In a 2013 Congressional hearing on drone warfare, a young Pakistani boy named Zubair Rehman, aged 13 at the time, talked about the feeling of living under the threat of constant drone strikes. In his powerful testimony, Zubair stated that “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies…The drones do not fly when the skies are gray…When the sky brightens, drones return and we live in…
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This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Sep. 11, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
The United States has experienced much political and social upheaval since then, but the subsequent “War on Terror” paved the way for our current moment, and there are booming echoes of the era all around us.
Once again, the United States is waging a disastrous war in the Middle East with no discernible end in sight. Islamophobic rallies targeting NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani conjure up memories of the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. The government designates activist and advocacy organizations as terrorists. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp remains open. In fact, a legal immigrant was just sent there.
CBS reveals that the Taliban seized roughly $7 billion worth of American-purchased military hardware after the United States officially lost that war 5 years ago.
“Taliban fighters patrol in armored vehicles once supplied to Afghan forces, wearing American tactical gear and carrying American weapons,” reads the report. “CBS News saw one Humvee in the Afghan capital still adorned with a faded Green Bay Packers decal — a remnant from its past operators.”
The small number of Americans who opposed that war were either dismissed or attacked. So too were those who warned that the Bush administration’s overreach would result in disaster.
“The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, ‘lone wolves’ — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters,” writes Radley
In Seattle, Facebook, Amazon, real estate management, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) all share one thing in common: membership to Seattle Shield, an exclusive intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police. The system highlights how secretive public-private networks of information-sharing have permeated law enforcement intelligence collection in Seattle and across…
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The government has largely won its first case bringing material-support-for-terrorism charges against protesters alleged to belong to “antifa,” which President Donald Trump designated as a domestic terror group in 2025 despite the fact that no such organized group exists and the president has no legal authority to designate organizations as domestic terror groups. A federal jury in Fort Worth…
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It’s not a war of aggression in the Middle East without the American media pushing out nonstop “sleeper cell” stories built on vague paranoia, supposed “chatter,” deliberate conflation of Sunni with Shia “terrorism,” and an even more deliberate conflation of mentally unwell “lone wolves” with state agents of Iran, sourced entirely from ex-spooks, zionist advocacy groups, and/or anonymous leaks from the US government. A trope as old as the War on Terror, “sleeper cell” stories are a media favorite because they require no actual reporting beyond copy-and-pasting anonymous government officials and quoting conflicted pro-war lobbyists, while providing an urgent sense of stakes to an increasingly cynical and war-weary public. Whenever polls show increased skepticism or opposition to bombing people 6,500 miles away, the U.S. security state and its media conduits can build support for these far-off wars by insisting that “sleeper agents” from the populations being bombed are hiding among you at your local PTA meeting or grocery store or strip mall and are ready to kill you and your loved ones at any time. This brings the war home without the messy burden of “evidence,” “proof,” or Things That Have Actually Happened.
Since the US launched its unprovoked war on Iran on Feb. 28, and in the weeks leading up to the attack, US media has uncritically promoted the broad narrative that Iranian sleeper agents are living among Westerners waiting on word to strike at any moment:
New York Times: Iran Could Direct Proxies to Attack U.S. Targets Abroad, Officials Warn (2/22/26)
Fox Business: Hezbollah, Hamas sleeper cell fears raised amid Iran strikes (3/2/26)
ABC News: Iran may be activating sleeper cells outside