Securing American Identity Through the Retelling of ‘9/11’

To Ada B.

SECURING AMERICAN IDENTITY THROUGH THE RETELLING OF ‘9/11’

BY M. L. deRaismes Combes

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a longitudinal study of the transformation of American identity through 9/11 storytelling from September 2001 to December 2016. Drawing on and contributing to critical security studies, discourse theory, and social identity theory, I argue that the narrative of the attacks (‘9/11’) has contributed to an unconscious shift in normalized experience that has broadened the permissive boundaries of American actions at home and abroad. In other words, the extraordinary has become the ordinary. Examining the discourses of aviation security and the covert drone strike program, I explain how this permissiveness is made possible by unearthing the two-step process of how ‘9/11’ constructs threat (understood as embodied insecurity) and then reveals how that threat (in part) constitutes identity. Theoretically, I incorporate elements of ontological security and materiality into a new framework that highlights Self/Other differentiation by way of the transitory role of the Stranger. Methodologically, I use Foucauldian discourse analysis to trace the original themes of ‘9/11’ and their contestation through the texts associated with key moments in the development and implementation of each policy. Brought together, the resulting genealogy sheds light on the ways in which certain truth claims of ‘9/11’ have bounded the space of ‘appropriate’ American-ness, in turn justifying and perpetuating government policies that otherwise might have been construed as exceptional and ‘un-

American’. Revealing this contingency opens up space for a reassessment of both American identity and U.S. security practices.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

TABLE OF FIGURES ...... v

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction ...... 1 Sites of Analysis ...... 6 Discourse Analysis ...... 8 Theoretical Framework ...... 11 Identity practice ...... 12 Critical security ...... 13 The Stranger ...... 14 Narrating 9/11 ...... 15 Contribution to the Field ...... 18 Plan of Dissertation ...... 21

CHAPTER TWO: 9/11 and the State of the Art ...... 22 Three Schools of Thought ...... 24 9/11 Storytelling and Threat Construction ...... 27 Uncontested Territory? ...... 30 ‘9/11’ as Traumatic Rupture ...... 31 Terrorism as Crime ...... 36 ‘9/11’ Moving Forward ...... 40

CHAPTER THREE: Discourse and Relational Causality ...... 43 Interpretivist Model ...... 45 Discourse Analysis ...... 48 Genealogy ...... 50 A note on terminology ...... 55 Analysis in practice ...... 58 Research Design and Data Selection ...... 60 ‘9/11’ and the Everyday ...... 67

CHAPTER FOUR: Theoretical Framework: The (In)secure Self ...... 69 Identity-as-practice ...... 70 Identity and ontological security ...... 73 The Stranger ...... 78 Bodies ...... 82 A Note on Vision ...... 86 Mapped Out ...... 87

CHAPTER FIVE: Targeted Drone Strikes – Call of Duty ...... 94 Literature Review ...... 98

iii

Official Narrative ...... 105 Security ...... 107 Values ...... 114 Identity-as-Practice ...... 119 Importance of 9/11 storytelling ...... 122

CHAPTER SIX: Targeted drone strikes – talking back ...... 124 Drone Strike Counter-Narratives ...... 127 Legality ...... 128 Collateral Damage ...... 139 Identity-as-Practice ...... 154 Importance of 9/11 Storytelling ...... 159

CHAPTER SEVEN: Air Travel Security: “Empty out all your pockets…” ...... 162 Literature Review ...... 164 Initial State Response ...... 169 Security ...... 170 Values ...... 173 Traveling on ...... 174 The shoe bomber, 2001 ...... 177 U.K. trans-Atlantic plot, 2006 ...... 184 The underwear bomber, 2009 ...... 187 Yemen cargo plot, 2010 ...... 190 ‘9/11’ and the everyday ...... 191

CHAPTER EIGHT: Air Travel Security: talking back ...... 193 Talking Back ...... 195 Complacency ...... 197 Jokes and Humor ...... 204 Identity-as-practice ...... 222 Importance of 9/11 Storytelling ...... 228

CHAPTER NINE: Conclusion ...... 230 Contribution to the field and future research ...... 233 Writing the extraordinary back into ‘9/11’ ...... 235

WORKS CITED ...... 238

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure I – 9/11 Narrative as Ideal Type ...... 17 Figure II: Breakdown of Source Material by Text ...... 65 Figure III: Data Points on Covert Drone Strikes by Year ...... 66 Figure IV: Data Points on Aviation Security by Year ...... 66 Figure V: Data Points Chart on Covert Drone Strikes ...... 66 Figure VI: Data Points Charted on Aviation Security ...... 67 Figure VII: Breakdown of Security Regime Source Material by Percent ...... 67 Figure VIII: Identity as an Embodied Experience of Security ...... 88 Figure IX: Plotting Identity in Drone Strike Narrative ...... 155 Figure X: Joe Heller, Green Bay Press Gazette, Cagle.com (2009) ...... 212 Figure XI: “New TSA Guidelines,” The Onion (19 December 2005)...... 213 Figure XII: Gary Markstein, Creators Syndicate (24 November 2010) ...... 215 Figure XIII: Mike Keefe, The Denver Post (18 November 2010) ...... 215 Figure XIV: Patrick Chappatte, Le Temps (12 January 2010) ...... 217 Figure XV: Bruce Beattie, Daytona Beach News-Journal (20 November 2010) ...... 217 Figure XVI: Plotting Identity Practices in Aviation Security Narrative ...... 224

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Still crazy after all these years Oh, still crazy after all these years --Paul Simon (1975)

In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians, we have people chopping the heads off many other people. We have things that we have never seen before -- as a group, we have never seen before, what's happening right now. The medieval times -- I mean, we studied medieval times -- not since medieval times have people seen what's going on. I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. --Donald J. Trump, Republican presidential debate, Manchester, NH, 6 February 2016

Speaking at a campaign rally on 7 December 2015 in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina,

Donald J. Trump outlined his plan for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the

United States, citing in particular their “great hatred” towards Americans. He reiterated this belief in a 9 March 2016 interview on CNN when Anderson Cooper asked whether he thought

Islam was at war with the West: “I think Islam hates us… There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There is an unbelievable hatred of us.” Eager to denounce radical

Islamic terrorism, Trump has unapologetically painted ‘the enemy’ in broad brushstrokes. In

September 2016 at another campaign event in New Hampshire, he warned, “I’m putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, if I win, they’re going back.” For Trump and his close associates, making America great again requires very clear boundaries between who belongs and who does not. Even refugees fleeing the horrors of the Syrian civil war deserve no sanctuary. While the protests against his ‘Muslim ban’ and the moral reprobation for such loose characterizations indicate that not all Americans feel the

same way, the very fact that Trump won the presidency (even if he did not win the popular vote) suggests that enough people in this country tacitly condone his rhetoric.1

Such practices of American identity in a post-9/11 world seem to present a conundrum: the frequently voiced response immediately after the attacks (and now with Trump) underscores the traditional notion of an exceptional and innocent ‘American-ness’: ‘they’ hate ‘us’ because we are a beacon on the hill blazing a path for freedom and democracy. Yet the reconfiguration of life since 2001 to accommodate what is deemed a constant and amorphous threat has taken its toll on those self-same virtues (e.g., an open society that builds walls). The attacks have thus helped both to reinforce a certain sense of what being American means as well as to complicate profoundly the relationship between that meaning and the actions taken in its name.2

Arguably, there has been no more defining and unifying moment in recent memory than the attacks of 11 September over what it means to be American, who belongs, and who does not.3 Such a traumatic and monumental event inevitably ripples through much of society like a shock wave and – at least for a time – feels irreversibly transformative. Yet over a decade and a half later, many seem to have grown weary of 9/11 as a subject, arguing that the country has put it to bed (particularly after killing Osama bin Laden),4 that studying 9/11 is passé,5 that, as

1 Opinion polls bear this out. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/01/donald-trump-is- bringing-anti-muslim-prejudice-into-the-mainstream/?utm_term=.efe88108a20a (accessed 16 March 2017).

2 This is not to argue that the attacks marked a unique rupture in American history in terms of fostering a disconnect between stated liberal values and enacted security policies. While such tensions have characterized long swaths of America’s past, the current study is more focused on how this tension has been negotiated and rearticulated since the end of 2001, and to what effects.

3 Over 90 nations lost citizens on 9/11, which helped spread the idea of a global war on terror. Nonetheless, because the attacks took place in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., they also took on a very particular meaning for the United States, a sentiment captured by France’s Le Monde newspaper on 12 September 2001 with the Page One headline, “Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans).

4 A number of websites and news agencies led news of bin Laden’s death with a byline on “closure.” See: David P. Kuhn, “Osama Bin Laden’s Death Brings Closure,” RealClearPolitics, 2 May 2011.

Senator John McCain observed in an interview on Fox News in 2015, “People seem to have forgotten 9/11” despite the glimmering remnants of “Never Forget” decals on the backs of their cars.6 Trump’s brand of ethnocentric populism has been chalked up to the rise in a number of economic, social, and political woes, but not to the lingering permissive effects of 11 September

2001.7 Does 9/11 still matter?

Pushing this further, does it matter how the U.S. has responded to 9/11? For instance, the

U.S. government justifies drone strikes outside official war zones based on the 2001

Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), meant specifically to target the perpetrators of 9/11. Does it matter that, despite some public push back during the Obama presidency, the Trump Administration has nearly doubled the number of strikes in Yemen in

2017 alone (139), compared to the last 14 years (163)?8 Does it matter what precedent the U.S. is setting by using these machines? Does it matter how many civilians in Yemen or Somalia or

Pakistan die in the ‘War on Terror’? Closer to home, does it matter that we submit our possessions and our bodies to intense scrutiny every time we fly somewhere? Does it matter that we can’t pack a full tube of toothpaste in our carry-ons? Does it matter that some Americans have a hard time flying at all because their names match someone else’s on the ‘No Fly’ list? http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/05/02/bin_ladens_death_brings_us_closure_109717.html (accessed 17 March 2017); Kyle Almond, “Bin Laden’s death brought 9/11 ‘closure’,” CNN, 29 April 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/28/world/bin-laden-death-anniversary/ (accessed 17 March 2017).

5 A senior scholar acting as my panel discussant at the 2013 ISA-NE conference said this to me after I presented a review of the critical security literature on 9/11.

6 America’s Newsroom, Fox News, 7 May 2015. http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/05/07/mccain-worried-about-nsa- ruling-seems-people-have-forgotten-911 (accessed 12 March 2017).

7 For instance, Gregory Krieg, “How did Trump win? Here are 24 theories,” CNN, 10 November 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/why-donald-trump-won/index.html (accessed 2 April 2017); Greg Sargent, “Why did Trump win?” The Washington Post (1 May 2017).

8 Similarly, Trump has approved roughly 40 drone strikes in Somalia since taking office, which doubled the total number of strikes up to that point. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war (accessed 28 February 2018).

Some of these questions may seem silly or trivial, but I assert that it all matters. It matters because as a nation, the United States has not really taken stock of what allows for these policies to persist, or what has impeded any changes in policy over the years. By and large, ‘we’ carry on because ‘this is the way it is done now’.9

This dissertation contends that the narrative of 9/11 (‘9/11’) has contributed to an unconscious shift in normalized experience that has broadened the permissive boundary of

American actions at home and abroad.10 The discrete shift in permissible government policy has created space for what many would claim are ‘un-American’ sentiments (such as Trump’s xenophobia) and practices to flourish in a country expressly founded by immigrants upon the belief (if not actual practice) that all men and women are created equal. Drawing on and contributing to critical security studies, discourse theory, and social identity theory, I explore

American identity practice through two security regime discourses: aviation security and the covert drone strike program. Tracing the evolution of 9/11 storytelling from September 2001 to

December 2016, I show how parts of the 9/11 narrative have been rationalized, internalized, and normalized within American identity practice to justify and perpetuate both security regimes.

To emphasize, my dissertation asks:

9 I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t a number of groups that actively protest against drone strikes and TSA regulations, just that they remain in the minority.

10 The use of scare quotes (single quotation mark) plays a central role throughout this dissertation: any expression of 9/11 without them refers to the calendrical date. The addition of quotes transforms the insides into a rhetorical device that refers to a broader social grammar implicitly understood as the dominant discourse of the terrorist attacks. Marc Redfield comments on this distinction, arguing that it has become a toponym, a “name-date.” He adds, “no study of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, whatever the methodology or emphasis, can afford to ignore the rhetorical and political work performed by this event’s loomingly proper names” (2007, 54). Jacques Derrida interprets this naming – le fait date – as a significant representation of our own loss/inability to even comprehend the events of that day. See: Borradori 2003, 85-90.

Question (1): How does ‘9/11’ help make possible the security regimes surrounding aviation and covert drone strikes in the post-9/11 United States? How are the regimes maintained by that narrative over time?

Question (2): What is the relationship between ‘9/11’ and American identity within the lifespans of these two regimes?

The sense of fear and victimhood, so palpable immediately after the attacks, helped rationalize a series of security responses, such as increased airport security, the USA PATRIOT

Act, enhanced interrogation, targeted assassination, and NSA surveillance programs, that many suggest would not otherwise have been possible or acceptable to the public or officials (Jackson, et al. 2011, 65-66; Kellner 2006, 164-165). Given what is often perceived as the extraordinary circumstances of 9/11, it is perhaps not surprising that such policies and practices were initially deemed warranted and enacted. Yet, over 15 years later, many of these programs remain in place.

While a number of theories might help explain their staying power,11 part of the answer in this case relies upon how 9/11 is drawn on, explicitly and tacitly, to normalize a certain understanding and practice of American identity that condones, if not promotes, such measures.

The normalization process looks something like this: the initial attack triggers policy changes and a narrative that justifies those changes. As time passes and a new but related danger manifests, the government defends the existing policy and any alterations by drawing on elements of the original narrative, parts of which by that point have been normalized or largely accepted as true. At each of these junctures, the emotive resonance of ‘9/11’ is internalized a bit further into American identity practice, justifying a widening range of what is perceived as appropriate state action. Dissention or movement away from such types of practices is generally

11 Such as satisficing and institutional path dependency. See: Nicholson 1989, 206; Pierson 2014.

staunched by allusions to or invocations of the attacks, even years later. In this regard, the 9/11 narrative plays an important role in shoring up a variety of security practices whose exceptional nature is otherwise (perversely) being absorbed into the everyday.12

The work of this dissertation is to denaturalize the post-9/11 security measures of air travel and targeted drone strikes by revealing the moments of contingency in their development that have been papered over with a particular practice of identity via ‘9/11’. In other words, the goal here is to explain continuity by paradoxically overturning the notion of an uninterrupted and harmonious understanding of post-9/11 America. Using discourse analysis, I trace the thread of

‘9/11’ through official, media, and popular representations of the two regimes.13 I concentrate on those instances when decisions are made about who belongs and who does not, focusing on the shared expressions used to justify, delegitimize, or otherwise describe that selection process in order to demonstrate how such “articulations […] shape possibilities rather than exhaustively

[determine] them” (Jackson 2006, ix). Doing so reveals how the deployment of ‘9/11’ and the identity practices made possible by that deployment have infiltrated the everyday, lending authority to expressions of national mythmaking that serve to police acceptable ‘American’ behavior, broadening what is [largely] considered normal in a post-9/11 world.

Sites of Analysis

Why air travel and drone strikes? As Trump’s campaign rhetoric illustrates, a particular

Self/Other relationship has strengthened and solidified in the U.S. since 9/11 around the question

12 This is not to suggest that such practices are universally considered acceptable or normal. Rather, despite protest and disapproval, the practices remain part of a common post-9/11 vocabulary that is largely seen as ‘the way things are now’.

13 I explain these methods in greater detail in Chapter 3.

of who belongs and who does not. Both selected security practices look to isolate those who do not belong, to excise them from amidst the otherwise ‘innocent’ masses, or to deny them access altogether. Aviation security looks predominantly at domestic practices meant to sort out the occasional bad apple from within the ranks of Self, while the covert drone strike program does similar work overseas, sorting amongst the Other. Both policies function through intermediating technologies essential to the sorting process. Air travel security works through a number of machines designed to ferret out dangerous objects and intentions. The drone program relies on the camera lens to identify danger.

As to their relevance, according to Gallup polls, an average of 53.7% of the American population has taken a commercial flight between September 2001 and December 2015.14 Of the security policies implemented (or significantly altered) after 9/11 that bear directly on the

American public, air travel remains the most visible, frequent, and shared experience of active government intervention meant to confirm Self-hood (Salter 2008; Hall 2015). Conversely, the deployment of drones to carry out targeted strikes overseas centers on the need to find and eliminate the Other. Unlike other forms of aerial bombing, drone strikes separate the Self physically from potential targets, avoiding the risk of bodily harm to the pilot.15 Like TSA screening machines, the drone operates as a [flying] set of cameras, technology meant to sift out good from bad, civilian from militant, and dispose of – literally obliterate – the enemy Other.

Both airport security and drone strikes involve physical sites of government intervention through which identities must be mediated. While most Americans begrudgingly accept the

14 Gallup News, “In Depth: Topics A to Z; Airlines” http://news.gallup.com/poll/1579/airlines.aspx (accessed 9 February 2018)

15 Of course, this is only how piloting drones is generally perceived and characterized. A number of studies have revealed that drone pilots suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as much as deployed pilots of manned aircraft (e.g., Otto & Webber 2013).

hassle of TSA screening practices, the civil liberties debates that have arisen over the years with regard to ever-increasing forms of surveillance and intervention suggest that such practices are not ‘normal’, even if many now perceive them as such.16 Targeting ‘terrorists’ across sovereign borders half a world away via computer screen, all from the confines of a trailer in the Nevada desert, has also raised concerns about ethics and transparency. Sanctified by the U.S. government, both practices are rooted to public trust in the government to determine safe and unsafe, good and bad, Self and Other. Both sites raise the question of how identity operates to gain or promote that trust. Specifically, tracing ‘9/11’ through the air travel narrative highlights the affirmation and visualization of the Self, while doing so for the covert drone strikes narrative conversely spotlights the denial and disappearance of the Other. Brought together, the resulting genealogy of post-9/11 American identity sheds light on the ways in which certain truth claims of ‘9/11’ have bounded the space of ‘appropriate’ American-ness. It also reveals the potential malleability of those claims.

Discourse Analysis

The main empirical question of this dissertation asks how the security regimes surrounding air travel and targeted drone strikes go on the particular way they do from 2001 to

2016. To answer, I employ discourse analysis on over 4,000 ‘texts’ drawn from official, media, and popular culture sources.17 Discourse refers to a publically available system of meaning and is

16 For instance: Adam Liptak, “Civil Liberties Today,” The New York Times (7 September 2011); D. Himberger, et al. (2011), “Civil Liberties and Security” 10 Years After 9/11,” The Associated Press- NORC Center for Public Affairs Research; “The Post-9/11 Civil Liberties Debate,” Council on Foreign Relations (10 September 2012). https://www.cfr.org/interview/post-911-civil-liberties-debate (accessed 20 January 2018).

17 I justify this selection of source material in Chapter 3.

tightly interwoven with identity in critical social theory and critical constructivism.18 Indeed, discourse analysis is less a discrete method than an epistemological feature of identity studies

(Hansen 2006; Epstein 2008; Campbell 1992; Connolly 1991). Even those outside the critical theory sphere acknowledge a link between language and identity. K. J. Holsti concludes, for instance, that what one says reflects deep-seated ideological beliefs and cognitive frameworks that have a profound effect on perception, including how identities are formed, issues are determined, friends and enemies are defined, and policies chosen (2011, 383; See also:

McCrisken 2003; Widmaier 2007; McCartney 2006).

Of the multiple forms of discourse analysis, I employ Foucault’s genealogy as the most appropriate for tracing the stabilizing and disrupting effects of language on identity practice.

Foucault contends that the task of the analyst is to problematize certain conditions of the present by excavating the often-circuitous route of rhetorical commonplaces attached to events of the past.19 This genealogical route is characterized by struggles with alternative meanings and pays particular attention to the exercise of power in the production and performance of identity.

Nonetheless, discourse analysis is often criticized for being ‘relative’ or ‘subjective’ (Howarth

2000, 126-133). Although meaning-making practices are indeed socially contingent in such an approach, that does not mean that anything goes. The Self and the language, meanings, and actions that that Self uses to communicate in and with the world are always operating within a system of signifying practices; the Self already inhabits a certain “grammar” that privileges some

18 The ‘critical’ world of International Relations encompasses a wide array of meanings. I consider myself a ‘critical constructivist’ or ‘post-structuralist’ who works on topics most often categorized as ‘critical security’. The numerous distinctions are discussed in a forthcoming edited volume, Tactical Constructivism: Expressing Method in International Relations, edited by Brent Steele, Harry Gould, and Oliver Kessler (Routledge). See also the September 1990 “Special Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 34(3).

19 Rhetorical commonplaces are recurrent expressions such as ‘American values’ that nonetheless do not have a single fixed meaning (see Jackson, 2006: 30–31).

discursive formations over others (Howarth, et al. 2000, 3; See also: Wittgenstein 2009). The work of the analyst centers on revealing the boundaries of this grammar and any efforts to transgress it (Howarth, et al. 2000, 6-7).

Frequently, the mechanism doing the work in discourse analysis is the ‘speech act’

(Austin 1962; Searle 1969; Buzan et al. 1998, 26). While Austin and his followers concern themselves with the illocutory and perlocutory meanings of the spoken or written word, this dissertation employs a broader interpretation of discourse to include other forms of representation: images, sounds, and objects (Bleiker 2001; Shapiro 2013; Hansen 2011). After all, humans see themselves not as pure text (in the narrow sense) but as a congeries of audio and visual impressions (Mitchell 1994, 24). A more aesthetic approach to discourse “speak[s] of brokenness of political reality, of the fact that there will always be a gap between a particular representation and what it represents” (Bleiker 2001, 3). The point is therefore to engage with the

“political dilemmas that are entailed in the very act of representing” (ibid, 4) and the possibilities that arise or are proscribed in that process.

Significantly, and to this end, it is not just ‘talk’ that communicates. The silences in these

‘texts’ also reveal important insights into how ’9/11’ has affected (and continues to affect) the

American construction of Self. My interest lies in the spaces that inhabit the borders between these muted contestations and the prevailing discourse, between ‘language’ and its [publically perceived] absence. Exposing the otherwise tacit contours of controversy surrounding ‘9/11’ vis-à-vis these policies opens up moments of possibility when alternative historical trajectories were or might have been spoken. In this way, Jackson argues, such counter-narratives help

“establish that a change occurred and that the conditions of possibility for articulation were altered” (2006, 76-77). Doing so demonstrates the causal pathway of ‘9/11’ whereby a specific

coming-together of factors produces particular and potentially momentary understandings and expressions of American identity.20

Why focus only on widely available public discourse? My intention is not to silence those at the margins of society or to deny their importance. Rather, I seek to interrogate the broader collective meaning-making practices of ‘9/11’ that so quickly extended the definition of Self

(and ‘us’) beyond human victims or a nation, to include freedom, democracy, and Western civilization writ large. For better or worse, the discourse of the U.S. government, major media, and pop culture is and has been the engine upon which broader national and international perceptions are made and disseminated; the voice above the din that attempts to shape the nation, and perhaps the world, in its image.

Theoretical Framework

To explore the relationship between American identity and security, I combine elements of social identity theory and critical security studies to create a new theoretical framework that maps out identity practice alongside physical and ontological security concerns. While I flesh out my model in Chapter Four, I offer a brief overview here: first, I draw out the idea of identity practice as constituting the Self through boundary-making; second, I explore the security implications surrounding the construction of threat; and third, I highlight the role played by the stranger in that process, arguing that elite and mainstream representations of strangeness are an important facet of threat articulation.

20 Jackson (2016) contrasts this definition of causality with the neo-positivist proclivity for universal covering laws.

Identity practice

The term ‘identity’ does not elicit much conceptual clarity. Among social theorists, identity is typically broken down to include two fundamental components: linking and Othering.

The former states that groups are constituted by deliberately and positively linking themselves to

‘similar’ groups (Lebow 2008; Allport 1954; Brubaker & Cooper 2000). The latter posits that social identity is a mental organization around what one is not or does not wish to be, typically framed as the dialectic ‘Self/Other’ (Tajfel & Turner 1979; Brewer 1999; Mansbridge 2001; Said

1978). In this case, identity becomes a practice of differentiation that produces at its very extreme the dichotomy ‘friend/enemy’, which, according to Carl Schmitt, lies at the heart of all politics. David Campbell reiterates, “the construction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated”

(1992, 259).21 Accordingly, politics occurs at the places between identifying or locating the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’. We enact these boundaries by making use of a certain grammar to imagine the real, what Mick Dillon refers to as a process of ‘veridiction’ (2015 cf. Foucault). Identity, therefore, is the political practice of imagining the truth of the world and one’s place in it; a practice that is constantly getting re-articulated, re-envisioned, re-told, and re-enacted (Walker

1993, Dillon 2015, Adler & Pouliot 2011).

Michael Shapiro (1989) notes that these Self/Other productions are historically contingent and thus shift over time. This insight is based on Michel Foucault’s argument that identity resides in language whose meanings are never stable, thereby implying that contradiction is built into the very process of Othering (1973, 151). Correspondingly, the stories told for one another about who the Self is come to play a pivotal role in collective identity-as-

21 A number of other theorists address this notion, such as Laclau & Mouffe’s conception of political frontiers and antagonisms. For a general overview of different approaches to identity, see: Neumann 1999, 1-37.

practice by creating the context in which politics is enacted through difference (i.e., who and what the Self is not). In this vein, discourses produce identity and difference simultaneously

“because the one contains the possibility for the other” (Bach 1999, 44-55, 58; See also:

Connolly 1991).22 Furthermore, as Shapiro points out, “Whether a given aspect of social reality is a matter of contention or is regarded as natural and unproblematic, meaning is always imposed, not discovered, for the familiar world cannot be separated from the interpretive practices through which it is made” (Der Derian & Shapiro, eds. 1989, 11; See also: Epstein 2008; Howarth 2000).

Critical security

Where, when, how, and why do security threats arise? The attacks of 9/11 might in retrospect appear to represent an obvious danger, but at the time, officials, media pundits, scholars, and civilians alike were scrambling for explanations and attribution. The moment of threat articulation is thus rife with political power. Part of the larger field of critical security, securitization studies center on such moments and problematize what in/security means by examining how it is employed in political practice (Buzan et al. 1998; Wæver 2004).

Characterizing an issue as posing an existential threat to some referent object (typically the state) then legitimizes certain responses to it that are placed above the realm of normal politics in what

Agamben calls a “state of exception.”23

By shifting the focus from what threats ‘really’ are to how they are represented, securitization scholars restructure security analysis to incorporate social interactions and language as constitutive processes of identity formation. Consequently, securitization reveals

22 Derrida sees this relationship a bit differently in that a discursive subject is always interpolated within a lacking or incomplete structure, which is itself always marked by a constitutive outside or frontier.

23 Giorgio Agamben suggests that the Modern State is still tethered to the more archaic sovereign form of power, which comes to light when the State declares an emergency, giving it the impunity to decide who lives and who dies outside of traditional governing norms. Butler has applied this notion to U.S. anti-terrorism policies since 9/11, questioning whether we have constructed a state of permanent emergency. See: Agamben 1998, 2005; Butler, 2006.

how particular identities, threats, and outcomes are made possible, legitimated, or delegitimized.

This permits an interrogation into how the way the U.S. tells ‘9/11’ affects the conceptualization of the nation’s own vulnerability, which in turn is used to justify or talk about certain domestic and foreign policy responses. Moreover, securitization allows for a certain degree of flexibility in defining audience and scope so that the securitized Self of the ‘9/11’ discourse is not limited to official representations of the state but also includes representations of the patriotic nation and the populace within.24

The Stranger

Still, the production of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ is more than disembodied discourse; the Self is also corporal and references specific – tangible, corporal – individuals or groups (Butler 2006;

Rumelili 2012). Combining the physiological and intentional nature of the subject allows analysis to move beyond a narrow reading of vulnerability to include a greater awareness of the emotive and physical power associated with threat construction (Steele 2008; Mitzen 2006;

Huysmans 1998). According to Jef Huysmans (1998), incorporating such notions of ontological security25 into threat analysis upsets common understandings of Self/Other by suggesting the possibility of being both, by erasing that diacritic between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and by upending the very basis for modern political life that Carl Schmitt so explicitly referred to as the friend/enemy dialectic. The resulting anxiety over not knowing who is what is more pernicious insofar as it is not rooted to a specific imminent threat; nor is it necessarily bound in time or space. Anxiety lingers and rests upon the possibility of danger, the possibility of Otherness – the stranger amongst ‘us’.

24 These different ‘selves’ are implicit in Lene Hansen’s discussion of intertextual models and source type. See: Hansen 2006, 60-64.

25 Defined as a sense of continuity in meaning of one’s life; holding a stable sense of self (See: Giddens 1991)

The liminal spaces between Self and Other confound easy rhetorical capture. These bodies appear to look and act like ‘us’, but such appearances are misleading.26 Indeed, liminal spaces are defined by their ‘unclassability’. The stranger is by definition unknowable. As such, she remains a possibility, a potential friend or enemy. Bahar Rumelili writes, “Liminals are perceived as threats because as entities that are neither here nor there, they undermine the categorical distinctions that social structures rely on” (2012, 496). Liminals in some sense challenge a state’s legitimacy or sense of self by “existing outside of and beyond the socially pre- given structural positions” (Ibid). The liminal, therefore, bares the burden of upholding or upending a state’s ontological security. As such, this enigmatic stranger highlights a different type of fear aroused by the securitizing language of state policy. Aside from the fear of physical death – a fear of the literal power of others to inflict mortal pain on our bodies – one also has “a fear of uncertainty, of an undetermined condition. … an epistemological fear – a fear of not knowing” (Huysmans 1998, 235).

Narrating 9/11

First encapsulated in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror (GWoT) rhetoric,

‘9/11’ is the product of both the language used to describe, explain, and rationalize the event itself and the actions subsequently taken in its name. It is important to remember, however, that though the narrative derives from patterns of public discourse, it does not represent a monolithic viewpoint. Indeed, much of the narrative was (and is) contested by portions of the American public, including by the very officials responsible for formulating policy. Nonetheless, the

26 A current pop culture example of this is The Americans television drama about a Soviet sleeper cell.

influence and repetition of this narrative has implications that extend beyond just those that subscribe to it.

A substantial body of literature has already empirically traced the evolution and stabilization of the dominant discourse of 9/11 as it appeared in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks (well summarized in Jackson et al. 2011, 62-67).27 This scholarship has identified several consistent assumptions, including: terrorist attacks are acts of war; terrorism is the most serious threat of the new century; this is a new kind of terrorism that is global, religious, and more lethal; the ‘war on terror’ is proportionate, just, necessary, and defensive; and the

United States has the right to defend itself by preventive measures. These security themes are generally couched in an overarching diagnosis of the attacks: they hate us because of our values.28

Indeed, articulations of ‘9/11’ have often been situated within or insinuated into the familiar rhetoric of American Exceptionalism, which forefronts the virtues of freedom, equality, and prosperity.29 Part of the mythos’ distinction derives from the contrast between America’s normative origins and ‘traditional’ state identities predicated on common culture, language, and

27 This narrative is derived from numerous investigations of official state discourse and studies of cultural artifacts from September 2001 to February 2003. The former examine hundreds of speeches, interviews, memos, radio broadcasts, Congressional debates, and reports, while the latter examine representations from video games, comics, television shows, novels, and movies (among others).

28 Those focusing explicitly on official discourse include: R. Jackson 2005, 2011; Fierke 2005; Holland 2013; Hodges 2011; Chowdhury & Krebs 2010; MacDonald et al 2012. Cultural examinations of ‘9/11’ bridge several disciplines, from communications to literary analysis. Particularly helpful studies include: Takacs 2012; Croft 2006; and Dittmer 2005.

29 American Exceptionalism alludes to “an informal ideology that endows Americans with a pervasive faith in the uniqueness, immutability and superiority of the country’s founding liberal principles, and also with the conviction that the USA has a special destiny among nations” (Patman 2006, 964). The belief in America’s singular place in the world dates as far back as John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon promising a “shining city upon a hill,” a covenant made by God endowing America with a special purpose as ‘His chosen land’ (Edwards & Weiss, eds. 2011, 2; Stephanson 1995, 3-12). The Founding Fathers understood this providential heritage to mean that their great political experiment had universal relevance for the future of all people, a notion later reiterated by visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville (Hamilton et al. 2003; Paine 2012; Tocqueville 1994).

traditions (perhaps best conveyed by Benedict Anderson 2006). In this regard, U.S. identity is

“crucially tied to principles, those of the Declaration of Independence with its emphatic statement of self-evident truths about human equality and rights grounded in nature and nature’s

God” (Lewis 2011, 21; See also: Hartz 1991). Viewed through this particular lens, ‘9/11’ intimates that the attacks were perpetrated for reasons that are deeply embedded in the very character of the United States and thereby give America and its agents license to (re)act exceptionally (Fierke 2005, Holland 2013).30

They attacked Us because They hate Our values (Freedom, Equality, Prosperity, Democracy)

As a result…

Pervasive threat …from Them Attacks on Us spread fear of… Vulnerability …to Them

Attacks on Us led to… Loss of innocence …because of Them

Evil and barbarity Attacks on Us were A new type of terrorism …perpetrated by Them acts of… War

Figure I – 9/11 Narrative as Ideal Type

Synthesized and distilled into an ideal-type, Figure I illustrates the various discursive elements that made up the 9/11 narrative shortly after the attacks and serves as the point of departure for my own investigation. Drawing on the two principal themes of security and values, a picture of the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’ emerges. Namely, the language of ‘9/11’

30 Much like ‘9/11’ itself – the use of Exceptionalism in discourse has neither a static meaning nor a singular purpose. As Anders Stephanson notes, the underlying rhetoric serves more as a lens through which various actors, often politicians, envision and legitimize U.S. actions, regardless of what those actions are (1995, xii-xiii). Correspondingly, the same Exceptionalist language can be used by President Wilson to advocate for U.S. engagement in the League of Nations as a moral duty to spread our values, as by his opponents to argue that the U.S. must remain an exemplary state separate from the problems of the rest of the world.

creates subject-positions with implicit and explicit identity markers delineated by an extreme measure of ‘othering’. As such, the hijackers, their organization, other like-minded individuals or groups, and ultimately anyone who would harbor them (or those like them) are declared evil, inhuman, ruthless, hateful, and treacherous. This is established in direct contrast to America/ans, who are portrayed as innocent, freedom-loving victims, inherently good, compassionate, honorable, and heroic (See R. Jackson 2005, 61).

To be clear, although ‘9/11’ does have an empirically documented footprint, it never shows up as a fully formed doctrine, despite often appearing as such. Rather, ‘9/11’ is better conceptualized as a strategy of representation that is configured in particular ways to be used at particular moments to do particular work, whether consciously or not. It is a discursive commonplace (made up of other commonplaces) whose meaning is contextually bound and always in the process of negotiation. As a result, there is no essential or predetermined meaning to the attacks themselves. It also bears repeating that a discourse analysis of identity practices is not a proxy for assessing public opinion or ‘what Americans really think’. Instead, the current study offers a particular lens on a body of ‘texts’ that highlights the narrative’s role in forming the broader boundaries within which those discrete identities tend to operate.

Contribution to the Field

Security studies scholarship examining post-9/11 America falls broadly into five categories: why the attacks happened (Betts 2002); how best to wage the war on terror (Jervis

2003; Leffler 2003; Van Evera 2006); what the public thinks about it (Li & Brewer 2004;

Chanley 2002; Huddy & Feldman 2011); what has changed or stayed the same after it (Rodden

2016; Jackson 2007; Crawford 2004); and how threat and war are constructed (among others: R.

Jackson 2005; Croft 2006; Krebs & Lobasz 2007; Redfield 2009; Hodges 2011; Holland 2013;

Der Derian 2005). Asking different types of questions than I do, scholarship in the first four categories often assumes that the war on terror is a direct and logical response to the attacks of

11 September, and that the predominant threat to a liberal and democratic America is Islamic fundamentalism. More relevantly, it also tends to ignore the mechanics that help explain how continuity with regard to policy or interpretation is possible over time.31 The last category, which is often identified as ‘critical security’ and best characterized as ontologically “monist” (Jackson

2011), steps back from common assumptions about 9/11, questioning how such beliefs came about in the first place and where they lead.32

My dissertation makes two distinct contributions to this overarching literature. The first is empirical. Tracing the development and ongoing justification/acceptance of two specific post-

9/11 security practices across the lifespan of the Bush and Obama administrations adds depth to contemporary security studies by specifically addressing how such practices were made possible over time and how they might have changed but did not. While critical security studies on 9/11 do focus on how certain interpretations and threat assessments have been constructed, none thus far have specifically addressed air travel and targeted drone strikes together or across so much time. Moreover, unlike other critical security studies that seek to explain or contest the meaning(s) and stabilization of the ‘9/11’ diagnosis itself, I am more interested in what avenues of meaning have been precluded in this process over time, how, and to what effect.

The second contribution is theoretical. Within the field of critical security studies, my work contributes to theories of identity and to the growing body of work on ontological security

31 This oversight isn’t necessarily on purpose but the result of focusing on different kinds of questions.

32 Still, this type of research runs the gamut of disciplines, including political geography, culture studies, anthropology, and communications.

by reasserting the importance of liminality in both creating and securing the Self. In particular, the conceptual lens offered by the stranger compensates for the predominantly black and white nature of identity studies in IR by blurring (but not erasing) the distinctions Self/Other and friend/enemy, so that identity is seen much more as a relationship always in the process of negotiation. Locating the liminal within security narratives also acknowledges the distinct role played by anxiety in the ongoing production of Self by revealing how ontological security practices manifest in particular moments of physical insecurity. This not only helps bridge insights from both literatures, it also gives greater analytical purchase than either can on its own in examining how different emotive forms of power (fear and anxiety) get exerted in securitized discourse.

Ultimately, this dissertation aims to enrich understanding of political possibility by demonstrating the constitutive and dynamic relationship between ‘9/11’ and American identity; a relationship formulated through language. It does so by questioning the extensive degree to which America/ns have bought into, subsumed, and responded to a specific envisioning of the world as a threatening space full of threatening and potentially threatening bodies. My approach is novel in several respects: (1) it analyzes a compendium of primary sources (including official speeches, documents, hearings, and statements; media debate and commentary; and popular culture) that is most often studied separately; (2) it is longitudinal, covering September 2001 to

December 2016, which permits the identification of continuity and contestation in the narratives across two ideologically different administrations; (3) it draws commonalities and inferences from two seemingly separate post-9/11 security practices; (4) it incorporates physical and ontological understandings of security into a single identity framework; and (5) it introduces the intermediary role of the stranger to map out how identity is practiced and to what effect.

Plan of Dissertation

The dissertation proceeds as follows: Chapter Two dives into the extant critical security literature on 9/11 to set the stage for my own analysis and situate my work within the discipline.

Chapter Three details the specifics of my research design. I describe my theoretical framework in

Chapter Four and explain its value added. The next four chapters explore the empirical cases of aviation security and the covert drone strikes program. Within these regimes, I unearth the two- step process of how ‘9/11’ storytelling constructs threat (understood as embodied insecurity) and then reveals how that threat (in part) constitutes identity.33 I look to the official drone strike discourse in Chapter Five, pulling out how elements of ‘9/11’ have structured certain government identity positions. Chapter Six looks at the public narrative (that of the media and popular culture) to examine how the drone program manages to persist at times of contestation.

Next, I turn to aviation security in Chapter Seven, offering a chronology of the evolution of TSA security policies and their national debates. Chapter Eight details how parts of the public narrative have worked to normalize TSA screening, even as they critique those same practices. I conclude in Chapter Nine with reflections on the broader implications of my study and suggested avenues for future research.

33 This breakdown is stylized to the extent that the construction of a threat is not necessarily prior to the construction of identity. The two are more accurately co-constitutive and recursive.

CHAPTER TWO

9/11 and the State of the Art

“He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.” ― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.” ― China Miéville, Embassytown

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

The volume of published works on 9/11 is vast and encompasses a host of disciplines, including the arts, literature, communications, law, history, geography, and the social sciences.

Within the field of political science, many explanations of American conduct after 9/11, particularly the move to waging a global war on terror and the dramatic reshaping of domestic security, reflect an underlying logic premising that the threat has changed so therefore ‘our’ actions must change. Several general themes emerge from this literature: understanding why the attacks happened (Betts 2002; Hoge & Rose, eds. 2001); assessing and proposing how to (or not to) wage the war on terror (Jervis 2003; Leffler 2003; Van Evera 2006); judging whether subsequent state actions are legal (Duffy 2005); and determining what the public thinks about it

(Li & Brewer 2004; Chanley 2002; Huddy & Feldman 2011). In such accounts, the framing of

9/11 as an act of war widely goes unquestioned, leaving unanswered how the threat came to be determined in the first place or how particular responses were chosen amid viable alternatives.

Traditional International Relations (IR) scholarship on policy formation generally does not address – nor is it designed to address – the evolution and meaning making power of a key event, particularly over time. Research questions aimed at understanding how specific policy narratives, fears, justifications, and perceptions arise, how they are used, propagated, contested, or transcended, instead fall under a more critical constructivist/critical security framework.

Within the 9/11 corpus, a majority of this literature examines how ‘9/11’ has been constructed and to what effects (among others: R. Jackson 2005; Croft 2006; Krebs & Lobasz 2007; Redfield

2009; Hodges 2011; Holland 2013; Der Derian 2005). In answering, scholars step back from assumptions about the ‘inherent’ meaning of 9/11 or the necessity of the global War on Terror

(GWoT) and instead question how such presuppositions came about in the first place. They do so by unveiling the “discursive conditions of possibility” tied to political, social, or scholarly claims about the way the world works (R. Jackson 2011; Jackson & McDonald 2009).

While I discuss the methodological commitments inherent to “how possible” investigations in more detail in the next chapter, it is important to stress that these types of questions seek to explain and upend certain power relations taken for granted or ignored in other approaches.34 In so doing, critical security scholarship highlights the different ways in which social interactions produce ideas, norms, identities, as well as language; structures that both constrain and enable how actors – states and individuals – see the world and themselves in it.

34 Jack Holland writes, “‘How’ questions consider the process through which threats come to be thought and spoken of as ‘threats’, rather than skipping to ‘why’ they were dealt with. This enables a focus on how policy is rendered appropriate – imperative, logical and/or legitimate – while alternatives are constructed as inappropriate or even marginalized as being unthinkable” (2013, 4).

The present chapter evaluates the major themes of, contributions to, and gaps in existing critical security studies (CSS)35 literature on 9/11 in order to better situate my own work. It is organized in four parts: First, I survey how the various schools within CSS have addressed the attacks in their works. Second, I focus more specifically on what securitization has to say about

9/11 and briefly review the discursive construction of the 9/11 narrative (‘9/11’) touched on in

Chapter One. This body of work sheds important light on the power of words to influence state behavior, while at the same time highlighting those moments when the ‘inevitability’ of ‘9/11’ might have been or was contested. Third, I take a closer look at the scholarship on two specific motifs of the 9/11 narrative to highlight their ‘stickiness’ over time despite contestation or the presence of alternative narratives. Even so, I argue that extant research skirts a deeper analysis of the effects of ‘9/11’ on American identity, particularly with regard to the relationship between identity and different understandings of security. This fourth section points out where my own scholarship adds to the discipline’s theoretical and empirical understanding of post-9/11.

Three Schools of Thought

The field of critical security has been divided into three prominent schools of thought: the

Welsh, the Paris, and the Copenhagen Schools. The Welsh, or Aberystwyth, School links security explicitly to the Critical Theory work of the Frankfurt School and Gramsci.36 Their research agenda questions the use of the concept ‘national security’, since to adherents the state

35 While Ole Wæver limits the term ‘Critical Security Studies’ (or CSS) to the Welsh School, others have been more liberal with the ‘CSS’ nomenclature and use it to refer to all three schools. The terms ‘interpretivist’, ‘constructivist’, and ‘post-structural’ are perhaps more accurate for the Copenhagen School, but for shorthand’s sake, I also take a broad view of the term ‘critical’ and include all work that denaturalizes elements of traditional security studies under a larger critical (little c) umbrella. See Wæver 2004.

36 The two leading figures of the Aberystwyth School are Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones. Work that typifies this model includes: Booth 1991; Krause 1998; Krause & Williams, eds. 1997; Wyn Jones 1999; and Booth, ed. 2005.

is often part of the problem. Instead, the Welsh School aims to redefine security research as it relates to human beings, which is most clearly conceptualized through the term emancipation.37

They distinguish between ‘real’ threats to people and the alleged threats to those same people as delineated by the state. For example, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (2012) have recently attempted to explain how America has squandered the last 10 years in its ‘GWoT’. Delineating between the

‘real’ threat of terrorism as experienced by the victims of 9/11, and the manner in which the

Bush and Blair administrations have cast the threat as a demonization of the ‘Other,’ they seek to show how the state’s construction of ‘national security’ obfuscates the ‘true nature’ of the threat and ultimately makes us as individuals even more insecure.

This type of analysis highlights the eschatological elements of good versus evil that underlie the dominant representation of 9/11 as a meaningful narrative. However, it also objectivizes or naturalizes certain threats as putatively ‘real’ versus the constructed and thus politicized threats characterized by the state. Doing so privileges the former over the latter even while premising that “we are the creature of words, as well as their creators” (Booth 1991, 214).

It also ignores the constitutive relationship between individuals and the state, particularly how state representations of danger are internalized by its citizens.

Didier Bigo’s Paris School also spotlights the security of individuals over the state though does so by focusing on the ‘field’ of meanings that produce in/security.38 Bigo is particularly interested in the domestic apparatuses of control meant to implement security – such as the police and the military – what he refers to as a “transversal field” of merged

37 Emancipation here means freeing individuals from all constraints that would otherwise impede them from doing what they want. Booth and his fellows argue that once free of any restraints, humans would naturally prefer peace (Booth 1991, 319).

38 Bigo borrows Bourdieu’s conception of fields as social systems of attraction, competition, alliances and conflicts, all with particular costs to the actor (See: Bourdieu 1998).

internal/external control mechanisms (2001). Much of this literature questions how liberal states with liberal identities address insecurity on an institutional level and often reproduce it in the process (Bigo 1996, 1998, 2001). While the resultant discussion on what this means for those state identities bears on how certain domestic policies enacted after 9/11, such as the color-coded threat index and the USA PATRIOT Act, have reinforced American perceptions of threat and insecurity (Bigo 2002), it cannot offer a more comprehensive portrayal of security in America beyond practices of government control. This limits investigations of foreign policy and culture, which are not so easily disentangled from more domestic counterterrorism practices. Further, what is so interesting about 9/11 is how thoroughly the American public took up the initial official narrative and made it their own, which they have subsequently re-presented and re-tooled outside official institutions of power. Neither the Welsh nor the Paris contingents really explain how this is possible.

The Copenhagen School is most distinctly defined by its theory of securitization (e.g.

Buzan et al 1989). Like the other schools, securitization scholars problematize the definition of security, but they broaden their search for meaning across all sectors of society and with regard to all possible objects of securitization by examining how ‘security’ is employed in political practice (Wæver 2004, 8). A significant number of these works utilize discourse analysis as a means of revealing the implicit relationship between words and how we see the world. As such, words do not denote or refer to some more real condition of being. Instead, the process of naming something an issue of security permits it to become one. Securitization is therefore “the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects” (Wæver 2004, 8).

By shifting the focus from what threats ‘really’ are to how they are represented, the

Copenhagen School restructures security analysis to incorporate social interactions and language as constitutive processes of state identity formation. Consequently, securitization reveals how particular identities, threats, and outcomes are made possible, legitimated, or delegitimized. In this regard, security is seen as an ontological necessity for a state not because the state’s primary function is to safeguard against danger broadly speaking, but rather because the state only comes into meaningful being through its opposition to the Others that constitute that danger.

9/11 Storytelling and Threat Construction

A large portion of securitization scholarship on the 9/11 attacks focuses on the creation and promulgation of the Bush Administration’s subsequent ‘GWoT’ discourse. R. Jackson incorporates two elements into this co-constitutive creation process – the rhetorical and ideational elements (including symbols, such as the American flag, and the American flag lapel pin) and the associated material practices and actions (2011, 392-393). Thus, ‘9/11’ is the product of both the language used to describe, explain, and rationalize the event itself as well as the actions taken in the name of that event. Those looking at the former tend to focus on the rhetorical commonplaces ascribed to the ‘GWoT’ in order to deconstruct the ‘inevitability’ of that particular narrative and its resulting practices. These scholars have identified several consistent themes in the original ‘9/11’ narrative, including: terrorist attacks are acts of war; terrorism is the most serious threat of the new century; this is a new kind of terrorism that is global, religious, and more lethal; the ‘war on terror’ is proportionate, just, necessary, and

defensive; and the United States has the right to defend itself by preventive measures.39 These themes are derived and synthesized from numerous investigations of official state discourse and studies of cultural artifacts from 2001 to 2003. The former examine hundreds of speeches, interviews, memos, radio broadcasts, Congressional debates, and reports, while the latter examine representations from video games, comics, TV shows, novels, and movies (among others). Many of these themes are reflected in the underlying assumptions girding traditional analyses of 9/11.

And yet, such assumptions – while now experienced by many as givens – were only some possible responses in the wake of the attacks. Croft offers three alternatives that failed to gain traction in the U.S., including the ‘terrorism as crime’ narrative adopted by the European

Union,40 the ‘costs of war’ narrative, and the ‘oil politics’ narrative (2006, 113-116). Entman

(2003) also discusses how two major journalists (Seymour Hersh and Thomas Friedman) attempted to redirect U.S. focus to Saudi Arabia as a threat to national security. While their arguments gained a small following among policy makers, Entman theorizes a cascading activation model to account for how the Bush narrative still managed to overcome these alternatives. Richard Jackson notes, however, that many of these alternatives were unlikely given the pre-existing political and social climate (2011, 393). Holland reiterates this point: “Simply describing a threat and demanding its eradication is insufficient to ensure foreign policy will be possible if it is inadequately framed to mesh with the cultural and discursive terrain” (2013, 20;

See also: Balzacq 2011). Instead, he challenges the ‘given’ nature of the threat by comparing the

39 Those focusing explicitly on official discourse include: R. Jackson 2005, 2011; Fierke 2005; Holland 2013; Nabers 2012; Hodges 2011; Chowdhury & Krebs 2010; MacDonald et al 2012. Cultural examinations of ‘9/11’ bridge several disciplines, from communications to literary analysis. Particularly helpful studies include: Takacs 2012; Croft 2006; and Dittmer 2005.

40 I discuss this in greater detail further in the chapter.

U.S. response to those in the U.K. and Australia (‘coalition of the willing’). While Bush framed the attacks as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, Tony Blair highlighted the rational and responsible nature of Britain, and John Howard foregrounded Australia’s common cultural ties to the others (Holland 2012, 84; 2013).

