1AC

In May, Cuba was renamed a State sponsor of terror on the State Department list of state sponsors of terror. The designation is totally unjustified The list is used as just used ineffectively as a coercive political weapon Bolender, research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 5-31-13 *Keith, Cuba is hardly a
'state sponsor of terror', 31 May, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/cuba-us-terror-sponsors-list]

The long-awaited annual report on international terrorism from the State Department was released Thursday, and confirmed what officials had already indicated that Cuba is staying on the list along with Iran, Sudan and Syria. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell confirmed the administration "has no current plans to remove Cuba". The decision came as a disappointment for those who were expecting new Secretary of
State John Kerry, a long-time critic of America's counter-productive policy against the Castro government, might recommend Cuba's removal. The fact he hasn't demonstrates how difficult it is to change the dynamics of the antagonistic relationship between these two ideological adversaries. Cuba was originally included on the list in 1982, replacing a then-friendly Iraq. The

designation levies comprehensive economic punishments against Havana as part of the overall strategy of regime change that includes a decades-long economic embargo, unrelenting propaganda, extra-territorial application of
American laws. For it's part, Cuba calls its continued inclusion on the list "shameful" and pandering to a small community of former Cuban citizens who now live in Florida. Cuba also asserts that the US has actually undertaken actions on the island that have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. An official of the country's foreign relations department, MINREX, who asked to remain anonymous, complained: "It is ridiculous

that the United States continues to include Cuba on an arbitrary list of states that sponsor terrorism, while it is Cuba that has suffered so much from terrorism originating from the United States." The so-called terrorism against Cuba began shortly after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. In the
early 1960s a covert CIA program known as Operation Mongoose led to the killing of teachers, farmers, government officials and the destruction of agricultural and non-military industrial targets. Other incidents involved attacks on villages, biological terrorism including the introduction of Dengue 2 that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 children in 1981, and a 1997 bombing campaign against tourist facilities in Havana and Varadero that killed Canadian-Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo and injured dozens. The most infamous act of terrorism occurred with the bombing of Cubana Airlines in 1976, killing all 72 on board. One of the two recognized masterminds, former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, has a long history of suspected terrorist activities against his former homeland; at one point bragging to the New York Times of his involvement in the hotel bombings. Posada continues to live a quiet life in Miami, considered a hero among many of the first generation exiles whose anti-revolutionary fervor has yet to diminish. The other architect of the Cubana Airlines bombing, Orlando Bosch, died peacefully in Miami a few years ago. As a result of these terrorist activities, the Cuban government sent intelligence officers to Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate Cuban-American organizations in an effort to thwart

While Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism remains unchanged, other countries that might be considered more deserving, such as North Korea and Pakistan, aren't on the list. What makes it all the more galling for the Castro government are the arguments the United States has advanced to justify Cuba's inclusion the most egregious stemming from the charge Cuba was not sufficiently supportive of the US war on terror or the invasion of Iraq, and was unwilling to help track or seize assets allegedly held by terrorists. A 2004 State Department report asserted that "Cuba continued to actively oppose the US-led coalition prosecuting the global war on terrorism." In reality, the Cuban side has consistently denounced all forms of terrorism, including the recent Boston Marathon bombings that brought quick condolences from the island leadership. Other rationales over the past 30 years to keep Cuba on the list have ranged from its support for left-wing rebels in Latin America, its relationship with the former Soviet Union, treatment of political prisoners and allowing members from alleged terrorist organizations such as Columbia's FARC and Spain's separatist Basque movement ETA to reside on the island. Even when those issues were
further acts. The agents, known as the Cuban Five, were uncovered by the FBI and are serving long prison terms. resolved, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, Cuba found its unmerited designation had not changed. One

long standing reason, that Havana permits refugees from American justice to find safe haven on the island, was re-invigorated with a ruling that was timed almost perfectly

with the announcement that Cuba would not be taken off the terrorist list. Assata Shakur,
accused of killing a New Jersey state trooper 40 years ago, was suddenly labeled as a most wanted terrorist by the FBI, with a $2m price tag on her head. Shakur, who fled to Cuba in 1979 and was given political asylum, has consistently maintained her innocence.

Categorizing Shakur as a terrorist could potentially endanger her life from those wanting to collect the bounty, and has led State Department officials to utilize her changed status as justification to keep Cuba on the list. There is no legitimate reason to use the arbitrary terrorism list as a political weapon against Cuba. To continue to do so simply exposes the State Department to charges of hypocrisy and manipulation of a serious threat based solely on ideological differences. Most importantly, it gives insult to all those who have been actual victims of terrorism.

The notion of a terrorist is socially constructed and societally bound it is not based in truth or objective analysis, but in discourse. Efforts to create effective counterterrorism policies are thwarted when this sociality is overlooked. Spencer and Hulsse 8
(Rainer Hulsse, professor and lecturer at the Geschwister Scholl Institute for Poltical Science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Alexander Spencer, Assistant Professor at the Geschwister Scholl Institute for Poltical Science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, The Metaphor of Terror: Terrorism Studies and the Constructivist Turn, Security Dialogue, 2008, http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/e-reserve/sullivan/SULLIVANPOL2309.pdf) If terrorism

is a social construction, the terrorist itself can no longer be the primary source for terrorism scholars. The terrorist is a consequence of discourse, rather than vice versa. Hence, the primary source of terrorism research must be the discourse in which the social construction of terrorism takes place, that is, the discourse that constitutes a particular group of people as terrorists. In the case of Al-Qaeda, for example, this would be the
post-9/11 Western discourse on Islamic terrorism. To be sure, what members of Al-Qaeda say, what they do, and how they present themselves feeds into this Western terrorism discourse, but it is always mediated by Western interpretations. Hence, the construction of Al-Qaeda in the Western

terrorism discourse will not be disconnected from Al-Qaeda itself, but the discourse certainly does not mirror any kind of reality or truth about the organization. The discourse gives Al-Qaedas words and deeds a certain kind of meaning, and it is this meaning that constitutes our relevant reality. This is obvious if we consider counter-terrorism. Counter-terrorism policies are not they cannot be based on objective knowledge about Al-Qaeda, but rather on the understanding of Al-Qaeda that has been produced in political, scientific, and media discourse.
Hence, counter-terrorism policies can be understood and explained only if one takes account of the discourse on which they are based.

We are not arguing that no actual terrorism exists in the world. Rather that, in the post 9/11 U.S., the term terrorism has taken on magical qualities invocation of the word terror justifies unquestioned US policy Marcopoulos 09 (Alexander J., lawyer at Shearman and Sterling llp J. D at Tulane, unpublished manuscript, Terrorizing
Rhetoric: The Advancement of U.S. Hegemony Through the Lack of a Definition of Terror January 2009, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=alexander_marcopoulos accessed 7/16/13 DG) When discussions arise concerning the status of U.S. hegemony vis--vis the rest of the world, the subjects touched upon are usually what academics have termed hard power hegemony, (i.e. the ability of a nation to project its military force upon

Rarely does such a discussion touch upon a nations rhetoric as a source of power. However, as the usage of the word terror and its variants became increasingly universal in, and thus important to, foreign affairs post-September 11, the usage of the word has itself become a source of power.5 Specifically, the ability of certain nations such as the United States to invoke the word terror to justify their actions and persuade organizations and nations of the world to cooperate with them has given rise to a unique form of hegemony that warrants
others), and soft power hegemony, (i.e. the ability of a nation to persuade others by diplomatic or other means).4 analysis outside of the traditional forms of hard power and soft power.6 This aim of this Paper is to analyze the implications on U.S. hegemony of the use of the word terror and its variants in the construction of U.S. policy. In examining the rhetoric of the

U.S. War on Terror, this Paper will argue that U.S.

definitions of terror have supercharged U.S. hegemony in the short term in a few key ways. First, this Paper will examine the various U.S. definitions of
terror and contrast them with international definitions. In doing so, it will demonstrate that both a lack of consensus on a definition and the trend in viewing terror as an act of war have afforded the U.S. much flexibility in pursuing an antiterror policy that is self-serving and that provided the Bush Administration with the flexibility to allow the U.S. to proactively project its power.

The argument will then proceed to a discussion of how the rhetoric of terrorism compares to the red scare rhetoric used during the Cold War in order to create an existential threat to justify U.S. policies. Finally, the Paper will examine the sustainability of the U.S.s use of terror rhetoric to bolster its
hegemony namely, whether theinvocation of terror to justify unilateral policies is a sustainable enterprise in the post-Bush United States.

The discursive construction of rogue terror states serves as pretext for the unilateral use of military force and expansionist warfare Continued use of the terror list replicates aggressive imperial violence
Marino 5, Senior Researcher and Professor at the Center for the Study of the United States at the University of Havana, Cuba, author of numerous articles in scholarly journals and anthologies on U.S.-Cuban relations (Soraya Castro, The Cuba-U.S. Conflict:
Notes for Reflection in the Context of the War Against Terrorism, Pg 13-14, excerpt from book Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? http://www.uh.cu/centros/cemi_old/documentos/The%20CubaU.S.%20Conflict%20Notes%20for%20Reflection%20in%20the%20Context%20of%20the%20War%20Agains t%20Terrorism.pdf)

The invasion of Afghanistan initially, and the intervention and occupation of Iraq by March 2003, showed an element of force, and in particular, military force and its array of technology as the brainpower behind U.S. national might. Force was reborn as the instrument of power most notably in foreign and security policy against those states, which unilaterally, the U.S. government defines as rogue states. Its emphasis is to stop emerging threats before they materialize through preventive attacks, for which Iraq became a test case. This overbearing philosophy with origins in neoconservatism increases the potential for a rapid and lethal show of power. This projection of power is combined with significant restructuring of the executive branch in matters of security and defensive reinforcement within the continental United States. The most significant components of this restructuring are: the Department of Homeland Security at the cabinet level, and
the creation of the Northern Command, whose responsibility covers the continental territory of the United States and a broadened version of its surrounding border areas, which includes Cuba. The

unscrupulous use of pretexts, as was the supposed threat which the Iraqi regime posed for U.S. security, under the presumption of the existence of an arsenal of WMDs, illustrates that the doctrine of regime change was hidden from U.S. and international public opinion and camouflaged within the global war on terrorism. These deceptive actions by policymakers and the White House in order to justify the war in Iraq, as well as manipulation and importance given to information from the intelligence agencies, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), and the Pentagon Office of Special Projects, in the fabrication of evidence to justify the aggression, demonstrate that the essence of the Iraqi problem results from what the Bush administration really held as a doctrinal proposition: regime
change in Iraq. However, this idea was not sellable, nor justified by such bellicose U.S. actions abroad and, consequently, the subject of WMDs, and the danger that these would constitute for the United States, were used to justify military intervention. The

designated rogue states, just like those considered part of the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) as well as those considered Beyond the Axis of Evil (Cuba, Syria, Libya), are together with Sudan, states which are also
considered by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. They are all are part of the South, which is a different variable in U.S. strategic thought, above all if we compare it to the Cold War period when an East-West axis was the main reference point.

Deemed a rogue state, Cuba finds itself on five black lists which were unilaterally created by the U.S. government as an instrumental part of its use of rhetoric and propaganda. It also

constitutes the basis to justify its present security policy to increase hostility as part of an openly aggressive policy based on the doctrine of regime change. These lists can be described as follows:
1.

Cuba finds itself on the list of countries which possess at least a limited, developmental biological weapons research and development effort.46 2. Cuba is on the list of state sponsors of international terrorism.47 3. Cuba is among the states on the list of flagrant human rights violators. 4. Cuba is on the list of countries with aggressive intelligence operations on U.S. territory.48 5. Cuba was included for the first time in June 2003 on the U.S. government black list for trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation and forced labor. This raises the specter of slavery (Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act).49Following

the war in Iraq, the gravest consequence for Cuba results from the U.S. governments projection of a new aggressive and expansionist discourse which it is willing to put into practice. Without being a direct strategic threat for Cuba, the invasion of Iraq establishes a clear warning that the United States has moved to the ultimate extreme in its range of options against its unilaterally defined enemy government, operates within the margins of the UN and its Security Council, and that there is no force capable of stopping it. At the same time, it should be emphasized that it uses the war on terrorism unilaterally, to its discredit, to achieve foreign policy objectives, even though there are no real links with terrorism for the country against which it applies the use, or threat, of force.

