Reign of Terror Quotes

“Bush was showing the Muslim world the America that bin Laden depicted: both a bloodthirsty oppresser and a vulnerable one. The United States looked like a rampaging tyrant, ruling through fear and coercion, yet one which Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan were demonstrating could be defeated. Bin Laden explained his strategy as simply provoking America into being itself. Much as the Soviet Union had collapsed after the Afghanistan insurgency—which he neglected to mention had aligned him with the CIA—bin Laden said, “We are continuing this policy, in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“By the time Administrator Bremer departed, $8.8 billion in reconstruction funds—taxpayer money harvested during a recession while Bush tilted more of the tax burden onto the middle and working classes—had simply disappeared without leaving a paper trail, while American contractors selling the occupation everything from laundry detergent to private security reaped windfalls.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“Triumph over the left or liberals—two different political traditions that the right often conflated—took on the imperative of national survival, a posture familiar from the right’s approach to the Cold War.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“A perpetual war,” Obama observed in May 2013, would “prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.” A great tragedy of Obama’s presidency is that this insight did not guide his actions.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“A war that never defined its enemy became an opportunity for the so-called MAGA coalition of white Americans to merge their grievances in an atmosphere of righteous emergency.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“The Republicans deplored surveillance against Trump while having no reservations about the surveillance dragnets expanding ever further over untold millions of others, at home and abroad.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“One of the insignia of that wartime coalition was the racist slander known as birtherism. Birtherism—which held that the first Black president was secretly a Kenyan Muslim noncitizen—was a fortress surrounding white anxiety made of anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“novel coronavirus pandemic revealed that America’s entrenched socioeconomic reality made life an agonizing choice between health and economic survival.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“A Pentagon investigation found that the team of mostly Green Berets was scheduled to meet with local leaders, but had to change their mission after a drone spotted an Islamic State potentate. Their captain, the target of blame from a Pentagon report that the soldiers’ relatives denounced as a whitewash, expressly warned his superior officer that the unit was neither equipped nor informed enough to execute the raid. More than a hundred militants opened fire on Operational Detachment-Alpha Team 3212. Air support and evacuation did not arrive for four hours, by which time Sergeant First Class Jeremiah W. Johnson, Staff Sergeant Bryan C. Black, and Staff Sergeant Dustin M. Wright were dead. Sergeant La David Johnson was missing, and his body would not be recovered for two days. Less than two weeks later Trump called Johnson’s grieving widow. Myeshia Johnson was with her mother and a family friend, Miami congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who paraphrased Trump as saying that Johnson—whose name Trump evidently didn’t remember—must have known what he had signed up for.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“was agnostic as to whether an advertiser, an analytics firm, or the NSA exploited them.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

“Osama bin Laden observed the American landscape he had reshaped. His plan had “exceeded all expectations,” he gloated, thanks to the indefinite, expanding war. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda,’ ” bin Laden marveled in a videotape he released October 30, “in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”
― Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump