counterrevolution.md

[[!meta title="The Counterrevolution"]]

* [The Counterrevolution](http://bernardharcourt.com/the-counterrevolution/).
* By Bernard E. Harcourt.

## Index

[[!toc startlevel=2 levels=4]]

## Genealogy

* Mass-scale warfare
  * MAD
  * Massive retaliation
  * Game theory
  * Systems analisys
  * Nuclear war

* Counterinsurgency
  * Modern warfare
  * Unconventional, counter-guerrila
  * Special Ops
  * Surgical operations

* Mao's “Eight Points of Attention” plus two principles:
  1. Talk to people politely.
  2. Observe fair dealing in all business transactions.
  3. Return everything borrowed from the people.
  4. Pay for anything damaged.
  5. Do not beat or scold the people.
  6. Do not damage crops.
  7. Do not molest women.
  8. Do not ill-treat prisoners-of-war. 6

      Two other principles were central to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine: first, the
      importance of having a unified political and military power structure that
      consolidated, in the same hands, political and military considerations; and
      second, the importance of psychological warfare. More specifically, as Paret
      explained, “proper psychological measures could create and maintain ideological
      cohesion among fighters and their civilian supporters.” 7

* Paret's (1960) tasks of “counterguerrilla action”:
  1. The military defeat of the guerrilla forces.
  2. The separation of the guerrilla from the population.
  3. The reestablishment of governmental authority and the development of a viable social order.

* Petraeus: 3 key pillars:
  1. "The first is that the most important struggle is over the population."
  2. "Allegiance of the masses can only be secured
     by separating the small revolutionary minority from the passive majority, and by
     isolating, containing, and ultimately eliminating the active minority. In his
     accompanying guidelines,"
  3. "Success turns on collecting information on
     everyone in the population. Total information is essential to properly distinguish
     friend from foe and then extract the revolutionary minority. It is intelligence—
     total information awareness—that renders the counterinsurgency possible."

## Excerpts

### Torture

    In Modern Warfare, Trinquier quietly but resolutely condoned torture. The
    interrogations and related tasks were considered police work, as opposed to
    military operations, but they had the exact same mission: the complete
    destruction of the insurgent group. Discussing the typical interrogation of a
    detainee, captured and suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization,
    Trinquier wrote: “No lawyer is present for such an interrogation. If the prisoner
    gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not,
    specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the
    suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid.” Trinquier
    described specialists forcing secrets out of suspects using scientific methods that
    did not injure the “integrity of individuals,” but it was clear what those
    “scientific” methods entailed. 4 As the war correspondent Bernard Fall suggests,
    the political situation in Algeria offered Trinquier the opportunity to develop “a
    Cartesian rationale” to justify the use of torture in modern warfare. 5
    Similarly minded commanders championed the use of torture, indefinite
    detention, and summary executions. They made no bones about it.

    [...]

    In his autobiographical account published in 2001, Services Spéciaux. Algérie
    1955–1957, General Paul Aussaresses admits to the brutal methods that were the
    cornerstone of his military strategy. 6 He makes clear that his approach to
    counterinsurgency rested on a three-pronged strategy, which included first,
    intelligence work; second, torture; and third, summary executions. The
    intelligence function was primordial because the insurgents’ strategy in Algeria
    was to infiltrate and integrate the population, to blend in perfectly, and then
    gradually to involve the population in the struggle. To combat this insurgent
    strategy required intelligence—the only way to sort the dangerous
    revolutionaries from the passive masses—and then, violent repression. “The first
    step was to dispatch the clean-up teams, of which I was a part,” Aussaresses
    writes. “Rebel leaders had to be identified, neutralized, and eliminated discreetly.
    By seeking information on FLN leaders I would automatically be able to capture
    the rebels and make them talk.” 7
    The rebels were made to talk by means of torture. Aussaresses firmly
    believed that torture was the best way to extract information. It also served to
    terrorize the radical minority and, in the process, to reduce it. The practice of
    torture was “widely used in Algeria,” Aussaresses acknowledges. Not on every
    prisoner, though; many spoke freely. “It was only when a prisoner refused to talk
    or denied the obvious that torture was used.” 8
    Aussaresses claims he was introduced to torture in Algeria by the policemen
    there, who used it regularly. But it quickly became routine to him. “Without any
    hesitation,” he writes, “the policemen showed me the technique used for
    ‘extreme’ interrogations: first, a beating, which in most cases was enough; then
    other means, such as electric shocks, known as the famous ‘gégène’; and finally
    water.” Aussaresses explains: “Torture by electric shock was made possible by
    generators used to power field radio transmitters, which were extremely
    common in Algeria. Electrodes were attached to the prisoner’s ears or testicles,
    then electric charges of varying intensity were turned on. This was apparently a
    well-known procedure and I assumed that the policemen at Philippeville [in
    Algeria] had not invented it.” 9 (Similar methods had, in fact, been used earlier in
    Indochina.)

    Aussaresses could not have been more clear:

        The methods I used were always the same: beatings, electric shocks, and, in particular, water
        torture, which was the most dangerous technique for the prisoner. It never lasted for more than one
        hour and the suspects would speak in the hope of saving their own lives. They would therefore
        either talk quickly or never.

    The French historian Benjamin Stora confirms the generalized use of torture.
    He reports that in the Battle of Algiers, under the commanding officer, General
    Jacques Massu, the paratroopers conducted massive arrests and “practiced
    torture” using “electrodes […] dunking in bathtubs, beatings.” General Massu
    himself would later acknowledge the use of torture. In a rebuttal he wrote in
    1971 to the film The Battle of Algiers, Massu described torture as “a cruel
    necessity.” 10 According to Aussaresses, torture was condoned at the highest
    levels of the French government. “Regarding the use of torture,” Aussaresses

    [...]

