866. 57. Gabriel Weimann, “Cyber-Terrorism: Are We Barking At the Wrong Tree?,” Harvard Asia Pacific Review 9 (2008): 42. 58. Conway, “Media, Fear and the Hyperreal,” 113; Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 2; Wall, “Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge About Cybercrime,” 870; Valeriano, and Maness, “The Dynamics of Cyber Conflict Between Rival Antagonists, 2001–11,” 349. 59. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 2. 60. Thomas D. Elias, “Toffler: Computer Attacks Wave of Future,” South Bend Tribune (Indiana), 2 January 1994, accessed 2 January 1994. 61. Richard A. Clarke, and Robert Knake, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It (New York: HarperCollins, 2010): 64–68. 62. John J. Kelly and Lauri Almann, “Ewmds: The Botnet Peril,” Policy Review 152 (2008). 63. FOXNews.com, “FBI Warns Brewing Cyberwar May Have Same Impact as ‘WellPlaced Bomb’,” FOXNews.com, March 8, 2010, accessed March 8, 2010, http:// www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/03/08/cyberwar-brewing-china-hunts-wests-intel-secrets/. 64. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, The National Military Strategy of the United States of America: A Strategy for Today; a Vision for Tomorrow (Washington, D.C, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2004); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, The National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations (Washington, D.C, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2006).

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65. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar is Coming!,” in In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, ed. John Arquilla, and David Ronfeldt (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1997). 66. John Arquilla, “Click, Click . . . Counting Down to Cyber 9/11,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 26, 2009, accessed July 26, 2009, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/ c/a/2009/07/26/IN6K18S60M.DTL. 67. FOXNews.com, “FBI Warns Brewing Cyberwar May Have Same Impact as ‘WellPlaced Bomb’”; Richard Adhikari, “Civilization’s High Stakes Cyber-Struggle: Q&A With Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.),” TechNewsWorld, December 2, 2009, accessed December 2, 2009, http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Civilizations-High-Stakes-CyberStruggle-QA-With-Gen-Wesley-Clark-ret-68787.html?wlc=1259861126& wlc=1259938168&wlc=1290975140. 68. Cramer and Thrall, “Introduction: Understanding Threat Inflation,” 7–8. 69. Francois Debrix, “Cyberterror and Media-Induced Fears: The Production of Emergency Culture,” Strategies 14 (2001): 153. 70. Chris Gaylord, “Cyber Shockwave Cripples Computers Nationwide (Sorta),” Christian Science Monitor, February 16, 2010, accessed February 16, 2010, http:// www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/0216/Cyber-ShockWave-cripplescomputers-nationwide-sorta. 71. American Blackout, National Geographic Channel, 2014, http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/american-blackout/. 72. Cramer and Thrall, “Introduction: Understanding Threat Inflation,” 6–7. 73. Lewis, The Cyber War Has Not Begun, 4. 74. Sean Lawson, “Motivating Cybersecurity: Assessing the Status of Critical Infrastructure as an Object of Cyber Threats,” in Securing Critical Infrastructures and Critical Control Systems: Approaches for Threat Protection, ed. Christopher Laing, Atta Badii, and Paul Vickers 2013). 75. Lee Clarke, “Possibilistic Thinking: A New Conceptual Tool for Thinking About Extreme Events,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 75 (2008). 76. Cass R Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Cramer and Thrall, “Introduction: Understanding Threat Inflation,” 6. 77. Lewis, The Cyber War Has Not Begun, 4. 78. Dunn Cavelty, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics, 34. 79. Wall, “Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge About Cybercrime,” 867. 80. Blank, “Web War I: Is Europe’s First Information War a New Kind of War?”; Evron, “Battling Botnets and Online Mobs: Estonia’s Defense Efforts During the Internet War.” 81. Ryan Singel, “Is the Hacking Threat to National Security Overblown?,” Threat Level, June 3, 2009, accessed June 3, 2009, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/ cyberthreat. 82. Kevin Poulsen, “‘Cyberwar’ and Estonia’s Panic Attack,” Threat Level, August 22, 2007, accessed August 22, 2007, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/08/cyberwar-and-e. 83. Rain Ottis, “The Vulnerability of the Information Society,” futureGOV Asia Pacific, August-September 2010, accessed December 10, 2010, http://www.futuregov.asia/ media/downloads/Magazine_7_4.pdf: 72. 84. Bruce Schneier, “Keynote Address,” (paper presented at Conference on Cyber Conflict, Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, Tallinn, Estonia, June 18, 2010). 85. Blank, “Web War I: Is Europe’s First Information War a New Kind of War?”; Evron, “Battling Botnets and Online Mobs: Estonia’s Defense Efforts During the Internet War”; Korns and Kastenberg, “Georgia’s Cyber Left Hook”; Nichol, Russia-Georgia Conflict in South Ossetia: Context and Implications for U.S. Interests; Bumgarner and Borg, “Overview By the U-CCU of the Cyber Campaign Against Georgia in August of 2008”;

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Ronald Deibert, Rafal Rohozinski, and Masahi Crete-Nishihata, “Cyclones in Cyberspace: Information Shaping and Denial in the 2008 South Ossetian War,” paper presented at International Studies Association Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada, February 8, 2010. 86. Lindsay, “Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare”; Blunden and Cheung, Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, & the Malware-Industrial Complex, 49. 87. Arquilla, “Click, Click…Counting Down to Cyber 9/11.” 88. Mike McConnell, “Mike McConnell on How to Win the Cyber-War We’re Losing,” Washington Post, February 28, 2010, accessed February 28, 2010, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/ AR2010022502493_pf.html. 89. “Fmr. Intelligence Director: New Cyberattack May be Worse Than 9/11,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2010, accessed September 30, 2010, http:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/09/fmr-intelligence-director-new-cyberattack-may-be-worse-than-9-11/63849/. 90. Leon Panetta, “Defending the National From Cyber Attacks,” speech at Business Executives for National Security, New York, NY, October 11, 2012. 91. David Meyer, “Cyberwar Could be Worse Than a Tsunami,” ZDNet, September 3, 2010, accessed September 3, 2010, http://www.zdnet.com/news/cyberwar-could-beworse-than-a-tsunami/462576. 92. Sean Lawson, “Phantom Cyber Wars Are a Distraction,” Forbes.com, November 4, 2011, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2011/11/04/ phantom-cyber-wars-are-a-distraction/. 93. Sean Lawson, “DHS Secretary Napolitano Uses Hurricane Sandy to Hype Cyber Threat,” Forbes.com, November 1, 2012, accessed May 20, 2014, http:// www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2012/11/01/dhs-secretary-napolitano-uses-hurricane-sandy-to-hype-cyber-threat/. 94. Tabassum Zakaria, “Former CIA Official Sees Terrorism-Cyber Parallels,” Reuters, August 3, 2011, accessed September 20, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/ 2011/08/03/us-usa-security-cyber-idUSTRE7727AJ20110803. 95. David E. Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up War of Cyberattacks Against Iran,” New York Times, June 1, 2012, accessed June 1, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/ 01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html. 96. Jason Healey, “Stuxnets Are Not in the US National Interest: An Arsonist Calling for Better Fire Codes,” New Atlanticist, June 4, 2012, accessed September 20, 2014, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/stuxnets-are-not-in-the-us-nationalinterest-an-arsonist-calling-for-better-fire-codes-1. 97. A comprehensive summary of the Snowden revelations can be found in Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), Kindle edition. 98. House Committee on Armed Services, “Statement of General Keith B. Alexander Commander United States Cyber Command,” House Committee on Armed Services, United States House of Representatives (2010): 4. 99. Sean Lawson, “Implications of U.S. Indictment of Chinese Officers for Cyber Espionage,” Forbes.com, May 19, 2014, accessed May 20, 2014, http:// www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2014/05/19/implications-of-u-s-indictment-of-chinese-officers-for-cyber-espionage/; Greenwald, “The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations.” 100. Sean Lawson, “Is America Really Building an Internet ‘Kill Switch,’” Forbes.com, February 11, 2011, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/firewall/2011/ 02/11/is-america-really-building-an-internet-kill-switch/. 101. Sen. Joe Lieberman, Sen. Susan Collins, and Sen. Tom Carper, “We Must ‘Arm’ Cyberspace Battlefront,” Politico, June 10, 2010, accessed June 10, 2010, http:// dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1ECC7CEE-18FE-70B2-A8F3B8F613F995E9.

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102. CNN.com, “State of the Union With Candy Crowley: Interviews With Senators Lieberman, Murkowski, Feinstein and Lugar,” CNN.com, June 20, 2010, accessed September 22, 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1006/20/sotu.01.html. 103. David Kravets, “No, Hackers Can’t Open Hoover Dam Floodgates,” Wired, February 3, 2011, accessed September 22, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2011/02/hoover. 104. Lawson, “Is America Really Building an Internet ‘Kill Switch.’” 105. Brendan Sasso, “‘System is Blinking Red’: Alarming Rhetoric in Push for Cybersecurity Bills,” The Hill, 17 March 2012, accessed September 22, 2014, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/216519-alarming-rhetoric-used-in-push-for-cybersecuritybills. 106. Kim Zetter, “Lawmaker Wants ‘Show of Force’ Against North Korea for Website Attacks,” Wired Threat Level, July 10, 2009, accessed July 10, 2009, http:// www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/show-of-force/; John E. Dunn, “North Korea ‘Not Responsible’ for 4 July Cyberattacks,” Network World, July 6, 2010, accessed July 6, 2010, http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/070610-north-korea-not-responsiblefor.html. 107. The National Military Strategy of the United States of America: A Strategy for Today; a Vision for Tomorrow, 5, 9. 108. David Perera, “Cyber Deterrence Dialog Raises Many Questions,” Defense Systems, May 19, 2009, accessed May 19, 2009, http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2009/ 05/19/Cyber-deterrence-raises-questions.aspx. 109. Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege Raduege (Ret), “Deterring Attackers in Cyberspace,” The Hill, September 23, 2011, accessed September 23, 2011, http://thehill.com/opinion/ op-ed/183429-deterring-attackers-in-cyberspace. 110. Siobhan Gorman and Julian Barnes, “Cyber Combat: Act of War,” Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2011, accessed May 31, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html. 111. William A. Owens, Kenneth W. Dam, and Herbert S. Lin, Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities (Washington, D.C, National Academies Press, 2009); John Markoff and Thom Shanker, “Panel Advises Clarifying U.S. Plans on Cyberwar,” New York Times, April 30, 2009, accessed April 30, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/science/30cyber.html?_r=1. 112. Sean Lawson, “Cyberwar: Not Just ‘like’ a Tea Party Issue, But Literally a Tea Party Issue,” Forbes.com, April 20, 2010, accessed May 20, 2014, http:// www.forbes.com/sites/firewall/2010/04/20/cyberwar-not-just-like-a-tea-party-issuebut-literally-a-tea-party-issue/. 113. Robert M. Gates, “Memorandum for Secretaries of the Military Departments, Subject: Establishment of a Subordinate Unified U.S. Cyber Command Under U.S. Strategic Command for Military Cyberspace Operations,” June 23, 2009. 114. Siobhan Gorman, “U.S. Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies,” Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2010, accessed September 22, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/ SB10001424052748704545004575352983850463108?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWh atsNewsSecond&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2F article%2FSB10001424052748704545004575352983850463108.html%3Fmod%3DWSJ_hpp_ MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond. 115. Department of Defense, Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2011). 116. Jason Miller, “McCain Again Makes His Case to Increase DoD’s Cyber Role,” Federal News Radio, May 10, 2012, accessed September 22, 2014, http:// www.federalnewsradio.com/473/2859574/McCain-again-makes-his-case-to-increaseDoDs-cyber-role; Steve Magnuson, “Defense Should be in Charge of U.S. Cybersecurity, Says Former Joint Chiefs Chairman,” NDIA’s Business and Technology Magazine, April 11, 2011, accessed September 22, 2014, http:// www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=368.

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117. Ellen Nakashima, “Pentagon Proposes More Robust Role for Its Cyber-Specialists,” Washington Post, August 9, 2012, accessed September 22, 2014, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-proposes-more-robustrole-for-its-cyber-specialists/2012/08/09/1e3478ca-db15-11e1-9745d9ae6098d493_story.html. 118. James A. Lewis, “Ready Player One Did the Pentagon Just Take Over America’s Cybersecurity?,” Foreign Policy, October 12, 2012, accessed September 22, 2014, http:// www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/12/ready_player_one. 119. Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

SIX The “Stress” of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Crews and the Biopolitical Normalization of America’s “Precise” Drone Attacks Overseas

In August of 1849 the city of Venice was besieged by the Austrian army. More than a year earlier, the citizens of that city decided to revolt against Austrian rule, and starvation and outbreaks of cholera eventually led to the surrender of the short-lived Republic of San Marco. Long after scholars and European audiences forgot about this particular historical dispute, a few remembered a time when an Austrian artillery officer, Franz von Uchatius, convinced his superiors that he could build balloons that could carry bombs across some distance, and the hope was that this would help end the siege. 1 A week after the surrender of Venice, a British newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, reported that on July 15, 1849, two balloons armed with shrapnel ascended from the deck of the war steamer Volcano, attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms above Venice, and headed in the direction of the enemy. Although there are conflicting accounts about where these balloons traveled and landed, what we do know is that British reporters indicated that after 23 minutes of balloon flight an explosion took place, and witnesses later testified to the “extreme terror and moral effect produced on the inhabitants.” 2 Military historians would characterize this as the first successful aerial bombing in history, but this would not be the last time that military planners would express confidence that they could dispense distant suffering on enemy populations. Nor would it be the last time that military and civilian communities 155

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would debate about moral and legal propriety of attacking civilian populations from the air. Since that time observers have constantly debated about how to think about what Peter Lee has called the “aircrew ethos” of those who dispense this type of distance suffering from the air. 3 Do we follow the lead of romantic authors who write about “manned” aircrafts, where pilots wear long ribbons flying back from their helmets who resemble the knights of old, 4 and where the only heroes are the ones who put themselves in physical danger and protect civilian populations? Or have our “new” ways of talking about the aerial aspects of America’s national security state changed so much during the twenty-first century that we need new grammars to help us live in a “post-heroic” age? 5 Today, as we hinted at in chapter one, technical, public, and legal debates about heroism, distance, and treatment of foreign enemies and civilians are often linked to commentaries on what the U.S. Air Force calls “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA). 6 In vernacular contexts, these technical weapons or platform systems are also called “drones” 7 or “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs), and they are treated by many military personnel as efficacious weapons. Note, for example, how one officer serving in the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAGs) wrote about the benefits of drones: While unmanned aircraft strike operations have generated a lot of criticism, drones undeniably have played a major role in the disruption of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other insurgent enemy forces. Unmanned technology has also been acknowledged as a weapons system that is truly saving American lives. Drones performing reconnaissance have detected numerous threats and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), protecting hundreds of our ground forces and convoys on maneuver. And it should go without saying, you do not have to worry about a downed pilot when a drone crashes. 8

This short fragment contains a cluster of assumptions that we will unpack later in the chapter, but for now it should be considered as a typical example of pro-drone argumentation. The advent of these tactical weapons, along with futuristic debates about unmanned “robots” 9 and “terminator” type conflicts, 10 have raised questions regarding whether America has a right to use drones away from “hot” battlefields (called jus ad bellum legal queries), and/or whether RPA lethal attacks violate international principles regarding how one conducts oneself while waging war (called jus in bello jurisprudential questions). 11 Many American lawyers who defend drone crews are convinced that America has both an inherent right to defend itself against terrorists and that RPA pilots do not violate the traditional principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).

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These are not just abstract, speculative jurisprudential questions, because theory and praxis come together as America’s leaders work with their listeners to co-produce drone defenses. For example, note the press coverage of President Barack Obama’s claim that American drone strikes are “precise.” In January of 2012, USA Today reported on how the nation’s commander-in-chief realized that U.S. lethal strikes abroad were raising the ire of increasing numbers of concerned global denizens, so he used the power of social media to advance these claims during a forum with YouTube and Google-plus: “I want to make sure that people understand [sic] actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” and that for “the most part they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.” President Obama elaborated by noting that this was “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on. . . . “ 12 This typical commentary from members of the U.S. executive branch is noteworthy for several reasons. First of all, President Obama is writing as if the American people who are listening to him, and may disagree with him or are standing on the sidelines of this dispute, don’t have a grasp of the true facts and misunderstand drone situations. This in turn creates the impression that he is a knowledgeable decision-maker who has insider information and knows all about RPAs and geopolitical realities. Second, his commentary, like many U.S. drone defenses, doesn’t go into detail outlining how many casualties can be linked to these drone strikes, and there is no explanation of how those casualty numbers were confirmed. Those who present these types of public addresses advocating drone use assiduously avoid discussing the criteria that reasonable listeners should know about in making determinations regarding excessive numbers of casualties. Third, the American president keeps repeating the mantra that drone strikes are precise, with little commentary on the technical, military, or legal standards that are being used to support that assessment. He acts as if the mere descriptive, nominal declaration that they are precise creates some ontological reality. Here there is no hint that many experts and international critics question America’s claims regarding drone precision. Fourth, notice how, for Obama, the very fact that he has some playbook to regulate drone usage seems to counter the claims of those who think that he has “willy-nilly,” arbitrary policies. Finally, his focus on “active terrorists” does not let listeners know that many drone detractors believe that foreign dissidents or insurgents who pose no “imminent” existential threats to the U.S. mainland get placed on the “disposition matrix” for a host of politicized reasons. What President Obama is implying is that the reach of drones should be geographically limitless— if the CIA or the Department of Defense has analysts who feel that any individual anywhere might have the capability, or the inclination to attack any embassy overseas, they can send messages to that effect up

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through the chain-of-command that ends at doorsteps of the White House. 13 Like many drone supporters, members of the Obama administration view drone crews as heroes in today’s overseas contingency operations, and they put in place annual recruitment, training, and health programs to help with the retention of trained drone crews. We may no longer be thinking about the lobbing of bombs from aerial balloons, but some of the same issues about treatment of civilian populations or wartime conduct resurface in strategizing about the “new” asymmetrical network-centric way of war (see chapters two through four). 14 While there are many fascinating facets of these drone debates, in this particular chapter we invite readers to focus in on one intriguing and influential feature of this disputation that is often underappreciated—the ways that medicalized talk about the “stress” of drone crew members circulates in both technical 15 and public spheres 16 to help legitimate, rationalize, and legalize America’s remotely-piloted aircraft systems. 17 Here we highlight the various elite and public texts and visual representations that are used to convey the impression that these particular purveyors of state violence are not violating the principles of armed conflict or international humanitarian law. 18 We argue that it is these particular biopolitical or thanatopolitical stories that are told about drone pilots that are read by many Americans, and these tales are used strategically to put on display the honorable intentions of today’s drone pilots and others who are involved in what are called America’s remotely-piloted air craft systems. 19 We wish to refute Professor Peter Lee’s claim that the majority of Anglo-American publics vilify drone pilots, and we want to show how a growing number of reporters are now recirculating information about governmental and non-governmental studies that note how drone pilots suffer from depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While Lee is right when he argues that there is some mythical discourse circulating today that treats the old chivalrous pilots who put themselves at risk as the only real pilots—“manned” pilots of yesterday and today—he conveniently ignores the countless essays that are now circulating in mainstream newspapers and on the Internet that attempt to glorify the RPA crews and treat them as misunderstood and often ignored victims. We begin with a contextual explanation that explains the seemingly insatiable appetite for drones and then move to a discussion of some of the typical textual and visual enthymemes that are used to illustrate how evidence of RPA combat “stress” militates against the possibility that these are detached cyberwarriors who might be committing war crimes.

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CONTEXTUALIZING THE AMERICAN PERCEPTUAL NEEDS FOR DRONES AND UAV PLATFORMS At first, drones were viewed as surveillance tools, but their weaponization and perceived lethality ensured that more intelligence and military planners would join the bandwagon of those who viewed this as a weapon of choice. As Colonel Hoagland recently explained: To put things in perspective, the US military entered Operation Iraqi Freedom with only a handful of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) and zero unmanned systems on the ground. Today, there are over 8,000 unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and over 12,000 ground systems, with UAS/RPA now conducting over 500 strike missions per year (a rise of approximately 96 percent since 2009). From an international commercial market perspective, the Teal Group Study of 2012 forecasts that the UAS industry will double over the next decade to approximately $12 billion, with more countries (currently at 87) deciding to develop and operate these systems [citations omitted]. 20

These drone obsessions created rhetorical situations where both supporters and critics felt they had to begin debating about the ethicality of drone usage. Drone detractors contend that since 2002, American drones have killed thousands of terrorist suspects and civilians, and organizations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism contend that in Pakistan alone, the RPA attacks authorized during the Obama years have killed approximately 416 civilians, including 168 to 200 children. 21 Casualty-averse military planners, who worry about the blowback that comes from the use of hundreds of thousands of conventional troops during massive foreign interventions, see drone usage as a less expensive tool in America’s counterterrorism toolkit. “Remote pilots,” argue Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi, “carry out out an apparently clinical operation, with none of the gore and messiness of military combat.” 22 Today the Air Force “pins more wings on drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots,” and journalists report on how forward-looking observers are advocating the changing of the “‘top gun culture’ of the Air Force,” 23 while UAV pilots themselves talk of the reward that comes from being deployed “on station” (living at home and commuting) rather than being “in theater” (in officially-designated combat zones). 24 Some have spent some six years serving in their assignments as members of RPA crews, and they write of the “intimacy” that comes from tracking suspects thousands of miles away. 25 As we note in more detail below, this talk of “intimacy” can be connected to a host of legal, political, and cultural arguments about the alteration of this “top gun” culture and the legal or moral status of drone attacks, and Anglo-American newspapers are filled with hagiographic

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accounts of the deeds of cyber warriors and their trials and tribulations. Take, for example, how David Wood, after a visit to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, would write about the “heavy burden” that was carried by drone crews, who were a part of a “kill chain” that involved “hundreds of young Air Force intelligence analysts who work 12-hour shifts.” For Wood those who were “riveted to computer monitors” went unnoticed, in spite of the fact that these were the “unseen faces of Obama’s drone war” whose fatigues were not “soaked in the sweat and dust and blood of Afghanistan.” 26 Readers are supposed to infer that these cubicle warriors need to have their labor rendered visible 27 and that they are making meaningful contributions to the GWOT. It will be our contention that at the same time that America’s law schools are cranking out article after article that review the formalistic, jurisprudential aspects of the transglobal “drone wars,” 28 journalists and military professionals are circulating a more subtle form of drone argumentation that uses descriptive studies of the psychological and physical conditions of overworked members of drone crews as a way of making prescriptive claims about the normative features of these activities. Many of those involved in these debates about this dimension of America’s national security state are very aware of the importance of public opinion for those who are trying to change the “top-gun” mentalities of those who are suspicious of drone crew activities. Colonel Bradley Hoagland of the U.S. Air Force, for example, is constantly writing and talking about the mistreatment of RPA crews, and he recently encouraged the Air Force to prepare “a grass-roots message in the training and operational communities that highlights the growing commercialization and strategic importance of unmanned systems, and the high tech and savvy personnel that are required to fly these machines.” 29 At the same time, members of RPA crews make it clear that they understand some of the reasons why some international communities are critical of their work. Elijah Hurwitz explained why many drone operators put their “top gun dreams on hold” and why they are trying to change some of the nomenclatures and attitudes of those who don’t understand their challenges: The word drone also evokes monotony, which is what fills much of the pilots’ daily routines. Though strikes on suspected terrorists and the resulting civilian casualties get the headlines, the lion’s share of remote piloting consists of quieter, more shadowy work: hour after hour of ISR—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Sitting in ergonomic chairs in ground control stations—essentially souped-up shipping containers—RPA operators coordinate with ground intel to identify human targets, then track them with high-powered zoom lenses and sophisticated sensors. (A nine-camera sensor nicknamed Gorgon Stare is capable of streaming full video with enough resolution to discern facial expressions). 30

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Again, notice the emphasis that is placed on the trials and tribulations of RPA crews. What we are witnessing is not the monolithic circulation of only one type of univocal discourse that treats RPA pilots as “Nintendo” warriors, but rather contested, multi-vocal clusters of arguments that are based on epistemes that flow in many directions. As international critics complain that America’s drone wars violate the international humanitarian law principles of distinction, proportionality, necessity, and humanity, or as they write about the potential horrors of “lethal autonomous robots,” 31 the RPA advocates are forced into a dynamic situation where they have to valorize the efforts of drone crews who are characterized as discerning, realistic, and caring social agents. In these versions of what Der Derian and others have called the virtual/virtuous wars, 32 tales of the honor and valor of long-distance warriors fighting what the Department of Defense call “telewarfare” are themselves the objects of both derision and adulation. In February of 2013 the outgoing CIA director, Leon Panetta, tried to create a new award, called the “Distinguished Warfare Medal” (DWM), that would be handed out to RPA crew members. “Our military reserves its highest decorations obviously for those who display gallantry and valor in actions where their lives are on the line, and we will continue to do so,” noted Panetta, but he went on to say that “we should also have the ability to honor the extraordinary actions that make a true difference in combat operations.” 33 Polls indicate that more than two-thirds of Americans do support the tactical usage of drones in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, but their responses to Panetta’s call provides scholars with evidence that they have ambivalent feelings regarding the characterization of those who are caricatured as “joystick operators” who do not share the battlefield risks of the infantrymen in the war zones who have to deal with Taliban or Al Qaeda returning fire, planting IEDs, etc. Panetta’s call for the creation of a new medal created an uproar, and many former and present ground troops felt disrespected because the proposed medal would sit two awards above the Bronze Star in precedence and three above the Purple Heart. 34 Congressman Douglas Hunter noted that the “operators of unmanned systems, most of who [sic] are far removed from the battlefield, face the same risk and imminent danger presented by ground combat.” 35 Hunter thought that all of this talk of drone medals had something to do with “Pentagon’s unrelenting attempt to redefine the nature of war and the dangers commonplace on the field of battle,” and he remarked that someone needed to ask “the Marines and soldiers who fought in Fallujah, Basra, Ramadi, Ganjgal Valley or Marjah, about the dangers they faced and whether they operated with ‘reduced personal risk’ . . .” 36 When Chuck Hagel, Panetta’s successor, took over, the

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plans for the Distinguished Warfare Medal were shelved in order to stop this interservice infighting and public wrangling. There are reasons why the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the CIA have to work at valorizing the efforts of RPA crews. First of all, as noted above, demand for drone crews is growing, and recruiters constantly complain that the supply of recruits is not keeping up with the demand for their services. By 2011, the United Air Force had trained more drone pilots than traditional fighter and bomber pilots combined— 350 RPA pilots compared to 250 fighter and bomber pilots, and today one in every three planes is unmanned. 37 At the present time, the U.S. Air force needs to attract more drone crews so that they can help guide the RQ-4 Global Hawks, the large intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance platforms (ISRs), and the hundreds of MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers. The USAF also employs an unknown number of RQ-170 Sentinels, a stealth reconnaissance aircraft. By the year 2016, the American government plans on spending at least $20 billion dollars on additional UAV platforms or next generation, multi-mission aircraft. 38 There are indications that the Pentagon intends to double the number of unmanned aircraft systems from 340 to 650 by 2021. The second reason that the U.S. Air Force works on valorizing the efforts of RPA drone crews has to do with the self-esteem needs of the recruits and the symbolic positioning of drone pilots in the military hierarchies that glorify the efforts of “manned” crews. There are no shortages of F-16 or F-18 pilots who join drone critics in ridiculing the idea that RPA crews are even in combat, deserve medals, or risk their lives like the aerial heroes of old. Oz, the name of one RAF drone pilot who knows all about these prejudices, told one reporter: “Flying a fighter aircraft was more fun. It was big, it was pointy. It went bloody fast and it carried big bombs. It was sexy. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Twenty-five years later I asked to come to the Reaper because it makes a significant contribution to the war.” 39 Oz’s commentary is not being presented in a rhetorical vacuum—the implicit message here is that if the U.S. does not make policy changes that quickly address the concerns of engaged RPA pilots, then this will hurt the recruitment efforts of those who work at the retention and training of crews that many believe represent the real future of aerial combat for decades to come. The third reason that the U.S. makes concerted efforts to valorize the efforts of RPA crews has to do with the fact that the characterizations of drone pilots is symbolically tied to the ways that domestic detractors, NGOs, and foreign critics complain about the illegal nature of American drone warfare. Note, for example, how Philip Alston and Hina Shamsi talked about the drone wars more than six months before the UN issued an official report on what they called “extra” judicial killings:

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Equally discomfiting is the “PlayStation mentality” 40 that surrounds drone killings. Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life? How will commanders and policymakers keep themselves immune from the deceptively antiseptic nature of drone killings? Will killing be a more attractive option than capture? Will the standards for intelligence-gathering slip to justify a killing? Will the number of acceptable “collateral” civilian deaths increase? History contains numerous examples of government secrecy breeding abuse. 41

The depictions of the activities of drone crewmembers were thus linked to larger, more structural issues related potential changes in Coalition modes of warfare. Alston and Shamsi were some of those who were inviting readers to believe that civilian deaths were excessive and that U.S. drone secrecy has hurt efforts at accountability. To help counter these types of critiques, American writers and decision-makers circulate metanarratives about the stress of UAV crews that illustrates the “intimate” nature of their work. In the next subsection we begin by explaining some of the general contours and features of some of these metanarratives, and then we dissect some of the more specific implied or explicit arguments that have become parts of these storied drone defenses. THE AMERICAN METANARRATIVES ABOUT RPA PILOT “STRESS” AND THE ARGUMENTATIVE PATTERNS OF THESE UAV DEFENSES One way of dealing with some of these debates about the heroic or the post-heroic nature of this entire drone warfare is to redefine the term “combat.” Jean Otto and Bryant Webber, for example, in their study of the mental health of U.S. Air Force remotely-piloted aircraft, noted that for purposes of their study “‘combat’ was going to be defined broadly to include ‘actual or remote deployment to a combat zone, and not necessarily as engagement with enemy combatants.’” 42 In some cases, semantic alterations will not suffice, and purveyors of drone defenses have to formulate novel mythologies to take the place of older fables that were once told about how pilots gained the respect of others by risking their lives in symmetrical warfare. Instead of joining those who would glorify the efforts of the “manned” pilots who have been mythologized since the Red Baron halcyon days, we would acknowledge that we live in a “post-human” century and treat the RPA pilots as combatants whose efforts are on par with those who serve on conventional battlefields.

