365 KO Terror Talk

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Terror TalkWilliam Huang

DDI 08Kernoff/Olney

Terror TalkTerror Talk .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. ........... . 1Very Short 1NC ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ............. ..... . 2

1NC ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............. ..... ..... 31NC ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............. ..... ..... 51NC ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............. ..... ..... 71NC ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............. ..... ..... 91NC ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ........... ...... .... 10Sweet 2NC Card ............ ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .. 11Link / Impact Homogenization .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ........ ...... .... 12Link Us/Them .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... ..... ...... .... 13Link Dehumanization .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .... 14Framework / Impact .................................................................................................................................................................................. 15Framework / Impact .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. ...... ... 17Impact / AT: Ethics ............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. ......... ... 18Turns Case ............. .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... ........... 19

Turns Case ............. .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... ........... 20Turns Case ............. .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... ........... 22Impact All Violence .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... ............ ..... ...... ..... ..... . 23Impact Biopolitics / Imperialism ............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ......... ...... ...... ...... ... 24Impact Imperialism ............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .......... ..... ..... .. 25AT: Alt Doesnt Solve .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ......... ..... ..... .. 26AT: Alt Doesnt Solve .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. ......... ..... ..... .. 27Aff .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ........... ..... ..... . 28Aff .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ........... ..... ..... . 29Aff .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ........... ..... ..... . 30Aff .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. ........... ..... ..... . 31AT: Terror Impacts ............. .............. ............... .............. .............. .............. .............. .............. ............... .............. .............. ........... ...... ...... ... 32

Note: The short 1NC is if you want a one-minute K to read, the regular one shouldnt include that Zulaikacard thats in the very short one.

Most of the cards make a link, impact, or framework claim even if theyre not explicitly labeled as such. The argument that their authors are all cheating biased liars is also in these cards.

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DDI 08Kernoff/Olney

Very Short 1NC The totalizing us-them nature of terrorism discourse prevents effective measures to stop the violence,requiring an infinite mimetic war to win only by problematizing our totalizing view can we prevent

endless cycles of violence. Joseba Zulaika, (Professor, Center for Basque Studies), Radical History Review, Issue 85 (winter 2003),ebsco

The events of September 11 are not immune to the possibility that counterterrorism is complicit in creating the very thing itabominates. We mentioned earlier that Sheik Omar, condemned to a New York prison for the rest of his life as the mastermind of the1993 attack on the WTC, was directly a product of the CIA that recruited him for Reagans anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan andgave him visas to come to the United States. The same pattern fits Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The United States initiallytrained and armed them. When the Taliban became a pariah regime, the United States main ally in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, gavethem primary support. But the blame game leads us at once into what Slavoj Zizek has labeled the temptation of a double

blackmail. 21 Namely, either the unconditional condemnation of Third World evil that appears to endorse the ideological position of American innocence, or drawing attention to the deeper sociopolitical causes of Arab extremism, which ends up blaming the victim.Each of the two positions prove one-sided and false. Pointing to the limits of moral reasoning, Z iz ek resorts to the dialectical

category of totality to argue that from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, thisvery innocence is not innocentto adopt such an innocent position in todays global capitalist universe is in itself a falseabstraction. 22 This does not entail a compromised notion of shared guilt by terrorists and victims; the point is, rather, that the twosides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. In short, the position to adopt is to accept the necessity of the fightagainst terrorism, BUT to redefine and expand its terms so that it will include also (some) American and other Western powersacts. 23 As widely reported at the time, the Reagan administration, led by Alexander Haig, would self-servingly confuse terrorismwith communism. 24 As the cold war was coming to an end, terrorism became the easy substitute for communism in Reagans black-and-white world. Still, when Haig would voice his belief that Moscow controlled the worldwide terrorist network, the StateDepartments bureau of intelligence chief Ronald Spiers would react by thinking that he was kidding. 25 By the 1990s, the SovietUnion no longer constituted the terrorist enemy and only days after the Oklahoma City bombing, Russian president Yeltsin hostedPresident Clinton in Moscow who equated the recent massacres in Chechnya with Oklahoma City as domestic conflicts. We should beconcerned as to what this new Good-versus-Evil war on terror substitutes for. Its consequences in legitimizing the repression of minorities in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries are all too obvious. But the ultimate catastrophe is that such a categorically ill-

defined, perpetually deferred, simpleminded Good-versus-Evil war echoes and re-creates the very absolutist mentality andexceptionalist tactics of the insurgent terrorists. By formally adopting the terrorists own gameone that by definition lacks rules of engagement, definite endings, clear alignments between enemies and friends, or formal arrangements of any sort, military, political,legal, or ethicalthe inevitable danger lies in reproducing it endlessly. One only has to look at the Palestinian-Israeli or the Basque-Spanish conflicts to see how self-defeating the alleged victories against terrorism can be in the absence of addressing the causes of the violence. A war against terrorism, then, mirrors the state of exception characteristic of insurgent violence, and in so doing itreproduces it ad infinitum. The question remains: What politics might be involved in this state of alert as normal state? Would this

possible scenario of competing (and mutually constituting) terror signify the end of politics as we know it? 27 It is either politics or once again the self-fulfilling prophecy of fundamentalist crusaders who will never be able to entirely eradicate evil from the world.Our choice cannot be between Bush and bin Laden, nor is our struggle one of us versus them. Such a split leads us into the ethicalcatastrophe of not feeling full solidarity with the victims of either sidesince the value of each life is absolute, the only appropriatestance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims. 28 We must question our own involvement with the phantasmatic reality of terrorism discourse, for now even the USA and its citizens can be regulated by terrorist discourse. . . . Now the North Americanterritory has become the most global and central place in the new history that terrorist ideology inaugurates. 29 Resisting thetemptation of innocence regarding the barbarian other implies an awareness of a point Hegel made and that applies to thecontemporary and increasingly globalized world more than ever: evil, he claims, resides also in the innocent gaze itself, perceiving asit does evil all around itself. Derrida equally holds this position. In reference to the events of September 11, he said: Myunconditional compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying it loudly: with regard to thiscrime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless. 30 In brief, we are all included in the picture, and these tragic events mustmake us problematize our own innocence while questioning our own political and libidinal investment in the global terrorismdiscourse.

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1NC The horrific image of terroristic violence contributes to the escalation of violent images that are the rootof all violence. The exceptionalism of 9-11 demands moral complicity in violence in the name of the

Crusade against terror. James Der Derian, Research Professor of International Relations, Brown University; Professor of PoliticalScience, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002 www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/der_derian_text_only.htmBefore 9.11 and after 9.11: all social scientists, save perhaps the most recalcitrant positivists waiting for more data points to come in, must now survey international as well as domestic politics

by this temporal rift. Yet we seem stuck, it is uncertain for how long, in a dangerous interim that thwarts scholarly inquiry . After terrorist hijackers transformed threecommercial jetliners into highly explosive kinetic weapons, toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center, substantially damaged the Pentagon, killed over fivethousand people, and triggered a state of emergency - and before the dead are fully grieved, Osama bin Ladens head is brought on a platter, justice is perceived as done,and information is no longer a subsidiary of war - there is very little about 9-11 that is safe to say. Unless one is firmly situated in a patriotic,ideological, or religious position (which at home and abroad are increasingly one and the same), it is intellectually difficult and even politicallydangerous to assess the meaning of a conflict that phase-shifts with every news cycle, from Terror Attack to America Fights Back;from a crusade to a counter-terror campaign; from the first war of the 21st century to a fairly conventional combination of humanitarian intervention and remote killing; from infowar to real war; from kinetic terror to bioterror.Under such conditions, I believe the immediate task of the social scientist and all concerned individuals is to uncover what is dangerous to think and say. Or as Walter Benjamin put it best , intimes of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in a situation where he has to play detective .Detective work and some courage is needed because questions about the root causes or political intentions of the terrorist act have beeneither silenced by charges of moral equivalency, or, rendered moot by claims that the exceptional nature of the act does not requireexplanation. It quickly became accepted wisdom, from President Bush on down , that evil was to blame, and that the appropriate political andintellectual focus should be on how best to eradicate evil. Even sophisticated analysts like Michael Ignatieff downplayed the significance of social or political inquiry by declaiming the exceptionality of the act:What we are up against is apocalyptic nihilism. The nihilism of their means - the indifference to human costs - takes their actions not only out of the realm of po litics, but even out of the realm of war itself. The apocalyptic nature of their goals makes it absurd to believe they are making political demands at all. They are seeking the violent transformation of an irremediablysinful and unjust world. Terror does not express a politics, but a metaphysics, a desire to give ultimate meaning to time and history through ever-escalating acts of violence which culminate in