    For Aussaresses, as for Roger Trinquier, torture and disappearances were
    simply an inevitable byproduct of an insurgency—inevitable on both sides of the
    struggle. Because terrorism was inscribed in revolutionary strategy, it had to be
    used in its repression as well. In a fascinating televised debate in 1970 with the
    FLN leader and producer of The Battle of Algiers, Saadi Yacef, Trinquier
    confidently asserted that torture was simply a necessary and inevitable part of
    modern warfare. Torture will take place. Insurgents know it. In fact, they
    anticipate it. The passage is striking:

        I have to tell you. Whether you’re for or against torture, it makes no difference. Torture is a
        weapon that will be used in every insurgent war. One has to know that… One has to know that in
        an insurgency, you are going to be tortured.
        And you have to mount a subversive organization in light of that and in function of torture. It is
        not a question of being for or against torture. You have to know that all arrested prisoners in an
        insurgency will speak—unless they commit suicide. Their confession will always be obtained. So a
        subversive organization must be mounted in function of that, so that a prisoner who speaks does
        not give away the whole organization.16

    “Torture?” asks the lieutenant aide de camp in Henri Alleg’s 1958 exposé
    The Question. “You don’t make war with choirboys.” 18 Alleg, a French
    journalist and director of the Alger républicain newspaper, was himself detained
    and tortured by French paratroopers in Algiers. His book describes the
    experience in detail, and in his account, torture was the inevitable product of
    colonization and the anticolonial struggle. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his

    [...]

    In an arresting part of The Battle of Algiers it becomes clear that many of the
    French officers who tortured suspected FLN members had themselves, as
    members of the French Resistance, been victims of torture at the hands of the
    Gestapo. It is a shocking moment. We know, of course, that abuse often begets
    abuse; but nevertheless, one would have hoped that a victim of torture would
    recoil from administering it to others. Instead, as Trinquier suggests, torture
    became normalized in Algeria. This is, as Sartre describes it, the “terrible truth”:
    “If fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then this
    behavior is not more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any
    time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” 20

### Misc

    The central tenet of counterinsurgency theory is that populations—originally
    colonial populations, but now all populations, including our own—are made up
    of a small active minority of insurgents, a small group of those opposed to the
    insurgency, and a large passive majority that can be swayed one way or the other.
    The principal objective of counterinsurgency is to gain the allegiance of that
    passive majority. And its defining feature is that counterinsurgency is not just a
    military strategy, but more importantly a political technique. Warfare, it turns
    out, is political.

    On the basis of these tenets, counterinsurgency theorists developed and
    refined over several decades three core strategies. First, obtain total information:
    every communication, all personal data, all metadata of everyone in the
    population must be collected and analyzed. Not just the active minority, but
    everyone in the population. Total information awareness is necessary to
    distinguish between friend and foe, and then to cull the dangerous minority from
    the docile majority. Second, eradicate the active minority: once the dangerous
    minority has been identified, it must be separated from the general population

    [...]

    and eliminated by any means possible—it must be isolated, contained, and
    ultimately eradicated. Third, gain the allegiance of the general population:
    everything must be done to win the hearts and minds of the passive majority. It is
    their allegiance and loyalty, and passivity in the end, that matter most.
    Counterinsurgency warfare has become our new governing paradigm in the

    [...]

    imagination. It drives our foreign affairs and now our domestic policy as well.
    But it was not always that way. For most of the twentieth century, we
    governed ourselves differently in the United States: our political imagination
    was dominated by the massive battlefields of the Marne, of Verdun, by the
    Blitzkrieg and the fire-bombing of Dresden—and by the use of the atomic bomb.

    [...]

    warfare.
    Yet the transition from large-scale battlefield warfare to anticolonial struggles
    and the Cold War in the 1950s, and to the war against terrorism since 9/11, has
    brought about a historic transformation in our political imagination and in the
    way that we govern ourselves. In contrast to the earlier sweeping military
    paradigm, we now engage in surgical microstrategies of counterinsurgency
    abroad and at home. This style of warfare—the very opposite of large-scale
    battlefield wars like World War I or II—involves total surveillance, surgical
    operations, targeted strikes to eliminate small enclaves, psychological tactics,
    and political techniques to gain the trust of the people. The primary target is no
    longer a regular army, so much as it is the entire population. It involves a new

    [...]

    The result is radical. We are now witnessing the triumph of a counterinsurgency
    model of government on American soil in the absence of an insurgency, or
    uprising, or revolution. The perfected logic of counterinsurgency now applies
    regardless of whether there is a domestic insurrection. We now face a
    counterinsurgency without insurgency. A counterrevolution without revolution.
    The pure form of counterrevolution, without a revolution, as a simple modality
    of governing at home—what could be called “The Counterrevolution.”
    Counterinsurgency practices were already being deployed domestically in the

    [...]

    new internal enemies. It is vital that we come to grips with this new mode of
    governing and recognize its unique dangers, that we see the increasingly
    widespread domestication of counterinsurgency strategies and the new
    technologies of digital surveillance, drones, and hypermilitarized police for what
    they are: a counterrevolution without a revolution. We are facing something
    radical, new, and dangerous. It has been long in the making, historically. It is
    time to identify and expose it.


