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

At the end of the Cold War, with the armaments race and fears of nuclear holocaust over, the United States emerged as the only superpower with no hint of any military enemy on the horizon. And yet the US Defence budget has almost doubled during the last decade after 9/11; it is now larger than that of all other countries combined. Such costs are justified because, after the Cold War, a new enemy has surfaced: the terrorist. The vast new security bureaucracy created after 9/11 encompasses some 1200 government organisations and 1900 companies. Estimates of the total bill for the war on terror range from $3 trillion to $4 trillion.

But the economy is only one aspect of the political climate forced by terrorism. What is most extraordinary is that the state of exception was imposed on American politics as a result of the war on terror. The evidence is there for anyone to see: Guantánamo, indefinite detention, rendition, torture and extra-judicial killings by drones. These are the daily staple news of current politics, officially sanctioned and normalised and broadly accepted by the general public. And yet, these are borderline realities at the intersection of law and politics, in the past clearly illegal and anathema, now official policy. The state of exception means that lawbreaking can be approved by the highest officials and go unpunished. As Agamben put it, a situation obtains in which ‘it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from the execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any reminder' (1998, p. 7).

What concerns me here is a crisis of knowledge in terrorism studies. Right from its inception, a sign of this crisis has been the difficulties of not only defining the term itself, but the very interpretive frameworks of the events covered by the concept. A critical analysis must inquire into the genealogy of this discourse and world view, beginning with the very naming of the phenomenon; it must examine its conceptual premises and policies and question its politics and ethics. In my latest work, I have been engaged in showing the extent to which counterterrorism, caught in its own spiral of a self-fulfilling prophecy, becomes terrorism's best ally. The events leading to the attack on the twin towers provide evidence for such an argument. It is a fact recognised by the 9/11 Commission Report that the plotters could have been found and the attacks prevented. It is well known that the blind sheik, bin Laden, and his followers had been in the past close associates of US counterintelligence services. After the removal of Saddam Hussein, there was information, based on the CIA's interviews with him, that he had been bluffing as to his possession or attempts to possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It is also established that reactions to 9/11, such as the war in Iraq and policies implemented by Paul Bremer after the invasion, added to the problem of terrorism. On the basis of this set of facts, the critical question should be, ex ante, did counterterrorism actually contribute, by omission or by action, to making 9/11 happen? Ex post facto, what are the premises and blind spots in counterterrorism that not only allowed 9/11, but contributed with reactions to making the problem much worse? It is in response to such questions that I presented the thesis of counterterrorism as a self-fulfilling prophecy (see Zulaika 2009). In the section below, I will add how the latest chapter in counterterrorism – the drone attacks – conforms to the same pattern.

My theoretical ground was borrowed initially from discourse analysis and from the anthropological study of taboo, to which I added in my latest book current psychoanalytical understandings of subjectivity. I did not argue that the intelligence communities were unconcerned about terrorist threats, much less voluntarily negligent. The officers in charge of preventing terrorism are likely to be the most concerned ones and the first in wanting to do a more efficient job. And I am not surprised that over 700 security studies scholars wrote in their ‘Open Letter to the American People’ after admitting that the war in Iraq was ‘the most misguided one since the Vietnam period’, the following: ‘One result has been a great distortion in terms of public debate on foreign and national security policy – an emphasis on speculation instead of facts’ (cited in Horgan and Boyle 2008, p. 54). My contention was that the generally admitted massive failure of counterterrorism in preventing 9/11 is paradigmatic of its blind spots and that we can learn the most from them. My argument was that these are problems that have to do directly with a faulty epistemology – beginning with the placement of the entire phenomenon in a context of taboo and the wilful ignorance of the political subjectivities of the terrorists.

The investigation of the crisis of knowledge in the field of terrorism takes me to examine in this article the force of fantasy in counterterrorism. One has to begin such a study by examining what counts as the standard of evidence and as valuable information in such a context of taboo, what type of experience should be respected and what sort of associative logic links together various kinds of events. My argument is that such faulty epistemology derives critically from the lack of attention paid to the role played by fantasy in the entire terrorism phenomenon. Thus, I am not primarily concerned with the usual criticisms received by the critical current of terrorism studies, namely, whether the liberal state should be included in the analysis, what is understood by ‘critical’, its ‘emancipation’ agenda and so on. My contention is rather that, in order to identify the blind spots in our knowledge of terrorism, the role of fantasy is a central issue. The cultural and political consequences of such work could not be more urgent.

Flying drones over Pakistan from Las Vegas

Pilotless drones to identify and destroy terrorist targets are the latest in counterterrorism – ‘the only game in town’, as it is widely referred to, echoing the former CIA director and current defence secretary Leon Panetta. Counterterrorism's basic approach has always consisted in tabooing outlawed terrorists as untouchables with whom no communication of any sort was permitted. The latest in counterterrorism, pilotless drones flying in the sky at 10,000 feet, the only contact between the hunter and the hunted, a Hellfire missile launched from a drone that might be operated by CIA agents 7500 miles away at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas in the Nevada desert, perfects the strategy of contact at a distance. The combat air patrols of the drones at any one time has gone from 21 in 2007 to 38 in 2009 to 54 in 2011 (Sluka 2011, p. 70). The flying robots, we are told, soon will be ‘in the position to take the initiative against the enemy on a battlefield’ and that ‘the pressure to let robots take the shot will be very hard to resist’ (Caryl 2011, p. 58). Not only in the air, ‘there are already more robots operating on the ground (15,000) than in the air (7000)’ (Caryl 2011, p. 55). There are 7000 drones ready to fly in the air and 15,000 on the ground. This is the new technological scenario, a Nintendo war in which subjectless machines will identify and eliminate terrorists. Terrorism's metaphoric hierarchy used to be that a superhuman entity (a country, an army, an organisation) killed a subhuman being (a ‘dog’, a ‘pig’ or some other beast); in the new weaponry, ‘drones’ mimic animals such as hummingbirds and seagulls.