Others have focused on how the Bush Administration first employed aspects of that narrative to support or legitimize various security policies. Krebs & Lobasz (2007), for instance, examine how coupling ‘9/11’ to the war in Iraq helped sell certain policymakers on the

“preventive” invasion. Richard Jackson (2007) does similar work linking the use of ‘9/11’ to the seeming normalization of torture in American public discourse. Accentuating the psychological repercussions, he explains how public language of the War on Terror has manipulated social fears of future attacks to justify military action in the name of ‘counterterrorism’. Similarly, Paul

Saurette (2006) focuses on the crucial role played by humiliation and counter-humiliation in constructing American global policy post-9/11. Domestic policies such as the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act have also been rooted to ‘9/11’ (Jackson 2011; Mabee 2007).

Importantly, the influence of ‘9/11’ goes beyond state policymaking to include effects on the American population more broadly. This ‘domestic level’ impact highlights that ‘9/11’ was not solely a tool employed by the Bush administration to achieve certain ends. In fact, although first emanating from official discourse, elements of ‘9/11’ were quickly adopted and adapted by a majority of America shortly after the attacks. Public appropriation is reflected in the considerable role subsequently played by ‘9/11’ in American popular culture, producing what

Richard Jackson calls a “cultural grammar” that has institutionalized, normalized, and embedded a particular understanding of the attacks in the American consciousness (2011, 390). For instance,

film and television portrayals and allusions to 9/11 naturalize certain threat identities, particularly that of Arabs and Muslims (Alsultany 2012; Dodds 2008; Holland 2011; Tanguay

2013).

These cinematic representations also project a specific image of American identity in diametric opposition to the ‘terrorist Other’, which reinforces the narrative of American innocence, integrity, and benevolence. In one such instance, Holland (2011) traces the pedagogical overtones of a special episode of The West Wing that aired several weeks after 9/11, which sought to ‘teach’ viewers how to understand the otherwise incomprehensible attacks by associating the Taliban with Hitler. In this vein, Carol Winkler (2006) makes an interesting theoretical observation about the term ‘terrorism’ itself – that it is a negative signifier that allows for – if not necessitates – an implicitly positive affirmation of American-ness in its usage. The result of such deployments, whether verbal, auditory, or visual, is a restriction on the psychic space for public debate and meaning contestation (Takacs 2012; Möller 2007).

Ultimately, this body of work provides a rich and thorough exploration of how ‘9/11’ was constructed shortly after the attacks, to what purpose, and to the exclusion of which alternative explanations. By questioning the inevitability of the resultant story of what happened that day, what it means, and how it gets used, these scholars have laid much of the groundwork for my understanding of ‘9/11.’ However, the nature and constitution of the narrative’s relationship with

American identity remains underdeveloped and leaves open areas for further research.

Uncontested Territory?

Two different observations drawn from the securitization of 9/11 deserve further scrutiny as a means of highlighting the constructed nature of the narrative and, hence, its un-inevitability.

The first observation explores the framing of 9/11 as a traumatic rupture of world history, time, and progress. The second contrasts the historical response to terror as a crime with the Bush

Administration’s characterization of 9/11 as an act of war. Understanding the success of the first helps explain the failure of the second and showcases how elements of ‘9/11’ have endured or relaxed over time.

‘9/11’ as Traumatic Rupture

For its part, the Bush Administration forcefully argued that after that fateful morning,

“night fell on a different world.”41 A few days after the attack, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated on Meet the Press that, ‘‘9/11 changed everything. It changed the way we think about threats to the United States. It changed about [sic] our recognition of our vulnerabilities. It changed in terms of the kind of national security strategy we need to pursue.” Even Francis

Fukuyama, the academic famous for declaring the end of history, admitted that “world politics, it would seem, shifted gears abruptly after September 11th.”42

According to numerous critical security scholars, however, framing the attacks as a violent temporal rupture is problematic. Rendering 9/11 to be, as Cheney said, “a day like no other we have ever experienced,”43 the Bush Administration urged the American public (and, to a degree, the world) to memorialize the date as a fundamental breaking point between life pre-

9/11 and life afterwards (Jarvis & Lister 2015, 16-17). Doing so, according to Maya Zeyfuss, helped establish ‘9/11’ as “the root, the cause, the origin” of the 9/11 afterlife, but one that –

41 George W. Bush, Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001.

42 Francis Fukuyama (2001-2), “Their Target: The Modern World,” Newsweek 138(25): 42-43.

43 Richard B. Cheney, Remarks given at the 56th Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, New York City, 18 October 2001.

crucially – was therefore portrayed as unprovoked (2003, 520). Any antecedent relationship between U.S. policies and al Qaeda that might have shed light on why 9/11 happened was effectively erased, rendered irrelevant, in the process (ibid). Similarly, Holland and Jarvis (2014,

188) write that the attacks are “positioned … as unforeseen, unpredicted, an event almost, if not entirely, sui generis.” Harmonie Toros suggests that one effect of the temporal rupture narrative has been a sort of imperial U.S. conquest of world time. Asma Barlas refers to this as an “abuse of memory” in that it is the ‘American’ memory of 9/11 that dominates, crowding out any other traumatic experiences associated with that particular date (2011, 728). As stated by Barlas, the

U.S. claims moral priority of victimhood partially because of widespread acceptance of ‘9/11’ as a (if not the) watershed moment in contemporary history (ibid, 730). In other words, “America had declared the new age: and that declaration would structure security and foreign policy for the world” (Croft & Moore 2010, 822).

Moreover, the status of the attacks as both exceptional and a fundamental breach of what came before is, according to the critical security literature, “relatively uncontested” by the

American public, which has had serious consequences for policy responses (Holland & Jarvis

2014, 188). Questioning the absolutist understanding of 9/11 and terrorism more broadly, Jacob

Stump and Priya Dixit (2012, 207) call for a specific exploration into “how social actors use the category of ‘terrorism’ to make sense of and act” in the world. Some of the breadth of this work is highlighted above in the survey of CSS. But more specifically, as Richard Jackson argues, this call necessitates an effort at “critical destabilization” (2009, 77) of the assumptions that sustain

‘9/11’ as a fundamental temporal rupture in the first place. Moreover, Jackson and others demonstrate that much of terrorism discourse actually is sustained around temporal tropes (See also: Hutchings 2007). For instance, comparing 9/11 to Pearl Harbor helps situate the 2001 terror

attacks within a historical timeline (Angstrom 2011).44 Similarly, contrasting the barbarity, savagery, and backwardness of the “troglodytes” in Afghanistan to the innocent, progressive, and freedom-loving victims of ‘Western civilization’ equally distinguishes 9/11 as temporal and traumatic moment of rupture (Solomon 2015, 73; Cloud 2004).

Holland and Jarvis (2014) argue that the endurance of the temporal rupture scripting can be mapped in four stages. The shock that helped institutionalize the attacks as rupture centers on the widely shared belief that U.S. geography had up until then isolated America/Americans from the violence of the rest of the world.45 That myth, even if predicated on a faulty reading of history, augmented the sense of vulnerability voiced so poignantly on 9/11 by members of the public, media personalities, and officials alike (Holland & Jarvis 2014, 192; Tom Brokaw Today

Show, “This is Fortress America”). This, coupled with an initial lack or void of words/meaning to describe the attacks, to make sense of what was happening (Holland 2009; Morris 2004, 401;

Derrida/Borradori 2003, 85-90; Der Derian 2002, 175; Solomon 2012) both reiterate the notion of a break with history; fracture. The subsequent narrative proffered by Bush and his administration filled that void by underpinning the attacks as a transformational and irreversible moment in U.S. history – one that closed the door on the post-Cold War unipolar ‘peace’ and opened another on the war on terror.

Of course, multiple sections of society have strongly contested the notion that 9/11 marked a unique rupture in American history or identity. Indeed, numerous academics argue that the policies themselves may look different, but they reflect well established trends originating

44 Despite equating 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, the dominant rhetoric still generally separated the two based on type of target and location, with 9/11 being even more exceptional for taking place on the mainland, using commercial aircraft as giant bombs, and primarily targeting civilians. See: Connor 2010.

45 Holland & Jarvis quote Jefferson’s inaugural address: “Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high minded to endure the degradations of the other” (2014, 192).

years, decades, and sometimes even centuries beforehand. Robert Jackson (2007, 297), for instance, cites 9/11 as an example of the Hobbesian assertion of sovereign state power, wherein the state became both “protector and safe haven” to its constituents. He adds that despite the awkwardness of declaring war on an idea, the subsequent enacting of that war has largely retained the traditional conceptualization of war as being perpetrated on and by sovereign states

(298; See also: Litwak 2007, 16). Similarly, John Mueller (2004) points out that the broader trend of abating interstate warfare persists, even as the globe divides itself up into ‘rogue states’ vs. ‘coalition against terror’. Neta Crawford also sees much continuity between George W.

Bush’s foreign policy and other post-Cold War policies; namely, a move towards a global, unilateral, and imperial strategy that establishes military dominance under the guise of multilateralism (2004, 686).

Furthermore, scholars argue that U.S. vulnerability wasn’t much different afterward.

Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Nicholas Rengger assert, “9/11, rather than heralding a new era in world politics, was merely symptomatic of certain key aspects of world politics” (2006, 540). In this way, they characterize the Iraq War as unfinished business from the first Gulf War (1990-91) more than a product of the war on terror. Further contesting the idea that the Bush Doctrine is radically new, they write, “In the context of the relevance of ‘hard power’ and specifically in connection with the use of force, there is no reason to believe that 9/11 is anything other than epiphenomenal: important certainly, but not transformative (ibid, 549).

Ultimately, a number of scholars agree that the one major result of 9/11 has been the unquestionable belief that everything has changed (Kennedy-Pipe & Rengger 2006). Rooting its origins squarely in the Bush Administration, Kennedy-Pipe and Rengger warn that such a belief has led to the serious erosion of the liberal values upon which the nation was founded (ibid).

Melvyn P. Leffler (2003, 1048-49) admits that perceptions of U.S. vulnerability did change dramatically after 9/11, if not in reality. He and a number of others argue that this change has been driven by the institutionalization and normalization of fear, and by a shift in understanding

‘imminent’ to mean ‘immanent’.

Stemming from the belief that the U.S. and global U.S. interests are permanently under threat because terrorists are always ready to strike, fear changes the political calculus that has historically divided war from peace (Robin 2004; Van Rythoven 2015). Moreover, fear changes the ethics of ‘freedom’. According to Bush, Osama bin Laden attacked the United States because he hated our freedoms and what we stand for. This helped gear the narrative towards a showdown between Islamist terrorists, on the one hand, and freedom itself, on the other. At the same time, the ‘freedom’ side has fought in this ‘war’ by limiting those very civil liberties as a necessary practice of counterterrorism. A collective sense of vulnerability has thus been instrumental in gaining public support for ongoing domestic security practices and for pushing the post-9/11 foreign policy agenda of military expansion and external intervention (Gibbs 2004,

320). But it has also fostered a broader social identity framework predicated on particular notions of who ‘we’ are vis-à-vis ‘them’.

While such critiques demonstrate that the ‘9/11’ notion of rupture wasn’t inevitable or self-evident, the framework persists. For instance, even though Obama purposely eschewed the expression ‘war on terror’ and actively sought to unite Americans towards what he framed ‘a reclamation’ of American values, he, too, drew on temporal imagery. Speaking at the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Obama said:

Ten years ago, America confronted one of our darkest nights. Mighty towers crumbled. Black smoke billowed up from the Pentagon. Airplane wreckage smoldered on a Pennsylvania field. Friends and neighbors; sisters and brothers; mothers and fathers; sons

and daughters – they were taken from us with heartbreaking swiftness and cruelty. On September 12, 2001, we awoke to a world in which evil was closer at hand, and uncertainty clouded our future.46

The persistence of this motif suggests that certain elements of ‘9/11’ have sunk deep into the national conscience. As I will demonstrate later, the mechanism of that subsumption is an identity practice that casts actors into the role of Self or Other, the consequences of which extend beyond presidential oration to include state security practices.

Terrorism as Crime

The second observation drawn from the securitization of 9/11 focuses on the distinction between terrorism-as-crime and terrorism-as-war. Nine days after Flight 93 crashed in a field in

Shanksville, Pennsylvania, with television cameras still aimed on the smoldering rubble and the rescue/recovery efforts at Ground Zero and the Pentagon,47 George W. Bush took to the podium in front of a joint session of Congress and told the nation that a new age had dawned of “a world where freedom itself is under attack;” that the war on terrorism had begun. He went on to say that the enemies of freedom who started this war deserved no compunction; they were evil.

Moreover, the President admonished, these evil men were not alone: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the

United States as a hostile regime.”

46 Remarks at “a Concert for Hope” Washington, DC: Kennedy Center, 11 September 2011. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/11/remarks-president-concert-hope

47 The term, “Ground Zero” is itself revealing and connotes a resetting of the historical clock alongside the denoted reset of physical space.

A decade and a half later, the ‘war on terror’ has become at once obvious, a meme, an eye roll, never-ending, inevitable. However, despite some imagery and rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism as a tactic long predates al Qaeda’s attack on 11 September 2001. Indeed, domestic attacks in the U.S. – Oklahoma City, the Atlanta Olympics – not to mention recent overseas attacks by al Qaeda on U.S. military and diplomatic assets indicate that the U.S. had already been dealing with terrorism long before declaring a war on it. Moreover, numerous countries have had long histories of addressing acts of terror. Stuart Croft and Cerwyn Moore, for instance, highlight the United Kingdom’s struggle with the Irish Republican Army, which had always been framed through the language of crime (2010, 823-824). Akin to the temporal rupture analogy, Ronald

Crelinsten (2009, 2014) distinguishes between pre- and post-9/11 counterterrorism. The former works within existing domestic law, while the later emphasizes military responses that have the potential to supersede existing law as exceptional circumstances. Crelinsten (2009, 52) argues that the benefit of the criminal framework was its success at delegitimizing the terrorist:

By criminalizing the acts that terrorists commit, emphasis is placed upon their criminal nature and not on their political or ideological motive. In this way, the terrorist’s claim to be acting in the name of a higher purpose is undermined and the means by which s/he attempts to achieve these higher goals is stigmatized.

Ian Shapiro echoes this sentiment, arguing that the criminal framework denies any sort of political legitimacy to the perpetrator, which is otherwise a large component of what ‘terrorists’ seek (2007, 13). In this vein, Croft offers a counterfactual, arguing that framing 9/11 as an attack perpetrated by an illegal organization that sustained itself through illicit activities such as drug smuggling or money laundering would not have resulted in an ideological war, but in a series of police actions and tactics (2006, 114).

Up until 11 September 2001, terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were tried and convicted in criminal court, not military tribunals. Shapiro conjectures that the scope of the 9/11 attacks, not to mention the symbolism of the selected targets, made a comparable legal response highly unlikely and politically unpopular (2007, 17). In this way, 9/11 as a war on terror “has thus achieved the status of a background narrative” whereby public debate over what type of problem terrorism is falls away in favor of one that must be addressed by war (ibid). The martial interpretation of the attacks, later espoused in the Bush Doctrine, elevated ideological and Manichean thinking beyond just the actual 9/11 attacks to incorporate a broader understanding of post-9/11 time as a new era of insecurity and danger (Agamben 2005). As Croft shows through news media and popular culture in the several years after the attacks, the new

“enemy” was discursively rendered substantively different than terrorists of old – more ruthless, evil; sophisticated yet barbaric; qualifiers that helped justify an exceptional response to an exceptional problem (2006, 69-70; See also: Butler 2006).48

The discursive separation of the 9/11 terrorists and their ilk from those who came before

– as noted by numerous academic investigations of official speeches, public responses, and cultural representations – also derives from the traumatic rupture narrative. Trauma, in this sense, is constructed as an experience outside of language (“void of meaning”) that thereby elicits a strong emotive response that attempts to reestablish rigid parameters for right and wrong (Edkins

2002; 2003). Criminalizing acts of terror, rendering them aberrant but banal (the opposite of exceptional), might have indeed diminished the psychological power given to al Qaeda following the attacks, but doing so could not speak to the broader public experience – egged on by official framing – of traumatic rupture, an attack ‘never before seen on this scale’ (Sofaer 2002, 257). Ty

48 Solomon is clear to note that there were other antecedents to this exceptional thought process, including the role of American hegemony, a belief in the efficacy and moral superiority of the military, and the power of American Exceptionalist rhetoric (2015, 74).

Solomon (2015) notes that any possibility of treating 9/11 as a crime was overwhelmed by the construction of the attacks as a specific and personal repudiation of U.S. identity.

Obama, for his part, attempted to return the U.S. to a more legalistic basis for prosecuting terrorists. One of his first major tests came after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013.

Given the wide terrain of the bombing narrative – Chechen roots, foreign travel, Jihadism, weapons of mass destruction, difficulty of unmasking lone wolves – some politicians fell back into a familiar 9/11 narrative that called for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be treated as an enemy combatant and interrogated (e.g. John McCain, Peter King, Lindsay Graham, Kelly Ayotte).

Interestingly, however, the ‘enemy combatant’ storyline failed to gain traction amongst the broader press and public. In fact, most commentary praised President Obama for insisting that

Tsarnaev be tried in a civilian criminal court and given his Miranda rights.49 Indeed, much of the public and media response to the marathon attack specifically pointed out that the U.S. had matured and learned from its excesses following 9/11;50 that the U.S. respects the rule of law and the American justice system; that the U.S. can respond to the new nature of terrorism capably and within the bounds of international norms and law; and that the U.S. response to Boston will contest the panicked thinking associated with 9/11 and the traumatic rupture of American identity.51

Interestingly, according to the non-profit Human Rights First, despite the War on Terror rhetoric and discursive framing of 9/11 as an exceptional act of war, there have been 668 federal court convictions of individuals charged with terrorism since 9/11, compared to only five

49 A specific statute made legal after 9/11 still permits the FBI and other law enforcement to question a suspect before Mirandizing them when there is a credible threat of imminent danger.

50 What Jeffrey Goldberg and others called America’s “overreaction after 9/11” (Meet the Press, 21 April 2013).

51 “Federal and State Courts can Capably Try Tsarnaev,” Boston Globe, 23 April 2013.

successfully convicted in military tribunals.52 The Obama Administration is often given credit for attempted to turn away from military commissions, despite persistent pushback from some sections of the American public.53 However, Donald J. Trump has voiced his preference for military trials, calling civilian courts “a joke and a laughing stock” with regard to prosecuting terror.54 Regardless, the point is that the initial repudiation of a criminal framework under the

Bush Administration was not the only way to play things out. As both Obama and U.S. allies indicate, the rule of law is not antithetical to fighting terror; it is perhaps essential to that struggle.

Indeed, legal analyses of non-state actors like al Qaeda tend to categorize attacks like 9/11 as criminal actions rather than “violations against the Westphalian system of states” (Rogers and

Hill 2014, 107).

‘9/11’ Moving Forward

‘9/11’ and its derivative (global) War on Terror (‘GWoT’ or ‘WoT’) still play a leading role in TV shows, movies, and other cultural artifacts; Events like the Boston Marathon attack reiterate or revive fears of imminent threat; Edward Snowden’s outing of the NSA brings to the fore questions of security versus civil liberty; ISIS is able to recruit four teenage girls from

Colorado, etc. In all instances, 9/11 still factors into the discourse used by officials, the media, and popular culture to contextualize these issues. Consequently, the degree to which ‘9/11’

52 Karen J. Greenberg, “Prosecuting Terrorists in Civilian Courts Still Works,” The Atlantic (20 November 2017). https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/isis-trump-terrorist-obama-court-military- guantanamo/546296/ (accessed 15 February 2018).

53 Bret E. Brooks, “Military Tribunals vs. Criminal trials: A Different Perspective,” Foreign Policy (30 March 2010).

54 Comments made at a Cabinet meeting on 1 November 2017, referring to the arraignment of the ISIS-sympathizer Sayfullo Saipov, who ran down a number of pedestrians in a rented truck in NYC. See: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/358275-trump-us-justice-system-a-laughing-stock-joke (accessed 15 February 2018).

guides the American vision of the world and America’s place in it remains an important area of research, especially since the U.S. still controls much of what happens around the globe.

While the critical security literature clarifies how 9/11 initially became ‘9/11’, as well as the effects of that rendering, few studies have traced the themes of the narrative discursively through to the present. Doing so helps assess the narrative’s stability as well as the relationship between any shifts in the discourse and security practices. Further, the ‘9/11’ literature lacks a more explicit and thorough analysis of American identity. Even though securitization is predicated on a certain understanding and representation of state identity, the resulting research has a tendency to do one of three things. First, few studies combine analyses of both ‘official’ public statements (the domain of most IR literature) and cultural references. Currently, the ramifications of ‘9/11’ on identity are usually illustrated either at the state level or at the more individual/domestic level. Yet, incorporating social representations typically outside the realm of

[high] politics more fully addresses how a dominant narrative of 9/11 has been institutionalized/embedded into the wider American identity landscape.

Second, existing literature often inadvertently assumes a sort of stasis in identity formation from the initial moment of threat articulation. But if identity construction is synonymous with discursive boundary making, a claim made by most securitization scholars, it stands to reason that state identity would change as discourses and policies do. The objective is therefore not to ‘reveal’ what a specific identity is (i.e., “American-ness post-9/11 is X”), but rather to suggest that examining American identity as a practice foregrounds how the U.S. has come to make sense of the world and its place in it after (and more often than not, through) 9/11.

And third, the current understanding of identity is based largely on defining security threats as discrete ‘Others’ or foreign bodies (Neumann 1992; Onuf 1989). Such analyses place too much

emphasis on the empowerment of distinct physical threats at the expense of the more abstract psychological ramifications of security discourse (Kinnvall 2004; Steele 2008; Huysmans 2011).

Increasing concern for the latter gives more explanatory purchase to identity, particularly as it is understood in the securitization literature to be both the impetus for and the product of state action. In the next chapter, I turn specifically to identity practice and its relationship to different notions of security.

CHAPTER THREE

Discourse and Relational Causality

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. John 1:1, King James Bible

‘When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Words seemed to fail much of America on 11 September 2001.55 In their place were gaping mouths, gasps, tears, and screams, followed by a hollow numbness, a black hole mirroring those newly formed in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon; many throats scorched like the burning fields in Shanksville. In fact, words literally failed that morning as the cellular system and phone lines became overwhelmed from overuse and crashed. This shocked silence – this absence of words – is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its

[perceived] rarity. If language is the gateway through which human beings process and understand the world, then without it, how can we possibly make sense of what is happening?

Many argue that the images of 9/11, the visual experience, rendered witnesses and viewers mute by the sheer audacity of the attacks, ‘unprecedented’ in nature and scope. That such iconic pillars of the NYC skyline could thunder down into rubble around our feet first seemed ludicrous, outside the realm of perceived possibility. Even the initial news reports of the

55 James Der Derian comments that even in academia this time period was marked by silence and absence of debate (2002, 175, 181). He suggests that the shock of the attacks left a void of comprehension and a longing for some sense of common purpose and understanding.

attack assumed pilot error, some sort of accident involving a Cessna. Was 9/11 different or worse than other national or international catastrophes? In many ways, the answer doesn’t matter. As indicated in the previous chapter, what matters is that 9/11 is often portrayed as unprecedented, a breaking point, the dawn of a new era; a portrayal that gathered form and substance later that night as President Bush sat in the Oval Office and addressed a grieving nation: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.” He continued,

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.

How was it possible for the United States to go from this reaffirmation of its liberal soul to waging two of the nation’s longest wars and restructuring the very notion of security away from social liberties both domestically and abroad?

Roxanne Doty reminds us that answering such how-possible questions means investigating “practices that enable social actors to act, to frame policy as they do, and to wield the capabilities they do” (1993, 299). These practices only come into consequential being via discourse, which Foucault defines as “historically specific systems of meaning which form the identities of subjects and objects” (1972, 49). Importantly, such discursive systems confine the possibility of interpretation to its own borders, making alternative meanings that lie outside its parameters unlikely or even im-possible to think.

At the same time, how-possible discourse analysis is also able to circumvent standard questions of intentionality, of somehow discovering what an actor ‘is really thinking’. Meaning produced through discourse does not depend on an actor’s goals, desires, or perceptions.

Language, once spoken or otherwise shared, does not itself distinguish between true and not true; rather, by adhering to certain socially constructed rules, it creates “a theoretical horizon” from which certain truth claims appear more valid than others (Howarth et al. 2000, 3). Bearing this in mind, if the actions of 9/11 appeared to give birth to a different global reality as many argue, then the discourse surrounding those attacks served as indispensible midwife. To understand how

9/11 made America’s ‘new’ self possible, therefore, is to understand how the narrative(s) of 9/11 has been practiced.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the ontological commitments inherent to an interpretivist model. I then explain why discourse analysis -- and Foucauldian genealogy in particular -- is the most appropriate methodology for this project. I follow with a closer explanation of my methods and a justification of my sources.

Interpretivist Model

Those who situate themselves outside neo/positivism do so under a number of different labels: interpretivism, relational, post-positivism, reflexive, and sometimes even just critical constructivism (Kubálková et al. 1998, 18-20). No matter the designation, this body of work contests the notion that the units of analysis in IR are discrete material entities with stable attributes that exist independent of the social world (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 291). As such, interpretivist scholarship is predicated on a monistic outlook, positing that social reality is intersubjective: all that is humanly knowable of and in the world is determined through the course of social relations (Wittgenstein 1953, Hacking 1999; Jackson 2011). By examining these interactions, the scholar is able “to grasp the process through which such relations are aggregated and used to stabilize and reify some other relations as making up an entity or thing” (Sending et

al 2015, 7).56 The result is a rejection of mechanistic causal explanations in favor of “heuristic focal points used by the researcher to make sense of social life” (Pouliot 2010, 64).

The predominant view of causation in the social sciences hews closely to that of the physical sciences. The objective “is the production of universal laws, theories that in Popperian terms are falsifiable” and can explain phenomena in such a way as to demonstrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for event X to happen (Howarth 2000, 126). Alternative methodologies in the interpretivist camp have generally satisfied themselves with descriptive analysis alone.

However, the definition of ‘causal’ need not be limited to statistical validation and reproduce- ability across cases. Instead, ‘to cause’ something to happen might easily also refer to the way a particular combination of temporally and spatially bound inputs (never to be repeated again in exactly the same way) leads to a particular incident. Patrick T. Jackson (2016) locates this distinction in the difference between causal claims and causal explanations. The former “is a more or less precise estimate of [an] impact estimated across cases,” while the latter “uses that estimate to show that the observed outcome was to be expected in light of the value of the input(s)” (ibid, 3).

An interpretivist explanation, therefore, cannot be evaluated in the same manner as a claim deriving from the perspective of mind-world dualism. Instead, value is measured on the explanation’s logical consistency and fidelity to the theoretical and analytical assumptions guiding the research. Three of those underlying assumptions include: (1) the reality under investigation could have gone another way(s); (2) facts are always subjective, hence,

56 David McCourt takes this a step further by explicitly coupling ‘relational’ with the ‘practice turn’ to “[foreground] process over fixity” in social explanations (2016, 479). I don’t think this is absolutely necessary, however, insofar as ‘practice’ is already implied in the notion of process, particularly if the scope of investigation extends across time. See also: “Seizing Constructivist Ground? Practice and Relational Theories,” ISQ Online Symposium (http://www.isanet.org/Publications/ISQ/Posts/ID/5473/Seizing-Constructivist-Ground-Practice-and-Relational- Theories).

constructed; and (3) patterns of stability require more explanation than patterns of change, since social interactions are by definition variable across time (Hacking 1999, 68-92). The resulting causal explanations, although far more limited in scope, stem from a search for “contingent practices that have historically made a given social fact possible” (Pouliot 2010, 64). Central to this distinction is the role of counterfactuals, the “rather than,” as Jackson puts it. He continues,

“If we don’t have a sense of what the ‘rather than’ consists of, we have no way to evaluate whether an explanation is a good one, or whether it actually answers the question asked” (2016,

19).

Knowledge production is thus the analysis of a “situationally specific configuration of factors” that causally leads to a certain observed outcome, if it is hard to plausibly conceive of that configuration NOT producing the outcome in question (Jackson 2011, 200-201). These

“analytical narratives” are derived from a comparison of the ideal typical to observed phenomenon. As a result, interpretivist explanations are what Jackson calls ‘adequate’ and what

Max Weber refers to as ‘single causal analysis’. For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of hypothetical concepts in the abstract. An ideal type is therefore not meant to refer to perfect things, moral ideals, nor to statistical averages but rather to stress certain elements common to most cases of the given phenomena. In this way, ideal types are idea-constructs that help put the chaos of social reality in order (Weber 1949, 90).

Uniting discourse and ideal types into a single framework means believing that the specific way in which language and social practices come together at any given time generates an equally specific outcome that would not result given a different combination of words, a different context in which they are presented, or a different timeframe (Tilly 1995; Jackson 2014,

279). The ‘rather than’ is very important here, since it becomes the scholar’s job to locate these

moments of possibility, when alternative historical trajectories were or might have been spoken.

In this way, Jackson argues, such counterfactuals help “establish that a change occurred and that the conditions of possibility for articulation were altered” (2006, 76-77). Causal explanation here is empirical, not analytically or theoretically pre-determined or predictive. This is the ontological foundation upon which the dissertation rests.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis plays a critical role in interpretivst methods, since language (in its broadest sense) is the primary vehicle with which we think, perceive, and navigate our social existence. A mind-world monist does not believe, therefore, that the Self can be extricated from language, meanings, and interpretations of the world. In this way, language is not an autonomous entity that connects an individual to an external truth. Rather, language serves as a sort of code or structure whose parts derive their meaning from their relationship with one another. As a result,

‘how possible’ questions place emphasis on the linguistic repertoires through which a particular identity practice is produced and validated over competing alternatives. Tracing and analyzing the specific performances of these repertoires via discourse analysis underscores the process of meaning making and the possibility of alternative trajectories. It is therefore the best means available to investigate how we understand something to be true or valid at any given moment.57

Consequently, the study of language and discursive practices more generally emphasizes three factors often missing from neo/positivist political analysis: (1) it questions underlying and taken-for-granted assumptions; (2) it focuses attention on the relationship between power and the production of knowledge in identity construction; and (3) it shows how the processes of identity

57 Michael Shapiro refers to this as “modes of reality making” (1989, 14).

formation shift over time – that “the ‘fixing’ or the ‘stability’ of the language examined is temporary and often an analytical convenience” (Stump and Dixit 2013, 110).

Using discourse as a tool with which to engage the political world routinely engenders strong reactions among other political scientists (cf. Bernstein, et al. 2000). Often these critics dismiss discourse analysis because they believe such scholarship is akin to conceptual and moral relativism, which prevents such work from making validity claims or objective value judgments

(Keohane 1989, 249-250; Howarth 2000, 13). Indeed, they fault discourse for only concentrating on linguistic texts and practices, which they believe divorces ideas from social reality and implies that there are no constraints on social and political action (Hansen 2006, 45).

However, for poststructuralists and other interpretivists who argue that we are always within a world of signifying practices and relationships, discourse does not imply that ‘anything goes’, nor does it reduce the social world to a bundle of words or texts. On the contrary, such an approach “seeks to … discern the representational practices that construct the ‘world’ of persons, places and modes of conduct and to inquire into the network of social practices that give particular modes of representation their standing” (Shapiro in Der Derian & Shapiro 1989, 71).

Lene Hansen more explicitly advises,

Analytically, the construction of identity should therefore be situated inside a careful investigation of which signs are articulated by a particular discourse or text, how they are coupled to achieve discursive stability, where instabilities and slips between these constructions might occur, and how competing discourses construct the same sign to different effects (Hansen 2006, 42).

Furthermore, social practices are contextual and rule-driven (Onuf 1989), meaning that discourse is never ‘immaculately conceived’. Rather, we always operate within a certain pre- existing “grammar” that, as John Shotter notes, not only constrains our view, but constrains our ability to view: “we can only look according to the opportunities for looking afforded us by our

surroundings, [so] there must always be a grammar in our looking” (2008, 77; See also

Wittgenstein §133; and Jackson 2011, 138). Foucault calls this a “regime of practice,” without which we would never be able to communicate or make sense of the world (1991, 75).58 Such regimes obviate the charge that discourse theory reduces everything to an idealized version of language. As Heidegger and Wittgenstein suggest, it is logically self-contradictory to imagine the possibility of somehow getting beyond or outside these systems of meaning.

Genealogy

The field of discourse analysis encompasses a variety of specific methods that each focus on slightly different epistemological interpretations of how the world works. Since I am interested in how the power of ‘9/11’ has been (and continues to be) exercised on identity through time, my research follows in the path of Foucauldian genealogy. While any discourse analysis assumes a certain degree of normative commitment from the analyst, Foucault’s bottom- up process is not necessarily focused on revealing underlying ideologies or calling for social emancipation from them, objectives more characteristic of the alternative frameworks of Laclau

& Mouffe’s post-Marxism or Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. Rather, “In every case genealogy disturbs what was thought solid and reveals the contingency behind all apparent necessity” (Fairfield 2011, 176; See also: Howarth 2000, 72-73). This contingency betrays the use of power, even as that power often hides behind and is served by the appearance of permanence and inevitability.59 Bent Flyvbjerg elaborates,

The researcher’s methodology must take account of the complex and unstable process according to which discourses can be both an instrument of power and its effect, but also an obstacle, a point of resistance or a starting point for a counterposing strategy.

58 Here I think of Wittgenstein’s discussion of games or “Slab!” See: §6-§20; §66-§71.

59 As Kevin Dunn (2008, 80) notes, “power is the practice of knowledge as a socially constructed system, within which various actors articulate and circulate their representations of ‘truth’.” See also: Flyvbjerg 2001, 115.

Discourses thus transfer and produce power. They reinforce power, but they also subvert and conceal it, make it fragile and contribute to obstructing power (2001, 124).

Broadly speaking, therefore, genealogy questions certain aspects of the present by tracing the tortuous path of rhetorical commonplaces from the past. The use of these commonplaces within a discourse – the twists and turns in meaning or usage – represent a form of power in crafting who ‘we’ are in contrast to a ‘them’. They “construct the space for ‘our’ legitimate activity, and the space for the behavior we will (and will not) tolerate from ‘them’” (Croft 2006,

1). Indeed, by “stepping into a particular subject-position carved out by a discourse, in taking on the ‘I/we’ of that discourse,” the analyst is best able to unearth how an actor’s identity is constituted and performed in a specific way (Epstein 2008, 15).

The genealogist’s process is necessarily one of careful documentation and “continuous disruption” of the edifices of meaning that create and constrain individual and collective identity practice (Shapiro 1992, 1-2). The particular Self/Selves that emerge from this project are not the result of a teleological or Hegelian evolution of consciousness, but rather the results and instantiations of power. Moreover, unlike Foucault’s earlier archeological approach, genealogy is not the search for origins, nor is it the excavation of a society’s linear progression. Rather, genealogists reveal the often contradictory pathways through which knowledge and ‘truth’ travel at the behest of power, all “in an attempt to show that the ‘now’ is an unstable victory won at the expense of other possible nows” (Shapiro 1992, 12).

The benefits of such a process are threefold: first, it helps highlight the means by which actors attempt to fortify and reproduce certain narratives to appear as if they held some intrinsic truth (Jackson 2006, 44). Second, drawing attention to these discursive practices also reveals the underlying fragility and malleability of commonplaces hitherto assumed to be monolithic,

particularly as they travel through time. And third, it “enables the enquiry to travel the full length of the levels-of-analysis spectrum, from individual to the state level” (Epstein 2008, 16).

Connotatively, then, a genealogical approach does not restrict the meaning of ‘identity’ to a single actor such as the ‘state’ but is able to run the gamut. Nor is power defined primarily through material or ideational capabilities but rather focuses on a bottom-up productive power.

Foucauldian genealogy can be mapped out in five steps:

(1) Foucault starts with a history of the present and asks, “What is puzzling about our current

world?” This dissertation asks, why did a nation, founded on the ideals of freedom and

justice for all, respond to 9/11 in the particular way the U.S. did? More specifically, how are

those responses – specifically with regard to the covert drone strikes program and aviation

security – made possible or contested over time?

(2) The answer to this question is then situated in a discourse, with a focus on how the problem

was produced and the specific linguistic forms by which that production came about. In this

case, there are three: the overarching discourse of ‘9/11’; the covert drone strike program;

and aviation security.

(3) This archeological phase excavates the linguistic framework with which we construct truth

claims. This framework, which Foucault calls an épistème, forms our basic assumptions

about the world and how it works. It follows certain historically situated rules (a “strategic

apparatus”) that separate all possible statements (e.g., ‘the moon is made out of Swiss

cheese’) into those that make sense and those that do not (1980, 197). Charlotte Epstein

describes this process as the evacuation of historical contingency whereby alternative

meanings and pathways get ruled out or even delegitimized (2008, 119-120). Examining

discourses by way of épistèmes provides a much more complex picture of ‘truth’ and

suggests that truth can only be decided within existing rules of the game. Moreover, the

moment when some statements are included as True and others are excluded as False is one

of power. Some statement formations do not even get to be candidates for Truth – they are

pre-excluded because they do not conform to the épistème’s rules (e.g., the world is round, c.

1480s). Foucault states,

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true (1984, 72-73).

Here, the resulting truth claims of ‘9/11’ made after the attacks included: the attacks were an

act of war; they hate us because of our values; they are evil, barbarous, ruthless; we are

innocent victims; we are no longer safe at home; and this is a new kind of terrorism that

requires a new kind of response.

(4) Yet it is not enough to unearth these rules as they exist(ed) at one point in time. Their

emergence must also be “tracked out” diachronically; that is, as they have developed and

evolved over time. In this sense, there is no pure origin – no teleology. The rules underlining

discourse are not marked by pure continuity or pure discontinuity. Instead of origins, the

analyst must search out emergences and disappearances, mapping how power is woven into

these processes of the rules and practices. More than one possibility always exists in

moments of emergence. By focusing on this contingency, analysis highlights exclusion and

opens up space to reconsider alternative possibilities. As discourses of air travel and the

covert drone strikes program progress, how have these ‘Truth claims’ adapted? What is still

evident, and what has disappeared? What is still verbalized and what has become tacit

‘knowledge’?

(5) Finally, the analyst seeks to unearth how these discursive acts create intersubjective

meanings whereby certain ideas and understandings become (loosely) shared through the

dynamic process of arguing, speaking, agreeing, performing, etc. Namely, how has this

process altered conceptualizations of American identity and what is deemed appropriate or

not in its light?

It bears repeating that contestations and changes in meaning, although often perceived as improbable or infinitely slow, undergird all social interaction and thus provide space for questioning the conditions of possibility that give rise to our interpretations of the world.

Language functions under a logic of iterability where every repetition results in some form of alteration, no matter how minute. By the same token, as a system of relational configurations, discourse is inherently political.

Unlike Saussure and other structuralists who believe that truth is an objective possibility afforded through juxtaposing the right signifier onto the right signified, poststructuralists like

Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan argue that things don’t have intrinsic essences, and that meaning derives from the value-laden relation of one thing to another (See also: Shapiro in Der Derian &

Shapiro 1989, 13-14). According to Derrida, this is made possible because language has a surplus of potential meanings. As such, discursive structures are always marked by a constitutive outside (i.e., those excess meanings), which grants coherence but also offers the possibility of dislocation (1976; 1978). In this way, each discourse has a moment of structural ‘undecidability’ where it could go in multiple directions, thereby necessitating a decision (as in Wittgenstein’s rules: we have a choice to follow or not). Since this multiplicity is inherent to the structure itself,

deciding to do X over Y or Z is always a political practice, even if not experienced as such. The

Self emerges in the space between choice and decision (Hansen 2006, 19).

A note on terminology

The humanities, and more recently the social sciences, have long proclaimed the value of studying language use. As a result, narratives, storytelling, and rhetoric all have substantial literatures on the meaning, importance, mechanics, and component pieces of language, given a particular discipline and text(s). The distinctions between these terms and discourse are often unclear (confounded by their colloquial mis/use as synonyms).

Telling stories is one of the first forms of discourse we learn as children, which, as

Hayden White notes, makes narrative an inevitable solution to “the problem of how to translate knowing into telling” (1987, 1).60 At its most basic, a narrative is an oral or written account of events strung together in some sort of logical sequence. Influenced by Bakhtin’s concept of

‘heteroglossia’ and Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’,61 literary analysts often draw a distinction between narrative and the other components of discourse, or non-narrative. Although intertwined, the former, in a traditional sense, carries a plot forward, while the latter, including descriptions, general orientation, evaluation, and commentary, helps establish the story’s framework and supports the narrative parts (Georgakopoulou and Goutsos 2004, 160).

60 In a recent forum on narratives in IR, Ronald R. Krebs describes man as part homo narrans. See: Krebs, et al. 2017.

61 Heteroglossia is defined as the presence of two or more voices or viewpoints in a single text. Bakhtin defines it as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (1981, 324), arguing that the conflict between a multiplicity of voices – including the author’s own – is the source of a narrative’s power. Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ to highlight that meaning is never transferred directly from the author to the reader. Rather, meaning for both is mediated through social and historical codes inherited from other texts.

Transferred to the social sciences, narratives – or stories – have come to be understood as the means by which humans situate themselves both as individuals and as part of larger collectives to make sense of the world around them (Somers 1994, 606).62 Margaret Somers argues that focusing on the ontological dimension of narratives (what they reflect about the narrator and her world, as opposed to simply being a form of representation) allows the term – and stories more widely – a greater analytical purchase on the relational, temporal, and spatial contingency of social practices (in the sense of both creating meanings and taking action).

Commenting on narrative scholars, she writes:

Their research is showing us that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories, that “experience” is constituted through narratives; that people make sense of what has happened and what is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives (1994, 614).

Similar to the relational nature of discourse analysis, Somers argues that narrativity also

“demands that we discern the meaning of any single event only in temporal and spatial relationship to other events” (1994, 616). Understood in this sense, narratives have recently gained more attention within critical IR, particularly in post-colonial and feminist scholarship

(Wibben 2011; Muppidi, Gregynog Ideas Lab II, III, IV). This body of work takes Foucault’s insights on power to heart by explicitly showcasing narratives as “sites of the exercise of power; through narratives, we not only investigate but also invent an order for the world. They police our imagination by taming aspirations and adjusting desires to social reality” (Wibben 2011, 2).

Annick Wibben continues, “The choice of genre, character, plot, and other elements in a particular narrative reveal much about the teller’s location, hinting both at shared cultural

62 Interestingly, this is also the explanation offered by many IR discourse analysts.

meanings and marking where the personal and the collective deviate. As such, both the content and the form of a narrative are crucial” (ibid).

Given the common heteroglossic strains of discourse and narrative, it is surprising that some of the most well-cited discourse analysis books in IR do not index ‘narrative’ or its derivatives (e.g., Howarth et al. 2000; Howarth 2000; Epstein 2008). Wibben suggests that this is because the connotation of ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ is often as fiction, a personal anecdote or perspective. And, indeed, Wibben’s project is, in a sense, to gain entry for these more subjective discourses into the broader pantheon of critical security literature/analysis. Given a deeply embedded disregard for the subjective, political science as a whole has eschewed such work for its lack of certainty or Truth. However, many critical theory scholars push back on this notion by focusing on individual perspectives, memories, and actions as the building blocks of political practice (and analysis), and hence the necessary components of its contestation.

Akin to Foucauldian discourse analysis, much of the work done by those interested in narratives is to highlight the value of interpreting stories as constituting social reality, where their de-construction is meant to shed light on underlying structures of power. In this sense, both narrative analysis and discourse analysis seem to arrive at the same point. Still, it is worth distinguishing the two, even though both share family resemblances and perhaps cannot exist one without the other. I find it useful to think of narratives/stories as particular means of expressing a broader discourse, or component parts of it. In this way, I look to the corpus of texts addressing

9/11 and its subsequent policies, actions, silences, and re-adaptations as the overarching discourse of ‘9/11’. Within that discourse, different actors tell different stories or narratives about particular moments, aspects, or practices. I use narrative and storytelling interchangeably.

Finally, I define rhetorical commonplaces to be recurrent familiar expressions, like ‘American

values’, that nonetheless have no fixed meaning, but rather a constellation of possible meanings.

I use the word ‘rhetoric’ to refer to certain styles of persuasive writing that often play on rhetorical commonplaces for effect.

Analysis in practice

As discussed above, instances of contingency take place within a pre-existing grammatical framework that is characterized by certain rules of the game, or by what David

Howarth calls “partial fixations of meaning” (2000, 7). Accordingly, genealogical discourse analysis “provides an account of social change that neither reduces all discontinuity to an essential logic, nor denies any continuity and fixity of meaning whatsoever” (ibid). But how exactly does it work? In an effort to simplify the mechanics of discourse analysis, I highlight three main mechanisms: subject, tone, and context.63 The first two are often fairly routine grammatical and syntactical exercises in identifying different parts of a sentence.64 The third incorporates the denotative and connotative elements of issue framing.

‘Subject’ most generally refers to the topic under discussion: what is the text about? More pertinently, it also refers to specific subject positions within a text: who is the text about? In this case, the ‘subject’ appears in the form of proper names, pronouns, and other nouns meant to insinuate a specific person, group, or category of people. These subject positions denote both the

Self and the Other (and whatever might be in between). Locating the subject(s) of a text establishes who the players of a discourse or narrative are. ‘Tone’ helps characterize the kinds of

63 Roxanne Doty (1993, 306) uses the categories: subject positioning, predication, and presupposition, which generally correspond to mine. However, I find her terms a bit unwieldy.

64 This looks different, of course, with image analysis and other non-verbal forms of expression. In these instances, subject and tone are often more interpretive, while context can be a bit more clear-cut. See: Bleiker 2003; Shapiro 2013.

players involved, typically along the normative spectrum of good/bad, and can be determined by adjectives, adverbs, verb tense, and sentence structure.

The last mechanism, ‘context’, situates the specific text within a larger body of data in two distinct ways. The first is reflexive, where the analyst asks: who or what is the source of this text? How and where was it made public? To whom is it intended to ‘speak’? How do I, myself, relate to this text? The second delves into the specific language of the text and how it is framed.

This aspect of analysis recognizes the iterative nature of a discourse, where traces of its past help structure experiences of the present. In this regard, ‘context’ calls attention to specific mention of or allusion to other texts as well as continuity of subject and tone between texts.

Part of this iteration also involves the use of myths of common origin, historical remembrance, and shared narrative, all of which are experienced or manifested through social performance and shape individual and group identities.65 Allan Young refers to this kind of shared memory as “the proof as well as the record of the self’s existence;” one of the “self’s most valued possessions” even as it is perpetually in flux (1995, 221). Through each mention, these

“sites of cultural contestation” (Patterson & Monroe 1998, 315) generate additional socially acquired meanings and actions that then structure future interpersonal interactions (and future texts). Within this co-constitutive process, the performance of historical narrative propagates certain conventions for interpreting behavior as socially legitimate.66

65 Stuart Kaufman dubs this the “myth-symbol complex” (2001; See also Horowitz 1985).

66 Erving Goffman’s work informs this idea of performance. See also: Butler 2006; Connerton 1989, 35; Somers 1994.

Research Design and Data Selection

Just as ‘American identity’ isn’t limited to a single analytical perspective, neither are the textual locations where that identity plays out. I follow Lene Hansen’s model (“3a”), which encompasses material from the government, media, and pop culture. Each of these categories has a different modality of authority (Hansen 2006, 60-67). Official texts focus on political leaders with recognized authority to sanction U.S. policy as well as those who implement it. This authority is predicated on a special claim to knowledge and the ability “to take responsibility [for it] and deploy power” (ibid). In contrast, the authority of the media is based mostly on its ability to disseminate knowledge and thereby extend the political debate to a broader audience. What form this knowledge takes may or may not reflect the views of the State. As such, debates in the media have the potential to articulate and circulate alternative narratives. Finally, the power and influence of pop culture derives from its widely available and often individually resonant representations, which can foster a sense of belonging and value beyond a person’s immediate circle of friends and family (Nieguth & Wilton 2015; Dittmer 2005). Like media, these portrayals have the potential to contest official discourse. However, unlike the other two categories, pop culture is not strictly bound to ‘reality’, giving it more leeway to construct stories that play upon individual sentiment.

All three domains bear upon aspects of the political, cultural, and social, transmitting particular understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that are often read in conjunction with one another

(R. Jackson 2005, 154; See also: Weldes 2006; Croft 2006). Given the sheer size and scope of

9/11 commentary across all three platforms, I narrow my focus to those texts with the most reach.

I determine ‘reach’ through a review of empirical data that assesses the influence of various media sources on public perceptions, policy formation, and identity. The resulting ‘texts’ in my

datasets share three basic characteristics: they are widely accessible; they are widely seen, read, or heard; and they are widely held in some form of esteem, as indicated by awards, elections, reviews, and the like.

Storytelling in Media and Pop Culture

Media Although newspaper circulation and print media in general has suffered in recent years (Baker 2009; Nichols and McChesney 2009), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and the New York Times (NYT) – ranked #1 and #2 in national daily circulation respectively – still maintain solid reputations for influential news reporting, as does the more local (and more centrist) The Washington Post (WAPO) (Amani and Berkowitz 2009; Jordan 1993; Habel 2012). The direction of influence vis-à-vis op-eds and editorials remains highly contested in academic literature (Cohen 2015; Soroka 2003; Risse- Kapen 1991). Philip D. Habel concludes that opinions from the NYT and the WSJ tend to follow changes in elite policy as opposed to influencing those changes. At the same time, he also cites the large number of references to these articles made by Congressional representatives during policy debates (2012, 259). Others have found that editorials in these newspapers have a ripple effect on like-minded news organizations. For instance, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella (2008) trace how editorials in the WSJ influence coverage on Fox News and other conservative outlets. These newspapers thus fulfill my criteria of being largely available, largely followed, and potentially largely influential. Television (TV) news shows, particularly Sunday morning programs, are the primary location where political debate publically takes place, although they cater primarily (and thus narrowly) to a certain informed American public as well as to other public officials. Despite the proliferation of alternative media platforms, TV statistically remains (as of 2016) the most significant and frequently used medium through which the public obtains its information (Pew Research Center, http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/; See also: Jones 2011, 48; Mutz and Nir 2010, 201). It is also a location where alternative discourses are discussed vis-à-vis the official narrative(s) with both pundits and politicians – what Geoffrey Baym refers to as “gotcha” journalism (2013, 16). In terms of availability, the main Sunday programs are all aired on standard broadcast networks. While their influence on policy formation is debated in the academic literature, many studies demonstrate that these talk shows play a key role in raising public issue awareness as well as lending credibility to the guests who appear on them (ibid; Steinhauer 2013). With regard to post- 2001, Shana Gadarian (2010) argues that this influence is derived from appeals and allusions to the emotive aspects of 9/11 such as pain, fear, and anger, which lead viewers to support more hawkish policies/politicians.

