articulations and experiences of citizenship.
Chapter 1, “Identity and Incidence: Defining Terror,” is concerned not with the formulation of a universally accepted definition of terrorism but with examining how three very different men and their violent acts were coded as terrorist: Daniel McGowan (ecoterrorist), Wade Michael Page (domestic terrorist), and Nidal Malik Hasan (homegrown terrorist). The chapter is structured along two definitional axes. The first is nominal (and suggestively ordinal) and examines the way identity constructs are deployed in efforts to mark an actor and his action as an existential threat, as “foreign.” It is a maneuver performed through the super- or sub-imposition of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other atop or beneath the familiar—be they the white faces of environmentalists and racists or a US military uniform. For a threat to be existential it must also be reoccurring and persistent. Thus, the second axis is temporal and examines how each actor/action was constituted as an incidence rather than a mere incident. In this effort, I detail how each man was paired with a past doppelgänger—McGowan/Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Page/McVeigh (who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing), Hasan/al-Hazmi (one of the 9/11 hijackers)—and characterized as a rematerialization of a ghost that promises subsequent, cyclical, and perhaps even more destructive returns. Together, the two axes illustrate the complex interplay of constructs of familiarity and difference as well as temporality in recoding violence as terror. Therein, I illustrate how the Double, a figure positioned in the past and future, but never present—one deployed strategically by various actors—is the operational figure of anticipatory or preemptive politics, the failure of which only reinforces its necessity.
“Informants and Other Media: Networking the Double” places contemporary fears of radicalization in a productive comparison with Cold War fears of infiltration. By focusing on media, writ broadly, I show how these anxieties are both, at their base and despite their differences, fears of connectivity. Furthermore, they are made sense of—and simultaneously exacerbated and alleviated—through the lens of conspiracy. Thus, Chapter 2 is situated in two courtrooms over sixty years apart: the 1949 Foley Square trial in which eleven leaders of the Communist Party of the United States of America were found guilty of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the US government; and the 2008 trial of the Fort Dix Five, New Jersey men convicted of conspiring to kill US military personnel. I remap how an old surveillance medium, the paid informant, fostered, facilitated, and elicited social, technological, and ideological links between those accused and broader enemy networks (Communism and global jihad, respectively) in a manner that made conspiracy legible to publics and juries. Here, the Double is found in the network; neither here nor there, but always circulating. As such, the Double is epistemologically inseparable from the media implicated in the enemy network by the informant—books, videos, etc.—and the informant himself (as a surveillance technology). Here connectivity is simultaneously ill and remedy and the informant is a securitizing-Double, the enemy-Double’s inverse, a conspiratorial figure that exploits connectivity in an effort to make conspiracy charges, a legal mechanism of counterterrorism, stick.
Counterterrorism 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.
1
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.