    [...]

    so on. I argued that we have become an “expository society” where we
    increasingly exhibit ourselves online, and in the process, freely give away our
    most personal and private data. No longer an Orwellian or a panoptic society
    characterized by a powerful central government forcibly surveilling its citizens
    from on high, ours is fueled by our own pleasures, proclivities, joys, and
    narcissism. And even when we try to resist these temptations, we have
    practically no choice but to use the Internet and shed our digital traces.
    I had not fully grasped, though, the relation of our new expository society to

    [...]

    strikes, indefinite detention, or our new hypermilitarized police force at home.
    But as the fog lifts from 9/11, the full picture becomes clear. The expository
    society is merely the first prong of The Counterrevolution. And only by tying
    together our digital exposure with our new mode of counterinsurgency
    governance can we begin to grasp the whole architecture of our contemporary
    political condition. And only by grasping the full implications of this new mode
    of governing—The Counterrevolution—will we be able to effectively resist it
    and overcome.

    [...]

    approach targeting small revolutionary insurgencies and what were mostly
    Communist uprisings. Variously called “unconventional,” “antiguerrilla” or
    “counterguerrilla,” “irregular,” “sublimited,” “counterrevolutionary,” or simply
    “modern” warfare, this burgeoning domain of military strategy flourished during
    France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria, Britain’s wars in Malaya and Palestine,
    and America’s war in Vietnam. It too was nourished by the RAND Corporation,
    which was one of the first to see the potential of what the French commander
    Roger Trinquier called “modern warfare” or the “French view of
    counterinsurgency.” It offered, in the words of one of its leading students, the
    historian Peter Paret, a vital counterweight “at the opposite end of the spectrum
    from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.” 2
    Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a


    [...]

    from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.” 2
    Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a
    combination of strategic game theory and systems theorizing; but unlike nuclear
    strategy, which was primarily a response to the Soviet Union, it developed more
    in response to another formidable game theorist, Mao Zedong. The formative
    moment for counterinsurgency theory was not the nuclear confrontation that
    characterized the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the earlier Chinese Civil War that led
    to Mao’s victory in 1949—essentially, when Mao turned guerrilla tactics into a
    revolutionary war that overthrew a political regime. The central methods and
    practices of counterinsurgency warfare were honed in response to Mao’s
    strategies and the ensuing anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia, the Middle
    East, and North Africa that imitated Mao’s approach. 3 Those struggles for
    independence were the breeding soil for the development and perfection of
    unconventional warfare.
    By the turn of the twentieth century, when President George W. Bush would

    [...]

    T HE COUNTERINSURGENCY MODEL CAN BE TRACED BACK through several different
    genealogies. One leads to British colonial rule in India and Southeast Asia, to the
    insurgencies there, and to the eventual British redeployment and modernization
    of counterinsurgency strategies in Northern Ireland and Britain at the height of
    the Irish Republican Army’s independence struggles. This first genealogy draws
    heavily on the writings of the British counterinsurgency theorist Sir Robert
    Thompson, the chief architect of Great Britain’s antiguerrilla strategies in
    Malaya from 1948 to 1959. Another genealogy traces back to the American
    colonial experience in the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century.
    Others lead back to Trotsky and Lenin in Russia, to Lawrence of Arabia during
    the Arab Revolt, or even to the Spanish uprising against Napoleon—all
    mentioned, at least briefly, in General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency field
    manual. Alternative genealogies reach back to the political theories of
    Montesquieu or John Stuart Mill, while some go even further to antiquity and to
    the works of Polybius, Herodotus, and Tacitus. 1
    But the most direct antecedent of counterinsurgency warfare as embraced by
    the United States after 9/11 was the French military response in the late 1950s
    and 1960s to the anticolonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. This genealogy
    passes through three important figures—the historian Peter Paret and the French
    commanders David Galula and Roger Trinquier—and, through them, it traces
    back to Mao Zedong. It is Mao’s idea of the political nature of
    counterinsurgency that would prove so influential in the United States. Mao
    politicized warfare in a manner that would come back to haunt us today. The
    French connection also laid the seeds of a tension between brutality and legality
    that would plague counterinsurgency practices to the present—at least, until the
    United States discovered, or rediscovered, a way to resolve the tension by
    legalizing the brutality.


    [...]

    A founding principle of revolutionary insurgency—what Paret referred to as
    “the principal lesson” that Mao taught—was that “an inferior force could
    outpoint a modern army so long as it succeeded in gaining at least the tacit
    support of the population in the contested area.” 4 The core idea was that the
    military battle was less decisive than the political struggle over the loyalty and
    allegiance of the masses: the war is fought over the population or, in Mao’s
    words, “The army cannot exist without the people.” 5
    As a result of this interdependence, the insurgents had to treat the general
    population well to gain its support. On this basis Mao formulated early on, in
    1928, his “Eight Points of Attention” for army personnel:

    1. Talk to people politely.
    2. Observe fair dealing in all business transactions.
    3. Return everything borrowed from the people.
    4. Pay for anything damaged.
    5. Do not beat or scold the people.
    6. Do not damage crops.
    7. Do not molest women.
    8. Do not ill-treat prisoners-of-war. 6

    Two other principles were central to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine: first, the
    importance of having a unified political and military power structure that
    consolidated, in the same hands, political and military considerations; and
    second, the importance of psychological warfare. More specifically, as Paret
    explained, “proper psychological measures could create and maintain ideological
    cohesion among fighters and their civilian supporters.” 7
    Revolutionary warfare, in Paret’s view, boiled down to a simple equation:

    [...]

    the population.” 10
    Of course, neither Paret nor other strategists were so naïve as to think that
    Mao invented guerrilla warfare. Paret spent much of his research tracing the
    antecedents and earlier experiments with insurgent and counterinsurgency
    warfare. “Civilians taking up arms and fighting as irregulars are as old as war,”
    Paret emphasized. Caesar had to deal with them in Gaul and Germania, the
    British in the American colonies or in South Africa with the Boers, Napoleon in
    Spain, and on and on. In fact, as Paret stressed, the very term “guerrilla”
    originated in the Spanish peasant resistance to Napoleon after the Spanish
    monarchy had fallen between 1808 and 1813. Paret developed case studies of the

    [...]

