This is how Trump exploited the counter-terrorism apparatus to his advantage

From The Washington Post

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The agencies and powers established to prevent further terrorist attacks following the 11 September attacks are being used by Trump against immigrants, drug traffickers and political dissent. Meanwhile, the nature of the threats is changing: cyberattacks, drones, AI and biotechnology

by Warren P. Strobel

10 SEP 26

Twenty-five years have passed since the 9/11 attacks, and powerful agencies and extensive legal powers created to prevent another terrorist catastrophe are now being turned inwards, with the Trump Administration using many of those same tools to arrest immigrants, combat drug traffickers and crack down on political dissent. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, established in response to the intelligence failures that emerged prior to 11 September, has played a central role in President Donald Trump’s dissemination of false conspiracy theories about the elections and in his reprisals against those he considers his political enemies.

Trump has ordered the Joint Terrorism Task Forces – established across the country after 2001 to pool federal and local resources – to investigate groups that challenge the White House’s positions on immigration, gender and religion. Another post-9/11 creation, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has under Trump stepped up surveillance and arrests of immigrants, sometimes going so far as to capture or kill American citizens in the process. As memories of the worst terrorist attack in American history gradually fade, some former senior U.S. officials argue that the rapid transformation of the agencies and laws created a quarter of a century ago has helped to divert attention from emerging external threats. They are referring not only to anti-American terrorism – which has declined but not disappeared – but also to a range of challenges that have largely emerged since 2001, including advanced artificial intelligence, cyber threats, drones and biotechnology.

Trump is dismantling or restructuring “almost all the agencies created by the Bush Administration to protect us from terrorism”, said John Bellinger III, who on 11 September 2001 was legal adviser to President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and helped draft the reforms that followed. “There has been a tremendous loss of focus,” said Bellinger. After al-Qa’ida hijackers killed 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the 9/11 Commission and other inquiries established that the CIA and the FBI had failed to share information on threats that might have led to the discovery of the plot. This was followed by the biggest reorganisation of US national security since the 1940s. A new cabinet-level department, the Department of Homeland Security, was created, alongside agencies such as ICE and the Transportation Security Administration. The ODNI was established to ensure that intelligence agencies, each with different mandates, communicated with one another. The National Counterterrorism Centre was set up to centralise data on terrorist threats. In 2006, the Department of Justice established a new National Security Division to coordinate resources dedicated to counter-terrorism and intelligence.

Following the attacks, US presidents were granted new and extensive powers. These included secret electronic surveillance programmes without a court warrant, which were publicly revealed in 2005, and an Authorisation for the Use of Military Force approved by Congress in September 2001, which was global in scope, had no expiry date and remains in force to this day. From the outset, the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ launched by Bush came into conflict with American civil liberties, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The New York Police Department spied on American Muslims and mosques without any evidence of wrongdoing. Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency, exposed a vast global network of mass surveillance. The Obama administration’s Department of Justice secretly seized journalists’ telephone records. And in 2011, Obama ordered a drone strike that killed a terrorist in Yemen who was also an American citizen.

Trump’s definition of terrorism, however, is very different from that of his predecessors. He has designated drug cartels as terrorist organisations and has used lethal military force against alleged drug traffickers on dozens of occasions. Many former national security officials and legal experts argue that drug trafficking does not fall within the definition of terrorism, because cartel members are motivated by money, not by ideology, violence against civilians or attempts to overthrow the US government. On the domestic front, Trump has targeted left-wing groups, including the informal network of militant anti-fascist activists known as antifa, which he designated as a domestic terrorist group last year. The Treasury Department has said it will conduct financial investigations into left-wing groups, including any international support. “We are mobilising some of the same tools we have used against terrorists abroad to tackle this emerging threat here at home,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in July.

In June, eight protesters involved in the violent demonstrations against ICE in Texas were sentenced to a total of 450 years in prison after being charged with “material support” for terrorists, a legal provision widely used since 11 September 2001. “One of the fears of civil liberties advocates from the outset was that these powers and institutions would be turned against dissent. And that is exactly what has happened,” said Jameel Jaffer, the lawyer who has argued some of the leading post-11 September court cases concerning national security and civil liberties. Measures initially justified by genuine national security needs “were very quickly repurposed or deployed against a much broader range of perceived threats”, said Jaffer. This process was “normalised” under Bush, “expanded” under Obama and “is now being fully exploited by Trump”.