Listing Cuba as a state-sponsor of terror is emblematic of continually vague and arbitrary expansions of terrorisms meaning to serve pre-existing imperialist political goals. The state-sponsor label is used to obscure mass terrorism caused by western governments in the name of American exceptionalism. Jackson, Professor in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 2007 *Richard, Critical
reflection on counter-sanctuary discourse, In: M. Innes, ed. Denial of sanctuary: understanding terrorist safe havens, p. 30-33]
A related problem for the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse is that it has always been characterized by a certain political bias and selectivity. For example, an analysis of the mainstream terrorism literature during the Cold War demonstrates that terrorism

experts regularly identified Iran, Libya, Cuba , the Soviet Union and many other mainly communist countries as "state terrorism ," but failed to include countries like Israel or South Africa despite the fact that South Africa, for example, not only engaged in numerous acts of terrorism against dissidents in neighbouring states but also sponsored movements like Unita and Renamo who engaged in extensive terrorism. The "terrorist sanctuaries" literature from this period also focused heavily on the assistance provided by states like Libya and Syria to groups like the PLO, but failed to discuss U.S. support for groups like the Afghan Mujahaddin. anti-Castro
"international

sponsors" of

groups , and the Contras, despite the fact these groups engaged in numerous acts of terrorism, including planting car bombs in markets, kidnappings, civilian massacres, and blowing up civilian airliners.51 Many would argue that from this perspective, the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse has functioned ideologically to distract from and deny the long history of the West's direct involvement in state terrorism and its support and sanctuary for a number of anticommunist terrorist groups. Western involvement in terrorism has a long but generally ignored history, which includes: the extensive use of official terror by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, the United States, and other colonial powers in numerous countries throughout the colonial period; U.S. support and sanctuary for a range of right-wing insurgent groups like the Contras and the Mujahideen during the Cold War 53; U.S. tolerance of Irish Republican terrorist activity in the United States54: U.S. support for systematic state terror by numerous rightwing regimes across the world, perhaps most notoriously El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia. and Iran 55; British support for Loyalist terrorism in Northern Irelands 56 and various other "Islamist" groups in Libya and Bosnia,
among others57; Spanish state terror during the "dirty war" against ETA58; French support for terror in Algeria and against Greenpeace in the Rainbow Warrior bombing; Italian sponsorship of right-wing terrorists; and Western support for accommodation with terrorists following the end of several high profile wars59among many other examples. In short. there is no denying that the

discourse has often been used in a highly selective manner to highlight some acts of terror whilst selectively ignoring others .

Arguably, this political bias continues today: the Taliban forces in Afghanistan are more often described as terrorists than insurgents, while various warlords, including General Rashid Dostum, are rarely,' called terrorists. despite overwhelming evidence of their use of terror and intimidation against civilians. This situation is mirrored in Somalia, where the Islamist Al Itihad Al Islam iya group is typically described as a terrorist organization with links to al Qaeda, while U.S.-supported Somali warlords who also use violence against civilians arc exempted from the terrorist label.61 Similarly,

Cuba remains on the State Department's list of "state sponsors of terrorism," but

continued U.S. sanctuary and support of anti-Castro terrorists,62 former Latin American state terrorists63 and other assorted Asian anticommunist groups64 is completely ignored . Most
glaringly, the state terror of countries like Uzbekistan, Colombia, and Indonesia and continued tolerance and support for it from the U.S.65is hardly ever discussed in the mainstream "terrorist sanctuaries" literature. From a discourse analytic perspective, it can further be argued that the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse often functions

to promote a set of partisan political projects. For example, the discourse describes an almost infinite number of potential "terrorist sanctuaries" or "havens," including: all failed, weak, or poor states; the widely accepted list of state sponsors of terrorism: a much longer list of passive state sponsors of terrorism; states with significant Muslim populations; Islamic charities and NGOs; informal, unregulated banking and economic systems; the media; the Internet; diasporas in Western countries; groups and regions characterized by poverty and unemployment; the criminal world; radical Islamist organizations; mosques and Islamic schools; insurgent and revolutionary movements; and "extremist" ideologiesamong others. The identification of these groups and domains as "terrorist sanctuaries" or "havens" then functions to permit a range of restrictive and coercive actions against themall in the name of counterterrorism. The point is that there may be other political reasons for taking action against such groups which the "terrorist sanctuary" label obscures. From this perspective, the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse can be shown to support a range of discrete political projects and interests, including: limiting expressions of dissent; controlling the media; centralizing executive power; creating a surveillance society; expanding state regulation of social life; retargeting the focus of military force from dissident groups and individuals (which privileges law enforcement) to states (which privileges the powerful military-industrial complex); legitimating broader counterinsurgency programmes where the real aims lie in the maintenance of a particular political-economic order66; de-legitimizing all forms of counterhegemonic or revolutionary struggle, thereby functioning as a means of maintaining the liberal international order; and selectively justifying projects of regime change,67 economic sanctions, military base expansion, military occupation, military assistance for strategic partners, and the isolation of disapproved political movements. In short, the discourse functionsin its present formto permit the extension of Western state hegemony both internationally and domestically.
I Ineffectual Policies A final criticism of the "terrorist sanctuaries" discourse is that it has proved in its prescriptions to be largely ineffectual and in many cases, counterproductive. In particular. the policy of employing military force against "terrorist sanctuaries" or "havens," a reasonable policy within the confines of the discourse, actually has an astonishing record of failure. For example, Israel has mounted military strikes and targeted assassination against "terrorist sanctuaries" in the Palestinian territories and surrounding states for over fifty years without any significant reduction in the overall level of terrorism. The apartheid regime in South Africa adopted a similarly futile policy against its neighbours during the 1980s. U.S. military strikes on Libya in 1986, Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, and the use of force in the current War on Terror against Afghanistan and Iraq, have also failed to noticeably reduce the overall number of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. More broadly, the use of military force against "terrorist sanctuaries" in Colombia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Sri Lanka. the Philippines, Turkey, and elsewhere has in every case failed to appreciably affect the level of antistate terrorist violence. It could be argued that the attempts since September 11 to eliminate "terrorist sanctuaries" in Afghanistan. Iraq, and South Lebanon in particular, have in fact, had the opposite effect. In many respects, these military interventions have solidified and greatly strengthened various Middle Eastern insurgent and "terrorist" groups, reinforced new militant movements and coalitions, provided new regions of conflict where dissident groups can gain military experience and greatly in creased overall levels of anti-Western sentiment across the region." It is probable that the price of these policies will be many more years of insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an ongoing international terrorist campaign against U.S. interests and its allies. The main problem of course, is that the discourse focuses on the symptoms and enablers of dissident terrorism, rather than its underlying drivers and poses a palliative remedy rather than a curative one. From this viewpoint, it

is actually an impediment to dealing with terrorism because it functions as a closed system of discourse, preventing discussion of the political grievances which cause individuals and groups to seek out places of sanctuary from where they can launch attacks in the first place. CONCLUSION There is a need for researchers and public officials to be far more reflective and critical of the language they employ and the "knowledge" they produce, because discourse and knowledge is never neutral; it always works for someone and for something. In this case, the language and knowledge of the "terrorism sanctuaries" discourse frequently works to maintain the hegemony of certain powerful states and a particular international order which is beneficial to a few, but

violent and unjust to many more. It also works to obscure the much greater violence and suffering caused by current Western counterterrorism policies (which have cost the lives of well over 40,000
civilians69 and caused incalculable material destruction since September 11. 2001), the double standards and selectivity of Western approaches to terrorism and the ongoing problem of civilian-directed state terror.

The terrorism justification has empirically been used for oppressive foreign policy in Latin America LeoGrande, government professor at American University, 6 *William, From the Red Menace
to Radical Populism U.S. Insecurity in Latin America, World Policy Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 2005/2006), pp. 25-35] U.S. policy toward Latin America has been eclipsed by the post- September 11 war on terrorism
because there is virtually no threat of Islamic terrorism in the region. As General Craddock testified in March 2005, there are no known Islamic terrorist cells operating in Latin America, though there are some supporters willing to provide financial and logistical assistance.20 The

dearth of a real terrorist threat and the con- sequent tendency of senior policymakers to focus on the Islamic East has allowed mid- level policymakers to gain attention for their favorite policy initiatives in Latin America by recasting them as ancillary to the war on terrorism. Thus, the war in Colombia, which before September 11, was justified as a war on drugs, has been reframed as a new front in the war on ter- rorism, with the main guerrilla movements and paramilitaries - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (farc), the National Liberation Army (eln), and the United Self Defense Forces (auc) - added to the State Department s list of terrorist organizations. Congressional restrictions that prevented U.S. military aid from
being used to fight the guerrillas were lifted and aid to the Colombian military increased.21 This linguistic legerdemain constitutes a serious confusion of threats. No doubt the Colombian groups have all engaged in acts of terrorism, including kidnappings, extrajudicial executions, massacres, and planting bombs in public places. However, they are not "international terrorists" in the sense that members of al-Qaeda are. The aim of the Colombian groups is to achieve political ends inside Colombia, and the targets of their violence are Colombian. Unlike al- Qaeda, they have no intention of attacking the United States, and their aims are not international. Their threat to U.S. interests is therefore fundamentally different. Guerrillas and paramilitaries in Colombia pose a threat to Colombians and their state. They may pose a threat to neighboring states as a re- sult of the internal conflict "spilling over" borders. But they do

not pose a physical threat to the United States as do Islamic ter- rorist groups. Ignoring this distinction by lumping all violent actors under the label "terrorist" is simply an attempt to transfer the legitimacy enjoyed by the real war on terrorism to less popular policies. Similarly, hardliners in the Bush admin- istration also seized on the terrorism threat as a rationale for their confrontational policy toward Cuba. Cuba remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors of inter- national terrorism, despite a dearth of evi- dence that the Cubans have actually done
anything recently to actively support foreign revolutionaries, let alone terrorists.22 This is not to say that there are no in- ternational terrorists in the Western Hemi- sphere. The

most persistent campaign of international terrorism in the Americas has been the series of paramilitary attacks against Cuba conducted by a small number of Cuban exiles. These attacks date to the early 1960s, when they were organized by the U.S. government, acting
through the Central Intelligence Agency. The end of U.S. support for such activities did not end the attacks, however. The most notori- ous was the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner off Barbados in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, a series of bombs were detonated in Cuban tourist hotels and nightspots, injuring dozens and killing an Italian tourist - bombings for which the Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles took re- sponsibility.23 Posada Carriles is currently in the United States fighting deportation. In 2000, Panamanian authorities thwarted an assassination plot against Fidel Castro (also involving Posada Carriles), and the U.S. Coast Guard foiled another apparent exile plot to assassinate Castro in Venezuela in 1997.24

The designation constructs Cuba as a foil for a fantasy of American innocence and benevolence. Locating blame for terrorism in foreign others like Cuba is designed to play to racist predispositions and sanitize brutal American foreign policy Grosscup, International Relations Professor at CSU-Chico, 2000 [Beau, Terrorism-at-a-Distance: The
Imagery That Serves US Power, GLOBAL DIALOGUE, Volume 2, Number 4, Autumn]

