Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism

by Christopher J. Coyne, Abigail R. Hall

Many Americans believe that foreign military intervention is central to protecting our domestic freedoms. But Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall urge engaged citizens to think again. Overseas, our government takes actions in the name of defense that would not be permissible within national borders. Emboldened by the relative weakness of governance abroad, the U.S. government is able to experiment with a broader range of social controls. Under certain conditions, these policies, tactics, and technologies are then re-imported to America, changing the national landscape and increasing the extent to which we live in a police state.

Coyne and Hall examine this pattern—which they dub "the boomerang effect"—considering a variety of rich cases that include the rise of state surveillance, the militarization of domestic law enforcement, the expanding use of drones, and torture in U.S. prisons. Synthesizing research and applying an economic lens, they develop a generalizable theory to predict and explain a startling trend. Tyranny Comes Home unveils a new aspect of the symbiotic relationship between foreign interventions and domestic politics. It gives us alarming insight into incidents like the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and the Snowden case—which tell a common story about contemporary foreign policy and its impact on our civil liberties.

Genres: Politics, Economics, Nonfiction, Political Science, History

280 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Christopher J. Coyne is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Associate Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford, 2013) and After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford, 2008).

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

US media tells us that “interventions overseas by the US government protect domestic liberties” when in fact “foreign intervention undermines liberties at home.” Did you know that during “the fiscal year that ended on September 30th, 2014, US Special Operations Forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries – roughly 70% of the nations on the planet.” If Russia deployed to 133 countries it would be endlessly on our TVs every night, but when the US does it – total silence. Our Department of “Defense” owns over 4,800 sites worldwide. “The United States has been in a permanent state of war for decades.” As economist Deepak Lal says, the “United States is indubitably an empire. It is more than a hegemon, as it seeks control over not only foreign but also aspects of domestic policy in other countries.”

Did You Know: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 defines ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ so broadly that it is possible for US citizens to be included.” The US has “a ‘no fly list,’ which lists people, including US citizens, prohibited from boarding a commercial aircraft to travel in or out of the US. The number has increased from 10,000 in 2011 to 45,000 in 2013”. Note warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and monitoring of emails of US citizens without a warrant by the NSA. “The FBI and Department of Defense spied on domestic organizations including the ACLU, Quakers, PETA, Greenpeace, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.” That’s amazing: We Quakers (I’m Quaker) STILL being surveilled even though we collectively haven’t done squat since the Vietnam War.

To learn how to spy on the American people, the US created the Philippines Constabulary in 1901 where their offices “intercepted 1.7 million messages annually” and by the mid-1920s the US run DMI in the Philippines had “accumulated some form of information on an estimated 70 percent of the population.” Back in the US, in a secret agreement with Western Union, James Bamford writes that the US Black Chamber had by the end of 1920, “the secret and illegal cooperation of almost the entire American cable industry.” “In 1956 the FBI implemented a counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. It operated until 1971 collecting information on any Americans deemed subversive. “These subversives included civil rights leaders, antiwar protestors, and those on the New Left, among others.” “The FBI spread false information to attempt to destroy their targets’ personal and professional relationships, disrupt meetings, and pit organizations against one another.” Not to be outdone, “meanwhile the CIA implemented its own domestic surveillance program in 1965.” Wait. Isn’t that illegal? Why yes, it is. “Project CHAOS was the result of a direct request from President Johnson for the CIA to begin a program to monitor domestic dissent.” So much for free speech in the US. “As part of Project CHAOS, information on approximately three hundred thousand individuals was entered into a CIA computer index.” “The CIA also illegally opened and photographed several hundred thousand pieces of first-class mail belonging to private US persons.” The NSA began in 1952; its job was to invade the privacy of the American people that the FBI and CIA still weren’t doing in our land of “freedom” and “liberty”. Imagine the millions of taxpayer dollars spent annually on siloed redundancy – all three organizations doing the same thing and NOT sharing info with each other.

