JOHN KIRIAKOU: A Terrible Take on the Capitol Storming
February 9, 2021
What does a CIA-style counterinsurgency campaign inside the U.S. look like?
Just use Iraq and Afghanistan as a model.
Trump supporters on Jan. 6 crowding the steps of the Capitol after
displacing the police shield wall preventing access. (TapTheForwardAssist,
CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
Like most Americans, I was appalled and disgusted by what I saw take place
in the Capitol building on Jan. 6, when a right-wing mob stormed the bastion
of U.S. democracy, killing one Capitol police officer and injuring others.
And like most Americans, I wondered what we could do to make sure it never
happened again. I've been following closely news of the arrests of at least
170 demonstrators, and I eagerly look forward to their prosecutions. They
deserve what they get, especially in light of the fact that in June 2020,
President Donald Trump, in the aftermath of demonstrations in which
Confederate monuments were torn down issued an executive order calling for a
draconian 10-year prison sentence for anybody damaging federal property.
With that said, I was horrified last week to see an op-ed written in The New
York Times by a former boss of mine at the CIA. Robert Grenier was a former
director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, a CIA chief in Pakistan
before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, and a former associate deputy
director for operations. He opined in the Times that, as he has "struggled
both on the side of insurgents and against them" during the course of his
career, he believes that here in the United States, "we may be witnessing
the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country,
perpetrated by our own countrymen."
Robert Grenier. (Twitter)
Grenier warns of those Americans "committed to violent extremism: the Proud
Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, Christian national
chauvinists, white supremacists, and QAnon fantasists."
Grenier's proposed solution at first glance looks perfectly reasonable. He
says the U.S. government must do three things:
First, it must pursue criminal justice against the perpetrators of
anti-government violence. Federal authorities must continue to track,
investigate and bring to justice known extremists who commit crimes. I have
no problem with that. People who plot to kidnap a governor, take over
federal installations, or plan sabotage ought to be prosecuted.
Second, he argues that "we must isolate and alienate the committed
insurgents from the population." That sounds fine too, until you consider
just how few people in this country are actually "committed insurgents." In
a country of around 330 million people how many made real trouble at the
Capitol that day? Around 5,000? What does "isolation and alienation" mean?
Does it mean segregating them? Putting them in camps? Grenier doesn't say.
'Insurgency Leadership'
Third, he says casually that "the final element of the plan concerns
insurgency leadership" before going on to criticize Trump's unwillingness to
accept his own defeat.
It's that last - unspoken - part of Grenier's plan that I believe is so
dangerous and un-American. What he means when he warns that we may be
headed into a period of political violence "not seen since Reconstruction"
is that the government needs to start cracking heads.
In a subsequent interview with NPR, Grenier opened by saying that he's not
predicting that the U.S. is going to go the way of Iraq or Afghanistan. But
that's exactly what he's implying. And it's what he implied in his Times
op-ed.
After all, what does a CIA-style counterinsurgency campaign look like? Just
use Iraq and Afghanistan as a model. What it looks like is teams of
military or paramilitary forces going around, blowing the doors off of
houses, and killing everybody inside - killing them before they can commit a
crime against the United States.
April 2005: Armed Iraqi interpreter on patrol with U.S. troops in Baghdad.
(Peter Rimar, Wikimedia Commons)
It also means a robust drone program. Remember Anwar al-Awlaki? The Obama
administration accused him of being a major recruiter for al-Qaeda in Yemen.
They executed him by drone, and then a week later they executed his
16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew. The problem, though, is that the
Awlakis were all American citizens. They had Constitutional rights,
including the right to face their accusers in a court of law and a right to
a trial by jury. The Awlakis had never been charged with a crime. The
government just decided to murder them without due process.
Recall also former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder who, in response to a
question from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in 2013, said that the president had
a constitutional right to use lethal force against American citizens on
American soil, even if those Americans had never been convicted of a crime.
That is what Grenier is recommending. He's supposed to be one of the
"moderates," one of those Americans who is so concerned about America's
future and wants to offer a solution to ensure it. His recommendation is
that we should be prepared to kill Americans whose politics we disagree
with. All we need to do is declare that they're "extremists" or
"insurgents."
That may be tempting for a lot of Americans who were angered and frightened
by the takeover of the Capitol. But if this kind of retaliatory lunacy
becomes the norm, what's to keep the far right from going after the rest of
us if they don't like our politics?
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act-a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.