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The terror/counterterror edge: whennon-terror becomes a terrorismproblem and real terror cannot bedetected by counterterrorismJoseba Zulaika aa Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada , Reno, NV, USAPublished online: 12 Aug 2010.

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Critical Studies on TerrorismVol. 3, No. 2, August 2010, 247–260

ISSN 1753-9153 print/ISSN 1753-9161 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17539153.2010.491332http://www.informaworld.com

RTER1753-91531753-9161Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 3, No. 2, Jun 2010: pp. 0–0Critical Studies on TerrorismSPECIAL SECTION

The terror/counterterror edge: when non-terror becomes a terrorism problem and real terror cannot be detected by counterterrorismCritical Studies on TerrorismJ. ZulaikaJoseba Zulaika*

Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

On the basis of cases such as the recent ban on the building of minarets in Switzerlandor the prohibition on wearing a burka in France and the Netherlands, and the passage ofterrorism legislation in various European countries in which there has never been aterrorism problem, as well as the recent history of counterterrorism in the UnitedStates, this paper examines how non-terror can become a terrorism problem and non-risk ideologically risky, while at the same time the real threats go undetected. Theinternational prominence gained by Spanish Prime Minister Jose María Aznar whenthe George W. Bush administration declared a worldwide ‘War on Terror’ shows thepolitical capital attached to terrorist risk. Countries may act as if afflicted by a case of‘terrorism envy’ when non-risk may be perceived as political irrelevance. This paperargues that the dynamics of terrorism/counterterrorism should be seen in the culturalcontext of taboo while displaying the qualities of the Lacanian edge: a self-generatingprocess that simultaneously links and separates them in a ‘non-relationship’ that isconstitutive of the entire phenomenon.

Keywords: non-terror; European cases; terrorism envy; US Muslims; terroristcounter-terrorist edge

IntroductionIn a referendum at the end of November 2009, 58% of Swiss voters approved a ban on thebuilding of two minarets. The most factual thing that one can say about minarets in multi-lingual, open, ultramodern Switzerland is that they do not exist; there are four of them,mostly in faceless industrial neighbourhoods and with no permission to broadcast the callto prayers; two others were being planned (comparatively, in Germany there are 120mosques with minarets and there are 120 more planned). As to the existence of the Muslimreligion in Switzerland, this is also questionable: they are 5% of a population of 7.5 million,of which 50,000, or 13%, worship openly – hardly a paragon of fervid practice by a reli-gious community. What about the interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims? Thereis hardly any interaction as they co-exist side by side in mostly separate social networksand cultural universes. As the novelist Peter Stamm put it, ‘We Swiss sacrificed our goodstanding as a multicultural and open-minded society to ban the construction of minaretsthat no one intends to build in order to defend ourselves against an Islam that has neverexisted in Switzerland’ (Stamm 2009, p. A19).

*Email: zulaika@unr.edu

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So where is the problem of non-existing minarets in a country with non-worshippingMuslims to whom one does not relate? You might say that the problem is precisely thevery absence of the problem. How so? According to all the news about the current worldof international politics, there should be a problem in Switzerland as well. When normalcyimplies the urgent ‘waiting for Terror’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996), the most ominous signis the absence of a sign, which only confirms that this has to be simply the lull before thestorm. It can only be the silence of the enemy while plotting the unknown sudden attack.

Everybody knows that after the attacks of 11 September 2001, a War on Terror hastaken precedence in the grand scale of international politics. There are no greater mediarealities than the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, which are direct products of such War onTerror. Terrorists attacked not only New York and Washington on 9/11, but also Madrid,London, and other targets. This explains that a state of heightened expectation of theincoming Terror is a most natural reaction. It is hard not to conclude that a hidden terroristplot must be in the making right now. So why are terrorist attacks not being carried out inSwitzerland? Or in Finland? And once we continue thinking along this logic of suspicion,why are there only four minarets when normally each of the 200 Swiss mosques should haveone? Why do not all Muslims in our society practise their religion as they should like?These are probably ominous signs: the non-existence of the problem proves that some-thing is amiss in the picture, that the concerted effort to disguise the danger of the evilamong us is succeeding, that the possible occurrence of something horrible is imminentand yet we have no clue where it will come from. Indeed, would not it be better if we hadthe enemy among us and we knew it and did something about it? Anything would bebetter than this state of ignorance of an ‘evil we know’ as an axiom that it exists.

On the basis of these examples and the wider history of terrorism in the United States,I develop the idea of ‘terrorism envy’ while reviewing various aspects of ‘playing terrorist’.Cases such as McVeigh or Major Hasan and the current unease of Muslim communities inthe United States prompt me to pay special attention to how mirror images of terrorist andcounterterrorist can play within the same culture and the same individual. I argue that theprocesses of self-generation, self-fulfilling prophecy, and mimicry between the counterter-rorist and the terrorist are intrinsic to the entire phenomenon. The conclusion to which thisnon-religious problem of a non-war leads us, with the implication that counterterrorismbecomes the best ally of terrorism, is to the need to rethink such ‘passion for ignorance’ asthe edge – a feature of the Lacanian Real that points to a simultaneous linkage and separa-tion of two surfaces, a terror/counterterror relationship based on its very impossibility andyet constitutive of the entire phenomenon.

