Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Samer Araabi about dissent as “terrorism” for the September 4, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260904Araabi.mp3FAIR.org (9/11/21)

Janine Jackson: The upcoming remembrance of September 11, 2001, will pull a lot of strings. For New Yorkers, it’s a memory of a nightmarish day full of sirens and empty streets, followed by months of foul-smelling air, posters on lampposts asking about missing loved ones, solidarity around folks who went to work, and the workers who risked and gave their lives to save them.

And for media watchers, it’s the ominous introduction of the term “war on terror,” which we knew, knew, would turn on its head the statement that we saw posted everywhere here: “Our grief is not a cry for war.”

How can a country wage war on a concept? Why isn’t this a crime, for which perpetrators can be found and engaged? But it was clear that the “war on terror”—which, for a minute, reporters kept in quotation marks—would morph into an all-encompassing explanation and excuse that, as Lyndon Johnson said approvingly of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, was like “grandma’s night shirt” because it “covered everything.”

So here we are. For those just waking up, today’s troubles seem new, and in some ways they are. But understanding the roots of what we’re seeing now is part of fighting the branches, if you will, growing into every aspect of our lives.

Samer Araabi is the associate director of political education and research at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He’s author of the recent piece on CCR’s blog titled “Trump Is Turning Counter-Terrorism Into an International Campaign Against the Left.” He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Samer Araabi.

Samer Araabi: Thank you. Great to be here.

CCR (7/30/26)

JJ: Your piece is focused on the recently unveiled document labeled “United States Counter-Terrorism Strategy.” I want to ask you, briefly, before we get into it: How real is this? We know not to overlook plans; Project 2025 should teach us that. But we also know that people will say, “Well, this is a wish list. It isn’t law and it isn’t legal, so worry about something else.” What is the state of reality, if that’s not too weird a question, of this document?

SA: I don’t think that’s too weird of a question at all. I mean, “What is the state of reality?” is probably the thing all of us have been asking ourselves for a few years now.

And I think the comparison to Project 2025 is very apt, where I think when it was first published, there was an attempt to minimize the possibility of what this could mean. We sort of, I think, have a predisposition towards assuming that things will kind of go along at the status quo. And that turned out not to be the case, and that’s certainly not the case here.

ProPublica (5/14/26)

This latest counter-terrorism strategy document by the Trump administration is only one of many, and a number have come down the pipe just in the past year, all of which have really drastically expanded who the United States government perceives as the “enemy,” and what they feel entitled to be able to do.

It’s not for nothing that Trump himself, in the forward to the counter-terrorism strategy document, closes it by saying, “We will find you and we will kill you,” referring to people that the Trump administration considers to be, in their words, “anti-American, radically pro-transgender or anarchist.” These are labels that could mean absolutely anything and could apply to anybody. I think we should be really, really concerned about what that means for all of us.

JJ: Right. And so here’s my big question, because listeners to CounterSpin, because they listen to CounterSpin, might have an ideology that could be called “anti-American.” So what is it calling for, and why does the language matter so much?

SA: Sure. And this is actually a point that we made in that blog post as well, that anyone who’s reading the blog at the Center for Constitutional Rights is themselves probably within this extremely broad remit. And I think that just goes to show that this is really a campaign, not against advocates of political violence, or people trying to overthrow the existing system, but rather the entire left, and the left as perceived from people that are situated on the far, far right.

And frankly, I don’t think it’s even limited to the left. It’s a broad attack against anyone who questions the authority of this very small group of people. The thing that undergirds that is this idea that the existing system is threatened by an amorphous and terrifying “other,” this “other” that can’t really be defined, that can’t be whittled down to a particular group of people espousing one particular ideology, or any particular strategy or plan, but rather it’s everywhere. It’s omnipresent. It’s everyone and it’s no one. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere.