The strength of the emerging robotic weaponry, we are told, consists in ‘their ability to see and think’ (Caryl 2011, p. 55). The drones can programme a destination and fly by themselves; they can follow a target for days from the invisible altitude, while the faraway operator is never in danger of being killed from below. One thing that is obvious about unmanned machines is that they do not have desires of their own, nor intentions, nor are subjectively responsible for their actions – and they cannot commit war crimes, as the required intent to commit them is missing from machines. The killing itself might perhaps now be done in a subjectless manner by machines finding out who the terrorists are and acting on their own.

The disturbing thing for counterterrorism is that both groups, terrorists and counterterrorists, have desires and subjectivities. Studies have shown (Lindlaw 2008) that the far-removed operators of the drone suffer the same combat stress as the combatants in a war zone. They cannot avoid the fact that innocent civilians are being killed by the Hellfire missiles they fire – including an estimated 168 children. It is hard to know how many people have been killed by drones (between 2000 and 3000), let alone how many of them are civilians. Estimates vary widely. Based on media reports, some Western estimates put the number of militants among the dead at 85%. The Pakistani daily Dawn calculated that of the 708 people killed in 2009, only five were known militants; the other major English-speaking daily in Pakistan, The News, estimated that of the 701 people killed by drones between January 2006 and April 2009, only 14 were known militants (Ahmad 2011). The area is sealed by Pakistan, the available sources being the CIA and Pakistani secret services. Of the people killed, the CIA knows the names of 125 people and considers 35 of them as ‘high value targets’ (Ahmad 2011).

Who are these hundreds of killed people of whom we do not even know their names? Counterterrorists' ‘passion for ignorance’ is well documented on the grounds of lack of basic knowledge regarding the languages or cultures of the peoples they are engaged with, let alone disinterest in their political goals or subjective motivation. Turning into fatal targets, anonymous people about whom not even their names are known, marks a new bar. But such issues, let alone the objection of why the 35 high-value targets should be subject to extrajudicial killing when the United States is not at war with Pakistan, are superfluous in the counterterrorist mindset. You only need apply the logic of taboo typical of terrorist contamination: when anti-Americanism is at an all-time high of 90% in countries such as Pakistan, due in good part to the drone attacks, can anyone on the ground be completely ‘innocent’ from actual or potential terrorism? Indeed, ‘the agency can target all suspect militants based on “pattern of life” analysis collected from surveillance cameras’ (Ahmad 2011). Since most adult males traditionally carry guns, such ‘pattern of life’ makes them all potential targets. But guns might not be necessary, for, as a CIA officer told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, ‘no tall man with a beard is safe anywhere in Southwest Asia’ (Ahmad 2011). Why should you want to know their names before you kill them?

It is not surprising therefore that reliable information is extremely hard to get and that American and Pakistani official sources issue wildly divergent claims. The impossibility of even counting whether the dead bodies are militants or civilians, when both countries are allegedly close allies in the war on terror, is one more implication of the secrecy surrounding counterterrorism; so secret are the attacks that the CIA denies that the drone programme even exists, let alone the criteria by which it chooses its targets. There is not, however, anything secret about such wilfully upheld secrecy turned into a tool of information control, so that even a body count becomes an act of ‘magical realism’ (Ahmad 2011), as there are recurrent cases of people ‘killed’ who rose from the dead several times and were killed in later attacks. The Pakistani government publicly disapproves of the attacks but privately they provide intelligence and support. Pakistani sovereignty is another area shrouded in mystery, as it depends on the secret agreements it has with the Americans.

Are these drone attacks legal? ‘Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,’ wrote Philip Alston (cited in Caryl 2011, p. 56). But for the global war on terror, is there anything anywhere that is not ‘armed conflict’? Thus, under the guise of combating terrorism, US counterterrorism considers itself legitimised to overrule national sovereignties and flaunt international law; in short, to establish a state of exception by which actions that ordinarily are illegal and immoral are suddenly tolerable because the fight against the terrorist demands it. When in the 1980s, various European countries enacted policies of ‘shoot-to-kill’ against suspected terrorists, they were met with international outrage (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, pp. 158–160). Extrajudicial killings of hundreds of suspect militants, of whom we even ignore their names, are now perpetrated in the name of the war on terror; they no longer elicit international scandal but are praised as most effective.

Ignoring that we know: the impasses in knowledge

What are the practical results of the drone campaign? The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan has gone up sharply in a wave of anti-Americanism, for Pakistanis ‘overwhelmingly believe that most of those who die in the attacks are civilians’ (Caryl 2011, p. 56). Given the fact that drone strikes ‘have had a particular affinity for hitting weddings and funerals, and appear to be seriously fuelling the insurgency’ (Sluka 2011, p. 72), it is no surprise that Taliban recruits have increased. Air strikes are prominent in motivating suicide attacks, a UN report concluded; surveys show direct links between family members killed and joining or supporting the insurgency (Sluka 2011, p. 72). One concrete instance of such links was provided by Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American known for the failed bomb in Times Square in May 2010, who declared in his trial that ‘I'm avenging the attack’ for the ‘drones [that] kill women, children … everybody … I am part of the answer’ (cited in Hari 2010). Sluka's conclusion is shared by many experts: ‘By losing hearts and minds, the UAV [drones] war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is losing the fight against and increasing the threat of terrorism, and making further terror attacks on American more likely, not less’ (Sluka 2011, p. 76).

Do counterterrorists ignore these too obvious links? Of course not. David Kilcullen is, among others, an example of a ‘counterterrorist guru’ aware that drone attacks have a negative effect. He told Congress in April 2009:

Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al-Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism … The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population. (Cited in Sluka 2011, p. 73)

The ratio of civilians killed for each militant is 50:1, Kilcullen observed; that is, 98% of drone casualties are civilians – so much for technological surgical ‘precision’. That this is self-fulfilling is a given for Kilcullen: ‘Every one of these dead non-combatants [creates] an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased’ (cited in Sluka 2011, p. 73). Kilcullen concluded that the use of such drones is ‘immoral’.

Counterterrorists know all of this. Yet why is it that these very drones, which help increase terrorist insurgency ‘exponentially’, are still ‘the only game in town’? In short, counterterrorism knows that its tactics operate clearly along the path of a self-fulfilling feedback, and yet there is nothing else better to do. Such an impasse – if we do nothing, terrorism will flourish; if we do something it will flourish even more – shows dramatically the current crisis in counterterrorist knowledge.