Terrorism envy: creating the problemThe problem of terrorist non-Terror has affected not only the Swiss. The United Stateswas also afflicted with this problem in the 1970s and 1980s. Does anyone remember anyterrorist act in the United States during the early 1980s? These were the years in which theRonald Reagan administration labelled terrorism its major international problem whilepointing the finger to Moscow. At times, over 80% of Americans regarded it as an ‘extreme’danger. Even if nobody remembers who they were, 17 people’s deaths were categorised asterrorism during 1980–1985. In 1986, a survey showed that terrorism was the most frequentlymentioned problem, ‘the number one concern’ facing the country (Hinckley 1989, p. 388).In fact, between 1974 and 1994, two decades in which terrorism loomed as the greatestthreat to American security, more people died in the United States of bee stings; and John

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Mueller has shown the extent to which the dangers of terrorism have been ‘overblown’(Mueller 2006).

Consider the four years 1989–1992 to realise the magnitude of the non-Terror problemafflicting the United States. These were the years in which communism as the historicenemy of the West disappeared and terrorism was called to substitute for it. And yet,contrary to Brian Jenkins’s prediction that by the end of the 1980s terrorism incidentsmight double, during those four years there was not a single fatality from terrorism in theUnited States. During those same years there were approximately 100,000 reported ‘nor-mal’ deaths. In the same period over 1500 books on terrorism were published. It is not ajoke to say that the real problem for this entire terrorism industry was the very absence ofterrorism. The very logic of ‘anomaly’ requires that some exceptional event takes place,so that at last one ‘terrorist’ death will make a thousand other deaths ‘ordinary’. But if theratio is, as it was during those four years, 100,000 versus zero, then the very non-existenceof the anomalous puts in question the normality/abnormality polarity and deprives the entireterrorism discourse of its basic frame.

What do you do in such situations? If there is no problem but there is supposed to beone, consciously or unconsciously you end up helping create one. This is the very definitionof the self-fulfilling prophecy. As sociologist Robert Merton puts it:

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking anew behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity ofthe self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of terror. For the prophet will cite the actualcourse of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning . . . such are the perversities ofsocial logic. (Merton 1968, p. 477)

It was false that al-Qaeda was in Iraq before March 2003 (the excuse to go to war) but it istrue that there is al-Qaeda in Iraq now – which serves as a justification to continue the war.It was false that there was a minaret problem in Switzerland (the excuse for an anti-Muslim referendum) but it is true that there is a minaret problem in Switzerland now.

A similar affliction appears to be taking over in other regions of the European Union.Countries such as Finland, as an example, are so peripheral to the hot spots of the currentinternational politics that there has never been a terrorist act, let alone a terrorist organisa-tion, in their soil. When Terror is the tabooed coin of political centrality, a country with noTerror problem appears to be a second-class power deprived of symbolic capital. Suchnon-existence borders on the anomalous. It is no surprise therefore that Finland, underobligation from the European Union and international treaties, has decided to enact anti-terrorist legislation. It is one thing not to be a nuclear power, a prerogative that requiresenormous economic and political might, and which is the ultimate symbol of militarypower; but in the absence of nuclear power, what else but involvement in counterterrorism(always symbiotically related to nuclearism in the current world) holds enough symboliccapital as to guarantee that a country is not totally irrelevant in current world affairs? So,even if there is no threat of terrorism and this is the last thing the authorities want toplague their country, the dynamics of international politics subject to the ‘War on Terror’and the omnipresence of the apocalyptic messages of terror spread by the media make itinevitable the development of a tough counterterrorist legislation (with the likelihood thatpreviously non-terrorist acts will now be categorised as ‘terrorist’) and the involvement ina dominant public discourse in which everyone is affected by the threat from terrorism.

It appears to be partly a case of terrorism envy. I remember Basque friends of minebeing affected by this malady in their youths: anyone worth his salt should have been in

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ETA during the anti-Francoist resistance of the 1960s and early 1970s. If you were not, yousuffered from a clear case of symbolic castration. Involvement in ETA was the way to showthat you had what it took. And in order to be considered by ETA a worthy candidate, youhad to do something daring, such as putting at risk the life of an alleged police informer byprovoking a car accident, hoping in the meantime that this would be rewarded with member-ship in the group. When ETA had all the symbolic capital of heroic resistance, you felt guiltyfor not participating in its violent activity and envious of those who enjoyed its mystique.

Something similar seems to take place with nations regarding international terrorism.Was not the good luck of Prime Minister Jose María Aznar that he had a puny domesticterrorist group, killing a town councilman or a journalist once in a while, against which hecould involve his entire nation; and as a reward for which he could suddenly turn Spain,after centuries of political and military irrelevance on the world stage, and as illustrated bythe photograph of the Azores before the Iraqi war, into a power player on the internationalscene in the company of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair?Which second- or third-rate country would not feel political envy when seeing such influ-ence in exchange for three or four terrorist fatalities a year?

