Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11

Preface

ix PREFACE As I observed the extraordinary fear that gripped both the nation and its policymakers in the months after 9/11, it seemed to me that a significant aspect of terrorism and the response to it remained unexplored. For the fear that we can all still recall came not from an enemy whose forces and weapons we could see but from an adversary that was effectively invisible. The nineteen hijackers had lived among us undetected and unmolested, a fact that quickly aroused fear of sleeper cells and of terrorists indistinguishable from the innocent persons around them. When a month later the anthrax letters began to arrive, new anxieties came with them, evoked this time by minute disease-bearing agents that might be in the very air we breathed. The fear of terrorism thus resolved into fear of unseen dangers, and though much has been said about terrorism, its link with the unseen is a subject that has aroused curiously little interest. The complexity in understanding the problem of unseen dangers lies in the fact that terrorism exists in two domains—in the world and in our minds. It can take one shape in the world outside and another in the imagined worlds that we fear await us. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, we often seek to understand these worlds by constructing narratives about them, broad and gripping stories about how evil is organized and why it occurs. In the case of terrorism, where full and reliable information is often difficult to come by for governments as well as citizens, these narratives help to fill in the blanks. x Preface Within days of each other in the late fall of 2008, two events took place that vividly illuminate the gap between the reality of terrorism and the imagined threat of terrorism. They also suggest two kinds of stories. The first began the day before Thanksgiving when a handful of individuals— perhaps as few as ten—paralyzed the center of Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Armed only with AK-47s, grenades, and explosives, they fought for two and a half days, during which they held two major hotels. To some, the Mumbai attack exemplified a larger narrative of terrorism as a phenomenon in which weak local or regional groups, using conventional weapons, lash out against their enemies. The second event occurred four days after the last Mumbai attacker was killed—on December 2nd—when a report was issued in Washington by a panel created by Congress. The report, titled World at Risk, was produced by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism, chaired by former senators Bob Graham of Florida and Jim Talent of Missouri. It concluded that “more likely than not” terrorists would use a weapon of mass destruction “by the end of 2013”—that is, within the next five years—and that it would probably be a biological weapon, although the commission did not wholly discount the possibility of nuclear terrorism.1 The report played to a different narrative, a narrative that emphasized terrorism driven by increasingly empowered groups that might be able to bring states to their knees. The juxtaposition of these events is striking, for at almost the moment that the commission was prophesying that terrorists would employ exotic, high-tech means of attack, a tiny group of terrorists was temporarily holding a major metropolis at bay with conventional weapons. Aside from the military-quality explosives, which they made relatively little use of, their armaments might easily be obtained legally or on the black market. Although the reality seemed dramatic, the means the attackers employed were banal, yet at the same time the commission was obsessed with an imagined world of apocalyptic super-weapons. The commission’s fixation on the imminent use of biological or nuclear weapons by terrorists was typical rather than exceptional for official and semi-official statements. If it appeared unusual, it was only in its timing, alongside the indisputably conventional character of the Mumbai attack. If we look to the reasons for the concern about weapons of mass destruction (wmd) in the hands of terrorists, it can hardly be as a result of their use, for no terrorist group has ever employed them. The only nonstate group to do Preface xi so was the Japanese religious sect Aum Shinrikyo, which developed both biological and chemical weapons before deploying the nerve gas sarin in the...