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Public persuasion often depends on the concretization and the operationalization of key features of this metanarrative, and arguers who support these UAV campaigns often have to find empirical ways of evidencing the psychic, physical, or social costs of this drone warfare. Note, for example, how Otto and Webber wrote about the current state of the mental health diagnosis and counseling among drone pilots: Although a USAF white paper dismissed this claim as “sensational,” the psychological health of RPA crew members remains a topic of military public health and operational concern. Research by Chappelle and colleagues at the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, Department of Neuropsychiatry, has demonstrated high levels of stress among the pilots, sensor operators, and image analysts who comprise the RPA crews. . . . RPA crew members may face several additional challenges, some of which may be unique to telewarfare: lack of deployment rhythm and of combat compartmentalization (i.e. a clear demarcation between combat and personal/family life), fatigue and sleep disturbances secondary to work shift, austere geographic locations of military installations . . . social isolation . . . and sedentary behavior with prolonged screen time . . . 43

Witnessing traumatic events thousands of miles away thus threatens the health and well-being of RPA crew members and at the same time becomes a visual and vicarious way of illustrating that one is willing to suffer from participating in an underappreciated form of combat. Since the fall of 2008, when mainstream and alternative news outlets started writing about the physical and psychological struggles of RPA crews, 44 public interest in the personal affairs of drone crews and their families has spiked, and a running ideological battle has taken place as critics complained about the secrecy, the lack of accountability, and the illegality of the drone program and those who dispensed death from afar. William Saletan, for example, thought that the system of actual controls for ground crews that were produced by Raytheon looked and felt like video games, and he wondered whether these types of consoles would make “killing too” easy. 45 Philip Alston, the former United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial summary, or arbitrary executions, circulated a May 2010 report that claimed that the RPA pilots’ remoteness from the actual battlefields was contributing to the development of a “PlayStation” mentality. 46 This obviously is not the way that those who write about the stress of RPA crews want to think about distant suffering or the purported lack of vision of cyberwarriors fighting from their desert trailers. We believe that a review of many of the arguments that have circulated about drone pilots and stress since 2008 can be decoded in ways that allow us to see the suturing together of five key subclaims: 1) RPAs are “manned” and flown by knowledgeable crews, 2) the superiors of drone crews have handed down to them accurate “disposition matrices” that are based on

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the “pattern of life” behaviors of terrorist suspects, 3) RPA systems involve “precise” platforms that afford drone crews an “intimate” knowledge of the enemy, 4) this intimacy shows that RPA crews are not violating any IHL principles, and 5) drone crews should be receiving special medals and other public recognition for their labor. In a nutshell, as the CIA likes to assert, these arguments come together to help buttress the claim that drones are “lawful, aggressive, precise and effective.” 47 In the following pages, we elaborate on these five subthemes. RPAs are “Manned” and are Flown by Knowledgeable Crews Drone advocates who try to craft convincing metanarratives about the health problems of RPA crews often begin with an argument that contains the claim that drones are not unmanned robots” that are “flying blind.” 48 Instead, UAV supporters like to emphasize the amount of simulated training that these pilots and sensors receive, and one rarely finds any mainstream article or blog site on the World Wide Web that mentions the term “drone” or “RPA” without a pedagogical lessons for Anglo-American publics on how these vehicles are “manned”—in every hypermasculine sense of this term. Manned in the sense that drones are not autonomous robots, and manned in the sense that these metal assemblages are flown by trained crew members who know all about the operative rules of engagement. In other words, skeptics need to stop writing about American lethal strikes as if they were guided by terminator robots who are “out of the loop.” “The only thing that is unmanned with this system,” argued Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Black, was “a very tiny piece of fiberglass that’s on the end of this very long people-intensive spear.” 49 Military personnel scoff at the idea that drones are “unmanned” because they are trained to talk and write about UAVs as parts of complex systems, or “platforms,” that bring together sensor operators, pilots, grounded flight operators, communications technicians, JAG officers, imagery analysts, military commanders, and supervisors. Each Combat Air Patrol (CAP) mission for a Predator or Reaper is incredibly labor intensive and requires somewhere between 160 to 180 personnel for each mission, 50 and when RPA crews fire their missiles, they can be assured that they have behind them phalanxes of equally-committed social agents who take pride in their work. Yet, in order for readers or viewers to be convinced that RPA crews are acting reasonably they also need defenders who are willing to advance another argument—that drone crews have been handed lists of targets that identify those who deserve to have “warheads” coming down on “foreheads.” 51

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Tracking Militant Islamic “Patterns of Life” Helps Pre-plan Targeted Killings While human intelligence is often collected from CIA operatives, informers, and others and is then passed up the American military chainof-command, there are times when RPA crews are credited with helping supply other forms of intelligence-gathering. In 2011, for example, RPA crews flew 54 combat air patrols over Afghanistan and Iraq, and, during that same period, drone crews participated in many other missions that involved intelligence-gathering. Many American newspaper reporters wrote about the probative value of all of that intelligence and about how the drone crews were protecting the U.S. ground troops by watching over them 24/7. 52 One key feature of these geopolitical imaginations has to do with the veracity and the reliability of the intelligence sources coming from CIA analysts and others who have culled through countless foreign sources and data mined materials so that they could develop mosaics that help decision-makers prepare “pre-planning” lists. Interestingly enough, the more data that comes the way of the sensor operator or the drone pilot, the more they seem to be engaged and in the thick of battle. David Zuccino of the Los Angeles Times, for example, explained some of the stressors that contributed to the feelings of disconnect, and the sense of hopelessness, were taking a toll on the psychological well-being of drone crews: “Sitting before video screens thousands of miles from their remote-controlled aircraft, the crews scan for enemy ambushes and possible roadside bombs, while also monitoring what the military calls ‘patterns of life.’” Zuccino then quotes Dr. Ortega, who remarks that since humans “don’t work well at 3 in the morning” that “builds fatigue, which decreases human performance, which leads to more stress.” 53 There are several reasons why this type of passage is noteworthy. First, note how the geopolitical framing of the drone activities are linked to traditional battle zones. The focus on IEDs and what we call the identification of “band of brothers” dangers makes it appear as though drone pilot behavior should be evaluated in the same way one would think about the typical soldier at the front lines of battlefields. This strategic choice of settings maintains the illusion that most drone strikes are “personal strikes,” which gets confusing, given the fact that most reported strikes are “signature strikes.” This also obfuscates the fact that the Obama administration has often signed off on lethal strikes that target highand low-value suspects who are attacked hundreds of miles away from any IED or combat situation. Second, notice the Orientalist assumptions that are being made about what constitutes terrorist “patterns of life.” Do these members of America’s national security state have some secret, scientific way of discerning “patterns of life” that would discriminate between civilians having simi-

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lar cell phone habits? What calculus allows them to sort out those who daily mingle with the Taliban, the Afghan tribal members who carry guns, or the bombers who are supposedly preparing “imminent” attacks against the U.S. mainland? All of this talk of being able to trace some observable “patterns of life” brings to mind similar claims that American militarists know the “Arab Mind,” the habits of Pashtuns, or the cultural habits of those who live in places like Northern Wiziristan. The term “patterns of life” is an incredibly protean concept, whose usage signals that Coalition pilots and other military personnel can be trained by military or civilian teachers at bases and universities to pick up the supposed behavioral and cultural patterns of Jihadist extremists. Joseph Pugliese provided one of the best critiques of the many vectors that are swirling around these types of weaponing grammars when he remarked: The military term “pattern of life” is inscribed with two intertwined systems of scientific conceptuality: algorithmic and biological. The human subject detected by drones’ surveillance cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence of numerals: the digital code of ones and zeros. Converted into digital data coded as a “pattern of life,” the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that flickers across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a “pattern of death” with the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, “pattern of life” connects the drone’s scanning technologies to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence. Patterns of life are what are discovered and analyzed in the Petri dish of the laboratory. 54

No wonder that some warhawks use the thanatopolitical term “bugsplat” to describe the greenish imagery that drone crews see in the aftermath of target strikes. 55 Note how commentators who are writing about drone crews are no longer just debunking the old myths about the glorious risks and courage of manned aircraft—now we are witnessing the inclusion of summaries from military medical reports that makes it appear as if drone crews who work at intelligence-gathering also have to worry about occupational stress or post-traumatic stress disorder. In other words, it is not just the crew members who pull the trigger on Hellfire missiles who have to deal with stress—now, every single person who is recruited by the U.S. Air Force or CIA can feel that they too are making sacrifices that need to be acknowledged. In theory, the more recruits who sign up, the more rotations that are assigned, the greater the number of individuals who can say that they did their part to reduce the combat stress of RPA crews. Talking about RPA crews and the global collection of intelligence through drone surveillance also legitimates the Obama administration’s

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efforts to take the fight to the enemy, even in places where allies are unwilling or unable to take out terrorist threats. As Ian G. R. Shaw explains, talk of tracking “patterns of life” helps us understand why the CIA’s fleet of secret drones have little interest in securing traditional, physical “territory,” 56 because now counterinsurgents can focus on more ephemeral, networking-centric ways of thinking about space and place. As Michel Foucault once explained in Security, Territory, Population, biopower does not have to be exercised across geographical areas because the flow of power may involve the “control over relations” as empowered communities can control populations’ “environment” or the “milieu in which they live,” 57 and drone rhetorics provide an excellent example of that type of state empowerment. For those who still remember the traumatic events of 9/11, these are incredibly persuasive arguments, but what really humanizes the RPA crews are the ways that journalists and others write about the “intimacy” that they have with those that they target. RPAs are Precise Combat Platforms that Involve Personal and Technical Levels of “Intimacy” While drone critics like to argue that drone pilots are firing at targets that are thousands of miles away from their cockpits and trailers, RPA pilots themselves often argue that when they sit in front of video screens they are really just “18 inches” away from the battlefield. One of the reasons that RPA crews argue so vehemently about detachment is that they know that talk of physical distance is being used to make arguments about the inherent imprecision of drone warfare and the potential culpability of those who participate in these lethal attack campaigns. Since at least the early 1970s, military scientists have been writing about the advent of precision-guided munitions (PGM), and accurate weaponry that could be guided through the “fog of war,” and the technical development of military robots has forced strategists, ethicists, and policymakers to think about how all of this has impacted the “law of armed conflict.” 58 What is interesting to observe are the ways that some patriots go so far as to opine that it would be unethical if Americans didn’t use these precise weapons. 59 The reason that drone apologists spend so much time conversing about drone precision and the “situation awareness” of RPA crews is that the mainstream media and alternative outlets sometimes report to readers about drone errors and the deaths of civilians. For example, in February of 2010, Hellfire missiles were launched from a Predator at targets in the Uruzgan Province of central Afghanistan, and this strike killed 15 Afghan civilians and injured many others. 60 These types of reports seemed to provide anecdotal evidence that impatient cyberwarriors, anx-

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ious to join the fray against terrorist enemies, were indeed flying blind and having a hard time distinguishing friend from foe. In order to counter these types of claims, drone supporters have crafted what we would call a “rhetoric of intimacy” that makes it appear as if drone technologies render visible the minute details of the daily lives of those that they are targeting. As Col. Albert K. Aimar, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and is the commander of the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing, explained, when in a fighter jet, “you come in at 500–600 mph, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don’t see what happens.” In contrast, when a missile is fired by a Predator pilot, “you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it’s very vivid, it’s right there and personal. So it does stay in people’s minds for a long time.” 61 In theory, the problems from which RPA crews suffer don’t come from their detachment or lack of empathy for those who are targeted or their families, but instead, come from seeing too much, being too engaged. Using language that almost perfectly inverts the claims of those who complain about IHL violations of lack of distinction, one reporter explained that a “Predator's cameras are powerful enough to allow an operator to distinguish between a man and a woman, and between different weapons on the ground.” 62 One academic echoed these types of remarks when he explained to readers that unlike F-16 or F-18 pilots of “manned” aircraft who are flying at some 8,000 feet per second and departing from the scene of an attack as rapidly as they arrived, RPA crew members are not spared “the instantly emotional impact of the physical destruction of life and material below.” 63 All of this creates the impression that both the technical prowess of the drones, as well as the exceptional skills of sensor operators, have no trouble finding those on disposition matrices that need targeting. One would almost think that distance becomes an advantage if you read some of this discourse on intimacy, because it creates the illusion that RPA crews see everything going on from thousands of miles away. As Dr. Peter Lee explained in one typical scholarly defense of RPA activity, long “loiter times enable a pattern of life to be established in considerable and mundane detail, with meal times, prayer times, toilet habits, friends, and even relatives being identified,” and this creates a “much greater degree of emotional engagement with an intended target . . .” 64 After reading these types of observations—that appear in the guise of scientific research that objectively is reporting “facts” about drones—how can any reasonable person believe the NGOs, the UN rapporteurs, or others who keep harping about the dangers that come from “joystick” warriors? In a fascinating illustration of the dynamic nature of some of this disputation, note the way that some participants in these RPA debates counter some of the detractors’ explicit claims that jingoist crews are only

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being “voyeuristic.” As one RAF drone pilot working out of Creech Air Force Base told one researcher: We have the capability to see (unlike a fast-jet) the effect of our weapons strikes in relatively close-up detail. Also, if the troops on the ground take photos of the strike effects they can often send them to us as feedback. No matter how explicit these photos are I personally look at them all. Not because of some voyeuristic tendency but because I believe that if you cannot face the reality of what you do in killing a human being then you should not be part of that process. 65

Drone crews thus buy into all of this rhetoric of intimacy, and they participate in all of these public debates as a way of reinforcing the message that they are indeed “combat” pilots performing necessitous duties. RPA Attacks are Carried Out by Pilots Who are Convinced that Their Actions are Legal, Ethical, and Desirable The fourth key strategic argument that appears in some of these RPA defense metanarratives involves the claim that America’s lethal drone strikes are legal, ethical, and desirable. Few drone crew members who are interviewed by mainstream presses doubt that we are “at war” with many different types of Taliban or Al Qaeda supporters, and they rarely talk about any differences that exist between drone strikes that are carried out over “hot” battlefields in places like Afghanistan and the RPA strikes that target terrorist suspects in places like Yemen or Pakistan. During most interviews, drone crewmembers defend both the need to go war, as well as the conduct of those who participate in the firing of hellfire missiles. Like many members of the American military, these warriors have their own nomenclatures and they use their own jargons, and they almost always try to talk clinically as they reference the taking out of “bad guys.” RPA crew members constantly articulate their belief that there were good reasons for killing those who die during American lethal strikes overseas, and they have the ability to “compartmentalize” their work so that their intimate relations with those they target do prevent them from carrying out their assigned missions. During these journalistic interviews or conversations with medical authorities or others, one rarely hears from UAV crews about any potential violations of the principles of distinction, humanity, necessity, or proportionality. Instead, what looks like casual referencing of RPA crew psychological states can be used to fend-off those who might later accuse them of war crimes that need to be handled by international tribunals. For example, Colonel D. Scott Brenton, a former F-16 pilot, was quoted as saying in United Kingdom’s Daily Mail that contrary to the opinions of some, piloting a remote-controlled vehicle gave him intimate connections with his targets. 66 “I see mothers with children, I see fathers with chil-

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dren . . . I see kids playing soccer.” Colonel Brenton then elaborated by switching to some normative claims, as he noted that while he was locked-on and was paying attention to his surveillance duties he felt “no attachment to the enemy” because he felt he was doing his duty. 67 Here audiences are not presented with any questioning of the orders of superiors, no interrogation of how the father of those kids playing soccer ended up on some “disposition matrix.” Asking those types of questions, after all, would require the setting-aside of Kafkaesque, clichéd responses that would underscore the point that answers to those questions involved matters of state secrecy. Reaper pilots and sensor operators, like their neighbors, can read the newspapers, and they are cognizant of the fact that many drone critics are trying to cobble together arguments that make it appear as though they are a part of some illegal war machine. This recognition, in turn, leads to even more adamant defenses of what Dr. Lee calls the “RPAS Aircrew ethos” and more determined refutations of the notion that cyber warriors act as twenty-first-century terminator robots. One of Dr. Lee’s interviewees took on some of the most repetitive of the skeptics’ claims when he candidly observed: I sleep soundly at night because every person that I have killed was a clearly identified enemy combatant engaged in hostile actions as described in the rules we work to. I utterly refute the concept that we are capable of reducing the taking of a life to a “PlayStation game” just because we are 12,000 miles from the people we kill. I feel that the certain knowledge that everything we do is being watched by others: general officers, legal advisors, operations officers etc. in the command centre makes us more, rather than less, aware of the consequences of the actions we take. 68

This is a fascinating fragment. It illustrates the hegemonic power of Coalition discourses that convince subalterns to believe that their omniscient superiors have “certain knowledge,” and that there is nothing wrong with any of this surveillance. This mirrors the NSA “trust me” defenses regarding national security surveillance that we have seen in other chapters and illustrates why so many drone crewmembers are willing to carry out both “personal” and “signature” strikes. In theory, the more “eyes” that you have on the targets—and on each other—the better decisions you will make and the more likely you avoid the stigma of being a part of some “PlayStation game.” In sum, very, very few RPA crew members—besides folks like Brandon Bryant—would even countenance the idea that they are participating in any illegal activities.

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RPA Pilots Should Receive Medals and Other Public Recognition of Their Accomplishments The last key argument that we dissect in this chapter has to do with the public recognition of the RPA pilots. This is where the continued influence of “top gun” cultures continues to stand in the way of those who wish to treat drone pilots as if they were warriors who risked life and limb in the carrying out of missions for the national security state. As noted above, many supports of George W. Bush’s “GWOT” or Barack Obama’s “overseas contingency operations” are willing to accept the argument that drones help with the disassembly of terrorists’ networks, but they are unwilling to go so far as to believe that RPA pilots are true combatants. Many work hard to try and convince skeptics that drone crews deserve their own medals. For example, Dr. Peter Singer, who has written extensively on aerial warfare and military development of unmanned vehicle systems, had this to say about RPA crew accomplishments: Let’s use the case of the mission that got the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Zarqawi. So there was a team of unmanned aerial systems, drone operators, that tracked him down. It was over 600 hours of mission operational work that finally pinpointed him. They put the laser target on the compound that he was in, this terrorist leader, and then an F-16 pilot flew six minutes, facing no enemy fire, and dropped a bomb—a computer-guided bomb—on that laser. Now, who do you think got the Distinguished Flying Cross? The people who spent 600 hours, or the six-minute pilot? And so that’s really what we’re getting at. Actually, the drone operators, in that case, they didn’t get the medal, but they did get a nice thank-you note from a general. 69

For those who agree with Peter Singer, the national security state “system” has to be altered to adapt to the needs of these cyber warriors. CONCLUSION We have illustrated how talk of drone crew “stress” has opened up a window of opportunity for some defenders of America’s national security state who want to defend the efficacy of these lethal attacks. Moreover, we have argued that all of this commentary can be considered to be a populist way of fending off claims that drone crews are detached pseudo-warriors, who engage in post-heroic acts that also violate a host of domestic or international laws. If we are right, the growing interest in drone usage will lead to even more discussions about the psychological or social well-being of RPA crews, and more governmental resources will be allocated to the study of drone stress, management, and treatment. The human stress that was

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detected in one study, noted David Wood, was “extremely high,” to the point where concerned commanders on bases were assigning a psychologist and a chaplain with top security clearances to work full-time inside some military facilities. 70 Make no mistake; in spite of all of the critics’ skepticism and argumentation, the drones are here to stay. We will have more to say about this in chapter eight, but for now we want to point out that, although only three countries are known to have used RPAs in combat (U.S.A., Israel, and the United Kingdom), more than 75 countries possess some type of RPA and the shift toward using these platforms “seems to be an inevitable evolution in a time when asymmetric war against hidden enemies dominates warfare and military cost restrictions dictate budget planning.” 71 We anticipate that many other nations will be appropriating some of America’s drone rhetorics as other countries seek to justify the firing of their own hellfire missiles against dissidents and others that they will configure as “terrorists.” We are also aware that, in many ways, some of what appears to be smaller debates about physiological conditions of drone pilots and sensors’ attitudes become proxy fights for larger disputation about the legality of the GWOT itself. As Ryan J. Vogel, a foreign affairs specialist for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, noted in 2013: Drone use is not the reason for controversy here; it is the conflict that is the real source of controversy. It took years of diplomatic persuasion, court decisions, and legislation recognizing the inherent right to detain in armed conflict and a change in presidential administrations before the United States could move past much of its misplaced focus on detention. Similar energy should now be used to defend the government’s inherent right to target enemy forces with any lawful weapon of its choice. Exclusive regulation of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] is inappropriate and unnecessary if they operate within the same rules and boundaries that apply to any other similar weapon platform. The United States should, therefore, continue to clarify at every opportunity—both publicly and privately—that drones are a perfectly legal and appropriate platform for legal attacks . . . 72

This obviously assumes that drone critics are wrong, and that some of the key persuasive efforts have already been undertaken by knowledgeable elites. As far as Vogel is concerned, Americans are acting righteously, and they just need to get their act together so that they can do a better job of communicating. For those who might agree with Vogel, drones are perfectly good tactical weapons that should be deployed. Vogel is of course taking for granted the need for a well-armed national security state, and he is impatient with those who allegedly don’t respect America’s “inherent right” to target enemy forces during wartime. What this type of elitist, “top-down” way of thinking about persuasion misses are the incremental, vernacular ways that drone rhetorics gain

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hegemonic power. All of the journalistic and other commentary on drone “stress” is doing a fine job of explaining why drone pilots, during “combat,” were acting courageously on the nation’s behalf. NOTES 1. For more on Franz von Uchatius and the Austrian bombing of Venice in 1849, see Brett Holman, “The First Air Bomb: Venice, 15 July 1849,” Airminded, http://airminded.org/2009/08/22/the-first-air-bomb-venice-15-july-1849/; Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), 6. 2. Holman, “The First Air Bomb,” paragraph 2. 3. Peter Lee, “Remoteness, Risk and Aircrew Ethos,” Air Power Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 1–19. 4. For commentary on this romanticism and childhood dreams of emulating heroic pilots, see John Norman Harris, Knights of the Air (London: Macmillan, 1958), 12. 5. Many credit Edward Luttwak with helping popularize the phrase “post-heroic” warfare. Edward Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May/June, 1995), 109–122. For an insightful recent discussion of the importance of that phrase, see Christian Enemark, Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a Post-Heroic Age (London: Routledge, 2013). 6. Throughout this chapter, we will be using the terms “RPA,” “drones,” “UAVs,” and “UAS” in interchangeable ways. We understand why other social agents choose to do otherwise. For example, representatives of the U.S. Air Force do not like to use what they view as the boring, pejorative term “drone,” and prefers to use the term remotely-piloted aircraft (RPAs) when writing or talking about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They wish to valorize the effort of RPA crews and they ask that American citizens and others avoid the usage of the term “drone.” Drones, after all, conjure up images of having equipment that is unmanned, dull, thoughtless, and drab. The term “Unmanned aircraft systems” (UAS) refers to the entire assemblage of aircraft, ground equipment and information technology. See Department of Defense, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, November 8, 2010 (As Amended Through 14 March 2014). (Washington, D.C., Department of Defense, 2014), http:// www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf. Some contend that the term “drone” was first popularized in military circles during the 1930s when a British named a pilotless version of the British Fairey Queen Fighter, the “Queen Bee.” See Blackhurst, “The Air Force Men,” paragraph 3. 7. For essential background reading on these drones, see Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control (London: Verso Books, 2013). 8. Keric D. Clanahan, “Drone Sourcing? United States Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Inherently Governmental Functions, and the Role of Contractors,” Federal Circuit Bar Journal 22 (2012), 4, retrieved from Social Science Research Network, May 4, 2012, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051154. 9. For commentary on this “robots revolution” in military affairs, see Peter W. Singer, Wired For War: The Robots Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 10. See, for example, Nick Turse and Thomas Englehardt, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare 2001 – 2050 (New York: Dispatch Books, 2012). 11. Put simply, these are questions about why you fight (i.e., having an inherent right of self-defense), or how you fight (i.e., according to rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law). 12. Barack Obama, quoted in David Jackson, “Obama Defends Drone Strikes,” USA Today, last modified January 31, 2012, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/01/obama-defends-drone-strikes/1#.U6LRzvldXTo.