For nearly two centuries the rationalisation system of American

foreign policy was based on the moral constructs of American benevolence and the uniqueness of the American social and political experiment. From the late 1960s, a politicised image of
terrorism was added to that system. The product of a closed system of discourse dominated by researchers and security analysts with close ties to government and private institutionslabelled the terrorism industry by Edward Herman and Gerry OSullivanthis image encourages Americans to view terrorism as the most dastardly of evil deeds. More to the point, it

portrays the terrorist as an enemy of the Western establishment, somebody who stands in the way of the realization of Western aims.1 This jingoistic imagery has been highly
effective in rallying public support for US foreign policy for nearly three decades.2 Initially, Ame rican policy makers took advantage of terrorisms pejorative connotations to undermine public support for various anti-colonial nationalist movements by linking them, and them alone, to the terrorist label. The Palestine Liberation Organisation in the Middle East, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the African National Congress in South Africa and Namibias South West African Peoples Organisation were all affected by thi s effort. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration and its terrorism industry experts insisted that anyone opposed to Western, in particular American, interests was a Sovietsponsored terrorist. Restricted to this jingoistic analysis, Americans

rallied behind the administrations revitalised Cold War agenda against an evil Soviet empire and its international terrorist network. The same is true in the postCold War era. Terrorism industry experts, who continue to monopolise the terrorism discourse, argue that rogue state, Islamic, narco and ad hoc terrorism are central components of a New World Disorder threatening the American way of life. Their efforts have not
been in vain. During the Persian Gulf War, linking Saddam Hussein to anti-American terrorism heightened American support for the slaughter of Iraqi military and civilians, much as linking Manuel Noriega with narco-terrorism rallied public support for the illegal invasion of Panama in 1989. Terrorism imagery also produced public acquiescence in American military interventions in Somalia and Haiti, interventions which were presented as humanitarian missions. In the mid-1990s, revitalised images of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorism dominated foreign policy discussions of the threats to American initiatives in the Middle East and beyond. By the end of the 1990s, the evil terrorism of Osama bin Laden and Slobodan Milosevic provided rationales for the humanitarian use of American air power. Essential to the success of the jingoistic concept of terrorism is a carefully constructed imagery labelled here terrorism-at-a-distance. Two assertions combine to produce this imagery. The first contends that terrorism occurs over there, that it is a product of foreign cultures and a sinister act of foreign adversaries whose treachery victimises Americans who live in or travel to far-off lands. The second, reinforcing the first, is the warning that although Americans have been spared the horrors of contemporary terrorism at home, our luck is running out, our day is coming. It is only a matter of time before Americas global pursuit of freedom and democracy and its open society make enemies of foreign terrorists and draw them to the United States, both as a land of exile and as a potential target of terrorist actions. Thus, unless

preventative foreign and domestic policy measures are taken, the stage is set for the victimisation of America. The Foreign-Policy Factor Richard Falk argues that the concept of terrorism has been useful in sanitising US foreign policy: This process is aided by locating terrorism in the foreign other, a process that can build on the racist convenience of non-Western challenges.3 Locating terrorism in the foreign other has been a consistent theme of American expert analysis of contemporary terrorism. In its Cold War construction, terrorism was the work of the Soviet Union, both in its own actions (Afghanistan) and via its control and/or sponsorship of foreign states, namely Cuba, Libya, Syria, East Germany, North Korea, Nicaragua and Iran. The
Soviets were said to be behind the non-state terrorism of the PLO, the BaaderMeinhof gang, the IRA, ANC, Swapo and individuals such as Carlos, Abu Nidal and Mehmet Ali Agca. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, terrorism has not disappeared, and the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis continues to underlie American analysis. State-sponsored

terrorism is now the work of foreign rogue states (retitled

states of concern by the Clinton administration in June 2000), namely Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea. The centre of the international terrorist network, allegedly headquartered in Moscow during the Cold War, is said to have moved three times, initially to Baghdad in August 1990, then after the Persian Gulf War to Tehran. In August 1998, President Clinton informed the world that under Osama bin Laden, the international terrorist network was now headquartered in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Non-state terrorism is described as multifaceted, complex and foreign-based. Among its agents are leftist groups newly orphaned by the demise of their Soviet parent. In the post Cold War climate they frantically search the political landscape for foster parents to supply them with the materials of terrorism. Even more dangerous to the American-led new world order are the dual foreign threats of Islamic terrorism and narco-terrorism. Islam is portrayed as a monolithic menace and a universal threat to Western civilisation in general and to the United States in particular. This contemporary consensus about Islam is built upon historical images of Islamic militancy, of an Islamic mentality, of Islamic fundamentalism or the Shia penchant for martyrdom, all of whi ch helped provoke the fervently hostile Western response to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Commenting on the media coverage of that crisis, Edward Said writes: We were back to the old basics. Iranians were reduced to fundamentalist screwballs by Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Const itution, Claire Sterling in the Washington Post argued that the Iran story was an aspect of Fright Decade I while Bill Green on the same pages of the Washington Post wrote of the Iranian obscenity aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem.4 In the 1990s, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, the New York World Trade Center bombing, the HamasHizbollah challenge to the US-sponsored Middle East peace process, and the terrorism tied to Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist colleagues have re-ignited the fires of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States. New Forms of Terrorism A by-product of the Cold War, narco-terrorism, too, has survived the end of the Soviet Union. According to terrorism industry experts, its growing presence is connected to central features of the emerging political order. First, with the loss of Soviet support, the modern terrorist, in need of financial resources, seeks to gain huge profits from illegal activities. How else, American terrorism experts ask, but through the sale of drugs could terrorists afford the costly weapons of mass destruction they ardently desire? Second, the politically constructed image of the lawless rogue state directly supports former Secretary of State George Shultzs claim that drug trafficking requires an environment of lawlessness and corruption to enhance the production and marketing of illicit drugs. Conversely, the insidious imagery of narco -terrorism exaggerates the nature of the threat, providing the American architects of the new world order with the pretext for intervention in the affairs of the designated rogue regimes in direct violation of the right to national sovereignty. Although the United States is the major market for insidious drugs, the plague of narco -terrorism is located exclusively in the foreign other. Its origins are found either in the Islamic fundamentalist regimes of Iran, Iraq and Libya, or in the drug cartels of South America, Asia a nd the Middle East. In August 1995, terrorism industry experts discovered a new form of foreign-instigated terrorism threatening America and its friends. In this decentralised or ad hoc model, specialist guerrillas are brought together to commit a specific terrorist act and then quickly returned to th eir country of refuge. The new modus operandi is allegedly followed by Muslim extremist groups and possibly by those who bombed the World Trade Center. It is a new

operational design in which there are no clear patterns, associations or the traditional cell structure used by terrorist organisations in the past. Ad hoc terrorism is difficult to counter and even to analyse as it involves general guidelines coming from religious leaders, r ather than precise commands. Terrorism industry experts say the new model has probably been seen in Argentina, the United Kingdom, Egypt, France, Algeria and Israel. American Jingoism Firmly

established in Cold War and postCold War constructs, the imagery of terrorism-at-adistance serves the US national security establishment by reinforcing American ethnocentricity and jingoism. First, insisting that terrorism is the dastardly deed of foreigners strengthens the high moral opinion
American citizens hold of themselves, their society and their benevolent role in the world. Armed with this view and believing US foreign policy to occupy the firmest of moral ground, Americans see their nations adventures abroad as beyond reproach, deserving support with vigour and righteous indignation. In this bipartisan, jingoistic climate, the assessments of foreign policy analysts, particularly terrorism experts, are held in high esteem as moral truths and as making moral sense. Typical of these moral truths is a distinction made by revered terrorism expert Brian Jenkins. Jenkins argues it

is morally defensible to drop American bombs on Iraqi cities from twenty thousand feet, or to lob the suicidal car bomb terrorist who killed 241 marines in Beirut committed a cowardly and morally indefensible deed. Typical also was the climate of official and public moral outrage evident in February 1996 when Cuba shot down two private planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American anti-Castro organisation. Despite diplomatic objections by
sixteen-inch shells for six months into Druse and Shiite towns in Lebanon from the battleship New Jersey. Yet the Cuban government, the groups planes had been violating Cuban airspace and dropping anti -communist leaflets over Havana for nearly a year. Yet for most Americans, Cubas

status as a state sponsor of terrorism (a US State Department designation) and the alleged Cubas claims to sovereignty and national selfdetermination. As a result, the crimes of the Brothers were sanitised, while the intensified US embargo and the UN censure of Cuba captured the moral high ground. Second, the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance connects with American views about foreigners, the inferiority of their culture and the danger they pose to the American way of life. The construction of a heightened foreign threat to Americans at home and abroad permits US policy makers to
innocence of the humanitarian Brothers to the Rescue overrode pursue means and measures that would otherwise be highly controversial with the full approval of most Americans.

The moralistic fundamentalism endemic to this method of counter-terrorism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Filtering the world through the dichotomy of our exceptional innocence and the terrorist enemys absolute evil simplifies political complexity and reproduces terrorism, causing endless violence. Zulaika, director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, 2003
*Joseba, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Counterterrorism, Radical History Review 85 (2003) 191-199]
Welcome to the promised land of terrorism. At the turn of the eighties, the problem with the terrorism industry might have been to convince the rest of us that a phenomenon that for years had not produced one single fatality was still the most dangerous threat to national life. Soon

the problem is going to be to convince the rest of us that not everything is terrorism. The self-fulfilling prophecies of the 1980s and 1990s pale compared with the new scenario between "Good and evil" that George Bush has laid down for us, apparently to everyone's approval. The danger with such morality plays is that by constantly repeating them, one ends up believing them. Splitting the world radically in Good/Evil terms, calling all Evil terrorism, and declaring that the destiny of the Good side is to combat the Evil one to death, must surely be a preface to political silliness. As he told Congress, the Bush doctrine states that "from this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." The problem is, of course, that the very "evildoer" blamed for sending suicide bombers to kill innocent Israelis, and the very nations supporting such "martyrs" (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), are also the ones we need as partners in the war. And the great morality play reveals itself for what it is an intellectual and political sham. A painful example of this is translating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into one more
chapter in the new global war on terror. From the outset, this has forced the Bush administration into simultaneously trumpeting the "moral clarity" of the war against terror, according to which "there is no such a thing as a good terrorist," while at the same time having to dispatch the secretary of state to meet with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, often labeled by his enemies a world-class archterrorist. As in other prominent cases (Nelson Mandela, Sean McBride, Menachem Begin), the terrorist Arafat is also the Nobel Peace Prize winner Arafat. So much for Bush's proclamations that "my job isn't to try to nuance" between good guys and bad guys, while his secretary of state Powell will soon be having "constructive" meetings with the archterrorist. Of course, as everyone agreed,