Playing terroristBegona Aretxaga views the response of the Spanish state terror to ETA’s terrorism as theresult of mimetic terrorist desire, namely, ‘an organized mimesis of terrorism as theconstituting force of the state as subject’ (Aretxaga 2005, p. 223). In essence, in order tovanquish Basque terrorism, state officials became terrorists and organised a state terroristorganisation by the name of Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacíon (GAL, AntiterroristLiberation Groups). Aretxaga shows how the Spanish agents’ involvement in the killing ofBasque refugees reads like:

a parody of stock representations of Basque terrorists. It imitates the landscape and actionsassociated with ETA in cinema, fiction, and the media. . . . What is produced in this mimeticengagement of the state with the representation of terrorism is, precisely, terror: a traumaticread of dead bodies and intense affects – exhilaration, anger, and fear. And not only terror, butthe state itself as subject, is produced in the act of producing terror – a restless state subjectcharacterized by uncontrolled excitement. (Aretxaga 2005, pp. 223–224)

One of the kidnappings by the Spanish officials was that of a French citizen by the nameof Segundo Marey; soon they found out that he had no connection with ETA at all; still,instead of admitting the mistake and letting the man free, the Chief of Police consultedwith the Civil Governor and the Head of Intelligence and decided to keep Marey kidnappedin order to exploit him politically against the French state. They issued a communiqué askingthe French authorities to release two Spanish policemen detained in France for an attemptedkidnapping or Marey would be killed. There was talk among the officers about killing theman, but luckily France released the Spanish policemen and Marey was also freed. Thiswas a clear case in which state officials were ‘playing terrorist’ (they even decided toorganise an extortion system similar to ETA’s that involved kidnapping French industrial-ists and levying a ‘revolutionary tax’). In the process, they ‘got carried away by the excite-ment of transgression and the sensation of omnipotence it brings’ (Aretxaga 2005, p. 221).By then, Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez had famously justified the state’s counterterror-ist dirty war as the need for ‘the sewers of the State’. The state terror went on for fouryears and resulted in the killings of 27 refugees.

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It is a case of terrorism envy in which what counts for state officials is not the legalityof freeing an innocent man, but instead, observes Aretxaga (2005):

what matters is the power emanating from mimetic action, the enactment of the desire to be aterrorist. It is the act of kidnapping, killing, extorting that makes terrorism – like the state –real and effective, by binding its actors to and in an imaginary relation that constitutes analternative reality. On the stage of the state being, fantasy cannot be separated from the calcu-lated objectives that originally triggered the actions of terror. Indeed, it is through the enactmentof fantasy in mimetic performance that terror becomes real and the state powerful. (p. 224)

Could not we say similar things about the open adoption of torture by Bush’s administra-tion? If terrorists can kidnap, torture and kill, then why not our powerful state? Regardlessof the well-recognised fact that it does not bring forth reliable truth, torture is the ultimatetransgressive act of power.

Mirror images inside terrorists: from McVeigh to Major HasanWhat about the terrorism envy of those who, according to media representations, becameparadigmatic ‘terrorists’ such as the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, or most recentlyMajor Nidal Hasan? In the case of Basque friends of mine who suffered ETA envy, it wasan armed organisation that had to recruit them after weighing up whether they were suitablematerial for an underground organisation; I know of several who were rejected despitetheir ‘actions’ to prove their worth. But in the current media frenzy, anyone can instantlybecome a ‘terrorist’ regardless of being part of an armed group or having a stated strategy.

This is the case of McVeigh whose acts did not fit any classical definition of an armedterrorism group engaged in psychological terror with a political agenda. What is remark-able about McVeigh is the self-fulfilling nature of his terrorist career, because the basicreferences of his plot were provided by counterterrorism discourse: his shooting practicetargets while a soldier were ‘terrorists’; his action plan was scripted by William LutherPierce’s (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald) right-wing The Turner Diaries (1978)(itself inspired by the anonymous apocalyptic novel The John Franklin Letters (1959) inwhich America falls under a global Soviet conspiracy); his alias was ‘T. Tutle’, the nameof the superterrorist hero in the Hollywood film Brazil (1985); and the day chosen for thebombing was 19 April, the second anniversary of the Waco tragedy, a cause célèbre formilitias angered by the government’s violent response to the apocalyptic Branch Davidians.So the question is: after his rejection by the army, where he wanted to serve as a marine, towhat extent was a dejected McVeigh’s desire for violent action prompted out of spite andfollowing the very counterterrorism agenda he had pursued earlier in his army career? InMcVeigh’s subjectivity the terrorist and the marine soldier had an imaginary relationshipin which they constituted each other as in a Lacanian ‘mirror image’. What makes a soldier asoldier in counterterrorist warfare is his deadly opposition to the figure of the terrorist;similarly, even if ordinarily the aspiration of the terrorists is not to fight soldiers, in an all-out war in which the enemy is defined as ‘terrorist’, what makes him or her a terrorist isthe determination to fight the soldier to the end. McVeigh felt the power by which his ownself could experience both sides of his divided self, the soldier and the terrorist, by switchingfrom one side of the imaginary mirror to the other; and his omnipotence consisted in demo-nstrating to the American public that he was the subject who could be the edge bringingboth irreconcilable sides of the mirror together. Since he was not allowed to be the marinecounterterrorist hero, he could instead be its arch-enemy by enviously appropriating forhimself the power of the tabooed Terrorist.