a final battle between good and evil.1By funneling the experience through the image of American exceptionalism, 9.11 quickly took on an exceptional ahistoricity. For themost part, history was only invoked - mainly in the sepia tones of the Second World War - to prepare America for the sacrifice and suffering that layahead . The influential conservative George Will wrote that there were now only two time zones left for the United States :America, whose birth was mid-wived by a war and whose history has been punctuated by many more, is the bearer of great responsibilities and the focus of myriad resentments. Which is why

for America, there are only two kinds of years, the war years and the interwar years .2Under such forced circumstances, of being beyond experience, outside of history, and between wars, 9.11 does not easily yield to philosophical, political or social inquiry. I believe the bestthe academician can do is to thickly describe, robustly interrogate, and directly challenge the authorized truths and official actions of all parties who are positing a world view of absolute differences in need of final solutions. I do so here by first challenging the now common assumptionthat 9.11 is an exceptional event beyond history and theory, especially those theories tainted, as Edward Rothstein claimed in the New York Times, by postmodernism and post-colonialism.3Second, I examine the representations, technologies, and strategies of network wars that have eluded mainstream journalism and traditional social science. I finish by uncovering what I

consider to be the main dangers presented by the counter/terror of 9-11 .An Exceptional Act ?On the question of exceptionalism, consider a few testimonials, the first from an editorial in The New York Times :If the attack against the World Trade Center proves anything it is that our offices, factories, transportation and communication networks and infrastructures are r elatively vulnerable to skilledterroristsAmong the rewards for our attempts to provide the leadership needed in a fragmented, crisis-prone world will be as yet unimagined terrorists and other socio-paths determined to

settle scores with us .4 Another from a cover story of Newsweek :The explosion shook more than the building: it rattled the smug illusion that Americans were immune, somehow, to the plague of terrorism that torments so many countries .5And finally, one from the London Sunday Times :He began the day as a clerk working for the Dean Witter brokerage on the 74th floor of the World Trade Center in New York and ended it as an extra in a r eal-life sequel to Towering Inferno6 It might surprise some to learn that these are all quotes taken from 1993, the first and much less deadly terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. They are presented here asa caution, against reading terrorism only in the light - the often-blinding light - of the events of September 11. Obviously the two WTC eventsdiffer in the scale of the devastation as well as the nature of the attack. 9-11/WTC defied the public imagination of the real not to mention, as just about every public official and mediaauthority is loathe to admit, the official imagination and pre-emptive capacity of the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, airport security, military, and other governmental

agencies. Shock and surprise produced an immediate and nearly uniform reading of the event that was limited to discourses of condemnation, retribution, and counterterror. But surely itis a public responsibility to place 9.11 in an historical context and interpretive field that reaches beyond the immediacy of personaltragedy and official injury. Otherwise 9-11 will be remembered not for the attack itself

but for the increasing cycles of violence that follow.If 9-11 is not wholly new, what is it? We have a better sense of what it is not than what it is: from the President and Secretary of Defense and on down the food-

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DDI 08Kernoff/Olneychain of the national security hierarchy , we have heard that this will not be a war of states against states; it will not be the Gulf War or Kosovo; and it will not be Vietnam or Mogadishu. And theyre probably right certainly more right than commentators from both the Right (its Pearl Harbor) and Left (its an

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1NCanti-imperialist struggle) who have relied on sloppy ideological analogies to understand the event. In my view 9-11 is a combination of new and old forms of conflict, including : the rhetoric of holy war from both sides; a virtual network war in the media and on the

internet; a high-tech surveillance war overseas but also in our airports, our cities, and even our homes; and a dirty war of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, using an air campaign and limited special operations to kill the leadership and to intimidate thesupporters of al Qaeda and the Taliban.I call this new hybrid conflict , virtuous war. 8 It has evolved from the battlefield technologies of the Gulf War and the aerial campaigns of Bosnia and Kosovo; it draws on just war doctrine (when possible) and holy war (when necessary); it clones the infowar of global surveillance and the networked war of multiple media. In the name of the holy trinity of international order global free markets, democratic sovereign states, and limited humanitarian interventions - the U.S. has led theway in a revolution in military affairs (RMA ) which underlies virtuous war. At the heart as well as the muscle of this transformation is thetechnical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance but again, with minimal casualtieswhen possible .Using networked information, global surveillance, and virtual technologies to bring there here in near real-time and with near-verisimilitude, virtuous war emerged before 9-11. But it nowlooks to be the ultimate means by which the U.S. intends to re-secure its borders, maintain its hegemony, and bring a modicum of order if not justice back to international politics. The

difference after 9-11 is that we now have an enemy with a face; with 22 faces in fact, all of them available on the FBIs new website of most-wanted terrorists .9 Network WarsFrom the start, it was apparent that 9-11 was and would continue to be a war of networks. Whether terrorist, internet, or primetime, most of the networks seemed equally adept at the

propagation of violence, fear, and disinformation. For a prolonged moment there was no detached point of observation: we were immersed in a network of tragic images of destruction andloss, looped in 24/7 cycles, which induced a state of emergency and trauma at all levels of society. It was as if the American political culture experienced a collective Freudian trauma, whichcould be re-enacted (endlessly on cable) but not understood at the moment of shock. This is what Michael Herr meant when he wrote about his own experience with the trauma of Vietnam: " Ittook the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was thatyou didnt always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed storedthere in your eyes." (Dispatches, New York: Avon Books, p. 20). And in a state of emergency, as in war , the first images stick. There was no initialattempt by the media or the government to transform these images of horror into responsible discourses of reflection and action. Movingat the speed of the news cycle and in a rush to judgment there was little time for deliberation , for understanding the motivations of the attackers, or for assessing the

potential consequences, intended as well as unintended, of a military response . Networks are not merely nodes connected by wiring of one sort of another. They convey, mimic, and in some cases generate human attributes and intentions, as suggested by Wired founding

editor Kevin Kelly, who defined a network as organic behavior in a technological matrix. But 9-11 knocked akilter this always problematical relationship between meat and wire .Technologically-driven events outpaced organic modes of comprehension, and human actions, whether out of trauma or informationoverload, seemed increasingly to resemble machinic reflexes. Indeed, the first reaction by most onlookers and television reporters wasto deem the event an accident. The second attack destroyed the accidental thesis, and as well, it seemed, our ability to cognitively map the devastatingaftermath. Instead, into the void left by the collapse of the WTC towers and the absence of detached analysis, there rushed a host of metaphors, analogies, andmetonyms, dominated by denial (Its a movie), history (Its Pearl Harbor), and non-specific horror (Its the end of the world as wehave known it ).In our public culture, it is increasingly the media networks rather than the family, the community, or the government that provide the first, and, by its very speed and pervasiveness, most

powerful response to a crisis. Questions of utility, responsibility, and accountability inevitably arose, and as one would expect, the medias pull-down menu was not mapped for the twin-towered collapse of American invulnerability. Primetime networks did their best (Peter Jennings of ABC better than the rest) to keep up with the realtime crises. But fear, white noise, andtechnical glitches kept intruding, creating a cognitive lag so profound between event and interpretation that I wondered if string theory had been proven right, that one of the 10 other

dimensions that make up the universe had suddenly intruded upon our own, formerly ordered one, exposing the chaos beneath .Indeed, after the looped footage of the collapse of the towers began to take on the feeling of dj vu , I seriously wondered if the reality principle itself had not takena fatal blow . Like Ignatieff , I discerned a nihilism at work, but of a different kind, of the sort vividly on display in the movie , The Matrix . It first appearswhen some punky-looking customers in search of bootleg virtual reality software come to see Neo, the protagonist played by Keanu Reeves. He pulls from a shelf a green leather-bound book,the title of which is briefly identifiable as Jean Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulation. When he opens the hollowed-out book to retrieve the software, the first page of the last chapter appears:

On Nihilism. Clearly an homage by the two directors, the Wachowsky brothers, it all happens very quickly, too quickly to read the original words of Baudrillard, but here they are :Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a weltanshauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical

radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death . Todays nihilism is one of transparency, this irresolution isindissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it.10With the toppling of WTC a core belief was destroyed: it could not happen here. Into this void the networks rushed, to provide transparency without depth, a simulacrum of horror, a much

purer form of nihilism than imagined by moralist commentators like Ignatieff or Rothstein . In official circles, there was a concerted effort to fence off thevoid: the critical use of language, imagination, even humor was tightly delimited by moral sanctions and government warnings. Thisfirst-strike against critical thought took the peculiar form of a semantic debate over the meaning of coward. In the New Yorker andon Politically Incorrect, the question was raised whether it is more cowardly to commandeer a commercial airliner and pilot it into theWorld Trade Center, bomb Serbians from 15,000 feet, or direct a cruise missile attack against bin Laden from several thousand milesaway. The official response was swift, with advertisements yanked, talk-show condemnations, and Ari Fleischer , White House presssecretary, saying people like Bill Maher of Politically Incorrect should watch what they say, watch what they do .Protected zones of language quickly began to take shape. When Reuters news agency questioned the abuse-into-meaningless of the term terrorism, George Will onABC Sunday News (September 30), retaliated by advocating a boycott of Reuters. Irony and laughter were permitted in some places, not inothers. At a Defense Department press conference Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld could ridicule, and effectively disarm, a reporter who dared to ask if anyone in the Department of Defensewill be authorized to lie to the news media.11 President Bush was given room to joke in a morale-boosting visit to the CIA, saying hes spending a lot of quality time lately with George

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DDI 08Kernoff/OlneyTenet, the director of the CIA. And then there was New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein, taking his opportunistic shot at postmodernists and postcolonialists, claiming that their irony and

relativism is ethically perverse and produces a guilty passivity. Some of us were left wondering , where would that view place fervent truth-seekers and

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1NCserious enemies of relativism and irony like bin Laden? Terrorist foe but epistemological ally ?The Mimetic War of Images

The air war started with a split-screen war of images: in one box, a desolate Kabul seen through a nightscope camera lens, in grainy-green pixelsexcept for the occasional white arc of anti-aircraft fire followed by the flash of an explosion; in the other, a rotating cast of characters, beginning with President Bush, followed over the courseof the day and the next by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Meyers, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, then progressively down the media food chainof war reporters, beltway pundits, and recently retired generals. On the one side we witnessed images of embodied resolve in high resolution; on the other, nighttime shadows with nobody in

sight.Strategic binaries were also legion in President Bushs war statement, incongruously delivered from the Treaty Room of the White House: as we strikemilitary targets, we will also drop food; the United States is a friend to the Afghan people and an enemy of those who aid terrorists'; the only way to pursue peace is to

pursue those who threaten it. And once more , the ultimate either/or was issued: Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is noneutral ground.But the war programming was interrupted by the media-savvy bin Laden. Shortly after the air strikes began, he appeared on Qatars al-Jazeera television network (the Arab worlds CNN) in a

pre-taped statement that was cannily delivered as a counter air-strike to the U.S. Kitted out in turban and battle fatigues , bin Laden presented his own bipolar view of theworld: these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. But if oppositionconstituted his worldview, it was an historical mimic battle that sanctioned the counter-violence: "America has been filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God what America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted."Without falling into the trap of moral equivalency, one can discern striking similarities. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and others have mademuch of the asymmetrical war being waged by the terrorists. And it is indeed a canny and even diabolical use of asymmetrical tactics as well as strategies whenterrorists commandeer commercial aircraft and transform them into kinetic weapons of indiscriminate violence, and then deploy commercial media to counter the military strikes that follow .Yet, a fearful symmetry is also at work, at an unconscious, possibly pathological level, a war of escalating and competing and imitative oppositions, amimetic war of images.A mimetic war is a battle of imitation and representation, in which the relationship of who we are and who they are is played out along awide spectrum of familiarity and friendliness, indifference and tolerance, estrangement and hostility. It can result in appreciation or denigration, accommodation or separation , assimilation or extermination. It draws physical boundaries between peoples, as well as metaphysical

boundaries between life and the most radical other of life, death. It separates human from god. It builds the fence that makes goodneighbors; it builds the wall that confines a whole people. And it sanctions just about every kind of violence .More than a rational calculation of interests takes us to war. People go to war because of how they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of others: that is, how they construct the difference of others as well as the sameness of themselves through representations. From Greek tragedy and Roman gladiatorialspectacles to futurist art and fascist rallies, the mimetic mix of image and violence has proven to be more powerful than the most rational discourse. Indeed, the medical definitionof mimesis is the appearance, often caused by hysteria, of symptoms of a disease not actually present. Before one can diagnose a

cure, one must study the symptoms or, as it was once known in medical science, practice semiology.MIME-NET

It was not long before morbid symptoms began to surface from an array of terror and counter-terror networks . Al Qaeda members reportedly usedencrypted email to communicate; steganography to hide encoded messages in web images (including pornography); Kinkos and public library computers to send messages; underground

banking networks called hawala to transfer untraceable funds; 24/7 cable networks like al-Jazeera and CNN to get the word out; and, in their preparations for 9-11, a host of other information

technologies like rented cell phones, online travel agencies, and flight simulators. In general, networks from television primetime to internet realtime delivered events withan alacrity and celerity that left not only viewers but decision-makers racing to keep up.With information as the life-blood and speed as the killer variable of networks, getting inside the decision-making as well the image-making loop of the opponent became the central strategy of

network warfare. This was not lost on the U.S. national security team as it struggled after the initial attack to get ahead of the network curve. Sluggish reactions were followed by quicker pre-emptive actions on multiple networks. The Senate passed the Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act, which allowed for rovingwiretaps of multiple telephones, easier surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic, and the divulgence of grand jury and wiretap transcripts to intelligence agencies. National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice made personal calls to heads of the television networks, asking them to pre-screen and to consider editing Al Qaeda videos for possible coded messages. Information about the

air campaign as well as the unfolding ground interventions were heavily filtered by the Pentagon. Information flows slowed to a trickle from the White House and the DefenseDepartment after harsh words and tough restrictions were imposed against leaks. Psychological operations were piggy-backed onto humanitarian interventions by the dropping of propagandaleaflets and food packs. The Voice of America began broadcasting anti-Taliban messages in Pashto. After the 22 Most Wanted Terrorists were featured on the FBIs website, the popular TV

program Americas Most Wanted ran an extended program on their individual cases .Some of the most powerful networks are often the least visible, but when you add Hollywood to the mix, its hard to keep a secret. The entertainment industry journal Variety first broke thenews about a meeting between White House officials and Hollywood executives. The stated intention was ominous enough, to enlist Hollywood in the war effort :The White House is asking Hollywood to rally 'round the flag in a style reminiscent of the early days of World War II. Network heads and studio chiefs heard thatmessage Wednesday in a closed-door meeting with emissaries from the Bush administration in Beverly Hills, and committed themselves to new initiatives in support of the war on terrorism.

