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Show description:

In 16 pages, the Trump administration’s new official counterterrorism strategy outlines in broad terms who it views as terrorist threats and priority targets, ranging from anti-fascist activists to ISIS and so-called narco-terrorists. The line “We will find you, and we will kill you” appears in the memo.

“[The] strategy brings together Trump's war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. “It combines it with the administration's war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. ... We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Turse and Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement, dissect how the Trump administration is painting anyone it wants to go after — state and non-state actors — as terrorists. “Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration's enemies and a promise of what they're going to do to them,” says Hurowitz. “This anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.”

“We're not just talking about rhetoric here,” says Washington. “We've seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.”

“The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret,” says Turse, who has been covering the attacks on so-called narco-terrorists. “We're talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren't even read into the fact that they're in an armed conflict with the United States.” He adds, “It's really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world. It's the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.”

“Say what you will about the people around President Trump,” Hurowitz notes, “but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies.”

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