Scahill interviews Harcourt on the links between foreign wars and domestic suppression:
"all of the [ways] in which we govern abroad and at home is now funneled through a particular way of thinking about the world ... the way of thinking about society is this counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare."
"we know that counterinsurgency as a way of thinking and as a way of preceding in international affairs, but also domestically, is not new to 9/11. We were engaged in counterinsurgency in Vietnam. We also, the United States, experimented with forms of counterinsurgency domestically against the Black Panthers and with the COINTEL program, et cetera. But starting in 9/11 really there was a much more systematic turn to that way of thinking and governing."
"by the time you get to mass incarceration is you know, you have literally just incapacitated, you have just knocked out this whole tranche of young, black and brown men, predominantly. The numbers are really increasing for African American and Hispanic women right now. But you’ve just knocked out this tranche which is the generally, in the United States, perceived as the internal enemy."
"You know, when I was speaking earlier about the internal enemy and referring to the Muslims and referring to the Mexicans, et cetera, of course, also African American protesters or #BlackLivesMatter folks fit in that category, "
"The use of drones in a place like Pakistan is no longer a military engagement. It’s foreign policy, right. Now we’re conducting our foreign policy with this counterinsurgency mentality."
"Or when you bring it onto American soil and you all of a sudden use a drone to assassinate a target effectively, a suspect, you’ve domesticated this way of thinking and you’ve blurred the lines in such a way that we don’t really think about questions of self-defense anymore because now we’re thinking through a military prism. We’re thinking through a counterinsurgency prism."
"you are identifying some real differences that Trump presents in policy, and style, and tactic from Obama but that the core strategy, that you document the history of it in your book, is in place whether you have a third term of Obama or a first term of Trump."
"you look at the U.S. military you look at the intelligence budget, you look at surveillance capabilities, the leadership of the Democratic Party is consistently backing Trump in expanding all of these things despite the fact that they say he’s such a threat to our democratic process in this country. "
"the Chuck Schumer’s of the world are going to be whipping up those votes to make sure that the military gets its record breaking budget again or that the president has these surveillance capabilities."
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/25/counterinsurgency-us-drone-strikes/sidd