These initiatives would stress efforts to enhance the perception of America around the world, to " get out the message" on the fight against terrorism and to mobilizeexisting resources, such as satellites and cable, to foster better global understanding.12Although some big media picked up this aspect of the story, none except for Newsweek took note of an earlier meeting organized by the military and the University of Southern CaliforniasInstitute for Creative Technology.13 I knew about the ICT because I had covered its opening for Wired back in 1999, when the Army ponied up $43 million to bring together the simulation

talents of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the U.S. military.14 Now it seemed that they were gathering top talent to help coordinate a new virtual war effort :In a reversal of ro les, government intelligence specialists have been secretly soliciting terrorist scenarios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers. A unique ad hoc working group convenedat USC just last week at the behest of the U.S. Army. The goal was to brainstorm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats, in light of thetwin assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Among those in the working group based at USC's Institute for Creative Technology are those with obvious connections to theterrorist pic milieu, like "Die Hard" screenwriter Steven E. De Souza, TV writer David Engelbach ("MacGyver") and helmer Joseph Zito, who directed the features "Delta Force One,"

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DDI 08Kernoff/Olney"Missing in Action" and "The Abduction." But the list also includes more mainstream suspense helmers like David Fincher ("Fight Club"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"), RandalKleiser ("Grease") and Mary Lambert ("The In Crowd") as well as feature screenwriters Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson ("The Rocketeer").15

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1NCIt would appear that 9-11 christened a new network: the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET). If Vietnam was a war waged inthe living-rooms of America, the first and most likely the last battles of the counter/terror war are going to be waged on global networks that

reach much more widely and deeply into our everyday lives.Counter/Terror DangersWhat lies ahead? In the spirit of the season, I think the best statement about what might follow 9-11 comes from that great philosopher and ballplayer, Yogi Bera, who famously said the futureisn't what it used to be. (He actually said aint what it used to be; it was the French poet Paul Valery who said isnt, but Yogi wasnt very big on footnotes). The point is made all the clearer

by the ambiguity of the statement: its hard to maintain let alone imagine a link between a happy past and a rosy future after a disaster, especiallyone in which terrorist technologies of mass destruction are force-multiplied by media technologies of mass distraction. My greatest concernis not so much the future as how past futures become reproduced, that is, how we seem unable to escape the feed-back loops of bad intelligence, bureaucraticthinking, and failed imagination.From my own academic experience, when confronted by the complexity and speed of networks , the fields of political science and international relations are notmuch if at all better: as disciplines of thought they are just too narrow, too slow, tooacademic. This leaves another intellectual void, into which policy-makers and military planners are always ready to rush. Currently the RMA-mantra among the techno-optimists is to engage in their own formof network-centric warfare. As first formulated by Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (formerly President of the Naval War College and putatively picked by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tohead-up the Pentagons military transformation), network-centric war is fought by getting inside the decision-making loop of the adversarys network, and disrupting or destroying it before it

can do the same to yours. In the rush to harden and to accelerate networks, all kinds of checks and balances are left behind. There seems to be little concern for whatorganizational theorists see as the negative synergy operating in tightly coupled systems, in which unintended consequences producecascading effects and normal accidents, in which the very complexity and supposed redundancy of the network produce unforeseen

but built-in disasters. Think Three Mile Island in a pre-1914 diplomatic-military milieu. Think Paul Virilios integral accident .My second concern is that social scientific theories are unsuited for the kind of political investigation demanded by the emergence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment

network. President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address famously warned the US of the emergence of a military-industrial complex, and of what might happen should public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite. Now that Silicon Valley and Hollywoodhave been added to the mix, the dangers have morphed and multiplied. Think Wag the Dog meets The Matrix. Think of C.Wright Mills power elite with much

better gear to reproduce reality .So, for the near future, I believe virtuous war as played out by the military-industrial-media-entertainment network will be our daily bread andnightly circus. Some would see us staying there, suspended perpetually, in between wars of terror and counterterror. How to break out of theoften self-prophesying circles? Are there theoretical approaches that can critically respond without falling into the trap of the interwar? One thatcan escape the nullity of thought which equates the desire to comprehend with a willingness to condone terrorism? The use of sloppy analogies of resistance, as well as

petty infighting (pace [Christopher] Hitchens, [Noam] Chomsky and their polarized supporters ) on the left does not give one much hope of a unified anti-war movement. For the moment, we need to acknowledge that the majority of Americans, whether out of patriotism, trauma or apathy, think it best to leave matters in the hands of the

experts. I think for the immediate future the task will be to distinguish new from old dangers, real from virtual effects, and terror from counterterror in the network wars .

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1NC The alternative is to reject such representations of violence. By viewing these as criminal rather than evil,we can prevent totalizing violence and evaluate a more democratic perspective.

Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 2003, Evil EnemyVersus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism, Ebsco

If the rhetoric of fighting an evil enemy, especially when reinforced by U.S. military might, economic clout,and presidential resolve, lowers the threshold of war, trumps arguments for pursuing peaceful resolutions,and masks Americas complicity in the spiraling cycle of violence , what alternative to this tragic perspective might

prove to be a more serviceable response to terrorism ? How can the debate be reframed to privilege the presumptionof peace consistent with democratic values, to shift the burden of proof back to the advocates of war, andto increase the force of arguments for diplomacy and against pre-emption? What kind of a perspective mightmotivate a higher degree of appreciation for the complexities of the human condition, more tolerance of differences, and greater resistance to the legitimization of coerced consent? What conceptualization of the Other promotes the practice of democracy instead of

playing the trump card of an evil enemy to diminish and indefinitely defer democracy in the name of defending it? How can therhetoric of antagonism be transposed into the more constructive discourse of democratic agonistics? In the

simplest terms, what is being suggested here is that a basic shift of perspective, achieved by insisting on the primacy of democracy, entails a wholly different order of priorities than the prevailing accent on evil. Rather than reducing democracyto a convenient excuse for wartrading on it as a legitimizing symbol, protecting it as an imperiled andvulnerable institution, restraining it as a risky practice in times of crisis, and promising it as the prize of victory advocates of pre-emption should be held squarely accountable to meeting the standard of democracy and all that it entails.Similarly, those troubled by the prospect of war mutating into a routine instrument of statecraft and creating a post-911 dystopia of terror and counter-terror must rearticulate their arguments to feature democratic criteria, repositioning the most salient corollaries of arobustly democratic ethic at the forefront of political consciousness and with sufficient presence to displace an otherwise disquietingimage of evil . Democracy, unlike a seamless political ideology of universal values, means, and ends, comprises amultifaceted and situation-specific cluster of simultaneously overlapping and conflicting terms such as liberty, equality, self rule,rights, pluralism, elections, debate, protest, and the rule of law. As Michael Walzer avers, big ideologies do not providesufficiently concrete and intimate knowledge of society and the world to prompt healthy criticism andpromote democratic rule in which delimited perspectives are held accountable to one another and thus

kept appropriately humble and suitably open to the force of evidence and the influence of deliberation. 25 Atits best, democracy manages the human divide peacefully, channeling competing interests and differencesamong groups of engaged citizens into a continuous struggle for one anothers qualified assent. Persuasionis the paradigm of democratic communication in managing divisive relations. Within this paradigm,adversaries are addressed as rivals who, in Mouffes words, share a common symbolic space but . . . wantto organize [it] in a different way, not as sheer enemies holding nothing in common. 26 Sheer enemies holdnothing in common, that is, except perhaps a shared propensity for engaging in rituals of victimization through which they transformone another into convenient scapegoats, thereby alleviating social guilt at each others expense and ignoring their own culpability.27Sheer enemies speak of one another as evil; democratic adversaries speak of one another as wrong, mistaken, and even stupid. Thus,democracy is lost when the agonistic Other is rendered rhetorically into a diabolical enemy, and when democracy vanishes so, too, therule of law, liberty, respect for diversity, and accountability to the people wane. Put another way, addressing ones adversary asmistaken rather than evil is requisite to achieving and featuring a democratic perspective. If sharing symbolic space while competingover its organization is the sine qua non of democracy among mortal beings, demonizing the Other is tantamount to throwing Satan