Powell's mediation had nothing much to do with the perpetual tragedy of the Middle East per se and everything to do with removing the obstacle for Bush the son to complete his father's unfinished war against Iraq. As Benjamin Netanyahu put it, "Saddam Hussein is driving United States foreign policy." 9 Netanyahu knows what he is talking about. He is the man to the right of Ariel Sharon, waiting to replace him as the next prime minister of Israel. Sharon is a warrior hawk who sees everything in actual military terms. Netanyahu is something [End Page 194] much worse: a hawk whose only assets are the windmills of terrorism. Is there a better example than Netanyahu of the interdependencies between the terrorist and the counterterrorist? Bush should learn from Netanyahu about the fables and follies that inevitably accompany terrorism as ide fixe. His political career heavily dependent on terrorism from the very beginning, Netanyahu is "a sort of Israeli Rambo," who has never had "anything particularly interesting or authoritative to say about terror, or anything else," but who, nevertheless, has "built a successful career in the United States as a regular and articulate participant in talk shows, much sought after because of his reputation as a leading expert on the 'war on terrorism.'" 10 One of his "students" was Ronald Reagan, who decided to attack Libya after he read in Time magazine excerpts from a conference that Netanyahu organized at the Jonathan Institute, an action censured by a General Assembly resolution at the United Nations. Antonio Cassesse devoted an entire book to the complex legal implications of this entire affair, including the United States interception of an Egyptian airliner "in a way that was totally unjustified under international law" and concluded that "the United States preferred violence to law, leaving behind an unfortunate legacy that has polluted international law and aggravated political and diplomatic relations between states." 11 Thus it is

not surprising that some critical legal scholars have had no qualms in describing the United States counterterrorism policy as "itself both terroristic and illegal." 12 The critical point, one that can be illustrated with countless examples from Great Britain, Spain, Israel, Chechnya, South America, India, and other nation-states, has to do with the inevitable tendency of how the semantics of terrorism work in relation to law. By charging the other with terrorist lawlessness , it allows oneself to dispense with the rule of law. The final result is what Agamben describes as "the state of exception," in which "it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from the execution of the law, such that what
violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any reminder." 13 To the post-September 11 question of "why they hate us," a generalized response was "because of our freedoms," rather than because of the legal, political, and social justice implications of our policies, and because of our main ally in the Middle East, Israel. By

letting terrorism become the main United States public discourse and by thus enshrining categorical totalization and moral fundamentalism, we are blinded so as not to see the everyday realities of history, culture, and politics. As a consequence, we become immune to the one realization that really matters: the extent to which our own counterterrorism policies foster more terrorism. "Bibi Netanyahu is a Hamas collaborator," charged late Israeli prime minister Rabin. 14
His words were not mere sarcasm; they pointed out the strong umbilical cord between terrorists and counterterrorists. In typical irony, the very day on which Rabin was assassinated, Netanyahu had published an op-ed article in the New York Times, which warned of the existence of at least fourteen militant terrorist groups in Europe, "their active membership reaching tens of thousands," as well as "a number [End Page 195] of terrorist groups" in America with widespread connections to Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Gaza, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. "This new terrorism poses unprecedented dangers," he went on, "especially because . . . a nuclear Iran could resort to indirect blackmail." 15 One thing that Netanyahu did not alert the readers to was the possibility that, as the columnist Thomas Friedman put it, his own primer minister and political adversary Rabin might be murdered by a "gunman whose politics is virtually identical with that of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud Party and its allies in the Orthodox Jewish right." 16 In his oped article, Netanyahu demanded a "systemic investigation of groups openly preaching terror," but he had no qualms about allowing himself to be photographed in the company of West Bank settlers who "routinely described Rabin as an evil killer." 17 The administrations of presidents Carter and Reagan were also replete with instances in which the slippery phantom qualities of terrorism came to haunt its promoters. Gary Sick, the expert in charge of Iran during the hostage crisis, wrote an insider account of the Carter White House's war on terrorism, in which reacting to fictional threats played a major part. Whatever

policy mistakes the government made, the tendency was always to blame them on "intelligence failures." But there was something else far harder to correct regarding that administration's myopia, Sick tells us: "[It] was not so much a failure of sources or observation of data as a structural inadequacy of the system itself to make a conceptual leap from chessboard to hurricane." 18 He complains how, during the
Iran crisis, the journalist Robert Moss, who lacked hard evidence and had no qualifications as a specialist on Iran, still had an enormous influence on top United States policymakers when he wrote a piece stating what many in the administration feared, namely, that the Soviets must have guided the events of the Iranian hostage crisis. Sick shows that this influenced United States policy disastrously. 19 Similarly, it was no secret that Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, William Casey, and other high officials read and praised Claire Sterling's book The Terror Network, only to later discover to their embarrassment that it was based essentially on CIA disinformation "blown back." 20 The final result of playing with terrorism was of course the Iran-Contra fiasco, in which the White House secretly traded arms for hostages with Iran, while proclaiming a highly publicized policy of no negotiating whatsoever with states sponsoring terrorism, and which almost derailed the presidency of Reagan and the vice presidency of the senior Bush. It doesn't look like the present Bush administration has learned much from its predecessors. And what are we to make of the massive intelligence failures leading to September 11, according to which the CIA knew that two of the Al-Qaeda hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawag Alhazmi, were in the United States and never shared that information with the FBI or any other federal agency? By simply tracking the two men, who were living openly in Los Angeles without even concealing [End Page 196] their real names, the entire group taking part in the September 11 plot could have been uncovered. Similarly, an FBI agent's repeated warnings that Al-

Qaeda operatives might be training as pilots in the United States went unheeded by her superiors. Don't these inexplicable lapses point once again to the systemic complicity between terrorists and counterterrorists? Guilt and Innocence: The Double Blackmail

The events of September 11 are not immune to the possibility that counterterrorism is complicit in creating the very thing it abominates. We mentioned earlier that Sheik Omar, condemned to a New York prison for the rest of his life as the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the WTC, was directly a product of the CIA that recruited him for Reagan's anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and gave him visas to come to the United States. The same pattern fits Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The United States initially trained and
armed them. When the Taliban became a pariah regime, the United States' main ally in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, gave them primary support. But the blame game leads us at once into what Slavoj Zizek has labeled "the temptation of a double blackmail." 21 Namely, either the unconditional condemnation of Third World evil that appears to endorse the ideological position of American innocence, or drawing attention to the deeper sociopolitical causes of Arab extremism, which ends up blaming the victim. Each of the two positions prove one-sided and false. Pointing to the limits of moral reasoning, Zizek resorts to the dialectical category of totality to argue that "from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocentto adopt such an 'innocent' position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction." 22 This does not entail a compromised notion of shared guilt by terrorists and victims; "the point is, rather, that the

two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. In short, the position to adopt is to accept the necessity of the fight against terrorism, BUT to redefine and expand its terms so that it will include also (some) American and other Western powers' acts." 23 As widely reported at the time, the
Reagan administration, led by Alexander Haig, would self-servingly "confuse terrorism with communism." 24 As the cold war was coming to an end, terrorism became the easy substitute for communism in Reagan's black-and-white world. Still, when Haig would voice his belief that Moscow controlled the worldwide terrorist network, the State Department's bureau of intelligence chief Ronald Spiers would react by thinking that "he was kidding." 25 By the 1990s, the Soviet Union no longer constituted the terrorist enemy and only days after the Oklahoma City bombing, Russian president Yeltsin hosted President Clinton in Moscow who equated the recent massacres in Chechnya with Oklahoma City as domestic conflicts. We should be concerned as to what this new Good-versusEvil war on terror substitutes for. Its consequences in legitimizing the repression of minorities in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries are all too obvious. [End Page 197] But the ultimate catastrophe is that such

a categorically ill-defined, perpetually deferred, simpleminded Good-versus-Evil war echoes and re-creates the very absolutist mentality and exceptionalist tactics of the insurgent terrorists. By formally adopting the terrorists' own gameone that by definition lacks rules of engagement, definite endings, clear alignments between enemies and friends, or formal arrangements of any sort, military, political, legal, or ethicalthe inevitable danger lies in reproducing it endlessly. One only has to look at the Palestinian-Israeli or the Basque-Spanish conflicts to see how selfdefeating the alleged "victories" against terrorism can be in the absence of addressing the causes of the violence. "A war against terrorism, then, mirrors the state of exception characteristic of insurgent violence, and in so doing it reproduces it ad infinitum. The question remains: What politics might be involved in this state of alert
as normal state? Would this possible scenario of competing (and mutually constituting) terror signify the end of politics as we know it?" 27 It is either politics or once again the self-fulfilling prophecy of fundamentalist crusaders who will never be able to entirely eradicate evil from the world. Our choice cannot be between Bush and bin Laden, nor is our struggle one of "us" versus "them." Such a split leads us into the ethical catastrophe of not feeling full solidarity with the victims of either sidesince the value of each life is absolute, "the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims." 28 We must

question our own involvement with the phantasmatic reality of terrorism discourse, for "now even the USA and its citizens can be regulated by terrorist discourse. . . . Now the North American territory has become the most global and central place in the new history that terrorist ideology inaugurates." 29 Resisting the temptation of innocence regarding the barbarian other implies an awareness of a point Hegel made and that applies to the contemporary and increasingly globalized world more than ever: evil, he claims, resides also in the innocent gaze itself, perceiving as it does evil all around itself. Derrida equally holds this position. In reference to the events of
September 11, he said: "My unconditional compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying it loudly: with regard to this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless." 30 In brief, we

are all included in the picture, and these tragic events must make us problematize our own innocence while questioning our own political and libidinal investment in the global terrorism discourse.

This reproduction of insecurity necessitates escalation the endpoints of the exceptionalist violence at the heart of the war on terror are total wars of annihilation and mass imperialist violence. Lifton, professor of psychiatry, 2003 *Robert Jay, American Apocalypse, The Nation, Dec
22nd, http://www.thenation.com/article/american-apocalypse]
War itself is an absolute, its violence unpredictable and always containing apocalyptic possibilities. In this case, by militarizing the problem of terrorism, our leaders have dangerously obfuscated its political, social and historical dimensions. Terrorism has instead been raised to the absolute level of war itself. And although American leaders speak of this as being a dierent kind of war, there is a drumbeat of ordinary war rhetoric and a clarion call to total victory and to the crushing defeat of our terrorist enemies. When President Bush declared that this conict was begun on the timing and terms of others *but+ will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing, he was misleading both in suggesting a clear beginning in Al Qaedas acts and a decisive end in the battle against terrorism. In that same speech, given at a memorial service just three days after / at the National Cathedral in Washington, he also asserted, Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, not a man given to irony, commented that the

president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of Gods master plan. At no time did Bush see his task as
mounting a coordinated international operation against terrorism, for which he could have enlisted most of the governments of the world. Rather, upon hearing of the second plane crashing into the second tower, he remembers thinking: They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war. Upon hearing of the plane crashing into the Pentagon, he told Vice President Cheney, Were at war. Woodward thus calls his account of the Presidents rst hundred days following / Bush at War. Bush would later recall, I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win. With world leaders, he felt he had to look them in the eye and say, Youre either with us or youre against us. Long before the invasion of Iraqindeed, even before the invasion of AfghanistanBush had come to identify himself, and be identied by others, as a wartime president. Warmaking

can quickly become associated with war fever, heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of ones nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people. In this case, the growth of war fever came in several stages:
the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience of transcendence. War then becomes its beginnings, with Bushs personal declaration of war immediately after September ; a modest increase, with the successful invasion of Afghanistan; and a wave of ultrapatriotic excessestriumphalism and labeling of critics as disloyal or treasonousat the time of the invasion of Iraq. War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its

underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroadand later
to growing casualties in occupied Iraq. The scope of George Bushs war was suggested within days of / when the director of the made a presentation to the President and his inner circle, called Worldwide Attack Matrix, that described active or planned operations of various kinds in eighty countries, or what Woodward calls a secret global war on terror. Early on, the President had the view that this war will be fought on many fronts and that were going to rout out terror wherever it may exist. Although envisaged long before / , the invasion of Iraq could be seen as a direct continuation of this unlimited war; all the more so because of the prevailing tone among the President and his advisers, who were described as eager to emerge from the sea of words and pull the trigger. The war

on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the innite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil. Bush keeps what Woodward calls his own personal scorecard for the war in the form of photographs with brief
biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the worlds most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out if killed or captured. The scorecard is always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Oce. War and Reality The amorphousness of the war on terrorism is such that a country like Iraqwith a murderous dictator who had surely engaged in acts of terrorism in the pastcould, on that basis, be treated as if it had major responsibility for 9/11. There was no evidence at all that it did. But by means of false accusations, emphasis on the evil things Saddam Hussein had done (for instance, the use of poison gas on his Kurdish minority) and the belligerent atmosphere of the overall war on terrorism, the Administration succeeded in convincing more than half of all Americans that Saddam was a major player in 9/11. The

war on terrorism, then, took amorphous impulses toward combating terror and used them as a pretext for realizing a prior mission aimed at American global hegemony. The attack on Iraq reected the reach not only of the war on terrorism but of deceptions and manipulations of reality that have accompanied it. In this context, the word war came to combine metaphor (as in the war on poverty or war on drugs), conventional military combat, justication for pre-emptive attack and assertion of superpower domination. Behind such planning and manipulation can lie dreams and fantasies hardly less apocalyptic or world-purifying than those of

Al Qaedas leaders, or of Aum Shinrikyos guru. For instance, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, a close
associate of Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, spoke of the war against terrorism as a Fourth World War (the Third being the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union). In addressing a group of college students, he declared, This Fourth World War, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the cold war. That

kind of apocalyptic impulse in warmaking has hardly

proved conducive to a shared international approach. Indeed, in its essence, it precludes genuine sharing. While Bush has frequently said that he prefers to have allies in taking on terrorism and terrorist states worldwide, he has also made it clear that he does not want other countries to have any policy-making power on this issue. In one revealing statement, he declared: At some point, we may be the only ones left. Thats OK with me. We are America. In such declarations, he has

all but claimed that Americans are the globes anointed ones and that the sacred mission of purifying the earth is ours alone. The amorphousness of the war on terrorism carries with it a paranoid edge, the suspicion that terrorists and their supporters are everywhere and must be pre-emptively attacked lest they emerge and attack us. Since such a war is limitless and innite extending from the farthest reaches of Indonesia or Afghanistan to Hamburg, Germany, or New York City, and from immediate combat to battles that continue into the unending futureit inevitably becomes associated with a degree of megalomania as well. As the worlds greatest military power replaces the complexities of the world with its own imagined stripped-down, us-versus-them version of it, our distorted national self becomes the world. Despite the constant invocation by the Bush Administration of the theme of security, the war on terrorism has created the very oppositea sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized in support of further aggressive plans in the extension of the larger war. What results is a vicious circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: Our excessive response to Islamist attacks creates more terrorists and more terrorist attacks, which in turn leads to an escalation of the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected victory becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending Fourth World War and a mythic cleansingof terrorists, of evil, of our own fear. The American
military apocalyptic can then be said to partner and act in concert with the Islamist apocalyptic.