Kilcullen's (2009) recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla, dramatically states the changes needed in US counterterrorist thinking while also showing the core deadlocks in which it is trapped. A close associate of General David Petraeus in the successful ‘surge’ to end the war in Iraq, Kilcullen is a vocal advocate of applying a strategy of protecting the population and, contrary to the usual counterterrorism strategy that saw this as a ‘soft approach’ (2009, p. 145), negotiating with and of co-opting local leaders. Kilcullen is one of the most vocal exponents of the implications of terrorism's ‘asymmetric warfare’ – the stark facts that ‘the United States is spending in excess of $400 million per day in Iraq’ and that ‘the United States has so far spent $1.4 million per dollar of AQ [Al Qaeda] investment in the attacks on the response’ (2009, pp. 25, 274). He is also much aware that, in relation to the other countries, ‘the U.S. defense budget accounted for 54.5 percent of total global defense spending in 2007’, and internally, ‘the U.S. Defense Department is about 210 times larger than the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department combined’ (2009, pp. 22, 298). Faced with these staggering numbers, Kilcullen does not hesitate to state that with bin Laden ‘we have turned a mouse into an elephant’ and that the war on terror has ‘largely played into the hands of this AQ exhaustion strategy’. He makes a strong case for ‘a radical rethinking of some key Western policies, strategies, and attitudes’ (2009, pp. 38, 263, 264).

Kilcullen, however, does not see in his own proposals anything radical or controversial conceptually, for ‘[m]uch of the best strategic work by the State Department, defense departments of contributing powers, and NATO planners conforms exactly to these prescriptions’ (2009, p. 114). He saw the decision to invade Iraq as ‘an extremely serious strategic error’ and warned against it, but then he adds, again, so did ‘almost every other counterinsurgency professional’ (2009, p. 268). So how is it that the military establishment knew that the consequences of Iraq would be disastrous, officers being aware that the hubris behind the assumption of the efficacy of American military power was breathtaking and yet we went to war? Much like how is it that, previous to 9/11, 50–60 officers knew for many months that two of the future hijackers were in the country and nothing was done about it. Much like how it is that currently counterterrorism knows that drones will produce terrorism ‘exponentially’ and yet this is the much hyped ‘only game in town’? These are known facts, yet they are made to be unknown when concrete policies are to be taken. This ‘passion for ignorance’ points to the core of the crisis of knowledge in counterterrorism.

Droning, writing, divining: the perversion of temporality

‘The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning,’ writes sociologist Robert Merton,

a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning… .Such are the perversities of social logic. (1968, p. 477)

It was false that there was al-Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion but then it became true after the invasion. Anti-American radical Islamists could never afford to have antiaircraft missiles, until the CIA provided Stinger missiles to Afghan rebels battling the Soviets in the mid-1980s. Similarly, over 40 countries are currently developing drone technology to be used as military robots, with the likelihood that in a not faraway future they might fall into the hands of terrorists. Such self-fulfilling prophecy of counterterrorist drones being used by terrorists, we are told, ‘is not far away’ (Caryl 2011, p. 58).

Kilcullen's main concern is with the formation of what he labels ‘the accidental guerrilla’ – ordinary people caught in the fight between terrorists and counterterrorists, who end up supporting the local fight against the outsiders and who would be impossible to distinguish from the terrorists, ‘except by accident’. His thesis is that most of the adversaries encountered by Western powers after 9/11 are the products of such accident – ‘people who fight us not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element’ (Caryl 2011, pp. 34, 263). But even if ‘accidental’ and a ‘guerrilla’ (and not a ‘terrorist’), still Kilcullen remains within the counterterrorist mindset when he immediately proposes that: ‘I theorise that the accidental guerrilla emerges from a cyclical process that takes place in four stages: infection, contagion, intervention, and rejection’ (2009, p. 35). The ‘cyclical process’ is thus not ruled by cultural or political circumstances or by the logic of historical repetition and action/reaction linkages, but by the medical analogy of ‘a virus or bacterium’ – the primary associations of ‘infection’ and ‘contagion’ which point to a thinking that is typical of how the logic of witchcraft and taboo operate in ethnographic communities (Zulaika and Douglass 1996).

The failed approach to insurgency in Iraq is characterised by Kilcullen as ‘enemy-centric’ (2009, p. 129), with the focus on killing the terrorists. But despite his criticisms of the very notion of the war on terror, still he cannot avoid framing counterterrorism as a war, his main reference for comparison/contrast being the Cold War. Kilcullen finds it a ‘limited analogy’, ‘[y]et in at least one dimension, that of time, the enduring trends that drive the current confrontation may mean that the conflict will indeed resemble the Cold War’ (2009, p. 301). I agree that time is central to our analysis but not in the sense that ‘we are at the beginning of a very long road’, rather, in the perversion of temporality implied in such ‘waiting for terror’. In such temporality of waiting, one has to start with the non-hypothetical premise that no matter what, there will be terrorism. Imagine all the terrorists disappeared tomorrow; still, for Kilcullen, ‘All these [terrorism] trends would endure even if AQ and its takfiri allies disappeared tomorrow’ (2009, p. 294). What is indisputable is that we should look at ‘AQ as a harbinger of a new era of conflict’ (2009, p. 294). It is not if, but when. The bedrock premise is that there will always be war and now there will always be terrorism.

And once terrorism is defined as inevitable, its very logic will tend to make it self-fulfilling by producing a behaviour that will make the original false definition come true. The reality itself is that ‘terrorism constantly morphs into new mutations,’ Kilcullen tells us, and therefore ‘counterterrorism methods … are almost by definition already obsolete’ (2009, p. 294). Yet, the one fact that can never be put into question is that the thing itself is terrorism. The assassination of President Kennedy was not a terrorist act at the time; nowadays, by one of those ‘mutations’ into which it is morphed, it would be the terrorist act by excellence. Your own discursive definitions make things be what you want them to be. Kilcullen is very aware that there are other threats as well, such as proliferation of nuclear weapons, climate change, resource conflict, rogue states, actual wars between states and so on; but terrorism will always be a distinct one, non-reducible to those other threats.