out of heavena heaven, it should go without saying, that neither exists on earth nor warrants making a living hell of earth. Just as therhetoric of evil promotes war, the rhetoric of identification, as Kenneth Burke calls it, enacts democracy and advances a positiveconception of peace among consubstantial rivals.28 Peace in this sense is not merely the absence of war, which is a hopelesslynegative notion of erasing the human divide and ending the struggle for advantage, but instead a positive strategy of crossingconceptual boundaries and articulating common ground in a continuing context of competition, conflict, and division. Indeed, ErnestoLaclau and Chantal Mouffe allow that without conflict and division, a pluralist democratic politics would be impossible, for anydemocratically derived agreement is the result, not of universal truth and reason, but of a hegemonic articulation which is itself incomplete, impermanent, and contingent upon rearticulation.29

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Sweet 2NC Card Terrorism is inevitable, its only a question of how we respond to it. By retaliating, America has sowed theseeds for its eventual destruction and perpetuated international outrage. However, we can change this by

rejecting the us-versus-them, good versus evil dichotomy proposed by the aff / neg.Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 Profiling

Terrorism http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm

Caleb Carr warns, warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind, for it is a failed tactic that brings about retaliationin kind and perpetuates a cycle of revenge and outrage that can go on for generations, planting the seeds of our own eventualdownfall; a nation must never think that it can use . . . the agents of terror when convenient and then be rid of them when they are nolonger needed.[25] So, given this counterproductive cycle of terror and counter-terror, why are such tactics used? What so stronglymotivates the political use of violence against civilians? What are the roots of terrorism? What makes them grow ever deeper? Andhow have we become so thoroughly entangled in them? Terrorism is a problem, as Walter Laqueur notes, that has rarely been absentfrom history and a threat, as Philip Heymann observes, that cannot be completely eliminated.[26] Its sources are intensely complexin their political, economic, social, cultural, and religious dimensions of grievance, and they will never be fully resolved, for ethnicconflict, nationalism, imperialism, revolutionary ideology, economic exploitation, poverty, religious fervor, and political alienation are

not finite problems, especially as they reassert themselves against the continuing presence of American empire in the post-Cold War power vacuums left by the collapse of the old order of U.S.-Soviet rivalry.[27] One characteristic is constant, however: whether thesource of violence is cultural, ideological, religious, economic, or state terrorism, the us-them dichotomy is paramount in thethinking of terrorists and counter-terrorists.[28] Herein lies the key to the terrorist trap and the problem of escalating violence insofar as it is within our power to widen our circumference of understanding and develop a more serviceable attitude toward the problem athand. In its most extreme form, the form it has taken in our own time of defending Western civilization against Islamic revolution (andvice versa), the dichotomization of us vs. them in a dramatization of good vs. evil is a call to cosmic war. This is no ordinary

political strategy or statement but instead a public performance of violence that serves as a symbolic assertion of empowerment. It iswhat Mark Juergensmeyer calls performance violence, which must be understood and analyzed as symbol, ritual, and drama.

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Link / Impact Homogenization Terrorism discourse creates a motive to focus on killing as many as possible rather than identifyingdifferences between perpetrators of violence extermination becomes necessary to stop the terrorists.

C. Douglas Lummis, Teaches at Tsuda College, PhD Poli Sci), January 19, 2004, Zmag,http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4853

In the past several years, a new category of human being has been introduced into the public discourse: The Terrorist. Of course, people have been called terrorists before, but with the beginning of the U.S. government's War on Terrorism, "terrorist" has come tomean not simply a person who engages (or engaged) in a certain form of combat, but rather a separate human type.The Terrorist is different from, for example, the criminal. We think of a criminal as a person who was born as an ordinary human

being, but has somehow "gone wrong." The criminal has committed a criminal act, but may still be capable of penitence, which is whywe put criminals in penitentiaries. But The Terrorist has not "gone wrong." As President Bush has so often told us, The Terrorist isevil. The word "evil" is not a legal term; no court of law can convict a person of being "evil ." Evil is a religious concept. The evil

person is not someone who has taken the wrong path, but rather someone who has come into this world for the very purpose of causing pain and suffering. As you can see by putting a "d" at the beginning of the word, the evil person is here to carry out the

project of the Enemy of God. Repentance is out of the question: the misery that the evil person has brought about is exactly what was

intended.In the new terrorist discourse, the issue, when a particular case is being discussed, is not what the person did, but what the person is.When the case of John Walker Lind, the young man from California who was captured in Afghanistan, was being discussed in thenewspapers, the question was framed not in terms of what crimes, if any, he actually may have committed, but rather what category heshould be placed into: was he a terrorist, or was he an ordinary American boy gone wrong? If the former, he should be tried (the

papers said) by a military tribunal; if the latter, he should get an ordinary jury trial (as it happened, the latter position prevailed). Theterrorism discourse is based on a form of essentialism: once a person is categorized as a terrorist-in-essence, that person can be placedin a separate legal category. The important thing is that this determination of what the person is takes place before a legaldetermination is made (by trial) as to what the person did.I wrote above that no court of law can make a judgment of what a person is (e.g., essentially good or evil), but there is another kind of court that has claimed to make such judgments. That is the court used in witch trials, where the evidence as to what the accused persondid is only relevant insofar as it indicates whether that person is or is not a witch. Once the person is judged to be a witch, then whathe or she did is no longer relevant. The logic of the present terrorist discourse is witch-hunt logic.

In political cartoons and commentaries, The Terrorist has most often been depicted as a gutter rat. Not the white rat or the browncountry rat, but the plague rat, the one that is never displayed in zoos and that no one (except witches) ever keeps as pets. The plaguerat, like the cockroach, exists in popular imagination (though animal rights activists may disagree) as an animal to be killed on sight,and exterminated if possible. And "extermination," a word that, outside of Nazi discourse, has not often been used in regard to acategory of human beings, is precisely the word being used in War-on-Terrorism propaganda today.This characterization of The Terrorist revives the emotional content of racism without being, strictly speaking, racist. Anti-Terrorist

propaganda cannot be racist because The Terrorist, while a category, is not a race. The people the U.S. government calls terrorist belong to a variety of nationalities and speak a variety of languages. Moreover, given the multi-ethnic makeup of the U.S. voting population today, it is no longer politically wise for U.S. politicians to lay this kind of stereotype on a particular ethnic group. Sowhen government spokespeople say this is not a war against Muslims or Arabs, this should be taken seriously. What is happening isthat the stereotype that used to be projected onto this or that ethnic group is now being projected onto this new category: TheTerrorist. In classic racism, the discriminated people were depicted as incapable of education, enlightenment, or moral improvement ,so that it would be fruitless to put them in the same legal framework, and grant them the same rights, as the dominating group. Thereis nothing for it but to place them in a separate legal category -- say slavery, or apartheid, or ghettoization, or legal segregation. Andtoday this is just what is happening: for the new human type called The Terrorist, a separate and unprecedented legal framework is

being established.