    But for purposes of describing the “guerre révolutionnaire” of the 1960s, the
    most pertinent and timely objects of study were Mao Zedong and the Chinese
    revolution. And on the basis of that particular conception of revolutionary war,
    Paret set forth a model of counterrevolutionary warfare. Drawing principally on
    French military practitioners and theorists, Paret delineated a three-pronged
    strategy focused on a mixture of intelligence gathering, psychological warfare on
    both the population and the subversives, and severe treatment of the rebels. In
    Guerrillas in the 1960’s, Paret reduced the tasks of “counterguerrilla action” to
    the following:
    1. The military defeat of the guerrilla forces.
    2. The separation of the guerrilla from the population.
    3. The reestablishment of governmental authority and the development of a
    viable social order. 12

    [...]

    interact.” 13
    So the central task, according to Paret, was to attack the rebel’s popular
    support so that he would “lose his hold over the people, and be isolated from
    them.” There were different ways to accomplish this, from widely publicized
    military defeats and sophisticated psychological warfare to the resettlement of
    populations—in addition to other more coercive measures. But one rose above
    the others for Paret: to encourage the people to form progovernment militias and
    fight against the guerrillas. This approach had the most potential, Paret observes:
    “Once a substantial number of members of a community commit violence on


    [...]

    In sum, the French model of
    counterrevolutionary warfare, in Paret’s view, had to be understood as the
    inverse of revolutionary warfare.


    [...]

    The main sources for Paret’s synthesis were the writings and practices of French
    commanders on the ground, especially Roger Trinquier and David Galula,
    though there were others as well. 15 Trinquier, one of the first French
    commanders to theorize modern warfare based on his firsthand experience, had a


    [...]

    persisting in repeating its efforts.” Trinquier argues that this new form of modern
    warfare called for “an interlocking system of actions—political, economic,
    psychological, military,” grounded on “Countrywide Intelligence.” As Trinquier
    emphasizes, “since modern warfare asserts its presence on the totality of the
    population, we have to be everywhere informed.” Informed, in order to know and
    target the population and wipe out the insurgency. 17
    The other leading counterinsurgency theorist, also with deep firsthand


    [...]

    time.’” 19
    From Mao, Galula drew the central lesson that societies were divided into
    three groups and that the key to victory was to isolate and eradicate the active
    minority in order to gain the allegiance of the masses. Galula emphasizes in
    Counterinsurgency Warfare that the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory
    “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”:
    In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral
    majority, and an active minority against the cause.

    [...]

    time.’” 19
    From Mao, Galula drew the central lesson that societies were divided into
    three groups and that the key to victory was to isolate and eradicate the active
    minority in order to gain the allegiance of the masses. Galula emphasizes in
    Counterinsurgency Warfare that the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory
    “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”:
    In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral
    majority, and an active minority against the cause.

    The technique of power consists in relying on the favorable minority in order to rally the neutral
    majority and to neutralize or eliminate the hostile minority.20
    The battle was over the general population, Galula emphasized in his
    Counterinsurgency Warfare, and this tenet represented the key political
    dimension of a new warfare strategy.

    [...]

    US general David Petraeus picked up right where David Galula and Peter Paret
    left off. Widely recognized as the leading American thinker and practitioner of
    counterinsurgency theory—eventually responsible for all coalition troops in Iraq
    and the architect of the troop surge of 2007—General Petraeus would refine

    [...]

    On this political foundation, General Petraeus’s manual establishes three key
    pillars—what might be called counterinsurgency’s core principles.
    The first is that the most important struggle is over the population. In a short
    set of guidelines that accompanies his field manual, General Petraeus
    emphasizes: “The decisive terrain is the human terrain. The people are the center

    [...]

    The main battle, then, is over the populace.
    The second principle is that the allegiance of the masses can only be secured
    by separating the small revolutionary minority from the passive majority, and by
    isolating, containing, and ultimately eliminating the active minority. In his
    accompanying guidelines, General Petraeus emphasizes: “Seek out and eliminate
    those who threaten the population. Don’t let them intimidate the innocent. Target
    the whole network, not just individuals.” 25
    The third core principle is that success turns on collecting information on
    everyone in the population. Total information is essential to properly distinguish
    friend from foe and then extract the revolutionary minority. It is intelligence—
    total information awareness—that renders the counterinsurgency possible. It is

    [...]

    paraphrasing the French commander, underscores the primacy of political factors
    in counterinsurgency. “General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central
    committee once stated that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and
    only 20 percent military,” the manual reads. Then it warns: “At the beginning of
    a COIN operation, military actions may appear predominant as security forces
    conduct operations to secure the populace and kill or capture insurgents;
    however, political objectives must guide the military’s approach.” 27
    Chapter Two opens with an epigraph from David Galula’s book: “Essential

    [...]

    General David Petraeus learned, but more importantly popularized, Mao
    Zedong’s central lesson: counterinsurgency warfare is political. It is a strategy
    for winning over the people. It is a strategy for governing. And it is quite telling
    that a work so indebted to Mao and midcentury French colonial thinkers would
    become so influential post-9/11. Petraeus’s manual contained a roadmap for a
    new paradigm of governing. As the fog lifts from 9/11, it is becoming
    increasingly clear what lasting impact Mao had on our government of self and
    others today.

    [...]

    D eveloped by military commanders and strategists over decades of anticolonial
    wars, counterinsurgency warfare was refined, deployed, and tested in the years
    following 9/11. Since then, the modern warfare paradigm has been distilled into
    a concise three-pronged strategy:
    1. Bulk-collect all intelligence about everyone in the population—every
    piece of data and metadata available. (total information awareness)

    [...]