[...] The Office of the Director of National Intelligence had been created to address the urgent shortcomings in information-sharing that had emerged from the failure to piece together the evidence that might have led the intelligence agencies onto the trail of the 11 September plot. Over the years, both Republicans and Democrats have called for cuts and other reforms to the ODNI, but during Trump’s second term, he reduced the size of the organisation and subjugated it to partisan ends, according to current and former officials.

His first Director of National Intelligence during his second term, Tulsi Gabbard, dismissed career analysts whose conclusions conflicted with the White House’s preferences. Gabbard used her position to selectively declassify snippets of intelligence to support Trump’s false claims that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was a ‘hoax’ orchestrated by the Democrats. Her interim successor, Bill Pulte, used the office to support Trump’s claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him.

[...] The National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC), which reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), has also scaled back its operations. It now devotes between a quarter and a third of its budget and staff to combating drug trafficking, rather than international terrorism, according to former senior US officials. Kent acknowledged that the fight against drug trafficking represents a ‘departure from the original mission’ of the NCTC, but said that designating the cartels as terrorist organisations was correct, given the number of Americans they have killed. The Administration, he added, had, however, taken too broad an approach and should have focused on the Mexican cartels smuggling lethal drugs across the southern border. The CIA, too – although its budgets and staffing figures are classified – has shifted resources away from international terrorism and other threats towards Trump’s priority: combating drug traffickers. The Department of Justice’s National Security Division, which deals with terrorism, counter-espionage and weapons proliferation, has lost nearly 38 per cent of its staff under Trump, according to documents obtained by Reuters.

According to US officials, one of the most important tools available to the government for identifying terrorist plots, monitoring planned cyber-attacks and intercepting drug traffickers is the successor to the secret electronic surveillance programme from the Bush era known as FISA Section 702. That flow of information will cease in March unless a divided Congress votes to renew it. The Democrats, along with some libertarian-leaning Republicans, cite Trump’s extensive use of national security tools as one of the reasons why they are reluctant to renew the surveillance programme.

After two decades of the US war on terror, the central structures of al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State have been largely destroyed, according to US intelligence assessments. Their affiliated groups in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia appear, for the time being, to be focusing primarily on local and regional targets. However, former US counter-terrorism officials are questioning whether the US counter-terrorism network, now scaled back, still has the capacity to identify and dismantle potential threats from groups such as al-Shabaab in East Africa or the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda, should they expand their capabilities and ambitions to the point of striking US soil.

Then there is the seven-month war that Trump started with Iran, a country with known capabilities in the field of terrorist and cyber attacks. “We’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat whilst at the same time making holes in the nets that protect us. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were targeted,” said Bellinger, the former legal adviser to the National Security Council. Current and former officials say they are even more concerned about a long list of threats that did not exist on 11 September: advanced artificial intelligence in the hands of an adversary, low-cost lethal drones and synthetic biotechnology turned into weapons. “The reforms adopted after 11 September have largely achieved their fundamental objective: to help prevent another terrorist attack on American soil on the scale of 11 September,” said Rick Crawford, the Republican from Arkansas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, during a visit by committee members on 31 August to the Flight 93 National Memorial, near Shanksville. “We still have to deal with terrorism. But we also face increasingly aggressive state adversaries, sophisticated counter-espionage operations, malicious foreign influence, economic warfare, rapidly developing artificial intelligence, biotechnology, drones and autonomous systems, and threats to critical infrastructure,” said Crawford. “Many of these threats do not fit easily into the bureaucratic frameworks our government created decades ago. Our adversaries know this.”

However horrific and deadly it may have been, the 11 September attacks took place in limited areas of the United States, said former Congresswoman Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, who helped draft the 2004 law establishing the ODNI. “This time, if we were to suffer a catastrophic cyberattack and infrastructure were to collapse across the country, it would be more difficult to respond,” she said. “And putting together a bipartisan and effective response would be more difficult than it was a quarter of a century ago.” “We are rapidly moving backwards,” said Harman.

Almost a third of the American population was born after 11 September 2001. “For those who do not remember 11 September, what they come to learn about it might be something even worse,” he said.

Warren P. Strobel, Copyright Washington Post