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Link Us/Them The word terrorism invokes a good and evil binary that results in characterizing all terrorists as evil andparasitic and all Westerners as patriots. This fabricated binary reduces all other political questions to

this singular focus of good and bad making effective action impossible.Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 Profiling

Terrorism http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htmThe true patriot knows, according to this logic, that freedom must be sacrificed in some measure for an indefinite period of time in order to defend against the enemies of freedom and civilization. (At this point, you may bewondering whether this kind of reasoning is a version of Nietzsches famous dictum that what doesnt kill us makes us stronger or, alternatively, the infamous adage of the Vietnam war that we had to destroy the village inorder to save it.) Given the persistence of the presidents theme of war, patriotism, and consumerism in the defense of freedom and civilization, it isnt at all surprising that he opened his first state of the union address lastJanuary by declaring our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers.[12] Since the shock and suffering of four months earlier, he continued, our nation hascomforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistans terrorist training camps, saved a people

from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression. The terrorists who had survived our bombing campaign in Afghanistan were either occupyingcells at Guantanamo Bay or running for their lives. The women of Afghanistan were now free and no longer captives in their ownhomes. America was winning the war on terror against a hateful and mad enemy that laughed[ed] about the loss of innocent lifewhile plotting to destroy American nuclear plants and poison public water supplies. The presidents aim was to eliminate theseterrorist parasites worldwide and to prevent the axis of evil regimes in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea from threatening the UnitedStates, its friends, and allies with weapons of mass destruction. The war would continue indefinitely until an evil enemy that

embraces tyranny and death is defeated by those who choose freedom and the dignity of every life. Not only did the presidentsstate of the union address establish a focus of evil, but it also reduced all other political questions to this singular focus as extensionsof the war on terror which, he stressed, is well begun, but it is only begun. Just as September 11 had brought about the u nity and resolve of America and Congress, thissame spirit [would be] directed toward addressing problems here at home. (As an aside, I should note that this same spirit of unity and resolve, we have learned, also means that any criticism of the presidents partisan

positions on economic, social or other political issues is likely to be equated with supporting terrorism and undermining the war effort.[13]) Not only did the p resident propose the largest increase in military spending in twodecades as the price of freedom and security, but he also requested new funding for homeland security to protect against bioterrorism, provide for emergency response, fund airport and border security, and enhanceintelligence gathering. Research on bioterrorism would yield knowledge to improve public health. Training and equipping heroic police and firefighters would mean safer neighborhoods. Stricter border enforcementwould help combat illegal drugs. And better intelligence meant depending on the eyes and ears of alert citizens. Moreover, to revitalize the economy, the presidents budget, or what he referred to as his economicsecurity plan, would run a small and short-term deficit, so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible manner that eventually enables unemployed American workers to earn paychecks insteadof receiving unemployment checks. Good jobs, he continued, begin with good schools and depend on reliable and affordable energy production along with expanded trade, new world markets, and tax relief that will growthe economy by encouraging investment in factories and equipment. Health security and retirement security were further measures of the nations true character in this time of testing, in this time for courage and

compassion, strength and resolve. Each American patriot was called upon to dedicate 4,000 hours to public service over the rest of his or her lifetime, thus proving that our enemies who believed us to be weak, divided, and materialistic were as wrong as they are evil.Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, the president stressed again, I know wecan overcome evil with greater good. You may be wondering what is so troublesome about the language of evil as a profile of terrorism . My answer is that the term isnt entirely wrong for characterizing the heinous crime against humanity committed on September 11, but it isnt the most serviceable term either for guiding our thinking abouthow best to address the continuing problem of terrorism. Rather than bringing us together as a d iverse and democratic people committed to respecting pluralism at home and abroad, the rhetoric of evilconstitutes us negatively through a ritual of victimization.

The delineation of terrorism constructs an absolute evil that must be eliminated at all costs. We end upbelieving America is the worlds indispensable nation, a nation that must dominate and control disorderlegitimating pre-emptive strikes and mass violence against the Axis of Evil.

Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 Profiling Terrorism http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm

Yes, terrorism today is firmly rooted in our past and specifically in the history of American empire since World War II. In animportant sense, it is what Chalmers Johnson has called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. This is, for the most part, an unacknowledged and informal empire, an imperial project that the Cold War obscured but the byproduct of which is reservoirs of resentment against all Americans . . . that can have lethal results. Americas determination to dominate the

global scene, to project its military power and extend its social, political, and economic system throughout the world, is atriumphalist act and attitude, Johnson argues, for which the United States and its citizens will continue to pay a steep price unlessand until we reassess our global role and become more conscious of how we look to others who hate us for our arrogance and he gemony. Even as we worry about how todefend ourselves against rogue states, we must consider whether the United States has itself become a rogue superpower. Wehave declared ourselves the worlds indispensable nation and the architect of a new world order. Now we must confront thelikelihood that when it comes to understanding terrorism, empire is the problem, at least to a significant degree.[3] Instead of reflecting carefully and judiciously onAmericas global presence, however, to consider how we might play ou r post-Cold War role more constructively, our greatest impulse in this time of crisis is to close ranks in

patriotic fervor, declare war on international terrorism, and vow triumph over evil. Should we succumb to this great temptation Or might I say more realistically, if we continue to submit to it too long and exclusively? we risk falling ever more deeply into whatJeffrey Simon has called the terrorist trap, that web of psychological, political, and social entanglement in the dramas of international violence which will persist and worsen unless we learn to address the problem of terrorism comprehensively in its manydimensions.[4] Thus, the purpose of my talk this evening is to focus attention on how our current image or profile of terrorism is a

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DDI 08Kernoff/Olneydangerous caricature of the enemy, a crude portrait of absolute evil which can only confound the quest for peace and security in aglobal village where diversity resists conformity, tribalism confronts empire, and, in Benjamin Barbers phrase, Jihad vs.McWorld.[5]

Link Dehumanization The terrorist label dehumanizes those whom it is applied to and gives freedom of action to thegovernment paving the way toward violence.

Journal of Political and Military Sociology , Summer 2002, The Rhetoric of Terrorism and itsConsequences. ( http://animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/terrorism.htm )

The discriminatory applications of the terms terrorism and terrorist by the U. S. Government and mainstream American mediareveal that neither uses these terms with any real concern for consistency, completeness, and accuracy. If they did, and if the U.S.Government really meant what it says it means when it proclaims a war on terrorism, then the United States would be declaring war on itself, or, at the very least, upon its allies that have practiced or supported violence against civilians for political ends.Instead, these terms are selectively used by governments and media to describe those who resort to force in opposing governmental

policies. This development is not entirely surprising. For example, we might expect that the U.S. State Department will be selective inits catalog of terrorist incidents since it is an arm of a government pursuing its own political agenda. It is a bit more difficult to

understand why a free press should follow the Governments lead, but some have tried to explain this phenomenon by pointing outthat the American media support the existing social, political, and economic order in which they operate because they are part of and benefit from that order, and the views they convey rarely stray far from the norm (Picard 1993: 121).12

The American situation is not unique in this regard; other countries, including Israel, Great Britain, Russia, India and Egypt routinelydo the same, and so might any state in describing militant insurgents opposed to its policies, like the Nazis in describing resistancefights in the Warsaw ghetto (Herman and OSullivan 1989: 261). There is a definite political purpose in so doing. Because of itsnegative connotation, the terrorist label automatically discredits any individuals or groups to which it is affixed; it dehumanizesthem, places them outside the norms of acceptable social and political behavior, and portrays them as people who cannot be reasonedwith.13 As a consequence, the rhetoric effectively,

erases any incentive that an audience might have to understand the point of view of those individuals and groups so that it canignore the history behind their grievances;

deflects attention away from ones own policies that might have contributed to these grievances; repudiates any calls to negotiate with them;

paves the way for the use of force and violence in dealing with them, and in particular, gives a government freedom of action byexploiting the fears of its own citizens and stifling any objections to the manner in which it deals with them.14

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Framework / Impact The idea of a singular global terrorist organization ignores the multifaceted nature of its violence oursingularly focused discourse inspires genocidal violence as we overreact to the perceived nature of

terrorism. Joseba Zulaika, (Professor, Center for Basque Studies), February 1998, Social Identities, Vol. 4, Issue 1,ebsco

'Type of warfare', 'ritual', 'pathology', 'social drama' -- these are some of the scholarly categories and poetic strategies (each equippedwith its own disciplinary literature and prominent authors) commonly applied to the study of terrorism. For the most part, these areself-enclosed genres in which each author refuses to relinquish the vocabulary and premises of his or her discipline. Among thevarious possible modes of formal argumentation within texts about terrorism, the causal one deserves primary attention: 'what are thecauses of terrorism?'. Most conferences and texts that focus on terrorism frame it in such terms. The very query creates the mirage thatthis bizarre phenomenon may finally be reduced to a formulaic question, the answer to which holds out the promise of resolving theriddle. The prospect of a Foucaultian inquiry for the 'genealogy' of the entire discourse as linked to power and situated in formations of

bodily violence is simply beyond such causal investigation. Yet, ironically, the causal perspective is employed to examine a phenomenon that is ideal --typically portrayed as 'random' and 'indiscriminate' violence, that is, as non-causal by definition.