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And what about Major Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre? Was it a case of insanity orterrorism? He seems to be a Muslim fanatic, connected to other Muslim fanatics. Is he aterrorist? Does he have an organisation behind him ready to use terror to further a politicalagenda? Or is he someone who, in a case of terrorism envy, translated his psychotic confu-sion, pushing him over the edge into the fantasy of becoming a ‘martyr’ for his Muslimbrothers? He must have seen himself in the mirror of his split American and Muslim per-sonae. Should he be on the side of his own American army killing Muslims in Iraq andAfghanistan, or should he be squarely on the side of the Muslims and therefore against hisown army? When he could no longer harbour inside the split between both phantasmaticrealities constituting each other, he decided to overcome the unbearable by turning himselfinto a martyr in the name of Allah. As Robert Wright wrote in an op-ed piece:

The Fort Hood shooting, then, is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by thewar on terrorism – or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And FortHood is the biggest data point we have – the most lethal Islamist terrorist attack on Americansoil since 9/11. It’s only one piece of evidence, but it’s a salient piece, and it supports theliberal, not the conservative, war-on-terrorism paradigm. (Wright 2009, p. W11)

Conservatives may argue that we cannot allow people like Hasan veto power over ourforeign policy, but the reality is that alienated, vulnerable people like him are likely to endup going over the edge because of the hawkish anti-jihad War on Terror that led to disasterssuch as the Iraq war.

Is such a never-ending war necessary when, in the era of the Internet, terrorist acts canbe orchestrated from anywhere, including a US military barracks such as Fort Hood? InWright’s opinion, ‘the case of Nidal Hasan shows one thing for sure: Homegrown Americanterrorists don’t need a safe haven. All they need is a place to buy a gun’ (Wright 2009,p. W11). Still, Hasan is, out of the millions of American Muslims, the only one to havecommitted such a horrific massacre in the eight years since 9/11, which shows that Muslimsare not intrinsically any more violent than Christians. But when, in the era of the Internetand video technology, you have instances such as minaret bans in Switzerland and deni-gration of Muslims in the workplace, the likelihood of vulnerable people going overboardincreases dangerously.

There was also the case of Carlos Bledsoe, converted to Islam as a teenager, who fatallyshot a soldier in Little Rock who, upon being arrested, told the police about Muslims beingkilled in Iraq and Afghanistan. To what extent is all of this a case of self-fulfilling prophecy?

On 4 December 2009, at New York’s Binghamton University, a Saudi Arabian studentstabbed to death an emeritus 77-year-old professor who had been a member of his disser-tation committee. One of the student’s roommates declared that, before the murder, theMuslim graduate student ‘was acting oddly, like a terrorist’ (Schmidt and Regan 2009,p. A23). Is there now any way in which the actions of a Muslim who goes mad in theUnited States would not be translated into ‘terrorism?’

And then, on 11 December 2009, there were reports that five young Muslim Americansfrom the suburbs of Washington had been arrested in Pakistan on their way to Taliban ter-ritory. The men’s intention was apparently to fight American troops in Afghanistan;reportedly, they had been recruited by a Pakistani militant through an Internet chat room:

It was unclear on Thursday how serious a threat the group presented, or whether these youngmen had broken any laws in Pakistan of the United States. At least two of the men were beingquestioned in F.B.I. custody in Pakistan, and all of them would probably be deported, a senioradministration official in Washington said. Whether the men acted on a lark or were recruited

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as part of a larger militant outfit, the case has renewed concerns that American citizens, somewith ethnic ties to Pakistan and other Muslim countries, are increasingly at the centre of ter-rorist plots against the United States and other nations. (Giliani and Perlez, 2009, p. A20)

Below the report there was another piece about the suspected men being praised by theirneighbours as ‘intensely devout “good guys”’ (Lorber and Southhall 2009, p. A20).

If they had been recruited by ‘a militant with links to al Qaeda’, once in Pakistan the fivemen were stranded. They tried to join ‘an extremist Islamic school’ near Karachi and an‘extremist organisation’, but were ‘rebuffed in both places because of their Westerndemeanor and their inability to speak the national language, Urdu’. The five men had beenarrested at a home in a government housing complex that belonged to an uncle of the eldestof the group. The picture of five American citizens recruited allegedly by al-Qaeda throughthe Internet and unable to join an extremist group once in Pakistan does not underscore a veryefficient terrorist organisation; still, the journalists wondered ‘whether the men had beenrecruited to a specific militant or terrorist organization’ and mentioned the possibility of tiesto banned groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad and Jamaat-ud-Dawa. What the report did notdisclose was the mystery of who the Pakistani close to al-Qaeda was who recruited them withpromises of taking them ‘to Afghanistan to fight jihad’, and who ‘booked them in a hotel inLahore’, but ‘once they got there, their contact went to ground and they were stranded’.

In the end, were the five Muslim Americans caught in the ‘mirror image’ inside theirsplit identities, by which their religious self and their civic citizenship are constituted inirreconcilable mutual antagonism? Such a mirror split, needless to say, is linked directly tothe policies and mind-set of the War on Terror turned into the self-fulfilling soil in whichMuslim Americans are pushed towards the edge. A week after the news of the five youngmen caught in Pakistan broke, another report delineated the larger contexts of Muslimanger in the United States and a clear picture, once again, of how counterterrorism maybecome terrorism’s best ally.