‘A new lexicon’ is Kilcullen's first proposal among his ‘tentative conclusions’ (2009, p. 300). Again, counterterrorism knows that its vocabulary and discourse produce in part the thing itself of terrorism. But what I find most surprising is that, in the study of terrorism, he advocates not international relations (the grand narrative we read about in daily news about the internationalisation of terrorism), but anthropology – with its methodology to ‘[g]et as close as possible (in time and space) to the actual events, ideally by being present when they unfold but, at the very least, by seeking firsthand descriptions from eyewitnesses’ (2009, p. 304). As an ethnographer of political violence myself, I find this recommendation extraordinary in its incongruence with counterterrorism's ordinary modus operandi.

In fact, as I completed my ethnography of Basque violence (1988), I was faced with the existence of an international committee of terrorism experts to tackle the very problem I had just studied and which issued a report to much media fanfare that left me wondering what claims to ‘knowledge’ did anthropology, as opposed to counterterrorism, have (Zulaika 1991). The basic recommendation by the terrorism experts was blunt: never see a terrorist (not even on television), never listen to a terrorist (not even on a radio) and never talk to a terrorist. Anthropology was called upon as a discipline that could help bring valuable information to carry out the grand counterterrorist agenda of cleansing the Basque Country from terrorism. The Irish were given a similar advice, lest someone might identify with their cause.

Kilcullen's proposal that counterterrorism should turn into anthropology, I assume on the basis of the experience gained in Iraq's surge, is a radical departure from the former strategy of complete tabooing and distancing from the untouchable terrorists. But this is unrealistic and misses the key issue: counterterrorism has established a political and moral cordon sanitaire regarding terrorism, a strict taboo backed with the most stringent laws that de facto prohibits conducting an ethnography of terrorism. Even interviewing a terrorist in prison, let alone while active, is out of the question, as proven recently by the Bureau of Prisons’ rejection to grant access to a group of scholars proposing to investigate how they got into terrorism (Shane 2011, p. 26). Truman Capote could write a compelling narrative of multiple murder, identifying with the killers; an equivalent identification with terrorists would turn into the anathema of an apology of terrorism (Zulaika 2009, pp. 37–59). Indeed, one could argue that, as the result of writing, the same ‘murder’ becomes a different reality in the hands of a historian, a sociologist, a journalist, a novelist or a counterterrorist. Similarly, you could argue that the Basque political violence of my ethnography at a village level was not the same ‘thing’ as the Basque terrorism of the international experts (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, pp. 31–63). In short, there is again this impasse in Kilcullen's proposal, by which an anthropological approach might in fact dissolve the violence into cultural patterns and political causes, and yet while terrorism remains the undisputable, permanent category and counterterrorism ‘the only game in town’.

A central dimension of terrorism, and one that is crucial to show its self-fulfilling quality, has to do with threats and their perception and the reactions they provoke. A threat plays with the sign as representing a future event, while we never know whether the issuer actually means it or not or whether he might change his opinion in the future. The Unabomber brought the traffic in California airports to a halt by simply sending a letter to a newspaper with the threat of bringing down an airliner, while he sent another letter to another newspaper admitting that the threat was a ‘prank’. The actual reality of the threat might be nothing but play: a zero that can yet have deadly serious consequences. Counterterrorism is a prime example of what Merton labelled ‘the Thomas theorem’, namely: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (1968, p. 475). Once the situation is defined as one of inevitable terrorism and endless waiting, what could happen weighs as much as what is actually the case; once a threat, whose intention or possibility is unknown to us, is taken seriously, its reality requires that we must act on it. Terrorism is the catalyst for confusing various semantic levels of linguistic, ritual and military actions.

Anthropologists have examined phenomena such as divination, which manipulates the axis of time in a cultural context of magic and witchcraft. They have compared premodern mystical notions of causation and temporality to our own modern standards of rationality. The discussion leads directly to issues of ontology and epistemology: what is the thing itself of magic or taboo or divination? What is the nature of ‘reality’ and what type of ‘knowledge’ is involved in such ‘beliefs’ by the natives of those cultures as well as by the ‘interpretations’ produced by their analysts?

As we ask what the rationale and the nature of the information supporting counterterrorism's most fateful decisions were, such as those taken by the Bush Administration before going to war with Iraq or by Bremer after the invasion, an anthropologically informed observer is reminded of secret oracle consultations among the Azande, as famously described by Edward Evans-Pritchard, and which were summed up thus by Peter Winch:

Oracular revelations are not treated as hypotheses and, since their sense derives from the way they are treated in their context, they therefore are not hypotheses. They are not a matter of intellectual interest but the main way in which Azande decide how they should act. If the oracle reveals that a proposed course of action is fraught with mystical dangers from witchcraft or sorcery, that course of action will not be carried out; and then the question of refutation or confirmation just does not arise. We might say that the revelation has the logical status of an unfulfilled hypothetical. (1977, p. 88)

The need to consult oracles concerning witchcraft responds to the urge to know the causation of unfortunate events. How they happen is perceived by the senses; why they happen is what magical thinking is all about. This is where revelations by oracles become essential to Azande thought. The spirit of consulting an oracle is obviously very unlike a scientist's experiments.

The central premise of counterterrorism thinking is the oft-repeated formula that ‘it is not if, but when’. Hypotheticals are premised with the conditional ‘if’: ‘if A, then B’. What characterises basic counterterrorist knowledge about the next impending attack is that it will happen. In a mindset that parallels Azande witchcraft, the counterterrorist axiom of ‘not if’ rules out mere hypotheses. The revelations are thus ‘unfulfilled hypotheticals’ that will become real with time. Counterterrorist projections are the equivalent of oracular certainties: the horror will happen no matter what. This leads in pragmatic terms to the fatalistic attitude of disregarding actual knowledge and not taking responsibility for actual decisions: what does it really matter what we decide since it is going to happen anyway and whatever happens is out of our hands? What matters, therefore, is that we sort of divine what the course of action will be.

