I know what it means to be watched too closely, a phenomenon that has only worsened the years of the war on terror. I’m a strange combination, I suppose, being a wife of the army and an activist against the war on terror. In this country, those years, having your eyes on one has unfortunately become a non-unusual and widespread phenomenon. When the government does, it’s called “surveillance. “it reaches your comrades or those above you in the world of army wives, there are no words at all.

Now, bear with me as I begin my little exploration of such an American state at a non-public peak before moving on to how we now live in a – yes – surveillance state.

“The army sounds like the mafia. Her husband’s rank determines her potency. It’s the reaction of a smart friend a decade ago when a more experienced Navy woman embarrassed me for texting that my husband’s nuclear submarine would soon be returning to port. Her husband had been assigned to the same ship for a year longer than mine and she led the related Family Preparation Group (FRG).

Such FRGs, addressed to the wives of officers, are fully voluntary sets that are intended for the families of troops assigned to any ship. In a moment of inconsiderate enthusiasm, he had in fact texted another wife, giving her a hand to celebrate. the imminent return of our husbands, the kind of party that, as the woman herself told me, “all women help thanks to our guys for what they do for us. That’s the key to keeping the mood up. “

She had described the symptoms that other wives had presented under the direction of the captain’s wife and hers, as well as the telephone chain they had set up to inform us of when the boat would arrive so we could run to base to say hello. In reaction to my message, she responded in a visibly angry way (i. e. , in capital letters): “NEVER, EVER INDICATE IN ANY CASE BY TEXT THAT THE SHIP WILL RETURN SOON. YOU WOULD BE EXCLUDED FROM ALL WATER ACTIVITIES IF YOU EVER HINTED THAT SUCH A RETURN IS IMMINENT.

Only in my apartment in a sparsely populated city near the local army base, my center was pulsating under the risk of additional isolation. What would happen because of what he had done?

And yes, I had made a mistake, but no, as I got the impression, in no way that it mattered or endangered anything or anyone at all; nothing, in other words, that simply hasn’t been addressed in a kinder, less Orwellian, given that it was a group of volunteers.

It was my first little advent to be monitored and the strain that comes with such vigilance in the world of army wives. Years later, when my husband was assigned to another submarine, the wife of an officer at the same naval base broke down in tears when she told me about the wonderful scale on which he had just won from 3 women married to senior officials on other ships stationed at that base.

Sitting across from her in her designer dresses, they insisted she wasn’t doing enough to raise cash for a raffle to pay for the long-term education of an army boy. Am I really guilty of sending another child to college?That was his desperate question for me. Unable to hold down a job, given her husband’s multiple mutations, she had struggled only to save enough for the education of her own children. he was in this city, while advising some women who had committed suicide in the long deployments of their husbands.

Of course, I could multiply those examples, but you get an idea: in the army of the war on terror era, eyes are on you.

Married to the army (or terror)

On paper, the US military is racing to “acknowledge the and sacrifice” of the 2. 6 million spouses and youth of active duty troops. And indeed, there are steps in the right direction, from partnerships with employers who commit to hiring spouses from the military for intellectual fitness in the event of a short-term crisis.

Worse, all this deliberate activity has a tendency to drag you into casual global surveillance whose goal is not only to make sure you don’t spill beans on classified troop movements, but also to avoid imaginable pr crises on the move. the realities of the military that lie ahead, such as domestic violence and emerging suicide rates among troops. After the birth of our son at the time, a woman with no intellectual education on physical fitness called me regularly every week to “register” me. She wanted to make sure, she insisted, that I was taking smart care of our baby. If I refused to communicate with her, and found her really oppressive, I threatened to call children’s welfare. I was in graduate school to become a clinical social worker, I told her, and I knew full well that she had no explanation why to report me. However, I wondered what the lives of spouses with fewer resources were when they earned those “surveillance” calls.