Vote aff to endorse that the United States federal government should remove Cuba from the list of countries subject to economic penalties governed by Section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act. Voting affirmative means more than imagining the adoption of a simple policy its an endorsement of a critical interrogation that destabilizes hegemonic knowledge about terrorism. As activist-scholars we have an obligation to uncover subjugated knowledge hidden by the War on Terror. Jackson, Professor in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 8 *Richard, State
terror, terrorism research and knowledge politics, paper presented at the British International Studies Association, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1949/BISA-Paper2008-Jackson-FINAL.pdf?sequence=1] In contrast to first order critique, second order critique involves the adoption of a critical standpoint outside of the discourse. In this case, based on an understanding of discourse as socially productive or constitutive, and fully cognisant of the knowledge-power nexus, a second order critique attempts to expose the political functions and ideological consequences of the particular forms of representation enunciated by the discourse. In this case, we want to try and understand what some of the political effects and consequences of the silences of state terrorism are. A number of such effects can be identified. First, the discourse naturalises a
particular understanding of what terrorism is, namely, a form of illegitimate non-state violence. Such an understanding of terrorism functions to restrict the scholarly viewpoint to one set of actors and to particular kinds of actions, and functions to distract and obscure other actors and actions which should be named and studied as terrorism. It also narrows the possibilities for understanding terrorism within alternative paradigms, such as from the perspective of gender terrorism (see Sharlach 2008). In

other words, it has a restrictive and distorting effect within the field of knowledge which gives the impression that terrorism studies is more of a narrow extension of counter-insurgency or national security studies than an open and inclusive domain of research into all forms and aspects of terrorism. Consequently, Andrew Silke (2001) concludes that

terrorism studies is largely

driven by policy concerns and largely limited to government agendas (p. 2). In addition, the broader academic, social, and cultural influence of terrorism studies (through the authority and legitimacy provided by terrorism experts to the media and as policy advisers, for example), means that this restrictive viewpoint is diffused to the broader society, which in turn generates its own ideological effects. Specifically, the distorted focus on non-state terrorism functions to reify state perspectives and priorities, and reinforce a state-centric, problem-solving paradigm of politics in which terrorism is viewed as an identifiable social or individual problem in need of solving by the state, and not as a practice of state power , for example. From this perspective, it functions to maintain the
legitimacy of state uses of violence and delegitimize all forms of non-state violence (which has its own ideological effects and is problematic in a number of obvious ways). This fundamental belief in the instrumental rationality of political violence as an effective and legitimate tool of the state is open to a great many criticisms, not least that it provides the normative basis from which nonstate terrorist groups frequently justify their own (often well-intentioned) violence (see Burke 2008, Oliverio and Lauderdale 2005).

There is from this viewpoint an ethical imperative to try and undermine the widespread acceptance that political violence is a mostly legitimate and effective option in resolving conflict for either state or nonstate actors. Political violence is in fact, a moral and physical disaster in the vast majority of cases. From an ethicalnormative perspective, such a restricted understanding of terrorism also functions to obscure and silence the voices and perspectives of those who live in conditions of daily terror from the random and arbitrary violence of their own governments, some of whom are supported by Western states. At the present juncture, it also functions to silence the voices of those who experience Western policies
directly, as in those tortured in the war on terror, and indirectly, as in those suffering under Western-supported regimes as a form of terrorism. That is, it deflects and diverts attention from the much greater state terrorism which blights the lives of tens of millions of people around the world today. Related to these broader normative and ideological effects, the treatment of state terrorism within the discourse the silences on it and the narrow construction of statesponsored terrorism also functions to position state terrorism (should it even exist within the dominant framework) as seemingly less important than non-state terrorism, and as confined to the actions that states take in support of non-state terrorism. This also distorts the field of knowledge and political practice by suggesting that the sponsorship of Palestinian groups by Iran for example, is an infinitely more serious and dangerous problem than the fact that millions of Colombians, Uzbeks, Zimbabweans, and so on, are daily terrorised by death squads, state torture, and serious human rights abuses. Within

this discursive terrain, it can also function to provide legitimacy to Western policies such as sanctions, coercive diplomacy, and pre-emptive war against politically determined state-sponsors of terrorism which may be terroristic themselves, and which ignore the involvement in state-sponsorship by Western states. From a
political-normative viewpoint, the silence on state terrorism, and in particular the argument of many terrorism scholars that state actions can never be defined as terrorism, actually functions to furnish states with a rhetorical justification for using w hat may actually be terroristic forms of violence against their opponents and citizens without fear of condemnation. In effect, it

provides them with greater leeway for applying terror-based forms of violence against civilians, a leeway exploited by many states such as Israel, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, and others who try to intimidate groups with the application of massive and disproportionate state violence. From this
perspective, a discourse which occludes and obscures the very possibility of state terrorism can be considered part of the conditions that actually makes state terrorism possible. In addition, the silence on state terrorism within the field also functions to undermine the political struggle of human rights activists against the use of terror by states by disallowing the delegitimizing power and resources that come from describing state actions as terrorism. It is pertinent to note in this context that the worlds leading states have continually rejected any and all attempts to legally define and proscribe a category of actions which would be called state terrorism, arguing instead that such actions are already covered by other laws such as the laws of war (see Becker 2006).

The silence on state terrorism has another political effect, namely, the way in which it has functioned, and continues to function, to distract from and deny the long history of Western involvement in terrorism, thereby constructing Western foreign policy as essentially benign rather than aimed at reifying existing structures of power and domination in the international system, for example. That is, by preventing the effective criticism of particular Western policies it works to maintain the dangerous myth of Western exceptionalism. This sense of exceptionalism and the supportive

discourse of terrorism studies permits Western states and their allies to pursue a range of discrete political projects and partisan interests aimed at maintaining international dominance. For example, by reinforcing the notion that non-state terrorism is a much greater threat and problem than state
terrorism and by obscuring the ways in which counter-terrorism can morph into state terrorism, the discourse functions to legitimise the current war on terror and its associated policies of military intervention, extraordinary rendition, reinforcement of the national security state, and the like. More specifically, the discourse can provide legitimacy to broader counter-insurgency or counterterrorism programmes where the actual aims lie in the maintenance of a particular politicaleconomic order such as is occurring in Colombia at present (see Stokes 2006). Importantly,

the silence on state terrorism also functions to de-legitimise all forms of violent counterhegemonic or revolutionary struggle (by maintaining the
notion that state violence is automatically legitimate and all non-state violence is inherently illegitimate), thereby maintaining the liberal international order and many oppressive international power structures (see also Duffield 2001). Lastly, the discourse can be used to selectively justify particular projects of regime change,14 economic sanctions, military base expansion, military occupation, military assistance for strategic partners, and the isolation of disapproved political movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah. In the end, the discourse functions to permit the reification and extension of state hegemony both internationally and domestically, and perhaps more importantly, the belief in the instrumental rationality of violence as an effective tool of politics. Despite the intentions of terrorism scholars therefore, who may feel that they engage in objective academic analysis of a clearly defined phenomenon, the discourse actually serves a number of distinctly political purposes and has several important ideological consequences for society. Conclusion As noted above, there is a real puzzle revealed through this analysis, namely, why there is such a deep and pervasive silence on state terrorism within the discourse, especially given the genealogical origins of the term and the mountain of empirical examples of the phenomenon? There are a number of likely answers to this puzzle. In the first place, there

may be cases in which scholars have been co-opted through various means into state perspectives and projects. Given the benefits that can accrue from close association with state power, it is not surprising that some scholars choose to participate directly in such projects. Related to this, some
scholars may be intimidated by state power, fearing the ways in which state officials and state apologists can punish and harm scholars who apply the term terrorism to state actions. This could be a major reason why the silence on Israeli state terrorism is so pervasive. In the U.S. at least, scholars who criticise Israeli policies in public are regularly attacked and intimidated as anti-Semitic. Alternately, many scholars who joined the field following the terrorist attacks in 2001 did so out of a genuine desire to work with the U.S. government to prevent further occurrences of such atrocities. Another

reason is likely to be simply the failure of academic procedure and scholarly reflection the failure to interrogate and question the assumptions and accepted knowledge of the field. This is related to a broader process of
socialisation into the accepted discourse and practices of the field; scholars are trained into viewing terrorism in a particular light. Related to this, most scholars feel an inherent affinity to the values and interests of their own societies, which may make facing the reality of their governments involvement in terrorist atrocities difficult and disturbing. Finally, it may be related to the inherent difficulties involved in studying state terrorism: not only is obtaining primary data a challenging exercise, especially in cases where state agents may want to prevent potentially damaging international publicity, but a great deal of conceptual and theoretical work often has to be done to determine which acts constitute state terrorism (Blakeley forthcoming). In the end however, the puzzle of why state terrorism has been so neglected in the field is less important than recognising that there are important reasons for bringing the state back into terrorism studies (Blakeley 2007). First, there are obvious analytical reasons for taking state terrorism seriously, including the imbalances and distortions which a narrow focus on non-state terrorism introduces. Second, there are normative reasons for studying state terrorism in a rigorous and systematic manner, notably that such knowledge furnishes a powerful means of holding states to account for their actions and reinforcing norms of behaviour that exclude the use of violence to intimidate and terrorise civilians. By any measure, states have been responsible for infinitely more human suffering and terror than any other actor; the promotion of human security therefore depends on protecting citizens from the abuses and predations of states. In conclusion,

exposing the ideological effects and political technologies of the discourse has

the potential to open up critical space for the articulation of alternative and potentially emancipatory forms of knowledge and practice . The good news is that discourses are never completely hegemonic; there is always room for counter-hegemonic struggle and subversive forms of knowledge. In this case, not only is the discourse inherently unstable and vulnerable to different forms of critique, but the continual setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing revelations of state torture and rendition by Western forces, and increasing resistance to government attempts to restrict civil liberties suggest that the present juncture provides an opportune moment to engage in deliberate and sustained critique of a dominant discourse
which focuses on non-state actors and obscures the much greater terrorism of state actors

Terrorism policy is performative. The process of discourse and deliberation matters more than a policys outcome because it frames the terms of debate. de Graaf, Associate professor Associate Professor at the Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism at Leiden University, and de Graaff, history professor at Utrecht University, 10 *Beatrice, and Bob, Bringing politics back in: the introduction of the
performative power of counterterrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3:2, 261-275] In sum, it is almost impossible to measure arithmetically the outcome of counterterrorism efforts. However, this does not mean that we cannot and should not try to assess the effect of governmental policies. The issues outlined above suggest that it

is not necessarily the policy measures and their intended results as such, but much more the way in which they are presented and perceived that determine the overall effect of the policy in question. The key question is therefore really: What do counterterrorism policy-makers want? They set the agenda with respect to the phenomenon of terrorism, define it in a certain way and link it to
corresponding measures. Subsequently, they execute these measures, behind closed doors, and with the tacit permission of the public or, conversely, they feel forced to market their measures first, in order to generate a substantial leve l of public and political support. The

way in which they perform, or in other words carry out the process of countering terrorism, can have more impact than the actual arrests being made (or not being made). This is what we call the performativity of counterterrorism, or its performative power. The authors would like to introduce the concept performativity1 in this discussion, expressing the extent to which a national government, by means of its official counterterrorism policy and corresponding discourse (in statements, enactments, measures and ministerial remarks), is successful in selling its representation of events, its set of solutions to the terrorist problem, as well as being able to set the tone for the overall discourse regarding terrorism and counterterrorism thereby mobilising (different) audiences for its purposes.2 There is of course a difference between
threat assessment and threat perception, and there are other players in the field apart from official state actors. Here, however, our focus is on the governments attempts to persuade public opinion of the legitimacy and accuracy of its threat assessment. In terms of developing counterterrorism policies, this is particularly relevant because counterterrorism officials and we as academics and advisers can exert influence particularly on this field (see also the introduction and conclusion in Forest 2009).