    2. Identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total information about
    everyone makes it possible to discriminate between friend and foe. Once
    suspicion attaches, individuals must be treated severely to extract all
    possible information, with enhanced interrogation techniques if
    necessary; and if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they
    must be disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or drone
    strike—in other words, targeted assassination. Unlike conventional
    soldiers from the past, these insurgents are dangerous because of their

    [...]

    3. Pacify the masses. The population must be distracted, entertained,
    satisfied, occupied, and most importantly, neutralized, or deradicalized if
    necessary, in order to ensure that the vast preponderance of ordinary
    individuals remain just that—ordinary. This third prong reflects the
    “population-centric” dimension of counterinsurgency theory. Remember,
    in this new way of seeing, the population is the battlefield. Its hearts and
    minds must be assured. In the digital age, this can be achieved, first, by
    targeting enhanced content (such as sermons by moderate imams) to
    deradicalize susceptible persons—in other words, by deploying new
    digital techniques of psychological warfare and propaganda. Second, by
    providing just the bare minimum in terms of welfare and humanitarian
    assistance—like rebuilding schools, distributing some cash, and
    bolstering certain government institutions. As General Petraeus’s field

### Torture and surveilance

    T HE ATTACK ON THE W ORLD T RADE C ENTER SHOWED THE weakness of American
    intelligence gathering. Top secret information obtained by one agency was
    silo’ed from others, making it impossible to aggregate intelligence and obtain a
    full picture of the security threats. The CIA knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers
    were on American soil in San Diego, but didn’t share the information with the
    FBI, who were actively trying to track them down. 1 September 11 was a
    crippling intelligence failure, and in the immediacy of that failure many in
    President George W. Bush’s administration felt the need to do something radical.
    Greater sharing of intelligence, naturally. But much more as well. Two main
    solutions were devised, or revived: total surveillance and tortured interrogations.
    They represent the first prong of the counterinsurgency approach.
    In effect, 9/11 set the stage both for total NSA surveillance and torture as
    forms of total information awareness. The former functioned at the most virtual
    or ethereal, or “digital” level, by creating the material for data-mining and
    analysis. The latter operated at the most bodily or physical, or “analog” level,
    obtaining information directly from suspects and detainees in Iraq, Pakistan,
    Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But both satisfied the same goal: total information
    awareness, the first tactic of counterinsurgency warfare.

Census

    What is clear, though—as I document in Exposed—is that the myriad NSA,
    FBI, CIA, and allied intelligence agencies produce total information, the first
    and most important prong of the counterinsurgency paradigm. Most important,
    because both of the other prongs depend on it. As the RAND Corporation notes
    in its lengthy 519-page report on the current state of counterinsurgency theory
    and practice, “Effective governance depends on knowing the population,
    demographically and individually.” The RAND report reminds us that this
    insight is not novel or new. The report then returns, pointedly for us, to Algeria
    and the French commander, David Galula: “Galula, in Counterinsurgency
    Warfare, argued that ‘control of the population begins with a thorough census.
    Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.’” 5

    [...]

    Today, that identity card is an IP address, a mobile phone, a digital device, facial
    recognition, and all our digital stamps. These new digital technologies have
    made everyone virtually transparent. And with our new ethos of selfies, tweets,
    Facebook, and Internet surfing, everyone is now exposed.

Enhanced interrogation:

    Second, tortured interrogation. The dual personality of counterinsurgency
    warfare is nowhere more evident than in the intensive use of torture for
    information gathering by the United States immediately after 9/11. Fulfilling the
    first task of counterinsurgency theory—total surveillance—this practice married
    the most extreme form of brutality associated with modern warfare to the
    formality of legal process and the rule of law. The combination of inhumanity
    and legality was spectacular.
    In the days following 9/11, many in the Bush administration felt there was
    only one immediate way to address the information shortfall, namely, to engage
    in “enhanced interrogation” of captured suspected terrorists—another
    euphemism for torture. Of course, torture of captured suspects would not fix the
    problem of silo’ed information, but they thought it would at least provide
    immediate information of any pending attacks. One could say that the United
    States turned to torture because many in the administration believed the country
    did not have adequate intelligence capabilities, lacking the spy network or even
    the language abilities to infiltrate and conduct regular espionage on
    organizations like Al Qaeda. 6
    The tortured interrogations combined the extremes of brutality with the

Getting information or "truth" was not the only, perhaps not the main point
of torture sessions, and maybe not as well the main point for mass surveillance:

    Even the more ordinary instances of “enhanced interrogation” were
    harrowing—and so often administered, according to the Senate report, after the
    interrogators believed there was no more information to be had, sometimes even
    before the detainee had the opportunity to speak.

Torture template:

    Ramzi bin al-Shibh was subjected to this type of treatment immediately upon
    arrival in detention, even before being interrogated or given an opportunity to
    cooperate—in what would become a “template” for other detainees. Bin al-
    Shibh was subjected first to “sensory dislocation” including “shaving bin al-
    Shibh’s head and face, exposing him to loud noise in a white room with white
    lights, keeping him ‘unclothed and subjected to uncomfortably cool
    temperatures,’ and shackling him ‘hand and foot with arms outstretched over his
    head (with his feet firmly on the floor and not allowed to support his weight with
    his arms).’” Following that, the interrogation would include “attention grasp,
    walling, the facial hold, the facial slap… the abdominal slap, cramped
    confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours,
    and the waterboard, as appropriate to [bin al-Shibh’s] level of resistance.” 8 This
    template would be used on others—and served as a warning to all.
    The more extreme forms of torture were also accompanied by the promise of

"Bigeard shrimp":

    The more extreme forms of torture were also accompanied by the promise of
    life-long solitary confinement or, in the case of death, cremation.
    Counterinsurgency torture in the past had often been linked to summary
    disappearances and executions. Under the Bush administration, it was tied to
    what one might call virtual disappearances.
    During the Algerian war, as noted already, the widespread use of brutal
    interrogation techniques meant that those who had been victimized—both the
    guilty and innocent—became dangerous in the eyes of the French military
    leadership. FLN members needed to be silenced, forever; but so did others who
    might be radicalized by the waterboarding or gégène. In Algeria, a simple
    solution was devised: the tortured would be thrown out from helicopters into the
    Mediterranean. They became les crevettes de Bigeard, after the notorious French
    general in Algeria, Marcel Bigeard: “Bigeard’s shrimp,” dumped into the sea,
    their feet in poured concrete—a technique the French military had apparently
    experimented with earlier in Indochina.

