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.
This chapter is structured around two definitional axes through which the 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
