Drones, witches and other flying objects: the force of fantasy in US counterterrorism

Abstract

A key concern for critical terrorism studies is the extent to which counterterrorism contributes to the promotion and perpetuation of terrorism. When dealing with either the events leading to 9/11 or the current anti-Muslim movements in Europe, we owe serious attention to the self-generating process by which terrorism and counterterrorism operate as an edge that simultaneously and constitutively links and separates both aspects of the phenomenon. The 9/11 Commission Report established that the events could probably have been prevented; there were after all 50–60 officers who knew two of the future attackers were living in the United States. What requires analysis are the blind spots in counterterrorist thinking that lead to such failures and ultimately to the self-fulfilling nature of the war on terror. This article will examine the conceptual similarities between witchcraft societies and the counterterrorist thought and policies put in practice by various US administrations – having to do with the perversions of temporality, the logic of taboo, non-hypothetical knowledge, secret information, the passion for ‘expert’ ignorance, mystical causation and dual sovereignty. The need for an epistemic shift that will take into account the constitutive nature of discourse and the political subjectivities of the actors will be advocated.

Keywords:

• counterterrorism
• fantasy
• self-fulfilling
• epistemology
• discourse
• subjectivity