    [...]

    The CIA would devise a different solution in 2002: either torture the suspect
    accidentally to death and then cremate his body to avoid detection, or torture the
    suspect to the extreme and then ensure that he would never again talk to another
    human being. Abu Zubaydah received the latter treatment. Zubaydah had first
    been seized and interrogated at length by the FBI, had provided useful
    information, and was placed in isolation for forty-seven days, the FBI believing
    that he had no more valuable information. Then the CIA took over, believing he
    might still be a source. 10 The CIA turned to its more extreme forms of torture—
    utilizing all ten of its most brutal techniques—but, as a CIA cable from the
    interrogation team, dated July 15, 2002, records, they realized beforehand that it
    would either have to cover up the torture if death ensued or ensure that
    Zubaydah would never talk to another human being again in his lifetime.
    According to the Senate report, “the cable stated that if Abu Zubaydah were to
    die during the interrogation, he would be cremated. The interrogation team
    closed the cable by stating: ‘regardless which [disposition] option we follow
    however, and especially in light of the planned psychological pressure
    techniques to be implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that [Abu
    Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his
    life.’” 11 In response to this request for assurance, a cable from the CIA station
    gave the interrogation team those assurances, noting that “it was correct in its
    ‘understanding that the interrogation process takes precedence over preventative
    medical procedures,’” and then adding in the cable:

KUBARK

    routines were approved at the uppermost level of the US government, by the
    president of the United States and his closest advisers. These practices were put
    in place, designed carefully and legally—very legalistically, in fact—to be used
    on suspected enemies. They were not an aberration. There are, to be sure, long
    histories written of rogue intelligence services using unauthorized techniques;
    there is a lengthy record, as well, of CIA ingenuity and creativity in this domain,
    including, among other examples, the 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence
    Interrogation manual. 13 But after 9/11, the blueprint was drawn at the White
    House and the Pentagon, and it became official US policy—deliberate, debated,
    well-thought-out, and adopted as legal measures.


    [...]

    The Janus face of torture was its formal legality amidst its shocking brutality.
    Many of the country’s best lawyers and legal scholars, professors at top-ranked
    law schools, top government attorneys, and later federal judges would pore over
    statutes and case law to find legal maneuvers to permit torture. The felt need to
    legitimate and legalize the brutality—and of course, to protect the officials and
    operatives from later litigation—was remarkable.
    The documents known collectively as the “torture memos” fell into two
    categories: first, those legal memos regarding whether the Guantánamo detainees
    were entitled to POW status under the Geneva Conventions (GPW), written
    between September 25, 2001, and August 1, 2002; and second, starting in
    August 2002, the legal memos regarding whether the “enhanced interrogation
    techniques” envisaged by the CIA amounted to torture prohibited under
    international law.

How torture was defined to allow torture to happen:

    As Jay Bybee, then at the Office of Legal Counsel and now a
    federal judge, wrote in his August 1, 2002, memo:

        We conclude that torture as defined in and proscribed by [18 US Code] Sections 2340-2340A,
        covers only extreme acts. Severe pain is generally of the kind difficult for the victim to endure.
        Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious
        physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the
        moment of infliction but also requires lasting psychological harm, such as seen in mental disorders
        like post-traumatic stress disorder. […] Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is
        significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
        or punishment fail to rise to the level of torture.22

    This definition of torture was so demanding that it excluded the brutal
    practices that the United States was using. It set the federal legal standard,
    essentially, at death or organ failure.

    [...]

    them 26 —and then, effectively, judicial opinions. The executive branch became a
    minijudiciary, with no effective oversight or judicial review. And in the end, it
    worked. The men who wrote these memos have never been prosecuted nor
    seriously taken to task, as a legal matter, for their actions. The American people
    allowed a quasi-judiciary to function autonomously, during and after. These self-
    appointed judges wrote the legal briefs, rendered judgment, and wrote the
    judicial opinions that legitimized these brutal counterinsurgency practices. In the
    process, they rendered the counterinsurgency fully legal. They inscribed torture
    within the fabric of law.

    One could go further. The torture memos accomplished a new resolution of
    the tension between brutality and legality, one that we had not witnessed
    previously in history. It was an audacious quasi-judicial legality that had rarely
    been seen before. And by legalizing torture in that way, the Bush administration
    provided a legal infrastructure for counterinsurgency-as-governance more
    broadly.

    [...]

    And through this process of legalization, these broader torturous practices
    spilled over into the second prong of counterinsurgency: the eradication of an
    active minority. Torture began to function as a way to isolate, punish, and
    eliminate those suspected of being insurgents.

