with or is shaped by that which is marked as American or familiar (suggestive of Galli’s “Global War”).35 In either case, the realities of increased contact and exchange fostered by digital, social, and global media are certainly a key aspect in this regard but do not fully account for the particularity of radicalization discourse in the US context. Enter the third lineage constitutive of a genealogy of homegrown terrorism, clues to which lie in the marking of threat as existential. To speak about threats as existential and necessitating annihilation (whether emanating from all or “bad” Muslims, or a distinct individual/group marked as such via simile) is to depoliticize violence. While undoubtedly deeply tied to the formulation of a civilizational other, the reduction of violence to irrationality and evil is equally tied to the increasing codification and routinization of terrorism in and through the US legal apparatus.
Political Violence
The idea that the kernel of hostility lies in inherent cultural or civilizational traits uproots acts of violence from their historical-political contexts. As does the framing of particular modes of violence as wrought exclusively for vengeance, bloodlust, and fanaticism rather than in the service of resistance or decolonization. The confluence of these notions has ushered in practices marked by the emergency or suspension of law aimed at annihilation: Guantanamo Bay, drone strikes, Abu Ghraib, extrajudicial killing, capture or kill lists, and so on.36 However, the depoliticization of violence is complex and multivalent. To fully account for how homegrown terrorism is conceptualized, addressed, and managed, other avenues need to be explored.
In sharp contrast to the exceptional bodies confined to the cells of Guantanamo Bay, there are actual terrorists walking the streets of America today. Not the shadowy figures security discourses warn of, but those who have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes, have served jail sentences, and have been ultimately released. This includes Daniel McGowan, a convicted ecoterrorist; Rothschild Augustine, part of a group called the Liberty City Seven, who was caught up a sting operation and sentenced to seven years in prison; and two men from the Virginia Jihad Network, Khwaja Mahmood Hasan and Yong Ki Kwon, whose initial sentences were reduced (and who are now released) after reaching plea agreements and cooperating with prosecutors. Even John Walker Lindh, an American captured fighting alongside the Taliban, has a projected release date of May 2019. These instances point to a need to go beyond narratives of exception to make sense of homegrown terrorism.37 There has been much debate over whether terrorism ought to be addressed through a war paradigm or as a problem of law enforcement. Critics of the war on terror have placed much focus on the war paradigm and how it has seeped into and/or usurped the law. However, the depoliticization of violence has as much to do with the criminalization of terrorism as it does with the militarization of law.
While much attention has been (rightfully) given to the US PATRIOT Act in this regard, the process began decades earlier and produced a variety of implications. For example, the much-discussed “material support” statutes were amended rather than introduced by the PATRIOT Act; they were drafted in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (section 120005). This occurred two years after the Federal Courts Administration Act inscribed a distinction between domestic and international terrorism into criminal law. What is significant here is that while the previous inscriptions of terrorism into the US Code (in 1978 and 1987) were connected to foreign policy, the 1992 distinction is placed in Title 18 (chapter 113 B, section 2331), Crimes and Criminal Procedure, a markedly different focus. During the 1990s there were various attempts to further criminalize political violence with a variety of repercussions, some exceptional, others not. For example, the US Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 established a list of “foreign terrorist organizations” and the ability to deport suspected terrorists based on secret information. Others facilitated practices that could hardly be characterized as exceptional. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the “terrorism enhancement” of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (section 3A1.4) was enacted, under which a judge may significantly increase the sentence of an individual if his crime is deemed to be terrorism (we see examples of this in Chapters 1 and 3).38 This is not to suggest that practices that could be characterized as exceptional have been abandoned. While the proposed Enemy Expatriation Act of 2012, which sought to grant the government the ability to strip individuals of their citizenship if convicted of a terrorism-related crime, initially failed—thought to have no chance of surviving a challenge on constitutional grounds—it has reemerged in more recent proposed legislation that I address in Chapter 3.39 Nevertheless, the point here is that the criminalization of political violence sets up a particular mode of depoliticization that opens the door to discourses of radicalization.
Historically, every time terrorism entered (or threatened to enter) mainstream political discourse its valence of illegitimacy has been articulated in different ways.40 But the marking of terrorism as inhuman and barbaric always begins, pace Badiou, with the manner in which it is emptied, or made “devoid of content.” This process is evident in the definition found in the US Legal Code: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” While terrorism is often used interchangeably with or is defined as “political violence,” the two are hardly synonymous. Terrorism transforms the single space that separates the two terms (political violence) into an intractable gap, a distance already signified in the US definition by the insertion of “motivated.” Political, in the context of terrorism, is thus always meant to be understood as being struck through, as political, that is, as fundamentally illegitimate. The obliteration of the political is completed through the stress placed on noncombatants, those who cannot be rightfully constituted as targets of aggression.41 The absence of legitimacy leaves in its wake only barbarism, irrationality, and evil.
In a peculiar maneuver, defining terrorism in US law voids the very motive fundamental to distinguishing it from other types of criminal violence, marking the complexity of its operation. Take, for instance, the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which replaced the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act. The result of a decades-long effort on the part of business lobbies, it is an example of the successful introduction of terrorism into new spaces of activity. The striking through of the political in domestic law opens an aporia in the “incorporeal transformation” of a criminal, arsonist, or vandal into a terrorist.42 It is the political that differentiates these figures. Yet, when making sense of these crimes the political cannot be given significant weight. The political must be simultaneously invoked and refuted: “These individuals claim to be motivated by the deprivation of the earth, but what is really driving them?” In other words, without a legitimate political lens through which to decipher the motivation to violence and with the stakes becoming increasingly global, a void emerges: how to make sense of incidents in which Americans carry out terroristic violence against America? In effect, the political returns criminal motive to the level of the personal, but not in the same way as it relates to petty crime. The move back to the personal in the context of homegrown terrorism is not marked by a motivation of material gain. What remains is pathological.
Useful here is French philosopher Michel Foucault’s interrogation of how psychiatry came to bear on law in the nineteenth century by addressing crimes that appeared to be “without reason” and “against nature”—two phrases commonly used to describe terrorism. Crimes, in essence, not preceded by a history, disturbance, or sign.43 The psychologizing of such crimes—like that of a woman who killed and decapitated her neighbor’s daughter, tossing her severed head out a window—injected into the fabric of society, a “dangerous individual.” This dangerous element is similar to the “enemy of mankind” that emerged alongside and facilitated the terror of the French Revolution. Today, homegrown terrorism is discussed in similar terms. To be clear, my argument is not that homegrown terrorism is a crime without reason, history, or sign. As I show in the following chapters, these are precisely the claims made in government discourses. Rather, the history I am outlining illustrates how it has become possible to speak about homegrown terrorism in this way. While certainly