Popular Culture TV shows are particularly useful as common texts because they are able to show how certain themes related to security shift over time. The ones selected for study consistently address American security and do so over time. They also all enjoy(ed) substantial acclaim and/or high viewership ratings, which many scholars argue helps explain their influence in both the policy world and the private sector (Engelstad 2008; Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2009; Tasker 2012; Takacs 2012, 2014). Specifically, JAG and The West Wing portray different aspects of the government and thus perform an unofficial ‘official’ narrative of American identity. While JAG ended in 2002, its spin-off, NCIS, premiered shortly afterwards and climbed to the number one spot in the Nielsen ratings in 2013. The West Wing also ended a few years after 2001, though its later seasons (after the attacks) explicitly addressed 9/11 and terrorism, becoming the focus of a number of academic studies (Engelstad 2008; Gans-Boriskin and Tisinger 2005; Holbert, et al. 2005; Takacs 2012). 24 caused a sensation when it premiered in November 2001, as each season is focused on a new terrorist plot against the U.S. and takes place in ‘real time’ over the course of 24 hours. Due to the success of NCIS, a spin-off (NCIS

Los Angeles) aired on CBS in 2009, and is more consistently centered on terrorism than its parent. It was ranked the #4 show on primetime (as of the 2013 season). Finally, Homeland – although somewhat limited in outreach due to its Showtime distribution – deals explicitly with counter intelligence, radicalized American citizens, and the threat of global jihadism. Each series addresses issues relevant to both ‘9/11’ as well as the individual sites, particularly targeted drone strikes. Straddling the line between media and pop culture, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are political satires that air(ed) on The Comedy Channel though can be seen in their entirety online (for free). Both are popular and influential enough to attract major public figures as guests – including the President. Their political influence has also been documented by a number of scholars (Reilly 2012; Baym 2013; Becker et al 2010; Jones and Baym 2010; Jones et al 2012; Jones 2013). Finally, movies are sites where the past, present, and future is imagined, imitated, and envisioned, often in high definition with sound and special effects, free from any claim to Truth. With regard to 9/11, Thomas Reigler argues that Hollywood and TV have constituted the foremost cultural apparatuses with which the American public has coped (and continues to cope) with the attacks (Riegler 2011). Documentaries, on the other hand, must claim some allegiance to an objective ‘reality’, yet Yiannis Mylonas finds that many ‘9/11’ documentaries also draw heavily upon the use of emotion to engage the audience and express fairly partisan interpretations of the event and its aftermath (2012; See also: Jones 2010). Such films – like Geert Wilders’ Fitna – have the power to instigate widespread controversy as well. A Note on Social Media I do not systematically trawl social media for blogs, Twitter, or Facebook posts related to 9/11. I do use this material, but only when it is cited or mentioned (directly or obliquely) in another text (e.g., Teju Cole’s tweets). I revisit this omission in the conclusion.

I organize these texts into three datasets covering the time period from 11 September

2001 to 31 December 2016. The first serves as a general timeline of official discourse on 9/11 and the War on Terror. I include every related speech, interview, statement, press briefing, and publication freely available from the offices of the President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of

Defense.67 To this I add Congressional public hearings, Supreme Court rulings, and major public statements made by the vice president, the secretary of Homeland Security, and the National

Security Advisor. These texts are the major public articulations of and justifications for United

States foreign and domestic security policy. All three departments represent the principal actors responsible for setting and implementing these policies, actors who ostensibly derive their legitimacy from being fairly and democratically elected or from being appointed by the president.

67 I do this by combing through each of the websites’ archives and/or current record of public statements.

Furthermore, their influence on policy formation, identity, and public opinion has been well documented (Peake & Eshbaugh-Soha 2008; Sarkesian, et al. 2008). Finally, many of these speeches receive substantial media coverage and are further widely available online.

All together, I gathered 2953 government source entries (speeches, proclamations, fact sheets, major press briefings, interviews, etc.). To this, I incorporated episode broadcasts of JAG,

West Wing, The Agency, NCIS, 24, NCIS-LA, and Homeland (905 entries). Finally, I added major global and national historical events relevant to the War on Terror to help contextualize the data (240 entries). Proceeding chronologically, I read each ‘text’ for general tone, subject positioning, and relationship to other texts/context. I coded each entry if it pertained to either air travel security or targeted drone strikes. Although not my primary empirical focus, it was necessary to include this overarching dataset of ‘9/11’ to establish a firm basis from which to draw conclusions on the tenor, breadth, and evolution of ‘9/11’ within the discourses of each empirical policy practice. Without that analysis, simply relying on existing literature would have drastically limited my ability to locate or highlight the specific intertextual pathways68 referenced in the specific policy discussions.

68 What I mean by this is twofold: one, all the literal ‘shout-outs’ of other ‘texts’ within a particular document or cultural artifact (e.g., talking about the movie Zero Dark Thirty on the Senate floor to justify or contest policy); two, Derrida’s (1982, 307-330) more figurative logic of iterability describing how signs and language work, where “traces [of the meaning of the word] exhibit a minimal sameness in the different contexts in which they appear, yet are still modified in the new contexts in which they appear” (Howarth 2000, 41).

Figure II: Breakdown of Source Material by Text

Popular Historical Dataset Official Media Total Culture Events

General Timeline 2953 0* 905 240 4098

Covert Drone Strike 60 430 137 14 641 Program

Air Travel Security 140 360 38 11 548

*Media interviews with government officials are counted under official texts

Next, each site of analysis generated its own dataset. I began by culling all the relevantly coded entries from the general timeline. To this, I incorporated major news articles from the

Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Washington Post using ProQuest search parameters based on keywords of both policy issues. From here, I added pop culture references

(TV, movies, or documentaries) addressing my policy issues and particular segments of satire or other comedy shows (primarily The Onion, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show). Using

ProQuest, LexisNexis, and the Internet, I widened my search to include other sources: news magazines (e.g., The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The Weekly Standard, Christian

Science Monitor), website news (e.g., The Daily Beast, Politico, RealClearPolitics), television news articles and segments, art installations, think tank publications, humanitarian organization field reports, etc.69 Going chronologically and using the mechanisms discussed above, I did a close reading of each text and culled any additional cited sources within. Targeted drone strikes totaled 641 texts, while air travel generated 548.

69 Although editorials in print media like the NYT and WAPO tend toward the left of the political spectrum, generally the Op-Ed sections are designed to be more balanced (cf., Page 1996a, 1996b, 18-37). Furthermore, TV news media (outside of cable news channels) attempt to give voice to the spectrum of parties and views.

Year # Texts Year # Texts 2001 6 2009 40 2002 19 2010 47 2003 7 2011 67 2004 1 2012 83 2005 6 2013 133 2006 8 2014 107 2007 1 2015 54 2008 20 2016 32 Figure III: Data Points on Covert Drone Strikes by Year

Year # Texts Year # Texts 2001 141 2009 32 2002 57 2010 63 2003 46 2011 19 2004 33 2012 14 2005 18 2013 22 2006 33 2014 14 2007 16 2015 15 2008 9 2016 16 Figure IV: Data Points on Aviation Security by Year

140

120

100

0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Figure V: Data Points Chart on Covert Drone Strikes

160

140

120

100

0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Figure VI: Data Points Charted on Aviation Security

Figure VII: Breakdown of Security Regime Source Material by Percent

‘9/11’ and the Everyday

An interpretivist approach is best situated to answer how certain dominant understandings of the attacks have become naturalized into the American identity landscape as

something broadly experienced as putatively self-evident, legitimating certain courses of

(re)action and relegating other possible responses to the background. Foucauldian genealogy is best able to answer this how-possible type of question by tracing articulations of ‘9/11’ through a body of texts and by paying close attention to those moments of potential or actual contestation.

In this case, the specific texts under scrutiny cover the everyday development and narration of two particular post-9/11 security regimes, air travel and covert drone strikes, across the span of

15 years.

The second question of the dissertation asks: what do these regimes and the ongoing discussions of them say about how the nation practices its ‘American-ness’? While discourse analysis shines a light on the mechanics needed to answer this question, it alone does not help clarify the theoretical commitments underlining what I mean by identity or security practice, save for acknowledging their co-constitutive nature and importance. Indeed, ‘identity’ and

‘security’ each have a robust literature of their own, offering multiple interpretations. The framework I assemble in the dissertation draws on several theoretical strands, including securitization, ontological security, and embodiment. Pieced together, they establish identity as a discursive and embodied practice of boundary making that produces potentially threatening

Others in an environment of constant risk. The next chapter expands on this.

CHAPTER FOUR

Theoretical Framework: The (In)secure Self

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. -- James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

When the second plane hit, the explosion took with it any thoughts that American

Airlines flight 11 had experienced catastrophic – but accidental – mechanical failure. Tom

Brokaw quickly latched on to one particular interpretation: “this is a declaration of war against the United States.”70 Many others in the media and on the ash-strewn sidewalks of the financial district quickly attributed the attacks to terrorism, “like they have in Israel.”71 As discussed in

Chapter Two, the ‘traumatic rupture’ and ‘terrorism as war’ threads of the 9/11 narrative helped legitimize a number of state security measures that would most likely not have been possible

(certainly to the same degree) under a ‘criminalization’ narrative. But what does being the

United States mean in this martial context?

As I argue, the way of seeing and being in the world outlined in ‘9/11’ has led to profound changes both at home and abroad. In order to grasp how this particular narrative has fostered those changes, I build a theoretical framework anchored to the notion of identity as a political practice of meaning making. Asking how identity works means asking how a ‘we’ got to be a ‘we’ in the first place. How does the ‘we’ constitute itself in its interactions with those the

70 Tom Brokaw, Today Show, NBC.

71 Said by a young man to his friends as they witnessed the attacks. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siYkDNbeRZk.

‘we’ decides do not belong? To put it another way, what mental and physical distance to

Otherness does the ‘9/11’ Self impose?

In this chapter, I first explore how ‘identity-as-practice’ appears in existing IR scholarship and to what effect. I next build upon this concept by highlighting three subfields within the identity and security literatures that are seldom made explicit or linked together. These dynamic elements include an understanding of ontological security, the role of the Stranger, and the relationship between these understandings and the physical or metaphysical body(ies) to which they refer or through which they manifest. Each component has played a role in identity studies in various guises. But alone, they only capture part of how the ‘we’ (singly or collectively) acts and envisions their actions in relation to a ‘them’. Uniting them into a single framework offers a more complete answer to the question of being-in-the-world, providing greater clarity as to how identities are leveraged, promoted, re-organized, and contested in social systems. I briefly situate each element within the broader body of literature from which it emanates and then draw out the key features highlighted in my framework. Finally, I present a visual heuristic that maps out the relationship between these constituent pieces to help break down how I engage with my empirical data.

Identity-as-practice

The term ‘identity’ is inherently ambiguous. In Western social theory, it is most often explained as an acknowledgement of similarity or difference. Focusing primarily on the latter, I draw insight from post-structuralism and its engagement with what Iver Neumann calls the more

dialogical accounts of the Other.72 I identify three major analytical commitments shared across the breadth of this literature: (1) Selves and Others are co-constituted, which means otherness is built into the very definition and understanding of Self (Norton 1988, 3; See also Kearney 2003,

16); (2) Self/Other constructions are inherently value-laden – ‘othering’ necessarily enacts and reifies relations of power; and (3) Self/Other construction is mediated through discourse. Taken together, they highlight the contingent, and thus contestable, nature of identity in world politics.

The recent turn to ‘practice’ in IR further unearths identity’s contingency by attempting to “[weave] together the discursive and material worlds” (Adler & Pouliot 2011, 8). Practices are

“socially meaningful patterns of action” (ibid, 6) that do something, both in the sense of physically or verbally altering one’s environment as well as in the sense that such actions

“cannot be thought or understood ‘outside of’ discourse” (Neumann 2012, 58). With this in mind, identity is better understood as the practice of how we render ourselves intelligible as actors at any given moment in time. That practice necessarily insinuates Others (other-than-me) into its process. Conceptually, then, identity might be thought of as the political practice of differentiating me from you, us from them, Self from Other; a relational exercise fraught with power implications.73

It bears repeating that whoever constitutes the Self at any given time and place cannot be determined by some permanent attribute (e.g. black/white, male/female, etc.), but by a situationally specific constellation of [linked] characteristics made meaningful through what they exclude (cf. Guillaume 2011). Campbell adds,

72 Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism most basically argues that language and the ideas that language conveys are always as if they were in the middle of a conversation with the past and the future. It is relational and ever changing.

73 As Guillaume (2011) and others argue, the Self/Other paradigm isn’t the only way to think identity. However, it remains the most prominent framework in Western social theory.

[Identity] is constituted in relation to difference. But neither is difference fixed by nature, given by God, or planned by intentional behavior. Difference is constituted in relation to identity. The problematic of identity/difference contains, therefore, no foundations that are prior to, or outside of, its operation (1998, 9).

Accordingly, if the notion of ‘being’ results from the particular way in which certain social interactions come together, then analyzing identity must necessarily be concerned with locating the pathways through which actors navigate their social world, as well as the ones they circumvent. This navigation is defined by boundary markers that divide appropriate from inappropriate, safe from dangerous, familiar from strange. As such pairings evince, navigating is essentially a value-laden activity, since, as William Connolly explains, “If there is no natural or intrinsic identity, power is always inscribed in the relation an exclusive identity bears to the differences it constitutes” (1991, 66). Even when the Other seems to pose no immediate existential threat, she is still judged – however marginally – as less than ‘my’ Self given the particular context (time and space) in which the boundary is made. Power “emerges out of the very way in which figurations of relationships … are patterned and operate” (Emirbayer 1997,

292).74

If identity construction is synonymous with discursive boundary making, it stands to reason that state identity as understood in IR is practiced by speaking and enacting specific policies

(Neumann 1992; Onuf 1989). Indeed, state identity and policy-making are profoundly interlinked:

[It] is only through the discursive enactment of foreign policy, or in Judith Butler’s terms ‘performances’, that identity comes into being, […] Identities are thus articulated as the reason why policies should be enacted, but they are also (re)produced through these very policy discourses: they are simultaneously (discursive) foundation and product (Hansen 2006, 21).

74 Foucault writes, “Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships … but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations” (1990, 94).

State policies are articulated as discrete sets of actions designed to address specific problems or change particular relationships. Foreign policies establish at any given time the literal and figurative boundaries between international actors, particularly what constitutes ‘us’ versus

‘them’. In this way, the rise of the state as an ordering principle enshrines difference as the fundamental basis through which international politics is realized, with war perhaps the ultimate enactment of both difference and politics (Walker 1993, 117).

Unearthing such figurations of power between state actors initially places emphasis on the linguistic repertoires through which a particular state identity is produced and validated over competing alternatives. Tracing and analyzing the performances of these repertoires – in this case, the narrative ascribed to the 9/11 attacks – underscores the process of meaning making and the possibility of alternative trajectories. Identity-as-practice therefore focuses on the relational and unfixed nature of identity formation, privileging neither the Self nor the Other, but their mutual and transitory constitution.

Identity and ontological security

Foreign policies are more than stories of difference, however. They also tell of potential danger. Broadly categorized under the critical security umbrella, scholars such as Weldes,

Campbell, and Hansen argue that state identity is predicated on the articulation of danger through policy-making, a process of securitization (Campbell 1998, 13). By this rationale, [existential] threats have to be interpreted and articulated as such in order to have meaning. Moreover, the discursive act of rendering something/someone a threat presupposes that that something or someone can be clearly demarcated and labeled as threatening. As a result, threats are typically

described as emanating from specific bodies that mean to do serious physical harm to other bodies.

As touched on in Chapter Two, the equivocation of who belongs and who does not is particularly relevant to securitization. In the most extreme cases, those who do not belong are presented as external dangers to an actor’s physical existence (Schmitt 2007). Indeed, most IR security literature focuses on studying how state actors secure their physical world from the harm such dangers pose (e.g. with borders, militaries, police, etc.). Conversely, critical security studies primarily engages with the production of threats, with an eye to revealing any underlying assumptions that structure them. Within the umbrella of CSS, securitization most specifically deconstructs the process by which threats are brought into existence, maintained, transformed, or discarded – often through discourse – with the aim to unearth the contingent, contextual, and performative nature of the proffered danger.75

Accordingly, state identity is predicated on the articulation of some sort of danger through policy-making (Campbell 1998, 13). Security is seen as an ontological necessity for a state not because the state’s primary function is to safeguard against danger, but rather because the state only comes into meaningful being through its opposition to the Others that constitute that danger. This perspective relies heavily on post-structural theories of identity, which link the discursive production of a ‘Self’ to the practice of ‘Othering’ (e.g.: Foucault 1973, 151; Connolly

1991, 9; Campbell 1998; Neumann 1999; Hansen 2006, 48-50; Herschinger 2012, 73; cf.

Guillaume 2011). Coupled with a focus on physical security, such exclusionary practices are

75 The Copenhagen School is often judged for either not going far enough as a critique of existing power structures or for going too far in diluting the meaning of security as a political field of study. Critical security scholars are the most vocal in their criticisms, which include: an absence of normative or emancipatory focus (McDonald 2008); a lack of focus on gender (Hansen 2000); and a limited conceptualization of ‘language’ as the spoken or written word (Williams 2003; Hansen 2011; McDonald 2008; Balzacq 2011).

built into the very process of identifying, labeling, and responding to some sort of danger, which immediately – at least discursively – sets the source of insecurity in opposition to the thing or body ‘endangered’ (Buzan et al 1998; Wæver 2004).

The logic underwriting securitization theory borrows from Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the

Political (2007 [1932]). For Schmitt, naming an enemy, what he describes as an extreme form of exclusion, is necessary in the production of a collective political identity, particularly that of the state. This exclusionary relationship is dependent on threat construction as a process of breeding enmity or hate (Norman 2012). The resulting enemy [appears to] threatens the very survival of the state or a way of life, which consequently evokes fear of violence and death. In fact, some suggest that this enemy need not even be a reified actor; the constant possibility and even inclination to “reinvent each other as existential enemies” is sufficient for political identity construction (Kelanic 2008, 18, as quoted in Norman 2012, 415). Regardless, collective political identity for Schmitt only comes into being via the capacity to decide who is friend and who is enemy, a process which serves to unify and strengthen the political Self as well as legitimate those who claim the authority to do so (See also: Bauman 1990, 143).

Still, both canonical security and critical security scholars are faulted for placing too much emphasis on the empowerment of discrete physical threats while neglecting the more abstract psychological ramifications of security discourse (Kinnvall 2004; Steele 2008;

Huysmans 2011). Moreover, emphasizing the process of threat-making tends to conflate or transform ontological security concerns (anxiety about identity) into physical security concerns

(fear for one’s life). Yet what happens if securitizing language warns of potential danger in going about one’s daily life but is not able to adequately delimit that danger into a clearly threatening

Other? Posing this question attempts to turn the focus away from an exclusive understanding of

security as protection from bodily harm, which ignores the aspects of security that reside in our subconscious and call for the preservation of a sense of cognitive order and stability. To examine one without the other is to miss an integral part of the post-9/11 story.

Rectifying the imbalance between physical and mental has meant broadening the scope of what is traditionally considered ‘security’ in IR to incorporate the state of being secure, a concept originally attributed to Anthony Giddens (1991, 38-39). Jennifer Mitzen continues, “[it] is security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice” (2006, 344). Conversely, ontological insecurity ensues when one’s understanding of her place in the social order has been disrupted (Kinnvall 2004, Erikson 1969,

Volkan 1997). Upending such stability results in “the deep, incapacitating state of not knowing which dangers to confront and which to ignore, i.e. how to get by in the world” (Mitzen 2006,

345, see also Zarakol 2010). Much of this literature contends that the rupturing process is best captured when the Self and its biographical narrative are confronted with threatening alternatives: either explicit Others or simply ‘other than what I’ve known my Self to be’ (cf.

Steele 2008).

Ontological security scholars have done a commendable job of addressing the gaps in the field’s more traditional understanding and use of security. Nonetheless, in the process of highlighting an actor’s sense of Self (what I call, for shorthand: security-as-being), the relationship between the physical (security-as-survival) and ontological often gets lost or becomes a secondary concern. 9/11 as it was experienced that day served as both an instance of physical and ontological insecurity: death and destruction of bodies and infrastructure, but also of an understanding of the United States as being untouchable. Brokaw once again succinctly captured this ‘rupture’ when he said, “This is going to change this country profoundly,” and, “the

psychological effects of this on this country… and our innocence: ‘this is fortress America’, it couldn’t happen here.”76

Recent theoretical work has begun to unite the two security perspectives within a single analytical framework. Arguing that the corporal and the cognitive are in fact distinct yet intrinsically linked processes, Bahar Rumelili (2015) has crafted an ideal typical matrix of possible combinations of ontological and physical (in)security/asecurity, each of which produce certain identities over others. While primarily concerned with the process of de-securitization, she has opened up a valuable avenue for all critical security scholars interested in the interplay between mind and body.

Building on her work, I similarly argue that incorporating ontological representations of danger alongside the physical sheds light on how actors construct and perform certain identities.

However, the relationship between the two can be pushed further by emphasizing the importance of the unknown in Self-making. I personify this ‘unknowability’ into the figure of the Stranger.

Originally raised by Jef Huysmans in 1998, the stranger – the unknowable subject – has since largely been absent in the development of ontological security theory, with the notable exception of a 2012 Review of International Studies forum. What does exist is normatively engaged in upsetting power imbalances between different groups, particularly with regard to those at the margins of society (Neumann 2012; Mälksoo 2012). My use of the stranger differs insofar as I approach ‘strangeness’ not to question the associated marginalization of a group of people, but to question how ‘strangeness’ works in identity formation.

76 Tom Brokaw, Today Show, NBC, ~10:45am.

The Stranger

I lay the groundwork for a more nuanced look at securitizing identity by employing

Huysmans’ (1998) analogical coupling of Schmitt’s “enemy” with the fear of biological death and Georg Simmel’s “stranger” with the anxiety of the unknown (See: Simmel 1971). In essence,

I argue that the Stranger becomes a discursive site of identity/security negotiation for the Self and calls attention to the residual (ontological) uncertainty often overlooked in attempts to define and secure the body politic.

It is important to emphasize what I mean by ‘Stranger’. According to the Oxford English

Dictionary, the noun ‘stranger’ is defined as:

1. A person whom one does not know or with whom one is not familiar. 1.1 A person who does not know, or is not known in, a particular place or community. 1.2 A person entirely unaccustomed to (a feeling, experience, or situation)

The adjective ‘strange’ is defined as: 1. Unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand. 2. Not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien.

While both the noun and the adjective have a certain negative connotation colloquially (e.g., don’t speak to strangers, strange is bad), the definition itself remains agnostic. I therefore see the

Stranger as a category of ambiguity, with the potential to be either good or bad; it is a liminal personhood poised on the threshold that divides Self from Other. In this regard, the difference between ‘Stranger’ and the other two categories has to do with the nebulous space between

‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, since the stranger is technically someone who is unknown and as yet unknowable (Huysmans 1998).

Simmel’s pairing of stranger with anxiety is particularly salient in moments of traumatic rupture, when identity narratives have been upended and one’s sense of Self lies in tatters. Such scenarios result in anxiety over no longer knowing who one is or is not – where the boundaries are (Steele 2008). That ambiguity then places renewed emphasis on the potential for danger and the psychological need to safeguard against it; namely, to recreate a coherent Self narrative. A major part of that process, as discussed above, is deciding who is Other. In my framework, the

Stranger as a subject position occupies the discursive and physical space of that decision-making.

Like more traditional existential threats, the liminal subject position between safe and dangerous is discursively constructed and often associated with ongoing anxiety or foreboding that a threat of some kind might exist. These phantom hypothetical bodies are characterized in the discourse as appearing to belong to us, yet they are deceptive and potentially dangerous.

Terms such as ‘sleeper cell’ and ‘homegrown terror’, not to mention domestic security policies like the USA PATRIOT Act or the ‘see something, say something’ campaign, evoke or reinforce the idea that there are people who look like ‘us’ and act like ‘us’ but who are really allied with

‘them’. The purported existence of these yet-unknowable bodies complicates a view of the Self because an actor cannot so easily distinguish ‘them’ from ‘us’. They are ‘us’ – at least for a while.

By not being able to clearly classify the stranger as ‘us’ or ‘them’, she ends up belonging to either and neither at the same time; a non-place that initially presents us with both physical and ontological insecurity. Huysmans writes, “Different from enemies, strangers are disordering because they express the possibility of chaos within the existing order… They articulate ambivalence and therefore challenge the (modern) ordering activity which relies on reducing ambiguity and uncertainty by categorizing elements” (1998, 241, emphasis added; see also

Rumelili 2012, 496). In this regard, there is not much conceptual separation between the stranger and a state’s ontological insecurity. By being impossible to categorize, by “[unmasking] the brittle artificiality of division” (Bauman 1990, 148), she disturbs the ordering schema inherent to a state’s legitimacy; namely, an ability to clearly delimit who belongs and who does not. As such, she mediates between safe and unsafe, us and them, good and bad, friend and enemy, routine and exceptional (Mälksoo 2012, 483).

There are two primary ways in which a stranger is identified and comes into political focus. At these moments, a decision must be made about whether that – now known – stranger is friend or foe. First, a stranger reveals herself as such by doing something that transgresses social norms; that betrays an understanding of how things work. Returning to the definition, this could be as benign as giving bisous instead of a handshake in the U.S., driving on the wrong side of the road. But it might also be planting a bomb at a marathon. Second, a particular group is assigned blame for preexisting danger as a means of dispelling some of the social anxiety associated with that danger. Such scapegoating or overgeneralizing has long been the case with marginalized groups such as migrants (see Hughes 2009), and is now often the case with anyone who seems to be Arab or Muslim.

In both instances, the prescription ‘stranger’ is a subject position that invites further intervention: it is a site of becoming insofar as the state, or the Self more broadly, attempts to reconcile the ambivalence of the stranger into one of the two categories meant to sustain social and political life: Self or Other (Bauman 1990). As a result, we are constantly in the process of attempting to normalize or distinguish ‘strange’ and make it more ‘familiar/normal/routine’ or push it towards ‘foreign/abnormal/exceptional’.

In each case, however, the idea of strangeness and the potential for future danger lingers beyond the bounded confines of any specific person or group of people. In this regard, any attempt to reconcile the Stranger only succeeds in the short term, since this does not actually

‘solve’ the ambivalence or anxiety associated with the possibility of future strangeness. Such ongoing insecurity manifests in state policies that seem to blur the distinction between moments of political exceptionality and the normality of the day-to-day. For example, changes in air travel security measures - “the diffuse politics of little security nothings” – legitimize the

“unspectacular processes of technologically driven surveillance, risk management and precautionary governance,” by raising the specter of anxiety as a foil to the fear engendered by exceptional security practices (Huysmans 2011, 372, 375-376). This suggests that the security concerns underlining identity construction and boundary-making are not easily categorized as just emanating from the discursive portrayal of threatening “Radical Others,” to borrow David

Campbell’s (1992) term. Rather, understanding the relationship between security and identity also necessitates the inclusion of the specter of the unknown, the possibility of Otherness that resides inside us all but eludes easy rhetorical or physical capture.

Consequently, identity narratives and performances/practices are always in the state of becoming and never actually set. Moreover, the typical dichotomy of Self/Other is no longer fully satisfactory. There is an unsettling and unsettled space for belonging to neither, a space we might all inhabit at times. The implication of the stranger means that bodies (even our own) often have to be counted and accounted for in order to ‘belong’ to the collective Self or to be disavowed as Other. Moreover, this process is not a one-time deal but an ongoing intervention that takes place at borders (such as airports) and behind closed doors (such as domestic state surveillance) (Salter 2008).

Thus far, I have discussed the relationship between identity and security as it currently exists in the field. From this baseline, I have incorporated ontological security concerns about what constitutes a ‘threat’ to highlight the sometimes spectral sense of anxiety that arises from – and alongside – perceptions of physical danger. Finally, I have pushed this literature further by showcasing how conceptualizations of ‘the stranger’ mediate between the Self and Other. In this regard, the traditional identity dichotomy becomes blurred and often results in some sort of intervention to [temporarily] dispel the ambiguity such notions of strangeness represent (Combes

2017). The final component I wish to highlight is the role of the body.

Bodies

The notion that bodies exist as both corporate and discursive/expressive/performative suggests that neither traditional security studies (which focuses primarily on the former as objects of protection/danger) nor critical security studies (which focuses primarily on the latter as instantiating particular subjects and objects) is completely satisfactory as a lens through which to view the relationship between security and identity.

My starting point here is Barry Buzan’s claim that “people represent, in one sense, the irreducible basic unit to which the concept of security can be applied” (1991, 18). This most clearly alludes to the idea of security as protection from harm to an individual’s physiological body. As such, security measures primarily concern themselves with what to do about literal bodies – those that need protecting, and those that menace. But the body’s significance as a material entity extends beyond the role of ‘object to be secured’. The body houses and is a tool of individuals’ mental processes (i.e., discourse derives from a thinking, feeling body); the body itself can be used and read as a discursive device, whether intentionally (e.g., appearance) or not

(micro-expressions, body language, etc.);77 and the body can serve as a metaphor for groups with a professed shared identity (i.e., the body politic). In fact, much of identity politics centers on the physical and metaphorical body’s perceived vulnerability, which helps craft broader social narratives and policies about how to secure the [national] Self, as somatic (living, breathing), ontological (thinking, speaking), and metaphorical (the collective ‘we’).

In other words, the body serves as the carrier upon which certain other identity narratives or expressions are deployed. These rhetorical commonplaces are publically understood themes creatively drawn upon to express a particular reality to a certain audience (Jackson 2006, 31). As an illustration, consider the dispute over body counts attributed to targeted drone strikes. In contrast to the investigative journalists, NGO workers, and locals who claim that many of those killed are civilians, the U.S. government avers that civilian casualties are the exception, not the rule; that they only target ‘unlawful enemy combatants’, ‘rebel insurgents’, ‘Islamist fundamentalists’, etc. These characterizations help transfer the targeted killing of those bodies from the realm of illegitimate (i.e., civilian deaths) to reasonable practice. The subtext: our bodies must be preserved; theirs are expendable. What I am trying to illustrate here is that boundary markers are discursively (and ultimately physically) employed to separate certain bodies from others – some belong, and some do not. Deconstructing the perceived logic of such interventions means acknowledging the real-life people obscured by those rhetorical commonplaces, as well as the physical ramifications of such euphemisms to their bodies.

77 Janice Bially Mattern further contributes to this complexity by drawing on the relationship between human emotions and their physical manifestations. Referencing Schatzki, she argues that bodies “exceed the self-expressive routines of practical action that they perform” (2011, 74), meaning that our identities are more than what we think and say we are, they are also performed through a complex interplay of physiological, cognitive, and social forces. Crying, for instance, is physiological but it is typically based on some sort of cognitive or social trigger. Bially Mattern gives the example of having one’s heart race. The cognitive and social dimensions of emotion help determine whether the ‘symptom’ is of fear or anxiety. These moments of excess convey our identities to others and are therefore expressive social practices: “emotions are nothing if not socio-linguistic categories through which humans tacitly or reflectively convey information to others about how one is doing” (ibid, 76). Our bodies thus can be read as ‘texts’ in the Derridean sense without need of actual words.

Feminist scholarship has long underscored the consequences of discourse on bodies, particularly on the Other (Butler 1993, Ahmed 2015). Indeed, scholars within feminist security studies have called attention to how state policies and actions conducted in the name of security are borne on the bodies of individuals as practices of identity differentiation (Wilcox 2014;

Sjoberg 2009; Sylvester 2012; Hansen 2000; Wibben 2016). Writing on the body’s vulnerability to political violence, Lauren Wilcox states, “a body that can be killed or tortured is a body that is the product of discursive practices in international security, for example, the gendered and racialized discourses of ‘terrorist’” (2011, 597). To put it differently, the Other is a result of stuff done and said by the Self, and the particular stuff done and said makes a particular kind of Other

(and Self) possible. Much of this dynamic transpires on actual bodies even though that physical materiality is otherwise disappeared or obfuscated in discourse, as illustrated above. Shapiro adds, “The ‘real’, in this case the body, results from the set of interpretive practices through which the body becomes significant as one thing rather than another” (1992, 16). In other words, the body is a literal and conceptual battlefield where identity politics plays out.

Foucault is also very much focused on the role of the body as the resulting sign/signal/text of governing practices. He writes, “the body is a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, a nodal point or nexus for relations of juridical and productive power” (qt. in Butler 1989, 601). It is materially and discursively produced by governing social and cultural norms and expectations, which therefore provides information on who is viewed as safe versus who is viewed as a threat (Hansen 2000). Importantly, Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri argue that the body not only reflects the imposition of power but can exert it as well, at its most extreme actually becoming the weapon, such as with suicide bombers (2004, 199, 330-332).

The corporal body consequently “serves both to constrain and to enable our capacity for action”

(Chambers & Carver 2008, 67). While this agential component is often lost in discourse analysis,

Claudia Aradau reiterates that bodies do not simply materialize through language; rather, “matter and meaning” are co-constitutive (2010, 6). Rosemary Shinko adds, “The question of materiality here is complicated by the realization that bodies have both a physiological materiality and yet are constituted as subjects through a discursive materiality, which invests them, marks them, and in short produces them as useful and productive subjectivities” (2010, 738).

Given that bodies physically exist, and acknowledging that bodies both reflect the imposition of power and are instantiated through discourse, the body of the Self should not be immune from critical reflection. Indeed, ‘Self’ is just as equally a product of power and discourse deriving from a living body, despite often being expressed as an outside and omniscient Cartesian source of truth. Here is where I diverge from much feminist and critical scholarship. Instead of focusing on those marginalized or ‘othered’, I look at how the ‘we’ sees itself in light of that process of marginalization.

All of this presupposes that the Other is known and accounted for – that there are Other bodies to act upon. However, this is often not the case. Including the Stranger into the identity matrix acknowledges the possibility of a threatening body, without knowing exactly who or where it is. To combat this looming absence, many [domestic] state security measures are tasked with finding and revealing Self-like bodies to be Other; In order to make ‘them’ known, visible, other bodies must be counted and basically disqualified. Even here, identity practice derives from both physical and metaphorical bodies that perform and are performed upon.

As suggested by the foregoing discussion, the production of a threatened ‘us’ and a threatening ‘them’ is more than disembodied discourse. In addition to the metaphorical ‘body politic,’ it is also corporal and references specific individuals or groups, or the possibility of their

existence. Highlighting the physical body’s intermediary role in constructing and interpreting threats helps reimagine the subjects and objects of security discourse as tangible and active

‘presences’, which ultimately paints a better picture of how the Self practices identity.

A Note on Vision

Questions of visibility, even if not explicitly pointed out, consistently appear in 9/11 narratives – whether scholarly, policy-driven, or anecdotal. After all, it is hard not to think about the 9/11 attacks without images of burning towers, falling bodies, smoldering rubble, and crying witnesses flitting across the mind’s eye. Nevertheless, the concept of visibility deserves some unpacking. To begin with, many initially experienced the attacks on 11 September as a visual event (Möller 2007; Sontag 2003, 89); words came later (Der Derian 2005). At that later time, the government, and eventually others, argued that such destruction heralded the onset of a new era for the United States; that the attacks had opened America’s eyes to new and terrible threats otherwise thought to be the problem of other people and other states. Said differently, danger (in the form of Islamist terrorism) became visible.78 Seen in this way, the attacks could therefore be described as unseen plots of spectacularly visible destruction planned and perpetrated by unseen people.79 As a result, seeing and being seen have come to dominate U.S. counterterrorism practices, even if not explicitly understood or starkly articulated in such terms. Seeing is the key to safety, being seen the required price.

78 This is according to the dominant narrative. The implication here is that danger had been invisible prior to that morning. Of course, any cursory look at U.S. history dispels the notion rather quickly that the nation had been free from danger, or that Islamist fundamentalism was a new problem.

79 Again, in reality, traces of the plot and the perpetrators did exist, but the immediate experience of the attacks was often described as coming literally and figuratively out of the clear blue sky. See: Suskind 2006; Clarke 2004.

Michael Shapiro conceptualizes surveillance as a form of biopolitics “articulated with other political functions aimed at accepting, rejecting, or managing bodies” (2005, 21). He draws a distinction between Foucault’s emphasis on the usefulness of bodies with a post-9/11 focus on revealing dangerous bodies, what he refers to as “hypersecuritization” (2005, 22). In this regard, one of the main purposes or tasks of surveillance is to distinguish friend from enemy, which Carl

Schmitt defined as the very function of ‘the political’. However, in order to make visible the bad bodies, all bodies must be scrutinized. Shapiro sees contemporary surveillance practices as the meeting of physical bodies with technology under the guise of government tutelage over ‘proper’

(aka ‘safe’) behavior and “political will” (2005, 22) that the surveiled subjects can either accept

(by acting ‘normal’) or reject (by acting ‘strangely’). As I wrote in Chapter One, the selection of my two sites of analysis – the covert drone strikes program and aviation security – stems from how well each reflects different sides of the dichotomy between seen and unseen, visible and invisible. In brief, air travel security narratives best highlight the visualization of the Self, while the covert drone strike discourse emphasizes the ultimate disappearance of the Other.

Mapped Out

Whether physical or ontological, the (discursive) threat of Otherness is the engine that drives identity narratives down specific paths and practices of meaning. These meanings are attached – tacitly or explicitly – onto the material or abstract body. Identity-as-practice thus references the literal and metaphorical embodiment of both the Self and the Other. Americans know or experience themselves as bodies through which political power and values are reflected in disciplinary and regulative practices meant to keep them safe. Americans understand the

Other(s) as the threatening bodies from which they must be protected. Yet, the murky place in

between Self and Other is perhaps the most important site of identity construction. Here, hitherto unknown (hence invisible) bodies reveal themselves upon acting ‘strange’ (e.g., the Tsarnaevs of the Boston Marathon bombing). These bodies are then discursively and often physically re- categorized as either ‘more Self’ (friend) or ‘more Other’ (foe). At the same time, the potential for future strangeness from within the population always exists, leaving a certain anxiety and incompleteness (or lack, as LaClau, Mouffe, and Lacan might say) to bounding out difference.

The body thus serves as a medium through which in/security is felt, understood, and enacted or practiced. Consequently, asking how ‘we’ get constituted through ‘9/11’ plays on both the psychic and somatic understandings of what it means to be an American living in a space of

(potentially) threatening others.

Joining ontological security, strangeness, and embodiment together produces a framework that reimagines identity practice through the physiological and metaphorical presence of the body. Figure VIII maps out the various aspects of this identity practice.

Figure VIII: Identity as an Embodied Experience of Security

Touchable Bodies Abstract Bodies

‘Visible’ ‘Invisible’ References to specific References to general individuals or group as individuals or group as Self/’Our’ belonging; Non- belonging; Non- threatening threatening

References to specific References/allusions to Stranger individual(s) that do unknowable potential something ‘strange’ threats

References to specific References to general Other/’Their’ individuals or groups as individuals or group as threatening threatening

The vertical axis captures one’s proximate relationship to these Selves or Others. I also use the more colloquial pronouns to highlight the intimate nature of identity as well as its implicit act of possession – not in the sense of possessing something called ‘identity’, but rather in the sense of possessing a body through which that identity is performed and experienced. The personal pronoun also underlines the ambivalence of who or what actually belongs. What is

‘ours’ versus what is ‘theirs’ cannot be easily attributed based on pre-existing characteristics but must instead be claimed or disavowed as belonging. Finally, neither category is tied down to any specific level of analysis or actor but can run the gamut of perspectives: from an individual, to the patrie (looking within), to the state (looking without).

The horizontal axis distinguishes between touchable and untouchable bodies. The former refers to bodies that are in some sense visible, foregrounded, onstage, or immediate. These are literal bodies we can see, count, touch, and (ultimately) name. The latter is characterized as invisible, background, offstage, or distant to highlight the more abstruse (though no less ‘real’) experience of collective identity. These are faceless individuals and rhetorical ‘bodies’ (such as the body politic) that through their very opaque nature resist being quantified, touched, and individually identified.

Broken down, each box of the matrix highlights a particular type of identity practice:

Touchable, visible selves

The top left quadrant focuses on the Self’s relationship with specific fellow ‘Selves’. This

might include friends, family, co-workers, political leaders, celebrities, and media

personalities. It can reference the body of a single person or a group, but the group is

understood and experienced as a collective of known individuals, a discreet number of

people. This quadrant also highlights the Self’s personal experiences of belonging and

how that belonging is enacted (by the Self or by others) on their own bodies in ways

meant to show membership and safeguard the body for continued future membership.

Touchable, visible otherness

The bottom left quadrant focuses on the Self’s relationship with specific ‘Others’. With

regard to 9/11, this includes named ‘terrorists’ such as Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheik

Mohammed. It can also include unnamed Others who nonetheless are quantified and

made visible within a specific context, such as the tortured prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

While unidentified, any references to those prisoners are references to a specific group of

people whose bodies are marked in some way as bad, a threat to the Self’s own. In other

words, understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’ emerge by rendering ‘them’ visible, by naming,

citing, or visually portraying them, and by enacting force upon their corporal bodies, an

interaction often made face-to-face. Yet such actions also depersonalize the Other and

take away their agency. In this way, the physical interaction is often meant or used to

strip the Other of their personhood, to lump Others together as a mass of flesh unworthy

of distinction.

Touchable, visible stranger

The purgatory of strangeness mostly exists in the right column of Table III as an

unspecified anxiety about unknown unknowns, to borrow from Rumsfeld. However,

occasions such as homegrown terrorist attacks also highlight the fragility and fantasy of

believing in a unified and safe Self. Some who are part of the ‘Self’ turn out not to be,

they become known unknowns. These moments of revelation, when someone’s neighbor,

brother, or daughter commits an act that unmasks her as potentially Other, are important

moments of identity negotiation whereby the newly revealed stranger must then be made

to fit into the schema so crucial to political life, that of a binary Self/Other. This is thus a

transitory cell.80

Abstract, invisible selves

The top right quadrant focuses on collective identity and specifically the relationship an

individual has with other more theoretical and rhetorical ‘Selves’. This includes the use

of impersonal or possessive pronouns that refer to ‘everyone’ within that group, such as

when the American president uses the words ‘our’, ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘my fellow Americans’,

etc. This cell attempts to get at how we know we belong to these broad social groups that

really only exist as ideas (such as the state). And yet, as Wittgenstein tells us, we know

we are included without having to be specifically singled out as belonging.

Abstract, invisible otherness

The bottom right cell focuses on the Self’s relationship with the general ‘Other(s)’. Once

again, this is often experienced through discourse – references to ‘those terrorists’,

‘enemy combatants’, ‘Iraq’, ‘al Qaeda’, ‘evil’, and ‘the Taliban’. Whether in the singular

or plural, these bodies are interpolated more as ideas than as literal objects in the world.

Abstract, invisible strangers

The possibility that threats exist within the United States has been a major talking point

with the rise of ISIS-related homegrown terror attacks around the world. That possibility

exerts substantial force on Self-identity construction. Consider policies such as the USA

PATRIOT Act or the ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign. Both are predicated on

an ongoing anxiety of the unknown, urging the Self to remain vigilant to wolves in

80 I discuss this at greater length in Combes 2017. In brief, the response of the Self to the stranger indicates whether that stranger is being incorporated into that Self or pushed away as Other.

sheep’s clothing. As such, the strangers who inhabit this cell are phantasmatic (the

unknown unknowns) and are uncovered only indirectly through the Self’s identity

practice.

Identity-as-practice thus incorporates social, material, and expressive systems of meaning by means of a multi-dimensional and ongoing process, a process that undergoes constant reconfigurations given various contexts. The benefits of such an approach are threefold: (1) practices are temporal and spatial; they move, which better accounts for the fact that identities are never static no matter how much we experience them as such; (2) practices are not bound to a particular level of analysis. Integrating multiple identity perspectives better addresses the mainstream experience(s) of American-ness; and finally (3) practices are relationally constructed, which better acknowledges our multiple encounters with otherness. We perform a particular Self in relation to a specific kind of Other, while different types of Others produce different Selves.

Further, such insecurity affects both the physical condition of the actors, addressing the more material aspects of survival, as well as actors’ ontological needs, maintaining coherence and stability.

Incorporating all three components into a single analytical framework better reveals the process by which actors produce momentarily stable meanings of Self. To illustrate how this works in practice, I next turn to two specific security regimes enacted after 9/11: aviation security and the covert drone strike program. The former is a very conspicuous set of practices that most people have not only witnessed but have also experienced first-hand. In this scenario,

‘we’ practice Selfhood by confirming ‘our’ belonging and ‘our’ harmlessness primarily by rendering ‘ourselves’ – ‘our’ physical bodies and ‘our’ intentions – visible to the state and fellow travelers. The professed idea is to weed out potential Others, those who do not somehow

conform to a set of predetermined criteria for how the Self looks or acts. However, perhaps the more interesting element of air travel is this: despite wait times, inconvenience, occasional incidents, and reports that highlight an ineffective and broken system, most people have accepted this set of security practices as part of being American in an age of terror. How is this possible?

The latter set of security practices is meant to remain hidden from view by design.

However, the covert program has often been dubbed, “Obama’s worst kept secret” because of healthy media coverage and depictions within pop culture long before the administration publically acknowledged the program in 2012. In this scenario, ‘we’ practice Selfhood by maintaining the Other’s literal and figurative invisibility. Drone strikes are meant to destroy the bodies of ‘our’ enemies, with limited physical damage to nearby civilians and no damage to ‘us’.

A small number of U.S. personnel use drone cameras to surveil potential ‘threats’, performing their duty in the name of state security. Similar to air security measures, most people have accepted drone strikes as part and parcel to winning the war on terror despite numerous reports of civilian casualties, a fear that drone strikes simply ‘create’ more terrorists, and the lack of clear judicial or moral clarity over state-sanctioned assassinations. How is this possible? Tracing

‘9/11’ through the lifecycles of each regime offers answers to both questions.

CHAPTER FIVE

Targeted Drone Strikes – Call of Duty

He has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. ― Jeremy Scahill, The Assassination Complex

Hell-raiser, razor-feathered risers, windhover over Peshawar,

power's joystick-blithe thousand-mile scythe,

proxy executioner's proxy ax pinged by a proxy server,

winged victory, pilot cipher unburdened by aught

but fuel and bombs, fool of God, savage idiot savant

sucking your benumbed trigger-finger gamer's thumb ― Amit Majmudar, Ode to a Drone

At the 2010 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, fondly referred to as ‘Nerd Prom’,

President Obama stood before a room of news analysts and celebrities and joked about killing the Jonas Brothers if they came too close to his daughters: “I have two words for you… drone strikes.” Everyone laughed. It was meant to be funny: an overly protective father offering an over-the-top warning that his little girls were off limits. Except, his ‘over-the-top’ happened to be

a multi-billion dollar weapons system with a real kill list that he actually did influence.81 Funny, yet it also somehow made light of the fact that Obama had the potential to decide who lives and who dies… that the United States plays God halfway around the world. National hubris.

Of all the policies implemented as a result of 9/11, the sanctioned yet covert use of drone strikes remains one of the most shrouded in mystery, secrecy, and yet tacit approbation.82

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have long served the military as surveillance devices. They were developed into combat vehicles (UCAVs) after the various NATO engagements of the

1990s and successfully tested in February 2001. The two most well known UCAVs are the

General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and the larger General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper. Equipped with state-of-the-art cameras, both drones can fly over 400 miles to a target and can loiter above that target area for an extended period of time.83 The former is armed with two supersonic Hellfire missiles, vaunted for their targeting precision and limited destruction radius. The latter, in service since 2007, can carry a far greater payload, which results in larger casualties. The Department of

Defense (DoD) deployed Predator drones to Afghanistan almost immediately after 9/11 and used them in their first armed mission on 7 October 2001. Although a valuable asset in both

81 Determining who gets placed on the kill list is known as the ‘disposition matrix’, a “single, continually evolving database in which biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations are all cataloged. So are strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols…The database is meant to map out contingencies, creating an operational menu that spells out each agency’s role in case a suspect surfaces in an unexpected spot" (Greg Miller, “Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill list,” Washington Post, 23 October 2012). Based on the latest intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center under the Obama Administration prepared a kill list of possible targets, which was then re- evaluated every three months by another panel of intelligence and military personnel. The vetted list then went to a special panel of the National Security Council, and from there, to the president for final approval. Still, strikes in Pakistan only need to be approved by the CIA director. Authority for these targeted killings is highly contested but ostensibly derives from the AUMF of 2001.

82 According to the Pew Research Center, 58% of Americans approve of the use of targeted drone strikes. “Public Continues to Back U.S. Drone Attacks,” 28 May 2015. http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/28/public-continues- to-back-u-s-drone-attacks/ (accessed 4 January 2016).

83 Anywhere from 14 to 40 hours. See: http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets/Display/tabid/224/Article/104469/mq-1b-predator.aspx (accessed 3 January 2016).

Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has since most notably employed targeted drone strikes in three states with whom the U.S. is not at war: Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.84 It is an understanding of these more covert assignments that the dissertation addresses.

In this chapter, I explore the “drone strikes” discourse as it was presented to the

American public by the Bush and Obama administrations.85 The two central questions I ask are: how does ‘9/11’ help justify the covert drone program to that audience? Second, how does that process relate to American identity practice over the same timeframe? To answer, I first review existing critical security literature on drone warfare and situate my own research within it. I next turn to an analysis of what scholars and pundits agree are the U.S. government’s four major public statements on drone strikes. I search for the various truth claims of ‘9/11’ within these documents to see if they are present and how they are deployed. Using the three mechanisms of subject, tone, and context, I then illustrate how ‘9/11’ has contributed to a shift in what ‘normal’ looks like, widening the boundaries of permissible state action. Finally, I discuss how the drone attacks, and the machines (ostensibly) doing the attacking, are discursively positioned to normalize a particular understanding and practice of American identity that condones, if not promotes, the program.

A few clarifications need to be made for both this chapter and the next. First, in line with the methodological and epistemological commitments I outlined in chapters two and three, I do not claim that my insights are the only factors explaining the persistence of drone warfare. Nor do I claim that the entire American population accepts the Self/Other relationship I unearth in the

84 The first such targeted strike took place on 4 November 2002 in Yemen, the first attack in Pakistan took place on 18 June 2004, and Somalia began in January of 2007.

85 The sources I’ve listed in Chapter Three are available to far more than just Americans. However, those sources all have a substantial American viewership/audience.

following discourse. Also, it is not that important whether the government officials in this chapter actually believe what they say or not. To reiterate, I examine public ‘texts’ and discuss what they collectively say about 9/11, drones as weapons, and American identity practice. While my selection of sources is rigorous, based on and justified by previous discourse analyses (In particular: Epstein 2008; Hansen 2006), I also in no way contend that the themes pulled from these discourses are the only interpretations available. What I do assert, is that the breadth and depth of my sources is sufficient for making claims about an important portion of the American public’s perceptions of weaponized drones. The current chapter engages with official government discourse on the use of drones as precision weapons in covert operations overseas.

The next chapter highlights the dominant media and public discourse made in response to that discourse.

One other important distinction is necessary. Drone strikes and targeted killings are often assumed to be synonymous in the vernacular. However, targeted killing is a tactic of war, and drones are technically tools of war. While armed drones are a relatively new technological development in war fighting, targeted killing is not. The latter is defined as the “intentional slaying of individual terrorist leaders and facilitators undertaken with explicit governmental approval” and can be executed in a number of ways, including ambush, manned air strike, special operations assault, or explosives, to name a few (Wilner 2015, 75). Similarly, only a small fraction of U.S. military drone operations are actually engaged in tracking and killing militants. However, because of the syntactic elision between drones and targeted killing, the public, media, and even government officials often use the two interchangeably (ibid, 77-78).