Since there is a political imperative for the students of terrorism to define it in pathological terms, the 'psychology of terrorism' isanother thriving subfield. The influence of terrorist ideologies and false beliefs in urging revolutionary terrorism is also stressed bysome. The favourite argumentative plot of the best-informed students of terrorism is that it is a type of warfare. This is also the

preferred perspective of the activists themselves. The argument of warfare -- with its polarities, its tension between tactics andstrategy, its rules of engagement, its goal orientation and ideology, its roles and expectations -- provides a powerful source of narrativity for terrorism. Casting terrorism in this guise has a practical value: the typically unruly elements that characterise terroristactivity can be tamed by conceptualising them as the work of a fully-fledged army against which an organised counteraction can bemounted.Treatises on terrorism regularly ask: what is it? The ontological question is implied by the very search for its 'causes andconsequences'. There is no such ding an sich. The quest for the quintessential distillation by which 'terror' could be encapsulated,diagnosed under laboratory conditions, defined in precise terms, and then finally conquered and extinguished for the benefit of mankind, is of course an academic illusion. Its 'unreality' derives from the referential circularity of terror, its logic of randomness, itssemantics of play and threat, its deceptive use of sign and symbol, and its enormous power for collective representation.

Terrorism has become a global discourse that purports to define and decipher political realities that are poles apart (Zulaika andDouglass). As an instance, in 1985 an international panel of terrorism experts was convened to resolve the problem of Basque violence permanently. The panel members sat in a London hotel for nine months (they were never seen in the Basque Country); at last, theyissued a report, with the conclusion that the violence was caused by nationalism. The public was amused by their sagacity. Two thirdsof the panel's report described other European 'terrorist groups' as supporting evidence to prove their main contention, namely, thatBasque violence is terrorism. The remaining one third presented a programme of consciousness-raising, advising every sector of Basque society on how to banish the scourge of terrorism by tabooing the violent actors and their social context.These experts could act so confidently because terrorism, despite a lack of consensus on how to define it (there are literally hundredsof definitions) and on a frame to situate it, nonetheless has been globally accepted as a discourse central to contemporary politics. Itdisplays a literature and a legal-technical vocabulary that can make an 'expert' of anyone who writes a monograph on some insurgentgroup, none of whose members, God forbid!, the writer has ever met. Thus, it is not surprising that some of the very same experts whohave been instrumental in diagnosing and framing the Basque case have also been influential in US counter-terrorism policy.Terror and Taboo: From Guernica to the Nuclear ThreatThe obfuscation generated by such global discourse is enormous. In the Basque case, for example, the violent actors and their audience consider it part of their agenda 'to liberate' the symbolic oak of Guernica from foreign domination, while for those Basquesunsympathetic to their cause, and for the world at large, their politics is simply terrorism. Once again, the step from 'the native' to 'theterrorist' is a short one.Historically, encounters with natives have prompted a fetishistic response on the part of Europeans, who simultaneously turn these

peoples into terrifying monsters and quintessential objects of desire. The twentieth century response to the terrorist repeats thistendency to create a culture of fetishisation and taboo: discourse of terrorism incurred the polluting intimacy of such men as Noriega,Gadaffi, Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, who became at various moments either the West's most trustedallies or its most frightening monsters. It is the US State Department, depending on the political expediency of the moment, whichendorses one identity over the other.There was a moment when the previous generation's cast of 'terrorists' seemed to be fading away. Carlos the Jackal, Abimael Guzman,and Sheik Omar are incarcerated. The hapless Saddam Hussein and Muamar Gadaffi, yesterday's bogeymen and today's international

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pariahs, maintain the lowest of profiles. Yassir Arafat and Gerry Adams are now visitors at the White House. The ANC is the ruling party of South Africa. The Brigata Rossa and Baader Meinhof are but recent memories in a Western Europe increasingly preoccupiedwith the revival of fascism and racist backlash against its political and economic refugees. A blinkered optimist might have been

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Framework / Impact prepared to pronounce 'terrorism' itself dead. Yet, suddenly there is a new promised land for terrorism -- the United States. Itsapotheosis is expressed in the sealing off of Pennsylvania Avenue by a president besieged in his White House. What a triumph for

Timothy McVeigh -- to accomplish what all the horrors of the twentieth century could not!'Terrorism' is an enormously efficacious stimulant of the collective imagination. The fate of a few hostages can rivet public attentionfor months. As with other historical stereotypes -- the Jewish conspiracy, the witch craze, the red scare -- the collective representationof terrorism has a resulted in a chimera so enveloping and so terrible that it blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. Likeshamans, witches, prophets, saints, madmen and the like, terrorists present in their remythification a 'formless' persona, that is, onethat appears to be immune from ordinary constraints. These representations of terrorists show 'an intrinsic vagrancy of the imagination'(Needham, 1978, p. 64).What makes the collective representation of terrorism so uniquely threatening is its symbiotic relationship to nuclearism -- a type of energy that threatens to break all 'form'. The recent discovery of terrorism as a global discourse was simultaneous with the birth of thereal military taboo of our times -- atomic armaments. In the military imagination, the 'formless' powers of terrorism and nuclear terror are easily linked. Once there is a nuclear capability, the possibility of its falling into the hands of a madman becomes unbearably real.This explains why American administrations may turn terrorism into a major international problem. If the natives thought that theywere defending their symbolic tree, the experts and politicians know that what they are doing is endangering the Planet Earth.

The discourse of terrorism is overwhelmed by such 'reality effect'. As if to dispel any doubts about this reality, writers routinely begintheir works with some dreadful statistics. The shock value of statistics can, however, be turned against itself. As an example, duringthe six-year period 1980-85, seventeen people were killed by acts of terrorism in the US -- less than three per year in a country whoseannual homicide rate is about 25,000. Yet, at various points over the same period, 80 per cent of Americans regarded terrorism as an'extreme' danger. In April 1986, a national survey showed that terrorism was the most frequently mentioned problem facing thecountry, 'the number one concern' (Hinkley, 1989, p. 388). During the four years 1989 to 1992, in which there was not a single fatalitycaused by terrorism in the United States, American libraries catalogued 1,322 new book titles under the rubric 'terrorism' and 121under 'terrorist'. As in the 'referential illusion' of the realist aesthetic of modern literature, 'the very absence of the signified ... becomesthe very signifier of realism' (Barthes, 1968, p. 148).Ultimately, discourse requires reality. It was inevitable that terrorism would finally come 'home'. First, it was the World Trade Center

bombing in New York City, perpetrated by anti-Communist heroes of the Afghan war left without a mission after the collapse of theSoviet Union. Then there was Oklahoma City's 'terror in the heartland', perpetrated by a former Gulf War hero. Thus distant, world-menacing 'terrorism', so much abominated and promoted by successive US administrations, has come to America itself, ironically, theweapon of Reagan's and Bush's ex-warriors. The triumphant concept of a New World Order, an idea for which they had fought sovaliantly, had itself become their worst conspiratorial nightmare.

