Blowback

I walked out of a Starbucks on March 20th with a coffee in one hand and my phone in the other, pointed the camera at the sky, and took a picture of a crescent moon. Then I sent it to Ibrahim Ali with “Happy Eid Bro” and a rose emoji.

I didn’t know the crescent moon was the literal mechanism that ends Ramadan. I didn’t know that for fourteen hundred years, Muslim communities have sent people out to physically spot that exact sliver in the sky, and that when it’s confirmed, the celebration begins. I didn’t know that different countries fight about whether they actually saw it, that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan might celebrate Eid on different days because of it, that this scheduling dispute is one of the longest-running in human civilization.

I learned all of this in a conversation that started with a moon and ended, about six hours later, with me understanding how the United States government decides who’s a terrorist and who isn’t.

The distance between those two points is the distance this report covers.

Blowback. The term showed up in a classified CIA report from March 1954, documenting Operation Ajax — the coup against Iran’s Mossadegh. They borrowed it from firearms: the recoil of spent casings back toward the shooter. A nice metaphor. Accidental, violent, self-inflicted.

The term stayed classified until Chalmers Johnson — a man who consulted for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 — published a book called Blowback in 2000. Nobody cared. Then September 11 happened and the book became a bestseller, because it turned out the specific problem Johnson was describing — that covert operations create the very threats they’re supposed to prevent — had just killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania.

Johnson’s definition was precise and worth remembering: not mere reactions to foreign policy, but “reactions to operations carried out by the US government that are kept secret from the American public.” The secrecy is the mechanism. You can’t contextualize an attack if you don’t know your government started the fight twenty years ago.

Operation Cyclone. The CIA’s covert program arming Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets. Ran from 1979 to 1992. Cost somewhere between $2–3 billion in American taxpayer money, with Saudi Arabia matching dollar-for-dollar. President Carter signed the initial finding on July 3, 1979 — five months before the Soviet invasion. Under Reagan, annual funding peaked at $630 million in 1987.

All the money flowed through Pakistan’s ISI, which distributed it to the most extreme fundamentalist factions because that’s what Pakistan’s strategic interests dictated. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — who later became a bin Laden ally and used American-supplied rockets to shell Kabul — received an estimated $600 million during the 1980s. The CIA made cash payments directly to Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of bin Laden’s closest associates.

Approximately 2,300 Stinger missiles shipped between 1986 and 1989. A subsequent buyback program spent $65 million and was deemed a failure. About 600 Stingers remained unaccounted for by 1996. Just floating around the world’s most unstable region with the ability to shoot down commercial aircraft.

In 1984, Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden founded the Maktab al-Khidamat in Peshawar to recruit Arab fighters. It established offices in over 30 countries, including 33 American cities. On August 11, 1988, Al-Qaeda was formally established in meetings at Peshawar. The founding members used infrastructure, training camps, and weapons pipelines that American tax dollars built.

Al-Qaeda was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization on October 8, 1999.

Eleven years after its founding. Seventeen years after the CIA started building the machine it emerged from.

CPA Order 1, signed May 16, 2003 by Paul Bremer, banned senior Baath Party members from government. CIA Baghdad station chief Charlie Sidell warned him: “You will have between 30,000 and 50,000 Baathists go underground by sundown.” CPA Order 2, signed seven days later, dissolved the entire Iraqi military — 720,000 armed personnel. Trained soldiers. With weapons. And nothing to do.

Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet all later claimed they were never consulted.

The Der Spiegel investigation in 2015 obtained 31 pages of handwritten ISIS organizational charts from the house of Haji Bakr — a former colonel in Saddam’s air force intelligence who became ISIS’s military architect. The documents contained no religious references beyond a brief introduction. They described a blueprint for an “Islamic Intelligence State” modeled on East Germany’s Stasi. Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi’s assessment was direct: Bakr was “a nationalist, not an Islamist.”

The organizational architecture of ISIS directly replicated Saddam’s security state. The same officer class purged by two American executive orders rebuilt their power structure under an Islamic flag because Islam was the only banner available after America destroyed every other institution in the country.

In 1979, Israel officially recognized Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama al-Islamiya as a charity. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, met with Yassin approximately a dozen times and arranged hospital treatment for him. Segev told the Wall Street Journal that Fatah was “our main enemy” and that Yassin was “still 100% peaceful.”