The practical aspect of this temporality of waiting, in which the certainty of the impending evil is beyond any hypothetical (‘not if’), is that we need to act pre-emptively now against events that are to happen in the future. The rationale behind nuclear deterrence was that developing armaments now, ready to strike at the push of a button, guaranteed that they would not be used in the future. Many commentators saw in such logic the quintessence of technological madness. But that was not enough. Since future nuclear attacks by terrorists are only a matter of time, we must wage a war now pre-emptively, even in a nuclear context, thus breaking the historic assumption that nuclear arsenals were for deterrence, not for actual usage. What justifies the use of a ‘just war’ in the nuclear era is the desire of terrorists for having the WMD we possess. There is nothing evil or irrational about having or using them, as it is an established fact that terrorists desire them and one day will have them. Thus, the formula of ‘not if, but when’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The counterterrorist thinking makes it an imperative that the war must start now – against Saddam Hussein, against al-Qaeda, against Iran and against all potential terrorists. This is how the American public, including the liberal media, accepted the rationale to go to war against Iraq.

It is the play with the axis of time that is most revealing of the manipulations of associative magic, as well as of counterterrorist thinking. The oracle, based on secret knowledge, reveals whether witchcraft has transpired and whether its danger looms ahead. The terrorist threat also creates the temporality of waiting. Actual historical temporality becomes subservient to the feared future. If there are no terrorism attacks, the counterterrorist can claim success in preventing them; but if the attack does occur, then the counterterrorist can say ‘I told you so’ and argue that he was right in his predictions. At this point, terrorism foretold becomes prophecy fulfilled. Such imperviousness to error in actual historical events points to a time warp that goes to the heart of counterterrorist mythology. Such waiting implies in fact that historical time has surrendered itself to a fateful future.

The result of this passive temporality regarding events we can do nothing to prevent is a fateful mindset in which the terror events are closer to nature than society and politics, and there is hardly any point in looking into the intellectual premises or subjective motivations that guide terrorist actions. The great political victory of the suicide bombers is that they imposed on US politics their own suicidal temporality of waiting and a culture grounded on the oracular knowledge of secret intelligence, which then justified the war on terror.

Secret knowledge and the state of exception

Kilcullen's trenchant, internal criticism of counterterrorism goes to the core of its culture when in his concluding ‘new paradigms’ he dares question a belief-based intelligence:

Why, for example, did Western intelligence miss the imminent fall of the Soviet Union in 1992? In part, at least, because we were reading the Soviet leaders’ mail – and they themselves failed to understand the depth of grassroots disillusionment with Communism. Why did most countries (including those who opposed the Iraq war) believe in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Because they were intercepting the regime's communications, and many senior Iraqi regime members believed Iraq them … [while] their resources were … following analytical dead ends. (Kilcullen 2009, p. 293)

The crisis of counterterrorist knowledge begins with the nature and context of the ‘intelligence’ gathered. We need to inquire as to what is valid information in the counterterrorist situation, what critical information is missing from it and what controls are exerted over such information. Forty percent of the US military budget is secret (Johnson 2007, p. 209), as are the budgets of the intelligence agencies.

The basic political context of counterterrorist intelligence in the Bush-declared war on terror parallels what anthropologists have categorised as ‘dual sovereignty’. In many societies, there is an opposition and complementarity between the jural/administrative power of the chiefs and the secretive, mystical authority of priests and sorcerers. A classic case is the Shilluk's divine kingship studied by Edward Evans-Pritchard (1948). The relationship between the open political process and the secret covert action required by the war on terror evokes in our own society a similar dual sovereignty by which legal authority is complemented with a different type of power that finds its legitimacy in the elusive principle of national security. If overt politics is based on the rule of law, covert politics is grounded on secret information that cannot be shared with the public at large.

The secretive power needed to confront ‘unseen forces’ in societies ruled by dual sovereignty can be related to the concept of the ‘state of exception’, when, in Agamben's formulation, the sovereign is both inside and outside the law, and execution and transgression of law coincide. Guantánamo can be seen as both civilisation's ultimate bastion against terrorism and the ultimate denial of international law. Who can decide whether the thousands of people killed by drone attacks are the lawful killings required by the war on terror or are illegal murders? The sovereign is paradoxically both inside and outside the law.

What is the meaning of ‘information’ in such terrorist scenarios of states of exception and in the presence of a community of believers whose basic structure separates those who ‘know’ the secret information and the rest of us who are to be kept in the dark? Secrecy means that no critical judgment can be exercised, much like in mystical societies where knowledge belongs only to the sacred specialist. Questioning the effectiveness of the information amounts to lack of faith and goes directly against the community of believers. In the days previous to invading Iraq, the frequent visits by Cheney to the intelligence community are well documented; essentially, the community did not know what it was asked to know regarding Iraq and the war on terror. Thus, knowledge had to be created by tying together the bits and pieces of scattered information while adding inferences and guesswork in order to come up with a plausible scenario. A new intelligence unit was formed at the Pentagon. Only a handful of senators read the classified intelligence about Iraq prior to authorising war.

Intelligence becomes ancillary information when belief drives knowledge. Once the decision has been made that the enemy is Hitler, the ordinary standards of factual evidence are supplemented with untested premises grounded on moral and political principles. The main role of information is no longer procuring factual evidence, but helping uncover the secret intentions of the evildoer. And, given the final goal of defeating evil, if information that contradicts the belief system is provided, then it is better to reject it. Thus, the likes of Wolfowitz become ‘this know-it-all who won't believe the intelligence community’ (Ricks 2006, p. 30). The ‘know-it-all’ is essentially in possession of a secret type of knowledge, having to do with the realisation that the world is confronting evil – a secrecy that allows the knower to disregard ordinary information. In factual terms, there might be a problem, namely, that ‘[h]e's deeply misguided, he's impervious to evidence’ (Ricks 2006, p. 31) – including the evidence of lack of evidence – but we are by now deeply immersed in a type of knowledge consisting in a world view engaged in transforming the evil reality at hand. The concerns of military men about the lack of preparation to go to war, as well as of the advisers of the previous administration who suspected that evidence was being fabricated, were dismissed by the Bush administration. Once you are a crusader who ‘knows’ that Saddam Hussein stands for the apocalyptic combination of terrorism and WMD, the ordinary standards of evidence, information and knowledge no longer apply – not even those of your own military and intelligence communities. By then the only moral imperative is creating and manipulating information to defeat the evil enemy. This is no longer ordinary politics, but counterterrorism is by then ‘a religiously sanctioned moral duty’ (Leach 1977, p. 36).