For this reason, although technically inaccurate, the public debate on ‘targeted killing’ most often is referring to the U.S. [covert] policy of using drones to target and kill terrorists, overseen

primarily by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).86 Consequently, since my interest is in public discourse, I too blur the distinction between tool and tactic, where context suggests this is appropriate.

Literature Review

Despite the name, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are in fact manned, just from a distance.87 It is for this reason that the Air Force prefers to call them remotely piloted aircraft

(RPAs). Still, the notion of ‘unmanned’ has long spawned depictions of futuristic dystopias ruled by sentient robots – the most famous of which, perhaps, is the Terminator franchise. Indeed, media and pop culture have made note of this “unmanned-ness” with articles and big budget movies about the future of weapons automation, where the drone either makes decisions on its own (usually threatening the good guys) or is hijacked by evildoers and turned on the good guys.88 The distance – both literal and semantic – between the operators and the UAV contribute to this image of a loosely tethered machine whose technology seems so advanced, that its overseers might not actually be able to maintain control of it. Like nuclear weapons, drones inhabit a nebulous and morally ambivalent realm of the (present and) future that no one is too comfortable with yet no one wants to give up.

A Terminator-esque ‘rise of the machines’ undertone surreptitiously colors much of the public discourse on drone warfare, particularly that of pop culture, allowing the drone in these

86 Even here, some scholars contest the notion that attacks like ‘signature strikes’ are ‘targeted’ in the first place, since the victims simply exhibit a “pattern of suspicious behavior,” which can be as general as being male and carrying a weapon (Miller 2014, 321, 335).

87 As long as there is a regional air base crew. This regional crew, made up of roughly 70 people, is responsible for maintaining the planes, attaching missiles, takeoffs, and landings (Gusterson 2016, 30).

88 Matthew Brzezinski (2003), “The Unmanned Army,” New York Times Magazine (20 April); The two movies: Stealth (2005); Eagle Eye (2008).

narratives to become in itself an actor practically divorced from the humans who technically control it. The satirical online news organization, The Onion, often draws on this trope in its coverage of the War on Terror, depicting sentient weaponized drones as autonomous warriors who go ‘off script’. This has implications for the repercussions of drone strikes insofar as it becomes easier to ‘blame’ the drone or think of the drone as culprit (at least mentally), as opposed to the actual operators or military and government decision-makers ‘pulling the trigger’.

As Allison L. Rowland writes, “Although there is little novel about remote, technologically asymmetric, or so-called push-button warfare, rhetorics of “flying killer robots” thrive in the public sphere, sensitizing U.S. publics toward certain ideas of drone warfare” (2016, 602). The media’s insistence on using the word ‘drone’ as opposed to the military’s preferred ‘RPAs’ also helps foster public notions of independent and autonomous flying machines (ibid, 604-605).

The drone as a long-range killing machine also occupies an almost fetishized role in the public imagination. Consider this 2006 report for CNN, where the encounter with the physical drone borders on an eroticized experience:89

The Predator is the U.S. military's most sophisticated killing machine in the war on terror -- a flying assassin constantly searching for Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda members. […] Touring the airfield, I could not help but touch and feel the bird. My first close-up glimpse of the craft took my breath away. The 48.7-foot wingspan of the squadron's Predator MQ-1L is slender and flexible. I applied a little pressure to feel the bend. Indeed, this war machine is so flexible you can bend it with hand pressure.90

Killing machines as homoerotic surrogates are not new to security studies. Carol Cohn’s (1987) seminal work on nuclear weapons discourse within defense circles highlights how sex and gender infuse professional understandings of security policy and weapons procurement. Cynthia

89 Drones as proxies of masculine domination are a topic of concern vis-à-vis their domestic (non-lethal) use as well. See: Salter 2014.

90 “In the Sights of a Joystick Killing,” CNN, 9 June 2006.

Enloe (2014) paints a similar portrait with regard to military bases during the Vietnam War, and

Laura Sjoberg, alongside a number of other critical feminists, has explored the gendered implications of security discourse with regard to the War on Terror.

Nor are targeted aerial strikes new, either in practice or as a subject of research (Rogers and Hill 2014, 101). In many ways, drone strikes are treated as an ordinary evolution of more traditional airstrikes used in war to kill the enemy, fitting the “contours of legitimate violence; indeed they seem the very outcomes of modern and rational thinking” (Del Rosso 2015, 173). At the same time, the unmanned aspect of drones leads other scholars to conclude that drone strikes are thus “wholly discontinuous with traditional forms of military action” (ibid, 170). Nonetheless, many argue that the use of UAVs or RPAs as flying vehicles for assassination have, indeed, changed how policymakers perceive and use force, even in spite of the claim to self-defense

(Miller 2014; Del Rosso 2015; Rogers and Hill 2014). Drawing on just war theory, legal scholars question whether the three main considerations – proportionality of response to threat, distinction between civilian and combatant, and the military necessity for action – are met with drones. For instance, Ann Rogers and John Hill suggest that “the lack of reciprocity seems to make it easier to use force, while … the targeting, intelligence collection and interpretation of international law that also forms the drone assemblage seems to undermine rather than improve just conduct”

(2014, 105; See also: Miller 2014).

The last several years have seen a spike in academic research on the efficacy and ethics of drone warfare. Major concerns of this scholarship tend to center on unearthing the secrecy involved in the strikes – the locations drones survey and target and their points of origination

(Williams 2010); the strategic assessment of the program(s) (Rohde 2012; Boyle 2013; Cronin

2013; Aslam 2011; Carvin 2012; Powers 2014); and the restructuring of the notion of

100

‘international’ through their use (Pugliese 2015; Pope 2017). Other works have attempted to rehumanize those living under the threat of drone strikes, to call into question the U.S. government’s tendency to categorize all victims as justified kill shots (Bashir and Crews 2012).

Along the same lines, Wilcox (2015a, 2015b) examines the embodying and gendered effects of drone warfare at home and abroad with an eye to disrupting common perceptions of drone warfare as surgical and, hence, “virtuous” (See also: Zehfuss 2010; Gregory 2011; Der Derian

2009). Finally, the political theory of aesthetics looks at the counter narrative of the covert drone strike program as interpreted through art (Delmont 2013).

The overarching theme shared by a majority of this literature, and one that my scholarship also addresses, is the underlying tension of the drone program, whose killings “seem to rest outside the realm of acceptable democratic behavior, where civil liberties, due process, and constitutional limitation are enshrined” (Wilner 2015, 87). Yet, the targeted killing by drone of hundreds of unnamed suspected militants, in sovereign countries with whom the U.S. is not at war, generally are praised as effective, not scandalous (ibid). Additionally, the Obama

Administration’s secrecy surrounding the selection of targets and the claim that hardly any civilians are killed has elicited scorn from human rights groups, activists, and journalists, prompting Joseba Zulaika to comment that the official body count has become more an act of magical thinking than anything else (2012, 54).91 The use of epidemiological metaphors, especially relating the targets to cancers or tumors that must be excised from the otherwise healthy tissue around it, also helps naturalize military violence, especially when the particular tool for that violence is described as surgically precise (Gregory 2011, 205). Such precision is

91 For instance, the claim put forth by the Executive Branch (as reported by Senator Dianne Feinstein at John Brennan’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing to be the director of the CIA) that annual civilian casualties from CIA drone strikes were in the “single digits.” https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/11331.pdf (p. 19)

101

then often equated with virtue. This characterization helps conflate the technological advances associated with weaponized drones to just war, an association many scholars find problematic

(Rowland 2016, 614; See also: Zehfuss 2010; Gregory 2011; Der Derian 2009).

Claims to virtue alongside overwhelming force have long been a theme in post-colonial studies. With this in mind, Ashley Dawson (2016) likens the drone to an instrument of imperial gaze, whereby remote visual surveillance sets the stage for dominion over the colonized, the endpoint of which is ultimately death, but one that has been sanitized. She writes, “the imperial gaze mobilizes forms of biopolitical power that adjudicate in the starkest terms who is to die and who is to live” (ibid, 245). Drawing on Foucault’s definition of biopower, Rowland characterizes the official sanctioning of drone strikes as that of biolegitimacy, which she defines as “a commitment to the sanctity of ‘life itself’ to perform humanitarianism” (2016, 603). In this way, killing Others is defended as necessary to safeguard “manifold lives, including the lives of servicepersons, the lives of civilians abroad, and the lives of ordinary, innocent Americans at home” (Rowland 2016, 612). As such, drones “translate bodies into targets. The ‘drone stare’ abstracts people from context, while relying on clothing, behavior, and location, in the case of signature strikes, to determine combatant status” (ibid, 606). Coupled with the discourse of technological superiority, the images relayed by drones – despite still needing to be interpreted by humans – are presented as scientifically objective in the defense of who gets killed and who does not (ibid, 607).

In this regard, weaponized drones are framed by the government (and often by media) as

“weapons systems uniquely capable of determining the militant or civilian status of anonymous persons viewed from above” (ibid, 611). Mark Pope (2017) notes that such determinations are predicated on an underlying assumption that anyone defined as a combatant is a viable target for

102

death (2017, 149). Pope adds that media coverage of drone strikes also helps ‘other’ drone targets (inadvertent or otherwise) as legitimate kill shots by parroting the language of precision offered by officials, relying on government statistics of militants and civilians killed, and by visually repeating stock photographs of the drone as a gleaming, sterile machine. The result of such deployments is what Elspeth Van Veeren characterizes as an “anesthetic experience of violence, one which is calculating, rational, and irrefutable” and glosses over the difficulties or implications of deciding who is civilian and who is militant (2013).

Alongside scholarship calling attention to those living under drones is a growing literature on drone pilots themselves. Concern over the welfare of drone pilots has increased in recent years as reports and incidents of PTSD have grown in visibility.92 Hugh Gusterson argues,

“By separating the pilot from the plane and shifting combat from an embodied to an onscreen experience, drone technology has remixed war” (2016, 29). As such, flying RPAs – using them for surveillance and targeting – is a highly visual experience for pilots, which some academics and politicians stress “is remote killing in every sense of the term: it is done by remote control, and it is spatially remote, culturally remote, and emotionally remote” (Gusterson 2016, 44). This remoteness, like that of landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), has “disarticulated the spatial relationship between weapon and warrior” leading to a “profound and asymmetrical” shift in war fighting (ibid).

Two aspects of the drone program are particularly jarring. First, the ability of military drones to linger over targets for long periods of time yet destroy those same targets within a matter of seconds also scrambles the traditional relationship between weapon and warrior, space and time (Gusterson 2016, 46). Second, the practice of confirming kill shots – lingering over

92 In contrast to the psychological ramifications of living under drones, which remains limited outside of the field of psychology. See: Gusterson 2016.

103

targets after the fact to assess and confirm who/what was killed/destroyed – forces the pilot into an “experiential immersion” of death, which offsets remote killing with a sort of remote intimacy.

The result of such practices, according to Gusterson, is that:

They scramble relations of distance, making them simultaneously more elongated and more compressed in ways that are subjectively confusing and paradoxical. They make killing both easier and harder, creating a new psychological topography that we are struggling to understand (2016, 47). Clearly, the covert drone strike program occupies an important place in the topography of post-9/11 America. Due, perhaps, to its relative infancy, academics have not yet pieced together a broader historical narrative of that program, which I do here. Moreover, in contrast to much of the existing literature, this dissertation is less interested in whether drone strikes are legal, sound, or precise. Nor is it primarily a critique of the power imbalances generated by the use of drones.

Rather, the issue at hand is how enacting and representing drone warfare constitutes the subject – in this case, both the Self (the United States, Americans, ‘us’) and the Other (civilians, terrorists, particular nationalities, ‘them’) – and how such constitutions propagate (or contest) a belief in the legitimacy to carry out drone strikes. In other words, engaging in and talking about the covert program (or not) is itself a form of identity- or Self-making, and this process involves differentiating from, positioning in relation to, and posturing against something or someone else.

The resulting discourse of U.S. targeted drone strikes presents itself at first glance as a straightforward story between the virtuous Self and the evil Other. The following two chapters genealogically trace this seemingly unproblematic narrative, uncovering how it relies on elements of ‘9/11’ storytelling to buttress itself against moments of contestation or debate that might otherwise tear down the façade of a simple, linear, and monolithic storyline. Unearthing the contingency of these representations destabilizes the notion of a sovereign Self that somehow stands independent of a confrontation with difference, and it allows for the possibility of

104

alternative Selves, alternative Others, and alternative relationships between the two.

Official Narrative

The story of the covert drone strike program in relation to the War on Terror began shortly after 9/11 but remained a footnote in the broader campaign against al Qaeda until the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. During the first administration, UAVs were rarely mentioned outside the context of budget hearings. Much of this discourse drew directly upon security fears as the DoD tried to procure more money for the program or as they discussed who should have control of it.93 The discourse also framed weaponized drones as a critical component of modern warfare. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, for instance, took pains early on (2002-2003) to promote the idea that piloting UAVs was a major and vital mission in the War on Terror; that the U.S. military had to adapt to new technology or risk another 9/11. The fear associated with ‘another 9/11’ was tempered by praise from both Bush and Defense officials that drones have “tremendous capabilities,”94 that precision weapons and targeting are a

“revolutionary application of new technologies;”95 and that many steps in the process ensure that those at the controls “refine the targeting, checking to make sure civilians are not nearby.”96

Equating the use of drones to ‘noble’ warfare, Bush praised the machine’s technology as concomitant to, and complimentary of, American liberal values:

93 See, for instance: Bob Woodward, “Secret CIA Units Playing A Central Combat Role,” The Washington Post (18 November 2001); Judith Miller and Eric Schmitt, “Ugly Duckling Turns Out to Be Formidable in the Air,” The New York Times (23 November 2001); Quadrennial Defense Review 2001; Paul D. Wolfowitz, Senate Armed Services Budget Hearing (9 April 2002).

94 George W. Bush, Radio Address, 17 May 2003.

95 Paul Wolfowitz, Commencement Address, Naval War College (20 June 2003). While “precision weapons and targeting” encompasses far more than combat drones, they are, nonetheless, discursively associated.

96 “In the Skies Over Iraq, Silent Observers,” The New York Times (18 April 2003).

105

With this military technology, we can now target a regime without targeting an entire nation. … If we have to fight our enemies, we can now do so with greater precision and greater humanity. In the age of advanced weapons, we can better strike -- we can better target strikes against regimes and individual terrorists. Sadly, there will be civilian casualties in war. But with these advances, we can work toward this noble goal: defeating the enemies of freedom while sparing the lives of many more innocent people -- which creates another opportunity, and that is, by making war more precise, we can make war less likely.97

Despite praise for their efficiency and precision, UAVs were in their infancy during a majority of the Bush administration. They were seldom directly discussed at any length in scripted remarks, perhaps because relatively few drone strikes were reported outside Afghanistan and Iraq until 2008. Indeed, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism counts only 57 CIA drone strikes outside official war zones (Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) during Bush’s entire presidency.98 Technical problems and cumbersome control sequences that led to crashes and other drone mishaps spurred continued tweaking. The improved technology led to two major changes in the last year of Bush’s presidency: a switch to ‘signature’ strikes, and an increase in the number of strikes carried out in Pakistan.99 Both policy changes would have a profound effect on the Obama administration.

Barack Obama inherited a growing drone program and ran with it, which, unlike Bush, ultimately forced his reluctant administration to publicly defend the policy in 2013.100 Still, the

97 George W. Bush, Commencement Address, United States Air Force Academy (28 May 2006).

98 A majority of these took place in Pakistan beginning in the summer of 2008, when the Bush Administration began using ‘Signature’ strikes. All told, Pakistan had 51 strikes under Bush, beginning in 2004; Yemen had one in 2002; and Somalia had six, beginning in 2007. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war (accessed 24 February 2017).

99 Reported on 22 February 2008 in the NYT, “Instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, this shift allowed American operators to strike convoys of vehicles that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run, for instance, so long as the risk of civilian casualties is judged to be low.”

100 For instance, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism counts 55 strikes in Pakistan alone in 2009. Although most of the program remained classified, Obama was the first to acknowledge its existence during a Google Hangout

106

dearth of official comments on the covert drone program over his eight years in office highlights the administration’s reticence to discuss a classified and ongoing program.101 Of the few public remarks between January 2009 and December 2016, only four have been cited repeatedly in media reports and academic scholarship for establishing and justifying the drone strike progam.

These are: State Department lawyer Harold Koh’s keynote address in March 2010 at the annual meeting of the American Society for International Law; Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks of March 2012; then-Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan’s speech of April 2012; and

President Obama’s speech a year later in May 2013.102 Within this body of texts, I search for the themes of ‘9/11’ highlighted in Table I of Chapter Two (including such dichotomous pairings as: virtuous/evil; innocent/guilty; and victim/aggressor), though I do not assume that such relationships are static identity markers. I examine how they are used in the discourse to separate

Self from Other, and how that separation, in turn, helps justify the covert drone program.

Security

Matters of security run throughout all four speeches and are used as the legal justification for covert drone strikes. All four men directly connected their counterterrorism policies –

event in January 2012. The legal justifications and procedures for targeting suspected terrorists, including American citizens, is mapped out in Obama’s “playbook,” a Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) entitled, “Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.” Although sidelined by the coverage of the 2016 presidential election, the Obama Administration finally released a slightly redacted version of the PPG on 6 August 2016, after intense pressure from human rights groups, the ACLU, and others.

101 The Council on Foreign Relations lays out the distinction between programs: Micah Zenko (2013), “Transferring CIA Drone Strikes to the Pentagon: Policy Innovation Memorandum No. 31,” http://www.cfr.org/drones/transferring-cia-drone-strikes-pentagon/p30434 (accessed 4 February 2016).

102 Brennan’s speech, entitled, “The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism Strategy” was delivered on 30 April 2012 at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2012/04/brennanspeech/. At the time of Brennan’s speech, drones were a particular sore spot in Obama’s attempt to repair the U.S. relationship with Pakistan after the bin Laden raid. A year later, the controversy resurfaced when the President nominated Brennan to head the CIA, prompting Obama to address the issue himself on 23 May 2013 at the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, DC, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university.

107

including targeted killing by drone – to the 9/11 attacks. Stressing that the attacks were an act of war and citing the Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), they argued that the United States had the responsibility and legal authority to defend itself against future attacks. However, the tone and framing of their speeches differed considerably.

The two legal counsels built their remarks on a foundation of dispersed risk and danger.

Their speeches were both broader legal justifications for U.S. defense policies, including but not limited to, covert drone strikes. Still, the context in which both speeches were given deserves mention. At the time of Koh’s speech, Obama had been in office a little over a year, yet the number of reported drone strikes – especially in Pakistan – had more than doubled the total number of strikes in Bush’s entire tenure as president. According to the Bureau of Investigative

Reporting, the U.S. engaged in approximately 86 drone strikes from January 2009 to March 2010.

A week before Koh’s speech, the NYT reported that a drone strike had allegedly targeted and killed the al Qaeda leader responsible for planning the Camp Chapman bombing in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA agents on 20 December 2009. Moreover, while Koh only mentioned UAVs once by name, the WSJ and WAPO both published editorials shortly thereafter with the bylines,

“A Defense of Drones,” and “In Defense of Drones” supporting Koh, and in a sense helping to solidify the speech as a ‘drone strikes speech’.

Addressing a room full of lawyers and academics, Koh explicitly categorized defense policies like drone strikes under what he referred to as “the Law of 9/11.” In his estimation, the

U.S. had and continues to have the international legal right to defend itself in light of the

“horrific 9/11 attacks,” particularly given that al-Qaeda continues to espouse America’s destruction. Eric Holder began his speech on a more somber note, reminding his audience that since 9/11, Americans were living in an “hour of danger” and facing “a nimble and determined

108

enemy who cannot be underestimated.” He reiterated the need for vigilance against “urgent threats” when he told his audience that he went to sleep every night worried about how to keep

America safe.

Holder’s remarks were given in March 2012. By that point, the Obama Administration had approved roughly 257 drone strikes in Pakistan alone. Three recent incidents help give context to Holder’s speech. First, the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric and leader of AQAP, was killed in a drone strike at the end of September 2011, which resulted in much media discussion over the legality of targeting an American citizen. Second, Obama first publically acknowledged the existence of the drone program in a Google Hangout meeting with voters on

30 January 2012. He answered a question about civilian casualties by asserting that the drone program was kept on a very tight leash. Finally, after a NATO friendly fire incident on 24

November 2011, when a (manned) air strike killed 25 Pakistani soldiers, tensions with Pakistan – already high – boiled over, resulting in the eviction of the CIA and their drones from Shamsi Air

Base, among other things.103 All three incidents received top news coverage in the NYT, WAPO, and WSJ at a time when doubts about the program – its legal basis, moral footing, and efficacy – were steadily increasing in media coverage.

The Attorney General did not directly reference UAVs but spent a large portion of his talk obliquely defending Obama’s decision to target and kill Anwar al Awlaki, an American citizen and al Qaeda leader who was believed to pose an imminent threat to the nation. Because

Awlaki was killed by a drone strike, the connection – although not spelled out by Holder himself

– is nonetheless made. Throughout the rest of his remarks, Holder stressed the legal authority of the U.S. to engage its enemies, “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those groups,”

103 Drone strikes had resumed by the time of Holder’s speech, but tensions remained high.

109

including “stealth or technologically advanced weapons.” He highlighted the President’s responsibility to protect the country “from any imminent threat of violent attack” even if such threat did not derive from a traditional battlefield. The risk was far more insidious, according to

Holder, because “we are at war with a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country.” As a result, the U.S. had to respond to looming threats if the state in which such threats originated was unwilling or unable to deal with it itself. Again, the oblique reference here was to ongoing diplomatic tensions with Pakistan and Yemen, both of which had been accused by the U.S. of not pulling their own weight or trying hard enough to capture known extremists.

He concluded his speech with fear, by reminding his audience: “As we learned on 9/11, al Qaeda has demonstrated the ability to strike with little or no notice – and to cause devastating casualties.” The implication here is that another 9/11 could happen if the U.S. does not engage in the policies outlined in his speech.

Neither Holder nor Koh made any assertions supporting the notion that drone strikes represented a new policy that required new legal justification. In fact, what they did say was consistent with existing justifications for the use of targeted lethal force, established decades earlier and predicated on a nation’s right to self-defense. In both speeches, drones are conveyed as just another tool used in war. Folding new tools – drones – into pre-existing legal norms for the use of force syntactically and contextually helps normalize drone warfare and screens out the exact features of drones that make them unique. Still, as Rowland (2016) said, targeted killing might not be new, but the use of technology to both spy and kill from such a distance is.

Claiming the right to self-defense silences broader discussions on what, if anything, drone technology – such as the distance between pilot and vehicle and the long surveillance times – changes about U.S. war-fighting.

110

Unlike the two lawyers, Brennan and Obama dedicated their remarks entirely and explicitly to the covert drone program. Brennan’s speech came only two months after Holder’s.

In that time period, news coverage and commentary on the covert drone program remained prominent. For the rest of March 2012, the major newspapers maintained coverage of the

Administration’s efforts to repair the tense relationship with Pakistan, which, according to the media, centered on the drone program.104 In April, the newspapers reported that the CIA was seeking greater leeway for the drone program in Yemen, which Obama eventually granted.105

Two other April ‘events’ of note kept the drone program in the public eye. First, The Rolling

Stone magazine published Michael Hastings’ damning critique of Obama and the CIA drone program on 16 April 2012, which has made a substantial impact on the public debate on drones, as I will show in the next chapter. Second, and a bit less visible, the activist and advocacy groups

CODEPINK, Reprieve, and the Center for Constitutional Rights held an international “Drone

Summit” on 28-29 April 2012 in Washington, D.C. In this context, Brennan’s speech might be seen as an attempt to allay domestic (and perhaps even international) concerns about the program and the administration responsible for it.

However, the disquiet over drone strikes continued to gather steam in the media as well as popular culture mediums such as the Internet’s The Onion. The Senate Judiciary Committee also convened a hearing on “Drone Wars” on 23 April 2012.106 Referring to the covert program as “Drone Wars” connotes an image of Sci Fi robots or Star Wars. Although not necessarily

104 For instance: “Drones at Issue as U.S. Rebuilds Ties to Pakistan,” NYT (19 March 2012); “Pakistan Seeks End to Drones,” WSJ (21 March 2012); CNN Interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who did not answer (1 April 2012).

105 “Broader Drone Tactics Sought,” WAPO (19 April 2012); “A Barrier to Extending War to Yemen,” WAPO (21 April 2012); “U.S. Relaxes Drone Rules,” WSJ (26 April 2012); “Yemen to Face More Drones,” NYT (26 April 2012).

106 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counter-Terrorism Implications of Targeted Killing,” 23 April 2012.

111

disparaging, constructing the subject this way intimates that the U.S. (the ones with drones) is the one waging war on Others, as opposed to being a tool for self-defense. Overall, both Brennan and Obama sought the opportunity to quiet some of the public qualms about weaponized drones.

Their justifications established the baseline state policy and belief in the drone strike program that guided the public debate I explore in the next chapter.

Brennan started his speech on a positive note by referring to the successes of the Obama administration, particularly the killing of Osama bin Laden. This laid the groundwork for a defense of drone strikes predicated on their efficacy in eliminating danger (to the U.S.). Even as

Brennan discussed the ethics and oversight involved in their use, the overall tone of the speech was one of competence, responsibility, and success. In contrast, Obama began his speech with a

9/11 story. Obama’s ‘9/11’ painted the prelude before the attacks as a time of prosperity and

[false] tranquility, a decade that lured the United States into “complacency.” It was this naïveté that came crashing down around us in “clouds of fire and metal and ash,” the result of an attack by “a group of terrorists [who] came to kill as many civilians as they could.” Thus began the war.

Telling ‘9/11’ at the beginning of his speech set a different overall tone of sobriety and gravity and primed the audience in at least three respects. First, it established a security need for all of

Obama’s counterterrorism policies. Second, it evoked the horrific visual imagery of that morning, images whose immense emotive power typically unite American audiences with feelings of patriotism even as they remind Americans that they are no longer safe. And third, it emphasized that the United States didn’t start the war or the violence.

Even so, Obama also reassured the audience that his counterterrorism strategy had effectively decimated the core of al Qaeda, leaving a “lethal yet less capable” periphery and

“deranged or alienated individuals” behind who – at least thus far – did not present the same

112

large-scale risk.107 This distancing was at once comforting (we’re winning the war, and the threat of another 9/11 doesn’t seem imminent) yet equivocal. For Brennan and Obama to successfully argue in favor of their counterterrorism policies, they must present a compelling case that the

U.S. is still being threatened, even as they attempt to sell themselves as the most capable at combating that threat. Obama did this by linking the “future of terrorism” with “the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” such as the Oklahoma City bombing.

As with Koh and Holder, folding drone strikes into past policy responses helps gloss over any differences that the drone as a new technology brings to the calculus. Enumerating the major attacks of the 1980s and 1990s also works to normalize current crises such as Benghazi by insinuating that such violence – while not business as usual – at least has a lengthy history. He argued: “These attacks were all brutal; they were all deadly; and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.” Obama’s use of the adverbs “smartly” and

“proportionally” insinuates that his actions were just that. Likewise, using the first person plural throughout the text (“our folks,” “our Special Forces,” “our troops,” “we act,” “our laws,” “our government”) draws the audience into active participation, a rhetorical device deployed to discursively unify and align the audience to his ‘smart’ and ‘just’ side. Finally, he offset 9/11 as exceptional, the worst-case scenario that continued vigilance, including the surveiling vigilance of the drone, could avert.

Brennan also teeters between extoling American counterterrorism efforts and warning of continuing threats. He does this twofold. In the first part of his speech, he consistently drew on tone and subject by associated negative signifiers to ‘them’: “a vicious adversary that abides by

107 He states, “none of AQAP’s efforts approach the scale of 9/11,” “Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria. But here, too, there are differences from 9/11.”

113

no rules,” who “brutally murder thousands of Americans,” “al Qaeda’s violent agenda,” “al

Qaeda’s killing of innocents,” their “murderous ideology.” Then, in his discussion of the specific merits of drone strikes, he focused his attention on ‘us’ by ending each major point with an expression about the need, duty, and responsibility to save American lives and protect the homeland. This reminder of ‘our’ bodily safety, including that of the (now far removed) drone pilot, serves to mitigate any potential objections the ‘we’ might have to drones by indirectly drawing on ‘our’ fear of ‘our’ own deaths.

However, the principle argument proffered by Brennan and Obama is one based on logic and reason. They presented weaponized drones as the smart, legal, and singly effective way of preserving the nation’s winning streak and eliminating continuing threats to U.S. safety. Smart because these threatening terrorists lurked in “remote” and “inhospitable” regions inaccessible to

U.S. troops (or accessed at too great a risk). Smart because the drone’s cameras helped minimize the loss of innocent life by locating specific individuals, following them, and killing them without endangering women and children in the vicinity. Smart because otherwise ‘they’ would remain hidden from literal sight and continue planning attacks against ‘us’/U.S. Ergo, if not for the technological abilities of the drone – its powerful camera and capacity to loiter overhead, unseen, for long periods of time – the terrorist Other would escape and melt into an

‘impenetrable’ and ‘concealed’ background of unknown future threats.

Values

If the above is taken at face value, then the ongoing nature of the threat from al Qaeda suggests that the covert drone program is, indeed, necessary for the nation’s continued safety.

However, all four speeches specifically justified the practice as also representing liberal values.

114

Even if the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism is epiphenomenal, a veneer meant to sell otherwise controversial policy, its use nonetheless suggests that at least some of those opposed to weaponized drones were so for moral reasons. Those misgivings are discussed at greater length in the next chapter. Here, however, I highlight the degree to which the discourse painted itself and its policies as necessary, just, and discriminate.

More than simply efficacious, all four speeches argued that using drones for targeted killing was at once sanctioned and constrained by American values. They all structured their policy defenses around the Obama Administration’s notion that living by American values and in consistency with the rule of law ultimately made the nation safer and stronger. Koh even defined his role as legal advisor to include serving “as a conscience” to the government. He and Holder highlighted the U.S. commitment to several underlying war principles governing the use of force

– necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity. According to them, each was meant to limit damage to non-combatants and was espoused to reflect the Obama Administration’s commitment to international norms, the seriousness with which the U.S. took up lethal force, and the numerous “procedural safeguards” enforced to ensure due process. Even more, both lawyers connected the technological precision of drone strikes to its camera surveillance system; a more humane way to wage war. Pushing back against the notion that UAVs were somehow immoral,

Koh and Holder both praised the surveillance and intelligence gathering abilities of “pilotless aircraft” for ensuring that operations minimized or avoided civilian deaths.

Brennan also went to great lengths to prove that targeted drone strikes were in line with domestic and international law, referencing the findings of Koh, Holder, and other top legal

115

officials numerous times.108 Both Brennan and Obama defended their drone policy as one of self- defense, with Obama quite specifically defining American actions as a “just war.” He proceeded to emphasize the frontier between ‘our’ moral self-defense (counterterrorism) and ‘their’ immoral targeting and wanton killing of innocent civilians. Coupling values with security,

Obama then turned the conversation back towards protecting the lives of Americans at home. For instance, addressing his decision to target Awlaki he said, “as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took him out” (emphasis added). Not acting is thus associated with letting Americans die, whereas acting with an alternative option to drones is constrained by “distant and unforgiving” terrain that “[poses] profound risks to our troops.” Drone strikes are thus presented as legitimate acts of self-defense that save American lives.109

Beyond drone strikes, the larger conflict is also portrayed as one between American values and terrorist immorality, imagery consistent with the original 9/11 narrative. The U.S. is discursively rendered synonymous with freedom, the first amendment, moral rectitude, as well the contemporary ‘city upon a hill’ that others who achieve drone technology will or should emulate. Obama’s opening sentence, in fact, makes reference to ‘our’ exceptional nature: “For over two centuries, the United States has been bound together by founding documents that defined who we are as Americans, and served as our compass through every type of change.” Brennan’s speech reiterates the notion that al Qaeda hates us and attacked us because

108 Including Jeh Johnson (then-general counsel at the Department of Defense) and Stephen Preston (general counsel at the CIA).

109 Even if this applies to precision targeting more broadly, the context of the speech centered on drones as implements of that precision. Again, what is important here is not why drones and precision strikes have been blurred into the same thing, or whether they should be, but that they are blurred in the first place.

116

of our values, and that it is our values that distinguish us from them.110 The implication in these narratives that we are on the ‘just’ or moral side of the war then mitigates – if not dispels – any sense of real culpability or blame in terms of “collateral damage” – as demonstrated in Brennan’s passive way of blaming all the deaths – past, present, and future – on al Qaeda’s ongoing quest to attack the United States.

Values played a particularly interesting role in Obama’s speech, where he spent less time directly addressing the morality of targeted drone strikes than establishing a moral distinction between the previous administration and his own. He did this in two principle sections of his remarks. First, while he went to great lengths to remind the audience that the United States was at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their affiliates, he never referred to the war as one against terrorism. Distancing himself from the Bush era of perpetual war and fear, he presented America

“at a crossroads” by discursively aligning himself with the Founding Fathers (and by association with American values) in opposition to Bush: “We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror.” And again later on, he more explicitly drew the same line: “Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Here, it appears he is distinguishing between appropriate tactics: The ongoing ground wars (on terror) started by Bush have resulted in loss of life, loss of tax dollars, American war weariness, and limited options for victory. In contrast,

110 One of the most interesting pieces to Brennan’s speech is his use of pronouns. He employs the first person plural throughout his speech: “our nation,” “our inherent right of national self-defense,” “we are a nation of laws,” “our intelligence capabilities,” “the high standards to which we hold ourselves,” “our values as Americans.” On one level, he is referring to the people that work under him and more generally are employed by the federal government to combat terrorism. But the repeated use of “we” and “our” also extends an invitation to the audience and the broader American public to join in, practically forcing the listener into a sort of collusion with the government and its policies.

117

using drones to find and kill specific enemies, wherever they might be, has less of a military footprint, thereby keeping Americans home, costs less, and is more effective since drones can go where people cannot. The pretext: Bush used a (something big) when (something small) was actually what was needed.

Second, Obama discursively separates himself from his predecessor in terms of their approach to counterterrorism: “I believe we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”

His use of the third person plural connotes, however, that ‘we’ were all mislead (including him) and hence guilty of perverting ‘our’ collective true nature. Syntactically, this dichotomy between

Bush and Obama allowed for the following syllogism: Bush did all these bad things… I do not do bad things; therefore, the things that I do, like use drones, are by logic moral and in line with

American values. The syntax and subject positioning give permission to the audience to acknowledge their misstep and correct it by aligning themselves with Obama’s more ethical and legal counterterrorism policies, which, as outlined in his speech, included drone strikes.

Transforming the morally muddy waters of targeted drone strikes into an ethical tactic of war, implicating all Americans into the decision-making process, and distinguishing between the mistakes of the previous administration all lay emphasis on the virtuousness of the Self (as led by

Obama), while ignoring or camouflaging the physical repercussions of the strikes on the Other.

Both Brennan’s and Obama’s remarks further obfuscated the distinctions within the category

‘Other’ by foregrounding terrorist immorality as the foil to American values but avoiding the role played by innocent Muslims, save as subjects to others’ actions.

118

Identity-as-Practice

Questions about bodies litter this official discourse, though rarely explicitly. After all, it is the bodies of individual terrorists that drones are targeting to kill; and it is the bodies of innocent civilians that are meant to be avoided but make up the ‘collateral damage’. It is also the bodies of American servicemen and women that drones ‘save’ by keeping away from danger, and it is the public’s bodies that such policies are meant to safeguard back at home.

That said, it is the topic of ‘their’ civilian casualties that perhaps best captures the rhetorical role of the body and visibility in the Administration’s drone strike policy.111 Brennan consistently employed “collateral damage” as a euphemism for the deaths of civilians in the vicinity of drone strikes. The term quite literally conceals the dead body and minimizes the lethal results by using the less specific ‘damage’ (Wilcox 2015a, 2015b, 2014). He, Koh, and Holder also distanced themselves and the audience (the ‘we’ and ‘us’) from accusations of moral recklessness by touting drones for their ability to help ‘us’ “make more informed judgments about factors that might contribute to collateral damage.”112 Consider the following sentence from Brennan: “never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al Qaeda terrorist and innocent civilians.” While he acknowledges the difference between both actors (terrorist vs. civilian), it is interesting to note that the syntax places both of them together in opposition to the “us.” Furthermore, his choice of language suggests that the bodies of the terrorist and the civilian appear to us at first glance to look the same and must be ‘properly scrutinized’ to correctly identify a legitimate target. In this example,

111 What matters here is that this language was used vis-à-vis the covert drone program; not that the same language had been used long before 9/11.

112 Brennan 2012. Ross Chambers (2003) examines patterns of euphemism along with tautology and equivocation in a study of news and press reports at the beginning of the Iraq War. He argues that euphemisms such as “collateral damage” serve as a particular type of persuasive technique, which is often overlooked by rhetoricians.

119

the drone as sorting device is paramount. The camera looks down upon a sea of potential threats

– strangers. Through relayed satellites, images of strangers are sent to people a continent away who decide whether they live or die. It is only through the surveiling (yet also killing) drone that

‘we’ can be so virtuous.

The syntactic construction of the subject also helps offset any misgivings about the program. Throughout his speech, Brennan used the active tense when describing al Qaeda’s actions against Americans and allies: “strike our homeland,” “killing of innocents,” “seek to do us harm.” He described them as “murderous,” “violent,” “dangerous,” “a cancerous tumor.”

However, when talking about innocent loss of life as a result of a drone strike, Brennan became much more equivocal: on the one hand, he argued persistently that weaponized drones were surgical and thus killed far less people than typical ordinance used in war – implying that the decision to use drones for precision strikes was ethical because the alternatives would undoubtedly have risked the lives of far more people. Yet he also minimized U.S. blame for such deaths by using a passive sentence structure: “we only authorize a strike if we have a high degree of confidence that innocent civilians will not be injured or killed, except in the rarest of circumstances.” The different tones associated with active and passive voice establish a hierarchy of subjects, whereby the terrorist Other overshadows possible drone strike victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Syntactically, there is also an interesting dynamic with regard to Brennan’s use of the word ‘innocent’, which he ascribed to both American civilians at home and [Muslim] civilians living in the vicinity of drone strikes. Yet the innocent Other – who Norton (1988) reminds us is a ‘liminal’ figure – was not discursively placed on the same level as her American counterparts, as indicated by Brennan’s use of the passive voice, his use of the term ‘collateral damage’, and

120

his analogy to a diseased body. Implying that they stem from the same physical body, the terrorist was equated with a cancerous tumor, and the innocents were the tissue around it at risk of either becoming part of the tumor itself, or falling victim to their violence, an analogy he further emphasized by drawing attention to the “surgical precision” of drone strikes. This quote is worth noting in its entirety:

In addition, compared against other options, a pilot operating this aircraft remotely — with the benefit of technology and with the safety of distance—might actually have a clearer picture of the target and its surroundings, including the presence of innocent civilians. It’s this surgical precision—the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it—that makes this counterterrorism tool so essential.

Obama avoided euphemisms, instead insisting that, “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set”

(emphasis added, also note passive voice). Acknowledging that civilian casualties were “a risk that exists in any war,” Obama admitted that U.S. drone strikes “have resulted in” innocent deaths (passive voice), which he described as a “heartbreaking tragedy” that would continue to haunt him. However, he then attempted to justify those deaths by claiming that the alternative would have been many more lives lost both in the United States and in the Muslim world; the benefits outweighed the potential costs. He further contested the civilian casualty figures published by NGOs and reminded the audience that the death toll from terrorist attacks on fellow

Muslims “dwarfs any estimate” of casualties resulting from drones.

Obama’s minimization of innocent loss of life – represented by the brevity with which he addressed the topic, his rejection of outside body counts, and the syntax he chose – helped those civilians ‘disappear’ into the background of the discussion.113 They discursively remained an

113 I am not suggesting that Obama did not care about civilians. I argue that his speech does not engage with those deaths beyond a brief nod.

121

ephemeral presence in the text, particularly through the use of the passive voice: the sad inadvertent consequence of a war the U.S. didn’t start. Interestingly, when a female audience member interrupted him towards the end to ask if he would compensate the families of civilian drone victims as a strategy to keep “us safer here at home,” Obama only acknowledged her right to speak as an American (value) and that being able to have such difficult discussions was one of

America’s defining virtues. He did not address the question. The civilians – while innocent – were not heard, their numbers were ignored in this discourse.114

Importance of 9/11 storytelling

Although it is the killing that gets the attention, the drone program is primarily reliant on the camera lens. That camera, or set of cameras, is the gatekeeper – relaying images of people – strangers – to pilots and others in the United States, who’s job is then to mediate the strangeness of the bodies on screen, to discern who is good and who is bad. Civilians, primarily women and children, are ‘innocent’; military-aged men are not.115 Without these images, the U.S. would not be able to sort; and without sorting, the U.S. would likely not be able to kill the bad guys, since alternative methods such as manned aerial bombing or special forces operations are too costly.

The camera allows the pilot to avoid the innocent and kill the guilty when he deploys his missiles.

By this calculus, the drone as an instrument of war is essential in the fight against terror.

All four official statements draw on ‘9/11’ to legitimize the covert drone strike program.

Security themes drawn from the 9/11 narrative elicit fears of another attack should America not

114 When he does address accountability in his speech, he is referring not to the civilian victims of drones or their surviving relatives; he is [only] addressing Americans’ fear of government overreach, implying that our concerns are the only ones that really matter, or the only ones a domestic audience wants to hear about.

115 Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times (29 May 2012).

122

remain vigilant; reiterate that the enemy is ruthless and cunning, yet diminished; tout the surveiling and precision bombing capabilities of the drone; and remind ‘us’ that drone strikes are measured, vetted, and ‘just’, unlike the attacks on 9/11. With regard to identity practice, these

‘9/11’ themes work discursively to foreground ‘our’ safety over either the terrorist or the civilian subject. The diminished place given to drone victims, the foreclosing of any discussion about who really gets killed, and the ongoing ambiguous characterization of who is ‘terrorist’ all contribute to the continuing perception of the Other as less than, invisible, not something the

American public has to worry about except as a threat to be eliminated. Innocence, in this regard, is still reserved primarily for Americans at home. After all, as Obama and the others have reminded ‘us’, it was ‘our’ innocence that was shattered so effectively that September morning.

The next chapter explores how the media and popular culture have responded to this narration of the drone program.

123

CHAPTER SIX

Targeted drone strikes – talking back

Below us: A furnace for tyrants Above us, drones?

The friendly drones, the enemy Which makes death fall Overhead As though we are fields And death our downpour. --Ayman Shahari, “Unrhymed Drone”

What makes weaponized drone use in the War on Terror stand out to so many Americans as something special or something especially problematic? The official discourse on covert drone strikes argues that such bombings are highly vetted, exist within the framework of domestic and international law, and are the least collaterally damaging of any other option. However, much of the American public has expressed displeasure with the program: it lacks transparency; it kills too many civilians; it creates more enemies than the U.S. started with; it is a fancy way of saying

‘assassination’ and, hence, immoral and illegal; it runs roughshod over state sovereignty, etc.116

This displeasure is captured in both the media and popular culture, where alternative discourses and counter-narratives have attempted to gain ground against the government’s account. While

Obama made some concessions to these concerns towards the end of his time as president, the program more or less remains in place. How can we explain this?

Chapter Six explores how the media and popular culture have contributed to the national

“drone strikes” discourse, often in response to the official discourse presented in the last chapter.

116 The latest Pew Research poll of May 2015 indicates that 58% of Americans approved of drone strikes, 35% disapproved, and 7% didn’t know. See: http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/28/public-continues-to-back-u-s- drone-attacks/ (accessed 22 February 2018).

124

Two broad issues emerge from this body of texts. The first centers on whether or not drone strikes comply with the ‘rule of law’. The second focuses on civilian casualties and proper vetting of targets. Using the three mechanisms of subject, tone, and context, I trace the themes of

‘9/11’ through both debates to assess when and how aspects of ‘9/11’ are employed, and to what effect. In both cases, the insertion of ‘9/11’ storytelling (advertent or inadvertent) serves a political purpose. Namely, it helps gloss over underlying misgivings about ‘robotic killing machines’ with the Obama Administration’s emphasis on the rule of law and American liberal values, ultimately allowing the covert drone program to continue, with a few modifications here and there. I end the chapter with a discussion of how identity is practiced within the “drone strike” discourse – specifically, how the role of the Stranger helps mediate Self-Other identity practice via drone camera.

U.S. policy on drone strikes has gone through a number of changes from the inception of the War on Terror to the end of the Obama Administration. As mentioned in the previous chapter, for much of Bush’s tenure, the drone program was working out the kinks in technology and bureaucracy. At that time, UCAVs were used to hunt down known upper-level terrorists and kill them, a process referred to as a ‘personality’ strike. During the summer of 2008, however, Bush quietly expanded the program to include a more laxly vetted ‘signature’ strike, which allowed for the targeting and killing of unspecified people who nonetheless fit a behavioral profile commonly associated with militants, insurgents, and terrorists. Between June 2008 and January

2009, the number of drone strikes in Pakistan increased from 11 to 51, with an estimated 255-

406 people killed in those six months alone.117 When Obama took office, he continued both types of strikes and expanded the program to play a bigger role in Yemen and Somalia. However,

117 Drone strikes began in Pakistan in 2004. Between then and June 2008, the total number of casualties was estimated to be between 157-185. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war (access 23 February 2018).

125

the increased visibility of the program forced the administration to publically defend the policy to its critics, which eventually led to several (albeit small) changes, including a pledge to increase transparency and decrease the volume of strikes in Pakistan.118

Once again, however, it is important to note that much of the discussion about the drone program in the media and in popular culture is technically about precision bombing, not drones per se. Still, even though targeted killing is often the real issue found objectionable in much of the public discourse, that discourse has largely framed the debate to be about drones. In essence, the broader category of precision killing has been subsumed under the more narrowly defined drone strike. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that such an elision makes it appear as if targeted killing is a new policy born with weaponized drones. At the same time, given that this dissertation is interested in what is presented as true, collapsing targeted killing into drone strikes is less an issue. Why drones, though?

UCAVs are unique insofar as their technology untethers the machine from its master, but not the master from the machine. In other words, the pilot is physically removed from harm yet still connected to the action via camera, satellite relays, and control buttons. Unlike manned aircraft, the drone’s cameras and hovering capability allow it to linger over particular areas and

‘watch’ a target for long periods of time without risk to the pilot. In this regard, the camera is really a drone’s most deadly weapon, since its purpose is to sort those in its scope into friend or foe, good or bad, Self or Other. Once selected, it matters less whether a drone shoots the hellfire missile or another type of aircraft does.

118 Obama’s “presidential policy guide,” more commonly referred to in the press as the ‘drone playbook’, was released in the summer of 2016; The Bureau of Investigative Journalism documents a noticeable decline in the number of strikes in Pakistan beginning around the time of Obama’s speech in May 2013, though there was a brief spike in the fall of 2014.

126

Drone Strike Counter-Narratives

Narratives from the media and pop culture offer insight into the views of U.S. civil society, albeit at an elite level. I refer to these sources collectively as the public discourse (in contradistinction to the official discourse).119 Reading through these texts chronologically and in conjunction with the government’s justifications paints a far more contentious and unstable picture than the official discourse might suggest. The alternative narratives stem from a reading of drone strikes that essentially flips the ‘9/11’ script: Americans are no longer the innocent ones.

Instead of holding fast, ‘we’ have corrupted the nation’s principles, mutated them into something that no longer defends the defenseless or upholds the notion that all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights. Under the ‘guise’ of self-defense, the United States secretly surveils far away populations, watching them through invisible cameras, depriving them of their own civil liberties, and deciding which of them should die. It is the U.S. who now rains death and destruction down on others with whom it is not at war.

Drawing on the conceptual framework of Self—Stranger—Other, I investigate the discursive slippages brought about by these counter narratives and examine how traces of ‘9/11’ are invoked, consciously or not, to buttress the official story as the ‘right’ one. Two aspects of the 9/11 narrative in particular serve to placate critics, despite the fact that neither, once invoked, actually changes the objectionable practices under scrutiny. These are avowals of the sanctity of the rule of law and of the moral imperative of robust vetting. The traces of these assurances in the discourse help explain how ‘9/11’ has been incorporated into the everyday, structuring certain ways of viewing and interacting with the world. The result with regard to identity practice

119 Based on Hansen’s 3a model (2006, 62-63) described in Chapter Three, this conglomeration of sources does not purport to express or substitute for ‘American identity’ writ large. Rather, it offers a snapshot of an influential cross- section of society that publically engages in political debate and performance.

127

is the overarching reassertion of the moral and righteous Self and the disappearance of the Other as a meaningful and visible subject position with her own rights and humanity.

Legality

Legality is one of the major concerns raised in the discourse about the U.S. use of drone strikes.120 Hinging on the authorization given to the president by the AUMF in 2001, drone strikes were originally justified by the unprecedented nature of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent ‘new’ degree of danger it augured for the United States.121 Indeed, the need to safeguard against this ‘new’ danger took precedence over otherwise important political institutions brokering international relations, such as state sovereignty. Reiterating that the War on Terror would inevitably be prosecuted differently than past engagements because the stakes were so high, the Bush administration defined “the zone of armed conflict against al Qaeda [to encompass] the entire globe,”122 justifying strikes anywhere.

For a majority of Bush’s tenure, drones were praised for their clinical efficiency; their legitimacy as a tool of war was largely absent from the public discourse. The administration’s switch to signature strikes in August 2008 and the dramatic increase in the number of attacks in

Pakistan and Yemen during the early Obama years changed this. As news organizations began to report more frequently on drone attacks, and as reports of civilian casualties rose, the validity,

120 Increased concern over the legality of drone strikes has also translated into a growing worry over the legal precedent Obama has set, particularly with regard to how other sovereign states might employ similar technology in the future. However, this ongoing debate is typically divorced from current operations or the War on Terror, with a few noted exceptions.

121 The AUMF allows the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against actors who are in some way connected to 9/11 “in order to prevent any future acts” of terrorism against the U.S. See: Joint Resolution, Public Law 107-40, 107th Congress, 18 September 2001.

122 Michael P. Scharf, “In the Cross Hairs of a Scary Idea,” The Washington Post, 25 April 2004.

128

morality, and utility of drone strikes became much more uncertain in national public discourse.123 This uncertainty was presented in a counter-narrative that questioned whether targeted killing by drone was legal under existing domestic and international law. The legality thread also spotlights the secrecy of the government with regard to its policy, arguing that such silence hampers any frank discussion of the matter, leaving room for doubt that existing justifications for drone strikes are robust enough to withstand prosecutorial scrutiny. Relatedly, many have also called into question the government’s security measures for framing national safety in such a way as to require the public’s blind obedience.124

This counter narrative centers on a reading of the United States Constitution – one of the foundations of American identity – as interdicting the targeting of a U.S. citizen without due process.125 The controversy was spurred by the American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was tracked down and killed in Yemen by drone strike on 30 September 2011.126 The lack of transparency over the decision – defended by officials as a necessary security precaution – conversely fed growing skepticism of the program, instigating a national debate (at least among

123 A link might be drawn as well to growing public disapproval for the WoT.

124 “ACLU Sues to Force Release of Drone Attack Records,” The Washington Post, 2 February 2012.

