Terrorists

 In the many think pieces that filled my news feed last week on the subject of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, astonishingly few devoted any attention to the question of whether we are at risk of suffering another conventional attack on U.S. soil of a similar scale. 

This seems like a question we really ought to be asking ourselves, since we are in a protracted war with a foreign adversary that has a long history of sponsoring international terrorism. 

It has been said that 9/11 occurred because U.S. intelligence agencies suffered a "failure of imagination." But sometimes, the imagination fails not because the risk we overlook is too improbable or strange—but because it's too obvious. It's right in front of our faces. 

9/11, after all, wasn't entirely unpredictable—or unpredicted. The same people who allegedly carried it out had tried to destroy the same target less than a decade earlier, in the 1993 WTC bombing. Intelligence agencies had warned over the summer of 2001 that Bin Laden wished to strike the U.S. 

Are we overlooking similarly obvious threats today? 

Over a week of commentary on the 9/11 anniversary, I saw not a single article or reflection on the potential risk of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil from Iran. Instead, we have been wringing our hands for days about "AI existential risk" and the potential menace of an unaligned chatbot swarm. 

But let's take a moment to remember that our government unilaterally (and without any legal justification) hauled off and assassinated multiple generations of the senior leadership of a foreign power earlier this year. 

The people we killed have families and followers. They have already publicly and repeatedly vowed revenge. And they have a history of sponsoring international terrorist attacks that make no distinction between military and civilian targets. 

They also have a fanatical end-times ideology that can hold its own for doctrinal extremism and lunacy with the theological views of our own current secretary of defense. 

Recall that these are the same people who have spent almost forty years now trying to hunt down and murder Salman Rushdie for the "crime" of publishing a book in another country that didn't even have anything to do with them. 

Trump, many days of the week, appears to have forgotten about his own murderous and unlawful attack on Iran. The Iranian regime, I promise you, has not. 

Has Trump any idea what kind of dragon's teeth he has sown? 

We seem to take it for granted for some reason that Iran wouldn't have the capacity or reach to pull off a strike on U.S. soil. But one of the lessons of 9/11 was surely that, sometimes, a lot less sophistication is needed than we think. Sometimes, someone just needs a box cutter.

I'm traveling to New York City this coming week for a work trip. In my paranoid moments, I think about those recent news stories about mysterious and unknown people seen opening manhole covers and crawling into New York's underground sewer system at night. 

Probably, they are just oddball urban explorers or YouTubers. Perhaps they are down there hunting alligators like in Thomas Pynchon's V. 

But if they were up to something more sinister—would we know? ("The moles have built their palace beneath us / We have not far to fall," to quote Edna St. Vincent Millay.)

And who exactly is keeping track of this, or keeping us safe? Our current executive branch has purged a generation or more of talent from the intelligence agencies. They are busy fighting their own culture war against those Trump calls "the enemy within" and Stephen Miller deems "antifa terrorists." 

What if there's a much more obvious "enemy without" who might threaten us, though—one with whom Trump very blatantly and specifically chose to pick an utterly gratuitous and unnecessary fight to the death (even if Trump is now bored with the same contest and would rather go golfing)? 

Since taking power, of course, the Trump administration has revived and supplemented all of the worst abuses of the post-9/11 Bush regime. They are doing their own kidnappings and extraordinary renditions; their own extrajudicial killings; their own crackdown on free speech and civil liberties. 

Part of what has proved so baffling and unappealing to the American people about these excesses, though, is that they are directed against no even remotely plausible external threat. 

We all know that the Trump administration is blowing up civilian fishing boats—some of which might at worst have been transporting a kilo of coke to pick up some spare dollars—and is kidnapping day laborers and Uber drivers to send to its gulag archipelago of torture prisons abroad. 

But since the Trump administration has already done all it can to gin up a mass panic and authoritarian makeover of the country with almost no actual material to work with—can you imagine what they would do with a terrorist attack on U.S. soil that actually cost American lives? 

This White House has already tried time and again to invoke the magic word "terrorism" as an all-purpose excuse to evade civil liberties and violate the laws of war. 25 years after 9/11, though, this particular talisman has lost some of its power. 

But how much power would it regain if there were another conventional attack on U.S. soil of a similar magnitude? 

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States did things and engaged in spectacles of cruelty and violence that would later come to shame us. As Seymour Hersh writes in Chain of Command: 

"After John Walker Lindh [...] was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001, his American interrogators stripped him, gagged him, strapped him to a board, and exhibited him to the press [....] These apparent violations of international law met with few, if any, objections." 

The reason, Hersh writes, is doubtless that Americans were "still traumatized" and "angry" about the 9/11 attacks. 

The Trump administration has already exceeded even these levels of conspicuous cruelty. They have kidnapped people, shackled them in full-body restraints for 14-hour flights, and rendered them to third countries where they are being imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. 

And instead of trying to hide it, the administration has flaunted it. They tweeted out photos and live-streamed videos of their own handiwork in the CECOT prison in El Salvador. They have posted snuff-films of their murders on fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. 

And there was not even any national "trauma" from a recent terrorist attack in their case that could somehow psychologically mitigate or at least explain some of these excesses. 

Can you imagine what this administration would do, then—if it had "trauma" and "anger" to work with too?

The "spectacular" form of fascism—the fetishization of violence that this administration engages in—has also started to spread to Trump's allies in the region too. The new Trump-backed far-right president of Colombia, for instance, has reportedly streamed videos of himself striding among the corpses of slain victims. 

They are all, of course, alleged gang members, though we have only his word for that. 

Walking among the 23 dead bodies, he apparently crowed to the cameras, "Long live Christ the king!"

One is moved to ask, with Thomas Hardy: "I would know / By whom and when that All-Earth-gladdening Law/ Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified/ Was ruled to be inept and set aside?" 

As Robert Tressell writes in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: It would seem that "in foreign countries—the same as here—there are plenty of so-called 'Christian' bishops and priests always ready to give their benediction to any such murderous projects, and to blasphemously pray to the Supreme Being to help his children to slay each other like wild beasts."

Of the Colombian president's video of himself boasting over the corpses of the slain (and let us recall here that this man is a U.S. ally, and that the extrajudicial killings he is advertising in this video were carried out with U.S. targeting and intelligence support), the Wall Street Journal notes: 

"The practice has alarmed de la Espriella’s political opponents and human-rights groups, who accuse him of displaying the dead as trophies and violating international rules that prohibit desecrating those killed in operations."

In his discussion of Rembrandt's painting "The Anatomy Lesson," in his book The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald writes at one point of how dissection of a hanged criminal in that era would have been seen as part of the penalty for crime—a posthumous mutilation that added humiliation and insult to death. 

"The spectacle" of the anatomy lesson, therefore, he writes, "[...] also represented (though this would surely have been refuted) the archaic ritual of dismembering a corpse, of harrowing the flesh of the delinquent even beyond death[.]" (Hulse trans.)

Our U.S. allies, posing with the corpses of the victims of their own extrajudicial killings—carried out with U.S. intelligence support and our president's blessing—have apparently revived this same "archaic ritual" as well, as part of the resurgent far-right's global push toward ever greater extremes of fascist spectacle and violence. 

In his book about the post-9/11 response, Seymour Hersh observes that the Bush administration ended up "fighting terror with terror." 

The Trump administration, by contrast, has simply been inflicting terror gratuitously. For the hell of it, it would seem. They are engaging in terrorist violence for its own sake, without even the pretext of "fighting terror." 

How far could they go if they had an actual terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 to work with? And what incentive, then, would they have to prevent it? 

God help us!