In 1974 Sy Hersh did a NYT article on how Nixon was “directly violating its charter” by spying on anti-war protestors and other dissident groups. The Senate then began the Church Committee which showed how US intelligence agencies “undermined the liberty of American persons.” “If the War on Drugs kicked the door to militarization wide open, the War on Terror blew it off its hinges.” Remember the War on Terrorism was all about stopping THEIR terrorism, and never OUR terrorism. The deliciously invasive PATRIOT Act “allowed federal and state and local law enforcement to gather intelligence on civilians.” Gee, what could go wrong? “Data from 2005 indicates that SWAT teams were deployed fifty to sixty thousand times that year. Current estimates place the number of deployments as high as eighty thousand annually.” James Bamford wrote how Obama, over his two terms, “Created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen.” Imagine ANY of your liberal Facebook friends EVER telling you that! “From 22,300 miles in space, where seven Advanced Orion crafts now orbit; to a one-million-square-foot building [Bluffdale – which cost taxpayers $1.5 billion] in the Utah desert that stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and social media accounts; to taps along the millions of miles of undersea cables that encircle the Earth like yarn.” How wonderful that our government sees that the biggest threat to its business as usual, is its own citizens? How wonderful that our US police departments between 2006-2014 were given 93,763 machine guns to be used against the American taxpayers if they got out of line (p.114). Or that Keene, New Hampshire got a DHS grant of $285,933 “to purchase a BearCat, an eight-ton armored personnel carrier. Keene has a population of 23,000 and has seen only two murders since 1999.”

Not to be outdone, “in 2015 North Dakota became the first state to legalize the use of ‘weaponized’ drones by the police.” Gosh, what could go wrong there, when you factually know that “nearly 90% of people killed by US drone strikes were not intended targets (p.132)”. “A related concern is that the use of drones by the US government to combat terrorism results in widespread terror for those foreign populations who must live with drones overhead (like in Gaza today in 2024).” This led to Abu Ghraib where we saw photos of “US soldiers smiling next to an inmate’s dead body.” And we read about detainees there “subjected to sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours.” And don’t forget the joy of US military personnel at Abu Ghraib threatening “to physically harm detainees’ children and to rape and murder their mothers.” What a perfect way to make America more hated and less safe while clearly increasing the chances of future serious blowback against Americans. Most Americans were rightfully appalled by all of this and “seventy-three percent said it was wrong to ‘feed a detainee by pumping food into his anus (p.139).” Who the hell says in a Committee meeting, “Hey have we thought of pumping food into the anuses of kidnapped occupied people who have committed no crime?” And who the hell said, “Great idea, Jim, let’s get right on that!”

Private Clarence Clowe wrote Senator Hoar (R-MA) during the Philippine Occupation (1898-1946) that when he was stationed, his fellow soldiers would sadistically torture bound locals relentlessly to almost death, “I regret to have to say that, on the contrary, the majority of soldiers take a keen delight in them [torture sessions], and rush with joy to the making of this latest development [in torture techniques].” The private then “asked to be discharged from the army, a ‘service [that was] outraging his conscience’.” “Torture and other atrocities appeared to be not merely intermittent occurrences, but rather standard operating procedure.” Thus, Abu Ghraib was merely a continuation of an American military pastime. I know what American Patriots are saying, “Hey back off! We perfected waterboarding in the Philippines!” The nasty stuff learned during the Philippine Occupation (read “Policing America’s Empire” by Alfred McCoy) was brought back to the US to try out of American citizens by people like August Vollmer and Jesse Garwood and Lieutenant Colonel Harry Bandholtz. In fact, the 1931 US Report on Lawlessness of Law Enforcement found torture in use in “New York, Buffalo, Boston, Newark, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, El Paso, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle” police departments where it was euphemized as giving someone the “third degree”. “By all accounts the use of the ‘third degree’ became systemic and widespread throughout the United States by the 1920’s.” Pause to salute the American flag.
Truman approved Operation Paperclip, “denying the [Nazi] scientists to the Soviets became the primary justification for the program.” This book mentions how these Nazi scientists’ skills were “important to the development of torture techniques, particularly ‘clean torture,’ or techniques that leave little to no physical marks. The Nazis had experimented with their own methods of psychological torture throughout the war.” “Nazis connected to both the Gestapo and the SS, for example, dosed unknowing prisoners with mescaline.” “The purpose of these experiments was to see if unwilling subjects could be brought under the control of their captors – that is, ‘to eliminate the will of the person examined’.” After giving the highest mescaline dose to thirty prisoners w/o achieving the goal, the Nazis found it was “impossible to impose one’s will on another person [later it WAS found possible if only they were US liberals fed a diet of only Rachel Maddow, NYT and WP].”

The CIA did lots of mind control experiments in the US at every major university from Princeton on down [p.155 for the list], but with no success. It got so over-the-top that “for example, CIA personnel were known to put doses of LSD into their officemate’s morning coffee.” Many of the first to be dosed were members of the Manhattan Project, which developed the government’s nuclear capabilities.” Imagine that fact being put into the movie Oppenheimer. These antics led to a dosed CIA doctor committing suicide or murdered as explained in my Goodreads review of David Talbot’s Chessboard book. “When a plan was discovered to lace the punch with LSD at the 1954 CIA Christmas party [US taxpayer dollars hard at work], a security memo was issued, stating that the drug could “produce serious insanity for periods of 8 to 18 hours and possibly longer…[we do] not recommend testing [LSD] in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.” “The CIA soon ceased testing drugs on their own personal and instead began to experiment on the American public.” So much for sincerity of the heavily promoted US “War on Drugs.” In Operation Midnight Climax the CIA hired prostitutes to dose clients, while in prison “one inmate was given LSD for seventy-seven straight days.” Such were the upstanding morals of the CIA during the time when the rest of us were watching such wholesome fare as Father Knows Best, or Leave It to Beaver.

