The War on Terror Enabled Donald Trump’s Authoritarianism
Preemptive war without congressional approval and unchecked executive power were normalized during the “war on terror.” Trump is following the path set by Bush and Obama but pushing it to dangerous extremes, writes CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.
America’s “war on terror” helped remake the Right, explains CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. It radicalized veterans who would later storm the Capitol and legitimized the idea that the president had the unconstrained right to declare war. (Shawn Thew-Pool / Getty Images)
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks marked a paradigm shift in US politics. Following the unprecedented horror and the worst intelligence failure in US history, the United States embarked on the “war on terror:” a sprawling, multifaceted, and in many ways illegal global campaign that profoundly reshaped both foreign and domestic policy. As they waged this offensive, driven by fear, nationalistic fervor, and a desire for revenge, successive US administrations jettisoned liberal democratic norms and legal constraints that had previously defined the American state. In so doing, they sowed the seeds for the authoritarian transformation currently underway.
America’s Descent into Barbarism
I had a front row seat to the CIA’s dismantling of the Constitution. I spent nearly fifteen years at the agency, serving as the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11 and then as executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations during the planning of the Iraq War. It was clear even then that the United States was moving to embrace what Vice President Dick Cheney called the “dark side”: torture, assassinations, secret prisons, and extrajudicial “renditions.” It was equally clear that the Justice Department would sit idly by while the federal judiciary looked the other way. This dismantling of checks and balances, normalization of extrajudicial power, and cultivation of a culture of paranoid militarism laid the ground for the subsequent rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. These forces continue to endanger American democracy, especially as the US far right embraces insurrectionist ideologies.
The Bush administration acted quickly after 9/11 to launch the war on terror with overwhelming bipartisan support. The need for urgency to prevent another attack seemed at the time to justify extraordinary measures that redrew the boundaries of acceptable government conduct. These measures included:
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