The strategy was textbook divide-and-control. Empower a religious alternative to split the Palestinian movement. Let the Islamists build mosques and schools while you hunt the PLO’s secular nationalists. It worked beautifully until December 1987, when the First Intifada erupted and Yassin’s charity network reorganized into Hamas.

Avner Cohen, who was responsible for religious affairs in Gaza until 1994, told the Wall Street Journal in January 2009: “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation. It was a mistake we made — an enormous, stupid mistake.”

Hamas was designated an FTO in October 1997. Eighteen years after Israel started funding Yassin’s network.

The Contras in Nicaragua: CIA-created, CIA-trained, funded through illegal arms sales to Iran, responsible for over 1,300 documented terrorist attacks. The International Court of Justice ruled the US violated international law. America refused to comply and vetoed enforcement at the Security Council. The Kerry Committee found CIA-linked drug trafficking. Fourteen people charged. Most convictions reversed. Six pardoned by George H.W. Bush.

The School of the Americas: 60,000+ Latin American military personnel trained at Fort Benning. Pentagon-released manuals advocating torture, execution, and bounties for enemy dead. Forty-eight of 69 officers cited for the worst atrocities in El Salvador were graduates. Ten graduates became heads of state through non-democratic means.

The Taliban: emerged directly from CIA-ISI madrassa infrastructure built during the 1980s. ISI was “the main architect of the Taliban’s rise.” The Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996. The US initially welcomed them — Unocal was negotiating a pipeline deal. Only after the 1998 embassy bombings did relations turn. Notably, the Taliban has never been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Not even now. Because the US needs the diplomatic flexibility.

The Libya intervention scattered 250,000–700,000 weapons to at least 12 countries, directly fueling the jihadist takeover in Mali. The LIFG leader who became commander of Tripoli’s Military Council was the same man MI6 had rendered to Gaddafi’s torture prisons in 2004. The 2017 Manchester Arena bomber’s family had connections to the same MI5-facilitated network of Libyan exiles sent to fight in 2011.

The MEK was on the US terrorist list from 1997 to 2012 while simultaneously receiving Mossad support for assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. Its delisting came after 33 former US officials were paid upwards of $50,000 per speech at MEK events. The PKK is designated as terrorist. Its Syrian affiliate the YPG is America’s primary ground partner against ISIS. Same people. Different acronym.

I ran the numbers as best I could. Of the approximately 75 Foreign Terrorist Organizations on the State Department’s list, roughly 25–40% have direct or significant indirect connections to Western covert operations or military interventions that created the conditions for their emergence. If you expand the definition to include groups that formed primarily as responses to Western military action or colonial policy, the number climbs considerably higher.

Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in March 1928 with six canal workers in the British-controlled Suez city of Ismailia. A schoolteacher who believed Islam was a complete governance system and Western secularism was a colonial imposition. The organization grew from 800 members in 1936 to over 2 million by 1948. They built hospitals, schools, charity networks — a parallel social infrastructure serving the people the government couldn’t or wouldn’t serve.

For nearly a century they operated primarily through social services and political participation. They won elections when they were allowed to compete. They ran hospitals that outperformed government facilities. Their earthquake response in 1992 humiliated the Egyptian state. They dominated professional associations for doctors, engineers, and lawyers.

Then the Arab Spring happened. And for the first time, they actually got to govern.

Mohamed Morsi won Egypt’s presidential runoff on June 16-17, 2012 with 51.73% of the vote. The first democratically elected leader in Egypt’s 5,000-year history. He governed badly — overreached on constitutional authority, alienated secular allies, showed authoritarian tendencies. Fair criticisms.

On July 3, 2013, General Sisi conducted a military coup. Saudi Arabia and the UAE bankrolled it with billions in immediate financial support.

On August 14, 2013, security forces moved into Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. Armored vehicles. Bulldozers. Live ammunition. Rooftop snipers. Human Rights Watch documented at least 817 killed at Rabaa alone — one of the largest single-day massacres of protesters in modern history. They called it probable crimes against humanity.

No Egyptian official has ever been investigated.

By mid-2014, between 16,000 and 40,000 Brotherhood members had been arrested. Morsi died in detention on June 17, 2019.