125 The debate over liberal identity of course is far is older than the U.S. Constitution.

126 Although Awlaki is the first American specifically targeted for assassination, he is not the first American to die as a result of a drone strike. A strike on 5 November 2002 targeting a Yemeni man, Qaed Salim Sunian al-Harethi, a collaborator on the USS Cole attack of 12 October 2000, also killed five associates, one of whom was an American. The death of the American citizen, albeit inadvertent, hardly elicited any public concern. The NYT wrote, “Administration officials have made it clear… that they are not troubled by the fact that Mr. Derwish may have died in the attack, because he was considered a Qaeda operative and therefore a legitimate target” (“Man Believed Slain in Yemen Tied by U.S. To Buffalo Cell,” New York Times, 10 November 2002).

129

the elite) that set out to weigh the security needs of the country against the nation’s purported democratic principles.127

Awlaki first came to the public’s attention in 2010, when his father, the ACLU, and other civil rights groups sued the U.S. government to release the legal justification for including the imam on the drone ‘kill list’. The Washington Post observed, "The request relates to a topic of vital importance: the power of the U.S. government to kill U.S. citizens without presentation of evidence and without disclosing legal standards that guide decision makers."128 The lawsuit and

WAPO’s undertone of disapproval here echo a growing sentiment emerging during the Obama administration that such targeting was both morally and legally suspect. Still, as USA Today explained in 2010, Awlaki was the “bin Laden of the internet,” which linked him semantically to

9/11 and implied that he was just as evil and dangerous as the mastermind behind the attacks, thereby justifying his presence on a ‘kill list’.129 Combining the two subjects ‘Awlaki’ and ‘bin

Laden’ into a single ‘evil’ subject position discursively dismisses either’s individuality as inconsequential. As Winkler notes, that evacuation of personhood leaves only ‘evil terrorist’, which is easier to condemn to die (2006; See also: Wilcox 2015a).

As for context, two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and several weeks before

Awlaki’s death, The Atlantic magazine published an article detailing Awlaki’s extensive ties to two of the 9/11 hijackers.130 While the timing was purely coincidental, it was nonetheless

127 This came to a head in Congress in May of 2013 with Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster against the drone program, though his primary (rhetorical) concern was whether the president had the authority to target an American on American soil.

128 “ACLU Sues.”

129 Aamer Madhani, “Cleric al-Awlaki dubbed ‘bin Laden of the Internet’,” USA Today (24 August 2010). The Arabic news network al Arabiya is given credit for the moniker.

130 J. M. Berger, “Anwar al-Awlaki’s Links to the September 11 Hijackers,” The Atlantic (9 September 2011).

130

significant. Given the attention paid to 9/11’s 10th anniversary – the television specials, the news articles, the ceremonies and moments of silence – connecting the cleric to 9/11 at that particular time helped strengthen the state’s justification for his death. It did so by – perhaps unintentionally – reminding the nation that the U.S. had gone 10 years without ‘another 9/11’… but Awlaki was poised to be the one to break that streak.

Even so, the debate over the legality of his death gathered steam after the strike. Obama, for his part, tried to minimize the drone strike’s significance by briefly addressing the mission at the “Changing of Office” of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ceremony at Fort Myer on

30 September 2011 (instead of holding a separate news conference). He stated, “The death of

Awlaki is a major blow to al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate. Awlaki was the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans.” After presenting a litany of

Awlaki’s offenses, Obama then characterized his death as a “significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda.” Not once did he mention that Awlaki was a U.S. citizen. Syntactically, he seems to mitigate direct government responsibility for the assassination by using a passive voice structure: “the death of...” Characterizing Awlaki as an important leader of al Qaeda also ties him to a broader understanding of the subject position ‘al Qaeda’ as the enemy who declared war on the U.S., in essence indirectly assigning Awlaki partial blame for 9/11.131 Moreover,

Obama placed Awlaki in opposition to the murdered “innocent Americans,” depriving the cleric of any sense of national identity: he was not innocent; he was not really American; he was Other.

This discursive othering allowed the conditions whereby Obama could literally make Awlaki

131 Awlaki was an Imam in Falls Church, Virginia, in September 2001. Although he publically condemned the attacks and was actively recruited by the Bush Administration as a ‘moderate’ voice in the Muslim world, evidence suggests that Awlaki had contact with the 9/11 hijackers and might have been an al Qaeda recruiter even then.

131

disappear – by killing him. Put another way, ‘9/11’ facilitated a discrete shift in permissible government action that created space for Awlaki’s death.

Much of the public discourse initially approved of the strike. WAPO defended the attack as “clearly justified, both legally and morally.”132 The editorial argued that because Awlaki was central to the radicalization of two homegrown terrorists – Fort Hood and Times Square – he qualified as a target under the AUMF and under the principle of self-defense. The New York

Times and the Wall Street Journal followed suit. Subtle use of language in these news items further separated Awlaki out as a legitimate target. For instance, the NYT described him as “the

American-born propagandist,” which connoted that he was not – or was no longer – a real

American (e.g. as opposed to saying “the American propagandist”). Awlaki was also described as Yemeni-born (i.e., not a true American), a “global terrorist,” and “an Internet guru for terror recruits via his widely distributed sermons and writings.”133 In these reports, he became a subject stripped of citizenship, the embodiment of a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a Stranger – who, when outed, was successfully distanced as Other.

However, the media’s discourse was not always so clear-cut. Despite approving of

Awlaki’s death, both WAPO and NYT criticized the administration more generally for being less than forthcoming with the official legal justification for killing an ‘American citizen’ with a drone. On the one hand, Awlaki as an individual was determined to be evil, Other; On the other hand, the broader issue of targeting even ‘former’ U.S. citizens provoked larger questions over the scope of the drone program and the power of the president to determine the bad apples

‘amongst us’ without revealing the selection criteria. In fact, it wasn't until 5 February 2013 –

132 “A Justified Killing,” The Washington Post, 1 October 2011.

133 Evan Perez, “CIA’s Drones at Issue in Suit,” Wall Street Journal, 4 August 2010. See also: Greg Miller, “Memo Backing Drone Strike Released,” The Washington Post, 24 June 2014.

132

over a year later – that any such disclosure took place. NBC’s Nightly News obtained a classified document outlining the legal justification for targeting U.S. citizens, what the NYT characterized as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories.”134 It gave Obama much greater leeway than previously thought, specifically with regard to the definition of ‘imminent’. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show quipped that ‘imminent’ really now meant ‘eventual’, adding, “So it’s more of an open admissions process, is what you’re saying? … Um, before we do it, do we at least yell, ‘Fore!

Head’s up!’?” His sarcastic tone illustrates that the decision to kill the cleric was contentious not so much because of Awlaki himself, but because of the secret process by which it was done. In fact, the ‘White Paper’ spurred pundits and scholars alike to question the ongoing nature of U.S. drone policy, beginning with an acknowledgement of the nebulous legal interpretation of the

AUMF as an open-ended declaration of war. The Washington Post wrote,

But bombing by drone is also an act of war that kills people. And wars are supposed to end. They have to have an end. Endless war is unacceptable and dangerous. The U.S. government simply cannot arrogate the right to wage an endless, global war against anyone it deems a threat to national security.135

Leaked just as John Brennan was facing confirmation as director of Central Intelligence, the drone program once again took center stage in the media and reinvigorated discussion on the legality and the prudence of drone strikes, culminating in Obama’s major defense of the policy on 23 May 2013. On one side, the WSJ editorialized that the White Paper was sufficient proof of legality. Many government officials did the Sunday TV circuit defending the selection process and arguing that sufficient oversight existed (e.g. Mike Rogers (R-MI) on Face the Nation). In contrast, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pushed for even greater clarity since, “The moral and ethical questions posed by the advent of drone warfare - which amounts to

134 “A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings,” New York Times, 24 June 2014.

135 Miller, “When Will the Drone War End?”

133

assassination by remote control - are painfully complex.”136 In other words, Brennan’s and

Obama’s ‘trust me’ was not enough. An editorial in the NYT summed up the debate at this time:

Now an overdue push for greater accountability and transparency is gathering steam, propelled by growing unease that America’s drones hit targets in countries with whom it is not formally at war, that there are no publicly understood rules for picking targets, and that the strikes may kill innocent civilians and harm, not help, American interests.137

Despite efforts from groups like the ACLU, and despite growing unease and pushback in the media, criticism over secrecy and legality was generally managed in a way that basically helped maintain the policy as it was. Part of the reason these narratives failed to effect more substantial change has to do with the invocation of ‘9/11’ (implicit or explicit) at key moments of the debate. Very much the way Obama framed his 23 May 2013 speech by beginning with 9/11, the media also drew on or reminded the nation of a particular version of what happened that morning: the ‘unprovoked’ attack ‘indiscriminately’ targeting ‘innocent’ civilians going about their daily lives. Contrasting the unprovoked 9/11 to a legal and vetted target policy helps distance the U.S. drone program from moral ambiguity, particularly when discursively aligned with fears of what Awlaki could do, and those who might have died if Awlaki had remained alive.

At the same time, Obama’s assurances that a bevy of lawyers had weighed in on the legality of targeting the cleric, and a bevy of pilots and intelligence analysts had stringently vetted the attack, also fostered a permissive environment for critics to acquiesce to Obama’s policy, lining up behind the notion that the U.S. had done its due diligence while safeguarding the homeland from attack. Jon Stewart’s comment about ‘Fore!’ illustrates this behavior pattern.

His sarcasm allows the audience to question the practice, yet the laughs he elicits equally allows

136 Robinson, “Death from on High,” The Washington Post, 3 December 2013.

137 “Drone Strikes Under Scrutiny,” The New York Times, 3 February 2013.

134

the audience to accept the practice as the butt of a joke and move on. The debate on drone strikes is framed in such a way that any critique of whether or not drone strikes are legal or should be legal still largely rests on the 9/11 narrative’s particular interpretation of American identity as fundamentally fair and objective.

The media drew or evoked the comparison to 9/11 again and again by reassuring themselves that drone strikes were not only effective at killing enemies but also the most discriminant and hence moral weapon in the U.S. arsenal. We don’t fly planes full of people into buildings full of people. We only target the bad guys. This connection can be read in the rhetorical use of ‘self-defense’ and the subject position ‘al Qaeda,’ the latter explicitly meaning

“authors of 9/11.”138 Such allusions temper outright condemnation of the program at all those potential inflexion points when the nation might have decided to end the program, much like the

U.S. did with torture. In one of the earliest public Congressional hearings on the use of drone strikes in the WoT (23 March 2010), Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University, ended his written testimony as follows:

What we call drone warfare is as much as anything else, an attempt to counter, through technology, tactics by our enemies that rely upon systematic violations of the laws of war. The next time that someone raises the proposition that American “disincentives to violence” are reduced by drones, let them be reminded that, far more, drones represent an attempt to address an unlawful equilibrium in which one side takes obligations under the laws of war seriously, while the other side does not. That is the fundamental disequilibrium at work here, and drones the most measured and discrete response available.139

The specific violations of war initiating the drone program began, according to Anderson, on

9/11. He reminded the committee that drone strikes were legal under the international law of

138 U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rise of the Drones: Unmanned Systems and the Future of War, 111th Cong., second session, 23 March 2010, 27.

139 Ibid, 32.

135

self-defense, once again reiterating that ‘we’ didn’t start this war. Congressman Jeff Flake (R-

AZ) concurred with this assessment in a hearing several years later, stating:

And so what we have to in a sense do is, in my mind, the 9/11 Commission described as part of the cause of the tragedy on that day was a failure of our own imagination. We need to apply this to this emerging technology here as well, use imagination in how we can utilize it for positive ends, but also being aware that the threat scenarios are widening as well.140

Flake not only connected drone technology to 9/11, he added further legitimation to the practice by couching it in the bipartisan and largely respected 9/11 Commission’s assessment of what led to 9/11. His implication – that had the U.S. used such technological imagination earlier,

9/11 might have been avoided – painted opponents of the drone program as irresponsible and negligent, un-American; if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists. Along similar lines, media pundits also reminded their audiences that it was the president’s duty to protect America and Americans from threats. Michael Gerson of WAPO wrote, for instance, that despite its use as metaphor, the WoT was real, with real victims. Referring to Awlaki’s assassination, he concluded that Obama would have been remiss to ignore this reality.141

In line with the security imperatives of drone strikes, the success of these strikes was also discursively centered on their ability to distinguish friend from foe: “drones are a centerpiece of the campaign against al Qaeda and … the CIA takes extraordinary steps to target only wanted militants and minimize civilian casualties.”142 The legality of drone strikes, despite niggling unease, was offset by the perceived [illegal and immoral] dangers facing the U.S. as illustrated

140 U.S. Congress, Senate, Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing, 113th Cong., first session, 23 April 2013.

141 Michael Gerson, “A Drone Too Far?” The Washington Post (4 May 2012).

142 Ibid.

136

by 9/11. But it was also offset by the observed achievements and virtues of the program in combating those dangers; again, in contradistinction to al Qaeda. As such, drone strikes are “an important part of the antiterrorism arsenal,”143 “spectacular successes”144 for which the Obama administration showed “aggressiveness and commendable prowess.”145 The tacit understanding was that the other side had no compunction and would kill as many civilians as possible (and had). Americans, on the other hand, respected innocent life. Therefore, drone strikes were a moral response to the horrors of 9/11, an exhibition of American values.

While the above debate has to do with precision killing, The Washington Post reminded its audience of the unique features of drones, describing them as “a tactical and technological innovation that has been invaluable in the war against al-Qaeda. Cost-effective, increasingly precise and surgical, it is almost the archetype of sterile, risk-free, push-button warfare.”146 The

WSJ, for its part, consistently praised the Obama administration for using drones, arguing that fewer civilians got killed than often publicized, “especially if compared with previous conflicts.”147 The article continued:

Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones. Even if al Qaeda doesn't issue uniforms, the remote pilots can carefully identify targets, and then use Hellfire missiles

143 Keith Johnson, “U.S. Defends Legality of Killing with Drones,” Wall Street Journal, 6 April 2010.

144 “A Justified Killing,” The Washington Post, 1 October 2011.

145 “Drone Wars.”

146 Paul D. Miller, “When Will the Drone War End?” The Washington Post, 18 November 2011.

147 “Drone Wars.” This particular article was in response to a retaliatory strike against the Haqqani Network after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA agents on 30 December 2009 in Afghanistan, roughly 10 miles from the Pakistani border.

137

that cause far less damage than older bombs or missiles. Smarter weapons like the Predator make for a more moral campaign.148

The camera lens is front and center in this description as the only ‘safe’ means of determining the good guys from the bad guys. The message underlining these narratives: while it was true that ‘we’ were at war with an enemy that did not play by the rules, the U.S. refused to engage the enemy at their level and had gone to great lengths to fight the war on just, legal, and moral footing. At the same time, because al Qaeda flouted all rules of engagement, making the enemy more dangerous and less predictable, the U.S. government also had a moral obligation to its citizens to protect them from future attacks. As Harold Koh argued, this “responsibility” towards Americans made not acting against a known threat all the more criminal if acting meant preventing another 9/11.149

With regard to identity, the majority of the legality thread focuses almost exclusively on the Self. The bodies of the others seem to disappear into the background as if the U.S. does not even question its legal right to kill ‘them’. It is only when ‘we’ killed one of ‘us’ – at least at first glance – that questions arise. The reporting of Awlaki’s death, for instance, rarely ever addressed those killed with him, with the exception of the other American. In this sense, Awlaki and the other American only mattered because they were (at least at one point considered) American, not because they were fellow human beings. To reiterate, the foreign ‘them’ was tacitly understood to be fair game, ultimately marked for death. Moreover, the moral ambiguity of those deaths

(were they fellow insurgents? Civilians? People in the wrong place at the wrong time?) was occluded by their lack of storyline, by their lack of mention beyond a footnote. We are concerned

148 Ibid.

149 Koh, 25 March 2010.

138

about our actions and whether or not they accord with a particular vision of who we think we are.

The Other remains unseen, invisible, a stage prop that only rarely gets carted out.

Collateral Damage

In the official discourse presented in Chapter Five, civilian casualties as a result of U.S. drone strikes were dismissed or brushed aside as an unfortunate but rare consequence of contemporary warfare. Drones themselves were staunchly defended as the most discriminative weapons available to the U.S. military; hence moral and appropriate. By highlighting the precision of drone warfare in comparison to other bombing and ground tactics, civilian casualties were construed as the exception to the rule rather than a necessary evil in an otherwise successful counterterrorism strategy. Koh, Holder, Brennan, and Obama all stressed that America’s security required pursuing the threat against ‘us’, but that American values meant ‘we’ would go to inordinate lengths to target only the bad guys. The result of this discourse was that the bodies of innocent civilians caught in strikes were both literally and figuratively eliminated.

Media reports, documentaries, and other pop culture artifacts have all talked back to this official storyline, and either directly or indirectly commented on those civilian deaths.

Discussion of or allusion to collateral damage in these other texts fosters certain subjectivity frameworks that either reiterate the overarching disappearance of the Other as a meaningful and visible subject position, or question that disappearance with a counter narrative that attempts to re-humanize the victims. The back-and-forth between these positions illustrates how the wider

American audience addresses the reality of violence perpetrated on Others to keep them safe.

More and more, that engagement strayed from the official line where the civilian Other was inconsequential to the broader WoT. Instead, civilian deaths became a potential recruiting tool

139

for America’s enemies, a symbol of American hubris in a program that would ultimately backfire on its masters. Still, this growing critique also remained somewhat stifled behind fears of

‘another 9/11’ and reassertions of ‘our’ goodness, both of which drew liberally, if indirectly, on

‘9/11’ as a melodramatic and tragic “tale of innocence violated” (Takacs 2012, 25).

Claims of innocence have played a major role in connecting 9/11 and drone strikes. On the one hand, foreign civilians are seen as innocent in international law and, hence, protected under that law. On the other hand, due to the covert nature of ‘the enemy’, what constitutes

‘civilian’ in these regions is far more opaque than the clear-cut understanding of American victimhood made so poignant by the 2001 attacks. This tension between valuing innocence and the fear of allowing/not preventing another catastrophe filters through the overall discussion on collateral damage and illustrates that despite attempts to reveal the plight of civilians living under drones, despite attempts to question the ethics and efficacy of drone strikes because of collateral damage, the overarching “drone strike” discourse generally persists in reifying American innocence lost on 9/11 over ‘theirs’ lost in the WoT. Like the legality thread, this is achieved not only by invoking ‘our’ innocence and right to self-defense, but by discursively blurring the boundaries between civilian and enemy Other (“suspected militants,” “al Qaeda,” “Taliban,” etc.).

The first well-publicized incident of ‘collateral damage’ took place in Afghanistan in early February 2002 and illustrates this blurring. Three men were targeted and killed with a hellfire missile allegedly under the assumption that the tall one might have been Osama bin

Laden. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported the story over the course of several days, yet their coverage was remarkably different in tone. The NYT towed the official line by consistently describing the three subjects as “a small band of suspected members of al

140

Qaeda” and shifted any potential blame for error away from the U.S. to faulty Afghan intelligence.150 WAPO, running with the byline: “Casualties of U.S. Miscalculations,” took a decidedly harsher tack and described the three men as “peasants” desperate to feed their families by collecting and selling scrap metal.151

The two contrasting perspectives of the same attack highlight different constructions of identity, different relationships between Self—Stranger—Other. WAPO humanized the victims, reporting their names. Strangers at first to the camera lens, the post-mortem revealed that the three were innocent men supporting their families despite grave risk. Readers were meant to empathize; meant to recognize their own devotion to loved ones.152 The NYT followed the official line: strangers (“suspected”), these three men were determined to be Other via camera lens because one of them seemed to be tall. The Times de-humanized the three men by never once describing them, never identifying them by name, never really seriously engaging with the idea that they were innocent. Their follow-up article parroted the official line by turning the men into inanimate objects (“it”) acceptable to target:

Today, Pentagon and intelligence officials defended last week's Predator attack, saying there was a ''mosaic'' of information indicating that the men who were the targets of the strike were involved in suspicious activities for several hours before the missile was fired. […] ''We're convinced it was an appropriate target,'' Victoria Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public information, said today.153

150 “U.S. Troops Search for Clues to Victims of Missile Strike,” The New York Times (11 February 2002).

151 Doug Struck, “Casualties of U.S. Miscalculation,” Washington Post (11 February 2002). The 11 February piece further highlights several previous incidents involving the CIA where the targets were misidentified, leading to civilian casualties and subsequent reparations. This in and of itself is problematic: in some sense, the CIA can “buy” the lives of those it kills almost as if the dead are goods to be exchanged.

152 Still, this representation is rife with inequality. After all, these are “peasants” who live in mud huts and survive by selling bomb fragments for pennies on the dollar. ‘We’ generally cannot relate to this degree of poverty.

153 “U.S. Defends Missile Strike, Saying Attack Was Justified,” The New York Times (12 February 2002).

141

The Washington Post’s coverage provides an early example of an alternative narrative in the War on Terror, one in which the Other is not necessarily always evil. But this storyline was quickly overshadowed by the U.S. government’s portrayal of drone targets as suspected militants and, hence, legitimate kill shots. A majority of all news items studied here since 2002 have never named the victims.154 One result of this is that the subject position of [innocent] Other has been discursively diminished, since it is hard to prove that an unknown victim couldn’t have been plotting against the U.S. Media coverage of an incident in 2006 is emblematic of this tacit disregard.155 It was not until halfway through their initial report that the NYT mentioned that 14 of the dead belonged to one family and included several women and children. The newspaper ended the piece with their first mention of the word ‘civilian’: “This is the second report of an

American attack on civilians in a Pakistani tribal region.”156 Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation

(15 January 2006), Senator John McCain (R-AZ) more directly conceded that innocent people were killed in this strike, and he appeared apologetic. However, he was also resolute:

It's terrible when innocent people are killed. We regret that. But we have to do what we think is necessary to take out al-Qaeda, particularly the top operatives. This guy has been more visible than Osama bin Laden lately. We regret it. We understand the anger that people feel, but the United States' priorities are to get rid of al-Qaeda and this was an effort to do so.

Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) echoed the sentiment on CNN’s Late Edition (15 January

2006): “It’s a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do? It’s like the wild, wild

West out there…” Wolf Blitzer, the host, commented, “when the United States does take these actions, even if it misses, it sends a powerful signal to the al Qaeda leaders – you know what?

154 Of course, part of the reason is the difficulty for reporters to get to strike locations.

155 In mid-January 2006, a drone allegedly targeting Zawahiri fired its missiles at residential buildings at 3:15am, resulting in the deaths of up to 17 people, including women and children. Several days later, protests broke out across Pakistan against the U.S. drone program.

156 “Top Qaeda Aide is Called Target in U.S. Air Raid,” The New York Times (14 January 2006).

142

Your days are numbered.” In this exchange, the civilian deaths were acknowledged both directly

(albeit in passive voice and generalized: “when innocent people are killed,” “the loss of innocent lives”) and indirectly (e.g. “It’s a regrettable situation,” “even if it misses”), insinuating a certain disregard for or suspicion of those very civilians. If the FATA region was akin to ‘the wild, wild

West’, then in some sense no one was actually innocent. The adage ‘innocent until proven guilty’ worked the other way here: guilty until proven innocent.157

The above indifference to civilian casualties relies on the 9/11 narrative’s clear understanding of al Qaeda as an ongoing imminent threat to innocent Americans, thereby

‘necessitating’ proactive security measures (in self-defense) to prevent ‘another 9/11’. They are unscrupulous and evil; we are principled yet determined to defend ourselves. Indeed, Blitzer’s three guest experts went on to reiterate the robust amount of intelligence the CIA required to justify a strike; that the U.S. would prefer not to use drones at all. While U.S. actions perhaps belie this sentiment, its articulation again allows for critics to acquiesce behind the shield of the

‘rule of law’ and exhaustive vetting. This frame therefore creates permissible space for American identity practice and American actions to go on.

Press reports on civilian deaths remained muted well into Obama’s first term. For instance, the NYT reported on 24 January 2009 that there had been 30 attacks since the summer,

“but some of the attacks have also killed civilians.” Also, “in the second attack, … the reports said three of the dead were children.” And: “A senior Pakistani official estimated that the attacks might have killed as many as 100 civilians; it was not possible to verify the estimate.”158 Such

157 This sentiment is best reflected in the Obama administration’s later approach to counting “militants” in the reporting of drone casualties. Any man military-aged is considered a combatant “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent” (NYT, 29 May 2012). 158 “Drone Airstrikes in Pakistan Continue Into Obama's Term,” The New York Times (24 January 2009).

143

qualifiers diminish the impact of the claims, suggesting the possibility of being wrong, and thus not to be taken seriously. CIA Director Leon Panetta stressed, in reference once again to drone strikes, “I can assure you that in terms of that particular area, it is very precise and it is very limited in terms of collateral damage and, very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership.”159 Again, drones are presented as the only way – although still moral – to stop al Qaeda from committing another act of terror against

Americans, another 9/11.

The ‘collateral damage’ counter narrative gained ground after yet another targeted drone strike in Waziristan in March 2011. Despite the frayed Pakistan-U.S. relationship at the time,160 the U.S. sanctioned a signature strike on what appeared to be a gathering of militants. In fact, it was a Jirga (a customary tribal gathering used to settle disputes) composed of elder tribesmen and mediated by a few members of the Taliban over mining rights in the area. The rift between the two states was further aggravated after major newspapers quoted American intelligence officials who strongly contested Pakistani claims of what happened: “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. … They were terrorists;”161 “These guys were terrorists, not the local men’s glee club.”162 Such strongly phrased refutation by the U.S. officials highlights the almost rote thinking in security circles that those strangers killed by drone strike must have been well vetted Others and thus deserved to die.

Contesting this characterization, Rolling Stone published an article in April 2012 that

159 Director’s Remarks, Pacific Council on International Policy, Los Angeles, CA, 18 May 2009.

160 CIA contractor Raymond Davis was arrested in Lahore in January 2011 shortly after killing two armed men he said were trying to rob him. Not inconsequentially, the strike took place a day or so after Pakistan released him from prison on 16 March 2011.

161 “C.I.A. Drones Kill Civilians In Pakistan,” The New York Times (18 March 2011).

162 “Pakistan Slams U.S. Drone Strike,” Wall Street Journal (18 March 2011).

144

painted the CIA and the Obama administration to be a bunch of cowboys with complete disregard for others’ lives. This was the first full-length piece in a major American magazine to highlight civilian deaths:

All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.163

The NYT also published a highly critical feature on the drone program at this time. Under the backdrop of Obama’s vows to fight al Qaeda based on American values – a course correction from the previous administration – the author first pointed out that drone strikes have “replaced

Guantanamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants.”164 Moreover, the perpetrators of recent domestic attacks, including Faisal Shahzad’s attempted car bombing in Times Square, have admitted that they were partially motivated by the drone program. Shahzad told the judge,

“When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”165 Scott Shane’s article (known subsequently as the “kill list” article) was hailed as one of the few to seriously and aggressively report on the drone program. In an Op Ed in October of that year, Margaret Sullivan praised the article and the

NYT specifically for being one of the few news outlets to attempt to uncover much of the secrecy of the program. Referring to media coverage and official statements, she wrote, “What’s missing is the human cost and the big strategic picture.” She added that Glen Greenwald, a lawyer who had written about drone strikes for a number of news organizations, concluded that there was “a

163 Michael Hastings, “The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret,” Rolling Stone Magazine (16 April 2012).

164 Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times (29 May 2012).

165 See also: “Drone Strikes Spur Backlash in Yemen,” The Washington Post (30 May 2012).

145

Western media aversion to focusing on the victims of U.S. militarism. As long as you keep the victims dehumanized, it’s somehow all right.”166

The counter-argument here, like that on legality, anchors itself on American values, arguing that as a result of 9/11, the U.S. has strayed from its beliefs – from what makes it exceptional – instead of ‘fighting back’ against al Qaeda by reaffirming those very values.

Moreover, despite Obama’s rhetoric and promises to the contrary, the drone program is hurting more than it is helping keep us safe. This sentiment most often gets translated to mean that drone strikes are inadvertently recruiting new militants. A deeper reading, however, though one only seldom highlighted, suggests that Americans lose ‘our’ innocence when we kill ‘their’ innocent.

This particular condemnation centers on re-humanizing victims, turning their strangeness into something resembling Self as opposed to relegating them to unambiguous evil Other.

The most effective tools for such a project have been popular and high culture artifacts, especially dramas and documentaries. Released on 30 October 2013, Unmanned: America’s

Drone Wars, for instance, dug into the 2011 Jirga attack and another strike that killed a teenager named Tariq Aziz, whom one of the producers had met and interviewed a few days prior to his death. The documentary also interviewed relatives and survivors of both attacks who not only described the victims as innocent civilians opposed to Islamist fundamentalism, but also related how the attacks had turned most of the remaining population against the U.S. These documentaries attempt to make the effects of deploying “kill-bots” far away overseas real to their audiences, many of whom, they claim, think of drone strikes as ‘video game killing’.167 Although limited, the effect of such survivors’ stories and the few occasions when they have been invited

166 Margaret Sullivan, “Questions on Drones, Unanswered Still,” The New York Times (14 October 2012).

167 Three stand out: Dirty Wars (2013), Unmanned: America's Drone Wars (2013), and Drone (2014).

146

to give congressional testimony and media interviews in the United States forces the U.S. government and wider public to confront the [innocent] Other; literally, given that actual surviving bodies show up on Capitol Hill and ‘speak back’ to their attackers, but also more figuratively in the sense that the conversation is not one-sided, and ‘we’ are not able to successfully ‘get rid’ of the Other entirely or pretend that she does not exist. The Other in this case refuses to remain invisible, and Americans have begun to pay attention.

Portrayals in popular culture are also well geared to illicit emotional responses from the audience; tapping into a different way of seeing the Stranger-Other. For instance, an Onion parody from 12 March 2012 epitomized the friction between acknowledging ‘their’ potential innocence and proclaiming America’s own virtue. The Onion satirized a news roundtable of commentators reassessing the drone program, what the host referred to as “our policy of killing

Afghan children with missiles shot from terrifying remote control flying robots.” She then asked her panelists whether such measures could actually hurt American efforts to stabilize the region.

One commentator replied, You don’t change horses midstream and you don't stop firing missiles from unseen death droids soaring high about the clouds just ‘cause a couple of schools get blown up.

Another retorted, Well, you know, I disagree with you. Accidentally bombing children with our super army of automated missile-firing bots may have worked great at the start of the war, but conditions on the ground have changed. I mean, we have got to find another way to obliterate this population.

He continued, OK, so maybe using a silent, hovering genocidal computer is unavoidable at wartime, but let’s do what we can for these civilians […] Oh, it should spray candy out of its chest a few minutes before it starts shooting everything.

The host ended by saying, You know, … that’s actually a really nice gesture for the children who don’t accidentally

147

get mowed down by the bullets.

The absurdity and callousness of this conversation hits home a critique of U.S. disregard for the victims of drone strikes, particularly the children. It is plausible to imagine that the intention of such interventions might have been a reevaluation of the program’s merits, leading to either more stringent criteria for targeting and killing, or the program’s actual grounding – at least outside of official warzones. Drone strikes did decrease noticeably in Pakistan (24 in 2014 to 11 in 2015 to 3 in 2016), however their numbers remain the same or have increased in both Yemen and Somalia.168 What accounts for this staying power? Despite the debates and contestations questioning the official narrative, many of which are ongoing, the covert drone program remains in place.

As illustrated above, the subtle invocation of ‘9/11’ in these counter-narratives has contributed over time to an unconscious shift in normalized experience that has broadened the permissive boundary of American actions at home and abroad. Those references have grown subtler over the years. For instance, while less directly correlated, assertions made by Koh,

Holder, Brennan, and Obama espousing the ‘rule of law’ and advocating for the highest standard of vetting potential targets still hold to the basic structure of ‘9/11’, which pits the innocent and virtuous Self against the guilty and evil Other. Reaffirming American values like law, justice, fairness, and freedom placates or tempers domestic concerns of unbridled and indiscriminant killing, even if the actions under review have not changed.

The connection to 9/11 can also be more direct and is often best made aesthetically. For example, the 2014 documentary Drone begins with a dark screen and audio from the morning of

168 “U.S. Airstrikes in the Long War,” The Long War Journal. https://www.longwarjournal.org/us-airstrikes-in-the- long-war (accessed 17 October 2017). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives similar numbers. See “Drone Wars: The Full Data,” https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-01/drone-wars-the-full-data (accessed 17 October 2017).

148

9/11 – a woman crying and screaming, “Oh my god!” When images do appear, it is an aerial shot of contemporary New York City at “Ground Zero.” The video next cuts to Obama at the podium reminding the audience: “we are at war with an organization that, right now, would kill as many

Americans as they could if we didn’t stop them first.” While ostensibly meant to give context to the drone program, which the rest of the documentary is fairly hostile to, this introduction also – perhaps inadvertently - serves as a reminder of ongoing threats, ‘our’ innocence lost, ‘our’ pain and grief. It returns some of the feeling of traumatic rupture back to the audience.

In the artistic genre, the stitching together, editing, splicing, and manipulation of time, narrative, perspective, and space disrupts linear knowledge production (abstract and rational) in favor of embodied knowledge centered on affect and the value of emotions (Callahan 2015, 892-

4). Given this, images, videos, and screen grabs of 9/11 work for many as a heuristic device, a shortcut, that forces the viewer to once again confront the suddenness of the attack, that sense of shocked helplessness that fractured so many peoples’ understanding of the world (Virilio 2003,

434). The fear of another attack, of experiencing a comparable horror, can color any critique of existing security policies, including drone strikes.

Pop culture in particular draws on these emotions to great effect. With regard to civilian casualties, fictionalized storylines are able to both condemn their deaths and yet explain them away as necessary for the successful prosecution of the War on Terror. This is perhaps more compelling with fiction because we are generally made privy to the protagonists’ ‘true’ remorse and/or herculean efforts to avoid killing innocents. We watch our [TV] heroes rescue ‘innocent’ civilians (especially women and children), who are threatened in some way by terrorists – as opposed to drones – thereby propagating an image or belief in the virtues of U.S. war-making and the virtuous soldiers/civil servants who engage in it. At the same time, when drones do

149

appear on television shows, often a terrorist has lost family from a drone strike, radicalizes, and retaliates or threatens to retaliate in a far more horrific manner. Whatever empathy the audience has at first for the perpetrator is mutated into fear of imminent attack and steadfast determination to stop him, once again reasserting our own innocence and need for (proactive) self-defense. In this light, collateral damage from drone strikes is a small price to pay for preventing ‘another

9/11’, so often alluded to in TV series like NCIS, 24, Homeland, and others.169

This is well illustrated in 2014’s reboot of 24: Live Another Day, which vacillates between critique, praise, and acceptance of drones and the drone program. In it, Jack Bauer is in

London trying to stop a terrorist family who has managed to hijack six U.S. combat drones and is threatening to attack the city and assassinate the U.S. president.170 A majority of the early episodes are visually and emotively anchored by an angry London mob protesting the use of drones outside of the U.S. embassy during an American state visit. Their continued presence on screen and the urgency of 24’s ticking clock elicits a sense of tension that heightens the importance of a broader debate within [the fictive] British parliament over continued support of the U.S. drone program. President Heller, himself, sympathizes with the protestors: “I don’t blame them.” Facing down a hostile audience of British MPs after two UK soldiers are killed by a U.S. drone in Afghanistan, Heller delivers a rousing speech that brings the audience to its feet.

He says:

[America and Britain have a shared] understanding of the threat that we face: A determined enemy sworn to destroy our way of life, thousands of our citizens killed in attacks against our cities and infrastructure. Thousands killed on the battlefield of Afghanistan and Iraq. But we can prevail…

169 NCIS, for instance, has a story arc in season 11 that centers on a terrorist named Benham Parsa who targets and kills a number of intelligence and security officials in Washington, DC with a stolen drone as revenge for the deaths of his parents and the destruction of his training camp.

170 Margot al-Harazi seeks revenge for the drone strike that killed her husband and a number of other women and children.

150

Prevailing, in this case, means preserving the drone program because, as Heller says, “the fact is it works.” This speech alludes to the civilian deaths of 9/11 and 7/7, and is reminiscent of the rhetoric used by both Bush and Obama. With Heller, though, thanks to the ‘backstage’ glimpse afforded to us as TV audience, we are made to understand both his moral compass and the impossibly difficult decisions he faces to keep America safe. We, like the MPs, are stirred from hostility or ambivalence to patriotic standing ovation.

Still, the very plot line raises the frightening possibility that others may someday use this technology against ‘us’; that ‘our’ omnipotence will not last, and the U.S./West will be force-fed a dose of its own medicine. In this way, 24 reimagines what it might be like for the Self to live under threat of drone strike instead of the civilian Stranger-Other. We as viewers squirm as we watch London get attacked. We fear the possibility that hackers could infiltrate American and

British weapons systems. At the same time, we want Bauer to win; to reclaim the drones and return them to their ‘proper’ purpose, which is to take out the terrorists over there. We are therefore enjoined to empathize with Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others who live under the daily threat of a drone attack (rendering them and their plight in a certain sense visible); yet we are also encouraged to root for Bauer, to prefer that drones patrol over there out of sight, back where their civilians get killed instead of ours.

On the one hand, the critique against the U.S. drone program as imperialist overreach is validated (even by the fictional president). On the other hand, the terrorist Other is thought to be unscrupulous, forcing the Self into a morally confusing position, where to act (with drones) risks compromising the values of Others, but not to act compromises the state’s responsibility to protect its Self. Themes from ‘9/11’ filter through to help guide the ‘proper’ response towards protecting the Self, primary among them is the assertion that the U.S. did not start the conflict

151

and was not looking for this particular fight. Consequently, criticism of drone strikes is consistently tempered in the discourse by a reassertion of the ‘innocent victim’ theme of ‘9/11’.

At the same time, given that the audience has an inside view to the fictional government response, highlighting the moral and legal discussions sustaining Jack Bauer’s actions also allows for the official drone mindset to persist: Americans abide by their values; the Others do not.

Like 24, Homeland also explores the new realities of a post-9/11 world and its associate security challenges. While 24 is a loud and explosive thrill-ride, Homeland hugs close to the curve of reality in its portrayal of U.S. counterterrorism and is deeply anchored to the attacks of

9/11, as CIA analyst Carrie Mathison blames herself for not picking up on the clues. In fact, the show’s creators recently brought the cast and crew to New York City to the National September

11 Memorial Museum for their annual ‘fact-finding’ mission to help set the tone and storyline for season six. Variety reported, “The close-up look at twisted steel girders and other artifacts from the devastation was a searing experience for the group, as were the gut-wrenching memorials to the nearly 3,000 casualties.171

Exploring the darker side of the costs of 9/11 has been Homeland’s raison d’être for six seasons, and drone strikes have figured prominently, especially in the fourth season. Airing between October and December 2014, season four is set primarily in Pakistan and centers on a wrongful bombing of a wedding party in the FATA region – carried out by a manned aircraft – that the Pakistani public assumes was a drone. Mathison, the CIA station chief who gave the order, navigates the turbulent waters of U.S.-Pakistani relations as she attempts to track down the

171 “’Homeland’: Mandy Patinkin, Alex Gansa 9/11 Museum Tour Sets Stage for NYC-Set Season,” Variety (7 October 2016). http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/homeland-cast-crew-911-museum-tour-mandy-patinkin-alex-gansa- 1201881621/ (accessed 30 September 2017).

152

terrorist leader Haqqani and deal with the fallout of the attack, made worse after cellphone footage of the wedding party is leaked to the press. Although the plot centers on the repercussions of what is perceived to be a drone strike on civilians, drones themselves do not get much screen time, nor was a drone even used in the attack. Regardless, it is the hatred and fear of those drones that structures the series and underscores the interactions between the Americans and Pakistanis.

The result is a very intense portrayal of the complicated political maneuverings that underlie the U.S. drone policy and its effects on the Pakistani population – civilian, terrorist, and government official. As viewers, while none of the characters are particularly sympathetic, we get a glimpse of the difficult decisions needed to ostensibly keep the U.S. safe. In this sense, we can understand Mathison’s resolve to call in strikes or to sacrifice some innocents for the sake of many. On the other hand, we also feel for the lone survivor of the attack, Aayan Ibrahim, who, despite losing his family, does not seek retribution or revenge but simply wants to get on with his life and his studies. Mathison plays him like an expendable pawn in a broader (and dangerous) game to capture his terrorist uncle, ultimately leading to Aayan’s death. The power of the series is its harshness: the viewer is not spared the difficult choices and the double-crossing, duplicitous nature of U.S.-Pakistani relations. We are brought into a world where drone strikes present both clear benefits and terrible consequences, yet no resolution.

As with the legality thread, concern over civilian casualties elicited a certain degree of media attention and pushback to the government’s more antiseptic narrative (and silence) of precision killing via drone. While this unease has peaked at various times since the beginning of the WoT, the concern within the public narrative has a tendency to ebb back into the ambient noise of daily life. Even the much-anticipated release of President Obama’s ‘playbook’ on 6

153

August 2016 failed to elicit much major press beyond a few days’ worth of expert and pundit assessments.172 The policy of double-taps, proper vetting, and residential target sites appear to have been relegated to inside baseball among policy wonks. Despite the clamor for official and accurate civilian body counts that preceded the release of the document, despite the unexplained gap that remained between those figures and the ones reported by NGOs like the New America

Foundation and the Long War Journal, public discourse has not succeeded much in altering the practice of covert drone strikes.

Identity-as-Practice

The drone strike narrative is anchored in and emanates from conceptualizations of the unknown / unknowable / invisible stranger. It is the fear that there are hidden bodies bent on ‘our’ destruction that compels ‘us’ to hunt them down; compels ‘us’ to ascertain their intentions. Yet, no matter how many targets the U.S. eliminates, it cannot definitively destroy the specter of what it cannot see, the potential for future strangeness. The driving response to this perpetual uncertainty as revealed by the government narrative and the several attempts to counter it has been to shroud the uncertainty/possibility of otherness in a certainty of Self – a tandem belief in both the existential imperative to safeguard that Self and the moral conviction in the right to do so.

172 Perhaps largely due to the rancor and fixed attention of the public on the U.S. presidential election

154 12

Visible Invisible Touchable Bodies Untouchable Bodies

Seeing Self Drone Pilots

Civilian s

Stranger Unseeing potential targets

Enemy Other Awlaki

Figure IX: Plotting Identity in Drone Strike Narrative

Figure IX attempts to map out how ‘we’ practice Selfhood via drone strikes by

maintaining the Other’s literal and figurative invisibility. In the official narrative of chapter five,

the Self was envisioned as a moral, law-enforcing and -abiding American government

determined to safeguard the nation against dangerous terrorists who would stop at nothing to

destroy ‘us’. That Self carefully ascertained via drone camera which foreign (‘strange’) bodies

were guilty and which were innocent. The guilty were then summarily dispatched, wiped off the

map, and the U.S. grew a little safer as a result. This calculus necessarily took place behind

closed doors, meaning that even though drone pilots and intelligence officials themselves had

some sort of visual confirmation to justify a strike, the rest of America had to take on faith that

the government would keep ‘us’ safe and do so according to ‘our’ values.

The ‘9/11’ themes that structure official policy on targeted drone strikes attempt

discursively to legitimize this particular counterterrorism practice by ‘disappearing’ the Other

into inconsequential byproduct. The diminished place given to drone victims, the foreclosing of

155

any discussion about who really is killed (at least in major U.S. media), and the ongoing ambiguous characterization of who is ‘terrorist’ all contribute to the continuing perception of the

Other as less than, invisible, not something ‘we’ have to worry about except as a threat to be eliminated. Innocence, in this regard, is still reserved primarily for Americans at home. Even after Obama introduces his ‘due process’ narrative, espousing America’s commitment to the

‘rule of law’ with regard to American enemies – innocent until proven guilty. The public discourse of the drone program examined here pushed back to some extent against such characterizations but also tended to lose steam and fade into tacit acceptance. As discussed above, the role of ‘9/11’ in this process is paramount in dulling the sharp edges of ‘our’ moral convictions. Nowhere is this better illustrated than with media coverage on drone pilots. After all, drones may take center stage in the public discourse, but they only work when flown by actual people.

Early in the narrative timeline, drone pilots – if acknowledged at all – were usually praised; or they, themselves, were praising the program. By 2013, however, the tone had shifted noticeably, which was clearly demonstrated by former drone pilot Brandon Bryant, who gave an interview in June 2013 to The Today Show describing his PTSD as a result of killing 1626 people for the U.S. government. Bryant became a familiar face in a number of documentaries on drone warfare, as one of the few willing to admit and publicly discuss what he did as a pilot and the effects it had on him. These psychological ramifications also figured prominently in several works of fiction at this time, visually and powerfully depicting the struggle to kill from the

American point of view. Such works include Grounded, a play written in 2012 by George Brant and first staged in NYC in 2014; Drones, an indie film released in October 2013173 about two

173 London release; U.S. release June 2014

156

drone pilots weighing the lives of a purported terrorist and his family; and finally, Good Kill, a

2014 film staring Ethan Hawke as a former F-16, now drone, pilot. All three present a progressively forceful moral condemnation of the CIA drone program. They give a devastating portrait of the toll such orders to kill have on the individuals pulling the trigger, the Self. The victims, in this sense, are not those Others killed by the drone’s missiles, but the American servicemen and women who must pull the trigger.

Security issues play a dual role in this narrative. On the one hand, drone pilots are fighting against the same terrorist threat that those on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are battling. By manning drones, they are serving their country and protecting

Americans from the threat of al Qaeda. That threat is never far removed from 9/11. In the culminating scene of Drones, Sue Lawson and Jack Bowles each at one point hesitate over whether they have targeted the correct person and whether they can ‘pull the trigger’ knowing they will kill innocent family members in the process. Their superiors, including Sue’s colonel father, incite them to take the shot by telling them that their target helped plan 9/11. The colonel shows them a photograph of Osama bin Laden with several other men and claims one of them is their target, Mahmoud Khalil. On the wall near the controls is a poster with photographs of the top most wanted terrorists. The décor of the trailer in Good Kill likewise has pictures of the Twin

Towers on the walls. While the poster is mostly ignored, its presence serves to remind the viewer that ‘they’ are the bad guys over there, and if ‘we’ don’t stop them now, they will do something worse to ‘us’ over here. The refrain: never forget.

On the other hand, concern over the mental health of American military personnel presents a nuanced counter narrative to the state’s storyline of a highly discriminant weapons system with highly vetted kill lists. In suggesting that drone strikes are the most effective and

157

least [collaterally] damaging option available to the United States to hunt down terrorists responsible for planning 9/11, Obama, Brennan, and the others painted a picture of drone warfare as a natural evolution of just war theory, where only the bad guys got killed after a painstaking intelligence gathering and surveillance process. Yet, the rise in reports of drone pilots suffering from PTSD, the intense portrayal of a man falling apart in Good Kill, suggests that something in this calculus is amiss. In his opening statement at a House hearing on 23 March 2010, Rep. John

F. Tierney warned:

If unmanned systems are changing the way that we train our military personnel, so too should they change the way that we respond to the stress of combat. We already know that unmanned pilots are showing signs of equal or greater stress from combat compared to traditional pilots. The stress of fighting a war thousands of miles away then minutes later joining your family at the dinner table presents mental health challenges that must be addressed.174

Despite the moral objections that Bryant and other fictional characters have raised about the targeted killing program, the main take-away for many has thus been concern for how the

Self fairs in this new prosecution of the WoT, not the consequences of that engagement on the

Other. The result is renewed focus on American bodies as they target, surveil, and ultimately kill other bodies. While the pilots destroy the latter, leaving only bits and pieces of a once living person, their own bodies are often psychically damaged, bearing witness in a sense to those deaths that otherwise leave no trace save as a highly contested body count. Moreover, the ongoing dispute over body counts between the U.S. government and foreign media as well as other NGOs reduces the civilians in question to biological organisms devoid of history, devoid of a past.

174 Rise of the Drones, 3.

158

Living bodies give off heat signals; dead ones do not. The body as depicted on a computer screen stands in contrast to the body behind the controls. The pilot becomes the ultimate voyeur; the drone in a sense serves as an aerial panopticon. Bryant’s kill record, for which he received so much praise from his superiors, also illustrates the problem of dehumanizing bodies by counting them. Bryant is a lone voice contesting the official narrative.

The story he often repeats to the cameras highlights U.S. disregard for these Other bodies – even the innocent ones. He recounts one particular incident when he raised his concern to a superior that a small child had just been caught in a Hellfire missile blast. However, his commanding officer responded that it was just a dog. Bryant then looks directly at the camera to quip, “a dog walking on two legs…” His NCO’s point? Bryant did his job to protect the United States. The rest isn’t important.

Importance of 9/11 Storytelling

Rendering the Other invisible and insignificant takes place precisely by drawing primary attention to the U.S. and Americans, who assume a position of God-like authority, upon our

‘City on a Hill’, that belies a certain hubris and sense of invincibility, and which others see as arrogance and unbridled power. This vacuity of personhood certainly remains true for the terrorist Other throughout the drone narrative, but the trajectory of the ‘innocent civilian’ subject position offers a glimpse into a muted domestic debate on drone warfare that is a bit less certain, a bit more ambivalent. Even so, despite the ongoing nature of this debate and the counter narratives that sustain it, targeted drone strikes remain squarely within the bounds of appropriate

American identity practice due to their framing as both a post-9/11 security imperative and a morally calibrated act of self-defense in response to 9/11. Holland (2013, 39) writes,

159

When foreign policy is framed to invoke popular understandings of the national Self, it is extremely difficult to contest the basic assumptions and perceived values around which a foreign policy debate could occur. In short, when foreign policy is framed as something the state is, rather than something that the state does, to contest that foreign policy is often to contest deeply ingrained social and cultural understandings of national identity.

Policies enacted as a direct result of 9/11 reflect this deep-seeded understanding of

American identity. The most obvious boundary in the WoT separates ‘innocent American’ from

‘evil terrorist’, a distinction that thereby sanctions a certain type of offensive retribution (yet framed as self-defense) that includes drone strikes. Indeed, the discursive division was also made geographically manifest because ‘they’ for the most part were from ‘over there’. But this borderline tends to ignore the innocent Others who also live ‘over there’. As Wilcox observes,

“’civilians’ only exist insofar as assurances of looking out for their welfare are used as a justification for certain practices of violence (2015, 159).

Both major counter narratives to that of the state – legality and civilian casualties – take issue with this lack of visibility, albeit in different ways. Those concerned that government secrecy about drone strikes either papers over flimsy jurisprudence or else establishes a dangerous international precedent for unilateral action question the long-term corrosive effects of government silence on the global (and domestic) image of America. The fear is not that civilian

Others are being unjustly targeted without recourse. Rather, the fear lies in whether the Self needs more robust and transparent legal protection from potential targeting. Concern for civilian casualties, on the other hand, centers on a lack of faith in the government’s claims of discriminant vetting and holds that collateral damage will ultimately create far more terrorists than drones could ever eliminate. Again, however, the focus is less on the welfare of the Other and more on the long-term [moral and physical] welfare of the United States. In both counter narratives, the Other is merely a foil for ongoing self-reflection, and, as such, remains

160

unspecified. ‘We’ are not so concerned with the imperious and invisible presence of drones hunting the skies of dangerous tribal areas as long as ‘we’ know where they are and what they are looking for.