FAIR.org (7/22/26)

As a result of that, the government can do anything. It doesn’t need due process. It doesn’t need warrants. It doesn’t need permission to spy on people, to surveil them, to follow their every movement, to detain them, to question them, to access their personal documents, to deport them. And we’ve been seeing that happening, and we’ve been seeing, both for US citizens and non-US citizens, the ways in which this continues to expand outwards to encompass an ever-growing set of violent activities from the United States government against these people–the overwhelming, overwhelming, we’re talking 99.999% of whom have done absolutely nothing, literally nothing at all.

And the ones who have been accused of things, including this Prairieland case in Texas just a couple months ago, where a protester was charged with terrorism for moving a box of magazines from one area to another, shows you, I think, how far this has gone.

And one of the things that we try to highlight in this piece is that it’s easy to point the finger at the Trump administration as being the aberration that’s going to do things like this. But what is really happening is he’s following in a long line of, as you said, a set of parameters and a set of operating procedures that were put in place after 9/11. And this is something that George W. Bush expanded, that Obama expanded after him, that Trump expanded after him, that Biden expanded after Trump I, and now Trump is metastasizing this into a whole new level.

JJ: Let me ask you first: The vagueness, the amorphousness of who the target is and could be, that part’s very murky. What they say they can do about those people is real explicit, and is real violent. That’s the other piece of it that we need to understand. What are they saying is acceptable to do, once they have labeled someone a terrorist?

SA: Yeah. I think even that is somewhat vague, because it does encompass a lot of powers that aren’t necessarily specifically delineated, but rather just opened up for the opportunity for people to do. But nevertheless, I think it basically situates people outside of the law. And I think that’s the thing that is the most scary, that we have built this whole system, however flawed—and obviously the system is deeply flawed as it is, with or without terrorism designations—but a whole system where there are rights to due process, right to a trial by a jury of your peers, right to your privacy, right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

These terrorism designations—and this is something, again, we talk about in the piece, and in this broader campaign that CCR is currently conducting in–we say “dismantle” this entire counter-terrorism framework, because we believe it really can’t be reformed or fixed—but what this counter-terrorism framework does is it situates people outside of those protections, and outside of those rights.

And this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, right? It was specifically designed to do this. The idea here is that, “Oh, we can’t use traditional safeguards, and we can’t respect traditional human rights, because these people are so dangerous.” But that danger is never defined, right? “Those people” are never defined.

As a result, the danger actually comes from, and the great irony here, the very people who are saying, “We need to take these rights away so that we can keep you safe,” are the ones who have made us all less safe. No one is safer now as a result of the “national security state.” No one is safer as a result of these broad counter-terrorism systems.

On the contrary, if anything, people are more radicalized, they’re more upset with the way that the government is conducting itself, and the government has lost legitimacy and the capability that it would need to actually build a functioning social contract.

And so we end up in a situation where everyone is worse off, with the exception of a very small group of very powerful people who are controlling the levers of the authoritarian system.

JJ: The response to the question of what can they do is, they can do anything, because they have left the door open and…

SA: Exactly.

JJ: …you can get the vibe from Trump’s quote, “We will find you and we will kill you.” I can’t say it clearer than that.

Well, this feels a little redundant, but there was a sort of ’70s mantra: “Don’t seek beauty, find beauty.” I was thinking of that lately because the Trump administration isn’t seeking “terrorists,” if by that we generously mean people who have actual plans to cause harm to innocent people in service of a cause that could and should be pursued through nonviolent means. They’re redefining terms in order to generate people that fit that category, and it wouldn’t work if the category had not been manufactured and then accepted.

And that brings us back to September 11, 2001, where, like I said, journalists used to say “war on terror” in quotes, because they knew that it didn’t mean anything in particular. That’s long been taken out of quotation marks, as though it has some concrete, specific meaning, and that was a loss.

Samer Araabi: “With every passing administration, it just grows and grows. And that’s because, with this undefined threat, you can expand it however you want.”