The message to the Arab world was clear: you can have democracy, but if Islam wins, we will kill you in the street and call it counterterrorism.

Trump signed Executive Order 14362 on November 24, 2025. On January 13, 2026, the State Department and Treasury designated the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese Brotherhood chapters. The legal hook was Hamas: the Egyptian Brotherhood allegedly coordinated with Hamas on “possible terrorist activities” against Israeli interests in 2025.

Every previous administration studied this designation and said no. Obama’s intelligence community found no legal basis. Trump’s first term couldn’t get it done — career national security professionals pushed back successfully, twice. The Brotherhood isn’t a unitary organization. It doesn’t have a central command. Individual chapters vary so dramatically that blanket characterization is “analytically incoherent,” according to scholars at Georgetown and Emory.

The second-term approach solved this by designating individual chapters instead of the global organization. And by using the lower SDGT threshold rather than FTO for Egypt and Jordan.

The timing wasn’t coincidental. Not even slightly.

Connect the dots in sequence. They’re not subtle.

November 24, 2025: Trump signs the Brotherhood executive order. January 13, 2026: the designations drop. ALSO January 2026: Massad Boulos — Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law — shows up at the Libya Energy and Economic Summit in Tripoli, meets both Haftar and Dbeibah, starts circulating a ten-point political restructuring plan. The $20 billion TotalEnergies/ConocoPhillips deal gets signed. Chevron returns to Libya. The first exploration licensing round in 17 years awards five blocks.

Also in January 2026: Ballard Partners — Trump’s most connected lobbying firm — signs a $2 million contract to represent Khalifa Haftar and his son Saddam. The man whose forces have been documented committing torture, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial killing gets a K Street makeover. The Brotherhood — whose primary method for 98 years was building hospitals and winning elections — gets the terrorism label.

The Brotherhood designation eliminates the primary opposition to Saudi-Israel normalization. It gives Haftar a legal weapon against Brotherhood-connected western Libyan factions. It validates Jordan’s April 2025 ban. It signals to Syria’s new government to distance itself from political Islam. And it removes the only organized democratic opposition in Egypt, Jordan, and across the Arab world.

Former State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin and former designations director Jason Blazakis co-authored a Foreign Affairs piece arguing the designation lacks legal foundation. Elliott Abrams — not exactly a peacenik — told the UAE ambassador in leaked emails that Sisi had “created a jihadi manufacturing plant” through repression.

But the designation serves the deal. And the deal is what matters.

I started this night photographing a moon I didn’t understand. I ended it understanding something about how the world actually works that I can’t unlearn.

The terrorist designation system is not a counterterrorism tool. It is a geopolitical instrument that allows the executive branch to criminalize, financially strangle, and delegitimize any organization that threatens American strategic interests — regardless of whether that organization actually engages in terrorism by any honest definition. The same government that created Al-Qaeda’s infrastructure, built the officer corps that became ISIS, nurtured the organization that became Hamas, trained the death squads of Latin America, and scattered Libyan weapons across a continent now decides who is a terrorist and who is not.

That power answers to no court at the point of designation. No Congressional approval is required. Classified evidence can be submitted that the designated entity never sees. The financial system enforces it automatically through compliance screening that no bank will override. Material support — defined so broadly that it includes translating documents and teaching conflict resolution — carries penalties of up to 15 years.

The Brotherhood is a complicated, imperfect, sometimes contradictory organization that spans a century and dozens of countries. It has produced democratic parties that governed peacefully and armed offshoots that killed civilians. It cannot be honestly reduced to either “freedom fighters” or “terrorists.” But honest assessment is not what the designation system is designed for.

The designation is designed to serve power. And in January 2026, that’s exactly what it did.

The current in March 2026 runs through Libya, where $20 billion in oil deals are being signed while two rival governments pretend to be one country. Through Jordan, where a king sits on a throne Britain built while 70% of his population watches their families die in Gaza. Through Egypt, where a general who massacred a thousand people in a single day is America’s third-largest aid recipient. Through Syria, where the Brotherhood’s latest experiment in governance is being told to choose between American recognition and its own ideological DNA.

I can’t change the current. Nobody can. But I can tell you what the documents actually say, what the money trails actually show, and what the designations actually serve.

That’s the river. And that’s what 주체강 is for.