Counterterrorism measures (in statements, enactments, activities, expressions made by cabinet members) set the tone for the political and public debate. Government statements and memoranda are not mere texts: they create reality. This is certainly the case when the presentation and definition of new policy dovetails with existing threat perceptions in the population (on communism, immigration or new religions, for instance); when they tune in to historical experiences (such as previous conflicts, attacks or major disasters); if they depict the alleged terrorist threat as foreign, radically different and alien or fundamentally hostile; or if they succeed in promoting terrorism as a central issue in a political
game or campaign (by portraying the opposition as being soft on terrorism or by presenting themselves as the nations saviour from all evil).3 When

these implicitly or explicitly formulated representations of threats, enemies and security are accepted by the majority of the population, political and social conflicts could be heightened. Consensus subsequently gives way to polarisation, acceptance of the limitation of civil liberties and stigmatisation of radical ideas. Counterterrorism measures therefore clarify which radical ideas are still tolerated, what level of sympathy with revolutionary terrorists is still permitted and which
infringements on civil liberties are accepted for the sake of national security.

Cuba is a crucial starting point. First, it strikes an unnerving chord because of its persistent, decades-long confrontation with imperialism and potential to set an example of resistance for the global South. Whitney, Cuba solidarity activist and member of Veterans for Peace, 5-8-13 *W.T., Reflections on
Anti-Cuban Terror, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/whitney080513.html+

The U.S. government itself is a purveyor of terrorism. Its wars, drones, economic sanctions, puppet insurgencies, torture regimens, and prison abuses terrorize peoples throughout the world. The United States exports spies and informants and supports the militarized police forces and national armies of puppet
governments. Terror fostered by the United States aggravates hostilities and swells enemy ranks. Vicious cycles ensue and conflicts expand. Openings then multiply for the U.S. government to claim victimization and to rationalize its own terror attacks. Cuba,

however, stands

apart from this deadly interchange seen elsewhere. Terror strikes in only one direction -- against Cuba. Cuban sources indicate that U.S.-based terrorists have killed almost 3,500 people over 50 years, either Cubans or friends of Cuba. By contrast, U.S. military and intelligence officials now and then reiterate that Cuba represents no military or economic threat to the United States. Yet the U.S. government maintains Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Apologists point to Basque separatists welcomed in Cuba and to
sanctuary given leftist Colombian guerrillas. But Spain asked that Cuba take in the Basques, and Colombia embraced Cuba's offer to host government negotiations with the guerrillas. So, political refuge provided for Assata Shakur has long been cited. Having escaped from a U.S. prison, the black liberation combatant moved to Cuba. The United States recently simultaneously announced that Cuba will remain on its list of terror-sponsoring states and that, conveniently enough, Assata Shakur was being placed on the FBI's ten "most wanted terrorist" list, as well as that the bounty for her capture and return to the United States was raised to $2 million. Many legal observers, however, remain highly critical of the prosecution and trial in 1977 through which she was convicted of murdering a New Jersey policeman. Considering

that Cuba is quite blameless, refusing to engage in titfor-tat, one may ask: Why have terror attacks against Cuba continued? One answer is that the U.S. government, as minder of an empire, is serious about its duty to counter revolutionary and antiimperialist movements from their earliest stirrings to their takings of power and beyond. U.S. governments have been dealing with Cuban revolutionaries for almost 150 years. In reaction to
anti-annexationist, anti-racist independence struggles led by Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo, the United States ended up invading Cuba. U.S. troops helped beat down an Afro-Cuban uprising in 1912. Then in the early 1930s came Cuban student and labor mobilizations, anti-imperialist in nature -- harbingers of a socialist revolution that took charge in 1959. Special

treatment for

Cuba may stem, in part, from enmity to an anti-imperialism that never quits. Cuban anti-imperialism is not all U.S. power brokers have to worry about. Despite bashings, Cuba poses the threat of a good example. The socialist state has ensured long life expectancy, low infant mortality, ready access to high quality education, jobs, adequate nutrition and housing, and inculcation of ethical, communitarian values and cultural heritages. Cubans even weather natural disasters in exemplary fashion. Cuba's adventures in international solidarity add insult to injury. Beleaguered Cuba contested apartheid in southern Africa, cares for the sick and injured throughout the world, and educates young people from all over. And annoyingly Cuba defends itself against terror in targeted, non-violent ways. Cuban volunteers moved to Florida to monitor U.S.-based terrorists so that Cuba could
prepare against attacks and maybe prevent them. For their pains, the Cuban Five, as they are known, were subjected to a biased trial and long, cruel sentences. A worldwide movement is demanding that U.S. President Obama release them.

Second, persecution of Cuba in the name of fighting terror is the continuous thread between the current War on Terror and the original one started by Reagan. Cuba has consistently been portrayed as a threat throughout the modern history of American exceptionalism. Chomksy, Professor of Philosopy and Linguistics at MIT, 6 *Noam, The Terrorist in the
Mirror, Counterpunch, JANUARY 24, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/24/the-terroristin-the-mirror/] Suppose, then, that we accept these simple guidelines. Lets turn to the "War on Terror." Since facts matter, it matters that the War was not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier. They came into office declaring that their foreign
policy would confront what the President called "the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz). The campaign was directed to a particularly virulent form of the plague: state-directed international terrorism. The main focus

the war was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. The civilian component of the re-declared War on Terror is led by John Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all counterterror operations. As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on director of the major operation of the first War on Terror, the contra war against Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. Ill return to some of his tasks. The military component of the re -declared War led by Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagans special representative to the Middle East. There, his main task was to establish close
was Central America and the Middle East, but it reached to southern Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond. A second fact is that relations with Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the war with Iran. The official purpose, not concealed, was Washingtons responsibility to aid American exporters and "the strikingly unanimous view" of Washington and its allies Britain and Saudi Arabia that "whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the r egion a better hope for his countrys stability than did those who have suffered his repression" New York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell, describing Washingtons judgment as George Bush I authorized Saddam to crush the Shiite rebellion in 1991, which probably would have overthrown the tyrant. Saddam is at last on trial for his crim es. The first trial, now underway, is for crimes he

in 1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terror so that aid could flow to his friend in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited Baghdad to confirm the arrangements. Judging by reports and
committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an important year in US-Iraq relations. It was commentary, it would be impolite to mention any of these facts, let alone to suggest that some others might be standing alongside Saddam before the bar of justice.

Removing Saddam from the list of states supporting terrorism left a gap. It was at once filled by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US terrorist wars against Cuba from 1961 had just peaked, including events that would be on the front pages right now in societies that valued their freedom, to which Ill briefly return. Again, that tells us something about the real elite attitudes towards the plague of the modern age. Since the first War on Terror was waged by those now carrying out the redeclared war, or their immediate mentors, it follows that anyone seriously interested in the redeclared War on Terror should ask at once how it was carried out in the 1980s. The topic, however, is under a virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon as we investigate the facts: the first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached, leaving traumatized societies that may never recover.
What happened is hardly obscure, but doctrinally unacceptable, therefore protected from inspection. Unearthing the record is an enlightening exercise, with enormous implications for the future. These are a few of the relevant facts, and they definitely do matter. Lets turn to the second o f the guidelines: elementary moral principles. The most elementary is a virtual truism: decent people apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others, if not more stringent ones. Adherence to this principle of universality would have many useful consequences. For one thing, it would save a lot of trees. The principle would radically reduce published reporting and commentary on social and political affairs. It would virtually eliminate the newly fashionable discipline of Just War theory. And it would wipe the slate almost clean with regard to the War on Terror. The reason is the same in all cases: the principle of universality is rejected, for the most part tacitly, though sometimes explicitly. Those are very sweeping statements. I purposely put them in a stark form to invite you to challenge them, and I hope you do. You will find, I think, that although the statements are somewhat overdrawn purposely they nevertheless are uncomfortably close to accurate, and in fact very fully documented. But try for yourselves and see. This most elementary of moral truisms is sometimes upheld at least in words. One example, of critical importance today, is the Nuremberg Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to death, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the principle of universality. "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes," he said, "they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well." That is a clear and honorable statement of the principle of universality. But the judgment at Nuremberg itself crucially violated this principle. The Tribunal had to define "war crime" and "crimes against humanity." It crafted these definition very carefully so that crimes are criminal only if they were not committed by the allies. Urban bombing of civilian concentrations was excluded, because the allies carried it out more barbarically than the Nazis. And Nazi war criminals, like Admiral Doenitz, were able to plead successfully that their British and US counterparts had carried out the same practices. The reasoning was outlined by Telford Taylor, a distinguished international lawyer who was Jacksons Chief Counsel for War Crimes. He explained that "to punish the foeespecially the vanquished foefor conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." That is correct, but the operative definition of "crime" also discredits the laws themselves. Subsequent Tribunals are discredited by the same moral flaw, but the self-exemption of the powerful from international law and elementary moral principle goes far beyond this illustration, and reaches to just about ev ery aspect of the two phases of the War on Terror. Lets turn to the third background issue: defining "terror" and distinguishing it from aggression and legitimate resistance. I have been writing about terror for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration declared its War on

To take official definitions, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in naturethrough intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear," typically
Terror. Ive been using definitions that seem to be doubly appropriate: first, they make sense; and second, they are the offi cial definitions of those waging the war. one of these targeting civilians. The British governments definition is about the same: "Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause." These definitions seem fairly clear and close to

