Yes, how truly (truly!) strange. I must admit that when President George W. Bush announced the launching of what he all too bluntly came to call "the Global War on Terror," or GWOT, in response to (and within days of) the September 11, 2001, plane hijackings and attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, I never imagined it would prove anything faintly as global as it became, or that it might come home in quite the fashion it has, ICE and all; nor would I have believed then that the American government would end up running what Rebecca Gordon recently labeled "concentration camps" across this country that would be filled with a striking new enemy, the immigrant.
But as a start, remember just how eerily strange it was that the president of the United States would actually go to war -- first in Afghanistan (for 20 years) and then in Iraq (for eight years) -- and that's just to start down a list of countries where the U.S. has fought and, from Iran to Somalia, now continues to fight endlessly in response to those acts of terror. Imagine the pleasure those 19 dead terrorists would now feel if they knew just how much chaos they had truly caused with their brief but devastating assaults.
As it happens, the very first article for this site from today's author, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, was "Bearing Witness to the Costs of War." She was, of course, one of the founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, and she's vividly continued to follow this country's endless wars since 2019 at TomDispatch. Today, she explores how the Global War on Terror, in its own strange fashion, did indeed come home to roost in the form of ICE, which, in the era of President Donald J. Trump, has already shot a number of people to death in this very country.
Yes, and imagine that, in the wake (an all-too-appropriate word) of 9/11, war would, after a fashion, become us. Tom
The Global War on Terror's Journey Home
The Collective Trauma of America's Twenty-First Century Wars
America's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me -- and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids' schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of "freedom," "civil rights," or "America." Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think?
In all of this mayhem, it's easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.
In a matter of months, ICE has leaped far from its mandate as the Department of Homeland Security's civilian investigative arm -- not its muscle. Note its agents' forced-entry tactics, its recent 40% shorter training protocols that stress the use of force over knowledge of our Constitution, and a dramatic rise in use-of-force incidents and deaths in custody. And it has more than doubled in size!
Instead of a workaday force that makes sure the rules are followed, it's become an internal police force that bears increasing resemblance to what the United States military has been doing in dozens of other countries around the world as part of the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT) that this country has been waging for almost a quarter-century now in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. America's wars are indeed coming home.
Our Wars, Ourselves
The War on Terror has been notable for its heavy reliance on special forces operations like nighttime raids on civilian homes and incursions into mosques, schools, and marketplaces to search for enemy combatants or information. In particular, the U.S. scaled back large troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan after its failed wars in those countries, and yet, by 2016, about 70% of the world's nations had U.S. special operations forces deployed in them. At the height of the Afghanistan war in 2010-2011, U.S. special operations forces were conducting thousands of nighttime raids into Afghan homes in search of suspected terrorists.
Since those special forces operate outside of conventional battlefield settings, often with little planning and without embedded journalists, the public has had few chances to scrutinize their activities. Not surprisingly, then, we haven't paid much attention to the civilian deaths that resulted. Roughly 40% -- or close to half a million -- of those killed directly in our wars have been civilians, an unnerving number of them children. Our military's reliance on special operations, urban warfare, and proximity-based ways of identifying suspected terrorists (more on that later) means that many people with no connection whatsoever to the warring parties have been shot down or bombed out in their homes, markets, or schools, among other places.
And that's because the U.S. military has come to rely on a form of targeting called "pattern-of-life surveillance," whereby they look for suspected opposition leaders by using what they know of their daily routines to aid with target identification. This approach holds some serious implications for the safety of civilians and has arguably led to extra anger and so the ability of armed opposition groups to recruit new members more easily.
The intimacy of death in our wars, combined with an increasingly unaccountable Pentagon that has isolated itself from journalists, while using its own secretive "justice" system, means that knowledge of civilian deaths often emerges only months or even years after the original events (if and when journalists find eyewitnesses willing to provide their accounts). As a result, the collective lack of awareness of most Americans has been striking and, in recent years, has been increased by the misconception that drone warfare -- an ever more prominent part of our wars -- is more "precise" at targeting enemy combatants than boots-on-the-ground combat.
Twenty-First Century Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
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