Where the action is: plotters, agent provocateursOn 18 December 2009, a report stated: ‘In March, a national coalition of a dozen Islamicorganizations warned that it would cease cooperating with the F.B.I. unless the agencystopped infiltrating mosques and using “agent provocateurs to trap unsuspecting Muslimyouth”’ (The Economist 2009). A cleric had sued the government with the claim that theFBI had threatened to deny his green card application unless he spied on relatives over-seas, a charge that took place in other court cases as well. If initially after 9/11, the FBIand the Muslim leaders were working together to build a relationship of trust, the reportadded that lately fear had taken over Muslims, whose communities are no longer viewedas partners but ‘as objects of suspicion’, the perception being ‘that F.B.I. informers areeverywhere, listening’. It talked of ‘several high-profile cases in which informers haveinfiltrated mosques and have helped promote plots’ (Vitello and Semple 2009, pp. A1–A33; emphasis added). The Muslim leaders are seen in the report as promising to redoubleefforts to combat extremism, yet also worried ‘about the fallout for the vast numbers of theinnocents’ being reported. The consequence of such fallout between law enforcement andMuslim leaders is that a critical early-warning system against domestic terrorism may be lost.

The planting of informers has played a critical role in US counterterrorism. The mainwitness against the blind Sheikh Rahman, for example, was the informer Emad Salem whowas paid US$1.5 million for the testimony on the basis of which Rahman was sentenced tolife in prison. It is worth remembering that Salem ‘began his testimony by admitting that

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he had lied to just about everybody he ever met’, that he was ‘always ready with anotherbelieve-it-or-not exploit’, and that his testimony sounded ‘like sheer fantasy’ (MacFarquhar1995, p. A9). An Editorial added that the indictment of the sheikh ‘only required . . . toprove an intention to wage a terror campaign’ and concluded that ‘only the sketchiest con-nections [were] established between Sheik [Omar] Abdel Rahman and the alleged master-mind of that crime, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef’ (The New York Times 1995, emphasis added).If The New York Times thought that the trial had been a sham, imagine the outrage of thoseMuslims who considered him their greatest spiritual and legal authority, including the manwho had been supporting his stay in the United States, Osama bin Laden, and the one whohad been tortured with him in an Egyptian prison, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Soon his sons wereplotting to hijack planes and distributing plastic-laminated cards containing their father’spicture and his written ‘will’ entitled ‘The Fatwa of the Prisoner Sheik Doctor OmarAbdel Rahman’, which called for the destruction of America. In the opinion of journalistPeter Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden and many other al-Qaeda jihadists, the card ‘is akey to understanding why some three thousand Americans lost their lives on the morningof September 11, 2001’ (Bergen 2006, p. 204).

The case of Salem who infiltrated the blind sheikh’s circle can be taken as para-digmatic of self-fulfilling prophecy. This was a circle of jihadists who had fought the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan hand in hand with the CIA – the agency that issued repeatedvisas for the blind sheikh to come to the United States. As Robert Friedman concludes, theCIA’s involvement with the first attack on the World Trade Center was, through its settingup jihad offices such as Al Khifa across the country, ‘far greater’ than was known to thegeneral public; in short, ‘the CIA had inadvertently managed to do something thatAmerica’s enemies have been unable to: give terrorism a foothold in the United States’(Friedman 1995, pp. 46–47).

One only has to read John Miller and Michael Stone’s The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plotand Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (2002) to see the extent to which counterterror-ism (through Salem) and the future terrorists were working together in the events that ledup to the 1993 attacks. According to Miller and Stone, the infiltrated ‘Salem was offeringto restart the paramilitary training that had lapsed in the year since Nosair’s [Al Khifa’sformer leader] arrest’. Salem was soon securing for his few fellow plotters ‘a warehouse inwhich to build bombs’ (p. 74). In short, the FBI actually planted someone in the blindsheikh’s inner circle in order to activate up to then non-existent illegal paramilitary activi-ties, including renting a warehouse for them to start making bombs. Not surprisingly, therewas concern within the FBI that ‘the Bureau was training potential terrorists, holy warriorswho may not be breaking the law now, but who might one day turn the skills they wereacquiring against the U.S.’ (Miller and Stone 2002, p. 88). They were aware of ‘the heatthe Bureau would take if it turned out it had assisted a future terrorist’, but still, since ‘thesubjects were going to get training whether or not the FBI provided it’, what was the pointof counterterrorism ‘if you weren’t willing to get close to the action, to get your handsdirty now and then, how would you ever know what he’s [the blind sheikh] plotting todo?’ (Miller and Stone 2002, p. 87). In other words, since they were going to be terroristsanyway, let us be complicit and push them into action and find out how far they are will-ing to go. This is how the 1993 plot began. Beyond self-fulfilling prophecy, this is alreadyself-fulfilling action, for we are dealing with a plot hatched by counterterrorism itself bymeans of playing with the desire of potential terrorists and seducing them into a course ofmonitored action in order to catch them.