But, if the reports of Hussein's WMD bluff are true, such a crusading attitude was unable to detect it. The inability to sort out real threat from a feigned one is in a nutshell the problem with counterterrorism. The problem is fundamentally epistemological, namely, what type of knowledge is missing if the actuality or the fakery of a threat cannot be assessed? It is the kind of problem an ethnographer faces in an alien culture, a psychoanalyst in the symptoms of a patient, a writer such as Capote when he wants to produce a true account of a multiple murderer or when a detective has to solve a crime. Why should we not demand from a counterterrorist the basic knowledge and skills of current knowledge as we do from these other types of writers? This is also the pragmatic knowledge expected from a good poker player always facing the probability of the opponent's bluff.

The issue does not affect only the counterterrorist official and expert, but the entire political establishment and intellectual culture and media discourse in general. The problem is that not even a Colin Powell, with all his experience and access to the most privileged information, can penetrate what is behind the ‘secret knowledge’ of counterterrorism – the secret being essentially ignorance regarding the terrorists. And that even the New York Times can publish on its front page fabricated reports because it assumes the legitimacy of a ‘secret knowledge’ forced on the community of believers. The role of critical terrorism studies has to be to remain fiercely sceptical about this new mythology. It is reminiscent of the myth of the wild man and points to a discourse that, at its core, holds on to the dichotomy between their ‘barbarism’ and our ‘civilisation’. The unrecognised premise is one of tabooing their voices and desires, by categorising their madness, suicides and killings as qualitatively distinct from ours, that is, by denying them a complex subjectivity like ours. The final outcome of such discourse is to justify a war of choice as a ‘just war’, for the phantom of terrorism has become the only justification in the nuclear era. The latest fantasy scenario is one in which the West's superior drone technology can detect terrorists from 10,000 feet above in the sky and kill them by remote control as if in a video game.

The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, having analysed the ‘grotesque mental construction’ of European witchcraft, concluded that during the Renaissance, there was in fact a regression in superstitious modes of thought from the Middle Ages. He had the following uncanny observation: ‘Indeed, the more learned a man was in the traditional scholarship of the time, the more likely he was to support the witch-doctors’ (1969, p. 154). Is current counterterrorism knowledge also in the ironic predicament that the more it ‘knows’ the more fooled it is? As a sample, here is a similar commentary on experts predicting biological terrorism by Milton Leitenberg: ‘The less the commentator seems to know about biological warfare the easier he seems to think the task is’ (cited in Mueller 2006, p. 22).

Following on from the earlier discussion on the value of ‘information’ in the counterterrorist episteme, the question is, does having more of it help? Or is not having more of the same thing even more obfuscating? What historians of the CIA have concluded is that its game of deception included fooling itself and thereby becoming incapable of sorting out true information from self-deception. Already in the mid-1950s, an internal report regarding widespread frustration in the agency came to the conclusion that its young officers saw that the intelligence service ‘was lying to itself’ (Weiner 2007, p. 78). Lying, in fact, becomes an imperative sworn under oath. There was nothing more destructive to the agency's morale than Carter's post-Nixon moral allergy to deceit and its pledge never to lie to the American public, when deceit is the quintessence of a secret intelligence service. Carter's naïve aversion to deception and secret action amounted to a radical dismantling of the ‘dual sovereignty’ of American politics throughout the Cold War.

The other issue with information being by definition ‘secret’ is what you do with information that is in the open. Imagine that the name of your next airplane hijacker is in a city's phone book, as was the case, and that 50–60 officers know that the hijacker is in the country: should you take it seriously? When such information is by nature ultra-secret, would paying attention to a phone book not betray in itself ignorance of what you are dealing with? In short, the information was in the system, yet why did the system refuse to read and act on it? Does such oversight not suggest that there is, at some level, unconscious but systemic complicity between terrorists and counterterrorists? Perhaps the complicity springs from sharing a culture of ultra-secrecy in which open information is dismissed as irrelevant and in which the temporality of waiting tends to grant more urgency to what could happen than to what is actually the case.

From the one per cent doctrine to poker thinking

It is well known that Vice President Cheney wanted to rule out any chance from the system when he maintained that if Saddam Hussein had a 1% chance of obtaining WMD, the United States had to act to prevent it (Suskind 2006). In order to see the limits and catastrophic consequences of such an inflexible doctrine, one only has to look at the role of change in human action through the lens of the most prevalent American card game – poker. The art of the game of poker consists in minimising the element of luck, yet is based on the knowledge that not only can it never be completely eliminated from the game, but luck becomes the key strategic component to use to one's advantage and prevail.

If detecting bluffs and false threats is central to counterterrorism, then poker might indeed be its best model for systemic knowledge – not chess, where the moves can be predicted in advance, but poker, where the cards are unpredictable and bluffing is an essential tactic to the game. The crucial tactic for poker thinking is: ‘cheating and thwarting cheaters, leveraging uncertainty, bluffing and sussing out bluffers, managing risk and reward’ (McManus 2009, p. 18). The admission that there are elements of ‘luck’ or ‘chance’ or ‘bluff’ in poker is not a denial of its systemic nature, but only a realisation of its more complex statistics (see Neuman and Morgestern 1944).

Playing with chance is pivotal to the terrorist modus operandi. Non-feedback action based on chance, innocence of the victim, ritual sacrifice and suicidal madness are all aspects of a logical space dominated ultimately, even if within a previously delimited field, by random election. The arbitrary election of the victim by chance carries the action to a different realm of possibility and meaning. The terrorist typically engages in a course of behaviour that strategically rules out feedback: once the airplane is hijacked for a suicide mission, there is no way back. It is the study of purpose that should be of key concern for terrorism studies: if feedback is required for teleological behaviour, the terrorist's non-feedback action is not only ‘purposeful’ in its objectives but also deliberately ‘purposeless’ in its means. The use of purposeless tactics in pursuit of political goals is what makes terrorism strategically so unpredictable. This is a system closer to poker than chess.