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13. Stovepiping involves the practice of sending up the chain-of-command only those select messages that will please, and reaffirm, the prior convictions of listeners farther up the chain-of-command. For other examples of stovepiping, see Seymour Hersh, “The Stovepipe,” New Yorker, October 27, 2003, 77–87; Gordon R. Mitchell, “Team B. Intelligence Coups,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 2 (May 2006): 144–173, DOI : 10.1080/00335630600817993. 14. The American military forces are aware of the importance of these debates. See, for example, Larry Lewis, Drone Strikes in Pakistan: Reasons to Access Civilian Casualties (Alexandria, VA: CAN Analysis & Solutions, 2014): James Igoe Walsh, “Precision Weapons, Civilian Casualties, and Support for the Use of Force,” Political Psychology (2014), DOI: 10.1111/pops.12175. 15. For an example deploying both technical and public arguments in their summary of RPA crew challenges, see Matthew Cox, “Air Force Criticized for Mismanaging Drone Program,” Military.com, last modified April 24, 2014, http:// www.military.com/daily-news/2014/04/24/air-force-criticized-for-mismanagingdrone-program.html 16. For typical examples of influential public commentaries on drones, see NOVA, “Rise of the Drones,” Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 2013, http://ecis2014.eu/Eposter/files/0829-file1.pdf. 17. For typical examples that are a part of this burgeoning work on drone crew stress, see Antony P. Tvarynas, “Human Systems Integration in Remotely Piloted Aircraft Operations,” Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine 77, no. 12 (December 2006): 1278–1282; Antony P. Tvaryanas and Glen D. Macpherson, “Fatigue in Pilots of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Before and After Shift Work Adjustment,” Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine 80, No. 5 (May 2009): 454–461; Joseph A. Ouma, Wayne L. Chappelle and Amber Salinas, Facets of Occupational Burnout Among U.S. Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Research MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, U.S. Air Force, 2011), file:///C:/Users/What/ Downloads/ADA548103%20(1).pdf. For an important critique that summarizes many of the findings from these studies and then provides Congress with guidance on what to do about the situations of RPA crews, see Government Accounting Office, GAO Report to Congressional Requesters, Air Force: Actions Needed to Strengthen Management of Unmanned Aerial Pilots (Washington, D.C.: Government Accountability Office, 2014). 18. This is not to say that some former RPA crew members don’t later have qualms about what they did. See Nicola Abé, “Dreams in Infrared: The Woes of an American Drone Operator,” Spiegel Online International, last modified December 14, 2012, http:// www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html. 19. For evidence of the growing material importance of RPA crews and systems, see Aaron Church, “RPA Strikes Still Rising,” Air Force Magazine, vol. 96, no. 3 (March 2013): 21. 20. Bradley T. Hoagland, Manning the Next Unmanned Air Force: Developing RPA Pilots of the Future (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 2013), 1. 21. Matt Sledge, “The Toll of 5 Years of Drone Strikes,” The Huffington Post, last modified January 23, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/23/obama-droneprogram-anniversary_n_4654825.html. 22. Alston and Shamsi, “A Killer Above the Law?” paragraph 1. 23. Jim Michaels, “Drones Change ‘Top Gun’ Culture of Air Force,” USA Today, last modified December 1, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/11/30/ drone-wars/1737991/. 24. Rebecca Maksel, “Drone Pilots Find It Hard to Balance Warfighting with Personal Lives,” Air & Space Magazine, April 19, 2014, http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/drone-pilots-find-it-difficult-balance-warfighting-their-personal-lives180951150/?no-ist. 25. Geoffrey Ingersoll, “’Voyeuristic Intimacy’ May Be Why Drone Pilots Get PTSD,” Business Insider, last modified October 23, 2013, http://www.

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businessinsider.com/voyeuristic-intimacy-may-be-why-drone-pilots-get-ptsd2013–10. 26. David Wood, “Obama Drone War ‘Kill Chain’ Imposes Heavy Burden at Home,” The Huffington Post, last modified May 5, 2013, paragraphs 1–4, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wood/obama-drone-war_b_3149660.html. 27. For a very different take on this UAV labor, see Peter M. Asaro, “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (2013): 196–224, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2013.777591. 28. Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of U.S. Drone Warfare,” Geopolitics 18, no. 3 (July 2013): 536–559. doi:/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241; Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, “The Drone Wars: Killing By Remote Control in Pakistan,” The Atlantic, October 27, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/ 2010/12/the-drone-wars/308304/; Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler, “Despite Administration Promises, Few Signs of Change in Drone Wars,” New York Times, last modified August 2, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/politics/drone-warrages-on-even-as-administration-talks-about-ending-it.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. One popular website for anti-drone research calls itself “Drone Wars UK.” See Chris Cole and Jim Wright, “What Are Drones?” Drone Wars UK, last modified January, 2010, http://dronewars.net/aboutdrone/. 29. Hoagland, Manning the Next, v. 30. Elijah Solomon Hurwitz, “Drone Pilots: ‘Overpaid, Underworked, and Bored,’” Mother Jones, June 18, 2013, paragraph 3, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/ 06/drone-pilots-reaper-photo-essay. 31. For more on lethal autonomous robots see Christof Heyns, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, United Nations General Assembly, April 9, 2013, A?HRC/23/47, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/ HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session23/A.HRC.23.47_EN.pdf; Human Rights Watch, Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2012). 32. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping The Military- Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 33. Leon Panetta, quoted in Gordon Lubold, “Medals for Drone Pilots? Hagel Faces Tough Choice,” Foreign Policy, January 27, 2014, paragraphs 2–3. 34. Ibid., paragraph 4. 35. Douglas Hunter, “Drone Medal Insult to Soldiers,” USA Today, last modified March 6, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/06/veterans-dronesdefense-column/1965909/. 36. Ibid., paragraphs 5–8. 37. Priscilla Kim, “Guest Post: The Humans Behind Remotely Piloted Aircraft,” Foreign Policy, December 11, 2013, paragraph 1, http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2013/12/11/ guest-post-the-humans-behind-remotely-piloted-aircraft/. 38. See Office of Management and Budget, Policy Options for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Washington, D.C. Office of Management and Budget, 2011). http:// www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/cbo-uas.pdf. 39. “Oz,” cited in Rob Blackhurst, “The Air Force Men Who Fly Drones in Afghanistan by Remote Control,” The Telegraph, last modified September 24, 2012, paragraph 52, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9552547/The-air-force-menwho-fly-drones-in-Afghanistan-by-remote-control.html. 40. For more detailed discussion of this supposed “PlayStation” mentality, see Chris Cole, Convenient Killing: Armed Drones and the “Playstation” Mentality (Oxford: The Fellowship of Reconciliation, 2010). 41. Philip Alson and Hina Shamsi, “A Killer Above the Law,” The Guardian, last modified February 8, 2010, paragraphs 9–10, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree /2010/feb/08/afghanistan-drones-defence-killing.

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42. Jean L. Otto and Bryant J. Webber, “Mental Health Diagnoses and Counseling Among Pilots of Remotely Piloted Aircraft in the United State Air Force,” Medical Surveillance Monthly Report 20, no. 3 (March 2013), 3. 43. Ibid., 3. For press commentary on the Otto and Webber study, see James Dao, “Drone Pilots are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do,” New York Times, last modified February 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/ drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html. 44. One of the first newspaper commentaries on this stress appeared in Scott Lindlaw, “Remote-Control Warriors Suffer War Stress,” Foxnews.com, last modified August 7, 2008. http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/2008Aug07/ 0,4675,RemoteWarStress,00.html. “The Air National Guardsmen who operate Predator drones over Iraq via remote control,” Lindlaw averred, “are suffering some of the same psychological stresses as their comrades on the battlefield.” Scott Lindlaw, “Remote-Control Warriors,” paragraph 1. 45. William Saletan, “Do Remote-Control War Pilots Get Combat Stress?” Slate, August 11, 2008, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/ 2008/08/ ghosts_in_the_machine.html. 46. See Philip Alston, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, United States General Assembly, May 28, 2010, A/HRC/14/24/Add.6, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/14session/A.HRC.14.24.A dd6.pdf; Charlie Savage, “U.N. Report Highly Critical of U.S. Drone Attacks,” New York Times, last modified June 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/world/ 03drones.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0. 47. Mary Ellen O’Connell, “Flying Blind,” America Magazine: The National Catholic Review, March 15, 2010, paragraph 2, http://americamagazine.org/issue/729/article/flying-blind. 48. Ibid., paragraphs 1–21. 49. Lt. Colonel Bruce Black, quoted in Keric D. Clanahan, “Wielding a ‘Very Long, People-Intensive Spear’: Inherently Governmental Functions and the Role of Contractors in U.S. Department of Defense Unmanned Aircraft Systems Missions,” Air Force Law Review 70 (2013): 119–202, 137. 50. David S. Cloud, “Civilian Contractors Playing Key Roles in U.S. Drone Operations,” Los Angeles Times, last modified December 29, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/ 2011/dec/29/world/la-fg-drones-civilians-20111230. 51. Anna Mulrine, “Warheads On Foreheads,” Air Force Magazine 91, no. 10 (October 2008),http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2008/October%20 2008/1008warheads.aspx. 52. See, for example, David Zucchino, “Stress of Combat Reaches Drone Crews,” Los Angeles Times, last modified March 18, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/ 18/nation/la-na-drone-stress-20120318. 53. Zucchino, “Stress of Combat,” paragraphs 1–5, 14–15. 54. Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (New York: Routledge, 2013), 193–194. 55. Derek Gregory, “Drones Militarized Visions and Civilian Casualties,” Geographical Imaginations, April 13, 2014, http://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/04/13/ drones-militarized-vision-and-civilian-casualties/. 56. Ian G. R. Shaw, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of U.S. Drone Warfare,” Geopolitics 18, No. 3 (2013): 536–559, doi .org/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241. 57. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 249. 58. John Kaag and Whitley Kaufman, “Military Frameworks: Technological KnowHow and the Legitimation of Warfare,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22, no. 4 (December 2009): 585–606, DOI:10.1080/09557570903325496. 59. Bradley Jay Strawser, “Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (December, 2010): 342–368, doi.org/ 10.1080/15027570.2010.536403.

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60. International Security Assistance Force News, “U.S. Releases Uruzgan Investigation Findings, ‘Afghanistan,’” ISAF News, last modified May 30, 2010; http:// www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-releases/u.s.-releases-uruzgan-investigation-findings.html; David S. Cloud, “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy,” Los Angeles Times, last modified April 10, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/10/world/la-fg-afghanistan-drone-20110410 61. Albert K. Almar, quoted in Law, “Remote-Control Warriors,” paragraph 4. 62. Law, “Remote-Control Warriors,” paragraph 9. 63. Lee, “Remoteness, Risk, and Aircrew Ethos,” 14. 64. Ibid., 14. 65. Ibid., 15. 66. Daily Mail Reporter, “There Was Good Reasons For Killing Those People, But I Go Through It in My Head Over and Over and Over,” The Daily Mail, last modified July 30, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2181222/Drone-pilots-say-intimate-view-Afghan-insurgents-firing-7-000-miles-away.html. 67. Colonel D. Scott Brenton, quoted in Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Day Job Waiting For a Kill Shot A World Way,” New York Times, last modified July 29, 2012, http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/drone-pilots-waiting-for-a-kill-shot-7000-milesaway.html?pagewanted=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0. 68. Lee, “Remoteness, Risk, and Aircrew Ethos,” 15. 69. Peter Singer, quoted in Celeste Headlee, “It’s Time to Recognize the Valor of Cyber Warriors,” National Public Radio, last modified February 19, 2013, http:// www.npr.org/2013/02/19/172412891/op-ed-its-time-to-recognize-the-valor-of-cyberwarfare. 70. Wood, “Obama Drone War,” paragraphs 5, 8. 71. Markus Christen, Michael Villano, Darcia Narvaez, Jesùs Serrano, and Charles R. Crowell, “Measuring The Moral Impact of Operating ‘Drones’ on Pilots in Combat,” Disaster Management and Surveillance, 2014, 2, http://ecis2014.eu/E-poster/files/0829file1.pdf. 72. Robert J. Vogel, “Droning On: Controversy Surrounding Drone Warfare is Not Really About Drones,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer, 2013): 9–10.

SEVEN Edward Snowden, Agent Provocateur, and Overreactions of the NSA

On May 20, 2013, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contract worker by the name of Edward Snowden boarded a flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong. Although there are conflicting reports about how many secret programs he had accessed, at least a few newspapers reported that one of his flash drives contained some 200,000 top secret files that were taken from the NSA. 1 For the next several weeks, infuriated decision-makers in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom had to watch as mainstream newspapers in both countries provided readers with almost daily revelations about these nations’ surveillance programs. For example, transatlantic newspapers were reporting that the NSA had managed to collect the phone records of millions of Verizon customers, and revelations about the infamous “PRISM” surveillance program let audiences understand that the NSA had been accessing Google and Facebook servers for the purposes of collecting personal data. In theory, the NSA was using the Internet and cellular networks to spy on “non-Americans” and “Americans” who might be using the Internet or cellular networks to communicate with Al Qaeda or Taliban terrorists, but a firestorm of protests followed in the wake of these revelations because it looked as though the NSA had been unleashed to engage in all forms of spying and economic espionage. 2 To add insult to injury, and provide just one more example of the Kafkaesque securitized world that we described in chapter one, the Obama administration, as well as Congress, started reassuring the American public that they would go after the leakers. At first, before Snowden revealed his identity, no one was sure where the Washington Post or the United Kingdom’s Guardian were getting this 179

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information, but all of this changed in early June of 2013 when the Guardian finally told the world about the source of many of these leaks. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras provided this epic introduction to one of the most explosive of early twenty-first-century journalist commentaries: The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said. 3

For the next several years, Snowden would try to characterize himself as a patriot who was performing an act of civil disobedience, but he soon became a polarizing figure in a host of political, legal, technical, and social venues. Although Greenwald, MacAskill, and Poitras were convinced that Snowden would go down in journalistic history as “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning,” 4 over the course of the next several months, these writers—as well as lead editors for the Guardian—would soon learn that defenders of national security states can offer up other, competing contextualizations of Snowden’s revelations. Government officials in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom went on the offensive and started circulating narratives that treated Snowden as if he was an aider or abettor who hurt Coalition counterterrorism efforts. 5 At the same time, America’s commander-in-chief used one of the rhetorical strategies that we mentioned in chapter one—denial—to counter claims that Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras had uncovered a massive, and largely uncontrolled, national security apparatus. President Barack Obama told reporters during the summer of 2013 that the “American people don’t have a Big Brother who is snooping into their business.” 6 Just days after British readers learned about Snowden’s identity the United Kingdom’s foreign Secretary William Hague brushed aside accusations that his own nation’s intelligence-gathering service, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was acting as some sort of puppet for the NSA. 7 U.S. journalists, think tank experts, and representatives of America’s national security state started to defend the necessitous nature of their foreign spying. Using a variant of muscular rhetorics that would have

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warmed the hearts of many military orientalists, John Kerry told Chuck Todd and viewers of MSNBC that Snowden needed to leave the friendly confines of the Kremlin, “man up,” and “face the music.” Kerry, who was reacting to the recent interview that Snowden had given in front of NBC News anchor Brian Williams, was convinced that the bad timing of the Snowden “leaks” imperiled America’s national security. He elaborated on why he thought that the world’s terrorists now had access to parts of America’s wartime playbook: “More importantly, much more importantly, what he’s done is hurt his country . . . What he’s done to expose, for terrorists, a lot of mechanisms which now affect operational security of those terrorists and make it harder for the United States to break up plots, harder to protect our nation.” 8 Countries that viewed themselves as allies expressed either real or feigned outrage when their citizens heard that American intelligence officers were spying on representatives of foreign countries, some major U.S. technology companies, service providers, and anyone placing calls to locations that had been linked to terrorist activities. 9 Audiences around the world soon learned that the NSA had been gathering nearly 100 billion pieces of information from worldwide computer networks, 10 and the blowback snowballed to the point where many American security experts realized that they were in the middle of a public relations nightmare. Snowden and his defenders, in other words, are having to cope with a national security state that was built by many Anglo-Americans who all had a hand in co-producing the constitutive rhetorics about necessitous surveillance and spying that are deployed by members of the Obama administration or the NSA. While public opinion polls reveal that many Americans are conflicted when they hear about the disputes that are taking place between Snowden’s supporters and those who sympathize with the NSA, 11 there is no shortage of evidence that shows that many Americans believe that he should be punished for his transgressions. In this chapter, it will be our contention that these complexities are not usually reflected in the coverage of the “Snowden Files” that appears in mainstream press outlets in the U.S. When most journalists, security officials, decision-makers, or laypersons write about the Edward Snowden revelations, they have a tendency to fall into one of two major polarized camps. 12 On the one hand, those who are frustrated with traditional, mainstream journalism support dissident or alternative presses that treat Snowden as a heroic member of a reinvigorated Fourth Estate who risked all in the cause of transparency. On the other hand, readers who buy some of national securitization arguments defend mainstream journalists and characterize Snowden as a treasonous villain, a weak and narcissistic hacker who naively disclosed some of America’s most guarded national security secrets.

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Interestingly enough, as we note below, Snowden’s own revelations, and the reactions in the U.S. and UK, remind us that these surveillance issues involve deep materialist and structuralist problems that cannot be undone with cosmetic changes. Granted, the study of epic deeds, reviews of editors’ mass-mediated circulation of polarizing soundbytes about Snowden, or commentary on the viral spread of monolithic perspectives provide us with some partial insights into how various individual social agents think about leakers or whistleblowers, but we are convinced that readers need to be asked to do more than just choose sides and follow this side or that side’s truncated ways of characterizing Snowden. In other words, we need to see how all of this discourse about Snowden is circulating within more complex grids of intelligibility, and how various views about America’s national security state operated before, during, and after the 2013–2014 debates about his travels to Hong Kong or Russia. With this in mind, this chapter illustrates how various transatlantic audiences have reacted to the circulation of the Snowden Files, the publication of Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide, and Frontline’s popular documentary, United States of Secrets. What we wish to put on display is the depth and breadth of the communicative practices that not only helped build, but continue to buttress and maintain, an incredibly hegemonic surveillance state. We begin with a brief theoretical explanation for why readers need to be presented with broader, structuralistic, and materialist ways of conceptualizing national surveillance issues. WAR MACHINES, NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE, AND THE NEED FOR STRUCTURAL WAYS OF APPROACHING STUDIES OF THE NATIONAL SURVEILLANCE STATE As noted above, instead of thinking about the individuated impact of each of Snowden’s revelations, or the role that any one leaker may have played in some single whistleblowing campaign, we need to adopt a more materialist way of thinking about these structures that review both the macro- and micro-features of America’s surveillance state. In other words, we need to follow some of the patterns of argumentation that appear in these debates so that we can trace the flow of rhetorical influence as various journalists, security experts, White House decision-makers, or even milbloggers write and talk about Snowden’s efforts. As Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and many others have reminded us, power cannot be found in single pages of parchment or some hidden collection of state secrets, and we are skeptical when we come across either hagiographic accounts of Snowden’s deeds or vilifying summaries of his behavior.

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State apparatuses—especially war machines that are assembled for fighting a GWOT or overseas contingency operations—involve both physical and relational networks of contested governmental power, and Snowden was facing more than simply the misinterpretation or misapplication of some Constitutional principle or statutory provision. His faith in America’s “rule of law” is as endearing as it is problematic, because it creates the impression that if the majority of Americans simply had access to the knowledge that Snowden had about potential NSA or other governmental misdeeds, then they would demand reform. In other words, his own brand of American exceptionalism was as patriotic, and as reductionist, as the other brands of exceptionalism that were purveyed by those who believed he was a traitor. We contend that an approach that goes beyond individual social agency in the study of provocation would take into account these types of activities: • The refurbishment of old Sedition Laws that had been around since the time of the World War I “Red Scare” so that they discipline potential “leakers” • The multiple attempts at redefinition of the nature and scope of privacy rights in order to trivialize their constitutional and social importance in securitization contexts • The attacks on dissident journalists and the evisceration of the journalistic principles regarding the role of the mainstream press as the “Fourth estate” that guarded the people from state tyranny • The ubiquitous legal and public wordsmithing that was used by many Americans when they redefined the meaning of “whistleblower” in order to validate the passage of more restrictive Congressional laws or the circulation of executive orders • The magnification of the dangers of supposed cyberthreats (see chapter five) and the linking of these supposed dangers to the activities of individuals like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and Greenwald • The glorification of the role of NSA spies and U.S. spying so that both elites and publics around the world could see how maintaining secrecy was an art form practiced by American exceptionalists • The usage of Kafkaesque interpretations of executive, judicial, and legislative decisions, rules, memos, or other texts as a way of hiding from publics information about who had the primary responsibility for overseeing the NSA • The usage of strategic campaigns in order to have former NSA contractors, members of the CIA, or White House spokespersons appear as “the” experts who knew how to balance national security interests with individual Constitutional rights

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Whether they realized it or not, those who engaged in any of these activities in the debates about NSA surveillance helped co-produce examples of the very acts that Snowden and his supporters were complaining about in the first place. While there are a number of productive ways of studying these relational dynamics and complex rhetorical flows, we suggest that readers pay attention to the rhetorical landscapes that were formed in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations. This involves the investigation of how Edward Snowden acted as an agent provocateur, a representative figure who catalyzed the efforts of countless members of America’ national security state. The term “agent provocateur” (French for an inciting agent) refers to the way that some spy or hidden agent manages to entice another individual to commit some rash act that puts on display the illegal or problematic nature of that overreaction. We feel that this term aptly describes some key rhetorical features of these relational power dynamics because it has been the post-Snowden reactions of the Obama White House, the Pentagon, the many mainstream journalists, the members of the public, and America’s national security apparatus that highlight the willingness of so many to acquiesce in the loss of national and international rights in the name of securitization. In many ways, those who have responded to the journalistic coverage of Snowden’s revelations have called for restrictive countermeasures that were more problematic than the actions that were discussed in his document dumps. CONTEXTUALIZING THE RHETORICAL HISTORY BEHIND SNOWDEN’S DECISION-MAKING AND HIS TREATMENT OF THE MAINSTREAM PRESS Snowden has been described as a “precocious computer whiz” who caught the attention of the group that he calls “the overseers”—the CIA— before he became a systems administrator contractor to the National Security Agency. 13 For several years it appears that Snowden avoided making waves and that he believed in the righteousness of the of the NSA efforts, but, by October of 2012, he started telling some of his superiors at both the NSA’s Technology Directorate and the NSA’s Threat Operations Center in Hawaii about some of his misgivings. For example, he told the Washington Post that during one relational exchange with some 15 of his co-workers, he opened up a data query tool called “BOUNDLESSINFORMANT” and pointed out just how many different color-coded “heat maps” were used to put on visual display the massive volume of the material that was being “ingested by NSA taps.” 14 Snowden alleges that some of his co-workers were astonished to learn that the NSA was collecting more in the U.S. on Americans than they

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were on Russians in Russia, and by December of that year, Snowden started trying to contact reporters. Some four months would pass, and he continued to ask his colleagues what the American public would do “if this was on the front page,” and he considered his conversations with colleagues to be acts that illustrated that he had not, in fact, bypassed the internal checks that existed within NSA structures. 15 After handing over an unspecified number of files to individuals like Greenwald and organizations like the Guardian, Snowden decided that he had to leave the U.S., and the Chinese government allowed him flee to Hong Kong. Eventually Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, publicly talked about Snowden’s “honor” and granted him asylum, and all of this was taking place at a time when U.S. authorities were trying to serve him with three criminal complaints, including two that would be brought under America’s Espionage Act. Snowden was being accused of leaking information in May of 2013 about some top-secret National Security Agency programs that were designed specifically for the tracking of potential terrorist activity. 16 In many of the interviews that Snowden has conducted since the summer of 2013, he has adopted the subject position of an average, yet concerned American patriot who was forced to overcome personal fears and worries about apathy when he decided to blow the whistle on NSA overreaching. He was bothered by the violence that followed in the wake of drone attacks, the apparent lack of oversight of intelligence-gathering, and the nonchalance of superiors who asked him to avoid interfering in matters that were “political” and were none of his business. Isn’t it interesting that his feelings of powerless can be juxtaposed to the massive perception of power that is conveyed in the very nominalism of the materials that he handed over to Greenwald and others? Note how some of the internal briefing documents that he released reveled in the fact that their producers were living in the “Golden Age of Surveillance,” and they had brash names like MUSCULAR, TUMULT, and TURMOIL that “boasted of the agency’s prowess.” 17 Throughout the summer of 2013, both Snowden’s supporters and detractors weighed in, and there were elite and vernacular conversations about the prudence of his activities, the responsibilities of the presses that could have republished some of these leaks, and the legitimacy of the NSA’s positions on the collection of domestic and foreign metadata. As Ed Madison explains, by June of 2013, Snowden couldn’t help interjecting himself in some of the debates about his character, and his own selfassessment was that he was “neither traitor nor hero,” but “an American.” 18 After hearing complaints about his handing over of information to the South China Morning Post that revealed NSA hacking in Hong Kong and mainland China, Snowden played the role of cosmopolitan citizen and world denizen when he averred that he had “acted at great personal risk to help the public of the world.” He apparently

