Government by experts: counterterrorism intelligence and democratic retreat

Abstract

The recently retired Homeland Security Advisory System constituted a main means by which the intensity of the terrorist threat was communicated to the United States' public. An examination of its inner workings and its social impact shows the System as part of a modality of government: an encapsulation of intelligence-led governmentality. Informed by the political philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis, I contextualise this modality as a settling of fundamental tensions inherent in modern sociopolitical culture, those between the principle of social and personal autonomy, and that of rational mastery of people and nature. These principles are strongly connected to democratic and oligarchic political organisation, respectively, and they give rise to different justifications of state authority. In turn, they pertain to the fundamental question of whether scientific expertise on politics is possible.

Keywords:

• Homeland Security Advisory System
• democracy
• intelligence
• government by experts
• Castoriadis

Notes

1. The Homeland Security Council consists of the Attorney General; the Secretaries of Homeland Security, Health, Transportation, Defence, and Treasury; the Directors of CIA, FBI, FEMA, Office of Management and Budget; and the President's and Vice President's Chiefs of Staff (Reese 2005, p. 3).

2. There has been no public statement on raising the level on 21 December 2004, the Christmas alert (US Congress 2004b, p. 46).

3. The tendency to conceptually associate popular and labour opposition to terrorism is systematic in the ‘homeland security’ context; see Robin (2004, pp. 185–190).

4. For Giddens's role as an organic intellectual and a critical review of his positions on counterterrorism, see Speck (2007).

5. Both A. Blair and G.W. Bush blamed ‘faulty intelligence’ for the absence of WMDs from Iraq, whereas the head of Federal Reserve A. Greenspan accused the inadequacy of algorithmic risk-aversion models for failing to realise the danger posed by sub-rate mortgages (Greenspan 2008).