Believe me, national security has taken on a new meaning in such an atmosphere. Once, for example, my husband confronted some other officer because he had written an article on an unnamed blog about life in the military that he was writing then; my identity had just been discovered – describing the poor nutrition the officers were forced to eat on their submarine. Even that he thought of as a risk to national security, because I “undermined morale. “

At times it seemed that those accused of waging this country’s never-ending war on terror had a deep drive to create even more disorder of all kinds, while also validating the assumption that we all live in a world of omnipresent danger. week after my husband and I moved to a new workplace with our little boy, for example, he came up to me one night in our still empty space after a 4pm shift on base. His face was pale when he, with clenched fists, he said: “I have a favor that I will have to ask you. ” His new comguyder asked me to come in one evening so that he and an organization of high officials and his wives could talk about what was “appropriate behavior” in conjugal organizations. Apparently the wife of an officer leaving Comguyd did not get along with the wives of the other officers. Because my husband’s rank was the same as that of the outgoing officer, I had to be warned preemptively on the basis of nothing more than the rank of the man I had selected to marry.

“Yes, I’m going to communicate with him,” I said. But I have some things I’d like him to do too. “If I were to attend such a meeting, I would have my own set of topics to communicate about, including that families deserve not to be required to pay $50 per price. Ticket to attend the annual dance and that new moms deserve not to be called every week by the Ombudsman Command and questioned about their parenting skills.

The next day, my husband told me that his commander felt like “you were forcing his hand. “His nerves were disturbed, he took a deep breath, and then whispered (so that our baby just wouldn’t listen to him): “Look, he said that if you didn’t come to his house, anything could happen to our family. Anything. “

I never visited this captain’s space, nor did I participate much the two years we were at this base, and yet the captain’s ambiguous risk to our circle of relatives haunted our house all the time. in each and every noise outside our windows. At a time when I was alone with our baby and very pregnant back, our space was really raided and even shortly I wondered if the captain was worried (before temporarily ignoring the idea). I began to feel that the terror of this era was coming from within the army itself.

No one attacked my family, yet it was going to be a difficult two years. For example, one night, in a time after my husband returned from a grueling deployment in which his submarine collided with a civilian ship, he shared a text message from the captain expressing his sadness that husbands like me did not decide to attend other occasions, adding the Navy. Thanks to families like ours, the captain insists, the morale of the command will pay the price. We were, he suggested, being watched and watched. Not only was my husband’s career in jeopardy, but the recent twist of fate that endangered life at sea and that we were all surprised was due, at least in part, to the lack of involvement of the spouses here. At home. Despite my most productive feminist efforts to reject such a ridiculous suggestion, I felt watched, crushed by guilt, powerless to face what seemed like an endless series of negative occasions affecting our family. Above all, I felt more and more alone.

And it turned out that I was still alone in this sense of constant follow-up and my reaction to it. According to a 2021 independent survey through another army wife, Jennifer Barnhill, more than a third of wives felt direct tension from commanders or obliques. However, most of the wives surveyed feel they have little influence over how the military actually works. leaders who cared about families.

My War on Terror

Terrorism can be anywhere. This is the message that has been conveyed to me on several occasions through my military network since the beginning of the war on terror. During those years, a terrifying, if unspoken, corollary of this idea developed: anyone whose way of life and point of view. opinion in disagreement or with whom the army does not approve of a danger.

Over the past decade, I had the impression that the small network of militant and disgruntled spouses I’ve associated with and the structures similar to a crowd of army conformists retreating to enlist or say goodbye seemed to recreate America in a microcosm afterward. A deep and pervasive concern of whistleblowers and dissent became increasingly widespread in our world. It is typical of the years when in 2010, Army soldier Chelsea Manning was convicted, through an army trial, of 17 counts, adding violations of the Espionage Act, and sent to criminal after offering more than 700,000 classified army documents to Wikileaks. Among other things, they detailed evidence that U. S. military leaders were not in the U. S. military. UU. no had investigated scores of cases of rape, torture and abuse through the Iraqi police; a U. S. military helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that killed two Reuters journalists; and the covert counter-terrorism operations in Yemen that, in my opinion, the Americans deserve to have been informed about.