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wanted to underscore his ideological distance from the NSA’s focus on American interests and desires, and he remarked that he was helping any member of the “republic,” regardless of whether that person was “American, European, or Asian.” 19 In Snowden’s utopian world, the Internet was a sacred, scientific, and intellectual space that should be open to everyone, and the NSA was destroying this communal network. By December of 2013, Snowden had become an iconic figure, the darling of many alternative presses, and the NSA, “accustomed to watching without being watched,” faced scrutiny it had not “endur[ed] since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.” 20 Barton Gellman, a reporter for the Washington Post, argued that by this time, the “cascading effects have made themselves felt in Congress, the courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals.” 21 In Europe American allies gathered to consider how they might protect their privacy and take measures that would keep their data out of the hands of U.S. intelligence gatherers, and in the U.S. representatives from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google started private initiatives in the hopes that they could at least regulate, if not stop, the arbitrary governmental collection of all types of metadata. For both Snowden and his supporters, the neoliberal tales that were being circulated by Obama, the mainstream presses, and the NSA needed to fall on deaf ears. Snowden, during a video-link appearance at a music and technology festival that was held in Austin, Texas, in March of 2014, argued that the NSA and their supporters were “setting fire to the future of the internet.” Several months later, he openly expressed his support for the online “Reset the Net” privacy campaign, and he helped create the impression that only the “people” could secure their own constitutional rights. He elaborated by noting: One year ago, we learned that the internet is under surveillance, and our activities are being monitored to create permanent records of our private lives—no matter how innocent or ordinary those lives may be. Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the U.S. Congress fails to do the same. . . . Don’t ask for your privacy. Take it back. 22

At first glance, all of this is incredibly naïve, because it assumes that members of war machines want more transparency and that Americans want to prioritize privacy over security interests. However, Snowden was getting at some of the structural difficulties that come when arguers in these surveillance debates ask nation states to police themselves. GREENWALD’S NO PLACE TO HIDE In May 2014 Glenn Greenwald published his book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. The book had been much anticipated by supporters and critics alike for what it might reveal

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about Snowden and how Greenwald had come to be in contact with him. Readers were also interested in finding out if there were any new bombshells that Greenwald might drop about the NSA. It turned out that Greenwald’s book did both of those things. Yet it also it served other rhetorical purposes when it refuted Greenwald and Snowden’s critics, warned readers of the harms of mass surveillance, and criticized the state of institutional journalism in the United States. The book’s argumentative approach appears to be “case” driven and is very legalistic, which makes sense given Greenwald’s background as a lawyer. We can also make some sense of the book’s organization and style by recalling that Greenwald was a star debater for George Washington University as an undergraduate. 23 In fact, with the exception of the second chapter, the book is laid out like a debater’s policy brief, addressing the significance and harms of the U.S. surveillance state, as well as the reasons it has gone largely unchecked. But even the second chapter, which tells the story of making contact with Snowden, is written with an eye toward refuting critics of Snowden and Greenwald’s motives, credibility, and qualifications. Greenwald, for example, notes that Snowden had always planned on revealing his identity. After he had done so, however, the focus of media coverage shifted from the revelations of NSA mass surveillance to the motives, psychology, and credibility of Snowden, and Greenwald himself. 24 Thus, Greenwald’s retrospective storytelling of how he made initial contact with Snowden takes pains to respond to Snowden’s critics. In response to suggestions that Snowden, like the WikiLeaks leaker, Private Chelsea Manning, had irresponsibly dumped thousands of top secret documents he had not actually reviewed, Greenwald noted that Snowden reviewed all the documents that he had disclosed, and evidence for this claim could be found in Snowden’s “elegantly organized structure.” 25 Greenwald rebutted the idea that Snowden was crazy or naïve by pointing out that Snowden was “highly rational,” “highly politically astute,” and showed no signs of being “emotionally unstable” or “suffering from psychological afflictions.” If anything, he thought readers needed to pay attention to Snowden’s “stability and focus,” which Greenwald said “instilled confidence.” 26 Finally, to the charge that Snowden was merely “a simple-minded, low-level IT guy” who could not possibly have had access to or understanding of the documents he had leaked, Greenwald argued that just the opposite was true. Snowden was no mere systems administrator. Instead, the U.S. intelligence community had turned him into a highly skilled hacker, the kind of cyber warrior that officials were fond of warning the U.S. possessed too few of. Having been trained in the fine art of offensive cyber warfare to be carried out against others, Snowden had instead used his skills to reveal NSA’s secrets for mass surveillance and its plans to turn the Internet into a battlefield. 27

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Though Greenwald devotes an entire chapter to criticizing America’s institutional journalism, he uses his book on Snowden as a rhetorical vehicle for answering the claimants of his detractors. For example, Greenwald notes that he had already received a small sampling of NSA documents from Snowden before traveling to Hong Kong in May 2013 and that his fellow reporter, Laura Poitras, was already in possession of the entire Snowden archive before the two of them ever left for Hong Kong. 28 Though Greenwald does not make the point explicitly, the argumentative purpose of this revelation seems clear: to refute the idea that he and Poitras had flown to Hong Kong to receive “stolen goods” from Snowden. Rather, it signals that this trip was all about the journalistic due diligence of vetting one’s source. Had they been the irresponsible journalists or mere “bloggers” and “activists” that many accused them of being, they would not have traveled to Hong Kong at all. Similarly, some questioned Greenwald’s own qualifications to vet Snowden as a source. After all, he was merely a “blogger” and an “activist,” not a trained, professional journalist. And if Snowden was such a “highly politically astute” character as Greenwald had claimed, or even a Russian or Chinese spy as some officials were implying, then was it not possible that Snowden had hoodwinked this amateur reporter? Indeed, parts of Greenwald’s own account would seem to lend credibility to this possibility. He notes that the Snowden documents reveal efforts by the GCHQ, the UK’s equivalent of the NSA, to engage in online deception and infiltration of dissident groups. One such tactic would involve the use of “mirroring,” “accommodation,” or “mimicry,” which the document described as “adoption of specific social traits by the communicator from the other participant,” noting that this technique could be used to exploit the fact that “people make decisions for emotional reasons not rational ones.” 29 Indeed, Greenwald describes behaviors that fit that framing of this decision. Of Snowden’s initial emails, Greenwald writes: I instinctively recognized his political passion. I felt a kinship with our correspondent, with his worldview, and with the sense of urgency that was clearly consuming him. Over the past seven years, I had been driven by the same conviction, writing almost on a daily basis about the dangerous trends in US state secrecy, radical executive power theories, detention and surveillance abuses, militarism, and the assault on civil liberties. There is a particular tone and attitude that unites journalists, activists, and readers of mine, people who are equally alarmed by these trends. It would be difficult, I reasoned, for someone who did not truly believe and feel this alarm to replicate it so accurately, with such authenticity. 30

Greenwald notes that in another message, Snowden had used language that played “on a Thomas Jefferson quote from 1798 that I often cited in my writing,” further bolstering Snowden’s credibility in Greenwald’s

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eyes. 31 In short, Greenwald was convinced of Snowden’s authenticity and credibility because Snowden’s messages had mirrored or mimicked Greenwald’s own style and emotion. But Greenwald assures readers that intuition and emotion were not the only sources of his confidence. Sure, he might not have had the same experience as a long-time investigative reporter, having spent eight years as a self-described “political writer.” But even better than having experience as a reporter, Greenwald argues, was his time spent as a lawyer taking depositions of witnesses. “[T]hese were the aggressive tactics I used [on Snowden],” he said. “Without so much as a bathroom break or a snack, I spent five straight hours questioning him.” 32 Thus convinced of Snowden’s credibility, he, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian embarked on what Greenwald called “a journalistic version of shock and awe,” which entailed “churn[ing] out one huge story after the next, every day” for a week, “culminating with unveiling our source.” 33 Having defended Snowden and his own motives, credibility, and qualifications, Greenwald proceeds to repeat and elaborate upon the case against the U.S. surveillance state that he had been making for years before he came into contact with Snowden. Despite his years of warnings, Greenwald noted, “the underlying problems [of surveillance] have been festering for years, largely in the dark.” In early 2014, however, the revelations enabled by Snowden provided Greenwald an opportunity to make his case once again for “the menace of mass electronic surveillance and the value of privacy in the digital age,” this time in the context of “unprecedented worldwide interest” in such issues. 34 In chapters three through five of the book, he proceeded to do just that. In Chapter three, “Collect it All,” Greenwald addresses the issue of significance, laying out the scope of the problem by describing the near ubiquity of NSA surveillance. While some had dismissed NSA Director Keith Alexander’s use of the phrase “collect it all” as merely an offhand comment, Greenwald set out to prove that this phrase “defines the NSA’s aspiration, and it is a goal the NSA is increasingly closer to reaching.” 35 He notes that the targets of NSA surveillance go far beyond the prevention of terrorism to include the kind of economic espionage U.S. officials had denied conducting. 36 He implicitly countered charges that he naively found espionage against foreign leaders to be shocking by acknowledging that such espionage was not new, but argued instead that the agency’s efforts to conduct mass surveillance against populations of entire nations was, in fact, a frightening new development. 37 Though his prior reporting had revealed NSA attempts to undermine some of the security standards that protect Internet communications, the book provided the new revelation that the agency was also working to plant backdoors into the hardware that runs the Internet. 38 Indeed, he points to the NSA’s own fears as expressed in its leaked documents to highlight the fact that “collect it all” is indeed the agency’s motto. In response to one such docu-

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ment that identifies the “Internet” and various other communication technologies as “the threat today,” Greenwald writes, The Internet has long been heralded as an unprecedented instrument of democratization and liberalization, even emancipation. But in the eyes of the US government, this global network and other types of communications technology threaten to undermine American power. Viewed from this perspective, the NSA’s ambition to “collect it all” at last becomes coherent. It is vital that the NSA monitor all parts of the Internet and any other means of communication, so that none can escape US government control. Ultimately, beyond diplomatic manipulation and economic gain, a system of ubiquitous spying allows the United States to maintain its grip on the world. 39

The “collect it all” policies appeared to be arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable. Having established the scope of the problem, chapter four turns to “The Harm of Surveillance.” The chapter describes the negative impacts of surveillance based on an examination of philosophical, historical, and social scientific evidence. The chapter also serves to refute the arguments of those who have argued in favor of mass surveillance, which is that it is essential to preventing terrorism. 40 To this, Greenwald responds as one would expect a former debater to respond: by providing evidence that much of the NSA mass surveillance has nothing to do with preventing terrorism, 41 that mass surveillance has failed to prevent terrorism, 42 that the threat of terrorism does not justify mass surveillance, 43 and that mass surveillance actually makes it more difficult to prevent terrorism. 44 Greenwald made an implicit cost-benefit argument: not only had mass surveillance not solved the problem it was intended to address, it had made the problem worse and, in the process, turned the U.S. into the surveillance state dystopia about which he and others had warned. For decades, privacy advocates had used the words of Senator Frank Church to warn about the dangers of government surveillance. In 1975, and in the wake of a prior domestic surveillance scandal, Senator Church wrote, The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. . . . That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything— telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. 45

This quote is the epigraph that begins Greenwald’s book and the source of the book’s title. And, in chapter four, Greenwald concludes that “Church’s concern . . . is precisely what the NSA has done post-9/11.” 46 The ultimate harm of surveillance is that Senator Church’s fears have been realized.

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Finally, chapter five, “The Fourth Estate,” addresses the question of how and why we have gotten to this point, what has allowed the emergence of a surveillance state and prevented us from reigning in the abuses of power that it entails. Throughout the book, Greenwald points to the natural and inevitable excesses that will come from the powerful if they are not kept in check. 47 But in chapter five, he identifies those who he holds primarily responsible for failing to keep power in check: institutional, corporate journalism. As with his case against the national security state and mass surveillance, Greenwald had been a harsh critic of institutional journalism for many years. In particular, he had been critical of the news media’s coverage of the “war on terror.” 48 Initially, many of those institutional journalists had been critical or even dismissive of Greenwald’s reporting about the NSA, often referring to him as a mere “blogger” or “activist” instead of as a journalist. 49 At the heart of Greenwald’s criticism is the charge that journalists in the U.S. have failed to serve as watchdogs of power and have, instead, become subservient to it. Instead of working as an outside, adversarial, “fourth estate,” institutional journalism has become an outsourced public relations department for the government. But perhaps the biggest charge is that American journalists had not been honest about their bias. Not only had American journalists become spokespeople for the powerful, especially the national security state, they had done so under the false banner of “journalistic objectivity.” 50 But this, he argued, was not only a betrayal of journalism’s proud history, but also of American’s founding principles. While “the iconic reporter of the past was the definitive outsider” devoted to “oppos[ing] rather than serv[ing] power,” he wrote, corporate journalists “identify with institutional authority and are skilled at serving, not combating it.” 51 “From the United States’ founding,” he lamented, “the best and most consequential journalism frequently involved crusading reporters, advocacy, and devotion to battling injustice. The opinion-less, color-less, soul-less template of corporate journalism has drained the practice of its most worthy attributes, rendering establishment media inconsequential: a threat to nobody powerful, exactly as intended.” 52 Corporate journalism, he argued, stood the reasons for the First Amendment protection of a free press on its head. “Nobody needed the US Constitution to guarantee press freedom so that journalists could befriend, amplify, and glorify political leaders; the guarantee was necessary so that journalists could do the opposite.” Without the kind of journalism that needs protection because it works to “disprove the falsehoods that power invariably disseminates to protect itself,” he said, the kind of “abuse” he had been warning about from the national security state “is inevitable.” 53 The reception of Greenwald’s book was mixed and largely predictable. Former national security officials and champions of the national

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security state panned the book, as did those media outlets that had received the harshest criticism from Greenwald. Media outlets that had not been in Greenwald’s crosshairs directly or who had participated in the NSA reporting were more favorable, as was the technology press and even some conservative commentators of a more libertarian bent. Among the first group, the champions of the national security state, it was perhaps to be expected that Greenwald would not win any hearts or minds. Individuals of this ideological persuasion had long found Greenwald to be an insufferable thorn in their side, and the publication of his book did nothing to change that. For example, Benjamin Wittes, a cofounder of the Lawfare Blog, a production of the Brookings Institution where a collection of national security lawyers write about ways that the U.S. can mold and shape its laws to fight the “war on terrorism,” had little if anything good to say of Greenwald’s work, which he found “strangely paranoid” and “juvenile.” Indeed, most of his criticism was of Greenwald’s writing style and personality, which he described with terms such as “polemic,” “shrill,” “windy and didactic, full of breathless adjectives and hyperbole,” “self-congratulatory,” “self-satisfied,” and “predictable and altogether conspiratorial.” In the end, he found the book to be filled with “Greenwald’s tired themes” and “black and white worldview” mostly “aimed at rallying those who already agree with him, rather than persuading those who do not.” 54 Similarly, former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, writing for the Wall Street Journal, saw in the book evidence that Greenwald is a “paranoid” outsider who harbors “ridiculous” conspiracies and “apocalyptic vision[s]” of “global mind control.” 55 Those in the corporate media against whom Greenwald had leveled such withering criticism reacted in largely the same manner. Writing for the New York Times, which had long been a target of Greenwald’s, Michael Kinsley argued that Greenwald “come[s] across as so unpleasant,” “seems like a self-righteous sourpuss,” and aspires to be a Trotskyite, “ruthless revolutionary.” Kinsley goes on to describe Snowden as a “political romantic[] . . . with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial worldview of a precocious teenager.” Ultimately, he sides with host of NBC News’ Meet the Press, David Gregory, who had asked why Greenwald should not be arrested for his reporting, arguing that Greenwald had indeed broken the law and that the government should have the final word over what leaks the media can report. 56 Greenwald had also been very critical of the Washington Post. But, of course, this paper had also been a major player in reporting on the Snowden documents. Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that its review was slightly more positive, finding the book to be “important” and “illuminating.” Nonetheless, the review focused on Greenwald’s style, tone, and personality in its criticism, calling out his “hyperbolic and more-radicalthan-thou attitude,” reliance on “overstatement,” and “black and white”

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worldview. In the end, the reviewer for the Post finds the book to be wholly negative, focusing on criticism and “lobbing grenades” while offering “virtually nothing in the way of positive reforms.” 57 Even those reviews that were largely positive also tended to note Greenwald’s style, tone, or personality as criticisms. Even though the Los Angeles Times found the book to be “part of a necessary conversation about surveillance and privacy,” it nonetheless called Greenwald “selfaggrandizing” and “self-important.” 58 Sue Halpern of the New York Review of Books also acknowledged these tendencies in Greenwald’s writing but asked, “so what?” To her, reviews like Kinsley’s and others from “mainstream journalists” were “emblematic of the illiberal bluster that has moved the debate from the message . . . to the messenger, with personal attacks on Greenwald.” To Halpern, such criticisms were transparent: if Greenwald was a “sourpuss,” as Kinsley had claimed, then mainstream journalists like Kinsley were suffering a serious case of sour grapes. 59 Others were also positive, including perhaps the paragon of technology journalism, Wired, which ran a long, completely uncritical summary of Greenwald’s book. 60 Greenwald even received support from some commentators on the political right. For example, Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano praised Greenwald for his “Jeffersonian fidelity to the principles of human freedom.” 61 From a rhetorical perspective, our assessment of Greenwald’s book must also be mixed. On one hand, we share many of Greenwald’s concerns and have applauded as he has championed the cause of holding the national security state accountable for its abuses of power. And yet, precisely because we share his concerns and hope for his success, we must not ignore the failings of his work as a persuasive text. His unyielding and argumentative style, though refreshing at times, demonstrates an implicit but problematic belief in the power of reason and evidence to win the day. On the one hand, it is exciting and inspiring as it seemingly elevates an American political discourse that often lacks substance or a true clash of ideas. On the other, Greenwald’s direct, confrontational style can be a turn-off to many audiences, as is reflected in many of the reviews of his book that find him arrogant and self-important. Audiences are not only, or perhaps even primarily, moved by evidence and reason, but also by emotion and their assessment of the speaker’s character, a fact that seems to have been overlooked by the former debater and lawyer. But even from a debate perspective, there are failings in Greenwald’s book. As a case that calls for change to American national security and surveillance practices, the Post’s review is correct: Greenwald’s case is incomplete. There are few solutions offered and no evidence provided that they would work. This silence, when it comes to proposing solutions, invites precisely the Post’s criticism, that Greenwald is merely “lobbing

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grenades,” that he has no positive vision or agenda. It is a common criticism of “ruthless revolutionaries.” Though we, too, long for a truly adversarial media and respect for constitutional protections on privacy and the press, we must acknowledge that Greenwald does exhibit the kind of black- and white-thinking that critics have identified, as well as a tendency toward deterministic thinking and nostalgic longings. We see these tendencies when he sets up clear distinctions between public and private, elites and dissenters, transparency and secrecy, good and evil. In the end, Greenwald’s critics are correct that there is not much that is new in his arguments and that the book was unlikely to persuade anyone who was not already convinced. To be fair, Greenwald himself acknowledges that his book represents a new opportunity to present the case he had been making for years. What’s more, he has noted that the response of elites and their allies in the media has always been to engage in ad hominem attacks against those who expose government secrets and abuses of power. That individuals in the national security community and mainstream journalism responded in exactly that way to his book could be seen as a kind of success all its own. He may not have convinced them that he is right, but he did entice many of them to respond in a way that demonstrated to everyone else in the audience that he was right. FRONTLINE’S “THE UNITED STATES OF SECRETS” PBS’s Frontline documentary, The United States of Secrets emerged as a two-part documentary that offered a more nuanced and complex understanding of the variety of events that led up to the massive Snowden leak. 62 As we stated earlier, there are a “variety of voices” that participate in any government and governmental decision, 63 and both installments of the documentary attempt to show multiple voices from both sides of the debate. Reviewing the documentary, Nate Genzlinger of the New York Times explained, Often, in these types of documentaries, there are a right side and a wrong side, and the program consists of the right-siders describing what happened while the wrong-siders refuse to be interviewed. But here there are relatively extensive and forthright interviews with some of the pivotal people who expanded the National Security Agency’s reach after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and with the people who raised red flags about those actions. “Right” and “wrong” in this arena are still very much an open question. 64

Indeed, director Michael Kirk was able to interview those on the side of government secrecy and those on the side of governmental transparency in order to show the difficult tension that governmental officials as well as U.S. citizens struggle with when desiring both security and freedom.

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The first part of the documentary is about two hours in length. Titled “The Program,” it aired on May 13, 2014, and it details how the surveillance operation emerged after 9/11. In the wake of the 9/11 emergency, government officials in the White House and NSA quickly moved to implement a surveillance system that no longer only focused on foreign targets, but turned into a “domestic dragnet.” 65 The documentary focuses on the numerous people involved, from NSA whistleblowers, to uninformed lawmakers, to high-ranking officials in the NSA and the White House. Ultimately, the first part of the documentary set up the rhetorical and historical contexts that would lead up to the Edward Snowden data leak and revelations. The second part of the documentary, titled “Privacy Lost,” was just under an hour long and aired on May 20. It was labeled “more alarming and disturbing than last week’s two-hour introduction” by journalist Lance Dickie, 66 and it detailed the secret relationship that existed between the NSA and the tech companies in the Silicon Valley who were in many ways complicit with the NSA’s goal of gathering personal data from U.S. citizens. 67 Various reviewers have described the documentary as “stunning,” 68 thorough, 69 (deeply) disturbing, 70 and a must-watch. 71 Because of its juxtapositioning of interviews with state officials who explain the need for such spying with interviews of whistleblowers and others who believe that the type of spying is a major constitutional violation, the film achieves an admirable amount of complexity and candidness. 72 Journalist Paul Szoldra praised the two-part documentary for “featuring interviews with a remarkable amount of the key players.” 73 This PBS show underscores the point that it is not one person, or one political party, that led to the current state of surveillance—both the Bush and Obama administrations signed off on it 74 —but rather focuses on the “story of the lies, the madness and the attacks that its creation occasioned.” 75 This situates the rise of the national security state as a reaction of 9/11 traumas. This particular documentary has been called the most complete picture available that documents the rhetorical context leading up to Edward Snowden’s leaks. As director Kirk explained, “This is as close to the complete picture as anyone has yet put together—and it’s bigger and more pervasive than we thought.” 76 Ultimately, our interest in this documentary is not only how complete and complex it is, but how it details the various actors in the rhetorical contexts that led up to the current national security state of surveillance. The NSA was created in the wake of the attacks on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Some twenty years later, during the Nixon years, Congress caught the NSA conducting domestic spying, and American legislators severely restricted their actions. The NSA could no longer wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant, yet by 2014, things had changed when it was

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discovered that domestic spying was happening without warrants in a manner “as casually as ordering a latte.” 77 The main impetus for this change, many argue in the documentary, was the 9/11 attacks. As Michael Hayden, the NSA director during the George W. Bush administration, explained in the two-part installment, his agency, which was created specifically to foresee and prevent surprise attacks, discovered the attacks through reports on television the morning of September 11, 2001, not through any of their own research data. As New York Times journalist Peter Baker explained, it was argued that the main reason that the 9/11 attacks were not prevented by the NSA was because the NSA was “fighting with one hand tied behind its back out of fear of a political backlash by being too aggressive.” 78 Ultimately, the lack of knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and the extreme surprise they were to the intelligence community served as a justification to many for “stretching the parameters of what was permissible” when it came to surveillance and national security. 79 As journalist Lowry further elaborated, “times of great fear are not conducive to establishing policy.” 80 Yet that is exactly what happened. As journalist and Frontline reporter Barton Gellman recounts, Vice President Dick Cheney immediately began to look for ways to circumvent the ban on domestic spying without warrants in order to prevent a replay of the 9/11 attacks. 81 Soon, the question no longer focused on what could be done within the current parameters, but rather, what President Bush asked NSA director Michael Hayden: “What would you like to do that you can’t already do that would help prevent another 9/11?” After his meeting with the president and vice president Hayden talked with his wife about the legality of what the NSA would do. As he described it, And she said, “What’s on your mind?” I said, “Well, we’re going to go do something here.” And I didn’t get into any details. “We’re going to do something. One day, it’s going to be public. And when it gets public, it’s going to be very controversial. And the people doing it are going to be swept into this thing.” And she said, “Uh-huh. Is it the right thing to do?” “Yeah, I think so.” She said, “OK, we’ll deal with that when it comes.” 82

The documentary displays Hayden’s hesitancy, and the audience understands the blurred nature of existential threats, and the difficulty of balancing the tension between national security and individual freedoms. A statement by the former Attorney General during the Bush administration, Alberto Gonzales, makes this tension even clearer. As he explained, “We have to remember that, you know, we’d had—we had had terrorists living in this country for a number of months and we didn’t know about it. What else didn’t we know? And so there was a great deal of concern about the fact that—that we not only could not connect the dots, we could not collect the dots.” 83 Therefore, despite concerns over the legality, “The Program” was signed on October 4, 2001, and the NSA

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was allowed to secretly conduct domestic surveillance without warrants in the name of keeping American citizens safe. Dozens of NSA employees were sworn to secrecy. 84 The United States of Secrets interviews served to show that, although Snowden himself was only contracted to work with the NSA for a few years before he leaked classified documents, his actions could not be attributed to a naïve, overly ambitious young employee, but were in line with other “NSA employees and security experts—people who spent their professional lives in and around state secrets—who were shocked and appalled by what they saw their government doing.” 85 For example, the documentary highlights and interviews former NSA executive Thomas Drake (2001–08), former NSA Senior Analyst J. Kirk Wiebe (1975–2001), former NSA Technical Director William Binney (1965–2001), former NSA crypologist Edward Loomis (1964–2001), House Intelligence Committee Staff Diane Roark (1985–2002), Department of Justice Attorney Thomas Tamm (1998–2006), and Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith (2003–2004). These interviewees discussed how they tried to reach out to their supervisors, the NSA, and/or someone in Congress. Each person was ignored or avoided. In some cases they were warned that the blood of everyone who died in the next attack would be on their heads. 86 These stories came to a head in the first part of the documentary, when, in the summer of 2007 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time, the FBI showed up at the homes of Wiebe, Binney, Loomis, and Roark. Wiebe emerged from the shower to FBI agents pointing a gun at his head, and Roark and the others watched as the FBI raided their homes, all of their papers, books, drawers, mattresses, and computers looking for documentation that one or all of them had leaked classified NSA information to the press. In reality, Drake was the leak, although he had only leaked unclassified documents. Six months after the FBI raided the other four’s homes, the FBI visited Drake. In the course of the investigation, the unclassified documents he had leaked were suddenly considered classified, and he was facing an uphill battle of Kafkaesque proportions. The documentary notes that Edward Snowden studied the whistleblowers that had gone before him, and, as Barton Gellman noted, “he’d learned from Drake and Binney is that you can be discredited or people won’t know whether to believe you if you don’t have proof. And it was because of that that he decided it had to be documents, and it had to be a lot of documents.” 87 Snowden’s security breach by leaking the documents was situated as both heroic and villainous. For example, Barton Gellman sides with Snowden. He had the last word in the two-part documentary and argued that U.S. citizens are now living behind one-way mirrors, where the government can watch us and hold us accountable, but we cannot do the same, despite the revelations by Snowden. Yet, those charged with national security and preventing the next 9/11-sized terrorist attack, like