This was not the end of Salem’s successes. In April 1993, two months after the firstWorld Trade Center attacks (and before Abdel Rahman and others had been arrested),

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Salem warned the FBI that Abdel Rahman’s circle was planning a simultaneous bombingof the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations, and the New York offices of theFBI. Once again, according to Miller and Stone (2002), since the plotters allegedly neededa safe house in which to build bombs, ‘Salem offered to find one’, and then theco-conspirators ‘accepted the offer’ (p. 114). So who took the initiative? Was it the coun-terterrorist informant who ‘offered’ to find a place to build bombs or the terrorists who‘accepted’? The counterterrorist is playing terrorist in order to catch the real terrorists.One could argue that it was the plotters who made the decision to commit a terrorist act,not the informant, but one cannot ignore the fact that without his simulation that a plot wasunder way, the actual decision was unlikely. The counterterrorist, after declaring ‘I gotcha’and receiving the US$1.5 million in reward, can always claim that he had no intention tocommit a terrorist act, he was only pretending. The counterterrorist was using a purpose-less simulation of terrorism purposefully to ignite an actual terrorist plot, so that he couldreap the reward of informing against it. The terrorists were not terrorists until the deceitfulsimulation prompted them to go along. In the deep play that is the terrorist action, bothsenses of ‘play’ (by the terrorists and the counterterrorists) get inextricably intertwined.

This is all normal behaviour once you accept the tenets of counterterrorism. The mostrecent news reported above is a continuation of this mind-set. Does counterterrorism havea clue that it might actually contribute to promoting terrorism? In the end, the conclusionwas that counterterrorism had triumphed with the arrest of the blind sheikh, as well as withfoiling ‘the second terrorist’ plot in the safe house set up by the informer Salem. Counter-terrorists were also aware of something else: the wretched plotters were dupes who couldeasily be manipulated. The potential terrorists were, after all, people whom the counter-terrorists knew intimately, who had been their associates in the past, who had been undertheir surveillance, and who could be infiltrated by informers willing to testify about any-thing they wanted in exchange for money. The counterterrorists could reasonably assumethat they were in control of an enemy they had in part created and who, in the process, hadprovided themselves a heroic status and the funding to be the guardians of a free society.This complacent counterterrorist fiction of its superior intelligence and technological controlwould be one of the components in the subsequent dismal intelligence failures leading to9/11, when 50–60 officers knew for months that two of the future suicidal plotters were inthe country, yet the system refused to acknowledge this and act. Despite the alarms aboutsuch dismal failures, what are we going to make of the case of Umar Farouk Abdul-mutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up an aeroplane with close to 300 passengersover Detroit on Christmas day 2009, who had been reported to the American embassy inNigeria as a potential suicide by his own father, and yet his visa had not been revoked?

The latest news about Muslim anger and fear at FBI tactics is an indication that thesame counterterrorist mind-set, engaged in a self-fulfilling prophecy that will end up pro-moting the very phenomenon it fights against, is still alive and well. Hence, we are notsurprised with reports that infiltrated informers have ‘helped promote plots’. One of thesetook place in Newburg, New York, where four members of a mosque ‘were charged inMay [2009] with plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues’, but later ‘the authoritiesacknowledged that the investigation had begun with an informer who became a linchpin inthe scheme. Congregation members said he had frequented the mosque, offering youngmen money and gifts’ (Vitello and Semple 2009, p. A33). This also casts a new light onyoung American Muslims being recruited through the Internet to fight in Afghanistan thento be found stranded in Pakistan.

Then there is the case of Queens imam, Ahmad Wais Afzali, an informer of the localand federal authorities, who was arrested in September on the suspicion that he had tipped

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off the target of their investigation, a coffee vendor who was also arrested and chargedwith plotting to detonate bombs in the United States.

Giving to charities, a primary duty of a practising Muslim, is another source of potentialrisk. In 2007, the FBI decided to stop sharing information with the Council on American–Islamic Relations, the nation’s most prominent Muslim civil rights organisation, becauseof the alleged failures of the council to answer questions about links with Hamas. TheAmerican Civil Liberties Union made a complaint in June 2009 about a decision by theJustice Department to shut down six Muslim charities without filing charges. In short, giv-ing to an Islamic charity implies a pervasive fear of arrest or prosecution. Some of thosecharities no longer solicit donations; the contributions have declined by 30–40%. Billionsof dollars in Muslim assets have been frozen.

Wael Mousfar, President of the Arab Muslim American Federation, a New Yorkumbrella group, commented on these events: ‘We are citizens who care about our countryas much as everyone. But people don’t know what to expect – who might report them forspeaking about Middle East politics, what someone might get your teenage son to do’(Vitello and Semple 2009, p. A33).

What does any of this have to do with non-terror becoming a terrorist problem? Itfollows the post-9/11 pattern of targeting Muslims as suspected terrorists. In the wake of9/11, the administration rounded up thousands of Arabs and Muslim foreigners, incarcer-ating them in secret, while the courts did nothing. Yet while not a single one of these victimshad any links with the attacks, the Supreme Court refused even to consider the legality ofthe arrests.

