Beschreibung:
For nearly the entire War on Terror, Spencer Ackerman has been a national-security correspondent for outlets like The New Republic, WIRED, The Guardian and currently The Daily Beast. He has reported from the frontlines of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. He shared in the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism for Edward Snowden's NSA leaks to The Guardian, a series of stories that also yielded him other awards, including the Scripps Howard Foundation's 2014 Roy W. Howard Award for Public Service Reporting and the 2013 IRE medal for investigative reporting. Ackerman's WIRED series on Islamophobic counterterrorism training at the FBI won the 2012 online National Magazine Award for reporting. He frequently appears on MSNBC, CNN, and other news networks.
A New York Times Critics Top Book of 2021
"An impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying Ackerman s deep stores of knowledge as a national security journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20 years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued." The New York Times
"One of the most illuminating books to come out of the Trump era." New York Magazine
An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction
For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, the era pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance; weakened the rule of law through indefinite detentions; sanctioned torture; and manipulated the truth about it all. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized feature of American politics and national security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home, as the summer of 2020 showed. A politically divided and economically destabilized country turned the War on Terror into a cultural and then a tribal struggle. It began on the ideological frontiers of the Republican Party before expanding to conquer the GOP, often with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today s nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era. And that door remains open.
Reign of Terror shows how these developments created an opportunity for American authoritarianism and gave rise to Donald Trump. It shows that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. By the end of his tenure, the war had metastasized into a bitter, broader cultural struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it.
Reign of Terror is a pathbreaking and definitive union of journalism and intellectual history with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on civic life.
AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST: Ackerman is a highly regarded and decorated political reporter with a wide social media following (over 150,000 Twitter followers) and experience as a national-security correspondent on the staff of a number of publications, including WIRED, The Guardian, and currently, The Daily Beast. In 2014, he was part of a team at The Guardian that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism, for reporting on Edward Snowden and the NSA's surveillance programs.HOT BUTTON PANDEMIC TOPIC: As government data tracking proves necessary to curtail the rise of COVID-19, issues of privacy and surveillance have become ever more newsworthy. This book will be published well into the pandemic landscape, when mass surveillance will be increasingly ubiquitous and the subject of privacy will be at the forefront of public concern.SELLING SUBJECT MATTER: Book about the rise of the surveillance state have been consistent strong sellers (Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide, Shoshanna Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, etc).