In spite of the buttressing provided by ‘9/11’, both counter-narratives demonstrate that

American identity vis-à-vis the Other is not necessarily monolithic; identity markers are not stable but constantly being negotiated. Still, if what we choose to represent matters, as well as how we choose to represent it, then it is clear that the relative dearth of information or exposition on the drone program (as compared to enhanced interrogation techniques, for instance) represents an apparent contradiction: drones give us greater visibility, but that line of sight ends up occluding the view represented by the public narrative. The Nation sums this up:

Americans today are expected to reconcile the documented existence of drones with the official silence or denials on the subject. As a result, the debate on drones verges on the surreal … drones are an aspect of speculation. Anything they do in the context of the work is immediately perceived as speculation, and not to be taken seriously (11 November 2014).

Drawing on the particular ‘9/11’ reification of our innocence versus their guilt – evoked in images, allusions, and explicit calls to “never forget,” as well as ongoing warnings of imminent danger – neither narrative succeeds in transplanting the official claims that drone strikes are just and justified preemptive self-defense in the context of a global war on terror, the first salvo of which was 9/11.

161

CHAPTER SEVEN

Air Travel Security: “Empty out all your pockets…”

I’m leaving on a jet plane; Don’t know when I’ll be back again. — John Denver

ATTENTION! Aircraft Designers, Operators, Airmen, Managers. Anxiety never disappears in a human being in an airplane — it merely remains dormant when there is no cause to arouse it. Our challenge is to keep it forever dormant.

— Harold Harris, Vice President, Pan American World Airways, c. 1950

Some things we know by talking and some things we know by doing. Airport security falls squarely into the latter category. The effects of 9/11 on aviation were immediate, felt across a wide public body, and long lasting. Air travel ever since has become a common shared experience of waiting in lines, providing identification, waiting in more lines, answering questions, unpacking, repacking, undressing, redressing; a certain embodied choreography that takes travelers from the ticket kiosk to the departure gate.175 Underlining this routinized stupor is the notion that inconvenience and frustration are “a small price to pay for increased security,” even if that security is more performance than reality.176 Now, by-and-large, passengers have internalized the potential for strangeness embodied in the practices of stripping down, opening up. As Giorgio Agamben argues, the state of exception that felt so pronounced after 9/11 has all but become “business as usual” (2005, 2).

175 According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), roughly 2.25 million people fly every day. “Air traffic by the numbers,” https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/ (accessed 2 May 2017).

176 Daniel Squadron, “United We Stand (in Line),” The New York Times (1 June 2005).

162

Unlike classified drone strikes, the story to be told here is not about a practice that takes place behind closed doors, largely invisible to the American public. Nor does the narrative pivot on government intervention. This sets up a different dynamic than that of the “drone strike” discourse, one that is intensely visible, physical, and present. I have therefore framed this genealogy as a conversation between state-sanctioned security measures (those codified in the

2001 Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) as well as those adopted subsequently, and public pushback against those practices. The former, addressed in this chapter, presents the official timeline and narrative of post-9/11 air travel. The latter, to be addressed in the next chapter, highlights instances of narrative slippage – moments of (direct and indirect) public contestation. Using the Self—Stranger—Other framework, I then analyze the role played by

‘9/11’ in reinforcing ‘faith’ in or acceptance of those contested security practices.

Here, I explore the aviation security discourse as it developed from the end of 2001 to the end of 2016, asking how ‘9/11’ has helped justify or normalize changes to airport security practices. I begin by reviewing existing scholarship on contemporary air travel, noting how my own work contributes to this literature. I next turn to an analysis of the immediate aftermath of the attacks and the U.S. government’s efforts to create a more robust security regime. I trace the ongoing development of that regime and the shift in what ‘normal’ looked like after four security scares. At each juncture, I briefly note how certain truth claims of ‘9/11’ were deployed, particularly fear of the Other, thereby widening the boundaries of permissible state action. I explore this permissiveness in greater detail in the next chapter.

163

Literature Review

Securing the skies has been a topic of concern since at least the 1960s, with the concomitant rise of mass commercial flight and (attempted) terrorist hijackings (Curry 2004).

Nonetheless, after 9/11, airports quickly became sites for new means of surveillance and security governance, partially because 9/11 was explained as an exceptional attack on freedom(s), including the freedom of mobility, and partially because 9/11 left many feeling that “insecurity is now seen as something ‘in here’ as well as ‘out there’” (Salter 2004, 71). Within academia, critical constructivists have been especially interested in how such modalities are deployed; how they form and inform power, risk, state sovereignty, and the subject (Foucault 2009, 49; See also: Miller 2010, 20).

Broadly speaking, much of the literature on airport security focuses on how post-9/11 security practices attempt to mediate risk by incorporating possible futures into the present

(Salter 2008b; Salter and Mutlu 2011). Security, in this regard, “presupposes controllability and is therefore motivated by … risk reduction and risk spreading” (Lippert and O’Connor 2003,

334). The result is a regime of practices that attempts to cover future contingencies even as it polices the present. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has resulted in an increased reliance on technology to reconcile the risk that permeates borders by regulating and condensing identity to movement (Schouten 2014; Aradau 2010; Adey et al. 2011). The importance of machines to do so has attracted those working within the material turn to re-conceptualize specific surveillance technologies such as biometrics, CCTV, and whole body imagers (WBIs)177 not as exogenous tools used by state actors to engage in ‘security’, but rather as agential in and of themselves in

177 Body scanners are also known as Advanced Imagery Technology (AIT).

164

determining and sorting populations (Adey 2006; Monahan 2011; Bellanova and Fuster 2013;

Valkenburg and Ploeg 2015).

Body scanners in particular have been the subject of much academic scrutiny, characterized as both the ‘solution’ to terror in the skies and a gross ‘violation’ of privacy

(Amoore and Hall). Their placement on the threshold of an airport’s sterile areas, the final physical barrier through which to weed out dangerous bodies, has led George F. McHendry, Jr. to ascribe WBIs with the literary convention deus ex machina (2015, 223). He likens body scanners to a panoptic technology that forces passengers into a kind of “disciplined self- awareness” that their bodies are no longer their own, but something the government must look at in order to pass ‘go’ (ibid, 219-220). Drawing on Foucault, the power of such a move is less on being watched and more on knowing that one could be watched at any time; “the State creates an illusory aesthetic field that subjects every body to the logic of potential surveillance” (ibid, 221).

This has the paradoxical result of anonymizing bodies that pass through the machines at the same time that the traveler associated with that body must be specifically identified.

The circulating body plays a central role in much of the aviation literature. Ole Pütz writes that post-9/11 security screening has in many ways managed to disconnect the body of the traveler from the individual it belongs to, turning it into an object that no longer requires much face-to-face interaction as long as that body can blend in and passively “express civil inattention”

(2012, 155). Affect and performance, accordingly, are plum conceptual tools for assessing TSA’s new security regimes, both in how to navigate them and potentially how to disrupt them

(McHendry 2016). A problem arises though in that such expectations are only geared to those whose appearance matches some hetero-normative conceptualization of ‘normal’. Muslims, persons with medical issues, transgendered people, and women all potentially become collateral

165

damage in the process (Valkenburg and Ploeg 2015, 339; Currah and Mulqueen 2011; Redden and Terry 2013).

Normal and abnormal appearances are part of a larger program of determining who and what belong in which secure spaces. Within this contemporary environment of risk analysis, language and everyday objects are now considered parts of a traveler’s appearance and therefore must be scrutinized for potential signs of danger. Consequently, humor, jokes, and sarcasm are all denuded of context and taken literally (Martin 2010); scissors, tweezers, face cream, and even water bottles hold the potential for disaster (Neyland 2009). The result is what Rachel Hall

(2007) terms an aesthetics of transparency: travelers’ words, bodies, and possessions must be rendered visible; threat is akin to concealment. In this vein, Peter Adey writes, “As opposed to an atomized individual, passengers are prosthetic subjects, made up of bodies, bags, trinkets, handbags, wallets, keys, and more. These objects are separated out; the prosthetic subject is disassembled into various vectors of flow that pass through the airport in different ways” (2008,

145).

The physical body isn’t the only identity that circulates. David Lyon notes that people’s

“data-doubles – that is, virtual identities located in networked databases – have far greater rates of mobility than their real-life counterparts” (2008, 30). If the airport serves as a surveillance machine, an “assemblage where webs of technology and information combine” (Adey 2004,

1375), then (primarily digital) information plays an outsized role in defining, sorting, and selecting the good from the bad (Dillon 2003; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2009). Moreover, it is the biometric border,178 not the territorial border, that reigns in these practices of sorting ‘trusted’ travelers from those deemed ‘risky’ (Muller 2008, 130). The result is a targeted focus on pieces

178 Biometrics refers to “automated methods of identifying or authenticating the identity of a living person based on a unique physiological or behavioral characteristic” (Quoted in Lyon 2008, 39).

166

of information: passports, visas, drivers’ licenses, social security numbers, PINs, passwords, biometrics, all of which help categorize different people into insiders and outsiders, the privileged few and the unprivileged masses (Lyon 2008, 45-46; Salter 2006).

Mark B. Salter (2013) cautions, however, that movement itself is not the issue. Rather, the question centers on how the post-9/11 security system has constructed which movements are allowed and by whom, “even in the absence of actual movement” (ibid, 9). In this regard, the airport “is a space of indistinction in which citizens, foreigners, exiles, refugee and asylum seekers are all held in an extra-political nowhere while the sovereign exercises a decision” about who belongs and who does not (Salter 2008a, 370; See also: Newman 2003, 15). Salter (2006) adds that this space represents a request for entry, not a guarantee. As such, the airport border can be construed as “a permanent exception” where sovereign power is enacted through the

“monopoly to decide” (Salter 2006, 169; See also Schmitt 1985, 13). Indeed, the ability to control the shape and size of a population has long been a fundamental component of state power and legitimacy, “intimately tied into the notion of sovereign territoriality and the imaginary of borders implied in this conception of bounded space” (Salter 2008a, 367).

The airport thus serves as a locus of sovereign power, but one that is structured through profit margins. Borrowing from Foucault, Leonard C. Feldman characterizes airports as heterotopias – spaces “outside the normal order of the everyday” – a blend of “mobility and surveillance, consumption and diversity, sovereignty and vulnerability,” awash in an atmosphere of anxiety (2007, 334). The literal structure and organization of the airport is designed to quell this unease and offset the “irreducible vulnerability of open societies” by providing the diversions of shopping and, inadvertently, the shared griping over the inconveniences of flying

(Salter 2008b, 244). In this sense, the public has increasingly become a consumer of security

167

rather than a producer, albeit a socially unequal one as the various frequent flyer buy-in programs attest (Lippert and O’Connor 2003, 336; See also: Monahan 2011). Paradoxically, although heterotopias are designed to be exceptional spaces, the practices of post-9/11 aviation security and the shared responses to them, Salter argues, actually conceal the encroaching

“securitization of everyday life” and the normalization of what otherwise is meant to be uncommon (2008b, 244).

It is this tension between exceptional and mundane that lies at the heart of airport security practices. Despite being relatively small in volume, the rich array of perspectives in the existing literature all addresses some aspect of this tension, often with regard to a specific component of the security apparatus. Nonetheless, most of this scholarship examines the practices, people, and machines that make up airport security without locating them in the broader historical narrative to which they belong. This dissertation traces the development and promulgation of aviation security over time, incorporating multiple aspects of the existing literature into a contextually bound narrative, thereby offering a broader perspective on the evolution of the industry. In this regard, despite documenting roughly 15 years, the most striking thing about the narrative is its general consistency in identity practice. Furthermore, although identity is already a key theme in the literature, the mechanisms by which identity arbitrates practice remain underspecified. As with the drone strike narrative, I unearth how elements of ‘9/11’ are employed through identity practice and argue that their use helps do what Salter claims above; namely, normalize the abnormal.

168

Initial State Response

The shock and scope of the 9/11 attacks – where planes themselves were turned into giant missiles of jet fuel and terrified passengers – no doubt was experienced by the government as a catastrophic security failure necessitating a complete overhaul of airport and airline screening practices. Jane Garvey, head of the FAA at the time, made the unprecedented decision to ground all aircraft at 9:25am that morning, even before the Pentagon was hit. Planes in mid-flight landed where they could, others were grounded; borders were closed. As the NYT noted the next day,

“The terrorist attacks affected virtually every means of coming and going in the country.”179 The

WSJ added, “Throughout the nation the realization mounted that the impact of the suspected hijackers was permanent.”180 The most immediate concern in the weeks and months directly following the attacks centered on implementing emergency measures meant to patch up the perceived holes in security that allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place. Efforts to this effect took place in the halls of government as well as the halls of public opinion. After all, what good is saving an industry if everyone is still too afraid to fly?

One of the first moves in both venues was to assign blame. The WSJ, for instance, called pre-existing security a joke because airlines typically hired the lowest bidding private security companies to run the x-ray machines, which were then manned by untrained and underpaid workers with lackadaisical attitudes towards passenger screening.181 Such opinions were subsequently reinforced by academic research arguing that outsourcing security services has

179 Laurence Zuckerman, “For the First Time, the Nation's Entire Airspace Is Shut Down,” The New York Times (12 September 2001).

180 “A Day of Terror: Thousands Stranded As the FAA Grounds Flights,” Wall Street Journal (12 September 2001).

181 “Terrorists Destroy World Trade Center,” Wall Street Journal (12 September 2001). Many are also described as immigrants, the implication being that they are not as invested in security or as smart as ‘regular’ Americans at enacting it. For instance, this is the implication when Senator Rogers asks Kenneth Mead how many screeners at Dulles are not U.S. citizens (See: Joint Hearing, Airline Security, Subcommittee on Appropriations, United States Senate and House of Representatives, 107th Cong., First Session, 20 September 2001).

169

resulted in an impossibly high turnover rate (up to 300%) of a poorly trained and poorly regulated pool of unskilled workers (Lippert and O’Connor 2003, 338). Members of Congress and the media, therefore, sought the complete federalization of screening, which – they assumed

– would mean better pay and benefits for the [American] employees and more stringent government oversight. New technology for policing airports, which up to then had been considered too expensive or too invasive, also gained the spotlight; measures including facial recognition software, fingerprint scanners, eye scanners, and an x-ray backscatter body scanner still in development.182 Perhaps tellingly, only a very few actors questioned how these changes would fare over time; whether public patience and understanding had a particular lifespan when it came to risk vs. inconvenience… security vs. values.183

Security

The immediate policy imperative for the government and the public following 9/11 was securing commercial air travel from other would-be terrorists. In many ways, this was a reactive impulse, safeguarding against the last attack as opposed to anticipating future threats.184 The focus followed three different though related discursive paths: what was necessary to prevent a similar attack; how to implement those changes; and what it took to feel secure as a passenger. In each instance, aviation security was seen as both a physical and ontological necessity for the ongoing existence of the United States of America.

182 Stephen Power and Andy Pasztor, “Aftermath of Terror: FAA Issues 3 Pages of New Requirements,” Wall Street Journal (13 September 2001).

183 “In for the Long Haul,” The New York Times (16 September 2001).

184 Malcolm Gladwell, “Safety In the Skies,” New Yorker (1 October 2001).

170

The initial debate over which measures to implement and how led to a number of immediate – yet fluctuating – changes that included: no curbside baggage check-in, makeshift reinforcements of cockpit doors, and a number of banned items, including plastic knives in the airport boarding areas and cutlery and corkscrews in first class. Material objects like tweezers, box cutters, and pocketknives were immediately prohibited from carry-ons. Anyone with a foreign-sounding name or dark skin suddenly elicited greater suspicion and fear. Discussions about fault, efficacy, and who should examine whom unfurled from this knee-jerk corrective and occupied debates in both the executive and legislative branches of the government.

Revealingly, these debates rarely questioned the need for such security changes. Rather, the point of contestation was often whether they were enough. For instance, the New York Times criticized Bush’s proposed changes unveiled at O’Hare Airport on 27 September 2001, arguing that, while sensible, the U.S. needed more: we needed to create a federal transportation police force to assume direct responsibility.185 Similarly, an op-ed in the WSJ argued that reinforcing cockpits and separating pilots from the passengers with an unbreachable door was necessary but not sufficient for safeguarding the skies. Taking a hard line, the author advocated,

The airlines must stop serving meals and showing videos, withdraw the eight to 12 stewards, and substitute for them four uniformed guards armed with Tasers, clubs, and special guns firing bullets that don't damage planes. These guns also could be "smart" weapons that only fire in the hands of guards… In this reconceptualization of air travel, passengers would exchange whatever pleasure the drink, food and video service provided them for the comfort of knowing that once they were locked into a sealed tube with a planeload of strangers, armed guards would protect them against suicides, lunatics and terrorists. Most passengers, I believe, would happily make this exchange. 186

185 “Progress on Airline Security,” The New York Times (28 September 2001).

186 Edward Jay Epstein, “Airliners Need Guards, Not Stewards,” Wall Street Journal (3 October 2001).

171

Finally, members of the public also expressed concerns that existing measures were not enough or were not enforced well enough to protect them as passengers. Several news outlets reported that passengers had been trying to trick the metal detectors on purpose to see how secure they were, and they had been succeeding.187

Although criticism continued about the uneven enforcement and uncertain restrictions of post-9/11 aviation, much of the initial debate about what security at airports should include was temporarily resolved roughly two months after the attacks, when President Bush signed into law the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) on 19 November 2001. The main measure codified in the act was a total federal takeover of aviation security, requiring the U.S. government to hire at least 28,000 employees to screen travelers and baggage within one year.

Other provisions included:

• Every airport has federal security director • All checked bags screened • Reinforced cockpit doors • Screeners would all be U.S. citizens • Sky Marshals significantly increased • Federal government could allow pilots to carry certain types of guns

The ATSA did not solve all the problems with air travel, particularly how to finance these new security measures or how to implement them successfully in the timeframe allotted. Still, it established a baseline for what future air travel was expected to look like vis-à-vis security practice. As such, it provides the necessary groundwork for the ongoing conversation between regulation, safety, freedom, and convenience.

187 Among others: Philip Shenon, “Air Travel: Routine No More,” The New York Times (30 September 2001); “Lax Security Still Plagues Many Airports,” The Washington Post (21 October 2001); and “Playing Games With Air Safety,” The Washington Post (26 October 2001).

172

Values

At a televised press briefing on the night of 11 September, Secretary of Transportation

Norm Mineta described that morning’s attacks as a gross violation of American values:

One of the most cherished freedoms is the freedom of movement, the ability to move freely and safely. But today, that freedom was attacked. But we will restore that freedom throughout the national transportation system as soon as possible. And we will restore the highest possible degree of service […] In a democracy, there is always a balance between freedom and security. Our transportation systems, reflecting the values of our society, have always operated in an open and accessible manner. And they will again.

In other words, American values of democracy, liberty, equality, and justice were intrinsically tied up with a belief that citizens had the right to move around. Freedom, in this case, meant the ability to purchase airplane tickets and travel. Security measures safeguarding the ability to fly therefore preserved our values. Framing 9/11 as an attack on Americans’ ability to freely move from one place to another immediately characterized any future air security measures as necessary for the “preservation” of ‘our’ open society – even as those very measures have conversely limited or hindered some of that openness. The conceptual space between security and values is miniscule.

Interestingly, the press made a subtle distinction between the freedom of movement so strongly defended after 9/11 and the ease of that movement prior to the attacks. The former was equated to “this nation’s traditions of liberty, openness and diversity,”188 while the latter was relegated to an unessential convenience that ‘we’ must learn to forego. An editorial in the NYT, for instance, argued that the freedom to travel was fundamental to the nation’s character, but

Americans now had to focus on safety in lieu of convenience and speed: “As airlines cut back on service to accommodate the new security procedures, consumers will have to live with fewer

188 “Security Aloft,” The Washington Post (14 September 2001).

173

choices. The men and women who perished last week would gladly have accepted a slower, less convenient air travel system if they knew it meant the difference between life and death.”189

Few concerns were publically aired at this time about civil liberties with regard to increased state security measures. Still, some observed that the impending transformation of air travel touched on a necessary (if future) broader conversation about surveillance and invasion of privacy. A news item in the NYT pointed out that ‘we’ were on the precipice of a “new kind of country” when it came to security technology. Presciently, the article continued:

Civil libertarians see a major battle ahead because an anxious public may now seem too willing to trade some freedoms for greater safety. It is not clear, said Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale University, whether that acceptance would continue if people perceived themselves as being searched and watched frequently… ''It is a profound affront to be metered and measured,'' he said. ''And that is, I think, the debate of the future.''190

Ackerman wasn’t wrong, but he also was not right with regard to air travel. As security measures have adapted from 2001 to the present, there has been only moderate (and fleeting) pushback on these invasions of privacy. Instead, most Americans perfunctorily present their digital, physical, and emotional selves to the airport security apparatus and aid in the stripping down of each, a process deemed necessary to “ensure” safe travel. This is the new normal.

Traveling on

The new airport/air travel security experience, unlike many other post-9/11 security practices, was predicated on a very public and physical need for visibility. Moreover, it was shared – or enacted – not behind closed doors with a handful of intelligence operatives and security experts, but with everyone. This new ritual depended on acquiescence from the general

189 “Securing the Skies,” The New York Times (18 September 2001).

190 William Glaberson, “A Nation Challenged: Safety and Liberty,” The New York Times (18 September 2001).

174

public to work and resulted from a fear of being unable to distinguish between Self and Other based on basic data or casual appearances. After all, if the 19 hijackers so easily circumvented existing security precautions, what guarantee did Americans have that others couldn’t do the same?

Rachel Hall roots this fear in what she describes as a body’s given opacity. She argues,

“opacity effects visualize bodies, geographies, buildings, or institutions as possessing interiors and thereby allude to realms beyond the visible” (2015, 7). These invisible interiors house the potential for strangeness and, therefore, manifest on the outside as risk, but a risk that, post-9/11, can no longer be tolerated. As a result, all bodies that turn up seeking passage on an airplane must necessarily first be considered potential threats. Until we are cleared to board, until our opacity is rendered transparent, we are all strangers capable of strange and violent acts. This is the pitfall of being an open society defined by a ‘melting pot’ demography.

Numerous newspaper articles reported on passengers’ anxiety and suspicion of fellow travelers after the attacks. For instance, the NYT pointed out on 14 September 2001 that,

“Passengers who made it inside airline terminals bit their nails or searched the faces of those boarding the plane with them, fearful that some might be terrorists.”191 An article in the WAPO on 22 September 2001 raised the issue of racial profiling and quoted a man: “I know it's wrong…

You shouldn't brand everybody like that . . . But the attacks bring home how vulnerable you are.”192 As a testament to the power of the fear associated with 9/11, a Saudi man, pulled aside

191 Pam Belluck and Laurence Zuckerman, “Flights Are Cleared to Resume,” The New York Times (14 September 2001).

192 Nurith C. Alzenman, “For Middle Eastern Travelers, Scrutiny is Already Increasing,” The Washington Post (22 September 2001).

175

and interrogated at Dulles, was quoted as saying that he didn’t mind: “I’ll stand in line for five or six hours. My life is worth it.”193

The question of who belonged, who was safe, and who was not, an issue that would come to define homegrown terrorism in subsequent years, was especially concentrated in airports, literal gateways or borders between particular definitions of Self and Other. Senator Richard

Shelby (R-AL) summarized this conundrum at a Joint Hearing on 20 September 2001 with a story about a pilot’s announcement to his passengers on 15 September. Instructing the passengers to fight back against anyone claiming to be a hijacker, the pilot distinguished between the “brave folks for coming out today,” and the cowards who would destroy that sense of community. He continued:

“The Declaration of Independence says, ‘We, the people . . .’ and that’s just what it is when we’re up in the air: we, the people, vs. Would-be terrorists. I don’t think we are going to have any such problem today or tomorrow or for a while, but some time down the road, it is going to happen again and I want you to know what to do. Now, since we’re a family for the next few hours, I’ll ask you to turn to the person next to you, introduce yourself, tell them a little about yourself and ask them to do the same.”194

This particular anecdote highlights the powerful sense of togetherness and camaraderie that linked much of the nation following the attacks. More though, it underlines the distinction made implicit by retooled airport security measures: before passing through checkpoints, we were all opaque and ambiguous bodies; once on planes, we had been rendered transparent, presumed safe – our bodies qualified and quantified. Still, the ongoing fear that one of ‘them’ had somehow deceived officials persisted and was made all the more real with several security scares or incidents that took place in December 2001, August 2006, December 2009, and

193 David Cho and Rosalind S. Helderman, “Adapting to a New Normalcy,” The Washington Post (27 September 2001).

194 This story is repeated on several Sunday morning news shows on 23 September 2001.

176

October 2010. An official narrative derives from stringing together these incidents and the public responses to them, ultimately giving rise to a chronology of post-9/11 air travel security from

September 2001 to December 2016.

The shoe bomber, 2001

Traveling on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami two days before

Christmas, Richard Reid, a U.K. citizen and Muslim convert, attempted to detonate plastic explosives in his shoes. He failed and was tackled and subdued by fellow passengers after they noticed smoke.195 The plane landed safely at Boston’s Logan International Airport, escorted by two fighter jets. Despite assurances from President Bush and other officials of the efficacy of their post-9/11 emergency measures, Reid’s near success brought home once again the fear that air travel would no longer ever be completely safe, that there were still gaping holes in security protocol. This sentiment was reflected in three major policy debates going on at the time: the installation of explosives detection systems (EDS), problems with the No Fly List, and whether a pseudo-profiling system first known as CAPPS could be made more robust. First, however,

Reid’s choice of shoe as bomb receptacle inevitably led to new injunctions on ticket-holders to remove their shoes and submit them to the x-ray machine with the rest of their luggage as part of the TSA screening process.

Within the halls of government, Reid’s attack revived concern about a looming

Congressional deadline codified in the ATSA: by 18 January 2002 all checked luggage had to be screened for explosives via CT scanning machine, bomb-sniffing dog, hand search, or bag matching. The magnitude of operationalizing this directive, coupled with the attempted shoe

195 Andrew Jacobs, “Air Passengers Are Watchful, But Still Flying,” The New York Times (25 December 2001).

177

bombing, initiated long debates over feasibility, cost, speed of implementation, and efficacy, particularly with regard to installing bulky EDS machines in every major airport in the country.196 The WSJ dismissed all four methods of examining checked baggage and concluded,

“Real security? No, not even close.”197 The article pointed out that bag matching did not work for connecting flights and would not have stopped 9/11 or Richard Reid since he had no luggage and got his carry-on through the x-ray machine. The WSJ worried,

What defense do we have against future Reids? For now, all we have is the vigilance of passenger screeners. There are no technologies in place, or on order, to check all carry-on bags or all passengers for explosives. Highly trained bomb-sniffing dog units are currently deployed at just 39 of the nation's largest airports.198

The NYT reiterated this apprehension over the lack of detection system by outlining the serious damage the shoe could have inflicted if successfully ignited. Once again, the last line of defense lay in fellow passengers, who remained hyper aware of those around them, ready and willing to intervene should it be necessary.199 Even Kenneth M. Mead, Inspector General of the

Department of Transportation, acknowledged that there was a “staggering amount of work that remains to be done;” that ongoing security gaps are proving harder to close than anticipated.200

Despite this continued risk, acceptance of the growing inconveniences associated with new airport security was often framed through American values. Admiral James M. Loy, then acting Under Secretary of the TSA, testified before the Senate Transportation Committee on 10

September 2002 about the need to fight tyranny:

196 These cumbersome x-ray machines are often ‘temporarily’ installed in airport lobbies for the simple reason that they are too big to fit anywhere else.

197 Robert Poole, “To Speed Up Airport Security, Issue I.D. Cards,” Wall Street Journal (17 January 2002).

198 Ibid.

199 “Air Passengers Watchful.”

200 “Improving Aviation Security,” The New York Times (1 April 2002).

178

Renee Fleming, the noted opera star, sang a very familiar refrain for all of us. Walk on with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone, she said. Not being alone is about overcoming fear, and fear is lonely, and we all experienced it in this past year. The evil ones inserted it into our routine lives, and our challenge together as legislator and executive is to translate fear back into confidence for the American people, and at TSA we are now keenly aware that the evil ones tried to take away mobility from Americans, and I would offer that that has always been one of our inalienable rights.201

The public adopted this sentiment with regard to flying and American values. A year after the attacks, the NYT highlighted the role of air travel in digesting and recovering from the trauma of

9/11:

“You can’t forget today, what it is and what it means,” said Becky Koch of Tuscan, who was flying Southwest Airlines from here to Las Vegas. “But flying today makes a statement to terrorists, that they can’t take away our freedom of feeling safe.”202

*** The other issue discussed at that time centered on a ticket holder’s digital identity. While the media praised the passengers and crew of Flight 63 for their vigilance and courage in confronting Reid, many believed that it shouldn’t have come to that – Reid should have been flagged before he got anywhere near the airplane. Digital profiling, or CAPPS (Computer-

Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), in existence since the 1990s, draws from information known as passenger name record (PNR), data that is collected by airlines at the moment of booking. CAPPS then crosschecks this information against various government lists, including the ‘No Fly List’, and assigns a risk score to the passenger. Before 9/11, a high score would trigger additional scrutiny, most often the screening of checked baggage for explosives. On 9/11,

201 James M. Loy, Status of Aviation Security One Year After September 11th, United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, 107th Cong., Second Session, 10 September 2002, 13.

202 Michael Janofsky, “A Year Later, Air Passengers Are Few, but Determined,” The New York Times (12 September 2002).

179

ten of the 19 hijackers were CAPPS selectees, but the added examination of their checked luggage did not affect their ability to hijack the planes.

The obvious failure of CAPPS to prevent 9/11 initiated a lengthy attempt to upgrade the program. Two linked debates about passenger profiling came to the fore in this process. The first addressed how travelers were flagged as possibly suspicious; the second centered on the problems that resulted from this flagging. Public opinion here was mixed: on the one hand, digital profiling should be expanded to catch the bad guys; on the other hand, digital profiling couldn’t be so expansive that it infringed on travelers’ privacy or created too many false positives. Yet, the criteria for determining threat level and inclusion on the ‘No Fly List’ was never disclosed. As a result, all subsequent efforts to upgrade CAPPS have ultimately languished amid concerns for civil liberties and the lack of government transparency.

Before 9/11, the FAA had issued several Security Directives and Emergency

Amendments that – at the time of the attacks – banned 16 people from flying (deemed “no transport”) due to substantial intelligence that they posed a security threat.203 In November 2001, the FAA took control of the ‘watchlist’ from the FBI, now dubbed the “No Fly List.” By mid-

December 2001, 594 people were banned outright from flight and 365 “Selectees” were deemed suspicious and warranted further scrutiny. The list grew so massive, however, that by 2005, it contained 70,000 names, and by 2008, over one million. Inevitably, this led to many false positives where people with the same or similar names were flagged and denied boarding, despite their innocence. The media offered numerous examples of those pulled aside for additional security checks or denied boarding. The WSJ aired its frustrations as early as 25

January 2002:

203 “Memorandum on Watchlists,” TSA, 16 October 2002.

180

Anyone who's traveled by air lately can speak from personal experience on this matter. We're not the only ones who know a grandmother who's been given the head-to-toe treatment while a Mohamed Atta lookalike is waved onto the plane.204

Salon magazine concurred, adding that the No Fly List seemed “to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns, Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups.”205

By 2006, numerous people had issued complaints to TSA, leading to several lawsuits over the undisclosed process by which names were included on either sub-list.206 In one famous example, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had been repeatedly held by TSA, confused for someone else on the watchlist.207 He then recounted the arduous three-week process of personal appeals to Homeland Security Secretary

Tom Ridge to get his name removed. In another example, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska reported that his wife, Catherine, had been subjected to questioning because of the similarity of her name to the singer Cat Stevens.208 TSA eventually created a cumbersome arbitration process known as DHS Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP) that gave people recourse to proving their identities, but the process remains confusing and full of holes.209

204 “Profiles in Timidity,” Wall Street Journal (25 January 2002).

205 Dave Lindorff, “Grounded,” Salon (15 November 2002).

206 The Transportation Security Administration’s Aviation Passenger Prescreening Programs: Secure Flight and Registered Traveler, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, 109th Cong., 2nd Session. 9 February 2006.

207 The 9/11 Commission and Recommendations for the Future of Federal Law Enforcement and Border Security, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 108th Cong. 1st Session. 19 August 2004.

208 Secure Flight and Registered Traveler, 109th Cong., 2nd Session. 9 February 2006.

209 Even if proving that you are not the person on the list, the name isn’t removed, and you are still blocked from curbside check-in or kiosk/online check-in.

181

Despite the headaches and failures associated with the No Fly List, the public for the most part accepted the necessity and inconvenience. In this vein, newspapers published several articles early on giving instructions for those whose names matched entries on the list, suggesting that the best bet for clearing security at an airport was to identify oneself by including one’s middle name and by obtaining a letter from TSA proving one’s innocence after submitting background information.210 The burden of proof lay on the public. Nonetheless, TSA did spend time reviewing all names on the No Fly List to weed out those inadvertently caught in the dragnet, which subsequently led to the requirement of using one’s full name to buy airline tickets. After TRIPS was initiated to field complaints, and even after TRIPS was also experienced as a bureaucratic nightmare, false positive stories decreased dramatically, as if the combination of these two adjustments, although unsatisfactory, had nonetheless tamed public frustration and outrage.

In contrast to the No Fly List, attempts to upgrade CAPPS hit major roadblocks. This is the one major policy initiative on air travel security that has failed to get incorporated into the

‘new normal’. Although many in the media and government advocated for a more explicit profiling system as the best way to ‘winnow down the haystack and find the needle’, no one managed to propose a satisfactory system. The WSJ and the NYT reported that the travel industry and civil liberties groups were opposed to government plans for the first attempt at a new airline passenger screening program (dubbed CAPPS II) because there were not adequate controls on how information was to be used.211 The proposed program would electronically check credit records and criminal histories alongside the watchlists, all to be performed by TSA.

210 For instance: Keith L. Alexander, “A Common Name Can Be a Curse,” The Washington Post (12 October 2004); Christopher Elliott, “Getting Off a Security Watch List is the Hard Part,” The Washington Post (2 November 2004).

211 Stephen Power and Ann Davis, “Airline Security Plan Faces Civil-Liberty Battle,” Wall Street Journal (24 February 2003); David Jones, “Travel Industry and Privacy Groups Object,” The New York Times (6 March 2003).

182

Each traveler would then be assigned a risk level, encrypted on their boarding pass and similar to the color-coded threat index: green = good; yellow = extra scrutiny; and red = trouble.

Delta Airlines agreed to beta-test the new procedure at three of its airports. In response, however, the New York Times’ business travel correspondent, Joe Sharkey, reported in an article he entitled, “1984,” that there had been a privacy-invasion uproar (hence the illusion to Orwell’s dystopic novel) and many threats to boycott Delta.212 While TSA stressed that CAPPS II only accessed what was already publically available, concerns for individual privacy, particularly the credit check component, filled the newspapers, with people asking why buying an airline ticket received more scrutiny than buying a gun. The Times, itself, wrote an editorial calling CAPPS II a “highly intrusive federal surveillance program” that “runs the risk of overreaching.”213 WAPO also reported on this public displeasure, noting some were calling it “McCarthyism.”214 Despite attempts to make the program palatable, TSA ultimately failed to get Congressional approval for

CAPPS II.215 This is the one outlier of the entire Air Travel narrative, especially given that the need for a pre-screening program was framed as both an issue of security and of upholding ‘our’ values. In a telling passage, James Dempsey, Executive Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, testified before a House Homeland Security hearing on 29 June 2006. He stated:

212 Joe Sharkey, “A Safer Sky or Welcome to Flight 1984?” The New York Times (11 March 2003).

213 “The New Airport Profiling,” The New York Times (11 March 2003).

214 Keith L. Alexander, “Seeing Red On Security System,” The Washington Post (11 March 2003).

215 Secure Flight, a half-hearted incarnation proposed in 2004, was first implemented in 2009 and was an additional screening mechanism to DHS’s other program, APIS (Advanced Passenger Information System). While the White House claimed to frequently re-examine the protocols for watchlisting people, as of now the process goes like this: tidbits of information go to the NCTC database (TIDE); Each night at 11pm, select information goes from TIDE to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB); Overnight entries are examined by an inter-agency team each morning at which time significant risks are “nominated” to specific watchlists (each with different criteria).

183

Passenger airlines remain a target of terrorists. Every day, 1.5 to 1.8 million passengers board airplanes in the United States for domestic flights. It is infeasible to intensively scrutinize each of those passengers. To focus resources, it is necessary to make judgments about them before they reach the security checkpoint. Therefore, one element of the layered security system for air transport should be the pre-screening of passengers. Second, in developing a passenger screening system, privacy is not a luxury. By privacy, I really mean fair information practices. How much information is collected? Is it accurate? How is it used? With whom is it shared? How long is it kept? Answering these privacy questions is not a distraction from the task of preventing terrorist attacks. To the contrary, addressing these information collection and use issues is part of the process for designing an effective system, from a security standpoint, as well as from a privacy and public trust standpoint, because as Mr. Rosenzweig said, every minute airport screeners spend inconveniencing an innocent person is an opportunity for the terrorist to slip by undetected.216

U.K. trans-Atlantic plot, 2006

The second incident in the air travel narrative occurred on 10 August 2006, when

Scotland Yard disrupted a major terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up as many as 10 planes with liquid explosives hidden in carry-on luggage mid-flight from the United Kingdom to the

U.S.217 British police arrested 24 men, most of whom were U.K. citizens from Pakistan, and the threat level between the U.K. and the U.S. was raised to red as concerns persisted that some terrorists remained at large. The Post and other U.S. media immediately insinuated a connection to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden in particular, by noting that this attempt was very similar to a

1995 bin Laden plot, code named Bojinka, which was meant to blow up 11 planes over the

Pacific. The size and scope of the would-be attack was described as much more serious than anything a mentally unstable man with explosive shoes might do. Moreover, the tone of the news coverage suggested that this attack was imminent, despite evidence to the contrary.

216 Airline Passenger Baggage Screening: Technology and Airport Deployment Update, House Subcommittee on Aviation of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, 109th Cong., 2nd Session, 29 June 2006.

217 John Ward Anderson and Karen DeYoung, “Plot to Bomb U.S.-Bound Jets Is Foiled,” The Washington Post (11 August 2006).

184

The immediate result was that liquids were banned from commercial flights. President

Bush issued a statement the same day, saying that the U.K. arrests remind us that, “this nation is at war with Islamist fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.” Thanking Blair and praising the cooperation between their nations, he added,

“Travelers are going to be inconvenienced as a result of the steps we’ve taken. I urge their patience and ask them to be vigilant. The inconvenience is – occurs because we will take the steps necessary to protect the American people.” Semantics matter here: issues of security are filtered through the rhetoric of American values. Banning liquids is an ‘inconvenience’ necessary to preserve life and liberty, as opposed to a ‘restriction’ or ‘limitation’ on the freedom of travel itself.

Inevitably, the new security measures led to long lines, waits, and frustrated travelers.

The subsequent media coverage was peppered with anecdotes of tears over lost (expensive) beauty products in “the latest ritual of an airport security crackdown,”218 which initially inspired fear and frustration, until news of the plot spread. Once aware of the reason behind the ban, travelers resigned themselves to their fates. The use of the word ‘ritual’ is telling here. It implies not only acquiescence, but participation and a sense of duty and obligation on the part of the

‘aspiring’ passenger. Airport security is framed as a collusive effort, not a draconian punishment.

The specifics of this latest restriction fluctuated over time. Michael Chertoff, Secretary of

Homeland Security, said that the complete ban of liquids in carry-ons was temporary, but there was no word on how long this might last or what future modifications would look like. As for actual travelers, the confusion from these changes prompted a number of articles on best

218 Frederck Kunkle and Hamil R. Harris, “Liquids and Gels Discarded With Weary Surrender,” The Washington Post (11 August 2006).

185

practices for flying. For instance, Laura Mercer lipstick was OK, but lip-gloss was not.219 It also became the basis for a number of jokes and sarcastic commentary. Sharkey of the Times wisecracked about a detonator in his wife’s confiscated yogurt after her yogurt triggered a 20- minute search of her bags. He also told a story about a grandmother who wrote to him concerned about traveling with a pie to bring to her family for Thanksgiving. Sharkey snarked: “This is the country that won the Battle of Midway, and now we’re scaring a nice woman over her cherry pie?”220

By the end of September 2006, the “moisturizer moratorium” eased up with the announcement that small 3oz. liquids were now permitted, as were drinks purchased after security screening.221 Michael P. Jackson, Deputy Secretary of DHS, praised the decision: “What you see here today is the prudent balancing of the work that we need to do to protect security and common sense.”222 The connotation here is that security practices are not antithetical to

American freedom [of movement] and values; they are commensurate with the public perception of risk and threat. Still, many criticized TSA’s whole approach as reactive, not proactive. The

WSJ – although calling these changes a step in the right direction, concluded that the confusion over what to ban just “underscored that nearly five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, significant holes in airline security remain.”223

219 Kirk Johnson, “Passengers Adjust to New Minimalism in Carry-On Items,” The New York Times (12 August 2006); Annys Shin and Amy Joyce, “Air Travelers Discovering What Will and Won’t Fly,” The Washington Post (18 August 2006); “Air Safety: What Has and Hasn’t Changed,” Wall Street Journal (19 August 2006).

220 Joe Sharkey, “Take Away the Liquds, But Leave Us Our Laptop,” The New York Times (22 August 2006).

221 Del Quentin Wilber, “U.S. Eases Carry-On Liquid Ban,” The Washington Post (26 September 2006); Laura Meckler, “Government Eases Ban of Liquids on Planes,” Wall Street Journal (26 September 2006).

222 Airport Security Changes, Homeland Security Department Briefing, Reagan Washington National Airport, 25 September 2006.

223 “Government Eases.”

186

The underwear bomber, 2009

The next incident, colloquially referred to as the ‘underwear bomber’ or the ‘Christmas bomber’ incident, took place on 25 December 2009 aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

Traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit with 290 people on board, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a

23-year-old Nigerian man, who was able to get past airport security with plastic (PETN) explosives sewn into his underwear, attempted to detonate the bomb shortly before landing.

When it failed, another passenger, Jasper Schuringa, tackled and restrained Abdulmutallab, who was later revealed to be a member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) with suspected ties to U.S. cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki. The attempted attack once again set alarm bells off in the

U.S. over ineffective security practices.

WAPO clarified a few days later that the suspect was listed in a U.S. terrorism database in November after his father told the State Department that he was worried about his son’s radical beliefs and extremist connections. Abdulmutallab was placed on a catch-all list called

TIDE – not the No Fly List – due to lack of sufficient evidence suggesting he was an imminent danger to the public. He was issued a two-year VISA to the U.S. in June 2008, and pre-boarding screening did not raise any red flags because only some information from TIDE had been transferred to the FBI database from which the No Fly List was drawn (around 4,000 people banned and 14,000 selected for added scrutiny).224

Like the debate following the U.K. plot in 2006, the Christmas bomber narrative was framed by most as a failure on the part of TSA and the government more broadly to safeguard

224 Byron Tau, “No-Fly List Is Only One of Many U.S. Watchlists,” Wall Street Journal (8 December 2015).

187

commercial air travel.225 This anger was enflamed when Janet Napolitano, Secretary of

Homeland Security, went on several Sunday morning talk shows and exclaimed that the system worked in this case. The ensuing outrage over her comments lead her to clarify that she meant the system worked after he tried to set off the bomb. Although her intention was to praise the passengers and response teams for their professional and timely handling of Abdulmutallab, many took her to task for glossing over the fact that the bomber was able to get on a plane with explosives in the first place.

Perhaps because of all this pressure, or in response to the criticism that he was ‘weak on terror’, President Obama issued a statement on 28 December 2009 acknowledging that the underwear bomber revealed serious deficiencies in the intelligence system. Indeed, he said, “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland. Had the suspect succeeded in bringing down that plane, it could have killed nearly

300 passengers and crew, innocent civilians preparing to celebrate the holidays with their families and friends.” He added the next day that despite the intelligence gaps, the ‘see something, say something’ mentality of the American people meant that the U.S. was resilient and could survive such attempts to destroy democracy:

Finally, the American people should remain vigilant, but also be confident. Those plotting against us seek not only to undermine our security, but also the open society and the values that we cherish as Americans. This incident, like several that have preceded it demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.

225 While the foremost response to the incident was a reiteration of security failures, gaps, and ineptitude, a counter- narrative did exist, offering some optimism. The WSJ wrote on 30 December 2009 that examples like Reid and Abdulmutallab showed that security did work, even despite the close calls (Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “Two Cheers for Airport Security”). Their failures demonstrated that al Qaeda could not get sophisticated bombs/bombers through, only incompetent ones. Deterrence – creating the unacceptable risk of being stopped at the gate – seemed to be working at a certain level.

188

President Obama summarized: “The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the No Fly List.” This oft-heard refrain about ineffective security measures, while sparking outrage and fear in some, was also unsurprising, normal. This was partially reflected in its use as fodder for late-night comedians. In his send off ‘moment of Zen’, Jon Stewart wondered: “If we had to take our shoes off after Reid, then…” Colbert introduced a new children’s placemat at a parody TGIFridays called TGIJihad, where the child could trace the underwear exploding. Making light of a potentially serious tragedy reflected a certain acceptance and was in itself a perverse means of normalization, even if both comedians frequently traipsed across the threshold of ‘poor taste’.

By following the ‘government failure’ verdict, the main policy consequence of the underwear bomber centered on how passengers themselves were viewed and screened as potential weapons. Many security officials used the incident to stress the need for better body scanners. As reported in WAPO, Chertoff made the case for new technology that is able to reveal objects beneath a person’s clothing. Acknowledging that terrorists seemed to be exploiting

Americans’ natural reluctance to engage in invasive body screening, he warned:

This plot is an example of something we've known could exist in theory, and in order to be able to detect it, you've got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at… It's either pat-downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out.226

Body screening was therefore framed as a security imperative because the bad guys had discovered this particular chink in TSA’s armor. It is ‘do this’ or acquiesce to fate; security

226 Dan Eggen, Karen DeYoung, and Spencer S. Hsu, “Plane Suspect Was Listed in Terror Database,” The Washington Post (27 December 2009).

189

trumps privacy. Adopting this mindset soon translated into increased pat-downs, tougher scrutiny on carry-ons, canine units, and plainclothes marshals on international flights to the U.S.227 The

TSA also began deploying roving bands of Transportation Security Officers (TSO) in airports looking for signs of suspicious behavior. Nonetheless, full body scanners became the main answer to the Christmas reminder of air travel’s ongoing danger. At the time, these machines were touted as the (partial) solution to a number of problems or setbacks faced by TSA, including: spending a fortune on faulty technology (the puffer machines), programs being delayed by Congress and bureaucracy (such as Secure Flight), and airlines complaining about their own bottom line. The result has been the gradual installation of full body scanners in most major airports in the United States and abroad.

Yemen cargo plot, 2010

The last publicized attempted attack against U.S. air travel took place on 29 October 2010 when bombs (PETN) and a detonation mechanism were discovered in two packages during stop- overs in the U.K. and Dubai on two separate cargo planes bound for the U.S. from Yemen.

AQAP claimed responsibility for the plot, which was foiled by Saudi intelligence, and both

American and British intelligence officials attributed the attempt to Awlaki. Just like the previous incidents’ knee-jerk security reactions, the WSJ reported that certain toner and ink cartridges were banned from passenger planes for both domestic and international flights.228

Moreover, air shipments were totally banned from Yemen and Somalia. Reporting on the same

227 Eric Lipton, “With Safety Gaps Revealed, a Surge in Security,” The New York Times (29 December 2009); Jennifer Steinhauer, “Ruses Are Topsy-Turvy After Terror Attempt,” The New York Times (29 December 2009).

228 Josh Mitchell, “U.S. Adds Certain Toner, Ink Cartridges to the No-Fly List,” Wall Street Journal (9 November 2010).

190

measures, WAPO added that “high risk” cargo would go through extra screening on cargo planes

(via dogs and x-rays).229

This last major plot did not affect passengers as much as the other incidents. What it did do, though, was once again illustrate the ongoing threat to aviation and the ongoing public concern over major gaps in existing security protocol. The result was an increased number of opinion pieces and evaluations of airport security in general, and TSA in particular. The latter turned 10 years old on 19 November 2011. Christopher Elliott of WAPO wrote that even though no major attack had taken place in those years, he wondered whether we were better off with this fledgling $8 billion-per-annum federal agency.230 On the one hand, many gave TSA credit for addressing an important issue seriously, if not always well. On the other hand, however, their report card had been rather pathetic. They were slow to adapt new technology and often seemed to operate above the law with no accountability to tax payers.

‘9/11’ and the everyday

The emotional fallout of the 9/11 attacks coalesced almost immediately into a rethinking of airline and airport safety. That ‘rethinking’ soon gave way to new practices of aviation security, and those practices soon shed their sheen of newness and adopted the pallor of the mundane. The chronology of air travel presented above highlights four major nodal points around which the majority of discussion was located. Each event reopened old wounds and fears of vulnerability and initiated a debate over whether or how air security should go on. As such,

229 Derek Kravitz and Ashley Halsey III, “U.S. Tightening Air Cargo Security,” The Washington Post (9 November 2010).

230 Christopher Elliott, “It’s the TSA’s 10th Birthday. Should We Celebrate?” The Washington Post (13 November 2011).

191

each illustrates potential moments of contestation between certain uses of the ‘9/11’ narrative – particularly that of fear – and plausible alternatives professing a different path forward, or at least questioning the existing one.

The next chapter examines the push and pull of this exchange and illustrates how the

American public has normalized, internalized, and taken for granted existing security measures by way of the deployment of the 9/11 motifs related to security and values. The result with regard to identity practice is the overarching reaffirmation and visualization of the Self amongst a sea of Strangers and potential Others. Expressed differently, successfully navigating airport security is an acknowledgement and performance of belonging and solidarity, a move from strangeness to familiarity under the backdrop of ongoing danger.

192

CHAPTER EIGHT

Air Travel Security: talking back

This is what they say: Secure your own mask before helping others. And I think of us, all the people, and the masks we wear, the masks we hide behind and the masks that reveal. I imagine people pretending to be what they truly are, and discovering that other people are so much more and so much less than they imagined themselves to be or present themselves as. And then, I think about the need to help others, and how we mask ourselves to do it, and how unmasking makes us vulnerable… -- Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

Wise were the kings who never chose a friend till with full cups they had unmasked his soul, and seen the bottom of his deepest thoughts. -- Homer

The overarching focus of this dissertation is on how ‘9/11’ has been stabilized and woven into the very fabric of American identity with regard to two distinct security policies. As I did with drone strikes, I investigate how ‘9/11’ has helped justify the changes in and persistence of post-9/11 aviation security measures, and how that process has affected American identity practice. Like with the “drone strike” discourse, I answer that ‘9/11’ has contributed to a shift in what ‘normal’ looks like, widening the boundaries of permissible state action. In particular, ‘9/11’ has changed the Self’s relationship to the physicality of the Other. For air travel, that physicality manifests on ‘our’ own bodies as we attempt to demonstrate that ‘we’ are not the Other.