There is one ancient concept in military theory that is central to terrorism: stratagem. It includes deception, surprise, ambush, feigned moves, disinformation, betrayal and other ploys. These trickeries have been in use from primitive warfare to nuclear deterrence. They are key to the ritualised action of warfare in traditional societies. The military strategy of the Cold War has been frequently compared with poker, beginning with D-day when Eisenhower employed various bluffing manoeuvres to outfox the Nazis. The second part of the twentieth century has been characterised ‘as an age of stratagem, in which theories of deterrence exploit the idea of bluff, intelligence agencies have become masters of deceit, and guerrilla warfare and terrorism consistently employ surprise, psychological tactics, and avoidance of battle’ (Wheeler 1991, pp. 24–25). Diplomacy during the nuclear age was well described by the mathematician theorist of poker, Morgenstern, as a ‘real-life version of poker’ (cited in McManus 2009, p. vii). The most dramatic example of such poker playing was when, on the brink of triggering a nuclear war, John Kennedy called Khrushchev's bluff during the Cuban missile crisis.

Terrorism is the culmination of these tactics of deception at all military and information levels; hence, the need for poker thinking. There is a Basque card game, mus, which I used as a model of activism in my work on political violence. I compared the ekintza ‘action’ of the militant with the all-or-nothing hordago in the mus game. The hordago point eliminates the point-by-point continuous process and, if accepted, condenses all alternatives in a single bet. Hordago is the final self-corrective point, usually a bluff, when one is losing. The hordago interruption of the gradual process introduces a premise of ritual condensation – an on/off, either/or digitalisation. The hordago is the last recourse of the loser – an almost obligatory bluff – and ritual premises of condensation and discontinuity are intrinsic to the entire phenomenon. Even if counterintuitive, professional gamblers also know that one should use the worst hands when bluffing, since, unlike for checking, one expects to lose if called for bluffing, it does not matter what hands are used. What is critical for counterterrorist thinking is not to be fooled by randomness and bluffing.

The national trauma of 9/11 confronted the United States with the alternative of either not responding to the attack and thus implying defencelessness or replying massively and thus possibly making things worse. In terms of counterterrorist thinking, the alternative was between a regression to a premodern mindset or a jump into a more creative thinking that would avoid its own self-generating repetition. The reaction by the Bush administration happened in terms of mechanical action/reaction responses with a medieval type of thinking, including the use of torture, a crucial component of the entire witchcraft demonology. In political terms, the regression consisted in returning to a ‘state of exception’ that led to Guantánamo and was visualised in the Abu Ghraib photographs of torture and sexual humiliation committed by the US forces.

A different approach requires a radical departure from this counterterrorist mindset. It must borrow clues from a detective as to how to read the actor's desire; it must have a novelist's capacity for projection into the murderer's subjectivity; it must be able to interpret the politics of the unconscious of the suicide killer's ‘death drive’; it must strategise the way a poker play does. The political commentator Bill Schneider called President Bush's decision to go to war ‘Texas political poker, the ultimate high-stakes gamble’ (McManus 2009, p. 332) – but it was poker premised on Cheney's blind inflexibility of the one per cent doctrine. It has been remarked that, in the nuclear era, the most important skill for a president may be the ability to sort out a genuine threat from a bluff. This requires genuine poker thinking, dominated by probability and making use of various kinds of inference and chance. This is a kind of thinking in which

players gauge pot odds, randomise bluffs, fold when their hand is a statistical underdog, raise when it's the favourite … decoys and stealing are crucial, but patience is just as important … players spend most of their time picking up signs, moving into position, and working the count, but once every nine plays or so, on both offence and defense, their skills really have to pay off. Yet more than in most competitions, luck becomes pivotal. (McManus 2009, p. 339)

Such complexity of various types of information, including those of the detective and the novelist and the art of the poker face, is what is missing from counterterrorism.

Buddhist thinkers have argued that technical knowledge is not enough to master an art and that it must become an ‘artless art’ that grows out of the unconscious. Not surprisingly, good poker players are believed to rely on intuition in order to read the states of mind of their opponents. This is also called ‘strategic flexibility’, the ability to playfully randomise by a sense of ‘feel’ and create algorithms that, in the words of the mathematician David Berlinski, ‘belong to the world of memory and meaning, desire and design’ (cited in McManus 2009, p. 389). As Bill Gates put it:

In poker, a player collects different pieces of information – who's betting boldly, what cards are showing, what this guy's pattern of betting and bluffing is – and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand. I got pretty good at this kind of information processing. (Cited in McManus 2009, p. 397)

Being skilful at poker requires first of all that one learns to view the world from the other's point of view. The poet Katy Lederer even talks of poker's ‘dirty’ intimacy when you are able to ‘read’ peoples’ thoughts and feelings (cited in McManus 2009, p. 417).

Getting into the other's subjective intimacy nowhere appears as ‘dirty’ as in terrorism, but if one wants to have the skills of a good poker player, it becomes necessary to project oneself into the other's mind and subjectivity. In the end, this requires that the analyst, as Capote observed of the writer, and as it is standard in ethnography, should look at the terrorist subject through his/her own subjectivity and conclude that they belong to the same field. But this would require as a prerequisite dissolving the essential myth of the terrorist as a human being entirely unlike the rest of us.

Conclusion: the force of fantasy and the real

We began with the statement that terrorism testifies to a crisis in knowledge and as such is a salient condition for thought in the current world. Those of us critical of the uses of terrorism discourse to further military approaches to world problems such as nuclear armaments or world poverty tend to take to heart Giambattista Vico's advice that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables. A current way of updating Vico's teaching is to say that one must take into account the force of fantasy behind current politics.