Bare existence, indefinite detention, incommunication:

    The indefinite detention and brutal ordinary measures served as a way to
    eliminate these men—captured in the field or traded for reward monies, almost
    like slaves from yonder. The incommunicado confinement itself satisfied the
    second prong of counterinsurgency theory. 5 But somehow it also reached further
    than mere detention, approximating a form of disappearance or virtual death.
    The conditions these men found themselves in were so extreme, it is almost as if
    they were as good as dead.
    Reading Slahi’s numbing descriptions, one cannot help but agree with the
    philosopher Giorgio Agamben that these men at Guantánamo were, in his words,
    no more than “bare life.” 6 Agamben’s concept of bare existence captures well
    the dimensions of dehumanization and degradation that characterized their lives:
    the camp inmates were reduced to nothing more than bare animal existence.
    They were no longer human, but things that lived. The indefinite detention and
    torture at Guantánamo achieved an utter denial of their humanity.
    Every aspect of their treatment at black sites and detention facilities

### Drone strikes

    This debate between more population-centric proponents and more enemy-
    centric advocates of counterinsurgency should sound familiar. It replays the
    controversy over the use of torture or other contested methods within the
    counterinsurgency paradigm. It replicates the strategic debates between the
    ruthless and the more decent. It rehearses the tensions between Roger Trinquier
    and David Galula.

    Yet just as torture is central to certain versions of modern warfare, the drone
    strike too is just as important to certain variations of the counterinsurgency
    approach. Drone strikes, in effect, can serve practically all the functions of the
    second prong of counterinsurgency warfare. Drone strikes eliminate the
    identified active minority. They instill terror among everyone living near the
    active minority, dissuading them and anyone else who might contemplate joining
    the revolutionaries. They project power and infinite capability. They show who
    has technological superiority. As one Air Force officer says, “The real advantage
    of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without
    projecting vulnerability.” 18 By terrifying and projecting power, drones dissuade
    the population from joining the insurgents.

    [...]

    Covered extensively by the news media,
    drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties
    than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory
    offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and
    contributes to Pakistan’s instability.” 19
    In July 2016, the Obama administration released a report estimating the


    [...]

    Those in the affected countries typically receive far higher casualty reports.
    The Pakistan press, for instance, reported that there are about 50 civilians killed
    for every militant assassinated, resulting in a hit rate of about 2 percent. As
    Kilcullen and Exum argue, regardless of the exact number, “every one of these
    dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge,
    and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as
    drone strikes have increased.” 25
    To those living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and
    neighboring countries, the Predator drones are terrifying. But again—and this is
    precisely the central tension at the heart of counterinsurgency theory—the terror
    may be a productive tool for modern warfare. It may dissuade people from
    joining the active minority. It may convince some insurgents to abandon their
    efforts. Terror, as we have seen, is by no means antithetical to the
    counterinsurgency paradigm. Some would argue it is a necessary means.
    Drones are by no means a flawless weapons system even for their proponents.

    [...]

    Regarding the first question, a drone should be understood as a blended
    weapons system, one that ultimately functions at several levels. It shares
    characteristics of the German V-2 missile, to be sure, but also the French
    guillotine and American lethal injection. It combines safety for the attacker, with
    relatively precise but rapid death, and a certain anesthetizing effect—as well as,
    of course, utter terror. For the country administering the drone attack, it is
    perfectly secure. There is no risk of domestic casualties. In its rapid and
    apparently surgical death, it can be portrayed, like the guillotine, as almost
    humane. And drones have had a numbing effect on popular opinion precisely
    because of their purported precision and hygiene—like lethal injection has done,
    for the most part, in the death-penalty context. Plus, drones are practically
    invisible and out of sight—again, for the country using them—though, again,
    terrifying for the targeted communities.

    [...]

    Chamayou’s second question is, perhaps, the most important. This new
    weapons system has changed the US government’s relationship to its own
    citizens. There is no better evidence of this than the deliberate, targeted drone
    killing of US and allied nation citizens abroad—as we will see. 32

    [...]

    An analogy from the death penalty may be helpful. There too, the means
    employed affect the ethical dimensions of the practice itself. The gas chamber
    and the electric chair—both used in the United States even after the Holocaust—
    became fraught with meaning. Their symbolism soured public opinion on the
    death penalty. By contrast, the clinical or medical nature of lethal injection at
    first reduced the political controversy surrounding executions. Only over time,
    with botched lethal injections and questions surrounding the drug cocktails and
    their true effects, have there been more questions raised. But it has taken time for
    the negative publicity to catch up with lethal injection. Drones, at this point,
    remain far less fraught than conventional targeted assassinations.

### Winning hearts and minds

    THE THIRD PRONG OF COUNTERINSURGENCY THEORY CONSISTS in winning the
    hearts and minds of the general population to stem the flow of new recruits to
    the active minority and to seize the upper hand in the struggle. This goal can be
    achieved by actively winning the allegiance of the population, or by pacifying an
    already passive population, or even simply by distracting the masses. The bar,
    ultimately, is low since, on the counterinsurgency view, the people are mostly
    passive. As Roger Trinquier noted in 1961, “Experience has demonstrated that it
    is by no means necessary to enjoy the sympathy of the majority of the people to
    obtain their backing; most are amorphous, indifferent.” Or, as General Petraeus’s
    manual states, the vast majority is “neutral” and “passive”; it represents an
    “uncommitted middle” with “passive supporters of both sides.” 1 The third prong,
    then, is aimed mostly at assuaging, pacifying perhaps, or merely distracting the
    indifferent masses.
    
    [...] the third prong has translated, principally, into three tactics: investments in
    infrastructure, new forms of digital propaganda, and generalized terror. [...]
    Undergirding them both, though, is the third tactic, the threat of
    generalized terror, that serves as a foundational method and looming constant.

    [...]

    In How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Rosa
    Brooks writes that since 9/11 we have witnessed the expansion of the military
    and its encroachment on civilian affairs. “We’ve seen,” in her words, “the steady
    militarization of US foreign policy as our military has been assigned many of the
    tasks once given to civilian institutions.” Brooks warns us of a new world where
    “the boundaries between war and nonwar, military and nonmilitary have
    eroded.”