SA: Yeah, a devastating loss. Even, I would say, when the Obama administration came in, there was an understanding that the “war on terror” was this kind of monstrosity, but instead of dismantling these unconstitutional powers, what they did instead was they renamed it, right? It became “global overseas contingency operations” or whatever. Guantánamo stayed open, the extraordinary power stayed in place, and as a result, instead of this being a singular moment tied to the George W. Bush presidency, it became a hallmark of the executive branch and its ability to operate in this unconstrained way.

And it continues to unravel. With every passing administration, it just grows and grows. And that’s because, with this undefined threat, you can expand it however you want.

Again, we’re seeing the Trump quote of, “We will find you and we will kill you,” is a terrifying one, and we should remember that it was Obama that was drone-striking US citizens overseas, with absolutely no permission to do something like that. And so this door has been progressively opened further and further, and we really deeply believe that if we can’t stop it, and we can’t wind it back, it will continue to do so, regardless of who’s in office in 2028.

JJ: It’s so important to understand the history, and to understand that not every bad thing started with Trump. We can’t fix things if we believe that way, because when Trump leaves office—I’m just going to pause around that—everything’s not going to go away. It’s not going to disappear with this one man. And I think that’s important for us to understand. But I wish media would underscore that by having a longer timeline when they talk about this set of issues.

SA: Absolutely, yeah. A lot of the issues that CCR confronts are structural and systemic, and it’s our work to make sure that people have the conditions that they need in order to live with respect and dignity, regardless of who is in office. I think there’s a crassness to the Trump administration, obviously, and maybe a certain extension of a lot of these violations of human rights and the international order. But he’s not alone in that, and there are broad structural systemic things that need to be addressed, and CCR is really trying to stand at the forefront of doing that.

USA Today (8/21/26)

JJ: I’ll ask you finally, I found exactly one major media story, and I may have missed some, certainly, but I found one story on Laura Berlin. USA Today reported that a woman, who the headline made clear was a “mom,” runs a website. She built an interactive map showing which companies, where, are profiting from ICE contracts, who’s flying the rounded-up people to prison in El Salvador, who’s running the detention centers where people are being hidden away and disappeared, and which politicians are getting money from those ICE contractors. It led some, like Citizens Bank, to break off some contractual relationships, and she was using publicly available data.

This led Homeland Security to label her website a “domestic terrorism threat,” and I’m guessing a “far-left terrorist”—we were talking about language, FLT, by the way, if you’re making T-shirts, “far-left terrorist” is a new term—but she’s using publicly available data to call attention to harms inflicted by the state, and that seems to be what makes it “terrorism.”

And my question is, how do reporters not see that that puts all of them in the crosshairs if they’re doing their job? So finally, your thoughts about news media, what they could be doing, what they should be doing, what they aren’t doing around this set of issues.

SA: Sure. I think you’re pointing to a really critical issue in terms of safeguarding our democracy, which is, of course, the concentration of ownership of media and the continued consolidation of traditional media sources under fewer and fewer hands, and the way that has, itself, become really tied to the state. It’s CBS, Paramount, all of the connections to the Trump administration at this point is not lost on anyone, I think.

LA Times (9/1/26)

And we’re now seeing those things work together in tandem, where just this past week, I think, there were accusations that Mark Ruffalo is both antisemitic and a supporter of terrorism, basically still using that label, because he questioned a media merger. It was about the Paramount acquisition.

Again, I think you’re seeing that exact same thing being used, and at the end of the day, if the media is accountable to the state and not to the citizens of that state, we’re seeing a mirror of what these underlying terrorism laws are doing too, which is, it’s no longer about a threat to everyday US citizens or people who reside in this country, it’s a threat to the national security apparatus that is considered to be the thing that needs to be attacked and prosecuted.

And so it’s a real danger to us all, and I think it really speaks to the need for independent media, and for folks to get information sources outside of things that are so highly corporately consolidated. Which is hard, but important.

JJ: Thank you very much for that. We’ve been speaking with Samer Araabi. He’s associate director of political education and research at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and you can find the piece that we’ve been talking about on their site, CCRJustice.org. Samer Araabi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SA: Thank you. It was such a pleasure.