But a problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to take the most uncontroversial case, Reagans state-directed terrorist war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two Security Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely abstaining). Another completely clear case is Cuba, where the record by now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a long list beyond them. We may ask, however, whether such crimes as the state-directed attack against Nicaragua are really
ordinary usage. There also seems to be general agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies. terrorism, or whether they rise to the level of the much higher crime of aggression. The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg in terms that were basically reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An "aggressor," Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as "Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State," or "Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection." The first provision unambiguously applies to the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the US war against Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents in Washington and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering them guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a huge and unprecedented scale. It may also be recalled the aggression was defined at Nuremberg as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for example, and in Nicaragua too, if the charge is not reduced to international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all too many other victims who are easily dismissed on grounds of wrong agency right to the present. A week ago (January 13), a CIA predator drone attacked a village in Pakistan, murdering dozens of civilians, entire families, who just happened to live in a suspected al-Qaeda hideout. Such routine actions elicit little notice, a legacy of the poisoning of the moral culture by centuries of imperial thuggery. The World Court did not take up the charge of aggression in the Nicaragua case. The reasons are instructive, and of quite considerable contemporary relevance. Nicaraguas case was presented by the distinguished Harvard University law professor Abram Chayes, former legal adviser to the State Department. The Court rejected a large part of his case on the grounds that in accepting World Court jurisdiction in 1946, the US had entered a reservation excluding itself from prosecution under multilateral treaties, including the UN Charter. The Court therefore restricted its deliberations to customary international law and a bilateral US-Nicaragua treaty, so that the more serious charges were excluded. Even on these very narrow grounds, the Court charged Washington with "unlawful use of force" in lay language, international terrorismand ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations. The Reaganites reacted by escalating the war, also officially endorsing attacks by their terrorist forces against "soft targets," undefended civilian targets. The terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a death toll equivalent to 2.25 million in US per capita terms, more than the total of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the shattered country fell back under US control, it declined to further misery. It is now the second poorest country in Latin America after Haitiand by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US intervention in the past century. The standard way to lament these tragedies is to say that Haiti and Nicaragua are "battered by storms of their own making," to quote the Boston Globe, at the liberal extreme of American journalism. Guatemala ranks third both in misery and intervention, more storms of their own making. In the Western canon, none of this exists. All is excluded not only from general history and commentary, but also quite tellingly from the huge literature on the War on Terror re-declared in

What about the boundary between terror and resistance? One question that arises is the legitimacy of actions to realize "the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United
2001, though its relevance can hardly be in doubt. These considerations have to do with the boundary between terror and aggression. Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation" Do such actions fall under terror or resistance? The quoted word are from the most forceful denunciation of the crime of terrorism by the UN General Assembly; in December 1987, taken up under Reaganite

pressure. Hence it is obviously an important resolution, even more so because of the near-unanimity of support for it. The resolution passed 153-2 (Honduras alone abstaining). It stated that "nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence," as characterized in the quoted words. The two countries that voted against the resolution explained their reasons at the UN session. They were based on the paragraph just quoted. The phrase "colonial and racist regimes" was understood to refer to their ally apartheid South Africa, then consummating its massacres in the neighboring countries and continuing its brutal repression within. Evidently, the US and Israel could not condone resistance to the apartheid regime, particularly when it was led by Nelson Mandelas ANC, one of the worlds "more notorious terrorist groups," as Washington determined at the same time. Granting legitimacy to resistance against "foreign occupation" was also unacceptable. The phrase was understood to refer to Israels US-backed military occupation, then in its 20 th year. Evidently, resistance to that occupation could not be condoned either, even though at the time of the resolution it scarcely existed: despite extensive torture, degradation, brutality, robbery of land and resources, and other familiar concomitants of military occupation, Palestinians under occupation still remained "Samidin," those who quietly endured. Technically, there are no vetoes at the General Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a double veto: the resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed from reporting and history. It should be added that the voting pattern is quite common at the General Assembly, and also at the Security Council, on a wide range of issues. Ever since the mid-1960s, when the world fell pretty much out of control, the US is far in the lead in Security Council vetoes, Britain second, with no one else even close. It is also of some interest to note that a majority of the American public favors abandonment of the veto, and following the will of the majority even if Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose elsewhere. That suggests another conservative way

Terrorism directed or supported by the most powerful states continues to the present, often in shocking ways. These facts offer one useful suggestion as to how to mitigate the plague
to deal with some of the problems of the world: pay attention to public opinion. spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age": Stop participating in terror and supporting it. That would certainly contribute to the proclaimed objections. But that suggestion too is off the agenda, for the usual reasons. When it is occasionally voiced, the reaction is reflexive: a tantrum about how those

Even with careful sanitization of discussion, dilemmas constantly arise. One just arose very recently, when Luis Posada Carriles entered the US illegally. Even by the narrow operative definition of "terror," he is clearly one of the most notorious international terrorists, from the 1960s to the present. Venezuela requested that he be extradited to face charges for the bombing of a Cubana airliner in Venezuela, killing 73 people. The charges are admittedly credible, but there is a real difficulty. After Posada
who make this rather conservative proposal are blaming everything on the US. miraculously escaped from a Venezuelan prison, the liberal Boston Globe reports, he "was hired by US covert operatives to direct the resupply operation for the Nicaraguan contras from El Salvador"that is, to play a prominent role in terrorist atrocities that are incomparably worse than blowing up the Cubana airliner. Hence the dilemma. To quote the press: "Extraditing him for trial could send a worrisome signal to covert foreign agents that they cannot count on unconditional protection from the US government, and it could expose the CIA to embarrassing public disclosures from a former operative." Evidently, a difficult problem. The Posada dilemma was, thankfully, resolved by the courts, which rejected Venezuelas appeal for his extradition, in violation of the US-Venezuela extradition treaty. A day later, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, urged Europe to speed US demands for extradition: "We are always looking to see how we can make the extradition process go faster," he said. "We think we owe it to the victims of terrorism to see to it that justice is done efficiently and effectively." At the Ibero-American Summit shortly after, the leaders of Spain and the Latin American countries "backed Venezuelas efforts to have [Posada] extradited from the United States to face trial" for the Cubana airliner bombing, and again condemned the "blockade" of Cuba by the US, endorsing regular near-unanimous UN resolutions, the most recent with a vote of 179-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau). After strong protests from the US Embassy, the Summit withdrew the

Posada is therefore free to join his colleague Orlando Bosch in Miami. Bosch is implicated in dozens of terrorist crimes, including the Cubana airliner bombing, many on US soil. The FBI and Justice Department wanted him deported as a threat to national security, but Bush I took care of that by granting
call for extradition, but refused to yield on the demand for an end to the economic warfare. him a presidential pardon. There are other such examples. We might want to bear them in mind when we read Bush IIs impassion ed pronouncement that "the United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support them, because theyre equally as guilty of murder," and "the civilized world must hold those regimes to account." This was proclaimed to great applause at the National Endowment for Democracy, a few days after Venezuelas extradition request had been refused. Bushs remarks pose another dilemma. Either the US is part of the civilized world, and must send the US air force to bomb Washington; or it declares itself to be outside the civilized world. The logic is impeccable, but fortunately, logic has been dispatched as deep into the memory hole as moral truisms. The Bush doctrine that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves" was promulgated when the Taliban asked for evidence before handing over people the US suspected of terrorism without credible evidence, as the FBI conceded many months later. The doctrine is taken very seriously. Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison writes that it has "already become a de facto rule of international relations," revoking "the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists." Some states, that is, thanks to the rejection of the principle of universality. One might also have thought that a dilemma would have arisen when John Negroponte was appointed to the position of head of counterterrorism. As Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he was running the worlds largest CIA station, not because of the grand r ole of Honduras in world affairs, but because Honduras was the primary US base for the international terrorist war for which Washington was condemned by the ICJ and Security Council (absent the veto). Known in Honduras as "the Proconsul," Negroponte had the task of ensuring that the international terrorist operations, which reached remarkable levels of savagery, would proceed efficiently. His responsibilities in managing the war on the scene took a new turn after official funding was barred in 1983, and he had to implement White House orders to bribe and pressure senior Honduran Generals to step up their support for the terrorist war using funds from other sources, later funds illegally transferred from US arms sales to Iran. The most vicious of the Honduran killers and torturers was General Alvarez Martnez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces at the time, who had informed the US that "he intended to use the Argentine method of eliminating suspected subversives." Negroponte regularly denied gruesome state crimes in Honduras to ensure that military aid would continue to flow for international terrorism. Knowing all about Alvarez, the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of Merit medal for "encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras." The elite unit responsible for the worst crimes in Honduras was Battalion 3-16, organized and trained by Washington and its Argentine neoNazi associates. Honduran military officers in charge of the Battalion were on the CIA payroll. When the government of Honduras finally tried to deal with these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Reagan-Bush administration refused to allow Negroponte to testify, as the courts requested. There was virtually no reaction to the appointment of a leading international terrorist to the top counter-terrorism position in the world. Nor to the fact that at the very same time, the heroine of the popular struggle that overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua, Dora Mara Tllez, was denied a visa to teach at the Harvard Divinity School, as a terrorist. Her crime was to have helped overthrow a US-backed tyrant and mass murderer. Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or weep. So far I have been keeping to the kinds of topics that would be addressed in a discussion of the War on Terror that is not deformed to accord with the iron laws of doctrine. And this barely scratches the surface. But let us now adopt prevailing Western hypocrisy and cynicism, and keep to the operative definition of "terror." It is the same as the official definitions, but with the Nuremberg exception: admissible terror is your terror; ours is exempt.. Even with this constraint, terror is a major problem, undoubtedly. And to mitigate or terminate the threat should be a high priority. Regrettably, it is not. That is all too easy to demonstrate, and the consequences are likely to be severe. The invasion of Iraq is perhaps the most glaring example of the low priority assigned by US-UK leaders to the threat of terror. Washington planners had been advised, even by their own intelligence agencies, that the invasion was likely to increase the risk of terror. And it did, as their own intelligence agencies confirm. The National Intelligence Council reported a year ago that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terroris ts who are `professionalized and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself," spreading elsewhere to defend Muslim lands from attack by "infidel invaders" in a globalized network of "diffuse Islamic extremist groups," with Iraq now replacing the Afghan training grounds for this more extensive network, as a result of the invasion. A high-level government review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion `focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. "Its a new piece of a new equation," a former senior Bush administration official said. "If you dont kn ow who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?" ( Washington Post). Last May the CIA reported that "Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic milita nts similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s," according to US officials quoted in the New York Times. The CIA concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaedas early days, because it is serving as a real -world laboratory for urban combat." Shortly after the London bombing last July, Chatham House released a study concluding that "there is `no doubt that the invasion of Iraq has `given a boost t o the al-Qaida network in propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,` while providing an ideal training area for terrorists"; and that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States" and is "a pillion passenger" of American policy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is extensive supporting evidence to show that as anticipated the invasion increased the risk of terror and nuclear proliferation. None of this shows that planners prefer these consequences, of course. Rather, they are not of much concern in comparison with much higher priorities that are obscure only to those who prefer what human rights researchers sometimes call "intentional ignorance." Once again we find, very easily, a way to reduce the threat of terror: stop acting in ways thatpredictablyenhance the threat. Though enhancement of the threat of terror and proliferation was anticipated, the invasion did so even in unanticipated ways. It is common to say that no WMD were found in Iraq after exhaustive search. That is not quite accurate, however. There were stores of WMD in Iraq: namely, those produced in the 1980s, thanks to aid provided by the US and Britain, along with others. These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, who were dismantling the

weapons. But the inspectors were dismissed by the invaders and the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors nevertheless continued to carry out their work with satellite imagery. They discovered sophisticated massive looting of these installations in over 100 sites, including equipment for producing solid and liquid propellant missiles, biotoxins and other materials usable for chemical and biological weapons, and high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear and chemical weapons and missiles. A Jordanian journalist was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border that after US-UK forces took over, radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing to Jordan, destination unknown. The ironies are almost inexpressible. The official justification for the US-UK invasion was to prevent the use of WMD that did not exist. The invasion provided the terrorists who had been mobilized by the US and its allies with the means to develop WMD namely, equipment they had provided to Saddam, caring nothing about the terrible crimes they later invoked to whip up support for the invasion. It is as if Iran were now making nuclear weapons using fissionable materials provided by the US to Iran under the Shah which may indeed be happening. Programs to recover and secure such materials were having considerable succe ss in the 90s, but like the war on terror, these programs fell victim to Bush administration priorities as they dedicated their energy and resources to invading Iraq. Elsewhere in the Mideast too terror is regarded as secondary to ensuring that the region is under control. Another illustration is Bushs imposition of new sanctions on Syria in May 2004, implementing the Syria Accountability Act passed by Congress a few months earlier. Syria is on the official list of states sponsoring terrorism, despite Washingtons acknowledgment that Syria has not been implicated in terrorist acts for many years and has been highly cooperative in providing important intelligence to Washington on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. The gravity of Washingtons concern over Syrias links to terror was revealed by President Clinton when he offered to remove Syria from the list of states spon soring terror if it agreed to US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on recovering its conquered territory, it remained on the list. Implementation of the Syria Accountability Act deprived the US of an important source of information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept US-

OFAC, Office of Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned informed Congress that of its 120 employees, four were assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen were occupied with enforcing the embargo against Cuba. From
Israeli demands. Turning to another domain, the Treasury Department has a bureau ( the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a central component of the "war on terror." In April 2004, OFAC 1990 to 2003 there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. The revelations received the silent treatment in the US media, elsewhere as well to my knowledge. Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the "war on

basic reasons were explained in internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years. State the "very existence" of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere, much like Irans crime of successful defiance in 1979, or Syrias rejection of Clintons demands. Punishment of the population was regarded as fully legitimate, we learn from internal documents. "The Cuban people [are] responsible for the regime," the Eisenhower State Department decided, so that the US has the right to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation, later escalated to direct terror by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castros departure as a
terror"? The Department planners warned that result of the "rising discomfort among hungry Cubans." The basic thinking was summarized by State Department official Lester Mallory: Castro would be removed "through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship so every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba in order to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government." When Cuba was in dire straits after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, at the initiative of liberal Democrats. The author of the 1992 measures to tighten the blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to wreak

All of this continues until the present moment. The Kennedy administration was also deeply concerned about the threat of Cuban successful development, which might be a model for others. But even apart from these standard concerns, successful defiance in itself is intolerable, ranked far higher as a priority than combating
havoc in Cuba" (Representative Robert Torricelli). terror. These are just further illustrations of principles that are well-established, internally rational, clear enough to the victims, but scarcely perceptible in the intellectual world of the agents.