    [...]

    We are indeed facing, as Brooks powerfully demonstrates, a new world of an
    ever-encroaching military. But what this reveals, more than anything, is the rise
    of the counterinsurgency paradigm of government. It is the model of
    counterinsurgency warfare—of Galula’s early turn to building schools and health
    facilities, to focusing on the hearts and minds of the general population—that
    has pushed the military into these traditionally civilian domains, including total
    surveillance, rule-of-law projects, artificial intelligence, entertainment, etc. In
    effect, it is the counterinsurgency paradigm of government that has become
    everything, and everything that has become counterinsurgency. The blurring of
    boundaries between war and peaceful governance is not merely the contingent
    result of 9/11, it is instead the culmination of a long and deliberate process of
    modernizing warfare.

Providing the basic needs:

    Providing basic necessities, labeled “essential services” in the field manual, is
    a key counterinsurgency practice. It consists primarily of ensuring that there is
    “food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical treatment” for the general
    population. General Petraeus’s manual explains the rationale in very simple
    terms: “People pursue essential needs until they are met, at any cost and from
    any source. People support the source that meets their needs. If it is an insurgent
    source, the population is likely to support the insurgency. If the [host nation]
    government provides reliable essential services, the population is more likely to
    support it. Commanders therefore identify who provides essential services to
    each group within the population.” 5

That, in most cases, involve funneling american taxpayer's money to enrich corporations
with "insane profit margins" for rebuilding countries along with US guidelines. See
Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine for more details.

    A second approach to securing the neutrality of the majority is more
    psychological. In the early days of modern warfare, examples of this approach
    included measures such as the resettlement of populations, in the words of
    counterinsurgency experts, “to control them better and to block the insurgents’
    support.” This is what the British did in Malaya, and the French in Algeria.
    Other examples included basic propaganda campaigns. 16

    As time has gone by, new digital technologies have enabled new forms of
    psychological counterinsurgency warfare. One of the newest involves digital
    propaganda, reflected most recently in the Center for Global Engagement set up
    under the Obama administration in early 2016. Created with the objective to
    prevent the radicalization of vulnerable youth, the center adopted strategies
    pioneered by the giants of Silicon Valley—Google, Amazon, Netflix—and was
    originally funded at the level of about $20 million. It targeted susceptible
    persons suspected of easier radicalization and sent them enhanced and improved
    third-party content in order to try to dissuade them, subliminally, from
    radicalizing or joining ISIS. In the words of an investigative journalist, “The
    Obama administration is launching a stealth anti-Islamic State messaging
    campaign, delivered by proxies and targeted to individual would-be extremists,
    the same way Amazon or Google sends you shopping suggestions based on your
    online browsing history.” 17

Terror e tortura:

    The third set of measures was even more basic: terror. The most formidable way
    to win hearts and minds is to terrorize the local population to make sure they do
    not sympathize with or aid the active minority.

    [...]

    The brutality of counterinsurgency serves, of course, to gather information
    and eradicate the revolutionary minority. But it also aims higher and reaches
    further: its ambition, as General Aussaresses recognized well, is to terrorize the
    insurgents, to scare them to death, and to frighten the local population in order to
    prevent them from joining the insurgent faction. Today, the use of unusually
    brutal torture, the targeted drone assassination of high-value suspects, and the
    indefinite detention under solitary conditions aim not only to eviscerate the
    enemy, but also to warn others, strike fear, and win their submission and
    obedience. Drones and indefinite detention crush those they touch, and strike
    [...] Terror, in the end, is a key component of the third core strategy of
    counterinsurgency.

Torture and civilization:

    Since antiquity, terror has served to demarcate the civilized from the
    barbarian, to distinguish the free citizen from the enslaved. The free male in
    ancient Greece had the privilege of swearing an oath to the gods, of testifying on
    his word. The slave, by contrast, could only give testimony under torture.
    Torture, in this sense, defined freedom and citizenship by demeaning and
    marking—by imposing stigmata—on those who could be tortured. It served to
    demarcate the weak. It marked the vulnerable. And it also, paradoxically, served
    to delineate the “more civilized.” This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the
    brutality of counterinsurgency: to be civilized is to torture judiciously. This
    paradox was born in antiquity, but it journeys on.

    [...]

    The judicious administration of terror is the hallmark of civilization. To be
    civilized is to terrorize properly, judiciously, with restraint, according to the
    rules. Only the barbarians tortured savagely, viciously, unrestrainedly. The
    civilized, by contrast, knew how and when to tame torture, how to rein it terror,
    to apply it with judgment and discretion. Compared to the barbarians—the
    beheadings of ISIS is a modern case on point—we are tame and judicious, even
    when we torture, not like those barbarians. And since 9/11, the judicious use of
    terror has been a key US strategy. In the end, terror functions in myriad ways to
    win the hearts and minds of the masses under the counterinsurgency paradigm of
    governing.

Terror in many levels of governing:

    Now, terror is not an unprecedented component of governing, even if its role
    in the counterinsurgency model may be uniquely constitutive. It has been with us
    since slavery in antiquity, through the many inquisitions, to the internment and
    concentration camps of modern history. And there too, in each of its
    manifestations, it functioned at multiple levels to bolster different modes of
    governing. Looking back through history, terror has done a lot of work. Today as
    well. And to see all that terror achieves today—above and beyond the three
    prongs of counterinsurgency theory—it is useful to look back through history
    and recall its different functions and the work it has done. The reflections today
    are stunning.

Torture and truth:

    The first episode reaches back to antiquity, but represents a recurring theme
    throughout history: terror has often served to manufacture its own truth—
    especially in terms of its efficacy. “They all talk.” [...]

    [...]