The role of the Stranger is paramount in this calculation. Until ‘we’ have cleared security, any of us might be dangerous, despite appearances to the contrary. After all, the 19 hijackers did not elicit any particular unease from those around them as they waited to board their flights (at least enough to warrant some sort of intervention). Lesson learned: appearances can be deceiving; what looks normal might not be. Flying has since become a regimented, policed

193

practice of rendering one’s body and one’s possessions inert or safe to the authorities; a means of ostensibly weeding out the Others by revealing their dangerous bodies. The specific interdictions, or contortions, travellers must endure in this process have changed a bit over time, yet the perceived need for such measures has remained steadfast, grounded in the ‘failed security’ and the ‘freedom to fly’ narratives of 11 September.

And yet, as I have indicated above, 9/11 isn’t an unambiguous thing that has unambiguous consequences. It is a locally bound tradition, a commonplace, a strategy of representation that we reach for – consciously or otherwise – to shore up certain understandings of the world. As such, it has a very particular role in plugging up holes in our understanding of post-9/11 security. It papers over certain cracks made visible at times when existing policies appear to be failing. What, specifically, does its insertion, reference, allusion, or tacit invocation do with regard to how we fly?

Drawing on tone, subject, and context, this chapter first takes a closer look at how ‘9/11’ has been used at key moments of the air travel narrative, when alternative paths forward were most pronounced. Those specific moments illustrate the power of ‘9/11’ to shut down debate and propagate a particular kind of model airline passenger subjectivity. Questioning that subjectivity, pushing beyond the first order explanations of ‘those are just the rules’ and ‘it’s for your own safety’, reveals how a particular understanding of the attacks has been normalized and routinized, how airport security has become a banal everyday nuisance/performance we largely ignore as opposed to an unacceptable invasion of privacy and hampering of productivity. I then discuss how that normalization has manifested with regard to American identity practice, and what that means going forward.

194

Talking Back

Given the widely shared experience of air travel, the aviation narrative following 9/11 has been sustained largely through individual anecdotes and experiences. Such stories themselves are policed by countless media articles, blogs, and public service announcements advising travelers on how best to traverse the minefield of constantly changing TSA rules and regulations.231 While the general tenor of this narrative has grown increasingly vocal against TSA, passengers and security officers alike continue to perform their ascribed roles in a sort of mindless trance – a requisite hassle for both sides of the x-ray machine.

Moments of contingency in the air travel narrative tend to coalesce around the security incidents presented in the previous chapter, each offering a vignette on a particular ongoing debate about the future of airport security. These debates highlighted possible counter-narratives that might have sent air travel down different paths, the most obvious of which was a back- peddling or reversal of what many civil libertarians described as invasive procedures eroding our fundamental civil rights as Americans. After all, as time passes and the initial trauma of a given situation recedes, it is normal for humans to forget the immediacy of that fear and refocus concern on convenience, cost, efficacy, and speed. Indeed, as early as 16 September 2001, the

NYT warned that at some point waiting in long lines at airports would not be as tolerated as it was immediately after the attacks.232

The main counter-narrative presented in varying degrees since 2001 centered on the idea that all subsequent security measures sanctioned by the state have bordered on a type of “security

231 For instance: Matthew L. Ward, “Agency Gives Revised Rules for Air Travel,” The New York Times (20 December 2002); Ken Belson, “The Lengths We Go for Toiletries,” The New York Times (16 April 2007); Christopher Elliott, “What the TSA’s Body Scanners Can’t See,” The Washington Post (25 March 2012); the scene in Up in the Air, when Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) explains to Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) the proper ins and outs of going through TSA security.

232 “In for the Long Haul,” The New York Times (16 September 2001).

195

theater of the absurd.”233 In other words, the various interdictions, bans, and restrictions did not, in fact, kept passengers any safer from another terrorist attack involving airplanes. Moreover, as time passed without a major incident, as a new generation came of age knowing nothing but

TSA, it became easier to divorce security procedures from their initial purpose. Yet, at each juncture, the American public remained more or less docile and pliant to new restrictions, new

‘dance moves’ in choreographing airport security. How does ‘9/11’ work in this process? Instead of critiques gaining ground and actually altering security policies, ‘9/11’ was reinserted at these moments, carrying with it the associated fear of being the next victim of a terror attack. The familiar experience of traveling heightened any fear rhetoric about imminent attacks and fed into the old refrain: “it could have been me…”

As illustrated in the drone narrative, references to September 11th were not always straightforward. In fact, more often than not, allusions to the attacks were subtle and indirect.

Within the overall aviation storyline, these oblique connections took two main forms. The first cohered around the notion of complacency and allusions to ‘before’. The second drew on the visual, fusing humor and critique to images of ‘terrorists’, ‘al Qaeda’, Osama bin Laden, and other symbols of danger. Both were sustained by a very relatable fear rhetoric that insinuated that

‘we’ were all potential victims if ‘we’ did not remain vigilant to the dangers around us. The result of such allusions, aside from dulling general disapproval, reasserted a particular understanding of American values that helped reproduce the perfect air travel subject. It also emphasized an ongoing fear of the stranger/strangeness in our understanding of airport security.

233 Ariel Kaminer, “Pat-Downs: Enhanced But Hardly Thorough,” The New York Times (28 November 2010).

196

Complacency

Not surprisingly, hostility towards TSA and aviation security practices in general increased over the years. Vanity Fair, for instance, complained that the enormous cost of all the post-9/11 airport security measures was not commensurate to the very small payoff

(“infinitesimal benefit”) they provided.234 In fact, Bruce Schneier, a relentless critic, said a great bulk of TSA measures were nothing more than “security theater,” actions that accomplished nothing but were designed to make the government look like it was responding.235 Pointing out that no big plane would ever be used like 9/11 again because passengers would now fight back, he noted that TSA seemed to always be fighting the last war, never looking forward. As early as

2002, newspapers also began to voice this counter narrative: namely, TSA had “uneven or capricious application of the rules” that were reactive –Osama bin Laden’s soldiers were not going to repeat the same hijacking. As one airline consultant and pundit opined, “Security is anticipating […] You want to know what anticipation is? It's not looking for pointy objects.

Security is saying, 'What could these clowns do next, and where are we vulnerable?'”236

Kip Hawley, former head of TSA, agreed. In a scathing 2012 WSJ op-ed, he wrote,

“More than a decade after 9/11, it is a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to protect.”237 Hawley contended that the crux of the problem was that the organization had taken the wrong approach to risk. He continued, “in attempting to eliminate all risk from flying, we

234 Charles C. Mann, “Smoke Screening,” Vanity Fair (20 December 2011).

235 Quoted in Eric Levenson, The Atlantic (31 January 2014). See also Schneier on Security blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog (accessed 10 December 2017).

236 Joe Sharkey, “The Ridiculous Side of Airport Security,” The New York Times (17 June 2003). The Wall Street Journal consistently argues that not enough is being done and that TSA should implement some sort of profiling system – looking at everyone equally is a waste of time and money.

237 Kip Hawley, “Airport Security in America is Broken,” Wall Street Journal (14 April 2012).

197

have made air travel an unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas, while at the same time creating a security system that is brittle where it needs to be supple.”238

Hawley urged the government to restructure TSA around two basic principles: TSA’s mission, which was to prevent a catastrophic attack (not to ensure that all passengers were safe); and

TSA’s job, which was to manage risk (not to enforce regulations). After all, terrorists were adaptive. His recommendations:

• No more banned items except the obvious • Allow all liquids • Reward TSA officers for initiative and give them more flexibility while still holding them accountable • Eliminate baggage fees because people are overstuffing carry-ons • Randomize security

He ended with this: familiarity with TSA has bred contempt.

These critiques highlight an alternative view of air travel that gathered momentum over the years: namely, aviation security post-9/11 did not, in fact, keep us safe. Instead, these measures encroached on our time, patience, privacy, and overall freedom of movement.

Hawley’s assessment, in particular, offered a viable alternative to existing practices, one that maintained sufficient acknowledgement of the ongoing threat while still allowing for the public to enjoy the freedom of the skies. And yet, travellers still measure out their shampoos in 3oz sample sizes. None of these narratives has managed to gain serious traction.

Aviation counter-narratives were consistently rebutted with reminders and warnings not to become complacent; that terrorists were always adapting and seeking new and more destructive means to take down airplanes. This exhortation first appeared as TSA was getting on its feet and new procedures and restrictions remained fluid. The NYT editorialized that “Six

238 Ibid.

198

months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, public confidence in the nation's aviation system is rebounding… It's just the sort of moment when a sense of complacency could take hold. That would be a grievous mistake.”239

The warning to us to guard against complacency set the tone early on that forgetting the attacks, returning to a pre-9/11 mindset, led to death and misery. Complacency was tied to forgetting the horrors of that September morning, forgetting the fear; it was going back to a time when 9/11 never happened. The use of ‘9/11’ here is meant to signify and justify fear of future attack, but also a fear of forgetting – in line with the oft-heard and seen refrain, “never forget.”

Moreover, ‘complacency’ also denotes a certain sense of smugness, which suggests that the next time something happened, we would only have ourselves to blame. The comment is geared to us as the subject, not the terrorists or even the government. ‘We’ are exhorted to keep vigilant. The editorial went on to critique the specific moves being made at the Department of Transportation and within the new TSA, but in the sense that neither agency was doing enough to protect the

American traveler.

The issue of removing shoes at the airport illustrates how complacency rhetoric has shored up an otherwise highly criticized practice within the overarching narrative. Despite visible disapproval, most TSA screening lines still require travelers to remove their shoes, unless one is lucky enough to be part of a ‘preferred traveler’ program. The specific counter argument against such a practice pivoted on the idea that it was highly unlikely that anyone would attempt another shoe bomb given that TSA agents and passengers alike would be looking for it, or at least aware of the potential. Indeed, as many comedians have since joked, if TSA attempted to account for all possible threats, ‘we’ would be naked with no luggage, a point already made back in the 1970s after a spate of terrorist hijackings.

239 “Improving Aviation Security,” The New York Times (1 April 2002).

199

Drawing on fear and complacency, the public (mostly via the media) largely policed itself into compliance. For instance, a month after a Times article fulminated against the removal of shoes, the DHS posted a warning about a potential hijacking. The NYT then editorialized a few days later:

The Associated Press headline picked up by newspapers across the country last week said it all: ''Air Marshal Program Could Be Cut, Despite Hijacking Threat.'' … A sense of complacency at this time would be inexcusable under any circumstances, but it is reckless when intelligence points to the likelihood of more terrorist attacks on aviation. President Bush called it a ''real threat'' at his press conference last week. … Federal airport screeners and airlines have also been put on notice that Al Qaeda terrorists may be adapting cameras or other electronic devices into weapons. Aviation security has been substantially upgraded since the Sept. 11 attacks, but airliners remain the most alluring terrorist target all the same.240

The Times and its readers might have railed against the inconvenience of removing shoes, but once presented with a threat, particularly framed as a likely airplane attack (“real threat,”

“airliners remain the most alluring”), critics quickly exclaimed that complacency from the public would be catastrophic, “reckless,” and “inexcusable.” As subject of the text, the Self was given the burden of due diligence in addition to the government’s security protocols. Not being diligent meant inviting in another catastrophe. Not being diligent meant forgetting to be afraid. The

Washington Post also reported an increase in angry rants about TSA’s inconsistent shoe policy.241 And yet, three months later, the same paper wrote:

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI concluded in a recent report that the nation's airlines were still vulnerable to terrorist attacks despite the government's expenditure of more than $12 billion on security enhancements.

240 “Shortchanging Security,” The New York Times (6 August 2003).

241 Keith L. Alexander, “TSA Intends To Lace Up Its Shoe Policy,” The Washington Post (21 December 2004).

200

The news comes as no surprise to many frequent fliers who responded to a BizClass inquiry last week. The travelers -- routinely subjected to intense scrutiny at the checkpoints -- say they have little confidence in security procedures. Although they are already forced to remove their shoes, endure inspection by hand wands and accept other forms of screening, many passengers said they didn't think the measures went far enough.242

The back-and-forth between complaints over policy and warnings of future 9/11-style attacks helps explain why the outcry over removing shoes never really amounted to a blanket reversal or amendment. Although the NYT passage did directly reference 9/11 in the text, ‘9/11’ was also invoked more subtly. For instance, the complaint: not safe enough, or the critique that security was still not good enough, both alluded to the attacks as the pinnacle of what happened with bad security. They both tacitly compared existing practices to those that were in place the morning of September 11. In so doing, such commentary suggested that another 9/11-style attack was a real possibility. The trauma and terror of that morning was therefore coupled to the idea that any one of ‘us’ might be on the next plane.

So passengers go to the airport wearing shoes that can easily slip on and off. We go wearing socks so our bare feet don’t have to touch the ground, upon which thousands upon thousands have also tread. We accept the inconvenience of trying to put our shoes back on – hopping on one foot – as we also try to gather bags, computers, and other possessions from the plastic security bins before reaching the end of the conveyer belt, before creating a plastic bin log jam for the people coming after. The path to the boarding gate is hampered or slowed down by the temporary lack of footwear, by the need to reveal both the contents of our shoes and our vulnerability as stocking-clad objects being scrutinized by fully dressed and shod airport personnel. We are declaring our innocence by removing our shoes and walking across that threshold; but in so doing, we are also reaffirming the potential for one of those shoes to actually

242 Keith L. Alexander, “Frequent Fliers Call for Better Air Security,” The Washington Post (22 March 2005).

201

be dangerous. Taking off our shoes propagates the narrative of our insecurity vis-à-vis the

Richard Reids out there – or even in line with us right now - who pledge allegiance to al Qaeda.

Strangers and their shoes cannot be trusted. Complacency gets us killed.

Complaints about additional security measures, whether the removal of shoes, added pat- downs, or a ban on liquids, were all met with a reminder that the terrorists (most often referred to generically as ‘al Qaeda’) were still planning to kill us as we fly. Reaction to the 2006 U.K. plot also reflected this pattern. The August arrest of 24 mostly British citizens of Pakistani descent brought to light a plot to simultaneously blow up ten airplanes over the Atlantic using liquid explosives, prompting an immediate increase to Code Red of all transatlantic flights between the

U.S. and the U.K. President Bush alerted the nation that these recent arrests reminded us that

“this nation is at war with Islamist fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” adding that the resulting inconvenience to travelers must be weighed against the necessity to safeguard the American people.243 Two days later, Bush warned the American public in his weekly radio address that authorities couldn’t be sure that the arrests eliminated the threat – that they got everyone – which is why new restrictions against liquids had been implemented:

This plot is further evidence that the terrorists we face are sophisticated, and constantly changing their tactics. On September the 11th, 2001, they used box cutters to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of innocent people. This time, we believe they planned to use liquid explosives to blow up planes in mid-air. In response, we've adjusted our security precautions by temporarily banning most liquids as carry-on items on planes. I know many of you will be traveling during this busy summer vacation season, and I ask for your patience, cooperation, and vigilance in the coming days. The inconveniences you will face are for your protection, and they will give

243 George W. Bush, President Bush Discusses Terror Plot Upon Arrival in Wisconsin (10 August 2006).

202

us time to adjust our screening procedures to meet the current threat.244

Bush directly equated the perpetrators of 9/11 to those recently apprehended in the U.K., describing them all as “Islamist fascists” who hated freedom and sought to destroy the Western way of life. He also conveyed the sense of an overwhelming, global, and unified threat in his use of the pronoun “they” throughout his comments, the implication being that ‘they’ were al Qaeda and were adapting after 9/11. As for complacency, once again Bush called on American citizens to participate in their own security by maintaining “vigilance”, by keeping a careful watch out for danger. Referencing 9/11 in both an explicit and implicit fashion had an immediate effect on travelers. As the NYT noted on 13 August: “Old fears are dragged out of cold-weather storage, dusted off, and tried on again. Is this the day it will happen to me?”245

Again, at the height of the crisis, it made sense that tensions rose, and that the immediate response would be to err on the side of caution. With regard to the liquid ban, however, there are two things to note: First, the plot was described at the time as immediate, urgent, imminent. Yet, as revealed at the June 2008 trial of eight of the suspects, there was actually no evidence of an imminent attack, nor did the suspects have any links to al Qaeda. While the accused had indeed made suicide/martyr videos at the time of their arrests, they had not made the explosives, picked a date, or bought airplane tickets. Indeed, there was no consensus among officials or experts about whether or not the suspects would even have been able to pull it off.246

Instead of being framed as the continued failure of security tied explicitly back to 9/11, the incident could have justifiably been framed as a success story. After all, British security

244 George W. Bush, President’s Radio Address, 12 August 2006.

245 Rick Lyman, “My Liquid-Free Flight Abroad,” The New York Times (13 August 2006).

246 Elaine Sciolino, “In ’06 Bomb Plot Trial, a Question of Imminence,” The New York Times (15 July 2008).

203

services thwarted the plot long before the terrorist cell had even purchased bomb-making materials. Why not cast the arrests in this light? Instead, the banning and restriction of liquids reinforced the notion of an ever-present threat; that every time anyone boarded an airplane, they put their lives at ‘imminent’ risk.

Second, even as the immediacy of the threat passed, the narrative warning against complacency persisted. For example, responding to a Government Accounting Office report about existing security holes in airport perimeters a year later in October 2007, Representative

Jackson Lee (D-TX) warned, “if we do not put effective security measures in place, our Nation may very well be the victim tragically of another attack…”247 The fear of being complacent, or of allowing some sort of threat to pass by because of a preference for convenience, has inured the public to wait times and procedure changes.248 As a result, the public begrudgingly accepted these new security measures, even as they complained or joked about the idiocy of it all. The bottom line? “Welcome to the era of the clear plastic dopp kit and makeup bag.”249

Jokes and Humor

Much of the post-9/11 aviation security regime has run up against questions of privacy, both in the media and in academia. Privacy is broadly defined as an “individual’s ability to control the flow of information concerning or describing or emanating from her” (Hiranandani

2011, 1092). Yet, ongoing anxiety about terrorism has resulted in what Hina Shamsi and Alex

247 Sheila Jackson Lee, Aviation Security: Are We Truly Protected, Subcommittee on Transportation Security and Infrastructure Protection, Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives, 110th Cong., First Session, 16 October 2007.

248 Ron Nixon and Michael S. Schmidt, “New Rules for Electronics on Flights Bound for U.S.,” The New York Times (8 July 2014).

249 “Hot Topic: Air Safety,” Wall Street Journal (19 August 2006).

204

Abdo dub, “a massive and secret surveillance-industrial complex” that calls into question a person’s ability to determine what is public and what is not (2011, 5). The struggle of constitutional guarantees to keep up with new technology, new business models, and new social platforms compounds these questions of privacy (Cohen 2012, 107). Still, according to the Pew

Research Center, Americans tended to vacillate on the privacy/security divide depending on what was happening in the news. For instance, in 2013 after Edward Snowden revealed the scope of NSA’s surveillance practices, 47% of Americans thought that security programs had gone too far in restricting civil liberties (compared to 35% who didn’t think the government was doing enough).250 However, after San Bernardino and the Paris terrorist attacks, 56% of Americans believed that the government wasn’t doing enough to protect them (versus 28% who thought the policies had gone too far).251

Unrest over ever-changing TSA rules and regulations never disappeared. Indeed, despite general compliance, the counter-narrative persisted that such measures reflected an incompetent government agency that kept adding more rules to hide the fact that it did not know how to keep

America safe. The critique against aviation security was loudest after the ‘underwear bomber’ incident, almost a decade after 9/11, when TSA announced that pat-downs, and eventually total body scanners, were now required. In contrast to some of the previous critiques, outcry at this time centered on civil liberties and the sanctity of the physical body. Framed as a debate between privacy and safety, many Americans voiced concerns about feeling violated – both by physical pat-downs, which were characterized as more aggressive, and by body scanners, which (at first) produced images suggestive of the passenger’s naked body. The justification for such measures,

250 Ibid.

251 Lee Rainie and Shiva Maniam, (2016) “Americans feel the tensions between privacy and security concerns,” Pew Research, 19 February. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/19/americans-feel-the-tensions-between- privacy-and-security-concerns/ (accessed 27 February 2018).

205

stemming from Abdulmutallab’s nearly successful attack using plastic explosives hidden in his underwear, once again drew on the ‘logic’ that security threats were omnipresent and necessitated constant vigilance.

The introduction of Advanced Imagery Technology (AIT) machines was meant to solve the uproar against enhanced pat-downs, which were the first to become mandatory after the failed underwear bombing, but which were also experienced as excessively invasive, bordering on sexual assault (Valkenburg and van der Ploeg 2015). Yet, the AIT machines raised similar civil liberties issues, given the machines’ ability to ‘see’ through clothes and reveal those images to a security officer. Especially for women, the new body-scanner blurred the distinction between virtual and real ‘strip searches’, leaving many embarrassed and uncomfortable (ibid,

332; Magnet and Rodgers 2012). Moreover, although TSA turned this function off, the AITs were still capable of recording and storing the body scans, raising questions about the reproduce- ability of images of the ‘naked’ body. The ACLU and Electronic Privacy Information Center

(EPIC) claimed that the scanners also violated the religious freedom of those whose devotion prohibited unnecessary immodesty or physical contact.252 A number of groups protested their use, including an organization called ‘We Won’t Fly’, which urged the American public to boycott until both pat-downs and scanners were suspended.253 Still, according to several polls,

Americans have tended to support body-scanners over pat-downs.254 Ultimately, despite some concessions on the part of TSA, body-scanners, too, were subsequently incorporated into the

252 Marc Rotenberg, “Body scanners, Pat-Downs Violate Law and Privacy,” CNN (19 November 2010).

253 Jayshree Bajoria, “The Debate Over Airport Security,” Council on Foreign Relations (22 December 2010).

254 Frank Newport and Steve Ander, “Americans’ Views of TSA More Positive Than Negative,” Gallup (8 August 2012).

206

routine of air travel, literally choreographing how we moved across the threshold between pre- screen/contaminated and post-screen/sterile.

Spherical, or upright, x-ray imaging machines were designed so that the passenger steps inside, feet apart and mirroring the yellow footprints on the ground, arms held up in mid-jumping jack. Looking straight ahead, two side panels swoosh around the perimeter, and the occupant is given the signal to step out. Biologically, this stance leaves the body very open and vulnerable, particularly with regard to the chest and groin areas.255 It is an off-putting moment in the security dance, and one that elicited much criticism. Ed Rollins opined on CNN:

Why have we as Americans spent billions of dollars, inconvenienced our lives, and lost many of our own freedoms? … I know we live in a dangerous time, but are we letting the other side win by letting our way of life be taken away from us by being overly cautious and maybe even overprotected? … If I thought for one moment the TSA teams (50,000 plus strong) at the airport, who treat me as a potential terrorist, could actually catch a real terrorist, I might be a more willing victim of their harassment. I now have to be searched, my computer and Kindle stacked separately, shoes off (thanks to Richard Reid, another incompetent bomber), belt, wallet, watch and whatever else taken out, and have my ticket and ID checked every 10 feet even though I am in their secure space. Now my underwear is to be viewed as a secret weapon.256

Rollins’ comments, particularly the fear that ‘we’ are letting ‘them’ win the War on Terror by infringing upon our own civil rights in the name of security, was a recurrent theme at the time and can be seen in several of the cartoons below.

The debate heated up in 2010 as more machines were installed across the country, and they or pat-downs became mandatory. WAPO reported that many felt the pat-downs were too

255 The standard response to threat or vulnerability is to make oneself smaller and more compact.

256 Ed Rollins, “The Case for Firing Janet Napolitano,” CNN (6 January 2010).

207

invasive.257 However, TSA rebutted that such measures were necessary if the full body scanner wasn't available or the person refused the x-ray machine. News items at this time highlighted the tension between security and passengers’ rights, with opponents of the pat-downs arguing that they were being treated like criminals just for flying – a telling critique, given that flying had been framed as a sacred right in much of this narrative. TSA responded that those who opted out were being irresponsible. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano reminded her audience of the ongoing danger ‘inaugurated’ by 9/11 at a National Press Club luncheon:

Now, we know that al Qaeda and al Qaeda related groups continue to believe that taking down a commercial airliner or to weaponize a commercial airliner would be a great leap forward in their terrorist view of the world. We also know that they are a very smart and determined adversary. And so they are very familiar with the steps we have already taken, as a country and indeed as a world, in the wake of what happened on 9/11.258

Napolitano’s comment tying body scanners directly to the 2001 attacks draws on the previous complacency discourse as well as the various ‘9/11’ themes. She builds off of fear that “al

Qaeda,” “a very smart and determined adversary,” is still intent on bringing down a plane full of people. Danger persists. She does this syntactically by framing the subject to be the first person plural (“we”), thereby incorporating her audience into active participation. Complacency comes into play in the implication that because “we know” this about them now, if we do nothing, if we do not do all we can to stop them, including the body-scans and the pat-downs, then the consequences rest on us.

The tension since 9/11 between privacy, convenience, and security appeared to reach the breaking point when it came to offering up our own bodies, all pretense and clothing aside, for scrutiny. A NYT editorial summarized the disparate viewpoints about body scanners and

257 Derek Kravitz, “New Searches Too Personal for Some Air Travelers,” The Washington Post (13 November 2010).

258 National Press Club, Washington, D.C., 15 April 2010.

208

privacy: Americans understood the need for security, but TSA had responded terribly to new complaints about pat-downs and scanners.259 Even as officials claimed sensitivity to the privacy concerns of the public, they had nonetheless determined that the current risk justified these more invasive measures. Indeed, Hillary Clinton appeared on Meet the Press (21 November 2010) and reiterated that if the intelligence experts responsible for the safety of the United States thought these measures were necessary, then this was what must happen. At the same time, when asked directly if she would undergo a pat-down on Face the Nation, she responded: “Not if I could avoid it, no. I mean, who would?” While some took this as a form of hypocrisy since Clinton didn’t have to fly on a commercial airplane, She was also stressing that even though no one would willingly subject themselves to an invasive pat-down, the degree of threat faced by the nation was sufficiently high to warrant certain sacrifices of comfort and privacy. Again, that threat – like Abdulmutallab – does not always look particularly threatening. It is therefore our

‘duty’ to screen ourselves for the sake of a safe nation.

Charles Krauthammer penned an op-ed in WAPO directly questioning the logic behind such security measures. He opened with a description of the latest public “hero,” who took his iPhone and recorded his pat-down, saying, “don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon! My package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my Johnson to kingdom come?!” Krauthammer commented,

Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives - when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone… We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections,

259 “The Uproar Over Pat-Downs,” The New York Times (20 November 2010).

209

searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.260

This strongly worded commentary reflected a growing call for a complete overhaul of aviation security, much along the lines of the ‘risk-based’ alternative suggested by Kip Hawley in 2012 (above). Instead, the controversy around the machines and images of the ‘naked’ body was ‘resolved’ by the addition of new software that hid those images from Transportation

Security Officers (TSOs) (although still produced by the machines themselves), and replaced them with a gender-neutral pictogram that “pretends to ensure [the passenger’s] invisibility”

(Bellanova and González Fuster 2013, 195). No overhaul, no major changes, just a Band-Aid.

Perhaps one of the most visible representations of this counter-narrative has been through the use of humor. Humor helps diffuse uncomfortable situations by way of being a shared communicative and emotional outlet between speaker and audience. As such, passengers joke about underwear bombs as a sort of collusion with the TSA agent, as if to say: I am one of you; I would never think about doing something so crazy. The sarcasm, eye rolls, intonations, and facial expressions associated with joking all play a part in translating the literal meaning of the spoken word into an alternative, shared, tacitly understood, and often subverted, meaning.

And yet, the potential for strangeness that sustained the everyday experience of air travel

– the potential for something/one that appeared harmless to turn out to be dangerous – was once again reinforced by TSA’s response to such quips. By 2006, TSA started to interdict jokes by passengers waiting in line. These “embodied utterances” were performed to officials and securitized by those officials as “sites of intervention” (Martin 2010, 20). The joke no longer

260 Charles Krauthammer, “Don’t Touch My Junk,” The Washington Post (19 November 2010).

210

stood innocuous outside the confines of space and time; rather, the post-9/11 climate of superimposing possible dangerous futures onto the present “leaves TSOs with little room to differentiate between what passengers say, what they mean, and their capacity or intention to commit an act of terrorism” (Ibid, 20-21).

In this sense, the bomb joke literally “declares the concrete possibility of violence,” even as jokes traditionally “[invert] the literal meaning of a verbal threat” by concomitantly implying the very absurdity of such a notion (Martin 2010, 27). Jokes rely on non-verbal cues to alert the listeners of intent. But given the literal meaning, the joke must be further investigated, pulling it out of its original affective performance/delivery. Alike in context and tone, but repeated over and over for officials, the joke loses its humor and reminds us once again of our vulnerability.

Prohibiting jokes is therefore yet another means of regulating the subject and her linguistic repertoire as she waits in line to board a plane.

Outside of the security screening line, air travel jokes functioned to connect a broader public to a shared experience. They permitted that audience to laugh at something that in other contexts was not actually funny but often frustrating, scary, dangerous. These pointed critiques, softened by the humor of delivery, pitch, tone, and context, presented a counter-narrative in a far more palatable format for the broader population. Cartoonists, for instance, re-imagined the implications of a growing list of ‘dangerous’ articles of clothing:261

261 I received permission from each artist to reprint their cartoons here.

211

Figure X: Joe Heller, Green Bay Press Gazette, Cagle.com (2009)

Connecting the underwear bomber to the shoe bomber served to both remind the viewer that threats persisted, and to poke fun at TSA’s reactive security measures. Still, it also underlines that someone in line waiting to be screened could also have a bomb in his underwear, that passengers are only safe if fully ‘naked’ to the security apparatus and to one another.

The Onion parodied:

212

Figure XI: “New TSA Guidelines,” The Onion (19 December 2005).

This list of guidelines makes fun of some of TSA’s restrictions at a time when TSA was attempting to loosen some of the restrictions around sharp objects. Doctor’s note for a machete?

OK. Wisconsin cheddar – the sharpest – still banned, but Vermont and New York cheddars are

OK. Five random searches in a year and you get a “sharper-object upgrade.” This use of humor and exaggeration to criticize the seemingly random yet lengthy list of restrictions allows the audience to both laugh and commiserate. After all, who likes having their seat kicked? Still, it also serves indirectly as a reminder that “danger” and “terror” still exist.

Late night comedians opined:

“Hillary Clinton said on CBS that she would not submit to a pat-down, to which Bill Clinton said, ‘Tell me about it’.” – Jay Leno

213

“Have you heard the TSA’s new slogan? ‘We handle more junk than eBay’.” – Jay Leno

“People are concerned that the new airport security scanners could lead to pictures of their genitals ending up on the Internet. Apparently no one has told them that without pictures of genitals, there would be no Internet.” – Conan O’Brien

“The day before Thanksgiving is National Opt-Out Day, where people are being asked to boycott the TSA’s full-body scanners. Sponsors of the event say people shouldn’t be made to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable while traveling. That’s what Thanksgiving with your family is for.” – Jimmy Fallon

“This year marks the first Thanksgiving in which travelers will get molested before they get to their uncle’s house.” – Seth Meyers

Jokes like the ones above transform the body scan or the pat-down into something at once more sexually explicit and uncomfortable (“molested,” ‘genitals on the Internet’, Hillary and Bill

Clinton’s sex life), yet at the same time a punch-line to laugh at. Like most jokes, these took serious subject matters (sexual abuse, terrorism) and made them laugh-able, de-clawing collective fears and unease over submitting to such a physically vulnerable practice and transforming those misgivings into something we could all relate to and laugh about. In many ways, a clear example of rendering these rather uncanny security measures banal and vice versa lay in this exact use of humor. Given this vocal – albeit humorous – invective, that adjustments to body scanning did not occur bears some explanation.

While the use of humor in and of itself helped routinize or normalize otherwise uncomfortable or annoying practices, ‘9/11’ also played a role in cementing pat-downs and full- body scanners into the everyday. In some cases, ‘9/11’ was explicitly present in the defense of these measures, as when one author discovered that he and the person he was interviewing both narrowly escaped 9/11 or ’93. With regard to the scanners, they were grateful for the added security, even if it was annoying and uncomfortable. Other times, ‘9/11’ showed up in a

214

compressed or coded reference, often within the same jokes meant to criticize the TSA or its practices. Consider the following:

Figure XII: Gary Markstein, Creators Syndicate (24 November 2010)

Figure XIII: Mike Keefe, The Denver Post (18 November 2010)

215

Both of the above cartoons make use of several tropes that help link the image to aspects of ‘9/11’. Both cartoons imply a struggle between security and values, though in this case, instead of U.S. politicians claiming that security measures conform to American values, the cartoonists are suggesting that silly security measures actually do harm to American values and identity more broadly. In the top cartoon, the ‘leader’ al Qaeda figure who resembles Osama bin

Laden is hiding out in a cave, harking back to speculation around the time of Tora Bora, just after 9/11. His foot soldiers have come to him wearing T-Shirts that say, “Don’t Touch My

Junk,” referencing John Tyner’s YouTube iPhone video and resulting controversy around intensified pat-downs… taking credit for the changes that resulted from Abdulmutallab’s attempted underwear bomb. The leader dons his approval.

The second cartoon shows a number of militants guffawing about all the ridiculous security restrictions Americans have imposed on themselves in the name of freedom. Both cartoons associate increased security measures at the airport with an al Qaeda ‘win’, insinuating that the U.S. and al Qaeda are engaged in a zero-sum struggle where the ultimate goal of the terrorists isn’t necessarily rampant death and destruction, but really any limiting of Western’ civil liberties – ‘our’ values – in the name of security. However, it also reminds the audience that the reason they can’t pack their favorite perfume and have to walk through a body scanner is because men with guns and beards somewhere ‘over there’ in the mountains still want to kill them. And now those men are laughing at us because we have put ourselves through all these new security measures – as if that was their plan all along.

216

Figure XIV: Patrick Chappatte, “The Era of the Body Scanner” Le Temps (12 January 2010)

Figure XV: Bruce Beattie, Daytona Beach News-Journal (20 November 2010)

These examples are all critiques of TSA and aviation security more broadly implying that we have basically done the work for al Qaeda by limiting and hampering our mobility in such

217

spectacularly absurd ways – that we are so intent on details, we miss the big picture. And yet, the cartoons also inadvertently reinforce the identity roles established by ‘9/11’. For instance, each cartoon depicted a turbaned, bearded, gun toting, bomb-making ‘terrorist’ as the ‘Other’ still bent on our destruction. The one depicting Osama bin Laden in particular – again, although a dig at

TSA’s particular brand of cluelessness – nonetheless reminded the viewer that the head of al

Qaeda, the man behind 9/11, was still at large and remained focused on air travel as a lucrative target. The association to danger, while perhaps not foremost in the cartoonist’s mind, was still clearly present and visually associated with the ‘original’ attack on 9/11. Yes, the various screening mechanisms employed by TSA might be silly, ineffectual, cumbersome, embarrassing, frustrating, etc., but they were put in place because these al Qaeda terrorists were still out there somewhere wanting to do us harm. The last cartoon is perhaps the most subtle. One man is building a bomb, and a colleague asks him when it would be ready to use. Looking closer, the man is working in the Research and Development division, implying that the enemy is always adapting and searching for newer, worse forms of destruction. When the other man asks about silencing criticism, the implication is that all grumblings from travelers about invasive security measures will cease when they unleash the latest weapon on us, and we are once again reminded of why we do these things in the first place. Danger persists.

Not unique to the body scanner debate, the same dynamic occurred around other aspects of air travel. Stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh, at a show in Los Angeles in 2011, asked the audience:

Is it too soon to talk about some of the good things that Osama bin Laden did for us? Fuck. Where’s his comedy tribute show? You say he didn’t do anything good? Knock it off! How ‘bout every time you take your wife or girlfriend over to the airport, you no longer have to walk them all the way to the gate? Thank you Osama. Remember that? All the way to the gate?... The flight’s delayed… Oh great! I get to wait here longer… What

218

do you get to do now, thanks to Osama bin Laden? Barely slow down and kick them to the curb. … and that’s one tower. I didn’t say two, that was overkill… ‘never forget’.262

In poor taste for many, Tosh’s quip nonetheless reminded the audience of the danger we faced in a post-9/11 world. His joke forced the audience to connect existing air travel practices to their initial cause: the hijacking of four planes, the fall of the Twin Towers, the death of 3,000 people.

We can laugh, but we cannot forget.

The role of ‘9/11’ in shoring up potential gaps in the justification of aviation security remained active across a number of specific aspects of TSA rules, even if the intention was meant to do the opposite. In 2013, TSA announced plans to loosen restrictions on pocketknives and sports equipment to align with international standards.263 The report left some concerned and upset, including flight attendants who were confused why knives were suddenly allowed but shampoo was not.264 Christopher Elliott of the Post, however, believed that the ‘controversy’ had been blown out of proportion, since a number of sharp objects had already been allowed on planes. Still, he wrote, “If nothing else, the agency’s efforts to incorporate what it calls “random and unpredictable” security measures throughout the airport have finally succeeded. Virtually nothing the agency does makes sense anymore, say many passengers.”265

Facing a somewhat hostile audience, head of TSA, John Pistole, testified before the

House Homeland Security Committee on 14 March 2013 regarding TSA’s efforts to advance

Risk-Based Screening (RBS). He argued that TSA had eased the restrictions list in an effort to

262 Daniel Tosh, Greg Giraldo Benefit, Los Angeles (29 June 2011). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtSFWTXzdh4 (accessed 7 October 2017).

263 Jad Mouawad, “U.S. Relaxes Air Travel Carry-On Prohibitions,” The New York Times (6 March 2013).

264 Christopher Elliott, “TSA’s Decision on Knives Draws a Sharp Reaction,” The Washington Post (14 March 2013).

265 Ibid.

219

focus limited resources on the more important threat of explosives. Reminding committee members that they were the ones who demanded this shift, he told them that this is what risk- based means, as opposed to one-size-fits-all. He walked the committee through the process of changing procedures and reported that TSA was turning more attention to the risks from abroad, since that was where the problems had been.266

An op-ed in USA Today, mentioned in testimony before the House, drew on ‘9/11’ as both a credential and – inadvertently – as a foil to the intended message supporting changes to prohibited carry-on items. Carie LeMack began,

Last week, the Transportation Security Administration announced its decision to allow weapons onto planes. A little more than a decade has passed since terrorists boarded the same flight as my mom, Judy Larocque, and used box cutters as their weapon of choice to begin the deadliest attack on our nation’s soil. Now TSA officials are permitting passengers to carry on small blades, bats, and other potentially deadly items. Have they forgotten?267

Drawing on her experience as daughter of a 9/11 victim, she proceeded to endorse TSA’s new rules, arguing, like Pistole, that TSA’s mission was to avoid catastrophic disaster – keep the bad guys off, not the bad objects. She made a point, however, to remind the public that the threat had not diminished since her mother boarded her plane. She wrote that RBS was based on behavior detection. Travelers, when properly informed of a threat, were the largest and most effective group of behavior detection officers available, but they weren’t aware of the role that they played.

These reminders of danger, of the human toll of 9/11 on families, flight attendants, even the rhetorical use of “have they forgotten?” all worked against TSA’s plan to ease certain

266 TSA’s Efforts to Advance Risk-Based Screening, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Transportation Security, Committee on Homeland Security, 113th Cong. First Session. 14 March 2013.

267 Carie Lemack, “TSA’s Knife Reversal is Part of its Job,” USA Today (14 March 2013).

220

restrictions on banned items, despite the intentions of their authors/speakers. Connecting current policy changes to that fateful morning refreshed the fear that it could have been me; it could still be me. This opposition was strong enough that the WSJ reported on 22 April 2013 that the plan had been postponed, and by 5 June 2013, TSA had canceled it altogether.268 While this incident highlighted the multiple and at times countervailing bureaucratic hurdles faced by TSA, it also illustrated that counter-narratives of the incompetency of the TSA and their idiotic restrictions were still not as powerful as the fear of ‘another 9/11’. This bipolar response was perhaps best illustrated by a Key and Peele skit, first aired on 10 December 2014 on television’s Comedy

Central, of an al Qaeda cave meeting, where the leader (Khalid) asked why his followers hadn’t taken a plane in the last 13 years. The exchange went as follows:

Second in command: Khalid, you don’t know? … it is all because the cunning and mighty TSA is always one step ahead of us … [Other member describes a plan to attack using 5” scissors, but TSA only allows up to 4”] … Shrewd TSA! Khalid: How could they know that a 5” blade is a dangerous weapon and a 4” blade is no more than a child’s plaything? Second guy: That is the genius of TSA! … The TSA strikes fear into my heart! They wear polyester shirts and their disposable rubber gloves… and their sneaker shoes Other: They are so clever. They act like they are listless overweight employees who don’t give a fuck – when, in reality, they are an elite force of anti-terrorist commandos.

Despite the obvious dig at TSA, the skit was formulated around the fact that there had not been a single hijacking since 9/11. The cave scene played on assumptions and stereotypes of Osama bin

Laden’s hiding places over the years before Abbottabad, including the lead-up to and planning of

9/11. It also reinforced the idea that despite his death, there were still other troglodytes actively

268 Jack Nicas, “TSA Delays Plan to Let Small Knives on Planes,” Wall Street Journal (23 April 2013); “TSA Cancels Plan to Allow Some Knives on Flights,” Wall Street Journal (5 June 2013).

221

planning our demise. In this regard, TSA’s rules might be incomprehensible, frustrating, or nonsensical (i.e., a 4” blade versus a 5” blade), but they have nonetheless worked to prevent another attack. The other implication? That next attack is still being discussed and planned somewhere out there as we speak. Danger persists.

Identity-as-practice

As indicated by the narrative above, air travel centers on a physical, virtual, and emotional deconstruction of the person presenting herself in the role of ‘passenger’. People moving through airports must now “bear the burden of embodying the threat of terrorism” (Hall

2015, 32) as they transverse a highly controlled space designed to regulate, uncloak, and assess those inside it. The airport, in essence, has become a panopticon that seeks to channel passengers through specific chokepoints via specific paths. Rendering this process more palatable, airport spaces have been reconceived as mini-malls post-9/11, what the NYT calls a “micro- choreography of surveillance and security” via consumerism.269 As such, “The airport represents

… a site in which ‘flows’ of information and capital are facilitated against a background of condensed and highly regulated surveillance practices” (Martin 2010, 18).

The processes and incidents that have made up this specific air travel regime center on the post-9/11 fear of ‘another 9/11’ underlining decisions about who belongs and who does not; where on the Self-Stranger-Other spectrum a traveller falls. A 2010 op-ed in the NYT zeroed in on this anxiety that people weren’t always what they appeared to be: “Ripple effect of public panic at the notion that any passenger on any plane could be a human time bomb has rattled the airline industry and compromised the freedom of travel that the world’s citizens previously

269 Michael Sorkin, “The Architecture of Air Travel,” The New York Times (14 April 2002).

222

enjoyed.”270 In other words, airport security was an attempt to manage the unease and anxiety of not really knowing the ‘truth’ of those around us. Salter continues:

In the moment of examination, we are made ‘strangers to ourselves’ – not exclusively in the psychoanalytic sense, but in the political sense (Kristeva 1991). More precisely, we are all strangers to the sovereign. As multiple writers have termed it, ‘we are all exiles’ – or to use Schmittian terminology, at the border we are all enemies. At the border, each claimant is a stranger (2008a, 375).

Salter notes that as strangers, we line up to be sorted, to be unmasked by the State before the

State will allow us to proceed. The very process of sorting, the very propagation of TSA’s security dance itself, reinforces the anxiety and fear that some of ‘us’ are not who we seem to be; that only the particular machines and apparatuses now blocking our path to the departure gate are

‘smart’ enough to tell friend from foe. We as passengers may laugh about it, or complain about it, or roll our eyes, but we still line up and submit ourselves for inspection. We still – at least through our behaviors – buy into the notion that the State, after failing so spectacularly on 9/11, and after failing to a degree at each subsequent security scare, still has the power to keep us safe.

After all, isn’t that what a state is supposed to do?

270 Liesl Schillinger, “The Price of High Anxiety,” The New York Times (3 January 2010).

223 12

Visible Invisible Touchable Bodies Untouchable Bodies

Self Passengers

All ticket Stranger holders

Selectees

Other No Fly List

Figure XVI: Plotting Identity Practices in Aviation Security Narrative

Figure XVI maps out how ‘we’ practice Selfhood within the air travel narrative by

reaffirming and rendering transparent our belonging. The degree of fear born from 9/11 and

reiterated at each subsequent incident helps frame the air travel narrative as one of persistent

threat and ongoing security failure. This threat takes the form of a ‘fellow passenger’, which, in

turn, necessitates a certain ambivalence towards anyone seeking to fly the commercial skies. In

this way, all ticket holders enter airports as strangers and are forced to participate in a number of

identity ‘tests’ meant to expose danger or prove innocence. Self isn’t revealed as such until she

successfully performs the entire choreography of airport security and is allowed to the other side.

TSA employees, as representatives of the U.S. government, are the arbiters and literal

gatekeepers of this belonging, but the criteria are ever changing and often inscrutable to the

public. Still, while airport security ostensibly exists to prevent a terrorist from boarding a flight,

the majority of people that pass through are cleared. In some sense, then, these measures are less

224

about actually unmasking the Other and more about reassuring ‘us’ of our own collective identity, temporarily allaying fears of strangeness.

The person seeking passage through an airport arrives as a stranger and must be made known before she can proceed (in or out). To counter risk and fear of the possible, therefore, airport security employs machines and techniques that read that person’s body for physical and psychological clues, looking for literal booby-traps, affect, and intention. In essence, the ticket holder is transformed into “the ultimate, naked image of homo sacer as a non-erotic ‘body’ that only consists of dismembered ‘organs’” (Diken & Lausten 2006, 449; Agamben 1998). Adey interprets this securitizing move as one that reduces, de-socializes, and animalizes the body into

“its prereflective and unconscious bodily capacities to affect or be affected” (2009, 275; See also

Deleuze 1988). He goes on to write that such techniques – whether through machines or human agents – foster the belief that any individual is really “an anxious and neurotic subject of drives, instincts, moods, and emotions,” all of which must be ascertained/uncovered before that subject is permitted to travel. In this way, the body is only allowed to be mobile once it is deconstructed, picked apart, and rendered an inert object to be governed and secured.

This securitization of human mobility conceptualizes the body as having both an interior and exterior, a past and future, all of which must be surveiled and acted upon as a means of preventing certain potential futures from coming true. The shift to “securitize the unconscious” means that no longer just acts, but thoughts and even pre-thoughts must be judged benign in order to ‘pass go’ (Weber 2007, 116). The body reveals intent whether the mind wants to or

225

not.271 It is up to officials to determine what that intent is before said body is allowed to move forward.

There is an interesting tension between the perception of mobility as a human right and the politics of mobility as something that must be controlled. The anxiety of not knowing who is entering or exiting a country, particularly after the failures of 9/11, has resulted in what Foucault calls a biopolitical managing of bodies as a way of making them known. In this regard, “bodies, and knowledge of bodies, are abstracted into data which may be sifted, tabulated, and searched”

(Adey 2009, 277). These bodies are coupled to a “data-double” so that “specific data about one’s body are being used to distinguish one person from the next by matching up the corporeal body presented at a border checkpoint with the digital imprint of that body stored on a database or a credit card” (ibid.).

In this way, the traveler is first mapped through its data doppelganger via various computer models. After that identity checks out, the boarding pass becomes the all-important physical manifestation of the passenger – not her physical body – as she uses it to navigate and get through the various areas of the airport (Salter 2008a). When this document is finally presented for screening, the holder of the boarding pass is scrutinized, both body and bags. The corps itself is rendered visible via technology like x-ray machines or full body scanners. Just as important, the passenger’s mannerisms and words also become sites of scrutiny. The body has, in effect, become our true passport to traversing the airport frontier: our irises, fingerprints, facial expressions, appearance, correlation with ID photos and digital data; each piece representing the whole at particular airport junctures and facilitating our movement out (or in).

271 Interestingly, the science behind micro-expressions and the like goes against much social theory on the performance of faces in public spaces (See: Goffman 1967; Butler 2006).

226

Profiling, therefore, is not about reading into how individuals have acted in the past; rather, it is meant to determine potential future behavior. The more traditional system of digital profiling – such as the CAPPS program(s) – corrals a large amount of data from credit cards and other publically available databases to model some sort of algorithmic behavior pattern that is then compared to behavior patterns deemed risky or suspect. TSA’s Screening Passengers by

Observation Techniques (SPOT), a behavioral profiling program carried out by trained TSOs, surveils bodies not through their digital fingerprint but through their physical appearance. Affect is read on faces and in body language. Intentions and emotions are displayed on our bodies in small tics and movements – microexpressions – that leak out and betray our inner psychology, whether we like it or not (Ekman & Friesen 1969).272

SPOT puts techniques like the full body-scan into perspective. Despite the discomfort felt by passengers at the thought of being objectified and sexualized, the security science undergirding the practice of body scanning is actually meant to strip bodies of their individual characteristics altogether in order to reveal what those individualities (e.g., clothes, gender, and appearance) are concealing. It reduces bodies to generic flesh and bone. The body-scanner combats the idea made manifest with the underwear bomber of a body appearing benign but harboring danger within. Again, this taps into a fear of the possibility of danger that surrounds us

272 TSA’s Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), designed by Paul Ekman, is based on the Behavioral Assessment System developed at Logan Airport and the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a catalogue of hundreds of expressions of emotions, developed in the 1970s to study nonverbal behavior and feelings (Adey 2009, 281; See also Ekman & Friesen 1976). The Israeli security forces at Ben Gurion Airport have long practiced such techniques. Recently, a new approach has been proposed and introduced that makes deplaned passengers spend five or so minutes in what amounts to be a large polygraph machine that asks a number of questions based on name, nationality, age, etc. and reads the body’s facial and physiological responses, which either clears that passenger or determines that she needs further scrutiny. TSA is working on a program that combines the more traditional behavioral detection practices with physiological measurements such as body temperature, speech patterns, voice, pupil dilation, and eye tracking (Adey 2009, 282-283).

227

in the cloth of ‘normal’. As a result, nothing is accepted at face value. Everything and everyone is abnormal until they pass to the other side of the screening line.273

Importance of 9/11 Storytelling

In the end, the subsuming of risk that validates and routinizes surveillance of our day-today lives, blurring the boundary between public and private, is uncanny. Historically, the subject’s body has mediated between state and individual sovereignty. In this conceptualization, privacy is bound to the creation of the [Western] political subject by initial articulations of habeas corpus, a measure meant to safeguard against Monarchical excesses of power. The body is reimagined as a form of private property, endowed to have certain natural rights, one of which is the right to justice. The body therefore serves as the locus of a subject’s political agency

(however limited) by being presumed innocent until proven guilty, which confers on it a certain sense of freedom, including a freedom of movement, and privacy or invisibility (Epstein 2016,

37; Hiranandani 2011). At the same time, the body of habeas corpus also legitimizes the sovereign power of the state through the necessity of being presented, defended, and judged. In fact, Hobbes views sovereignty in this way – beyond the social contract, the sovereign legitimizes his authority by locating it in “the subject’s very own will” (Foucault 2009 [1978],

73). The emergence of this form of control, a bottom-up process of productive power, grants the subject bodily privacy and mutes the experience of sovereign control while still legitimizing state sovereignty.

