Reign of Terror w/ Spencer Ackerman

Jan 13, 2026

Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist and author of *Reign of Terror*, delves into the lasting impacts of 9/11 on American society. He discusses how the War on Terror replaced civic solidarity with violence and shaped political landscapes. Ackerman critiques the media's role in normalizing state-sanctioned violence and traces the troubling legacy of institutions like ICE. He also touches on his work in comics to explore these themes and previews his forthcoming book on Majid Khan's harrowing experience in black sites.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

From Civic Grief To War Machine

Spencer Ackerman argues 9/11's horror was replaced by a war machine that redirected civic solidarity into global and domestic violence.
The war on terror transformed emotional unity into policy that normalized surveillance, detention, and secrecy.

INSIGHT

AUMF As An Unlimited Grant

The 2001 AUMF is effectively an open-ended grant of military power to the president.
It authorizes action across time, space, and against loosely defined "associated forces."

INSIGHT

Spaces Where Law Is Suspended

Guantanamo and CIA black sites created legal and geographic spaces where normal rights were suspended.
The enemy-combatant label removed prisoners' appeals and enabled torture and secrecy.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Gregk speaks to the award-winning national security journalist Spencer Ackerman about the long shadows of 9/11 and the War on Terror, how America’s response to those events contributed to its current condition, the media’s role in justifying and legitimating state violence, and much more.

Spencer Ackerman is a national security journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Wired, The Nation, Zeteo and many other publications, and whose career has spanned almost the entirety of the Global War on Terror. In 2014, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his work at The Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures surrounding the NSA’s global surveillance programme.

In 2021, he published Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He also recently wrote a ten-issue run on IRON MAN for Marvel Comics, currently available in two trade paperbacks. His latest book is The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan: A Father, A Son and the War on Terror, forthcoming from Penguin.

Spencer is also the founder and proprietor of FOREVER WARS, an ongoing chronicle, investigation and interrogation of the continuities, departures and permutations of the War on Terror

If you enjoyed this episode:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

– Leave a rating or review on your podcast app

– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – DEI-Codi

For this week’s newsletter, Gregk shares some of his thoughts on the extra-judicial killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 7, 2026, and reflects on the homologies between the Trump administration’s paramilitaries and the death squads that operated in Central and South America during the latter half of the twentieth century – in many cases backed, trained and coordinated by the United States.

Image: U.S. Military Police guard detainees within Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 2002. (Shane T. McCoy/U.S. Navy/Getty Images)