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Michael Hayden, see Snowden’s actions as wrong. Indeed, Hayden believes people like Snowden are quite fickle when criticizing the NSA’s methods of surveillance, explaining, “American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel in danger. And as soon as we’ve made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we’re doing too much.” 88 Hayden’s rhetoric attempts to shift the problem from the massive amount of surveillance being conducted by the U.S. government to the seemingly uninformed and naïve decision-making by the larger American public. Ultimately, the documentary might be best summed up by Richard Clarke, who was part of the NSA Review Group in 2013. Clark warned that “our concern is about what happens after the next 9/11. In that moment of national panic after a traumatic attack on the United States, will we again throw out civil liberties? Will we again empower the government to erode a little bit of the Constitution?” 89 In other words, the government needs to be sure that these are the best measures to take— both in terms of security and freedom—and that this massive amount of surveillance could not someday backfire and be used against not only U.S. citizens, but also the government. PUBLIC DEFENSES OF ANGLO-AMERICAN SURVEILLANCE STATES AND THE OVERREACTIONS OF U.S. GOVERNMENTAL COMMUNITIES As noted above, many of the daily leaks that were reported during June of 2014 embarrassed many members of the U.S. State Department as well as NSA personnel. Audiences around the world were learning that the NSA had conducted surveillance of European offices in the United States and Brussels, and some of the Snowden revelations documented the spying that was taking place in the embassies of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. However, as many lawyers like to say, embarrassment is not a sufficient legal rationale for the restriction of speech or press freedoms. In order to help legitimate the crackdown on “leakers,” neoliberals had to craft metanarratives that talked about the “transparency” 90 of the Obama administration while they magnified the consequential dangers that supposedly followed in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations. Real patriots, “whistleblowers,” were the ones who reported potential legal violations to their superiors and this theoretically went up the chain-of-command, while “leakers” were transgressors who didn’t bother to follow their nation’s “rule of law.” Snowden’s critics often contend that he was the one who actually violated his own nation’s domestic laws, because he took an oath that he would “defend the Constitution against all enemies,

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foreign and domestic,” when he signed on with both the CIA and the NSA. As a precondition for his security clearance, he had to promise that he wouldn’t divulge state secrets, and that he would not do anything that would hurt the United States. Snowden’s travelling to Hong Kong and then Russia only fed into American exceptionalist Cold War narratives that viewed these places as communist, totalitarian locales that knew nothing about the true tenets of democratic thinking. In theory, all major American governmental bodies have departments that help with legal policing or moral self-correction—for example, note the statutory provisions and the principles that helped with the formation of the Office of Inspector General, the NCIS, or the Office of Legal Counsel for the executive branch. The very existence of these entities is supposed to provide positive proof that patriot citizens—even skeptics— can turn to relatively independent regulatory departments that help with accountability. During the fall of 2013, for example, President Obama implied in one of his speeches that Snowden had jumped the gun and that he had interfered with the president’s own executive plans for curbing governmental surveillance problems. “I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Snowden made these leaks,” argued the nation’s commander-in-chief. 91 At the same time that Obama outlined his own series of steps that supposedly helped with reformation he made this assertion: “My preference—and I think the American people’s preference—would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws; a thoughtful, fact-based debate.” 92 He of course did not elaborate on who would be collecting these facts, who would be involved in this debate, and how any of this would have helped with the revelation of his own administration’s tolerance of NSA metadata surveillance. Other members of Obama’s White House averred that they were always working on protecting the personal privacy of American citizens, and that the public didn’t always know about these efforts because of all the media attention focusing on drones or Guantánamo detainees. At the same time that Obama administrators complained about Snowden’s recklessness, members of America’s intelligence community took advantage of the situation and started to argue that NSA efforts had prevented other potential 9/11s. Just a few days after Greenwald and the Guardian disclosed Snowden’s identity as “the leaker,” NSA director Keith Alexander argued during a cybersecurity conference that the massive data collection program had thwarted a total of 54 terrorist plots. 93 In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Alexander did his best to explain how the NSA’s intelligence mosaics were helping atone for the lapses that once led to the horrors of the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers: The intel community failed to connect the dots in 9/11. And much of what we’ve done since then were to give us the capabilities—and this is

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Chapter 7 the business record FISA, what’s sometimes called Section 215 and the FAA 702—two capabilities that help us connect the dots. The reason I bring that up is that these are two of the most important things from my perspective that helps us understand what terrorists are trying to do. And if you think about that, what Snowden has revealed has caused irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies. When . . . we pushed [sic] a Congress over 50 cases where these contributed to the understanding and, in many cases, disruptions of terrorist plots. And I brought with me a quote. . . . This is a report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2012 in support of the reauthorization of the 2008 amendments to FISA, and I quote, “Through four years of oversight, the committee has not identified a single case in which a government official engaged in willful effort to circumvent or violate the law.” 94

Alexander thus echoed the Obama administration’ claims that American decision-makers had found the right way to protect the nation while at the same time preserving the “rule of law.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was speaking at a Center For Security Policy dinner at Union State in Washington, exclaimed that if previous administrations had had these surveillance powers, then they could have tracked two key terrorists hijackers in San Diego and “might well have been able to prevent 9/11.” 95 Assertions were turned into facts as insecure Americans were told of how Snowden was aiding and abetting those who threatened the Homeland. Empirical claims regarding causation were mingled with normative claims about patriotic behavior, and Snowden became a condensation symbol for all of the dissenters who theoretically did not understand the real operational value of the NSA, the contractors, and the others who worked for the nation’s surveillance state. Even in situations where members of the NSA were forced to concede that they didn’t always believe that the collection of massive metadata could be empirically linked to the thwarting of specific terrorist plots, they still managed to find ways of defending international and domestic data collection. John Inglis, for example, the out-going deputy director of the CIA, conceded during a National Public Radio interview that he thought that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by the NSA’s bulk collection of American phone data—a case that involved a money transfer from four men to alShabaab in Somalia. However, Inglis went on to argue that in spite of this lack of evidence, the NSA bulk collection needed to be thought of as a necessitous “insurance policy” that covered seams. 96 Even this small concession was overshadowed by the countless journalistic accounts that recirculated Alexander’s claims about the thwarting of dozens of attacks. At the same time that the NSA advocates circulated self-serving arguments that magnified the role of surveillance in deterring terrorism, they vilified Snowden and treated him as pariah who aided foreign enemies.

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Michael Hayden argued that the word “defector” seemed to be an apt way of characterizing Snowden, because “[t]raitor is narrowly defined in the Constitution.” “We used to have a world for somebody who stole our secrets,” Hayden explained, and “it wasn’t a whistleblower; it was a defector.” 97 Given all of the neo-liberal commentary that has circulated over the years about the vaunted “balance of powers,” and the role of the judiciary in checking Congressional or executive overreach, one might think that Snowden or his supporters might get some sympathy from members of America’s judicial branch. Unfortunately for Mr. Snowden, these jurists, and the lawyers who write essays about the balancing of constitutional rights and state interests, have no shortage of ways of rationalizing why the NSA needs to be provided with even more powers. Since attacks of September 11, 2001, the vast majority of American jurists had implicitly or explicitly condoned the NSA’s gathering of controversial materials in the name of national security, 98 but Federal Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, shocked many observers when he handed down a decision in a lawsuit that was initiated by Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch. When the legal representatives of the government tried to argue that a 1979 case by the name of Smith v. Maryland set a judicial precedent for the collection of massive data from members of the American public, Leon wrote that the “almost-Orwellian technology” that was being used in 2013 to store and analyze data on hundreds of millions of people for a five-year period was, “at best, in 1979, the stuff of science fiction.” 99 For the first time during the GWOT, a U.S. public court had determined that the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata on Americans’ phone calls probably violated portions of the U.S. Constitution, and Judge Leon had little trouble arguing that “present-day circumstances” looked nothing like the legal and cultural landscape that existed back in 1979. 100 However, on December 27, 2013, federal district judge William Pauley III ruled that the NSA’s collection of phone data was legal. Judge Leon’s opinions would be cited by radical and liberal Snowden defenders who wanted to highlight the Kafkaesque features of America’s security apparatus, but it would be the federal court opinions that defended the legality of the NSA’s activities that resonated with most lawyers and members of the American judiciary. CONCLUSION In this particular chapter we have provided readers with a structuralist/ materialist reading that gives them a taste of the rhetorical cultural that we believe demonstrates the ways that reactions to the Snowden controversy have unintentionally put on display the very power of surveillance

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states that some of the leakers were talking about in the first place. By reviewing the context behind the circulation of the Snowden Files, and by analyzing some of the textual and visual arguments that were presented by Greenwald’s No Place to Hide and Frontline’s United States of Secrets, we get a sense of the types of claims that provoked so many members of America’s national security state. The American forensic architecture that is put in place to protect potential whistleblowers only serves to protect patriots who have mild complaints about the national security state that look nothing like the massive data dumps that were collected in the Snowden Files. Members of the Obama administration, or defenders of the NSA, may act as if Snowden always had the option of “legally” handing over his complaints and his files to concerned superiors who were interested in discovering and reporting governmental wrongdoing, but all of that is even more naïve than Snowden’s belief that the American public may value privacy over the NSA having a free hand in “collecting all” potentially relevant metadata. Legal formalists, constitutionalists, and others may want to harp on the avenues that Snowden did not pursue, but our structuralist study of various discourses that circulated in several venues illustrates the many realistic hurdles that are placed in the paths of individuals like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, or Edward Snowden. Our analysis of relevant documentaries also shows that they were not the first whistleblowers who were threatened for their parrhesia. Obviously, given the counterfactual nature of some inquiries that involve speculation about whether Snowden’s superiors would see the same type of potential war crimes when they viewed pictures of drone strikes or other problematic behavior, it is easy to make post hoc claims that Snowden should trust his own country’s national security state. Those who argue that Snowden should have followed the lead of Joseph Darby—the individual who let military investigators know about the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs—often fail to mention that the Schlesinger Report found that there was “no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities.” 101 Moreover, for several years the Obama administration fought valiantly in the courts to make sure that the Abu Ghraib photographs would not see the light of day, and until Salon’s publication of those images the official position was that the circulation of these images would hurt Coalition wartime efforts. Chelsea Manning’s imprisonment speaks volumes about what happens when vaunted freedom of expression theories regarding whistleblowing are put into actual practice. There is a reason why milbloggers and others enjoy writing about how the CIA or some other organization is still pursuing Snowden. There is some evidence that Snowden, in spite of some of his avowed optimism, may have understood at least some of the rhetorical hurdles

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that were placed in his path by so many members of America’s national security state. In an interview that took place in Moscow in December of 2013, Barton Gellman of the Washington Post had this to say about Snowden’s apparent state of mind: Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate. Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories. 102

That someone, of course, had to be Snowden. In sum, we believe that Snowden has little reason to believe that members of the American federal judiciary would characterize him as patriot who provided public service, and his caution is warranted. Note, for example, that even when judges working on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts are willing to acknowledge any “improper reading” of U.S. mail or spying on American residents, these jurists identify only a tiny number of problematic errors, and they often claim that they don’t have the jurisdiction to interfere in a matter that should be handled by the president or Congress. No wonder that legal experts who support this deference don’t hesitate to claim that there is “no evidence that anyone in the U.S. has suffered injustice or discrimination as a result of their emails having been read.” 103 Note how this looks nothing like empirical claims that are made about “evidence” regarding the Snowden revelations. As we noted in chapter one, there is no doubt that in many ways the U.S. governmental and public reactions to the activities of Edward Snowden have their unique cultural, political, and social features that have much to tell us about what Americans think about national security states and the GWOT. As Stuart Taylor, Jr., would write for the Brookings Institute in April of 2014, when “Edward Snowden hit the send button on a laptop in Hong Kong last June, just shy of his 30th birthday, he became the poster boy for an acutely American conundrum: the tension between the government’s constitutional commitment to privacy and its responsibility for the safety of the nation.” 104 However, recognizing this tension and doing something to “take back” our privacy are two different things. Throughout 2013 and 2014, both defenders and detractors of Snowden often treated journalistic commentary on his activities as a time to assess the role that the National Security Agency should play as it gathered massive amounts of metadata in the name of national necessities. How-

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ever, as Harvard’s David Pozen has recently observed, what many commentators on these issues end up doing is “relying on discrete case studies and high-level constitutional theory to identify relevant values, precedents, and tradeoffs,” but along the way they miss the “patterns and practices of leaking or enforcement,” or they fail to take into account the “functional and strategic dimension of the leak-law regime.” 105 Hopefully, in a small way, this chapter has helped rectify this situation by illustrating the pervasive nature of the rhetorical support that exists for America’s surveillance state. NOTES 1. See, for example, Anthony Cuthbertson, “Edward Snowden: A Year of Leaks and Revelations,” International Business Times, last modified June 6, 2014, http:// www.ibtimes.co.uk/edward-snowden-year-leaks-revelations-1451468. 2. For one of the best overall summaries of some of the perceived impacts of the Snowden revelations, see Sue Halpern, “Partial Disclosure,” New York Review of Books, accessed July 10, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/glenngreenwald-partial-disclosure/. 3. Edward Snowden, quoted in Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Revelations,” The Guardian, last modified June 9, 2013, paragraph 1, http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance. 4. Greenwald, MacAskill, and Poitras, “Edward Snowden,” paragraph 2. 5. For some fine overviews of Snowden’s activities and governmental reactions to these efforts, see Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (New York: Vintage, 2014); Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). 6. Barack Obama, quoted in Peter Baker, “After the Leaks, Obama Leads Damage Control Effort,” New York Times, Last Ratified June 28, 2013, paragraph 2. 7. Cuthbertson, “Edward Snowden,” paragraphs 6–7. 8. John Kerry, quoted in Jonathan Topaz, “John Kerry: Edward Snowden a Coward . . . Traitor,” Politico.com, last modified May 28, 2014, paragraph 6, http:// www.politico.com/story/2014/05/edward-snowden-coward-john-kerry-msnbc-interview-nsa-107157.html. 9. Nigel Inkster, “The Snowden Revelations: Myths and Misapprehensions,” Survival 56, no. 1 (2014): 51, DOI : 10.1080/00396338.2014.882151. 10. Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, “Boundless Informant: The NSA’s Secret Tool to Track Global Surveillance Data,” The Guardian, last modified June 11, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining. 11. For example, Ed Madison, who took up the question of whether the electronic media told a consistent “narrative” about Snowden, concluding in early 2014 that public opinion polls seemed to indicate a “shift in public opinion.” Ed Madison, “News Narratives Classified Secrets, Privacy and Edward Snowden.” Electronic News, 8 (2014), 73. In mid-June, during a period when coverage spiked in the aftermath of the Guardian stories on Snowden and the surveillance revelations, a Time Magazine poll seemed to indicate—by a margin of 54 percent to 30 percent—that Snowden had done a “good thing” for his country. However, a different CNN/ Opinion Research Poll also showed that 52 percent of Americans disapproved of what he had done, and a majority in a Pew Poll guessed that he would be prosecuted. Madison, “News Narratives,” 73; Aaron Blake, “The PR Battle Over Edward Snowden,” Washington Post, last mod-

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ified June 7, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/06/17/thepr-battle-over-edward-snowden-in-two-polls/; and Pew Research Center for the People & The Press, “Public Split Over Impact of NSA Leak, But Most Want Snowden Prosecuted,” Pew Research Center, last modified June 17, 2013, http://www.peoplepress.org/2013/06/17/public-split-over-impact-of-nsa-leak-but-most-want-snowdenprosecuted/. 12. Snowden’s detractors and supporters tend to magnify Edward Snowden’s social agency, and these polarizing commentaries ironically share the common neoliberal assumption that it was the archival content of Snowden’s revelatory materials that rendered visible the secrecy and power of the NSA’s operations. In other words, there must be some massive, almost metaphysical, monolithic, mosaic of national security knowledge out there that Snowden managed to tap into. Both of these polarizing positions assume that archival documents contain dangerous information about national state secrets, and both advocate jurisprudence redress as a way of rectifying the situation. It is our contention that both of these neo-liberal approaches that focus on individual agency, miss the massive constitutive, structural, and functional problems that exist when most of the American public not only condones, but demands, that the NSA be granted expansive surveillance powers. 13. Taylor, “The Big Snoop,” paragraph 2. 14. Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months,” paragraph 42. 15. Ibid., paragraph 44–45. 16. Lindsey Boerma, “Edward Snowden: Traitor, Whistleblower or Defector?” CBS News, last modified August 12, 2013, paragraph 2. 17. Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months,” paragraph 54. 18. Edward Snowden, quoted in Ed Madison, “News Narratives,” Electronic News 8 (2014): 72. 19. Brooke Gladstone, “Is Snowden a Hero, Traitor, or Something Else?” On the Media [Podcast], last modified June 14, 2014, http://www.onthemedia.org/story/ 298988-snowden-hero-traitor-or-something-else/. 20. Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months,” paragraph 19. 21. Ibid., paragraph 20. 22. Edward Snowden, quoted at Revolution News Staff, “Reset the Net! Don’t Ask For Your Privacy. Take It back,” Revolution News! last modified June 4, 2014, http:// revolution-news.com/reset-net-dont-ask-privacy-take-back/. 23. Anuhya Bobba, “Glenn Greenwald, Whose Stories Shed Light on NSA Surveillance, Was Star Debater At GW,” The GW Hatchet, last modified January 26, 2014, accessed October 3, 2014, http://www.gwhatchet.com/2014/01/26/glenn-greenwaldwhose-stories-shed-light-on-nsa-surveillance-was-star-debater-at-gw/. 24. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), Kindle edition, 1555-59. 25. Ibid., 518–26. 26. Ibid., 541–545, 695–697. 27. Ibid., 759–72. 28. Ibid., 465–68. 29. Ibid., 2657–60. 30. Ibid., 236–42. 31. Ibid., 423–25. 32. Ibid., 682–90. 33. Ibid., 913–15. 34. Ibid., 41–43; See also Ibid., 331–36. 35. Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 1681-82. 36. Ibid., 2075–2076, 2082–2085, 2088. 37. Ibid., 2115–20. 38. Ibid., 2140–2143, 2158–2163. 39. Ibid., 2283–97. 40. Ibid., 2784–89.

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41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 2791–811. 43. Ibid., 2873–75. 44. Ibid., 2831–39. 45. Quoted in Ibid., 18–21 46. Ibid., 2773–76. 47. Ibid., 68–70, 83–84. 48. Glenn Greenwald, “Mike Mcconnell, the Washpost & the Dangers of Sleazy Corporatism,” Salon.com, March 29, 2010, accessed March 29, 2010, http:// www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/29/mcconnell; Glenn Greenwald, “New Study Documents Media’s Servitude to Government,” Salon.com, June 30, 2010, accessed June 30, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2010/06/30/media_258/; Glenn Greenwald, “Bill Keller’s Self-Defense on ‘Torture’,” Salon.com, 3 July 2010, accessed http://www.salon.com/2010/07/03/keller_2/. 49. Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 2947-50. 50. Ibid., 3281–95. 51. Ibid., 3314–23. 52. Ibid., 3281–95. 53. Ibid., 3278–81. 54. Benjamin Wittes, “Book Review: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State By Glenn Greenwald,” Lawfare Blog, May 26, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/05/no-place-to-hide-edwardsnowden-the-nsa-and-the-u-s-surveillance-state/. 55. Michael B. Mukasey, “Book Review: ‘No Place to Hide’ By Glenn Greenwald,” Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/ articles/SB10001424052702304547704579561830180485764. 56. Michael Kinsley, “Eyes Everywhere,” New York Times, May 22, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/books/review/no-place-to-hideby-glenn-greenwald.html?_r=0. 57. David Cole, “‘No Place to Hide’ By Glenn Greenwald, on the NSA’s Sweeping Efforts to ‘Know it All’,” Washington Post, May 12, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-place-to-hide-by-glenn-greenwald-onthe-nsas-sweeping-efforts-to-know-it-all/2014/05/12/dfa45dee-d628-11e3-8a788fe50322a72c_story.html. 58. David L. Ulin, “Review ‘No Place to Hide’ a Vital Discussion on Snowden’s Revelations,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http:// www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-glenn-greenwald-20140513-story.html#page=1. 59. Sue Halpern, “Partial Disclosure.” 60. Kim Zetter, “Glenn Greenwald’s Pulse-Pounding Tale of Breaking the Snowden Leaks,” Wired, May 13, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/ 05/greenwald-no-place-to-hide/. 61. Andrew P. Napolitano, “Glenn Greenwald’s New Book ‘No Place to Hide’ Tells How NSA Spies on US,” FoxNews.com, May 29, 2014, accessed October 7, 2014, http:// www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/05/29/glenn-greenwald-new-book-no-place-to-hidetells-how-nsa-spies-on-us/. 62. “PBS Frontline Documentary: United States of Secrets,” Media Roots, last modified May 30, 2014, http://www.mediaroots.org/pbs-frontline-united-states-of-secrets/. 63. Robert Lloyd, “Frontline Documentary Gets with NSA’s Spy ‘Program,’” Los Angeles Times, last modified May 13, 2014, para. 7, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-frontline-united-states-of-secrets-review-20140513-column.html. 64. Neil Genzlinger, “PBS’s ‘Frontline’ Looks at the Security Agency’s Reach,” The New York Times , May 12, 2014, accessed October 2, 2014 paragraph 2, http:// www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/arts/television/pbs-frontline-looks-at-the-securityagencys-reach.html.

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65. Paul Szoldra, “The Most Interesting Revelations From Frontline’s Powerful Exposé Of The National Security Agency,” Business Insider, May 20, 2014, accessed October 2, 2014 http://www.businessinsider.com/united-states-of-secrets-2014–5. 66. Lance Dickie, “PBS’s Frontline ‘United States of Secrets’ Reveals Disturbing NSA-Silicon Valley Links,” Seattle Times, May 21, 2014, accessed October 2, 2014 paragraph 1, http://blogs.seattletimes.com/opinionnw/2014/05/21/pbss-frontline-unitedstates-of-secrets-reveals-disturbing-nsa-silicon-valley-links/. 67. Szoldra, “The Most Interesting Revelations.” 68. “PBS Frontline Documentary,” paragraph 1. 69. Brian Lowry, “TV Review: Frontline’s ‘The United States of Secrets,’” Variety, May 11, 2014, accessed October 2, 2014 para. 1, http://variety.com/2014/tv/reviews/tvreview-frontlines-the-united-states-of-secrets-1201175707/. 70. “PBS Frontline Documentary”; Lance Dickie, “PBS Frontline’s ‘United States of Secrets’ Must Be Watched,” Seattle Times, May 15, 2014, accessed October 2, 2014 http:/ /blogs.seattletimes.com/opinionnw/2014/05/15/pbs-frontlines-united-states-of-secretsmust-be-watched/. 71. “PBS Frontline Documentary,” paragraph 1. 72. “PBS Frontline Documentary”; Lowry, “TV Review.” 73. Szoldra, “The Most Interesting Revelations.” 74. Lowry, “TV Review”; Lloyd, “Frontline Documentary Gets with NSA’s Spy ‘Program.’” 75. Lloyd, “Frontline Documentary Gets with NSA’s Spy ‘Program,’” paragraph 9. 76. Dickie, “PBS Frontline’s ‘United States of Secrets’ Must Be Watched”; Szoldra, “The Most Interesting Revelations.” 77. “‘United States of Secrets,’ TV Review,” New York Daily News, May 10, 2014, paragraph 2, http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/united-states-secrets-tvreview-article-1.1786363. 78. Michael Kirk, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program,” Frontline PBS, May 13, 2014, accessed October 1, 2014 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ united-states-of-secrets/. 79. Lowry, “TV Review,” paragraph 2. 80. Ibid., paragraph 7. 81. Kirk, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program”; Lowry, “TV Review.” 82. Kirk, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program.” 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Dickie, “PBS Frontline’s ‘United States of Secrets’ Must Be Watched,” paragraph 2. 86. Kirk, “United States of Secrets (Part One): The Program.” 87. Ibid. 88. Michael Kirk, “United States of Secrets (Part Two): Privacy Lost,” Frontline PBS, May 20, 2014, accessed October 1, 2014 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ united-states-of-secrets/. 89. Ibid. 90. For an intriguing theoretical discussion on the symbolic role that “transparency” plays in “neo-liberal” settings, see Clare Birchall, “Radical Transparency?” Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies 14, no. 1 (February 2014): 77–88, doi: 10.1177/ 1532708613517442. 91. Obama was probably referencing the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies. See Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire, The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in A Changing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 92. President Barack Obama, quoted in Boerma, “Edward Snowden,” paragraph 7. 93. General Keith B. Alexander, quoted in Baker, “After Leaks, Obama Leads Damage Control Effort,” paragraph 14.

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94. General Keith B. Alexander, quoted in ABC News Staff, “‘This Week’ Transcript: NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander,” ABCNews.com, last modified June 23, 2013, paragraphs 34–38, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-nsa-directorgen-keith-alexander/story?id=19457454. 95. Dick Cheney, quoted in Michael O’Brien, “Cheney Says NSA Monitoring Could Have Prevented 9/11,” NBCnews.com, last modified June 16, 2013, paragraph 3, http:// firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/16/18987472-cheney-says-nsa-monitoringcould-have-prevented-911?lite. 96. John Inglis, quoted in Spencer Ackerman, “NSA Makes Final Push to Retain Most Mass Surveillance Powers,” The Guardian, last modified January 10, 2014, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/nsa-mass-surveillance-powers-john-inglisnpr?r=q. 97. Michael Hayden, quoted in Boerma, “Edward Snowden,” paragraph 5. 98. See, for example, the arguments that can be made about the lack of standing, or lack of harm to potential litigants that appears in Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, et al., v. Amnesty International USA et al., No. 11-1025, October Term, 2013, slip Opinion, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1025_ihdj.pdf. 99. Judge Richard J. Leon, quoted in Philip Bump, “Federal Judge: NSA’s ‘AlmostOrwellian” Data Collection Likely Violates Constitution,” The Wire, last modified December 16, 2013, paragraph 6, http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/12/federal-judgensas-almost-orwellian-phone-data-collection-likely-violates-constitution/356207/. Some of the original commentary can be found in Federal Judge Richard J. Leon, in Layman et al. v. Obama et al., Civil Action No. 13-0851, Memorandum Opinion, December 16, 2013, http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/191871518?access_key=key1o8e4g1bmwnubp9ida85&allow_share=true&escape=false&view_mode=scroll. See also Senator Ron Wyden, Senator Mark Udall and Senator Martin Heinrich, Amicus Brief in First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles et al. v. National Security Agency et al., Case No. 3: 13-cv-03287 JWS, In Support of Plaintiffs’ motion for Partial Summary Judgment, United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, November 18, 2013. 100. For mainstream coverage of the Kayman v. Obama case, see “Federal Judge’s Ruling On N.S.A. Lawsuit,” The New York Times, last modified December 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/17/us/politics/17nsa-ruling.html?_r=0. 101. Schlesinger Report, quoted in Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (New York: Routledge, 2013), 57. 102. Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months,” Washington Post, last modified December 23, 2013, paragraphs 13–15, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html. 103. Inkster, “The Snowden Revelations,” 52. 104. Stuart Taylor, Jr., “The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists,” The Brookings Essay, April 29, 2014, paragraph 1, http://www.brookings.edu/series/thebrookings-essay. 105. David E. Pozen, “The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures Of Information,” Harvard Law Review 127 (2013): 516.