The non-religious problem of a non-warMosques and minarets evoke terror not only in Switzerland. Likewise, across the UnitedStates in November 2009 federal prosecutors seized several buildings that housed mosqueson charges that they were owned by a non-profit group with links to Iran. Similarly, theminaret moment could happen almost anywhere in Europe. In Italy, a bill has been intro-duced to ban the construction of mosques and restrict the Islamic call to prayer for fear ofthe advent of Eurabia. And in the spring of 2009, Britain elected two representatives of theanti-Islamic British National Party (BNP) to the European Parliament. In France, theMuslim headscarf has been banned from schools and its officials have mentioned the pos-sibility of banning the burka, a prohibition already in effect in the Netherlands’s educationalsystem. All of this takes place in the specific European context of ageing populationsneeding immigration to keep their economies afloat (in Spain, for example, it is predictedthat the ratio of workers to retirees will fall from the current 4.5:1 to 2:1 by 2050), while atthe same time those immigrants present a challenge to the nation’s homogeneous culturalidentity (see the debate proposed by President Nicholas Sarkozy on French identity). Theso-called ‘clash of civilizations’, by which a fundamentalist and essentialised Islam and apost-Enlightenment Europe are locked in an unsolvable antagonism, becomes an easyscapegoat for societies affected by their own deep crisis of a multidimensional identity ina globalised world. The reality is that, as a French study found in 2001, only 10% ofMuslims living in France were religiously practising (similar to Switzerland). Is it theMuslim religious non-problem that becomes a problem when your ideology requires thatthere should be one?

What is specific to the latest wave of terrorism is that the suicidal component becomesa primary and decisive element of the entire strategy. The new type of terrorism starts bymaking it crystal clear at the outset that, through self-immolation, there will be no

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meta-language and no future negotiation. Conventional wisdom tried to explain this distur-bing reality of suicide terrorism in terms of religious fanaticism. But this explanation, likeothers having to do with psychological imbalance or social isolation, have been dismissedby the empirical research of authors such as Mia Bloom, Robert Pape, and YoramSchweitzer (Bloom 2005, Pape 2005, Schweitzer 2006). Most of the suicide terroristshave emerged from secular backgrounds and 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks take placeas the result of organised campaigns. The Quran explicitly prohibits suicide. The questionis not the religious sources of suicide, but why it has become so easy for people such asbin Laden and al-Zawahiri to reverse the official Quranic doctrine and turn ‘suicide’ into‘martyrdom’; why, eschewing the traditional religious outlook, believers and non-believersopt for espousing Lacan’s view that ‘suicide is the most successful act’ (quoted in Zupancic2000, p. 11); why people are led into the madness of terrorism that finds no other ‘wayout’ but suicide.

What about the very proclamation of the post-9/11 situation as a state of ‘war’ under-stood in the most literal terms? What counterterrorism is unable to see is that it oftenbecomes terrorism’s best promoter for perpetuating an unending struggle. Under PresidentBush, that complicity began by defining the confrontation between a few dozen suicidalmadmen armed with box-cutters and the greatest military power ever as a ‘this is war’ tobe won or lost along the classical lines of military victory or defeat. Such non-war turnedinto a global War on Terror became, in the opinion of many analysts, the greatest victoryof the terrorists. As the classic literature on terrorism emphasised, terrorist violence shunsby definition all organisational and tactical formalities; the goal of traditional ‘victory’loses its conventional meaning; the concept of ‘war’ is no longer the same with terrorism – itbecomes at best a ‘proxy war’ in which concrete targets and actions are selected primarilybecause of their symbolic value, and there is no protocol to end the conflict.

There is a consensus by now that the War on Terror and the Iraq War have made theUnited States more vulnerable, not less. This is why it is crucial to reveal that we arecaught in an impasse. When the overwhelming reality is that counterterrorism has turnedinto the pivotal current public culture, the ideological and strategic consequences of incor-porating self-generating Terror within the central axiom of our political and ethical lifehas proven to be disastrous. What counterterrorism is unable to see is that the tragicinvolvement of the United States in Afghanistan since the Jimmy Carter presidency was,and still is, a self-fulfilling prophecy. What it needs to explain is how and why our formerclosest allies in that war – the Osama bin Ladens, and blind sheikh Omars, and KhalidShaikh Mohammeds, and the Taliban – turned into our arch-terrorist nemesis. In short, weneed to know how it helped create our current enemies from Afghanistan to New Yorkand Iraq, and whether the same thing is not happening all over again. Remember, therewas no al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war; now there is – much like there was no Hamas inPalestine until Israeli counterterrorism helped it to organise there. Turning such a non-warinto the War on Terror against the most powerful military power in history is the singlegreatest victory for any terrorist group ever.

Rethinking the terrorist/counterterrorist edgeWhat escapes the public debate is precisely the terrorism/counterterrorism edge by whichterror has become a self-generating phenomenon. One of the clearest instances of how acounterterrorist mind-set can promote terrorist insurgency was provided, weeks after theinvasion of Iraq, by Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. A counter-terrorist by career, Bremer made the disastrous decision to fire 500,000 Iraqi state workers

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who had served under the tabooed regime and were thus ‘contaminated’ by evil, therebyturning tens of thousands of Iraqis into resistance fighters overnight. One of the generalsopposed to Bremer’s de-Baathification – cloaked as ‘de-Nazification’ – was DavidPetraeus. He returned from Iraq to rethink and write a manual; his conclusion was thatthere was not much that can be done to defeat an insurgency if it is seen as politically legit-imate. The military has always known that labelling legitimate insurgency as ‘terrorist’ isself-delusion.