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Impact / AT: Ethics The ethics of fighting the evil of terrorism demand that we use any sort of violence to stop it, leading tothe inevitable abrogation of rights and justification of violence in any instance.

Joseba Zulaika, (Professor, Center for Basque Studies), February 1998, Social Identities, Vol. 4, Issue 1,ebsco

There is a historical sequel to the present discourse of terrorism. The figure of the 'Terrorist' seems heir to the frightening and lawlessattributes of the figures of the 'Barbarian' during the classical Greek period and the 'Wild Man' during the Middle Ages. For Aristotle,humanity was defined as the capacity to behave as 'a political animal' within the confines of the city (the definition was understood toexclude women, slaves, and merchants). Those individuals living outside the city's borders could never claim full humanity becausethey were beyond the law. In premodern thought, the myth of the Wild Man, in its many archetypal forms and variations, fascinatedWestern civilisation. The great historical encounters with native savages forced Westerners to face their own alarming vaguenessconcerning the definition of 'humanity'. With 'wildness' we get the closely related notions of 'savagery', 'madness', 'heresy', and'barbarism'. That the second part of the twentieth century has added a new type -- the 'Terrorist' -- to this old myth testifies to itsenduring power.The terrorist poses a frontal assault on any type of norm, whether tactical, political, legal, or moral. It is antinomy in its pure form. The

terrorist enemy, identified as international in scope and in a symbiotic relationship with the nuclear predicament, falls outside theordinary realm of humanity. Once attributed to the terrorist, this subhuman state then becomes the basis for several related premises:that we cannot afford to be too humane when confronting terroristic inhumanity; that perhaps we should not be overly concerned withlaw while combating evil itself; and, finally, that perhaps we too must practice a little terrorism, but of the 'right' kind, in order tocontain the malignancy. Confronted with the unmitigated evil of terrorism, should we not be prepared to break, or at least bend, anyrule in order to stop the repellent monster? This is the same way that myth worked in ancient cultures,that is, as a projection of repressed desires and anxieties, as an example of a mode of thought in which the distinction between the

physical and the mental worlds has dissolved. (White, 1978, p. 154)We may call this terrorist archetype, then, a 'remythification' of the Wild Man.By first defining natives as subhuman, the European colonisers were able to justify the extermination, ownership, or subdual of these'monstrous' populations. At the end of the twentieth century, similarly ironic predications between politically unequal countries are far from extinct. In 1986, for instance, under US pressure after its raids on Libya, the twelve countries of the European Community

produced at the Tokyo summit a blacklist of nations in which almost all their poorer neighbours of Africa and the Middle East were

identified as terrorist (Lodge, 1988, pp. 248-49). This is reminiscent of Columbus's impudently ironic use of native inhumanity as justification for European barbarism.The myth of the Wild Man helped sustain the perception of 'dog-headed cannibals' when Europeans met American natives. Todaywhen the topic is terrorists, we find such canine imagery again in use. President Reagan, for example, prepared his attack on Gadaffi'slife in 1986 by first calling him 'mad dog'. Similarly, in the British press, 'Why the Dogs Had to Die' was a front-page headline in TheSun's article on the unarmed IRA men killed at Gibraltar by the British police in March 1988. In the literature on terrorism, the literalcrudity of such animal analogies supports the call for a merciless hunt.The anthropologist Edmund Leach has summarised the connections between those historical encounters and present terrorism:The common link between my two stories are, as you can see, the themes of terroristic massacre, cannibalism by imaginary dog-headed monsters, a political opportunism that makes your opponents virtuous or monstrous as a matter of convenience without anyregard for empirical facts of the case, and the principle that if the lack of shared moral values is so complete that the 'other' comes to

be categorised as a wild animal, then every imaginable form of terroristic atrocity is not only attributed to the other side butbecomes permissible for oneself. Indeed, counter terrorism becomes, in a bizarre sense, a religiously sanctioned moral duty .(1977,p. 36)The accuracy of these remarks may be verified by noting counter-terrorism's shoot-to-kill policy (as put into practice in Great Britain,Germany, and Spain), its abrogation of due process, and its frequent resort to torture. All of these 'point to a central truth -- that thereare few areas of state activity in which the temptation to abandon important ethical norms is so strong and so pervasive' (Roberts,1989, p. 62). Prominent counter-terrorism specialists in fact openly advocate co-opting terroristic strategy as part of 'indirect forms of warfare'.

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Turns Case The terrorist label destroys effective policy by representing them as barbarians constructive engagementthats crucial to solve becomes impossible.

Tomis Kapitan, Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illionois University, 2003, Terrorism and International Justice, http://www.niu.edu/phil/~kapitan/The%20Terrorism%20Of%20%27Terrorism%27.pdf

The American situation is not unique. Other countries, including Israel, Great Britain, Russia, India and Egypt routinely do the same,and so might any state in describing militant insurgents opposed to its policies, e.g., as the Nazis did in describing resistance fightersin the Warsaw ghetto (Herman and OSullivan 1989, p. 261). There is a definite political purpose in so doing. Because of its negativeconnotation, the terrorist label automatically discredits any individuals or groups to which it is affixed. It dehumanizes them, placesthem outside the norms of acceptable social and political behavior, and portrays them as people who cannot be reasoned with (Picard1993, p 10). 13 By delegitimizing any individuals or groups described as terrorist, the rhetoric, erases any incentive an audience might have to understand their point of view so that questions about the nature and origins of their grievances and the possibility legitimacy of their demands will not even be raised; deflects attention away from policies that might have contributed to their grievances; repudiates any calls to negotiate with them;

paves the way for the use of force and violence in dealing with them, and in particular, gives a government freedom of action byexploiting the fears of its own citizens and stifling any objections to the manner in which it deals with them; 14

fails to distinguish between national liberation movements and fringe fanatics.The general strategy is nothing new; it is part and parcel of the war of ideas and language that accompanies overt hostilities;terrorism is simply the current vogue for discrediting ones opponents before the risky business of inquiry into their complaints caneven begin. If individuals and groups are portrayed as irrational, barbaric, and beyond the pale of negotiation and compromise, thenasking why they resort to terrorism is viewed as pointless, needlessly accommodating, or, at best, mere pathological curiosity.The language of terror thereby fosters an unfortunate attitude, especially among those who are oblivious to its propagandisticemployment. Obviously, to point out the causes and objectives of particular terrorist actions is to imply nothing about their legitimacyand justificationthat is an independent matternor is it any sort of capitulation to terrorist demands. To ignore these causes andobjectives, on the other hand, is to seriously undermine attempts to deal intelligently with terrorism, since it leaves untouched thefactors motivating recourse to this type of violence. Far from contributing to a peaceful resolution of conflict, the rhetoric of terror

prepares the uncritical person to sanction a violent response.

More dramatically, the terrorist rhetoric actually increases terrorism in four distinct ways. First, it magnifies the effect of terroristactions by heightening the fear among the target population. If we demonize the terrorists, if we portray them as arbitrary irrational beings with a disposition toward unbridled violence, then we are amplifying the fear and alarm generated by terrorist incidents.Second, those who succumb to the rhetoric contribute to the cycle of revenge and retaliation by endorsing terrorist actions of their owngovernment, not only against those who commit terrorist actions, but also against those populations from whose ranks the terroristsemerge, for the simple reason that terrorists are frequently themselves civilians, living amid other civilians not so engaged. Theconsequence has been an increase in terrorist violence under the rubric of retaliation or counter-terrorism 15 Third, short of genocide, a violent response is likely to stiffen the resolve of those from whose ranks terrorists have emerged, leading them to regardtheir foes as people who cannot be reasoned with, as people who, because they avail themselves so readily of the terrorist rhetoric,know only the language of force. As long as th

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