EIGHT Anticipating the Future of America’s National Security State

In this concluding chapter, we explain why Americans will have a difficult time anticipating and planning for any end to America’s national security state. At various times, optimistic supporters of America’s national security state have discussed the termination of what has been called the “perpetual war,” but it is often a taboo subject to discuss the profits and motivations that are related to the creative destruction that comes from the maintenance of a wartime footing. 1 This, we contend, is not just a matter of articulating the need for defensive and vigilant protection of the Homeland, because if that were the case, we would have adopted much more isolationist policies, bringing home the military to guard “Fortress America.” There must be rhetorical reasons why so many American military strategists, milbloggers, journalists, and others continue to rationalize the “preventive” and “preemptive” efforts that we discussed in chapter two. In other words, many stakeholders psychologically and materially profit from believing that American military interventionism is inherently good and productive and that they reluctantly invade so many other nations because others are unable, or unwilling, to take out the terrorist networks before these “cancers” metastasize. Through rhetorical strategies like inflation of threats, projection, and deflection, both American elites and publics have convinced themselves that we need to brace ourselves for counterterrorist wars of attrition that might take us to Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. Our scopic regimes, buttressed by fighting faiths in mass surveillance, drones, the efficacy of night raids, and the power of the JSOC and the CIA, are emboldened by those who wish to extend the global reach of America’s national security state. For example, note the ways that securitization and military dispositifs have been used to frame the descriptive 209

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and prescriptive ways we should think about everything from terrorist financing to border security. Civil as well as criminal lawfare is used to buttress the efforts of the warriors who are the tip of the spear, and neighbors, families, friends, and public servants prioritize the usage of military gazes. As we noted in our chapter on Snowden, the discourses that are associated with the preservation of the national security state have become so entrenched that talk of going back to a time when the application of FBI or domestic police forces did not deal with existential terrorist threats appears to be naïve or anti-American. Instead, our posthuman visual registers invite us to think about the cautious “precision” warfare that can be carried out by those who follow in the footsteps of those who carried out the bin Laden raid. These national security dispositifs have become the stuff of both our military historiographies and our public memories. The National September 11 Museum, which opened to the public during the summer of 2014, announced the addition of new displays to this hallowed place when it was reported that the museum would prominently display the shirt a Navy SEAL wore in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as a special coin that was given to a CIA officer who played a major role in tracking down this arch enemy. 2 The president of the museum, Joe Daniels, explained that this new display would allow “millions of visitors the chance to recognize the extraordinary bravery of the men and women who sacrifice so much,” and the Associated Press went on to explain that this national museum was keeping both donors’ identities secret. Readers are told that the “coin bears the date—May 1, 2011, in U.S. time—on one side and a red ‘X’ on the other.” To add to the feeling of authenticity, the Associated Press elaborated by noting that the coin was “owned by the CIA officer, known as ‘Maya,’ who formed the basis for the main character in the Oscar-winning 2012 move Zero Dark Thirty.” 3 As we noted in chapter four, it is not always easy to draw fine lines between the real and the surreal, as some of this national security mythos takes us from militainment to one of America’s most hallowed spaces. Twenty-first-century American audiences feel not only comfortable but take pride in sacrifices that have been made by those who join myriad counterterrorist campaigns. Anyone who helps with the UAVs, or sends private military contractors to Iraq, can join those who talk and write about the growing surveillance powers of the NSA, CIA mosaics, President Obama’s and John Brennan’s “just wars,” and the dreary lives of the RPA pilots who drive to work at Creech Air Force Base. This allows the mundane aspects of life to be merged with the extraordinary heroism of those who know about the patterns of life of terrorists, and laypersons who read about cyber threats in their daily newspapers can join the chorus of those who sing praises about the efficacy of extraterritorial targeted killings. Granted, some may have a few qualms about EITs that are tantamount to torture, but naïve international critics have not walked in the

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shoes of those who witnessed the horrors of the Twin Towers, and if we are right, most Americans would gladly join Cofer Black and continue to take those “gloves” off. If we can send in the Special Forces, that would be great, but if not, then we will let others fight our proxy wars and make sure that the CIA has all of the financial and political backing that it needs. These are the types of fragments, narratives, and topoi that become such rhetorically persuasive elements in the fabrication of national security states. Throughout this book, what we have sought to demonstrate are the ways that various technological and ideological forces have converged at just the right time to help provide the material and symbolic conditions for this perfect storm of securitization. Americans who recognize the importance of maintaining tight security—here and abroad—can revel in the fact that they are “wired for war,” and are ready for the “robots revolution and conflict in the 21st century.” 4 The cultural capital that comes from avoiding conventional interventionism on a massive scale can now be spent by diplomats talking about the “lessons learned” in the wake of the problems with the “shock and awe” of 2003. Now, with the paradigmatic shifts that came from the adoption of chaos theories and nonlinear sciences, we are theoretically much better equipped to carryout twenty-first century, network-centric warfare. Americans can work at convincing Europeans that they are the ones who have misinterpreted the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) and have failed to adapt to the “new” GWOT, and they can respond to other detractors by underscoring the wisdom that comes from battlefield experiences as we harp on the importance of having mobile forces that are capable of fighting non-conventional, asymmetric, network-centric warfare. As Patrick Porter pointed out in Military Orientalism, U.S.-led coalitions, who took some time learning about the importance of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare in fighting enemies like the Taliban, have learned about the need to “weaponize cultural knowledge.” 5 One of the major issues that we have addressed in each of our chapters is the question of whether the rhetorical resonance of these militarizing and securitizing beliefs embolden those who can then pursue Kafkaesque wars in the name of peace. For example, can Americans use threat inflation narratives—that are filled with talk of morphing enemies—as they try to rationalize the promiscuous usage of militarizing frameworks that overwhelm diplomatic or policing paradigms? In the name of fighting “new” terrorist threats, will these advocates of aggressive counterterrorism continue to marginalize “soft” power as they lampoon the strictures found in the “quaint” Geneva Conventions? Will absolutist types of positions like the banning of assassination or torture continue to be configured as unnecessary shackles that hinder the efforts of those Americans who want more military attacks on overseas terrorist targets? How far can U.S. rhetors stretch the post-9/11 emergency texts as

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they try to write about the “imminent” threat that is supposedly posed by pirates, ISIL fighters, African kidnappers, and many others who will now find themselves configured as our nation’s enemies? Will military interventionism, of all different sorts, including proxy wars, become the first, and not last, options that are deployed by social agents convinced of their own righteousness and rectitude? As we noted in chapter one, this faith in the desirability and necessity of having an empowered, almost unassailable, national security state is not something that was imposed on American publics by a few individuals like John Yoo, Richard Cheney, or even President Barack Obama. Nor is this growing acceptance of states of exception and emergency powers for our national security state something that can be laid at the doorstep of some static “doctrine” that can be changed by replacing key textbooks, novels, or field manuals. 6 What we have pointed out throughout this book are the hegemonic and diverse ways that governmental organizations, think tanks, lawyers, Hollywood filmmakers, and others have tapped into the cultural desires of those who want to believe that counterterrorism is an American prerogative. Think, for a moment, of just how many American citizens today dream of the day that they can get their hands on someone like Edward Snowden. We have demonstrated that all of that theory and praxis about the national security state is tied to materialistic, realpolitik practices as various empowered social agents act as if they are constantly living in a never-ending state of siege, and this in turn makes them stakeholders who help reiterate the idea that we are in a state of perpetual war with terrorism. Regardless of whether this terrorism is defined as an ideological matter, an “Islamic” problem, or even a tactical situation, what unites these approaches is the firm belief that terrorism is a problem that should be dealt with through decapitation or the dismantling of networks. Troop rotations ensure that we can cut down on combat fatigue of soldiers who fight those terrorist cells, and talk of the counterinsurgency or disaster relief that is dispensed by the U.S. military cuts down on potential complaints about cultural imperialism. These thick tapestries of arguments about terrorists become the epistemic logics of those who fight the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but these threads can also be rewoven to justify all sorts of other interventionism against other foes. For example, even a focus on “Jihadist” terrorism may underestimate the eventual reach of the national security state that has the power to define and redefine, assorted enemies. This is because the ideological templates and the constitutive rhetorics that have been used to normalize states of exception don’t have any specified referent, and because the strategic vagueness and the textual interdeterminacy that shadows these naming powers opens the door for those who seek even more military humanitarian intervention. All of this is happening at a time when we are also witnessing the growing power of organizations like the CIA

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and the Department of Defense, and this will mean that in the future, Americans will be invited to consider related national security threats that are posed by “new” “Others.” If we are right, then in the near future U.S. audiences and their allies will be invited to think of the anticipatory, preventative measures that will be needed to fight off other supposed threats, including the “hacking” and economic espionage of the Chinese or even the growing expansionism of Putin’s Russia. We would not be surprised if Americans were asked to intervene to help the Israelis as they worry about Iran’s potential nuclear capability. We may soon be hearing permutations of the old arguments regarding “clashes of civilizations,” 7 but this time our enemies will include more than the “radical” Al-Qaeda cells that were the focus of securitization efforts during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The move toward multilateral rationales will augment the more unilateral operative logics that were used by the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. We hinted at some of this in our previous chapters on preventive war, the battles fought by drone crews, and the rise of the Special Forces, but it is here we want to make explicit what we have been implying all along— that the GWOT involves perceptual wars that Americans want to see, that incrementally take us further and further away from the events of 9/11 that once justified the dramatic expansion of America’s national security state. Soldiers may march home after they serve in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but the military contractors remain, the drone wars continue, and international legal experts still debate about the potential need to intervene in places like Syria, Yemen, Libya, or Somalia. Notice how absurd it would seem for Americans to stop ratifying the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was used to define “combatants” in the GWOT at the same time that it invested the nation’s commander-in-chief with broad “defensive” powers, 8 and how this opens the door for those who want to take the fight to new international enemies, that have little to do with anything that happened on 9/11. Vocal minorities have always had their suspicions as they listened to the rationalizations that were used for the invasion of Afghanistan, or Iraq, but their voices have been drowned out by those who advance controversial, but popular, counterterrorist and counterinsurgency policies. In a Foucauldian sense, the dominant dispositifs have sedimented and ossified, and we worry that this now means that the national security state will be asked to deploy both emergency rhetorics as well as lethal force in a host of situations that could, and should, be handled by other means. Now that American publics are used to hearing foreign affairs being discussed almost exclusively in terms of national security, their arguments about militarized solutions to terrorism will ideologically drift as they tackle a host of other geopolitical situations. For example, some military planners are writing dystopic texts that look like Tom Clancy

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novels as they draft rhetorical narratives filled with thanatopolitical scenarios of “the collapse of Pakistan,” the capture of Soviet-era atomic weapons, the proliferation of weapons on black markets, the spread of influenza pandemics, state collapse in Mexico, and Iran’s nuclear threats against Israel. Authors like Andrew Krepinevich draw up deadly futuristic scenarios as they contemplate the rest of the twenty-first century, and he chastises organizations like the JSOC for developing what he sees as meaningless concepts, such as “information superiority,” instead of developing the strategies and tactics that they will need in actual wartime situations. 9 By this point, readers might argue that knowledgeable leaders like Barack Obama have tried to contain the growing power of the military as he disagrees with “his” generals regarding the course of current affairs in the “war” or conflict with ISIS. 10 But, we would argue that this is a clash between communities who share the baseline securitized belief that terrorism actually poses existential threats, that cyber threats are pervasive, that the U.S. is in danger of losing network-centric warfare, etc. In other words, this is a clash between those who have accepted militarizing frames of reference, and there are some that go so far as to argue that Obama has adopted military postures that go far beyond those that were adopted by the George W. Bush administration. Note, for example, how Floyd Brown of the Wall Street Journal has recently contextualized some of President Obama’s rhetoric: By the end of two terms, most presidents become what they hate. And Barak Obama is no exception. He came to office deriding the Bush administration for its intervention in Iraq. Yet on Wednesday [September 10, 2014] Obama declared war against the Islamic State—in the same region that Bush tried to save. And ironically, by spreading the war beyond Iraq and into Syria, Obama is going farther than Bush ever attempted! . . . Here’s how he described his strategy . . . “I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, where they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against [the Islamic State] in Syria, as well as Iraq.” 11

Our contention, of course, is that this president’s discourse simply refracted the taken-for-granted assumptions that were already circulating in elite and vernacular circles about ISIS and Syria before Obama presented this type of commentary. Yes, it may be true that occasionally presidents like Barack Obama will be able to call for more transparency in surveillance affairs as he talks about bringing home most of the troops from places like Afghanistan. And there may be times when the nation’s commander-in-chief advocates the closing of places like Guantánamo. However, we would highlight the Congressional, military, and public opposition to some of that decision-making as so many can argue that this prematurely tries to

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“end” a more enduring terrorist conflict. The structural and ideological dimensions of the national security state help explain why the rhetoric of Senator Obama looks very different from the rhetoric and action of President Obama. Even those presidents who may use rhetorics that seemingly represent the ending of the GWOT are thus, in our view, not representative of the dominant ideological figurations that swirl around in so many twenty-first-century counterterrorist conversations. As we noted in several of our chapters, publics that are worried about casualty aversion may not want to hear about the deployment of large-scale conventional forces, but all of this can be avoided by discussing “small wars,” irregular warfare, asymmetrical war, network-centric warfare, etc. Preventive wars can be marketed and sold as the type of conflicts that will take out the “bad guys” while at the same time minimizing the dangers that confront our sons and daughters in uniform. Some, who may not be risk averse, can even join military contracting firms and reduce the risks that are faced by the army or the marines. Those coded ways of thinking about America’s “new” Way of War signal our enchantment with the notion that our generation, like the Greatest Generation that fought World War II, will not shirk their duty. This is why, as we explain in more detail below, drone usage will continue to proliferate, think tanks will keep beating the drums on the Potomac about the need for more cybersecurity from cyberterrorist threats, generals will keep making declarations about the harms incurred by whistleblowers’ treasonous revelations, and many American citizens will continue to believe that they are at “war” with the Taliban or Al Qaeda “affiliates.” If the reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden taught us anything, it was the fact that American global imaginations have no trouble inventing new enemies and that they have little difficulty believing, as the U.S. Navy recruiting campaign tells us, that we are “a force for good.” The very last thing that they are interested in is truly ending the global wars on terrorism. Over the last decade, the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars on the financial development of the American national security state, but the majority of Americans appear to be convinced that this was money well spent in the fight against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and a “metastasizing” cancerous terrorist threats. 12 Some commentators are even willing to argue that after more than 14 years of war, America needs to be involved in even more policing of the rest of the world. For example, Robert Kagan, a conservative American international relations theorist interested in the realpolitik of U.S. power, argued in May of 2014 that the weariness of a “tired country” did not mean that they should forget that “superpowers don’t get to retire.” In an essay in The New Republic, he explained:

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Chapter 8 In fact, the world “as it is” is a dangerous and often brutal place. There has been no transformation in human behavior or in international relations. In the twenty-first century, no less than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, force remains the ultima ratio. The question, today as in the past, is not whether nations are willing to resort to force but whether they believe they can get away with it when they do. If there has been less aggression, less ethnic cleansing, less territorial conquest over the past 70 years, it is because the United States and its allies have both punished and deterred aggression, have intervened, sometimes, to prevent ethnic cleansing, and have gone to war to reverse territorial conquest. The restraint showed by other nations has not been a sign of human progress, the strengthening of international institutions, or the triumph of the rule of law. It has been a response to a global configuration of power that, until recently, has made restraint seem the safer course. 13

Kagan elaborated by noting that it seems as though polls were showing that more and more Americans wanted to turn their attention toward nation-building at home, but he hoped that they recognized the existential threats that were posed by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, the proxy wars that were being fought in Syria, and the growing power of China. With this in mind, the rest of the chapter tries to explain how legal, military, and cultural arguments are going to be marshaled to rationalize not the containment, but the growth, of the national security state. The days of having massive conventional forces intervene overseas in major wars may be a thing of the past, but it is our contention that the move toward mobile, smaller military and CIA forces will only mean the advocacy of more creative military “humanitarian” interventionism. Beliefs in American exceptionalism will ensure that unilateralism remains an option, but at other times U.S. decision-makers will opt for joining more multilateral military humanitarian efforts. We begin with a discussion of how some bloggers are also defending the need for transglobal wars against Al Qaeda “affiliates” that have no geographical boundaries. REINVENTED ENEMIES—AMERICAN LAWFARE AND THE TRANSGLOBAL PURSUIT OF AL QAEDA ALLIES OR “AFFILIATES” Later on in the chapter, we will be explaining just why we think that counterinsurgency rhetorics will continue to resonate with military and civilian communities who believe in the righteousness of fighting terrorism, but for the time being, we wish to underscore the point that many current and former U.S. soldiers are convinced that just the right strategy needs to be adopted if we are ever going to “win” the war against terror-

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ism. Note, for example, how one famous milblogger, Uncle Jimbo, wrote in 2008 about the elusiveness and existential dangers that were posed by today’s foes. He believed that a “global COIN strategy” was needed, and that both the left and the right sides of the American political spectrums needed to make pragmatic compromises and abandon some of their preconceptions if they were going to help defend the country. “The left must understand that when dealing with bad actors effective diplomacy happens best when the threat of military force backs up the words,” noted this contributor to the Black Five website, and the “right must accept that we will parley with our enemies and even make deals with them.” These efforts, Uncle Jimbo averred, “must be combined with humanitarian, civil and entrepreneurial assistance that shows our commitment to helping people live free, productive lives.” 14 This milblogger applauded the rising acceptance of counterinsurgency polices on the part of the U.S. military and explained why he thought this was moving in the right direction: Almost seven years into our active fight against al Qaeda and Islamic extremism, we still have difficulty characterizing exactly who and what we are fighting. We have twisted ourselves around in verbal gymnastics to avoid using the word Islam in the description of this war and I actually agree that is a good thing. . . . Our enemy is a stateless, amorphous, ad hoc group of Islamic religious extremists who are conducting a global insurgency of opportunity against us and all free societies. The one area of the world where we have had major success against them is Iraq of all places, and the reason for that was a complete change of strategy from top-down nation-building to bottom-up, grass roots counter-insurgency. 15

Uncle Jimbo opined that Americans needed to learn that they could not “play an endless game of ‘whack-a-mole,’” and that they needed to do more than just focus on “sending jihadis to their hellish paradise.” Granted, he thought that “killing terrorists must be part of our game plan,” but generations of Iraqi youngsters also needed to see that Americans provided them with medical care, that they helped build schools for Iraqis, that they played soccer with them, and that U.S. soldiers had “shared sacrifices and stood back to back with them in their neighborhoods” as they fought the evils of Saddam as well as the “horrors of sectarian violence.” 16 Countless permutations of this type of rhetoric can be found all over the World Wide Web, and they help explain, after the spending of trillions of dollars, why so many still believe in the necessity and efficacy of America’s national security state. The military humanitarian logics—that make it appear as if securitization is much more than a U.S. concern— have incredible persuasive appeal for the hundreds of thousands of sol-

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diers and their families who continue to support President Obama’s policies. The support for America’s national security state is something that has involved the constitutive creation of many variants of the war against terrorism, and the texts that can be found in the “Black Five” website are fairly representative of how former members of America’s fighting forces feel about their own counterterrorist or counterinsurgency efforts. Once you have in place foundational and essentialized definitions of your terrorist enemies and the righteousness of counterterrorist or counterinsurgency causes, then you can trace the ideological drift of those positions as they become rhetorical fragments that are wrenched out of their Afghan or Iraq contexts and used to rationalize the fighting that has to be done against many, many other “terrorists.” To provide readers some idea of the protean, and the incremental nature of emergency rhetorics that can be transported from one geopolitical context to another, we would like to augment our discussion of the “Black Five” website with some critique of related materials that appear on a website called “Lawfare Blog.” We briefly mentioned this website earlier in the book, and we underscored the point that the “lawfare” website is usually assembled or visited by conservative American lawyers, judges, and law students who are interested in controlling the spread of lawfare. For example, contributors to the website often patrol the legal blogosphere so that they can tell their leaders about the misreadings of the law that are circulated by attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees or Pakistanis who file criminal or civil suits against CIA agents or drone pilots. One popular contributor to the Lawfare blog site, Marty Lederman, was one of the co-authors of the infamous Obama “drone memo” that legitimated and legalized the targeted killing of Anwar alAwlaki, an American citizen. Although the lawfare blog site is ostensibly open to all points of view, most of the time it contains contributions from patriotic writers who testify before Congress or make presentations in front of Georgetown University audiences about existential dangers of Al Qaeda threats and the laws that need to be changed in order to accommodate “new” military counterterrorist actions. Talk of jus ad bellum doctrines is often used to highlight the existence of myriad cases where “lethal force” or “selfdefense” can be used to justify wars around the globe, while commentary on jus in bello principles are used to argue for less restrictive ways of fighting irregular foes in asymmetric conflicts. For example, it should come as no surprise that several bloggers at the lawfare website write about Hamas’ rocket threats, Israel’s “inherent” rights of self-defense, and the supposed misreadings of international law provisions or principles by members of the Goldstone Commission and others who allegedly did not understand the “rule of law.” 17 As readers can readily imagine, many of the contributors to this blog site defend the usage of aggressive

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warfighting strategies, and they often lament the fact that Snowden, Greenwald, and others have gained any type of hearing in matters of national defense. The communities who contribute to the Lawfare website are often asked to testify before Congress about the proliferating nature of terrorist threats, and one of the major topics that occupies the attention of Congressional committees is the way that the laws passed after 9/11 have continued relevancy today. In one typical, written statement that was presented in front of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Jack Goldsmith, the Henry Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School (and Lawfare blogger), had this to say about the AUMF: On September 14, 2001, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The AUMF, as it is called, authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” The AUMF focused on entities responsible for 9/11. In the fall of 2001 those entities, including al Qaeda, were located primarily in Afghanistan. In the last dozen years, al Qaeda has undergone what Professor Robert Chesney describes as an “extraordinary process of simultaneous decimation, diffusion, and fragmentation, one upshot of which has been the proliferation of looselyrelated regional groups that have varying degrees of connection to the remaining core al Qaeda leadership.” 18

Robert Chesney is also a blogger at Lawfare, and the implication here is that prescient Congressional leaders—who in 2001 were fighting Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban—must have intended to provide the American commander-in-chief with broad, necessitous powers that could be used to fight just about any terrorist organization that threatened America. This meant going after not only those who swore allegiance to “Al-Qaeda,” but just about any “affiliate” that was labeled so by the CIA or DOD officials who wrote their briefs for Congressional leaders or White House officials. All of this dovetails with the jingoistic rhetorics that circulate in blogs like BlackFive, and the popularity of these open-ended frameworks adds to the rhetorical ethos of those who write about the need for Americans to play a “growing role” in places like Syria. 19 The elastic and morphing nature of the Obama administration’s ambiguous overseas contingency operations is especially worrisome when it allows members of the executive branch to claim that the 2001 AUMF provides statutory authority and Congress’s imprimatur to go after organizations or nation states that were not even in existence at the time of 9/11. For example, during the fall of 2014, the Obama administration argued that the executive branch

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could go after the fighters of the Islamic State and bomb their infrastructure in order to help more “moderate” forces in the region help stabilize Iraq. This not only meant that the U.S. was involved in covert operations that were used to train non-Islamic State Syrian resistance groups, but more violent, open operations as well. Individuals like Secretary of State John Kerry were arguing that U.S. interests were threatened by the very existence of tens of thousands of radical Islamist fighters in places like Syria and Iraq. Notice the absence of any tangible proof that any of these Islamic fighters were going to attack the Homeland or that they had the technology, power, or resources to carry out that threat. As we noted in chapter two, simply declaring a threat to be “imminent” will not suffice. President Obama indicated that he “welcomes” Congressional authorization for some of this strategizing, but some members of his administration were adamant that Article II of the Constitution already provided him with all of the inherent powers that he needed as commander-inchief to continue the “war” that began with Al Qaeda. Skeptics argued that this was one more manifestation of the national security state where the president was encroaching on Congressional prerogatives, but Obama’s supporters argued this was just a part of this administration’s “holistic strategy.” For example, Senator Menendez described this as a “comprehensive, holistic strategy that purports to integrate all of the tools of U.S. power to defeat ISIL,” but Andy Wright has argued that these are just “code words” for “recent national security” thinking about “integrated power.” 20 In spite of some of their skepticism in September of 2014, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 273–156 to approve the Obama administration’s plan to train and arm some of the Syrian rebels who were willing to fight the warriors of the Islamic State. 21 As Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane of The Washington Post explained: The vote placed Congress one step closer to authorizing the third significant U.S. military operation in Iraq in the past quarter century, and it put lawmakers on record approving U.S. engagement in the yearslong Syrian civil war. It delivered Obama much-needed domestic political support as he seeks an international coalition to combat the growing threat of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East. 22

A vocal minority of Democrats in the House worried that President Obama was committing the nation to more U.S. military operations in the Middle East that would exacerbate problems instead of solve them, but the Republicans who provided most of Obama’s support wanted even more interventionism in the region. As readers might imagine, the president could keep talking about significant threats as long as his response involved the use of those nimble Special Forces and the CIA, but he had to be much more circumspect when it came to talking about conventional forces and the potential for

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marine or army “boots on the ground.” During a speech that Obama gave in September 2014 at Florida’s MacDill Air Force Base, he told millions of listeners that he would not commit them to fight “another ground war in Iraq.” 23 Note how this did not necessarily mean that he couldn’t use drones, cybernetic network-centric warfare, or other assemblages that were fast becoming his administration’s weapons of choice. 24 Instead of sending in American ground troops, what Obama wanted to do was treat ISIS as if it was a branch of Al Qaeda, and then “degrade” that organization by using “America’s unique capabilities to take out targets” in support of “partner’s efforts.” 25 Allies fighting in Iraq were not always sure what to make of some of this presidential rhetoric. One of America’s partners, Iraq’s new prime minster, Haider al-Abadi, praised the U.S. aerial campaign that was being used to target Sunni militants who had overrun major parts of northern and western Iraq, but he argued that the Iraqis were “not giving any blank check to the international coalition to hit any target in Iraq.” 26 Unfortunately, as we have seen, perceptions of morphing dangers have a way of turning tactics into strategies. As many military strategists have noted about the nation’s security state, worries about casualty aversion can sometimes lead to cautious planning that puts the brakes on conventional warfighting and the commitment of the regular troops, but when terrorist threats morph and the template of exceptional counterterrorist powers becomes the norm, then this raises the odds that we will see more frequent, episodic interventionism. For example, by using rhetorical frameworks that mix and match the naming of “Al Qaeda” and “ISIS,” or the “Islamic State,” this allows America’s national security state to take its war to any part of the world, as long as American publics or Congressional leaders are presented with the most tenuous of links. These links don’t need to be established by the best or the most logical of warrants—they just need to be plausible and sound reasonable. There are multiple ways that Americans can symbolically link together Al Qaeda and organizations like ISIS. Now the U.S., riffing off of some of the legal and military arguments of the Israelis, can argue that they are in “hot pursuit” of the terrorists, even if that risks war with nations like Syria. In a fascinating rhetorical extension of narrative templates that have been around since colonial and imperial times, postcolonial communities can now treat ISIS fighters or Syrian terrorists as if they were pirates, and then use analogies between land and sea battles to rationalize the use of maritime laws as they are in hot pursuit of enemy transgressors. 27

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AMERICA’S WAY OF WAR AND THE PRECARIOUS BALANCING OF CONVENTIONAL WARFARE AND COUNTERINSURGENCY (COIN) PARADIGMS Given the popularity of both traditional, conventional warfighting paradigms, as well as the continued interest in the work of David Petraeus and the “COINdinastas,” 28 we do not expect that U.S. military planners or ordinary soldiers will stop debating about the need, and the scope, of America’s counter-insurgency policies. 29 Critics of some counterinsurgency strategies, tactics, and operational plans, like Douglas Porch, will continue to believe that they are exposing the “myths” associated with how the rules of engagement of “America’s Way of War” have been impacted by the adoption of COIN policies, 30 but this can be countered by those who point to the work of Petraeus in bringing the troops home from Iraq. Porch makes the astute observation that many Americans are trying to emulate some of the perceptual successes of military strategists who want to follow the alleged successes of the British “way of war” during colonial times in places like Malaysia, Kenya, or Palestine, and that some U.S. soldiers may be trying to reinvent history so that they can “win” the Vietnam War. 31 He explains some of the persuasive allure of the refurbished COIN strategizing that draws lessons from the likes of historical characters like T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). In this discourse, those who resist the West’s use of “soft power” (like COIN) for its “civilizing” mission are “delegitimized as thugs, bandits, criminal tribes, bitter-enders, or fanatic.” 32 These types of rhetorical binaries appeal to military planners, diplomats, and lay persons who believe that America’s national security state needs to be ever on guard as it fights jihadist insurgencies that have all types of savvy, yet deceitful warriors. One of the interesting questions that future researchers will have to decide is whether the technical rise of interest in social network analysis—that we discussed in our previous chapters on preventive warfare, drones, the CIA interrogations, and the rise of the Special Forces—will continue to influence the ways that U.S. strategists recirculate stories about General Stanley McChrystal’s attempt to apply COIN strategies against the Taliban in Afghanistan or how General Petraeus and the “surge” salvaged Operation Iraqi Freedom. Many milbloggers continue to complain about how the introduction of COIN policies have interfered with force protections, rules of engagement, and focus too much attention on the winning of hearts and minds, but those critiques have to be juxtaposed with the ways that many neoliberals believe that the adoption of the COIN policies have become a legitimate, an enduring example of how American forces are willing to “fight with one hand tied” behind their back because that is supposedly the ethical way to wage post-human warfare.

