Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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materializes in more than just America’s courtrooms. Chapter 3, “Opacity and Transparency in Counterterrorism: Belonging and Citizenship Post-9/11” examines two spaces integral to the production of counterterrorism spectacles: namely, the office of executive decision making and the US prison system, both largely kept from public view. The play of opacity and transparency in counterterrorism, inextricably linked to the spatial collapse of conflict, is visible in the two cases that inform this chapter: the placement of Anwar al-Awlaki on the infamous “capture or kill” list and the entrapment of four African American ex-convicts in a 2009 sting operation (the Newburgh Four). Both cases involve individuals readily made other, and yet what made their respective death and imprisonments so urgent was, I argue, their Americanness: al-Awlaki’s cultural familiarity and American accent and the Newburgh Four’s emergence from a quintessential American space—the prison. From there I examine the interplay of what is seen and left out of sight in counterterrorism, the articulations of belonging it fosters, and the already-existing second-class experiences of citizenship it exacerbates. The communication of the US drone program vis-à-vis hunting al-Awlaki as an open secret, a play of opacity/transparency, illustrates the fluid positioning of citizens as simultaneously spy and suspect. The resulting peculiar articulation of belonging—laughter, in the face of the drone strike that takes the life of a fellow citizen—illustrates the unequal distribution of this dual position. I develop this further through the Newburgh Four by illustrating how the largely unseen machinations of mass incarceration are integral to the production of the “successful” counterterror sting, which in turn only further oils the cogs of mass incarceration.
The book concludes by returning to the image with which it began, perhaps the most visible manifestation of the discourse of the Double in the context of homegrown terrorism. At the time of writing, the Boston Marathon bombing carried out by the Tsarnaev brothers is the only successful post-9/11 improvised explosive attack carried out on US soil by self-proclaimed jihadists. A metaphorical return to the originary Tale of the Two Brothers, the Tsarnaev case acts as a crescendo in which the themes of this book tie together. The case illustrates the failure of anticipatory politics, the complex interplay of articulations of otherness and likeness, and the consequences of the Double for thinking about belonging. Moreover, the Double manifests therein in digital media, in psychological splits, and as doppelgänger on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Above the cacophony of ball bearings, lost limbs, shootouts, messages scribbled in blood, and “fan-girls,” a single note resounded with a peculiar resonance. The younger Tsarnaev’s appearance in a space thought to be reserved for America’s idols (though this is a historically inaccurate portrayal of Rolling Stone) was interpreted as an indication that the terrorist had been absorbed into the popular imagination beyond a nameless figure, an other marked for an unremarkable death in a high-budget Hollywood production. To conclude the book, I address the question of whether the image of the Double is in fact an enemy image or one of a different type and modality. From the Tsarnaev cover and its various appropriations I move to examining the double images (before and after) that structure how sense has been made of Americans who have tried to join ISIS. These images and their juxtaposition powerfully illustrate “home|grown” security discourse and the consequences of the Double’s appearance on the scene of security. The strategic constructions of difference and likeness in threat itself, rather than in a clear us/other dichotomy, mark the usurpation of that binary. It is replaced by another nonbinary pairing—other-Double—that oscillates between deferral and closure, disruption and suture, engendering a cyclical movement, an ever-repeating coda that works to continuously defer the end of the war on terror.
Figure 2. Time, November 23, 2009.
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Identity and Incidence
Defining Terror
December 7, 2005: Daniel McGowan was arrested in connection to a series of arsons. The arrest was one of a dozen, the culmination of the FBI’s Operation Backfire, an investigation into acts of ecoterrorism.
August 5, 2012: Wade Michael Page, a known white supremacist, killed six at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. The FBI investigated the case as an act of domestic terrorism.
November 5, 2009: Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed thirteen fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. Given Hasan’s communiqués with Anwar al-Awlaki, the case was widely referred to as an act of homegrown terrorism.
“We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing,” President Obama said somberly as he relayed a request for Americans not to jump to conclusions in the wake of the Fort Hood shooting. Critics pounced, claiming that Obama, not a half year after his “New Beginnings” speech in Cairo, was playing politics with the lives of American servicemen and -women. Beyond the right’s Islamophobia or disdain for Obama, the exchange illustrates a more general and much older problem: namely, that dubbing an individual or group as terrorist (or, in this case, not) is an inherently “political” act. Much bemoaned, academic after pundit after politician continue to attempt to construct a definition of terrorism that might move above such politics. One of the most widely cited is the “consensus definition” of terrorism studies scholar Alex Schmid:
Terrorism refers to on the one hand a doctrine about the presumed effectiveness of a special form or tactic of fear-generating, coercive political violence and, on the other hand, to a conspiratorial practice of calculated, demonstrative, direct violent action without legal or moral restraints, targeting mainly civilians and non-combatants, performed for its propagandistic and psychological effects on various audiences and conflict parties.1
Evident from Schmid’s definition is that the so-called problem of politics associated with terrorism is not merely a matter of application (i.e., who counts as a terrorist) but is integral to the definition of terrorism itself. In his survey of academic definitions, “political”—that is, the nature of, or motive for, an act—is the second most commonly cited element of terrorism after “violence or force” (he conjoins the two in his definition). Thus, distinguishing the violence of crime, however heinous, from that of terrorism pivots on the ability to clearly determine whether an action is motivated by personal gain or politics—in moments of psychosis, it might be neither. So deeply ingrained is this thinking that in the aftermath of violence, news media coverage and government hearings are dedicated to uncovering the perpetrator’s motivation and whether or not she intended for the act to send a message to an audience beyond her direct victim(s).
Yet, as information rolled in about Nidal Malik Hasan, determining the nature of his motive became no easier. Featured on the cover of Time magazine two and a half weeks after the shooting, “TERRORIST?” covers Hasan’s almost expressionless eyes; the image taken from his military file. At this point, authorities and the public had learned that Hasan had communicated with a radical cleric. But they also learned of his potential psychological issues. In this chapter I do not engage in the futile labor of proposing a definition of terrorism that might somehow provide a way around this impasse.2 Instead, I descend from the mythologized air above politics and into its ground, charting the maneuvers, tensions, and debates initiated by efforts to mark three very different individuals as (eco, domestic, and homegrown) terrorists—Daniel McGowan, Wade Michael Page, and Nidal Malik Hasan.
The three cases that make up this chapter reveal not only that the determination of the nature of a motive itself is a matter of politics, but more importantly, that it involves a peculiar kind of valuation. I argue that the transformation of violence into terrorism not so much depends on the illustration of a political motive (i.e., pro-life, race, the environment, social change, etc.), but rather hinges on characterizing that motive as political; that is, as illegitimate, as foreign to ordinary politics, and, above all, as an existential threat to “our way of life” that must be anticipated and prevented. Thus, a shift in the crux of the definitional conundrum of terrorism—from searching for political motive to analyzing how actors are deemed a civilizational threat—reveals the close relationship between defining terrorism and identity constructs.