There is now a policy put in place by President Obama to repeat the successful Iraqi‘surge’ in Afghanistan by further escalating military involvement. What is lost in the pub-lic discussion is the strategic and conceptual framework in which Petraeus carried out thesurge. The thinking by Petraeus and his collaborators was that, paradoxically, ‘use of forcecan generate more insurgents’, and ‘some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency donot shoot’. Leaving aside the mantra that you should never negotiate with terrorist evil, heforged alliances with outlawed groups of armed men. Rethinking counterinsurgency,Petraeus wrote:

the people are, in many respects, the decisive terrain. . . . Working in another culture is enor-mously difficult if one doesn’t understand the ethnic groups, tribes, religious elements, polit-ical parties, and other social groupings – and their respective viewpoints. . . . Understandingof such cultural aspects is essential if one is to help the people build stable political, social,and economic institutions. Indeed, this is as much a matter of common sense as operationalnecessity. (Petraeus 2006, p. 3)

In short, Petraeus’s success was premised on the complete repudiation of counterterroristdoctrine.

Regarding terrorism discourse, I agree with Richard Jackson’s conclusion that ‘resistingthe discourse is not an act of disloyalty; it is an act of political self-determination; and it isabsolutely necessary if we are to avoid another stupefying period of fear and violence likethe cold war’ (Jackson 2005, p. 179). The many recent instances adduced here are proofthat counterterrorism contributes to creating its own enemy.

What counterterrorism seems unable to see is that it often becomes terrorism’s bestally for perpetuating an unending struggle. The complicity became complete by definingthe confrontation between a few dozen suicidal men armed with box-cutters and theUnited States military as a de facto ‘War on Terror’. More generally, as illustrated by thespectacular intelligence failures leading to the Iraq war, the counterterrorist industry doesnot know how to read the evidence at hand. As documented by the 9/11 CommissionReport, the attacks could have been avoided. The information about the terrorists being inthe United States and plotting aerial attacks against American targets was available to 50or 60 agents, but the system refused to acknowledge the fact that it knew. Did not theUnited States go to war against Saddam Hussein because the intelligence agencies couldnot figure out that he was bluffing?

Why such ‘passion for ignorance’? The systemic ignorance begins with the unwillingnessto learn the languages and cultures of the people involved; it is followed by the formationof a taboo that imposes secrecy and anomaly on anything touched by it; and it iscompounded by the inability to read the states of madness, suicide and amor fati of theterrorists. What is remarkable again in the current escalation in Afghanistan is the sheerignorance, reminiscent of Vietnam, about those very aspects mentioned by Petraeus. Nomilitary occupation can succeed against historical and political legitimacy – but it is pre-cisely such ‘common sense’ that the counterterrorist mind-set will not bear.

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the recent cases of Islamofobia reportedabove, are instances of that most classic of sociological truisms labelled ‘the Thomas the-orem’: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Merton 1968,p. 477). Once the situation is defined as one of the War on Terror or the endless waitingfor Islamic terrorism in Europe, what could happen weighs as much as what is actually thecase. The primary definition of our political reality as dependent on controlling the futurebecomes in itself the terrorists’ fundamental victory now. One example of such radicalsubversion of temporality is the adoption by the Bush administration of the doctrine ofpreventive war in a nuclear era. Only the figure of a mythified Terrorist and its potentialfor a nuclear attack can justify it. As we have heard from every expert turned prophet, ‘it isnot if, but when’ nuclear terrorism will take place. The seemingly wise fatalism of such atime warp ensures that the very building and possession of nuclear arsenals is no longerthe real issue; rather, it is the future possibility that potential terrorists might one dayobtain the remnant of ours. The Evil is not the reality that we now have nuclear arms;rather it is the desire of others to have them in the future.

Similarly, confronted with a Muslim population of which some members are likely toharbour terrorist desires, the premise of ‘not if, but when’ provokes a temporality thateither surrenders itself to inevitable Fate or organises a referendum to ban the constructionof minarets. The actual state of non-terror, but waiting for terror, forces action against anenemy that must be ready to strike and, by thus reacting to a non-existent problem, itbecomes suddenly a terrorism problem, since our actions have de facto defined them aspotential terrorists. The concern of those waiting for terror is no longer knowledge of thereligious premises, subjective motivations or social realities of the feared migrants in oursocieties, but how to react against utterly dangerous, secretively sinister and unchangingsubjects that must remain unknown to us.

The crucial issue is how to conceptualise this dynamic of mutual denial and mutualconstitution between the terrorist/counterterrorist couple. It displays the qualities of ‘theedge’ as a feature intrinsic to the Lacanian Real:

a duality that has nothing to do with the dichotomies between complementary oppositionalterms . . . the edge is the thing whose only substantiality consists in its simultaneously sepa-rating and linking two surfaces. This specific duality aims at the Real, and makes it take placethrough the very split that gives structure to this duality. It is a duality that simultaneouslyconstitutes the cause, the advent, and the consequences of the Real. (Zupancic 2003, p. 19)

When non-Terror becomes a terrorism problem, and real terror cannot be detected, it is theduality of the terrorist/counterterrorist edge that must grasped in its radicalness – an inti-mate relationship that takes place at the edge of its impossible ‘non-relationship’, yetconstitutes the entire phenomenon of terror.

AcknowledgementsIn the final writing of this paper I benefited substantially from the editorial skills of CameronWatson and the perceptive criticisms of two anonymous reviewers.

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