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+[[!meta title="The Counterrevolution"]]
+
+By Bernard E. Harcourt.
+
+## 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 (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.
+
+
+    [...]
+
+    warfare theory. 3
+    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.