The American people would love to know more about this CIA fueled insanity however “following the Watergate scandal, CIA director Richard Helms ordered that the files related to MKUltra be destroyed.” Keep the taxpayers in the dark – so noble. One doctor demanded the CIA cover his experiments because his continued placing army personnel volunteers in small boxes for hours in intentional sensory deprivation to break them meant the box would “almost certainly cause irreparable [psychological] damage to those subjected to it.” Idea: Maybe stop putting unwitting US citizens in boxes just to torture them. Transcripts of a 1977 hearing show however that the “CIA engaged in a program of human experimentation from the 1950s into the 1970s.” I’m surprised the CIA didn’t recruit Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy instead of putting them both in prison, apparently they would have fit right in.

Let an ex-Navy SEAL [p.162] during the Phoenix program tell you about what his team did in Vietnam: “We wrapped det [detonator] cord around necks and wired them to the detonator box. And basically what it did was blow their heads off….The general idea was to waste [murder] the first two [prisoners].” “By the time you get to your man, he’s talking so fast you’ve got to pop the weasel just to shut him up. I guess you could say we wrote the book on torture.” If that doesn’t make you exclaim, “Go Navy!” what will? In Vietnam US soldiers frequently wired telephones to sexual organs or “suspended prisoners by the toes, testicles, or the hands” and one guy said an interrogator came up to him [also p.162] complaining “my hands are getting tired from hitting this man in the mouth.” Poor baby; maybe stop torturing civilians. How come these sadists weren’t prosecuted? Well, “until March 1966 commanders in Vietnam were not obligated to report war crimes, including torture, perpetuated by US forces and their allies.” Remind me why God should Bless America? The punch line is that ALL this sadistic illegal crap was done “to protect the Vietnamese from the Soviets”. Realistically, what WORSE things were the Soviets going to do? The hypocrisy of the Cold War exposed.

Land of the Free: According to the recent legal decision in Meshal v. Higgenbotham, “American civilians cannot sue federal agents who illegally detain or torture them in other countries.” In addition, note that the Meshal in question was never even convicted of a crime! His case was thus dismissed. You might ask: What did any of that have to do with national security?

This was a great sorely needed book which no conservative or liberal will ever dare read, probably because they DON’T want to know what the Deep State behind BOTH political parties is really up to. Luckily US progressives do want to know the whole uncomfortable truth and we are not afraid of being despised for reporting what we have learned to the liberal and conservative rabble and fellow progressives. US liberals endlessly post on Facebook about the perils of Trump but intentionally will never discuss the perils of having a CIA, NSA and FBI unaccountable to the American people - or [as Noam Chomsky has asked us many times] instead of focusing only on Republicans, why not focus on the MANY ways historically Democrats collude with the WORST policies of Republicans? Democrats screamed at Bush’s policies and then stayed totally silent when Obama’s policies became clearly even worse. Railing at Trump, while applauding Biden’s open financing of Israel’s settler-colonial final stage killing and starvation in Gaza. Funny how those weaned on mainstream media can’t imagine anything to the Left of liberal party hack Rachel Maddow or the genocide apologists at NYT. I recommend this book to anyone still with INTACT morals or who simply still believes in the Golden Rule. Bravo to the author.

[Jennings · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a very enjoyable analysis of the impact of foreign intervention on our society. It examined the erosion of domestic civil liberties and the militarization of the police through a historical perspective -- forgoing partisanship in favor of analysis.

[Mike A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful, well-written, and painfully timely - Its a book I can recommend easily as required reading right now.

Coyne and Hall advance an idea that may seem intuitive upon reflection, but has failed to be adequately accounted for: the interplay between military interventionism and our domestic policies has drastically impacted our civil liberties. Their "Boomerang theory” is explained and then explored in a series of topical chapters that make it easy to digest.

It also expands on the idea that where technology has reduced the costs of government size, scope and action – without corresponding checks – it has grown accordingly, and often without adequate oversight.

The authors seek to show, I think persuasively, that military interventionism is incredibly damaging to our civil society. But it begs the question: what are the implications if one accepts their arguments? They posit that change will require broad-based cultural changes – but in some ways this response feels lacking. Of course this is true, but in the end we need the government to change – and that response is never fully given. Perhaps it would be a nice follow up to this book!