In 2013, I watched with the same horror the attack on whistleblower Edward Snowden for leaking classified data from the National Security Agency (NSA) about his astonishing surveillance activities globally and nationally. It also revealed a Foreign Intelligence Review Court order requiring Verizon and other primary telephone corporations to provide the NSA with phone records of Americans on a daily basis.

It wasn’t the country I imagined myself living in or protecting my husband. Snowden found himself stranded in Russia facing an imaginable life behind bars here for revealing the true nature of the U. S. edition of the post-September 11 national security state.

I helped co-found Brown University’s War Costs allocation to provide a more accurate picture than most Americans of the nature and value (financial and human) of this country’s endless war on terror. My colleagues and I were working, among other things, to raise awareness here that we were subjected to a kind of global surveillance that would certainly have inspired some of our favorite foreign authoritarian leaders, perhaps even Vladimir Putin himself.

After all, dust had settled slightly around the collapsed Twin Towers in New York City when President George W. ‘s administration. Bush began electronically tracking a growing number of Americans with no warrant in sight. In 2008, Congress would authorize this Foreign Intelligence Review Court to approve such systems without any prior indication of individual irregularities. Starting this year, according to the Costs of War Project, the U. S. government has been in the U. S. government’ business. USA It has more Americans under electronic surveillance through wiretapping and mass collection of communications without probable cause than through wiretaps based on most likely involvement in criminal activities (the norm for such surveillance before September 11).

During the war on terror years, the FBI’s powers to secretly force the disclosure of data about Internet use and individual banks have expanded significantly (no individualized suspicion necessary). The FBI also scans the data of tens of thousands of other people, citizens and non-citizens alike, into its databases, which are then available to tens of thousands of government employees, potentially marking a lifetime user as a suspected terrorist.

Similar advances are taking place at the national and local levels. Some police services, for example, have followed tactics similar to those of a police state. Since Sept. 11, the New York City Police Department, the largest in the country, has used facial recognition and license plate reading cameras to constantly monitor major traffic areas, thus obtaining data on American protesters. in public.

For example, the New York Times reports that, based on a recent analysis by Amnesty International, a user participating in a protest in a component of midtown Manhattan “would be captured through the police department’s network of Argus video cameras during approximately 80% of that march. “The Ministry also uses software to scan social media sites and buy data about other people without a court order. In Medinapolis, according to former FBI agent Terry Albury, who is recently serving a criminal sentence for leaking classified data, FBI agents mobilized local Somali nationals offspring, as well as local law enforcement, into “shared duties committees. “These were ostensibly meant to ensure neighborhood protection by identifying other young people in threat of radicalization, while in fact encouraging committee members to denounce others.

Of course, American Muslims have been disproportionately affected by the dramatic increase in government surveillance. According to the New York Times, U. S. intelligence officials estimated that “between 2000 and 5,000 al-Qaeda terrorists” in the United States were under FBI surveillance within a year of the September 11 attacks, based largely on their ethnic and devout identities. These individual investigations have led almost nowhere.

The discomfort I felt the first time I won a critical text message from a high-ranking army woman was not comparable to what an American Muslim husband might have felt when the FBI knocked on his door and took him away for questioning. It’s terrible to be away from the network to which she has spent much of her life seeking to contribute, whether as a wife, human rights activist, and therapist.

During one of the first “homecomings” of a ship my husband was stationed on, I was approached by a young army wife who had been placed under suicide watch through an officer’s wife at the start of the submarine’s deployment. we heard that I was from an unnamed blog about life in the military. (Soon after, under enormous social pressure, I close it. )Looking at the arrival by boat, he said in a muffled voice: “My father sent me your blog. He thought I would feel less alone. Someone told me that the editor was you. Then she temporarily walked away from me.

When the tears came to my eyes, I also felt less alone, thanks to his small revelation, if other people like us manage, even modestly, to express our solidarity in a position where it has become much more deceptive and harmful in those years. of an endless war, then perhaps others may begin to think about challenging leaders of all kinds who abuse their strength in the call for the fight against terrorism.

Since being considered harmful can replace your life in a world where surveillance is the order of the day, shouldn’t we all be held accountable for leaders who abuse their power, adding U. S. military leaders?USA?

This column is distributed through TomDispatch.