When Donald Trump’s counter-terrorism “czar”, Sebastian Gorka, introduced the Trump administration’s long-awaited counter-terrorism strategy on a call with journalists on Wednesday, he also reportedly described critics of the administration’s war in Iran as “testicularly challenged”.
The at-times bizarre 16-page memo Gorka authored is only slightly more subtle – taking rhetorically charged swings at the president’s enemies, the Biden administration, transgender people and some Islamist groups, while offering little clarity about the threat posed by political violence domestically or abroad or any specific plans to address it.
“President Trump has affected a complete revision of how we defeat threats to America predicated on national sovereignty and civilizational confidence and the objective of destroying the groups who would kill Americans or hurt our interests as a free nation,” the document claims. “This applies to cartels, Jihadists, left-wing violent extremists, state actors and state sponsors, or any future terror threat.”
Political and security analysts slammed the memo as “largely slop”, “utterly unhinged” and an “exercise in gaslighting, partisanship and obsequiousness”.
“It’s the opposite of ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. It’s more like ‘yell loudly to conceal your small stick’,” Colin Clarke, director of the Soufan Center, a security thinktank, wrote in a series of blistering posts about the document. “And it’s transparent to our allies and adversaries.”
The memo is largely scant on substance and does not lay out a roadmap for carrying out its prescriptions. It identifies what it labels “three major types of terror groups” as priorities: “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs”, “legacy Islamist terrorists”, and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists”. It makes no mention of far-right or white supremacist ideology, which has consistently been behind incidents of domestic political violence, but singles out “radically pro-transgender” and “anti-American” ideology for “neutralization”. It claims immigration has turned Europe into an “incubator of terror threats” and called on European allies to “halt its willful decline”. And it accuses past administrations of having “weaponized” the intelligence community, pledging to keep the intelligence apparatus from being used as a political tool “against innocent Americans” even as it outlines a plan that appears to do exactly that.
With regard to groups on the left it broadly dubs “violent secular political groups”, the document vows: “We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
Critics described the document, which makes half a dozen references to the Biden administration’s supposed failures, as both “completely Trumpian” and an “alarming” escalation in rhetoric. They particularly warned about the expanded use of a terrorism framework as pretext to deny the basic civil and political rights of targeted individuals.
Nadia Ben-Youssef, advocacy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted that the strategy openly embraces state violence and political repression, and normalizes extraordinary measures like illegal military strikes, renditions, deployment of the military and immigration enforcement agents, and digital surveillance.
“The document follows in the Trumpian tradition and that of the broader rightwing movement by explicitly articulating an extremist worldview, and openly promoting policy and a vengeful executive unbounded by law,” she said. “It overtly dehumanizes communities, and lauds executive action that has violated the constitution and international law.”
The strategy collapses a swath of disfavored communities and the broader political left “into ‘terrorists posing an existential threat to the US’”, Ben-Youssef added. “[It] can only be understood as a political project to criminalize dissent, demonize migrants, target Muslim communities, and label transgender people and their allies as acceptable targets of marginalization, repression and violence.”
It should come as little surprise that such an extraordinary document should come from Gorka, a far-right commentator whose selection as senior director for counter-terrorism drew ridicule and consternation even from within the ranks of the right.
For all that is unprecedented about the administration, however, Ben-Youssef and others argued that Trump is only expanding upon a flawed and dangerous counter-terrorism apparatus the administration has inherited from previous ones.
“The document unfortunately builds off of decades-long elements of US counter-terrorism policy,” said Chip Gibbons, policy director at the civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent. “A lot of people are very shocked by the language about leftwing extremists, anarchist extremists. And it is very shocking. But that language is not new.”
Trump may be unique in his willingness to crush democracy and dissent, Gibbons added. “But he’s doing so using tools that were handed to him and were created and sharpened over the last couple of decades.”
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