1/ Short THREAD on US COUNTERTERRORISM history informed by my forthcoming book Nixon's War at Home w/ @uncpressblog @jppbooks; "Terrorism" has a history: though various forms of insurgent violence have always been around, the term's contemporary meaning developed in the 1970s... https://twitter.com/danielschard/status/1347282163100651521

2/ The FBI and other police & intelligence agencies developed counterterrorism in the 1970s in response to leftist, Palestinian nationalist, and anti-colonial clandestine urban guerrillas who opposed US state violence including racist police killings and the war in Vietnam

3/ Counterterrorism developed as part of the "punitive turn" in US politics as the Nixon admin and its successors redirected gov. funding priorities away from the limited social democracy of the New Deal & Great society towards mass incarceration.

4/ Ironically, when Reagan came into office after the Iran Hostage Crisis promising to get tough on "terrorists," the CIA was already working on its biggest operation to date: supporting an anticommunist insurgency by Wahhabist Sunni extremists in Afghanistan...

5/ As Chalmers Johnson explained, this would "blowback" against the US on 9/11. Reagan also funded the Contras in Nicaragua. As Mahmood Mamdani @mm1124 has pointed out, in the Cold War, America decried "their" terrorism while exporting ours

6/ Meanwhile, with Reagan in office, and Strom Thurmond chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI developed inter-agency Joint Terrorism Task Forces and elite Republican policy analysts and politicians worked to roll back post-Watergate intelligence reforms...

7/ After 9/11, Bush and Congress put America's existing counterterrorism infrastructure on steroids with the Patriot Act and DHS Act, unleashing expanded "preemptive" mass surveillance, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, extraordinary rendition, torture, drone warfare, etc.

8/ Since the 1970s, US counterterrorism has disproportionately targeted people of color and leftists, especially those racialized as Arabs or Muslims, with "preemptive" surveillance, harassment, incarceration, and extrajudicial assassination.

9/ The US Global War on Terrorism was and is racist and an attack on the poor. It has failed to establish security or reduce violence--precisely the opposite. Remember, Trump campaigned in 2016 against perpetual war while fomenting violence and Islamophobic fear of "terrorists"!

10/ The FBI has successfully taken down racist rightwing groups in the past, but counterterrorism priorities have generally been elsewhere. Meanwhile, a growing movement is looking beyond policing for solutions to racism, economic inequality, and violence.

11 end/ I have to go now and prepare for a meeting of my zoom history class on the US & International Terrorism--I expect an interesting discussion! Thanks for reading, and if people are interested, I can link to some resources for further reading later on.