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If we are on to something, then we believe that it may be many years before Americans who defend the growing securitization of their nation will abandon these COIN rhetorics, because they create the impression that this supplements the nation’s “soft power” that needs to be a part of a nation’s flexible military and diplomatic toolkit. Drone Proliferation and “Proxy” Wars If drones did not exist, then purveyors of COIN strategies would have a much more difficult time convincing each other of the efficacy of these particular features of the national security state. Expanding on the discussion of drone pilots and American usage of drones that we presented in chapter six, here we wish to touch on another significant aspect of the future of the national security state—the global proliferation of drones. Given the growing importance of rights talk and the resonance of military humanitarian discourses, those who wish to follow America’s lead and adopt drone technologies need to make it appear as though the spread of “precision” warfare is better than indiscriminate area bombings that become a feature of conventional warfare. It does not hurt the cause of those who wish to buy Israeli or European drones to hear that the usage of unmanned drones can also help alleviate the risk of putting a pilot’s life in danger, and this in turn helps those who wish to alleviate the pressures associated with low recruitment for some of these efforts. 33 In this sub-section, we discuss the proliferation of drones, both in the U.S. and abroad, and we comment on the perceptual risks and dangers associated with this proliferation. We will also point out how beliefs in American exceptionalism help those who are convinced that the nation’s technical prowess can overcome some of the problems that are occasionally referenced in these drone commentaries. There is plenty of statistical evidence to support the claim that drone usage is proliferating. Kreps and Zenko reported that in 2004 there were only 41 states worldwide that had any type of armed or unarmed drones, and by 2011 that number had reached 76 (this was “according to the last reliable public estimate by the U.S. Government Accountability Office”). 34 Additionally, Brizmun reported that spending on research and manufacturing of drones is expected to total at least $94 billion for just the second decade of the twenty-first century, 35 and all of this provides quantitative evidence that other nations don’t seem to be worried about the occasional crashes or the complaints that are made about the “extraterritorial” usage of drones. While Americans continue to debate about both the domestic use of drones and military usages overseas, other countries are scrambling to buy up relatively inexpensive drones to supplement their traditional air force squadrons. These numbers that document drone proliferation, while substantial, are not necessarily that surprising, given the fact that President Obama

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has openly admitted that drones “have become a ‘cure-all’ for terrorism, a risk-free way to eliminate suspected terrorists in places such as Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.” 36 Indeed, in theory, unmanned drones offer many attractive benefits and alternatives to conventional warfare. They can remain over targets for up to 14 hours without any need of refueling and, as mentioned earlier, researchers indicated that they significantly reduce risk of pilot casualties. 37 Furthermore, unmanned drones are not restricted by human limitations, such as G-forces, and they are able to make turns and maneuvers that manned vehicles cannot. 38 There is no shortage of tactical, strategic, or operational reasons why other nations might join Obama in viewing drones as effective counter-terrorist weapons. Although the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Israel are the only countries to have used armed drones in combat thus far, 39 Russia and China have developed armed drones, and several other countries have made it known that they have developed their own drone programs. 40 For example, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Sweden have all collaborated on the production of a “stealth armed drone,” 41 while Russia, South Korea, India, Turkey, and Taiwan “claim that they are indigenously developing sophisticated armed drone capabilities.” 42 Still other countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have indicated interest in purchasing drones from other countries. 43 All of this interest in and proliferation of research and manufacturing of drones worldwide indicates that the “potential virtues of drones have not gone unnoticed by other countries.” 44 It also means that the United States and other world leaders need to be considering what such a proliferation could mean, including any potential risks. Does their ready availability embolden those who would be more willing to use them in the name of defending other national security states? Whereas many have touted drones as less risky and more precise due to their mechanical attributes, many others have focused on the political or symbolic dimensions of their usage, and they have argued that drones present even more risks and dangers when it comes to warfare and using unconventional weaponry. In fact, some even argue that drones can be more lethal than conventional warfare. As Zenko and Kreps aver, the proliferation of unmanned aircraft can carry an “increased risk of lethality” because drones may be seen as the “perfect vehicle for delivering biological and chemical agents.” 45 Statements like this are terrifying and may conjure up plotlines from the popular television series 24, in which there is often the risk of biological and chemical warfare being used against the United States. The merger of military with popular imaginations helps to legitimate this type of warfare. Here it is the perceptions that are related to drone proliferation that are important. Kreps and Zenko further explain that although the proliferation of drones will not be as transformative to the international war

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system as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the potential for their use in a deadly and destabilizing fashion is still a threat. 46 For example, leaders of countries and political parties may use drones to suppress domestic unrest. Additionally, Kreps explains that the seemingly “value-added” benefit to drone technology that it is risk-free for the country utilizing it may influence the adoption of these platforms. Kreps argues that this has prompted the United States to be more liberal with the use of drones, and supports this claim by underscoring that since 2002, the U.S. has conducted 473 non-battlefield targeted killings, of which 98 percent were carried out by drones. Since September 2011, despite claims that the U.S. has a “strong preference” for capture rather than kill, the United States has only undertaken three known capture attempts compared to the 187 drone strikes that have killed about 925 people, 95 of whom were civilians. 47 As some critics of drones have jokingly remarked with their gallows humor, how does one surrender to an armed drone? Even the NSA has been accused of providing some of the “metadata” that leads to “assassinations” overseas. 48 The seeming accuracy of drones, and their increased usage, creates a toxic situation where their clinical deployment hides their lethality. We contend that the global proliferation of drone usage will only exacerbate this situation. Defenders of drone proliferation often note the military attractiveness of some of this stealth technology, but the very secrecy and the opaque nature of some UAV defenses bothers detractors. Noel Sharkey, for example, has argued that the United States’ use of drones has contributed to the secrecy of the national security state and an erosion in democratic practices. As he explained, “Apart from Libya, none of the drone strikes in countries not at war with the US have even been considered by Congress under the War Powers Resolution.” 49 As Brizmun similarly pointed out, if there is no Congressional oversight, accountability becomes scarce, and there is no way of really knowing who is being killed. 50 This type of precedent, Sharkey argues, is “at best legally questionable under international humanitarian law.” 51 The beauty of having both military and CIA drone systems is that the U.S. can often respond to these critics by arguing that they are doing everything that they can to follow the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), including the notions of proportionality, necessity, distinction, and humanity. After all, can’t foreign powers who might be interested in drones see the attraction of having “precision” weaponry that can hover for days and allow drone operators to distinguish between civilians and enemy targets? And, when the US was asked at a UN General Assembly meeting in 2009 to provide legal justification regarding the targeted suspects who were killed, the US explained that the operations were covert and part of national security and could not be disclosed. 52 The lack of clarity as to the methods being used to bring suspects to justice, or the paucity of commentary on how enemies can surrender,

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contributes to situations where elites and publics have to accept the fact that all of this is “taking place behind a convenient cloak of national secrecy.” 53 Once again, it appears that democratic tenets are being sacrificed in the name of national security. The lack of real accountability and potential repercussions creates a “further distance between the democratically elected civilian officials and their military subordinates and the lethal actions of their operations.” 54 Representatives and elected officials will continue to make independent decisions regarding drones behind a veil of secrecy, which weakens the democratic process. The tension between individual freedoms and democratic values and protecting the country in the name of national security will only proliferate alongside unconventional warfare methods, and all of this is going to get worse as we stand by and watch drone proliferation. One unique feature of all of these mediascapes are the ways that U.S. officials, UAV experts, and others talk about the mixture of drone technologies and American political principles that supposedly ensure the safe and legal deployment of drones. In all of these conversations, many of the leading researchers of drone proliferation utilize rhetoric of American exceptionalism as a means to manage the potentially lethal outcomes. For example, Zenko and Kreps argue that because the US is the leading user of drones, it should also be the one who polices which countries may acquire drones, and it is suggested that Americans hold those countries accountable for how they use the drones. They argue that the US should hold countries to the following standards: “Peacefully resolving all outstanding border or maritime disputes; peacefully brokering domestic political disputes; protecting civilians from harm caused by other weapons platforms; and protecting human rights.” 55 All of this takes for granted the unique nature of American technology as well as the exceptionalist features of the United States’ role on the world stage. In another essay, Kreps argued that as the main actor using armed drones in combat situations, the United States should take the lead in “shaping international norms that guide how armed drones are used in the future.” 56 The problem, of course, is that the US is not even accountable to its own citizens when it comes to acknowledging who gets killed, who is carrying out particular drone attacks, and how one goes about challenging these processes before the targeted killings are carried out. 57 So what would it exactly look like for the US to require others to disclose information that it refuses to be transparent about itself? Ultimately, despite all the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the supposed humanitarian benefits of drones, we argue, along with others, that the proliferation of drone usage may not have all the supposed benefits that one might expect during the rest of the twenty-first century. Defenders of drones will argue that precision warfare is better than sending massive conventional forces overseas, but these are not the only

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choices that we have before us. Instead of helping decrease the continuation of ongoing global warfare, the ease of utilizing drones and the overall cost savings might mean that “the new post-human military reality will usher in . . . a new era of perpetual warfare” instead of “one of general global security and peace.” 58 THE EXPANSION OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE AND THE PERMANENCE OF UBIQUITOUS, INVISIBLE WAR Finally, we wish to highlight a number of factors that point to the continued expansion of the national security state via the expansion of what counts as “war,” and to war’s increasing invisibility, ubiquity, and permanence. As we saw in the previous chapter on the Snowden affair, Glenn Greenwald has pointed to the supposed universal lessons of human nature and history to explain the expansion of the national security state and the emergence of endless war in the wake of 9/11. Similarly, the expansion of the national security state and permanence of war can be inferred from the political-economic perspectives provided by recent works of investigative journalism like James Risen’s book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. In this account, too many powerful individuals and organizations benefit politically and economically from the permanent state of war for the national security state to shrink any time soon. As a result, though President Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his promises to check the excesses of the national security state and bring the war on terror to a close, instead he has expanded the national security state and made it permanent. 59 The close readings of the technical sphere rhetorics of security profession that we have provided in previous chapters also point to ample indicators and warnings of the national security state’s continued expansion and war’s permanence. All of this was supplemented by the journalistic commentaries and the vernacular discourses that took for granted the need for eternal vigilance. The strategies and doctrines of preventive warfare that we examined in chapter 2 are not going away any time soon, and they assure the constant reiteration of a permanent state of war and an expansion of the national security state. As Michael Dillon has astutely observed, networkcentric warfare (NCW) is “the key concept that will govern this war and the discourse that will characterize it.” 60 As we saw in chapter 2, NCW and its supposed “replacement,” counterinsurgency (COIN), were both decidedly preventive in nature. Though some have argued that the socalled “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war died with the closing of the Office of Force Transformation and departure of Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, 61 others more correctly observed that NCW and the strategic logic it represents never went away and continue to exert a profound influence. 62 The implications of that influence are even clearer now than they

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were in 2002 when Dillon observed that the “strategic logic of networking” leads to “indefinite war on an indefinite enemy” or in 2004 when Hardt and Negri made the same observation. 63 At that time, Dillon noted that this “strategic logic” harnesses and benefits from an “ancient” characteristic of modern state politics itself, which is that “Modern state politics were originally conceived as a protection racket. Protection rackets thrive on the very re-production of the dangerous delivery from which is promised by the enforcers.” 64 A key feature of these securitized, technical discussions of the national security state has to do with the supposedly visible or invisible dimensions of some of these security threats that can only be discovered, managed, or controlled by a few elites, who just happen to be some of the major players in these “protection” rackets. In the last decade, we have seen the impacts of these national security protection rackets, and some are as obvious and crude as one would expect. The United States’ attempt to unleash, and then harness to its own advantage, the chaotic forces of “creative destruction” in the Middle East have, in one sense, backfired. Neither the ousting of Saddam Hussein, nor the Arab Spring revolutions, has resulted in the “New Middle East” of democratic capitalist countries that the Bush administration had promised would ensure lasting security for the United States from “system perturbations” like the attacks of 9/11. Indeed, America’s “terrorist enemies” have proven remarkably adept at thriving on the very chaos that was supposed to work to the United States’ advantage. 65 As noted above, the most recent example of this, of course, may be the rise of the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS), whose fighters have been taking territory in both Syria and Iraq. ISIS, which supposedly poses a direct threat to “the American homeland,” and is said to be an outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Of course, fear of an Al Qaeda-Iraqi connection was one of several reasons given by the Bush administration for the 2003 invasion to depose Saddam Hussein and institute “regime change.” As it turned out, however, there had been no substantial ties between Hussein’s Iraq and Al Qaeda, and no link between Iraq and the attacks of 9/11. But after the invasion, numerous Al Qaeda fighters streamed into the country to fight the Americans. That is, the U.S. invasion resulted in the very Al QaedaIraq nexus that the invasion had been meant to prevent, a development that was used to warrant a “surge” of additional U.S. forces to Iraq and prolongation of the war in an effort to win the war through the implementation of the new Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine. Though that strategy has been hailed as a resounding success, in retrospect it seems that it failed to prevent the evolution and resurgence of the group that it had supposedly defeated, which is now the new, “new threat” justifying airstrikes in Syria in addition to Iraq. In addition to ISIS, however, U.S. officials have also justified the resumption of war in the Middle East, this time expanded to include Syria,

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by pointing to an “imminent” threat to the “homeland” posed by a heretofore unheard of group, the so-called Khorasan Group. At a time when some political leaders and commentators in the United States were questioning the president’s legal authority (even under the broad terms of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force) to launch strikes in Syria, this supposed group of Al Qaeda veterans suddenly appeared around the time of the first U.S. airstrikes in Syria and then mysteriously vanished from American political discourse almost as quickly. Based on a detailed analysis of media coverage of and official statements related to the Khorasan Group, Glenn Greenwald has made a strong case that the group never existed. 66 In short, if U.S. actions do not themselves produce the next enemy needed to keep the war going, it is always possible (with the help of corporate news media) to fabricate a threat. This is the national security protection racket in its most crude and obvious form. In another sense, however, the U.S. attempt to thrive on chaos has been a resounding success, and perhaps inevitably so. As we observed in chapter 2, while the strategic logic of NCW and COIN are focused on prevention, it is prevention of a particular kind. Of course, the prevention of Jack Bauer style, ticking-time-bomb scenarios has been a prominent feature of both entertainment media and public policy discourse in the wake of 9/11. In other words, in this Kafkaesque counterterrorism world, some of the elites, intentionally or unintentionally, were reflecting and refracting populist notions of dangers, and then they congratulated themselves on how successfully they were controlling their own figments of their imaginations. The U.S. has worked to prevent imminent threats of this kind from being realized, as well to prevent potential threats from becoming imminent. But, more importantly, the strategic logic of NCW and COIN as foreign policy or “grand strategy” has been about preventing the emergence of threats as such, about remaking the Middle East by force as a means of preventing the conditions of possibility that allow new threats to emerge, all while warning of the inevitability of the next 9/11. Thus, the national security state protection racket is more subtle and insidious than its crude manifestations in the fabrication of convenient threats like Khorasan. The fundamental contradictions at the heart of the strategic logic and rhetoric of preventive warfare guarantee the continuation, even expansion, of the national security state and its endless wars. In this logic and rhetoric, as long as there still exists the possibility for the emergence of a threat, then there is a need for the national security state to act preventively, by whatever means necessary, whatever the cost, and for however long it might take, to prevent the inevitable. Of course, preventing the inevitable is a contradiction. 67 But it is a productive contradiction for the national security state. Persistent warnings that the “next 9/11” is a matter of “if, not when,” maintains a certain base level of fear while simultaneously maintaining support for action by those who benefit most from

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that fear. In short, the logic and rhetoric of preventive war combines perpetual fear of the inevitable with perpetual hope that it might just be deferred for a little while longer. Just as COIN seemed to “replace” NCW but still maintained NCW’s focus on preventing emergence, so too are “new” doctrines and strategies emerging even now to “replace” COIN. While the United States has lost much of its enthusiasm for expensive, long-duration, “boots on the ground” intensive campaigns like those of Iraq and Afghanistan, it has not lost its will to use military force preventively, more often these days in the form of airstrikes, drone strikes, cyber attacks, or special forces raids. Such actions are justified by pointing to the emergence of “new,” “unprecedented,” and dangerous threats requiring “new” thinking and capabilities. For example, a September 2014 report from the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) points to the dangerous emergence of new, “hybrid,” “asymmetrical,” and “unconventional” threats not only from groups like ISIS, but more ominously from states like Russia, China, and Iran. Among the many recommendations to effectively counter these new, deadly, and unprecedented threats—which of course includes more reliance on and resources for special operations forces—USASOC says that the United States must “gain the initiative,” meaning that strategies to counter these new threats “must be proactive rather than reactive. […] The goal is a long-term change in the environment to a state more amenable to U.S. interests.” 68 The case of cyberwar is also illustrative of the national security protection racket. As we saw in Chapter 5, through various techniques of threat inflation, proponents of cyberwar have worked to raise the level of fear and even to project onto others the very actions taken by the United States itself, from economic espionage to cyber attacks against critical infrastructure systems. Stuxnet is perhaps the most salient example in this regard. While U.S. officials had pointed to this cyber attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as an example of the kinds of threats against which American citizens should allow the NSA to protect them, it later turned out that the NSA itself (along with the Israelis) had been responsible for that attack. As Jason Healey memorably noted, U.S. pleas for improved cybersecurity in the wake of Stuxnet are like “an arsonist calling for better fire codes.” 69 But the United States’ involvement in Stuxnet was only the tip of the iceberg in this regard. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the internationally recognized computer security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier argued that, “instead of helping defend against them [cybersecurity threats], the NSA . . . [is] contributing to the ongoing insecurity of the Internet.” 70 Despite this, cyber threats have been used and are still being used to expand the national security state and the definition of what counts as “war.” First, cyber threats contribute to the “state of exception” that allows the growth of the national security state. We learned from the

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leaked NSA documents, for example, that cyber threats are on par with WMD as an “exception” for which mass domestic surveillance is justified. In July 2013, the New York Times reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has expanded, in secret, the so-called “special needs” doctrine to allow the NSA to conduct more domestic surveillance without the need of warrants. The threat of WMD proliferation initially was used to carve out a larger space for domestic surveillance in circumvention of Fourth Amendment requirements. Since then, however, an expanded understanding of “espionage,” as well as “cyber attacks,” have also been added to the list of threats falling under “special needs.” 71 Similarly, threats to cyber security appear in the leaked “minimization” rules published by The Guardian. These are the rules that are supposed to minimize the amount of unwarranted information collected about United States persons. Once again, cyber threats appear as an exception to the general prohibition against surveillance of purely domestic communications among U.S. persons. 72 As we described in chapter 5, the definition of “cyber threats”—i.e. the scope of exception—can be quite broad. Second, in addition to being illustrative of the national security protection racket, its techniques of threat inflation, and the extrajudicial “state of exception” in which it thrives, the emergence of cyber threats is also a window into the manner in which war is being redefined in ways that make it increasingly ubiquitous, invisible, and permanent. Cyber threats figure prominently in recent theories of so-called “hybrid,” “asymmetric,” “ambiguous,” and “non-obvious” warfare. In these theories, the United States is increasingly faced with nefarious and dangerous threats from hybrid, non-state actors employing hybrid means of attack, both violent and nonviolent, making the very existence of an ongoing war seem ambiguous or non-obvious, all in an effort to achieve an asymmetric advantage over the United States. In this way of thinking, it is possible for war to be invisible, for the United States to be in a fight for its very existence, but not know it. 73 Talking about the invisible nature of some of these dangers only added to the potential urgency of the situation, and suddenly, phenomena that would not traditionally have been seen as “warfare” are defined as such or, at least, they might be attacks in an ambiguous, non-obvious war that we have just not recognized. This why the director of the NSA, Admiral Mike Rogers, can say, in all seriousness, “We’re still trying to work our way through distinguishing the difference between criminal hacking and an act of war.” 74 In this new environment, where war is everywhere and nowhere, where “the threat ecosystem is just too broad,” everyone is a potential warrior. Indeed, every citizen must become a potential warrior responsible for defending him- or herself and the nation because, as Adm. Rogers has explained, “we cannot assume that the government will be able to completely protect us.” 75 Americans no long-

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er just have the option to “play the war on terror” at home, they must play. 76 However, this does not mean that the state will retreat, but just the opposite. As the definition of war expands, so too does the field of possible state action. Just as we saw advocates of NCW in chapter 2 arguing that the United States military must “morph to mirror” the new, dangerous, “super-empowered” individuals and groups comprising America’s enemy, a white paper from the United States Army Special Operations Command argues that the United States should adopt the same kinds of hybrid, asymmetric, “political warfare” tactics that its enemies use to blur the lines between war and peace. 77 Similarly, in a July 2014 report on threats facing NATO, the U.K.’s House of Commons Defence Committee warned of the rise of “ambiguous warfare” tactics by Russia, which it said are exemplified in Russia’s supposed use of cyber attacks against Estonia in 2007, its invasion of and use of cyber attacks against Georgia in 2008, and its annexation of Crimea and support of Ukrainian separatists in 2014. 78 In response, the Committee recommended that NATO remove language from the Washington Treaty identifying “armed attack” as a prerequisite for the invocation of Article V collective defense measures. This, the committee said, would better allow the alliance to respond to ambiguous, “unarmed” attacks like cyber attacks. 79 Such a recommendation is not unprecedented. As we noted in chapter 5, various U.S. officials and experts have suggested that the United States would consider taking military action in response to cyber attacks that do not meet the traditional definition of an “armed attack” under international law. Similarly, in 2008, a report of NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence argued that the “new bloodless types of warfare” like cyberwar mean that “the definition of an ‘attack’ should not be strictly connected with established meanings of death, injury, damage and destruction.” 80 Lest all of these indicators and warnings of an emerging form of ubiquitous, invisible, and permanent war be dismissed as mere conspiracy theory, one can also point to statements by political leaders, who have been quite clear about the unending nature of America’s current wars. For years, current and former U.S. government officials have said explicitly that the “war on terror” would last for decades. Then, in October 2014, former CIA Director and, later, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war,” one that he said would go beyond the current airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria to include operations to quell “emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” 81 As Glenn Greenwald noted in response to Panetta’s comments, “At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. Endless War is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.” 82

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CONCLUSION In sum, all of this talk of imminent threats, metastasizing terrorist cells, invisible cyber threats, targeted assassinations, surveillance, etc. will continue to fuel commentary in technical, public, and personal spheres as both elites and others seem to be fascinated with so many facets of these securitizing rhetorics. From our vantage point, the danger here is that America’s national security state is now being maintained and defended by decision-makers and publics who often agree with military and legal warhawks and others who call for maintaining the open-ended nature of counter-terrorist warfare. All of this has to do with the creativity and the powers of rhetorical invention that were once used to usher in the “war” against terrorism in the first place. As Susan Moeller explained in her critique of George W. Bush’s rhetoric in 2004: The designation that a series of events has become a “war” wonderfully concentrates public and official attention on a situation that had not previously commanded interest. For President Bush, the “War on Terror” encompassed more than the fight against Osama bin Laden and his minions and began well before 9/11. Bush declared war against disparate enemies; in his estimation the War on Terror was not only properly fought in Afghanistan once the Taliban refused to give up al Qaeda leaders, but included battles of all kinds—against the terrorism of Saddam Hussein, the “terrorist regime” of North Korea. From the first declaration of the “War on Terror,” American and British media reiterated President Bush’s avowed connection among the 9/11 terrorists, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Iraq and other “axis of evil” countries. Major media outlets efficiently disseminated every administration pronouncement, despite the fact that the most devastating terrorist attacks to date had not used WMD or fissile material, or even involved Iraqis. The front-page, top-of-the-news coverage helped validate the White House position. 83