A critical perspective on terrorism discourse confronts us at the outset with the ontological ambivalence of what is the real of the thing itself. The figure of the terrorist gives ground to a reality, the menace of which requires the almost doubling of the defence budget since the Cold War. The task of a critical approach is to problematise that real as necessarily imbued in fantasy. This requires we deploy a valid theory by which fantasy is not equal to the not-real, but rather ‘it constitutes a dimension of the real’ (Butler 1990, p. 108). This is a theory of fantasy removed from the representational realism of the media whose reports on terrorism tend to be oblivious of the ‘state of the exception’ in which they are gathered and produced (censorship, one-sided sources, information obtained under torture, etc.). In such realism, ‘representation becomes a moment of the reproduction and consolidation of the real’ (Butler 1990, p. 106). In our view, fantasy interrogates the real, considers it a political postulate and does not have a mimetic relationship to it. A positivist view of the real stabilises itself by the phantasmatic exclusion of all absence as unreal. Terrorism is that disavowed phantasmatic exclusion, included in the system as exception that solidifies and gives ground to the politically real. As this real is shaped by the phantom of terrorism constrained by the state of exception, the exceptional phantasmatic draws the boundaries of the real and ‘assumes the status of the real, that is, when the two become compellingly conflated’ (Butler 1990, p. 107). Thus, fantasy merges with the mask of the real.

Not surprisingly, the current drone war has been described as ‘sheer fantasy, if not literally science fiction’ (Sluka 2011, p. 72). It has become part of the huge military–media–entertainment industry. Politicians easily become fascinated with technological novelties and special operations. The fantasy plays into the seductive illusion of virtual war ‘as a surgical scalpel and not a bloodstained sword,’ wrote Michael Ignatieff, adding: ‘We need to stay away from such fables of self-righteous invulnerability’ (2000, pp. 214–215). But these ‘fables’ are now the dominant culture, believed not only by the general public but also by the political class and the media elite. You will not read or hear in the mainstream media reports indignant of the drone killings on grounds that, in Kilcullen's numbers, 98% of the victims are innocent. John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821 that ‘America … goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’; in that case, he added, ‘She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit’ (cited in Kilcullen 2009, p. 1). Currently, America is taken by the powerful fantasy of the monster/terrorist. A candidate such as John Kerry, a war hero, may lose the presidency for being perceived as ‘soft’ on terrorism. For the same reason, President Obama is unable to close Guantánamo.

The phantom of the terrorist is responsible for historically charged events, such as sending the blind sheik, Omar Abdul Rahman, to life in prison after a trial that for the New York Times was a sham. He is among Islamists, the maximum spiritual and legal leader, kind of what the Pope is for Catholics, and a blind man who was brought to the United States repeatedly with visas issued by the CIA in order to help recruit mujahidin in the US-led anti-Soviet Afghan war. How much more ‘passion for ignorance’ can a counterterrorist culture display – including the judicial system, the public opinion and academic silence – than sending such a man to life in prison on the basis of an infiltrated informant working for money, disregarding the effect it was likely to have on his followers, including his closest associates, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? The informant, according to the New York Times, ‘began his testimony by admitting that he had lied to just about everybody he ever met’ and whose testimony sounded ‘like sheer fantasy’ (MacFarquhar 1995, p. A9). For the blind sheik to be condemned, it ‘only required [the government] to prove the intention to wage a terror campaign’ (Editorial, New York Times 1995, p. A14). This is also the informer who turned the alleged fatwa issued by the blind sheik – a charge he could never prove in court – into a self-fulfilling prophecy: once he was imprisoned for life, the blind sheik did issue a fatwa, a supreme command that made 9/11 morally imperative for his followers.

But fantasy, in its semantic excess, also has the potential to interrogate and contest the claims of the real. In an individual's wish-fulfilment, fantasy is both the ‘I’ who fantasises and the ‘I’ who is in the fantasised narrative. Fantasy provides the frame and the setting for the individual who is caught in the narrative of images: ‘As a result, the subject, although always present in the fantasy, may be so in a desubjectivised form’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, p. 27). The terrorist provides that fantasy setting in which the counterterrorist can participate in a desubjectivised manner. This also implies that the very identity of the subject of fantasy is put into question by the multiple identifications available in a fantasy setting; the mastery the subject claims over the fantasy is already undone by the fantasy's own power of fragmentation.

In the final analysis, what is most needed for counterterrorism might be more fantasy and fiction, not less. For anyone who has dealt with real ‘terrorists’ on the ground, counterterrorism's ‘latest game in town’ (terrorism resolved by drones shooting from the sky at alleged terrorists, as if in a Nintendo game) will appear as fatal fantasy. Eminent jurists and theologians believed in the seventeenth century that witches flew to the Sabbath, a belief that resulted in many thousands of them being burnt on the bonfire. It is no surprise that in our technology-driven era, counterterrorism officials will expect no less from drones and other flying objects. There is no point in trying to convince people that their fantasy images are unreal. What matters is to realise what kind of existence they do have as constitutive of the real. Here is where more fiction, an intensification of the crisis, might be a way out for the ontological problematic of perception and identity provoked by the terrorist phantom.

One way of articulating this solution is the one proposed by Hayden White regarding the myth of the wild man, when he advocated a

dissolution [of the grounds of the concept] … that permits us to distinguish between wildness as a myth and as a fiction, as an ontological state and as a historical stage of human development, as a moral condition and as an analytical category of cultural anthropology, and, finally, to recognise in the notion of the Wild Man an instrument of cultural projection that is as anomalous in conception as it is vicious in application. (1978, p. 157)

We need fiction to dissolve the myth of the culture of terror and realise the role of fantasy in constituting the real; Montaigne's irony used the concept of savagery to question the myths of civilisation of his own society. Further, fictionalising the myths of terrorism is one strategy to destabilise its realist representations. Eventually, even the learned theologians, prompted by the detective-like work of inquisitor Salazar (Henningsen 1980), were convinced that witches did not fly and that fantasy must have played a key role in the entire phenomenon. Eventually, even counterterrorists will come to grips with the hard fact that, as sadly proven by drones fired from Las Vegas into the Pakistani mountains being ‘the only game in town’, it is the force of fantasy that is most real in the current culture of terror.

Journal Editor's note

This article was first presented as the Third Annual Critical Studies on Terrorism Lecture, an event inaugurated by the journal to celebrate scholars who have made a significant contribution to critical terrorism studies. Professor Zulaika's lecture was presented at ‘A Decade of Terrorism and Counter-terrorism since 9/11: Taking Stock and New Directions in Research and Policy’, the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group (CSTWG) Annual Conference, 8–11 September 2011, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. The editors are grateful to Professor Zulaika for accepting our invitation and to the conference organisers for including it in the programme.