The strongest chapter, in my mind, was the militarization of the police – which provides an excellent historical narrative for how we got here. The authors caveat the theory by describing it as “long and variable,” meaning the full extent of the expansions of state power cannot be known or seen at the time they occur. Even so, the chapter looking at Drones seems to attempt exactly that, and with a degree less success. Still, it alerts us to dangers that we should seek to prevent.

In the end, I thought this book incredibly well written and well argued. I would love to see it updated to include additional discussion of recent events – but they would simply be making the points in the book even more forcefully.

[Christopher Hudson Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s commonly accepted that domestic policy is impacted by foreign policy. However, the hypothesis that foreign intervention, external state-produced social control, directly results in increased social control at home is unfortunately under researched. Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall propose what they call the “boomerang effect” where the militarism abroad that allows governments to experiment with social control often is then adopted domestically against the governments’ own citizens. This happen through three channels: Human-capital, organizational dynamics, and physical-capital. The authors devote individual chapters to the foreign policy origins that influenced to the U.S. domestic use of surveillance, militarized police, drones, and torture. Tyranny Comes Homes, though brief, tells a chilling tail of the loss of liberty we are willing to tolerate, especially towards marginalized groups. Once a government, at any level, increases its social control, it is very difficult to reverse the growth of power and return to a previous state of affairs. Coyne and Hall’s work will hopefully inspire further research into the boomerang effect, and serve as a good reminder that militarism is not free from domestic consequences.

[Y · Rating 5 out of 5]

How "fighting for your freedom" through coercive foreign intervention in fact leads to loss of liberty at home. Meticulous and very readable.

The first part of the book starts of by presenting this "boomerang effect". Its conditions are citizen's fear and centralization of state power. Innovations in state-produced social control come back to the intervening country through three channels: human capital (the experiences and skills in social control acquired by those involved in coercive foreign interventions remain with them after the intervention is over), organizational dynamics (they reintegrate society either in positions to influence domestic private or public institutions or go back to civilian life with a changed view of the appropriate scope of government activities) and physical capital (techniques and technology developed to control foreign populations often return home). It then moves on to explain how weak national and international constraints make the U.S. susceptible to the boomerang effect.

The second part of the book uses four case studies to illustrate the boomerang effect: surveillance, militarization of police, drones, and torture.

The main takeaway from the conclusion is the importance of the adoption of a particular anti-militarist ideology by the population.

[Arique Burgos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gonna try to make this short n sweet sabrina carpenter. Love this book and I genuinely think EVERYONE should read it. However that brings up my only critique, which is that the language should be more accessible. I truly think that every single person should read this book, but the language makes it hard. The book discusses things that have and currently are impacting the lives of Americans in small or large ways, but the language used makes it more academic and not accessible to everyone to just pick up and read. Again, everyone should read it especially since the current administration is eroding rights of Americans. Trump admitted to wanting to send Americans to El Salvador prisons which are practically extermination camps. He started with people he and his administration deemed as illegal terrorist but he recently used the term “home-grown” to refer to who he will be going after next.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was somewhat timely, considering what has been going on last week in the US. It does a pretty good job laying out the case as to why there is fertile ground for what happened in the US on the 6th.

Having said that, I think the book should have gone a bit more into the "Police Pipeline", that is people entering the military being trained in urban warfare only to then let loose at home on the population. Add on top of that the people with war experience, and potentially PTSD, and it should really not surprise that you get things like Ferguson or even the storm of the Capitol sooner or later.

[Chris Sosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid overview of the domestic risks posed by U.S. militarism abroad with strong emphasis on the "boomerang effect" that finds technologies and strategies designed for war being applied domestically, often with no fanfare.

Be prepared that it's a dry read and frustratingly not updated through much of the Trump administration despite its recent release date, but these are small complaints.

Highly worthwhile read.

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The framework seems intuitively plausible and useful, but I found the choice and framing of the evidence thinner and less convincing than I would have hoped.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great exploration about the hidden costs of foreign interventions and how they influence domestic policy.

[Andrew Wynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall good, a little academic. Very relevant for right now and good historical perspective.

[Azhar Ali]

This is an excellent book on how policies and tactics applied by US in foreign countries come back to haunt her citizens.

[Eila Mcmillin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely interesting and important information, it just felt sort of redundant at times, not as compelling for me to read.

[Elijah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book makes many many strong points, a large portion of which seem to be on accident. I would advocate reading someone like de Jouvenal, Burnham, or Schmitt, for a clearer analysis of the expansion of the central authority, but this book (indirectly) touches on many great, related ideas.