Now, however, we have become increasingly “ontologically dependent” on this governing gaze (Epstein 2016, 35). Debates such as the air travel narrative demonstrate how our

273 Even then, as both the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber demonstrate, Others still slip by, reinforcing a belief in the need for constant vigilance.

228

surveillance society post-9/11 teeters between an allegiance to that initial political subjectivity centered on privacy, and our fears of unknown dangers in our own backyards. Rendering the private public is one way the state safeguards itself (and ostensibly the bodies within). Again, though, the active participation of subjects in the weeding out process, especially inherent to the various fast-track programs – the offering up of their bodies to be deemed ‘safe’ – has muddied the distinction between public and private. The various ‘Registered Traveler’ programs for frequent fliers (TSA’s Pre√, CBP’s ‘Global Entry’) illustrate that for convenience, frequent travelers are willing to give up their access to privacy to prove they are who they say they are, if it means that they get to circumvent some of the more time-consuming security practices in the screening line, such as removing shoes.

Ultimately, our embodiment of threat, our assumption of the mantle of stranger, is part of a collaborative and cultural performance, lying somewhere between public demand/consent and government coercion, that then symbolically manages that threat through a tightly choreographed ballet through the airport. Whether or not those of us passing through believe that such dance moves really secure us from another attack, post-9/11 air travel requires us “to perform as if the threat construction and risk management measures adopted to address it were valid” (Hall 2015,

11-12). By and large, these performances have rendered us docile collaborators who no longer seriously question long screening lines, body scanners, 3oz bottles of liquids, or any other TSA restriction. This is just the way things are: empty out all your pockets, laptops out, shoes off, feet apart, arms raised.

229

CHAPTER NINE

Conclusion

I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with “BANG! Expand! Sssss…,” then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things…

--Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

--Frank Herbert

I began this dissertation wondering whether or not the 9/11 attacks still mattered. While certainly still visible, references to the attacks are far fewer in number than they once were, perhaps a logical attribute of passing time. However, the diminished visibility of 9/11 does not correspond to a diminished influence on American identity. Indeed, policies enacted back in

2001 continue to affect the U.S./us as a society and a state. I examined two here – aviation security and the covert drone strike program, asking: (1) How does ‘9/11’ help make possible both security regimes and how are they maintained by that narrative over time? (2) What is the relationship between ‘9/11’ and American identity within the lifespans of these two regimes?

The answers to both questions center on the 9/11 narrative and its use as a rhetorical device, a form of shorthand we have all mastered, often without realizing our locutionary acumen. That fluency means ‘9/11’ has lost its sheen of ‘exceptional-ness’. We’ve grown too comfortable with it, which has allowed the United States as a nation and as a people to broaden the permissive boundary of its actions. In Agamben’s terms, ‘bare life’ is now routine (2005; See also: Butler

2006).

230

American identity has long been predicated on the civil rights endowed to its citizens and espoused on behalf of others. Limiting those freedoms in the name of security should be cause for concern. That such alarm remains muted bears some explanation. I have sought to shed light on how certain aspects of post-9/11 America became possible, highlighting the unassuming everydayness of the 9/11 narrative in discussions and practices of air travel and drone strikes. In both cases, a specific reading of ‘9/11’ has helped anchor these regimes to their sense of inevitability, so that if ever challenged, explicit or tacit references to the attacks were thrown back out as justification for continuing along the same trajectory. In other words, America has naturalized a particular identity practice derived from the dominant interpretation of the attacks

(act of war, they hate us, etc.). Any moments of contingency, doubts about the efficacy, legality, or appropriateness of either policy have been consistently papered over with this identity practice.

What do air travel and drone strikes have to do with one another? Why focus on these two security regimes? After all, one practice is a very visible routine that primarily takes place on our own bodies, while the other happens behind closed doors and half a world away. The two share some striking similarities, however. Combining them into a single analysis helps demonstrate the breadth and scope of ‘9/11’ as well as the utility of using an identity framework to draw those similarities out. Both narratives reveal how a government practice intervenes to determine belonging. Both narratives craft a particular physical and psychological relationship between Self and Other through the transitory role of the Stranger. Both narratives tacitly rely on government-sponsored technology to justify its decision-making. Both focus on dangerous bodies hidden from the naked eye. Both play on rendering visible that danger.

Drone cameras are set upon a sea of strangers over there to determine who among them is friend and who is foe, who is innocent and who is guilty, who lives and who dies. ‘They’ remain

231

strangers (potentially dangerous) until the drone camera and those (of us) watching on the other end can ascertain the degree of threat posed by that particular body. Once the subject of the camera lens has been deemed safe or dangerous – once they in some sense are no longer simply strangers – their bodies are either ignored and spared, or they are destroyed. Airport scanning equipment is meant to do the same thing, albeit over here, up close in person. To officials and one another, we enter the airport as unknown entities – strangers – potentially malignant.274 As we navigate the various levels of security, we shed the carapace of anonymity and proclaim our belonging by demonstrating our benign intentions. We see others demonstrating their innocence as they unload their luggage in front of us and walk through the body scanner, a baptism of sorts.

The scanning devices, pokes, and prods reveal and filter out the bad, allowing in only the good.

And what of the exceptional? In both cases, strands of the dominant 9/11 narrative reinforce the notion of our innocence, their guilt; our values of freedom, their unprovoked hatred and desire to destroy those freedoms. Both policy regimes enact boundaries based on perceived threat and perceived value. In so doing, they normalize, stabilize, and legitimize the practices themselves and the broader ‘9/11’ identity discourse predicated on the pledge to wage a War on

Terror. Further, government intervention is portrayed as the only legitimate means of sorting, and therefore the only reasonable way to expect continued security. At the same time, not many are fooled that the U.S. only targets and kills insurgents abroad, or that TSA screening measures are foolproof. Yet, the familiar framing of both through the themes of ‘9/11’ permits U.S./us to ignore these doubts. ‘9/11’ framing papers over niggling unease that the United States might be committing human rights violations or that waiting in line and removing shoes is actually a complete waste of time.

274 Technically, with online check-in, the security process begins before we physically arrive at the airport.

232

The subsequent disappearance of the Other in drone narratives and the visualization of

Self in air travel reinforces this ignorance. Americans still live by the story told almost two decades ago, when, on 8 November 2001, George W. Bush rallied a shocked nation to unite in the face of evil, to hold strong to ‘our’ values, and to be vigilant in a ‘new’ world full of potential dangers. We imbue current policy with the same diagnosis (“This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views…We wage a war to save civilization itself”), condemnation

(“those who celebrate the murder of innocent men, women, and children have no religion, have no conscience, and have no mercy”), and national pride (“Ours is a wonderful nation full of kind and loving people, people of faith who want freedom and opportunity for people everywhere”).

Contribution to the field and future research

My dissertation makes two contributions to the discipline. The first is empirical. I provide a historical account of two specific post-9/11 security practices across 15 years, situating both within the broader ‘War on Terror’ narrative. This analysis adds depth to existing literature by specifically addressing how aviation security and the covert drone program were made possible over time and how those policies might have changed but did not. Moreover, using an interpretivist methodology allowed for the inclusion of a broad sweep of material, including official documents, media coverage, and popular culture, the whole of which paints a far more thorough picture of post-9/11 America and American identity practice.

The second contribution is theoretical. Here, I have developed a framework that explores the Self-Other dialectic via the transitory figure of the Stranger. In this formulation, the Stranger is an unstable subject position constantly being acted upon (actively or inadvertently) in order to abate the inherent anxiety associated with the unknown (ontological insecurity) and return social

233

understanding to the reliable categories of Self and Other. Incorporating physical and ontological security concerns into identity-as-practice also allows for an analysis of multiple perspectives, needs, and priorities, such as the desire to eliminate the threat of al Qaeda and the desire to do so according to American values. By the same token, it helps acknowledge both the concrete physical presence of danger and the ongoing possibility of future danger. Finally, this framework is portable, designed to be used across cases, subjects, and timeframes.

The effects of 9/11 on American identity extend beyond the two policy regimes examined here. Exploring other WoT practices, including the use of torture, the USA PATRIOT Act, extraordinary rendition, ‘see something, say something’, and GTMO, to name just a few, would paint a more comprehensive portrait of post-9/11 America and contribute to the country’s historical record. Using the Self-Stranger-Other framework across such cases would add greater nuance to how identity works in multiple venues, namely who occupies the Self, Other, Stranger subject positions, when, how, and why. As for source material, the role of social media deserves greater attention. Although such platforms were in their infancy in 2001, they have rapidly gained in influence over the last few years. Indeed, the Internet now offers a burgeoning source of texts that, although harder to trace, provides a wider array of perspectives, particularly as it relates to how identity moves on an individual level.275

Although this dissertation focuses on the United States, I do not necessarily mean to reify the American experience of 9/11 above the experiences of other states. Comparative analysis, therefore, offers a promising avenue of exploration to flesh out broader trends regarding security, narrative, and identity. Israel, for instance, has had a lengthy history with Palestinian violence.

275 Some critical security work has engaged with this material. See, for instance, Lee Jarvis 2010, 2011, on memory, 9/11, and the Internet.

234

How might the U.S.’s post-9/11 aviation security measure up to that of Israel? Indeed, during initial Congressional discussions about how to bolster U.S. airport security, numerous people cited Israel as a model. How does France’s state of emergency after the Bataclan attacks in

November 2015 relate to U.S. domestic security policies, such as NSA surveillance and the USA

PATRIOT Act? Finally, how does the United Kingdom’s criminalized response to terror – as briefly touched upon in Chapter Two – compare to the militarization of ‘enemy combatants’?276

Writing the extraordinary back into ‘9/11’

Demonstrating the ongoing use of ‘9/11’ and the identity practices inherent to it is not meant to conclusively or exhaustively explain why or how air travel and targeted drone strikes look the way they do. On the contrary, piecing together a genealogy of both policies over their lifespans aids in disrupting the perceived inevitability of post-9/11 America. The potential breaks in narrative, those moments of contingency when alternative interpretations or opinions were best poised to influence policy, indicate, if nothing else, that different futures were possible.

Moreover, illustrating how alternatives were shot down via ‘9/11’ shows how continuity of narrative works in practice. It also offers an opportunity for policymakers to consciously attempt to move beyond a 2001 mindset.

Too often those who study discourse and identity are satisfied with remaining on the theory side of the academic divide or are told that such theoretical foundations are not well suited towards policy formation. I disagree. Language and identity infuse all aspects of policy analysis, development, and implementation, even if not especially highlighted as such. In today’s increasingly interconnected and virtual world, the written or spoken word or image has had an

276 Holland (2013) and Croft (2006) both engage in cross-case comparisons between the U.S. and its allies after, and in regard to, 9/11.

235

enormous impact on public and government perceptions and interactions across the globe.

President Trump’s Twitter account currently bears this out. Yet, the link between political/social discourse theory and policy has been insufficiently addressed within the field of International

Relations, even within critical security studies itself.

While my work is strongly grounded in social theory, I believe it is necessary and long overdue to introduce this focus into the policy realm. Moreover, the global rise of populism, racism, classism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia in the last few years indicates that identity is currently a significant component to governance and security policy development. However, it is poorly understood and often over-simplified in existing scholarship as a singular ‘thing’ possessed by a state or its citizens. If conceptualized as a living, breathing practice instead, foreign (and domestic) policies reveal a number of potential inroads to change or restructuring.

Here is the opportunity for fresh thinking in forming, revising, and rejecting security policy in a post-9/11 world. After all, the ‘War on Terror’ is a battle of ideas about who we think we/they are. Having a better understanding of the lifecycle of those ideas is a necessary first step in constructing viable, innovative, and successful policy.

U.S. security policies in the post-9/11 era of the ‘War on Terror’ are often explained by the unprecedented nature of the threat posed by radical Islam and the rise of potent and resourceful non-state actors like al Qaeda or ISIS. Domestic surveillance, torture, extraordinary rendition, GTMO, body-scanners, and the clear plastic bag Dopp kit are just a few characteristics of this brave ‘new’ world. Yet, the seemingly logical leap from increased threat to more robust security measures bears further scrutiny. Acceptance of ‘9/11’ into the background of our lives has resulted in security practices that run the risk of profoundly altering American identity away from the very virtues initially presumed to be under attack. Indeed, both policy and practice

236

reflect a particular narrative of 9/11 as an act of war against innocent, freedom-loving Americans, which continues to pervade American thinking about security. Rendering such policies contingent, divorcing them from their otherwise perceived inevitability, is essential for reconfiguring 9/11 as exceptional.

237

WORKS CITED

Abdelal, Rawi, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Alastair Iain Johnston, and Rose McDermott. (2006) “Identity as a Variable.” Perspectives on Politics 4(4): 695-711.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. (2002) “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others.” American Anthropologist 104(3): 783-790.

Adey, Peter. (2003) “Secured and Sorted Mobilities: Examples from the Airport.” Surveillance and Society 1(4): 500-519.

------. (2004) “Surveillance at the Airport: Surveilling Mobility/Mobilizing Surveillance.” Environment and Planning A 36: 1365-1380.

------. (2008) “Mobilities and Modulations: The Airport as a Difference Machine.” In Mark B. Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport, 145-160. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

------. (2009) “Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitization of the Mobile Body.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 274-295.

Adler, Emanuel. (1997) “Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 3(3): 319-363.

Adler, Emanuel, and Vincent Pouliot. (2011) “International Practices.” International Theory 3(1): 1-36.

Agamben, Giorgio. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. D. Heller-Roazen, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

------. (2005) State of Exception. K. Attell, trans. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Ahmed, Sara. (2015) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Second Edition. New York: Routledge.

Allport, Gordon. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Alsultany, Evelyn. (2012) Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York: New York University Press.

Amani, Ismail, and Dan Berkowitz. (2009) “’Terrorism’ Meets Press System: The New York Times and China Daily before and after 9/11.” GMJ: Mediterranean Edition 4(1): 15-28.

Anderson, Benedict. (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Angstrom, Jan. (2011) “Mapping the Competing Historical Analogies of the War on Terrorism: The Bush Presidency.” International Relations 25(2): 224–242.

238

Aradau, Claudia. (2010) “Security that Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection.” Security Dialogue 41(5): 491-514.

Aslam, M. W. (2011) “A Critical Evaluation of American Drone Strikes in Pakistan: Legality, Legitimacy and Prudence.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 4(3): 313-329.

Austin, John L. (1962) How to do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bacevich, Andrew J., and Elizabeth H. Prodromou. (2004) “God Is Not Neutral: Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy after 9/11.” Orbis Winter: 43-54.

Bach, Jonathan P. G. (1999) Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Baker, William F. (2009) “How to Save the News.” The Nation. October 12.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Balzacq, Thierry. (2005) “The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context.” European Journal of International Relations 11(2): 171-201.

Balzacq, Thierry, ed. (2011) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve. New York: Routledge.

Barad, Karen. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Barlas, Asma. (2011) “September 11, 2001: Remember Forgetting.” Political Theology 12(5): 727-736.

Bashir, Shahzad, and Robert D. Crews, eds. (2012) Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bauman, Zigmunt (1990) Modernity and Ambivalence. In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, M. Featherstone, ed. 143-169. London: Sage.

Baym, Geoffrey. (2013) “Political Media as Discursive Modes: A Comparative Analysis of Interviews with Ron Paul from Meet the Press, Tonight, The Daily Show, and Hannity.” International Journal of Communication 9: 489-507.

Beck, Ulrich. (2009) World At Risk. Ciaran Cronin, trans. Cambridge: Polity.

Becker, Amy B., Michael A. Xenos, and Don J. Waisanen. (2010) “Sizing Up The Daily Show: Audience Perceptions of Political Comedy Programming.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 18(2): 144-157.

239

Bellanova, Rocco, and Gloria González Fuster. (2013) “Politics of Disappearance: Scanners and (Unobserved) Bodies as Mediators of Security Practices.” International Political Sociology 7(2): 188-209.

Berenskoetter, Felix. (2010) “Identity in International Relations.” The International Studies Encyclopedia, 3594-3611.

Bergman-Rosamond, Annika and Mark Phythian, eds. (2011) War, Ethics and Justice: New Perspectives on a Post-9/11 World. New York: Routledge.

Bernstein, Steven, Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein, and Steven Weber. (2000) “God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: Adapting Social Science to an Unpredictable World.” European Journal of International Relations 6(1): 43-76.

Betts, Richard K. (2002) “The Soft Underbelly of American Primacy: Tactical Advantages of Terror.” Political Science Quarterly 117(1): 19-36.

------. (2007/2008) “Two Faces of Intelligence Failure: September 11 and Iraq’s Missing WMD.” Political Science Quarterly 122(4): 585-606.

Bially-Mattern, Janice. (2011) “A Practice Theory of Emotion in International Relations.” In International Practices, edited by Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, 63-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bigo, Didier. (1996) Polices en réseaux, l’expérience européenne. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

------. (1998) “L’Europe de la sécurité intérieure: penser autrement la sécurité.” In Anne- Marie le Gloannec, ed. Entre Union et Nations. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques.

------. (2001) “The Mobius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies).” In M. Albert, D. Jacobsonnm and Y. Lapid, eds., Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

------. (2002) “To Reassure and Protect, After September 11.” Social Science Research Council http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/bigo.htm

Bleiker, Roland (2001) “Editor’s Introduction: The Politics of Visual Art.” Social Alternatives 20(4): 3-9.

------. (2003) “Aestheticising Terrorism: Alternative Approaches to 11 September.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 49(3): 430-445.

Booth, Ken. (1991), “Security and Emancipation.” Review of International Studies 17(4): 313- 327.

Booth, Ken, ed. (2005) Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

240

Booth, Ken, and Tim Dunne (2012) Terror in Our Time. New York: Routledge.

Borradori, Giovanna. (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

------. (1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Brereton, Pat, and Eileen Culloty. (2012) “Post-9/11 Counterterrorism in Popular Culture: The Spectacle and Reception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 5(3): 483-497.

Brewer, Marilynn. (1999) “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate?” Journal of Social Issues 55(3): 429-444.

Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. (2000) “Beyond ‘Identity’.” Theory and Society 29(1): 1-47.

Burns, Bob. (2012) “TSA Year to Date Report: A Look at the Year So Far.” Transportation Security Administration Blog. 14 August. http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/08/tsa-year-to-date- report-look-at-year-so.html (accessed 29 April 2013).

Burke, Anthony. (2004) “Just war or ethical peace? Moral discourses of strategic violence after 9/11.” International Affairs 80(2): 329-353.

------. (2005) “Freedom’s Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War,” Social Identities 11(4): 315-343.

Butler, Judith. (1989) “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy, Eighty-Sixth Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division 86(11): 601-607.

------. (1993) Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge.

------. (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Buzan, Barry. (1991) People, States, and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era. New York: Lynne Reinner.

Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, eds. (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Byron, Michael. (2005) “Simon’s Revenge: Or, Incommensurability and Satisficing.” Analysis 65(4): 311-315.

Callahan, William A. (2015). “The Visual Turn in IR: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method.” Millennium 43(3): 891-910.

241

Campbell, David. (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Carvin, Stephanie. (2012) “The Trouble with Targeted Killing.” Security Studies 21(3): 529-555.

Chambers, Ross. (2003) “The War of the Words: The Rhetoric of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.” Culture, Theory and Critique 44:2, 171-181.

Chambers, Samuel, and Terrell Carver. (2008) Judith Butler and Political Theory. London: Routledge.

Chanley, Virginia A. (2002) “Trust in Government in the Aftermath of 9/11: Determinants and Consequences.” Political Psychology 23(3): 469-483.

Checkel, Jeffrey T. (1997) “International Norms and Domestic Politics: Bridging the Rationalist- Constructivist Divide.” European Journal of International Relations 3(4): 473-495.

Cheville, Julie. (2006) “The Bias of Materiality in Sociocultural Research: Reconceiving Embodiment.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 13(1): 25-37.

Chowdhury, Arjun, and Ronald R. Krebs. (2010) “Talking about Terror: Counterterrorist Campaigns and the Logic of Representation.” European Journal of International Relations 16(1): 125-150.

Clarke, Richard A. (2004) Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press.

Cloud, Dana L. (2004) “’To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the Clash of Civilizations in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90(3): 285-306.

Cohen, Bernard C. (2015 [1963]) The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cohen, Julie E. (2012) Configuring the Networked Self. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cohn, Carol (1987) “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12(4): 687-718.

Combes, M. L. deRaismes. (2017) “Encountering the Stranger: Ontological Security and the Boston Marathon Bombing.” Cooperation and Conflict 52(1): 126-143.

Connerton, Paul. (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connolly, William E. (1991) Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Connor, Brian. (2010) “9/11: A New Pearl Harbor?: Analogies, Narratives, and Meanings of 9/11 in Civil Society.” Cultural Sociology 10(10): 1-26.

242

Coser, Lewis. (1956) The Functions of Social Conflict. New York: The Free Press.

Crawford, Neta C. (2004) “The Road to Global Empire: The Logic of U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11.” Orbis Fall: 685-704.

Crelinsten, Ronald. (2009) Counterterrorism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

------. (2014) “Perspectives on Counterterrorism: From Stovepipes to a Comprehensive Approach.” Perspectives on Terrorism 8(1): 2-15.

Croft, Stuart. (2006) Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Croft, Stuart, and Cerwyn Moore. (2010) “The Evolution of Threat Narratives in the Age of Terror: Understanding Terrorist Threats in Britain.” International Affairs 86(4): 821-835.

Cronin, Audrey Kurth. (2013) “Why Drones Fail: When Tactics Drive Strategy.” Foreign Affairs 92(4): 44-54.

Currah, Paisley, and Tara Mulqueen. “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport.” Social Research 78(2): 557-582.

Curry, Michael R. (2004) “The Profiler’s Question and the Treacherous Traveler: Narratives of Belonging in Commercial Aviation.” Surveillance & Society 1(4): 475-499.

Dawson, Ashley. (2016) “Drone Executions, Urban Surveillance, and the Imperial Gaze.” In American Studies Encounters the Middle East, edited by Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy, 241-262. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1988) Foucault. Seán Hand, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Del Rosso, Jared. (2015) Talking About Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate. New York: Columbia University Press.

Der Derian, James. (2005) “Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos.” Third World Quarterly 26(1): 23-37.

Der Derian, James, and Michael J. Shapiro, eds. (1989) International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Derrida, Jacques. (1974) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

------. (1978) Writing and Difference. London: Routledge.

------. (1982) Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dershowitz, Alan. (2003) Why terrorism works: understanding the threat, responding to the challenge. New Haven: Yale University Press.

243

Desch, Michael C. (2007/2008) “America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in US Foreign Policy.” International Security 32(3): 7-

Diken, Bülent. (2006) “From Exception to Rule: From 9/11 to the Comedy of (T)errors.” Irish Journal of Sociology 15(1): 81-98.

Diken, Bülent, and C. B. Laustsen. (2006) “The Camp.” Geografiska Annaler 88(4): 443-452.

Dillon, Michael. (1999) “The Sovereign and the Stranger.” In Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Véronique Pin-Fat, eds. Sovereignty and Subjectivity, 117-140. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

------. (2003) “Virtual Security: A Life Science of (Dis)order.” Millennium. 32(3): 531-558.

Dillon, Michael, and Luis Lobo-Guerrero. (2009) “The Biopolitical Imaginary of Species-being.” Theory, Culture & Society 26(1): 1-23.

Dittmer, Jason. (2005) “Captain America’s Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(3): 626- 643.

Dodds, Klaus. (2008) “Hollywood and the Popular Geopolitics of the War on Terror.” Third World Quarterly 29(8): 1621-1637.

Doty, Roxanne Lynn. (1993) “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines.” International Studies Quarterly 37(2): 297-320.

Dueck, Colin. (2006) Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dunn, Kevin C. (2008) “Historical Representations,” in Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, Audie Klotz & Deepa Prakash, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 80.

Edkins, Jenny. (2002) “Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11.” International Relations 16(2): 243-256.

------. (2003) Trauma and the Politics of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, Jason A. and David Weiss, eds. (2011) The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

Ekman, Paul, and W.V. Friesen. (1969) “Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception.” Psychiatry 32(1): 88-106.

------. (1976) “Measuring Facial Movement.” Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior 1(1): 56-75.

244

Emirbayer, Mustafa. (1997) “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 103(2): 281-317.

Engelstad, Audun. (2008) “Watching Politics: The Representation of Politics in Primetime Television Drama.” Nordicom Review 29(2): 309-324.

Enloe, Cynthia (2014) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. University of California Press.

Entman, Robert M. (2003) “Cascading Activation: Contesting the White House’s Frame After 9/11.” Political Communication 20: 415-432.

Epstein, Charlotte. (2008) The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti- whaling Discourse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

------. (2016) “Surveillance, Privacy, and the Making of the Modern Subject: Habeas what kind of Corpus?” Body & Society 22(2): 28-57.

Erikson, Erik H. (1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Fairfield, Paul. (2011) Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted: Dialogues with Existentialism, Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Postmodernism. London: Continuum.

Fearon, James. (1995) “Rationalist Explanations for War.” International Organization 49: 379- 414.

------. (1999) “Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types versus Sanctioning Poor Performance.” In Adam Przeworski, Susan Strokes, and Bernard Manin, eds., Democracy, Accountability and representation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fearon, James, and Alexander Wendt. (2002) “Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Skeptical View.” In Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth Simmons, eds. Handbook of International Relations, 52-72. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Feldman, Leonard C. (2007) “Terminal Exceptions: Law and Sovereignty at the Airport Threshold.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 3: 320-344.

Fierke, Karin M. (2005) “The ‘War on Terrorism’: A Critical Perspective.” Irish Studies in International Affairs. 16: 51-64.

Flyvbjerg, Bent. (2001) Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon.

245

------. (1973) Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon.

------. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.

------. (1984) The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.

------. (1990) A History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

------. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. London: Penguin.

------. (2009) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Friedman, Jeffrey, ed. (1996) The Rational Choice Controversy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gadarian, Shana Kushner. (2010) “The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes.” The Journal of Politics 72(2): 469-483.

Gaddis, John Lewis. (2004) Surprise, Security and the American Experience. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gans-Boriskin, Rachel and Russ Tisinger. (2005) “The Bushlet Administration: Terrorism and War on The West Wing.” The Journal of American Culture 28(1): 100-113.

Georgakapoulou, Alexandra, and Dionysis Goutsos. (2004) Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Gibbs, David N. (2004) “Pretexts and U.S. Foreign Policy: The War on Terrorism in Historical Perspective.” New Political Science 26(3): 293-321.

Giddens, A (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gilpin, Robert. (2005) “War is too important to be left to ideological amateurs.” International Relations 19(1): 5–18.

Goffman, Erving. (1967) Interaction Ritual; Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Doubleday.

Gregory, Derek. (2011) “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern Warfare.” Theory, Culture, and Society 28(7-8): 188-215.

Guillaume, Xavier. (2011) International Relations and Identity: A Dialogical Approach. London: Routledge.

Gusterson, Hugh. (2016) Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

246

Habel, Philip D. (2012) “Following the Opinion Leaders? The Dynamics of Influence Among Media Opinion, the Public, and Politicians.” Political Communication 29(3): 257-277.

Hacking, Ian. (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hall, Rachel (2015) The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hall Jamieson, Kathleen, and Joseph N. Cappella. (2008). Echo chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative media establishment. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. (2003) The Federalist Papers. Clinton Rossiter, ed. New York: Signet Classics.

Hansen, Lene. (2000) “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 29(2): 285-306.

------. (2006) Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London: Routledge.

------. (2011) “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis.” European Journal of International Relations 17(1): 51-74.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.

Hartz, Louis. (1991) The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Hawhee, Debra. (2009) Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Herschinger, Eva. (2012) “’Hell Is the Other’: Conceptualizing Hegemony and Identity through Discourse Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(1): 65-90.

Hodges, Adam. (2011) The “War on Terror” Narrative: Discourse and Intertexuality in the Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hoge, Jr., James F. and Gideon Rose, editors. (2001) How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.

Holbert, R. Lance, David Al Tschida, Maria Dixon, Kristin Cherry, Keli Steuber, and David Airne. (2005) “The West Wing and Depictions of the American Presidency: Expanding the Domains of Framing in Political Communication.” Communication Quarterly 53(4): 505-522.

247

Holland, Jack. (2009) “From September 11th 2001 to 9-11: From Void to Crisis.” International Political Sociology 3(3): 275–292.

------. (2011) “’When You Think of the Taliban, Think of the Nazis’: Teaching Americans ‘9/11’ in NBC’s The West Wing.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1): 85-106.

------. (2013) Selling the War on Terror: Foreign Policy Discourses after 9/11. London: Routledge.

Holland, Jack, and Lee Jarvis. (2014) “’Night Fell on a Different World’: Experiencing, Constructing, and Remembering 9/11.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 7(2): 187-204.

Holsti, K. J. (2011) “Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy: Is it Exceptional?” European Journal of International Relations 17(3): 381-404.

Horowitz, Donald L. (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Howarth, David. (2000) Discourse. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Howarth, David, Aletta J. Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis, eds. (2000) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Huddy, Leonie, and Stanley Feldman. (2011) “Americans Respond Politically to 9/11: Understanding the Impact of the Terrorist Attacks and Their Aftermath.” American Psychologist 66(6): 455-467.

Hughes, Christopher W. (2002) “Reflections on Globalization, Security and 9/11.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 15(3): 421-433.

Hughes, G (2009) Governing the Social and the Problem of the ‘Stranger’. In Community, Citizenship and the ‘War on Terror’: Security and Insecurity, P Noxolo and J Huysmans, eds. 13-31. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hutchings, Kim. (2007) “Happy Anniversary! Time and Critique in IR Theory.” Review of International Studies 33(1): 71–89.

Huysmans, Jef. (1998) “Security! What Do You Mean?: From Concept To Thick Signifier.” European Journal of International Relations 4(2): 226–255.

------. (2011) “What’s In an Act? On Security Speech Act and Little Security Nothings.” Security Dialogue 42(4-5): 371-383.

248

Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. (2006) Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

------. (2011) The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of science and its implications for the study of world politics. New York: Routledge.

------. (2016) “Causal Claims and Causal Explanations in International Studies.” Journal of International Relations and Development.

------. (2017) “Causal Claims and Causal Explanation in International Studies.” Journal of International Relations and Development 20(4): 689-716.

Jackson, Patrick T., and Daniel Nexon. (1999) “Relations Before States: Substance, Process, and the Study of World Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 5: 291-332.

Jackson, Richard. (2005) Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter- Terrorism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

------. (2007) “Language, policy and the construction of a torture culture in the war on terrorism.” Review of International Studies 33(3): 353-371.

------. (2011) “Culture, Identity and Hegemony: Continuity and (the lack of) Change in US Counterterrorism Policy from Bush to Obama.” International Politics 48(2/3): 390-411.

Jackson, Robert. (2007) “Sovereignty and its Presuppositions: Before 9/11 and After.” Political Studies 55, 297-317.

Jarvis, Lee. (2008) “Times of Terror: Writing Temporality into the War on Terror.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1(2): 245-262.

Jervis, Robert. (2003) “Understanding the Bush Doctrine.” Political Science Quarterly 118(3): 365-388.

Jones, Jeffrey P. (2010) “Moore Muckraking: The Reinvention of TV Newsmagazines in the Age of Spin and Entertainment.” In Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon. Matthew Bernstein, ed. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

------. (2011) “Reconceiving Television’s Relationship to Politics in the Post-Network Era.” In iPolitics: Citizens, Elections, and Governing in the New Media Era. Richard L. Fox & Jennifer M. Ramos, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

------. (2013) “Parody, Performativity, and Play: The Reinvigoration of Citizenship through Political Satire.” In A Companion to New Media Dynamics. John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns, eds. 396-406. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jones, Jeffrey P., and Geoffrey Baym. (2010) “A Dialogue on Satire News and the Crisis of Truth in Postmodern Political Television.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34(3): 278-294.

249

Jones, Jeffrey P., Geoffrey Baym, and Amber Day. (2012) “Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert Go to Washington: Television Satirists Outside the Box.” Social Research 79(1): 33-60.

Jordan, Donald L. (1993) “Newspaper Effects on Policy Preferences.” Public Opinion Quarterly 57: 191-204.

Kahler, Miles. (1998) “Rationality in International Relations.” International Organization 52(4): 919-941.

Katzenstein, Peter J., Robert O. Keohane, and Stephen D. Krasner. (1998) “International Organization and the Study of World Politics.” International Organization 52(4): 645- 685.

Kaufman, Stuart J. (2001) Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kearney, Richard. (2003) Strangers. Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. London: Routledge.

Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, and Nicholas Rengger. (2006) “Apocalypse Now? Continuities or Disjunctions in World Politics After 9/11.” International Affairs 82(3): 539-552.

Keohane, Robert O. (1989) “International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint.” Millennium 18(2): 245-253.

King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kinnvall, Catarina. (2004) “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security.” Political Psychology 25(5): 741-767.

Koremenos, Barbara, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal. (2001) “The Rational Design of International Institutions.” International Organization 55(4): 761-799.

Krause, Keith. (1998) “Critical Theory and Security Studies: The Research Programme of ‘Critical Security Studies’.” Cooperation and Conflict 33(3): 298-333.

Krause, Keith, and Michael C. Williams, eds. (1997) Critical Security Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Krebs, Ronald R., and Patrick T. Jackson. (2007) “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric.” European Journal of International Relations 13(1): 35-66.

Krebs, Ronald R., and Jennifer K. Lobasz. (2007) “Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq.” Security Studies 16(3): 409-451.

Kubálková, Vendulka, Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Kowert, eds. (1998) International Relations in a Constructed World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

250

Kydd, Andrew H. (2008) “Methodological Individualism and Rational Choice.” In Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, 425-443. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edition. London: Verso.

Landree, Eric, Christopher Paul, Beth Grill, Aruna Balakrishnan, Bradley Wilson, and Martin C. Libicki. (2007) Can Publicly Available Information be Used in Planning Terrorist Attacks? Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Layne, Christopher. (2006) The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lebow, Richard Ned. (2008) “Identity and International Relations.” International Relations 22(4): 473-492.

Leffler, Melvyn P. (2003) “9/11 and the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy.” International Affairs 79(5): 1045-1063.

------. (2011) “9/11 in Retrospect: George W. Bush’s Grand Strategy, Reconsidered.” Foreign Affairs 90(5): 33-44.

Levy, Jack S. (1997) “Prospect Theory, Rational Choice, and International Relations.” International Studies Quarterly 41(1): 87-112.

Lewis, Bernard. (2002) What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, V. Bradley. (2011) “American Exceptionalism: From a political theory to an article of faith.” America 3 October: 19-22.

Li, Qiong, and Marilynn B. Brewer. (2004) “What Does It Mean to Be an American? Patriotism, Nationalism, and American Identity after 9/11.” Political Psychology 25(5): 727-739.

Lippert, Randy, and Daniel O’Connor (2003) “Security Assemblages: Airport Security, Flexible Work, and Liberal Governance.” Alternatives 28: 331-358.

Litwak, Robert S. (2007) Regime Change: U.S. Strategy through the Prism of 9/11. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lyon, David. (2008) “Filtering Flows, Friends, and Foes: Global Surveillance.” In Mark B. Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport, 29-49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mabee, Bryan. (2007) “Re-imagining the Borders of US Security after 9/11: Securitisation, Risk, and the Creation of the Department of Homeland Security.” Globalisations 4(3): 385-397.

251

MacDonald, David B., Dirk Nabers, and Robert G. Patman, eds. (2012) The Bush Leadership: The Power of Ideas, and the War on Terror. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacDonald, Paul K. (2003) “Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: The Competing Epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory.” American Political Science Review 97(4): 551- 565.

Mälksoo, Maria. (2012) “The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory.” Review of International Studies 38(2): 481–494.

Mansbridge, Jane J. (2001) “The Making Oppositional Consciousness.” In Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest. Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris, eds. 1-19. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

March, James G. and Johan P. Olsen (1984) “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life.” The American Political Science Review 78(3): 734-749.

Martin, Lauren L (2010) “Bombs, Bodies, and Biopolitics: Securitizing the Subject at the Airport Security Checkpoint.” Social & Cultural Geography 11(1): 17-34.

McClintock, Anne. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.

McCourt, David M. (2016) “Practice Theory and Relationalism as the New Constructivism.” International Studies Quarterly 60(4): 475-485.

McDonald, Matt. (2008) “Securitization and the Construction of Security.” European Journal of International Relations 14(4): 563-587.

McGuinness, Brian, ed. (1979) Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

McHendry, Jr., George F. (2015) “The Re(d)active Force of the Transportation Security Administration.” Criticism 57(2): 211-233.

------. (2016) “Thank You for Participating in Security: Engaging Airport Security Checkpoints via Participatory Critical Rhetoric.” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 16(6): 548-559.

Miller, Benjamin. (2010) “Explaining Changes in U.S. Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise of Offensive Liberalism, and the War in Iraq.” Security Studies 19: 26-65.

Miller, Seumas. (2014) “The Ethics of Targeted Killing: Osama Bin Laden, Drones, and Counterterrorism.” Public Affairs Quarterly 28(4): 317-340.

Mitchell, Timothy. (1988) Colonizing Egypt, second ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

252

Mitchell, William J. (1994) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mitzen, Jennifer. (2006) “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma.” European Journal of International Relations 12(3): 341-370.

Möller, Frank. (2007) “Photographic Interventions in Post-9/11 Security Policy.” Security Dialogue 38(2): 179-196.

Monahan, Torin. (2011) “Surveillance as Cultural Practice.” The Sociological Quarterly 52(4): 495-508.

Monten, Jonathan. (2005) “The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy.” International Security 29(4): 112–56.

Moravcsik, Andrew. (1997) “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics.” International Organization 51(4): 513-553.

Morris, Rosalind C. (2004) “Images of Untranslatability in the U.S. War on Terror.” Interventions 6(3): 401-423.

Mueller, John. (2004) The Remnants Of War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Muller, Benjamin J. (2008) “Travelers, Borders, Dangers: Locating the Political at the Biometric Border.” In Mark B. Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport, 127-143. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mutz, Diana C., and Lilach Nir. (2010) “Not Necessarily the News: Does Fictional Television Influence Real-World Policy Preferences?” Mass Communication and Society 13(2): 196-217.

Mylonas, Yiannis. (2012) “Discourses of counter-Islamic-threat mobilization in post 9/11 documentaries.” Journal of Language and Politics 11(3): 405-426.

Neumann, Iver B. (1999) Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

------. (1999) Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

------. (2012) “Introduction to the Forum on Liminality.” Review of International Studies 38(2): 473-479.

Newman, David. (2003) “On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework.” Journal of Borderlands Studies 18(1): 13-25.

Nichols, John and Robert W. McChesney. (2009) “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers.” The Nation. April 6.

253

Nicholson, Michael. (1989) Formal Theories in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nieguth, Tim, and Shauna Wilton. (2015) “Popular Culture and the Study of Politics.” In Tim Nieguth, ed., The Politics of Popular Culture: Negotiating Power, Identity, and Place, 3- 18. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Norton, Anne. (1988) Reflections on Political Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Onuf, Nicholas. (2013 [1989]) World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations. London: Routledge.

Otto, J.L. and B.J. Webber. (2013) “Mental Health Diagnoses and Counseling Among Pilots of Remotely Piloted Aircraft in the United States Air Force.” Medical Surveillance Monthly Report 20(3): 3-8.

Owens, John E. and John W. Dumbrell, eds. (2008). America’s “War on Terrorism”: New Dimensions in U.S. Government and National Security. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Page, Benjamin I. (1996a) “The Mass Media as Political Actors.” PS: Political Science & Politics 29(1): 20-24.

------. (1996b) Who Deliberates? Mass Media in Modern Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Paine, Thomas. (2012) Common Sense and Other Writings. J. M. Opal, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Patman, Robert G. (2006) “Globalization, the New US Exceptionalism and the War on Terror.” Third World Quarterly 27(6): 963-986.

Patterson, Molly and Kristen R. Monroe. (1998) “Narrative in Political Science.” Annual Review of Political Science 1(1): 315-331.

Peake, Jeffrey S. and Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha. (2008) “The Agenda-Setting Impact of Major Presidential TV Addresses.” Political Communication 25(2): 113-137.

Pierson, Paul. (2014) “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94(2): 251-267.

Pope, Mark. (2017) “Reporting Beyond the Pale: UK News Discourse on Drones in Pakistan.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 10(1): 138-161.

Pouliot, Vincent. (2010) International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

254

Powers, Marina. (2014) “Sticks and Stones: The Relationship Between Drone Strikes and al Qaeda’s Portrayal of the United States.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 7(3): 411-421.

Pugliese, Joseph. (2015) “Drones.” In Making Things International 1. Mark B. Salter, ed. 222- 240. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pütz, Ole. (2012) “From Non-Places to Non-Events: The Airport Security Checkpoint.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41(2): 154-188.

Redden, Stephanie M. and Jillian Terry. (2013) “Feminist Understandings of Resistance to Full- body Scanning Technology.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15(2): 234-253.

Redfield, Marc. (2007) “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11.” Diacritics 37(1): 54-80.

Reilly, Ian. (2012) “Satirical Fake News and/as American Political Discourse.” The Journal of American Culture 35(3): 258-275.

Riegler, Thomas. (2011) “9/11 on the Screen: Giving Memory and Meaning to All That ‘Howling Space’ at Ground Zero.” Radical History Review 111: 155-165.

Riley, K. Jack. (2011) “Flight of Fancy? Air Passenger Security Since 9/11.” In Brian M. Jenkins and John P. Godges, eds., The Long Shadow of 9/11, 147-160. Washington, D.C.: Rand Corporation.

Risse-Kappen, Thomas. (1991) “Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies.” World Politics 43(4): 479-512.

Robin, Corey. (2004) Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rodden, John. (2016) “The Past Is a… Native Land?” Society 53(2): 112-115.

Rogers, Ann, and John Hill. (2014) Unmanned: Drone Warfare and Global Security. New York: Pluto Press.

Rohde, David. (2012) “The Obama Doctrine: How the President’s Drone War is Backfiring.” Foreign Policy (27 February).

Rowland, Allison L. (2016) “Life-Saving Weapons: The Biolegitimacy of Drone Warfare.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 19(4): 601-628.

Rumelili, Bahar. (2012) “Liminal Identities and Processes of Domestication and Subversion in International Relations.” Review of International Studies 38(2): 495–508.

------. (2015) “Identity and Desecuritisation: the Pitfalls of Conflating Ontological and Physical Security.” Journal of International Relations and Development 18: 52-74.

Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

255

Salter, Mark B. (2004) “Passports, Mobility, and Security: How Smart Can the Border Be?” International Studies Perspectives 5: 71-91.

------. (2006) “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31(2): 167-189.

------. (2008a) “When the Exception Becomes the Rule: Borders, Sovereignty, and Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 12(4): 365-380.

------. (2008b) “Imagining Numbers: Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security.” Security Dialogue 39(2-3): 243-266.

------. (2013) “To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation.” Mobilities 8(1): 7-19.

------. (2014) “Toys for the Boys? Drones, Pleasure and Popular Culture in the Militarisation of Policing.” Critical Criminology 22(2): 163-177.

Salter, Mark B., and Can E. Mutlu. (2011) “Psychoanalytic Theory and Border Security.” European Journal of Social Theory 15(2): 179-195.

Sarkesian, Sam C., John Allen Williams, and Stephen J. Cimbala. (2008) US National Security: Policymakers, Processes & Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Saurette, Paul. (2006) “You Dissin Me? Humiliation and Post-9/11 Global Politics.” Review of International Studies 32(3): 495-522.

Schmitt, Carl. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

------. (2007) The Concept of the Political, expanded edition. George Schwab, trans. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Schouten, Peer (2014) “Security as Controversy: Reassembling Security at Amsterdam Airport.” Security Dialogue 45(1): 23-42.

Searle, John R. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sending, Ole Jacob, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver B. Neumann, eds. (2015) Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shamsi, Hina, and Alex Abdo. (2011) “Privacy and Surveillance Post-9/11.” Human Rights 38(1): 5-9.

Shapiro, Ian. (2007) Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

256

Shapiro, Michael J. (1989) “Textualizing Global Politics.” In Der Derian & Shapiro, eds. International/Intertextual Relations, 11-22. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

------. (1992) Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.

------. (2013) Studies in Trans-disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn. New York: Routledge.

Shinko, Rosemary E. (2010) “Ethics after Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter.” Millennium 38:3, 723-745.

Simmel, W (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms. DN Levine, ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Singer, Peter W. (2009) Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin.

Sjoberg, Laura. (2009) Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Snidal, Duncan. (2002) “Rational Choice and International Relations.” In Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth Simmons, eds. Handbook of International Relations, 73-94. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Sofaer, Abraham D. (2002) “Terrorism as War.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 96: 254-259.

Solomon, Ty. (2012) “’I Wasn’t Angry, Because I Couldn’t Believe it was Happening’: Affect and Discourse in Responses to 9/11.” Review of International Studies 38(4): 907-928.

------. (2015) The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Somers, Margaret R. (1994) “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23(5): 605-649.

Soroka, Stuart N. (2003) “Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 8(1): 27-48.

Steele, Brent J. (2008) Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State. London: Routledge.

Steinhauer, Jennifer. (2013) “On the Sunday Morning Talk Shows, a rather Familiar Cast of Characters.” The New York Times. June 9.

Stephanson, Anders. (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang.

257

Stump, Jacob L., and Priya Dixit. (2012) “Toward a Completely Constructivist Critical Terrorism Studies.” International Relations 26(2): 199–217.

------. (2013) Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods. London: Routledge.

Suskind, Ron. (2006) The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Sylvester, Christine. (2012) “War Experiences/War Practice/War Theory.” Millennium 40(3): 483-503.

Tajfel, Henri, and John Turner. (1979) ”The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, eds. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Takacs, Stacy. (2012) Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

------. (2014) “Entertaining Uncertainty: The Role of the 9/11 Shout-Out on U.S. TV.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31(2): 161-179.

Tanguay, Liane. (2013) Hijacking History: American Culture and the War on Terror.” Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Tasker, Yvonne. (2012) “Television Crime Drama and Homeland Security: From Law & Order to Terror TV.’” Cinema Journal 51(4): 44-65.

Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Keren. (2009) “’Where Is Jack Bauer When You Need Him?’ The Uses of Television Drama in Mediated Political Discourse.” Political Communication 26(4): 367-387.

Thomas, Scott. (2005) The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations. London: Palgrave.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. (1994) Democracy In America. New York: A. Knopf.

Toros, Harmonie. (2017) “’9/11 is Alive and Well’ or How Critical Terrorism Studies Has Sustained the 9/11 Narrative.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 10(2): 203-219.

Unlu, Ali, Jonathan Matusitz, Gerald-Mark Breen, and Lawrence Martin. (2012) “The Impact of 9/11 on Information Policy in the U.S.: A Current Perspective on Homeland Security and Emergency Management.” Journal of Applied Security Research 7(3): 320-340.

Valkenburg, Govert, and Irma van der Ploeg. (2015) “Materialities Between Security and Privacy: A Constructivist Account of Airport Security Scanners.” Security Dialogue 46(4): 326-344.

258

Van Evera, Stephen. (2006) “Assessing U.S. Strategy in the War on Terror.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 607: 10-26.

Van Rythoven, Eric. (2015) “Learning to Feel, Learning to Fear? Emotions, Imaginaries, and Limits in the Politics of Securitization.” Security Dialogue 46(5): 458-475.

Van Veeren, Elspeth. (2013) “There is more than one way to imagine a drone: visualizing the practice of drone warfare.” Blog post. Solomon Asch Center. Bryn Mawr College. 20 February. http://aschcenter.blogs.brynmawr.edu/2013/02/20/there-is-more-than-one-way- to-imagine-a-drone-visualising-the-practice-of-drone-warfare/ (accessed 17 February 2018).

Virilio, Paul (2003). Art and Fear. London: Continuum.

Volkan, Vamik. (1997) Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New York: Basic Books.

Wæver, Ole. (2004) “Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen: New ‘Schools’ in Security Theory and their Origins between Core and Periphery.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, 17-20 March 2004.

Waisová, Šárka. (2013) “The Consequences of 9/11 for the U.S. Security Sector: New Actors, New Procedures, and New Practices.” Perspectives 21(1): 67-86.

Walker, R. B. J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wall, Tyler, and Torin Monahan. (2011) “Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-Scapes.” Theoretical Criminology 15: 239-254.

Walt, Stephen M. (1999) “Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies.” International Security 23(4): 5-48.

------. (2001-2) “Beyond bin Laden: Reshaping U.S. Foreign Policy.” International Security 26(3): 56-78.

Waltz, Kenneth. (2010) Theory of International Politics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Weber, Cynthia. (2007) “Securitizing the unconsciousness: the Bush doctrine of preemption and minority report.” In The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: living, dying, surviving, Elizabeth Dauphinée and C. Brown, eds. 109-128. London: Palgrave- Macmillan.

Weber, Max. (1949) “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, eds. 50-112. New York: Free Press.

259

Weldes, Jutta E. (2006) “High Politics and Low Data: Globalization Discourses and Popular Culture.” In Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. D. Yanow and P. Schwartz-Shea, eds. 176-186. Mount Kisco: M. E. Sharpe.

Wendt, Alexander. (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

White, Hayden. (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wibben, Annick. (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. New York: Routledge.

Wibben, Annick, ed. (2016) Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics, and Politics. London: Routledge.

Wilcox, Lauren. (2011) “Beyond Sex/Gender: The Feminist Body of Security.” Politics and Gender 7(4): 595-600.

------. (2014) Practices of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

------. (2015a) “Drone Warfare and the Making of Bodies Out of Place.” Critical Studies on Security 3(1):

------. (2015b) “Bodies.” In Making Things International 1. Mark B. Salter, ed. 201-221. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Williams, Brian Glyn. (2010) “The CIA’s Covert Predator Drone War in Pakistan, 2004-2010: The History of an Assassination Campaign.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 33(10): 871-892.

Williams, Michael C. (2003) “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 47: 511-531.

Wilner, Alex S. (2015) Deterring Rational Fanatics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Winkler, Carol. (2006) In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post- World War II Era. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (2009) Philosophical Investigations. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & Joachim Schulte, trans. 4th edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Wyn Jones, Richard. (1999) Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

260

Zakheim, Dov S. (2011) “What 9/11 Has Wrought.” Middle East Quarterly 18(4): 3-13.

Zarakol, Ayse. (2010) “Ontological (In)security and State Denial of Historical Crimes: Turkey and Japan. International Relations 24(1): 3-23.

Zehfuss, Maja. (2010) “Targeting: Precision and the Production of Ethics.” European Journal of International Relations 17(3): 543-566.

Zenko, Micah, and Michael A. Cohen. (2012) “Clear and Present Safety: The United States Is More Secure Than Washington Thinks.” Foreign Affairs 91(2): 79-93.

Zulaika, Joseba. (2012) “Drones, Witches, and Other Flying Objects: the Force of Fantasy in U.S. Counterterrorism.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 5(1): 51-68.

261