Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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three men were coded as terrorists. The first maps the manner in which the motives underlying the actions of McGowan, Page, and Hasan were demarcated as “foreign.” Efforts to do so begin with the discourse of the Double, if in varying ways, claiming that within the familiar—be they the white faces of environmentalists and racists or a US military uniform—lurks an otherness that threatens (Western) civilization. While each case presents distinct narrations of otherness, they are all accompanied by invocations of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. Through comparison or superimposition, this figure renders the otherness of each legible vis-à-vis their familiarity.
The second is temporal. Time magazine asked, “Is Fort Hood an aberration or a sign of things to come?” hinting that an answer to the single-word question that masked Hasan’s visage depended on whether his act could be shown to be an incidence rather than a mere incident. In more general terms, if terrorism is part of a political project, it cannot, by definition, be a one-time act. Efforts to mark the men as terrorist involved tying McGowan, Page, and Hasan to past doppelgängers: Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Nawaf al-Hazmi (one of the 9/11 hijackers), respectively. It is a definitional maneuver that sets in motion a Janus-faced discourse that projects and mutates a traumatic past into an imminent, yet not entirely determined, future. The logic here is that of a future-past (futur antérieur), but one that maintains a sense a Derridian unknowable future (the “to come,” à-venir)—trauma, as Derrida states, proceeds from the future.3 Each man, as the manifestation of a copy, the fulfillment of the future as past in the present, creates a cyclical lineage that promises subsequent copies and returns, though in perhaps even more destructive form. Time suggests as much. “A sign of things to come?” The titular question, thus, concerns more than one’s status as a terrorist; an affirmative answer also includes the promise of things to come. It is a futurity “held in the present in a perpetual state of potential,” made legible through a doubling in time.4
The Double reveals the complex and mutable interplay of identity constructs integral to recoding violence as terrorism as well as the temporal structure on which this incorporeal transformation depends. The Double is, in effect, the operational figure of preemption, a risk too catastrophic (and rare) to be subject to calculation and compensation. The Double, as existential threat, thus requires, as sociologist François Ewald puts it, that I, “out of precaution, imagine [rather than calculate] the worst possible, the consequence that an infinitely deceptive, malicious demon could have slipped into the false of apparently innocent enterprise.”5 Shifting the definitional problem of terrorism to a focus on how a wide breadth of actors, actions, and utterances are coded as existential threats illustrates how the Double is not simply a source of anxiety or another adversary to be captured and confined. Rather, the Double is internal to preemptive politics. It is an adversary that cannot—or, pace security thinking, ought not—be named, only anticipated.
Coding Terror (in Three Parts): Identity at the End of Civilization
Human-Hating Treehuggers
The largest domestic terrorism investigation in US history, Operation Backfire, focused on a series of arsons.6 The operation hinged on the use of an informant, Jacob Ferguson, a one-time mainstay in the environmentalist movement in the US Northwest. Exploiting his heroin addiction, the FBI swayed him into service to avoid drug charges. For his handlers, Ferguson mapped out a cell of eighteen individuals with ties to a variety of groups known for taking “direct action”—i.e., arson, vandalism, sabotage, and demonstrations—against organizations whose activities harmed the environment and animal life. Referred to as “the Family,” the cell was characterized by critics as a fiction cooked up by the combined imaginations of overeager FBI agents and a strung-out informant. Ferguson was flown around the country to stage “run-ins” with each individual and record their conversations; Daniel McGowan was one of the individuals he visited.
After his arrest, McGowan agreed to a noncooperative plea bargain (in which he was not required to testify against his codefendants) and admitted to his involvement in two arsons in Oregon in 2001. The trial judge applied a terrorism enhancement at sentencing and McGowan received a seven-year term, double the average federal sentence for arson. McGowan served his time in a communication management unit housed at the US Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. It is a form of confinement developed specifically to house terrorists and one that severely limits one’s contact with the outside world. He was released on June 3, 2013.7 Throughout the process FBI officials unequivocally referred to McGowan and company as terrorists.
Ecoterrorism is not the conceptual offspring of 9/11. Ron Arnold, founder of the Wise-Use Movement, coined the term in a 1983 article for Reason magazine. His intent, on behalf of a consortium of industry interests, was to secure additional protections against (and vilify) environmentalists.8 The concept’s migration from the pages of industry pamphlets into mainstream political discourse was the result of intense industry lobbying. The campaign also worked to insert itself into academic debate; the first article about “environmental terrorism” to appear in the journal Terrorism was authored by an executive of Contingency Management Services.9 Within two decades ecoterrorism became the FBI’s top domestic terrorism priority. In 2003, the American Legislative Exchange Council published a pamphlet (amounting to model legislation) titled “Animal and Ecological Terrorism in America” in an effort to transform the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 into the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The latter was ultimately ratified in 2006, preceded by a series of Senate and House committee hearings on ecoterrorism.
The radical environmentalist movement that industry sought to vilify is made up of a variety of groups, organizations, and networks. A few of the more recognizable names, those implicated in Operation Backfire, include the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and Earth First!10 ALF, ELF, and SHAC are British imports that arrived in the United States in 1979, 1996, and 2004, respectively. ALF announced its presence in the United States by freeing five animals from the New York University Medical Center.11 Earth First! was founded in 1979 by Dave Foreman, a popular figure in the environmentalist movement who penned Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching in 1985; his book details “ecotage,” tactics for sabotaging machinery in order to disrupt industry activities. The groups are tied together in a number of ways: tactics, philosophy, shared members, and declarations of solidarity—not to mention being the co-subjects of government hearings, investigations, and reports.
James Jarboe, the FBI’s domestic terrorism section chief, defines ecoterrorism as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target often of a symbolic nature.”12 As a carbon copy of the FBI definition of domestic terrorism, the terms “environmentally” and “environmental” are scribbled in, either attached to or in place of, “politically” and “political.” Republican Senator David Vitter, present at many of the hearings on the subject, lauded the application of terrorism to the actions of environmentalists. Echoing the testimonies of employees and executives who described the terror they felt as a result of direct action, he concluded, “I think it is absolutely appropriate. You look up the definition, and this is what terrorism is about. It is using violent and illegal activity to try to intimidate people, scare people into submission to go along with these extremist political agendas. That is basically the dictionary definition of terrorism.”13 Matters, however, were not so straightforward.
Despite causing approximately $110 million in damage in a suspected 1,100 cases, the actions of radical environmentalists have never resulted in a single death. The care taken by the movement’s organizations to not “harm any animal (human or otherwise)” led some within government and elsewhere to chastise those who would equate direct action with terrorism as engaging in “excessive name calling.”14 While I address the attempts to deflect charges of terrorism below, what is at issue here is the manner in which direct action and its practitioners were marked as terrorist in light of a lack of fatalities. Arguments that one ought not call another a terrorist if there is no trail of dead implies that the identification of a political motive alone is not sufficient for recoding violence as terrorism. How was this impasse circumvented? What provided proponents of the institutionalization of ecoterrorism with an avenue through which to authoritatively and legally (i.e., in