The absence of any WMDs barely put a dent in the nationalizing rhetorics that could suture themselves to discussions of the need for regime change and the “democratic” ouster of Saddam Hussein. Note the ways that so many now ask for military intervention against ISIS, Syria, or anyone else who might “threaten” America. We can readily guess who gets to define that threat and what types of research will be used to talk about the “prevention” of that threat. This strategic ambiguity, we argue, has set the stage for all types futurist and anticipatory commentaries on Al Qaeda affiliates and metastisizing terrorist threats. As Aziz Huq noted in “The Social Production of National Security,” challenges “to public security morph over time.” During the last decade, concerns about non-state-sponsored terrorism spurred institutional transformations, new surveillance technologies, and novel usages of familiar policy tools as America and her allies went after “Al Qaeda, its

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affiliates, and fellow travelers.” 84 Now, American security experts could write about the “decentralization of terrorist risks,” which meant that just about any major dissenter labeled a threat by allies might appear on the radar screens of those who patrolled the skies over Pakistan or Afghanistan. This was happening at the same time that experts on Al Qaeda “behavior” were paying attention to the growth of “new, localized terrorist organizations in weak or failed states,” including the North African al Qaeda in the Magreb (AQIM), Ansar Dine in Mali, the Shabaab in Somalia, and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. 85 Instead of writing about the “old” Al Qaeda—controlled by personalities like Osama bin Laden—the new way of talking about “affiliates” assumed that the future growth of terrorism was in the “safe havens” and “franchises.” 86 In sum, regardless of whether Americans deploy lawfare and military humanitarian rhetorics that are based on unilateral or multilateral involvement, they will respond to inventional threats that exaggerate threats of terrorism in general, as well as the threats that are posed by foreign terrorism to the Homeland. Military orientalism, beliefs in American exceptionalism, and beliefs in the powers of cyberterrorist experts may help with the growth of assorted cottage industries for the national security state, but it behooves us to use our critical faculties to demystify some of the talk that has become such a pervasive part of our conversations on small wars, irregular warfare, COIN doctrines, and “preventive war.” To paraphrase Jeremy Bentham, much of this is “rhetorical nonsense,” “nonsense on stilts.” 87 NOTES 1. For rare exceptions where scholars are willing to discuss this creative destruction, see Stephen Graham, Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwaell Publishing, 2004); Albert J. Bergesen and Omar Lizardo, “International Terrorism and the World System,” Sociological Theory 22, no. 1 (March, 2004): 31–52. 2. Jennifer Peltz, “9/11 Museum Shows SEAL’s Shirt from bin Laden Raid,” Bigstory,AP.org, last modified September 7, 2014, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/911-museumshows-seals-shirt-bin-laden-raid. 3. Peltz, “9/11 Museum Shows,” paragraphs 3–6. 4. Peter W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 5. Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes (London: Hurst & Company, 2009). For a related critique that focuses even more attention on the rhetorical and cultural dimensions of some of this contemporary American military planning, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “War is Culture, Global Counterinsurgency, Visuality and the Petraeus Doctrine,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1–18. 6. See, for example, Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst, 19452010 (London: Penguin Books, 2010). 7. For an intriguing critique of the potential diplomatic meaning of this ideographic “clash of civilizations,” see Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”

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Foreign Policy, 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. For a feminist critique that explains the evocative power of one variant of the rescue templates that are used by some military humanitarian interventionists, see the work of Dana Cloud, “’To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the ‘Clash of Civilizations,’ in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 285–306. DOI: 10.1080/ 0033563042000270726. 8. As noted elsewhere, the AUMF authorized the American president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against all actors that he determined were involved in the 9/11 attacks. This, of course, means that Presidents can simply argue persuasively that certain groups, like ISIS, are Al Qaeda spin-offs, and creative decision-makers can always find ways of explaining how particular novel enemy communities threat the “Homeland” in the same ways that Osama bin Laden once endangered American shores. For a typical legal discussion of the potential extensions of the AUMF to fit other contexts, see Graham Cronogue, “A New AUMF: Defining Combatants in the War on Terror,” Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 22 (2012): 377-406. 9. Andrew Krepinevich, 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century (New York: Bantam Press, 2009). 10. See, Craig Whitlock, “Rift Widens Between Obama, U.S. Military Over Strategy to Fight Islamic State,” Washington Post, September 18, 2014, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/rift-widens-between-obama-usmilitary-over-strategy-to-fight-islamic-state/2014/09/1_story.html. 11. Floyd Brown, “Obama Becomes a Wartime President,” Wall Street Daily, last modified September 12, 2014, paragraph 6, http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2014/09/ 12/obama-bush-wartime-president/. 12. See, for example, Ariel Ben Solomon, “Israel in Contac With Syrian Opposition: Obama Let ISIS ‘Cancer’ Metastasize,” The Jerusalem Post, last modified August 19, 2014, http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Syrian-opposition-figure-tells-Israeli-thatObama-let-ISIS-cancer-metastasize-371448. 13. Robert Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” The New Republic, May 26, 2014, paragraph 77. 14. Uncle Jimbo, “Global Counter-insurgency (COIN)-Petraeus to Head CENTCOM,” BlackFive, last modified April 23, 2008, http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/04/ global-counter.html. 15. Uncle Jimbo, “Global Counter-Insurgency (COIN),” paragraph 1. 16. Uncle Jimbo, “Global Counter-Insurgency (COIN),” paragraph 2. 17. See, for example, Kenneth Anderson, “Readings: Laurie Blank on Proportionality in Jus in Bello In Israel-Hamas Conflict, A Primer,” Lawfare, last modified August 1, 2014, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/08/readings-laurie-blank-on-proportionalityin-jus-in-bello-in-israel-hamas-conflict-a-primer/. 18. Jack Goldsmith, Written Statement of Jack Goldsmith, United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings on “Law of Armed Conflict, the Use of Military Force, and the 2001 Authorization of for Use of Military Force,” Lawfare, May 16, 2013, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Goldsmith_05–16–13.pdf. 19. See Neil MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad, Jihadists Taking a Growing Role in Syrian Revolt,” The New York Times, July 30, 2012, p. A-1. 20. Andy Wright, “SFRC Access to Intelligence Information During Force Authorization Debate,” Just Security, last modified September 18, 2014, paragraph 10, http:// justsecurity.org/15189/sfrc-access-intelligence-information-force-authorization-debate/. 21. Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane, “House Approves Obama’s Iraq-Syria Military Strategy Amid Skepticism,” Washington Post, last modified September 17, 2014, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress-poised-to-approve-obamas-iraq-syriamilitary-strategy-amid-skepticism/2014/09/17/c2494df2-3e85-11e4-b0ea8141703bbf6f_story.html?hpid=z1. 22. O’Keefe and Kane, “House Approves,” paragraph 2.

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23. David Nakamura, “In Speech to U.S. Troops, Obama Vows to Avoid ‘Another Ground War in Iraq,’” The Washington Post, September 17, 2014, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/09/17/in-speech-to-u-s-troopsobama-vows-to-avoid-another-ground-war-in-iraq/. 24. For an excellent discussion of how U.S. military assemblages can be brought together in a variety of transglobal contexts, see Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (New York: Routledge, 2013). 25. Obama, quoted in O’Keefe and Kane, “House Approves,” paragraph 5. 26. Haider al-Abadi, quoted in Associated Press, “AP Interview: Iraq Premier Nixes U.S. Ground Troops,” Washington Post, September 17, 2014, paragraph 14, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/ap-interview-iraq-premier-says-noforeign-troops/2014/09/17/8d941cae-3e71-11e4-a430-b82a3e67b762_story.html. 27. Somini Sengupta, “A Host of Possible Objections to Expanding Airstrikes In Syria,” New York Times, September 17, 2014, paragraph 9, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2014/09/18/world/middleeast/a-host-of-possible-objections-to-expanded-airstrikes.html. 28. See, for example, Thomas E. Ricks, “The COINdinastas,” Foreign Policy, September 30, 2009, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_coindinistas. 29. Note, for example, the way that books like Fred Kaplan’s The Insurgents continues to be a popular book that appears on the must reading lists of many soldiers, former officers, and military-planners. Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents, David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). For an insightful discussion of Petraeus became the embodiment of America’s counterinsurgency “style,” see James A. Russell, “Counterinsurgency American Style: Considering David Petraeus and Twenty-First Century Irregular War,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 25, no. 1 (2014): 69–90, DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2014.893956. 30. Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 31. See Porch, Counterinsurgency, 289–299. For more examples of how more American and international academics seem to be drawn to studies of older British colonial and imperial policies, see David French, The British Way of Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Victoria Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency: The British Army and Small War Strategy Since World War II (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 32. See Porch, Counterinsurgency, 2. 33. Noel Sharkey, “The Automation and Proliferation of Military Drones and the Protection of Civilians,” Law, Innovation and Technology 3, no. 2 (2011): 229–40. 34. Sarah Kreps and Micah Zenko, “Next Drone Wars; Preparing for Proliferation,” Foreign Affairs 93 (2014): 72. 35. Brizmun, “The Impact of Drones on Democracy,” Alonchonaa (Dialogue) , May 4, 2014, para. 1, http://alochonaa.com/2014/05/04/the-impact-of-drones-on-democracy. 36. Sarah Kreps, “Drone Proliferation: What We Have to Fear,” Text, The Hill , (June 25, 2014), para. 1, accessed October 13, 2014 http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/ 210109-drone-proliferation-what-we-have-to-fear. “Cure-all” is Obama’s wording; the rest of the quote is Kreps’ wording. 37. Kreps, “Drone proliferation.” 38. Sharkey, “The Automation and Proliferation of Military Drones and the Protection of Civilians.” 39. Kreps, “Drone proliferation,” para. 2. 40. Micah Zenko and Sarah E. Kreps, “Limiting Armed Drone Proliferation,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 2014, para. 2, accessed October 13, 2014 http:// www.cfr.org/drones/limiting-armed-drone-proliferation/p33127. 41. Ibid. 42. Kreps, “Drone Proliferation,” para. 2. 43. Ibid.

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44. Ibid., para. 1. 45. Zenko and Kreps, “Limiting Armed Drone Proliferation,” para. 4. 46. Kreps and Zenko, “The Next Drone Wars: Preparing for Proliferation,” Foreign Affairs 93 (2014), 68. 47. Kreps, “Drone Proliferation,” para. 4. 48. Jeremy Scahill And Glenn Greenwald, “Death By Metadata,” Democracy Now, last modified February 10, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/10/ death_by_metadata_jeremy_scahill_glenn 49. Sharkey, “The Automation and Proliferation of Military Drones and the Protection of Civilians,” 233. 50. Brizmun, “The Impact of Drones on Democracy.” 51. Sharkey, “The Automation and Proliferation of Military Drones and the Protection of Civilians,” 233. 52. Sharkey, “The Automation and Proliferation of Military Drones and the Protection of Civilians.” 53. Ibid., 234. 54. Brizmun, “The Impact of Drones on Democracy,” para. 3. 55. Zenko and Kreps, “Limiting Armed Drone Proliferation,” para. 6. 56. Kreps, “Drone Proliferation,” para. 12. 57. James Whibley, “The Proliferation of Drone Warfare: The Weakening of Norms and International Precedent,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, February 6, 2013, para. 3, accessed October 13, 2014 http://journal.georgetown.edu/the-proliferation-of-drone-warfare-the-weakening-of-norms-and-international-precedent-byjames-whibley/. 58. Brizmun, “The Impact of Drones on Democracy,” para. 1. 59. James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), Kindle edition. 60. Michael Dillon, “Network Society, Network-Centric Warfare and the State of Emergency,” Theory, Culture & Society 19 (2002): 71. 61. Jen DiMascio, “Analyst: Rumsfeld’s Departure May Signal End to Defense Transformation,” Defense Daily, November 9, 2006, Lexis-Nexis; John Barry and Evan Thomas, “Blame for the Top Brass,” Newsweek, January 22, 2007, 36; Martin Sieff, “Analysis: Harvey’s Fall May Help U.S. Army,” UPI, March 6, 2007, Lexis-Nexis; Robert M. Gates, “A Balanced Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 88 (2009); Robert M. Gates, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Arlington, VA: Department of Defense, 2010). 62. Thomas P. M. Barnett, “NCW Infiltration: Complete,” Thomas P.M. Barnett::Weblog, August 27, 2006, accessed August 27, 2006, http:// www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/003645.html; DiMascio, “Analyst: Rumsfeld’s Departure May Signal End to Defense Transformation”; Jeffrey Groh, “Network Centric Warfare (NCW) Never Went Away,” DIME Blog, April 5, 2010, accessed April 5, 2010, http://www.carlisle.army.mil/dime/blog/article.cfm?blog=dime&article=97. 63. Dillon, “Network Society, Network-Centric Warfare and the State of Emergency,” 74–75, 77; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). 64. Dillon, “Network Society, Network-Centric Warfare and the State of Emergency,” 77. 65. Mark LeVine, “The New Creative Destruction,” Asia Times, August 22, 2006, accessed October 17, 2014, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ HH22Ak01.html. 66. Glenn Greenwald and Hussain Murtaza, “The Fake Terror Threat Used to Justify Bombing Syria,” The Intercept, September 28, 2014, accessed October 17, 2014, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/28/u-s-officials-invented-terror-group-justify-bombing-syria/. 67. Greg Elmer and Andy Opel, Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishers, 2008): 26–28.

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Index

Abu Ghraib, 8, 46, 59, 61, 74, 75, 77, 78, 86; detainees, 59; photos, 23, 202 Abu Zubaydah, 64, 74, 77, 87 Agamben, Gorgio, 6; camp philosophy, 16; state of exception, 25n29 agent provocateur, 184 Akhter, Majed, 8 Al-Qahtani, 77, 80 Al Qaeda, 2, 4, 8, 11, 22, 73, 156, 161, 170, 179, 212, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 238n86; Al-Qaeda in the Magreb (AQIM), 172, 233; Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), 233 Al-Awlaki, Anwar, 11, 40, 114, 218 Al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 105, 172 Alexander, Keith, 11, 33, 35, 50, 50–51, 136, 142, 143, 189, 199, 200, 204 Alston, Philip, 159, 162, 163, 164, 175n22, 177n46 American exceptionalism, 6, 7, 19, 21, 22, 40, 69, 76, 79, 112, 183, 216, 223, 226, 234 America’s Way Of War, 3, 8, 16, 19, 26n38, 70, 95, 104, 108, 111, 113, 122, 125, 158, 215, 222, 236n29, 236n30 Arquilla, John, 48, 139, 142, 151n65, 151n66, 152n87 Assange, Julian, 9, 22, 23, 183, 202 assassinations, 9, 14, 37, 87, 106, 120, 125, 211, 233 Atta, Mohammed, 49, 51 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), 6, 107, 213, 219, 235n8 Bauer, Jack, 38, 41, 62, 87, 115–116, 123, 229 Beaver, Diane, 71, 72–73, 86 Bergen, Peter, 16, 176n28 big data, 47, 48, 51

Bin Laden, Osama, 5, 8, 12, 15, 19, 84, 87, 131, 219, 233, 235n8; raid on Abbottabad, 5, 95, 209–210, 215, 234n2; Tora Bora, 95, 105 Bissonnette, Matt [Mark Owen], 19, 110–112 Black, J. Cofer, 59, 61, 143, 211 Blair, Dennis, 13, 68–69, 73 Boyd, John, 42, 43 Bush, George, W, 2, 14, 17, 18, 23, 62, 63, 107, 133, 135, 137, 172, 192, 195, 195–196, 196, 201, 213, 214, 227–228, 233 Bybee, Jay, 18, 61, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81, 85, 86 Caproni, Valerie, 66, 76–77 Central Intelligence Agency, 2, 143, 152n94, 157, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 180, 198, 202, 210, 216, 218, 219, 222, 225, 232; black sites, 6, 12, 60, 61, 177n54, 204, 236n24; Director John Brennan, 6, 13, 210; Human Resources Exploitation Manual, 68; National Security Act of 1947, 7 chaos theory, 41, 48 Cebrowski, Arthur., 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 99, 102 centers of gravity, 66 chaoplexic warfare, 102–103 Cheney, Richard, 10, 14, 79, 82–83, 196, 200, 212 Clarke, Richard, 139, 150n61, 198 Clausewitz, Carl von, 66 Clinton, Hillary, 19, 118; internet freedom, 135, 136, 149n38, 150n44 complexity theory, 41, 42, 47, 55n38 Convention Against Torture (CAT), 75, 81

271

272

Index

counterinsurgency (COIN), 33, 39, 45, 50, 66, 96, 99, 211, 212, 213, 216, 218, 222, 227, 228, 234n5, 236n29, 236n30–236n32 Creech Air Force Base, 170, 210 critical infrastructures, 134–135, 135, 136, 137, 139, 143, 147n3, 149n29–149n33, 150n58, 151n74, 230 cyberwarfare, 20, 131, 132, 133–134, 136, 137, 138, 139–140, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 158, 159, 164, 168, 171, 172, 187, 230. See threat inflation; cyberterror, 8, 20, 139, 215, 234; Estonia, 135, 141, 232; Georgia, 135, 141, 232 Deleuze, Gilles, 182; war machine, 4, 25n23, 61, 71, 182, 183, 186 Detainee Treatment Act, 60 drone pilots, 21, 159, 162, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173, 218, 223; occupational stress, 21, 164, 167, 173; posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 21, 158 drones: dronification, 8; Gorgon Stare, 7, 160; patterns of life, 7, 164, 166, 166–167, 167, 169, 210; and precision, 7, 21, 105–106, 157, 165, 168, 224; remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), 21, 105, 159, 175n17, 176n37, 177n42; signature strikes, 2, 5, 166, 171; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 21, 156, 172, 174n6; White Paper, 40, 164 Dunlap, Charles, Jr, 66 enhanced interrogation techniques. (EITs), 6, 8, 59–69; Executive Order 13491, 60; U.S. Army Field Manual, 60, 66 Federal Administrative Tribal Areas of Pakistan (FATA), 37 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 63, 64–65, 65, 70, 74, 75, 76–77, 80, 83, 86, 107, 139, 197, 209; Director James Comey, 3 Foucault, Michel, 9, 26n44, 168, 182; dispositifs, 32, 105, 209–210, 213

Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW), 43, 43–44, 46 Frontline: United States of Secrets, 182, 186, 194–198 Geneva Conventions, 13, 59, 64, 69–70, 71, 75, 89n16, 90n42, 211 Geo Cell, 35 Ghul, Hasan, 37 Gonzales, Alberto, 12, 75, 196 Graner, Charles, 59 Greenwald, Glenn., 14, 22, 33, 34, 133, 180, 199, 218, 227, 229, 232; No Place to Hide, 182, 186–194, 201 Guantánamo, 14, 63, 70; Black hole, 5, 12; Joint Task Force 170, 71 Haditha, 46 Hague, William, 180 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 64 Harris, Shane, 34, 35, 50 Hayden, Michael, 35, 81, 87, 143, 196, 198, 201 Helgerson, John: Inspector General CIA Report, 66, 81 Heller, Jon Kevin, 3, 36 Hersh, Seymour, 8 high value targets (HVTs), 4, 35, 36, 46, 52, 106, 108 Holder, Eric, 13, 61, 85 Homeland , 113, 117–118 Huq, Aziz, 7, 233 Hussein, Saddam, 39, 49, 52, 137, 140, 228, 233 imminent threats, 37, 38–41, 87, 167, 212, 220, 228, 229, 233 imperial president, 2, 5, 9–10, 18 Improvised explosive devices (IEDs), 35, 156, 161, 166 Information and communication technologies (ICTs), 20, 29n79, 32, 42, 131, 134 insecurity, 9, 11, 15, 32, 230 ISIS, 3, 9, 15, 16, 24n8, 122, 214, 221, 228, 230, 232, 233, 235n8 International Humanitarian Law (IHL), 20, 68, 75, 158, 161; jus ad bellum, 156, 174n11, 218; jus in bello,

Index 98, 156 Ivie, Robert, 11 Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 5, 11, 13, 16, 95–124, 209, 214 Johnson, Jeh, 14 just wars, 6, 13, 31, 53n4, 210 Kafka, Franz, 1, 6; Joseph K, 3, 23; Kafkaesque, 1, 4, 71, 91n52, 171, 179, 183, 197, 229 Kerry, John, 181, 220 kill/capture, 16, 18, 29n79, 31–53, 106, 107, 112, 163, 225 Krebs, Valdis, 48, 49, 51 Khorasan Group, 229 Koh, Harold, 65 Latour, Bruno., 182 Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), 12, 168, 211, 225 lawfare, 6, 11, 13, 26n42, 27n62, 65, 66–67, 75, 192, 216–221; Islamic lawfare, 68 leakers, 12, 179, 182, 183, 187, 198, 199, 202 Lieberman, Joseph, 144, 145 Luban, David., 8 Manning, Chelsea, 9, 22, 23, 180, 183, 187, 202 MacAskill, Ewen, 180, 189 McConnell, Mike, 37, 80, 133, 142 McChrystal, Stanley, 36, 97–98, 99–105, 222 Militainment, 111, 112, 113, 116 military-industrial-mediaentertainment complex, 5 military orientalism, 35, 211, 234 military science, U.S, 31–53, 106 Mubarak, Hosni, 145 Muhammed, Khalid Sheikh, 65, 82 Nagl, John, 45 National Security Agency (NSA), 1; mass surveillance, 4, 6, 9, 17, 18, 23, 29n79, 31–53, 187, 189, 190, 203, 209; Deputy Director, John Inglis, 33, 200; Perfect Citizen Program, 146;

273

warrantless wiretapping, 14, 23, 51, 195–196, 197, 231 national security state : definition of, 2, 4, 7; ideograph, 10, 90n47, 234n7 National Security Strategy (NSS), 38, 39 national surveillance state, 182 Navy SEAL Team Six, 87, 95, 97, 120–121, 122 Natsec experts, 6, 12 Network-centric warfare, 11, 35, 42, 63, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 158, 182, 211, 214, 215, 221, 227, 229–230, 232 network science, 47–52 new way of war, 3, 8, 16, 19, 26n38, 70, 95, 104, 108, 111, 113, 122, 125, 215, 222 nonlinear science, 41–53, 211 Obama, Barack: Terror Tuesdays, 6, 8 Occultatio, 18 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), 13, 18, 197, 199; Torture Memos, 18, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 73–88, 89n11 Oklahoma City Bombing, 134 OODA loop model of conflict, 42 Operation Eagle Claw, 97, 100 Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), 45, 67, 70, 97 Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), 40, 67, 159, 222; Shock and awe, 23, 45, 211 Operation Pink, 5 Otto, Jean, 163, 164, 177n43 Panetta, Leon, 110, 142, 161, 232 Padilla, Joseph, 65, 81 perpetual war, 15, 20, 21, 24n10, 52, 99, 124, 209, 212, 227, 230 Persons of national interest (PONIs), 34, 46 Petraeus, David, 10, 15, 46, 101, 222, 236n29 Playstation mentality, 163, 164, 171, 176n40 Poitras, Laura, 22, 180, 188, 189 possibilistic thinking, 133, 134, 140 post-heroic, 156, 163, 172 Precision-guided munitions (PGM), 6, 168

274

Index

preemption, 38, 39, 41 preventive war, 17, 23, 41, 46, 53n3, 53n4, 64, 70, 99, 102, 213, 215, 222, 227, 229, 234 public screens, 24n8 Pugliese, Joseph., 59, 62 Putin, Vladimir, 185, 213 rapport-building techniques, 70, 71, 77 Rejali, Darius, 80 Reprieve, 4, 21 Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 23 Risen, James, 14, 18, 227 Rizzo, John, 74 Ronfeldt, David, 48 Rumsfeld, Donald, 42, 44, 67, 71, 75, 78, 86, 133, 227 Scahill, Jeremy, 33, 34, 36, 124, 125 Scandal, 29n88, 115, 116–117, 120–122 Schmidt, Carl, 16 Schmidle, Nicholas, 19, 109–110, 114 securitization, 4, 7, 10, 11, 17, 19, 25n16, 26n44, 27n50, 32, 82, 84, 107, 131, 181, 183, 184, 211, 213, 217, 223; securitizing actor, 10, 132, 133; securitization theory, 27n51, 82, 132 September 11, 2001 attacks, 4, 32, 34, 38, 43, 53n3, 73, 122, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 196, 201, 219 Shaw, Ian, 8 Signals intelligence (SIGINT), 15 Snowden, Edward: Snowden Files, 181, 182, 201, 202 social network analysis, 47–52, 222 Soufan, Ali, 65, 77, 90n42 Special Forces, U.S, 10, 19, 20, 95–98, 112–124, 211, 213, 220, 222, 230 Stahl, Roger., 99 Stuxnet, 11, 135, 141, 143, 230

Taliban, 2, 8, 35, 70, 97, 100, 102, 108, 124, 156, 161, 167, 170, 179, 211, 212, 215, 219, 222, 233 thanatopolitical, 21, 60, 74, 158, 167, 214 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 21, 159 threat inflation, 10, 15, 20, 21, 88, 131–147; Cyber-doom scenarios, 132, 134, 139–140, 140, 141, 142, 144, 144–145, 147; Exaggeration, 132, 134, 140–142, 144, 147; Overreaction, 132, 140, 144–146; Piggybacking, 132, 134, 142, 143; Projection, 132, 134, 140, 143, 144 Toffler, Alvin, 139 transparency, 9, 35, 61, 62, 84, 86, 115, 116, 123, 181, 186, 194, 198, 214 Unitary executive powers, 64, 75, 76, 87, 89n22, 116 unknown unknowns, 51, 133, 137–138 Vulcans, 2, 23, 24n5, 79 Waterboarding, 62–64, 74, 80–82, 85, 87 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 39, 134, 231, 233; eWMDs, 139 White House Situation Room, 8, 23, 118; Photographs of bin Laden Raid, 19, 118–119 Yoo, John, 18, 61, 64, 73, 75, 78, 81, 212 Zero Dark Thirty, 4, 5, 12, 16, 19, 62, 78, 111, 210; Katherine Bigelow, 5, 12; Mark Boal, 12; Maya, 62, 210