"In 2015 I made two trips to Guantanamo while writing my history of concentration camps...
The first visit, I went to a pretrial hearing of the five 9/11 suspects...
One person I talked to not long after that was Mark Fallon, a career NCIS agent, who said something that stuck with me. As NCIS chief of counterintelligence operations for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, he’d been part of the early interrogation program at Gitmo. He protested the U.S. turn to torture in interrogations there internally, later condemning it in public and writing a book, Unjustifiable Means.
Fallon told me that after 9/11, with the turn toward black sites and torture around the world, the U.S. had become a rogue state. And because we had brought those secret, illegal interrogation sites into being around the world, America had not only became a rogue state, but had pulled other states into that orbit. He thought the U.S. would remain a rogue state—and the danger of doing even worse things would remain—until there was full accountability for the program.
* * *
Given where the country is at now, I reached out to Mark Fallon again. When we spoke last week, I asked him what he thinks of our current moment, and whether America is still a rogue state.
He noted that the cabinet nominees put forward so far are in many cases the negation of the agencies Trump is inviting them to run. Each one exemplifies the opposite of the values of the institutions he wants them to lead.
“These nominees appear to be those who will destroy or hinder the internal workings of government,” he said, “which even Al Qaeda failed to do.”"
— Andrea Pitzer, America as a Rogue State: Trump’s malicious chaos targets democracy at home and around the world. Degenerate Art, November 19, 2024
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