Finally, just as policy makers rely on the discourse of existential threat of terrorism to justify genocide and bad policy, the neg will use existential risk as a reason to vote against us. Reject the try or die logic at the heart of their argument and in the War on Terror. Counter-terrorists and the neg distort rational risk analysis by relying on high-magnitude impacts based on decontextualized internal-link chains. Kessler 8 [Oliver Kessler, Sociology at University of Bielefeld, From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of
Security Politics Alternatives 33 (2008), 211-232]

If the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest degree of improb- ability becomes irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity.^o The
mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If

one factor of the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk manage- ment as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under
the historical con- dition of bipolarity, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deter- rence model collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with logical probability theory, the

logic of catastro- phe

does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncer- tainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophies. In particular, cata- strophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major impli- cations for the world polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has
consequences for the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since catastrophes hap- pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of

terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond "rationality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the responsibility to provide securityas long as they at least try to pre- empt an attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as
catastro- phe in various commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measuring dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" cur- rency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main prob- lem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact that we

do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the
"tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment is, however, that even the most absurd

scenarios can gain plausibility. By construct- ing a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility. "54 This so-called Oth- ello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very begin- ning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist
network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden.

As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This sentence
indicates that under the condition of genuine uncer- tainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty.

TERROR LIST BAD

Us v. Them
Placing Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism regards them as evil and expands the War on Terror Chomsky 2006 professor of language and linguistics at MIT
(Noam Chomsky, The Terrorist in the Mirror, Amnesty International Annual Lecture, Counterpunch, January 24, 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/24/the-terrorist-inthe-mirror/) Suppose, then, that we accept these simple guidelines. Lets turn to the "War on Terror." Since facts matter, it matters that the War was not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier. They came into office declaring that their foreign policy would confront what the President called "the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz). The campaign was directed to a particularly virulent form of the plague: state-directed international terrorism. The main focus was Central America and the Middle East, but it reached to southern Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond. A second fact is that the
war was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. The civilian component of the re-declared War on Terror is led by John Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all counterterror operations. As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on director of the major operation of the first War on Terror, the contra war against Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. Ill return to some of his tasks. The military com ponent of the redeclared War led by Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagans special representative to the Middle East. There, his main task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the war with Iran. The official purpose, not concealed, was Washingtons responsibility to aid American exporters and "the strikingly unanimous view" of Washington and its allies Britain and Saudi Arabia that "whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his countrys stability than did those who have suffered his repression" New York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell, describing Washingtons judgment as George Bush I authorized Saddam to crush the Shiite rebellion in 1991, which probably would have overthrown the tyrant. Saddam is at last on trial for his crimes. The first trial, now underway, is for crimes he committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an important year in US-Iraq relations. It was in 1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terror so that aid could flow to his friend in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited Baghdad to confirm the arrangements. Judging by reports and commentary, it would be impolite to mention any of these facts, let alone to suggest that some others might be standing alongside Saddam before the bar of justice. Removing Saddam

from the list of states supporting terrorism left a gap. It was at once filled by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US terrorist wars against Cuba from 1961 had just peaked,
including events that would be on the front pages right now in societies that valued their freedom, to which Ill briefly return. Again,

that tells us something about the real elite attitudes towards the plague of the modern age.

Us-them dichotomy that justifies complete extermination of populations. Denike, 8, associate professor of political theory at Dalhousie University with a PHD in social and political thought (Margaret, spring 2008, The Human Rights of Others:
Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and "Just Causes" for the "War on Terror", Hypatia, Project Muse)
The discourses of terrorism usher in the "uncanny return of the monster," that is, of the figure that Michel Foucault once traced among the members of the West's "abnormals" (cited in Puar and Rai 2002, 117) to instantiate the institutional regimes of power by taking hold of their bodies and minds, and talking incessantly, "officially" about them. The

terrorist, and its victims, are among what Puar and Rai call the "hypervisible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war," constructed, as Western patriarchy's monsters always have been, through tropes of deviance and destructive sexual perversity relayed and reiterated in dominant media representations of "the enemy" or the other. These figures are mobilized by modes of power that entail quarantining, correction, and expulsion: we see through them processes of
"quarantining a racialized and sexualized other, even as Western norms of the civilized subject provide the framework through which these very same others become subjects to be corrected" (117).

They are readily marked scapegoatsto use Rene Girard's notion of the "sacrificial economy" that underlies cycles of violence and vengeance against minorities: as the targets of sacrifice and persecution they are typically visible as familiar or

similar to "us," yet somehow different, "poorly integrated minorities" (1986, 39); they are those who, by virtue of their
differences (be they ethnic, religious, racial, or in ability) exist at the margins of dominant social groups, those cast as hidden and invisible among us, imperative to expose. Indeed,

they are more often than not the very individuals and groups that are most in need of legislated human rights or substantive equality protections and guarantees because of the likelihood that they will be madethrough racial profiling, detentions, torture, or deportationto appease the collective anguish, as, for instance, we see being done with Muslim immigrants to atone for the tragedy of September 11. In its mythically demonized, racialized
proportionas a subject and object of regimes of powerthe (invariably male) "terrorist" has emerged from the darkness of subterranean caves and subaltern scenes where mythic monsters are made, arising from the smoke and ash of the random death and destruction [End Page 106] of the fallen towers. Constituted at the interstices of institutional power and knowledge, the "terrorist" has taken on material form and discernible face, a literal and figurative embodiment of evil, as the enemy of civilization as we know it. And with this figure comes the terrorist act or terrorism in generalwhich, thanks to the hyperbole of the tales told about him, has come to be defined domestically and internationally, however contentiously, as a mode of criminality that stands above and beyond all other crimes, however much it looks just like them and is typically indistinguishable from the composite acts of suicide, murder, kidnapping, and hijacking that have long been familiar to us. This catastrophizing is facilitated, in part, by the incessant replaying of the scenes of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, and its effect of adding to the death toll at each repetition, compounding the scope of the destruction and its human cost. Some commentators have gone so far as to make September 11 tantamount to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, as we find, for example, in Ruth Wedgwood's speculation of how much higher the death toll would have been were the buildings not evacuated, such as to render "Al Queda's commitment to catastrophic terrorism . . . almost genocidal, seeking to annihilate thousands in a flash," and Osama bin Laden's fatwa in 1988 "a moral nihilism without parallel since the doctrines of the Nazis" (2004, 110). This talk of terrorists is the stuff that myths are made of: conjured through what is at once the fearmongering and consoling rhetoric of the self-righteous tough talk of just war, and circulated through countless daily media representations of the few acts actually attributed to a small handful of individuals.20 The terrorist is a material repository of fear and loathing, the infidel (as President Bush has brazenly named him); he is the mythic figure of evil incarnate, a device against which the sovereignty of the United States through its promise to preempt its threat and defend itself against its evil has reasserted itself, and its identifying values (of freedom and democracy), reinforcing its borders and expunging its potential allies. Such is the dynamic reinforced by the National Security Strategy of the United States, which, after 9/11 emerged as a post-facto justification of its "war on terror" and on the "tyrannies" or

and the pride and glory of the "rogue regimes," the strategy couples the language of self-defense against these ever-conniving and sinister enemies with the promise of protecting the "nonnegotiable demands of dignity" of the innocents targeted and brutalized by them, which, according the 2006 strategy, include the peoples of Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma, and Zimbabwe" (Bush 2006, 2). In pitting itself against these so-called terrorist-harboring tyrannies and "despotic systems," the United States locates itself on the side of universal righteousness, championing human rights values that "transcend all nations and cultures," and principles that are "right and true for all people everywhere" (Bush 2006, 2). The mythic terrorist and the regimes [End Page 107] that harbor him is constitutive of the "justness" of this cause, the "rightness" of the authority that opposes his evil, and the "legitimacy" of the savior states that engage in war against him. These figures and this dynamic have long been familiar to the moralizing rhetoric of Western colonization that is associated, in particular, with the bloody history of the "rise of the modern state" in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass have pointed out in their elaborate genealogy of
"failed states" that allegedly cultivate it. Invoking the specter of terrorism and terrorists as the "enemy of democracy" the political and cultural preoccupation with terrorism (1996), particularly in the United States, there is a strong cultural tradition of the colonial West that longs to define, as it does with the terrorist, the savage other, such as the "dog-headed cannibals" that quickly became the name for what Christopher Columbus first described as the people he encountered on the as-yet-unvisited Caribbean islands. The

cannibalistic savage that was literally and figuratively constructed as a devourer of man, as the antithesis of human civilization, provided a moral justification for their extermination, and for the enslavement of Africans on the plantations established there (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 154).

Obscures US/Western Terrorism

The inclusion of Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list promotes a discourse that obscures direct state terrorism Jackson 2008 - Deputy Director at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the
University of Otago, former Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Honourable Secretary of the British International Studies Association from 2009-2011, editor-inchief of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and the former convener of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group (Richard Jackson, State terror, terrorism research, and knowledge politics, paper presented at the British International Studies Association (BISA), 2008, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1949/BISA-Paper-2008-JacksonFINAL.pdf?sequence=1)
There is one more ghostly outline of state terrorism within the broader field, namely, a small but growing literature on so called state sponsored terrorism. I have analysed aspects of this literature in more detail elsewhere (Jackson 2007b) . Within these texts, one of the most common narratives is that terrorist groups depend upon significant state support to survive and active sponsors provide a range of positive and permissive forms of assistance. Gus Martins popular textbook for example, suggests that the state sponsorship of terrorism frequently consists of: ideological support, financial support, military support, operational support, initiating terrorist attacks, or direct involvement in terrorist attacks (Martin 2003, p. 91). Additionally, it

is commonly argued that weak, totalitarian, or so called rogue states are predisposed to sponsoring terrorism because: [F]or aggressive regimes, state terrorism in the international domain is advantageous in several respects:
State terrorism i s inexpensive ... Even poor nations can strike at and injure a prosperous adversary... State terrorism has limited consequences . State assisters that are clever can distance themselves from culpability for a terrorist incident... and thereby escape possible repri sals or other penalties. State terrorism can be successful . Weaker states can raise the stakes beyond what a stronger adversary is willing to bear... [and] successfully destabilize an adversary through the use of a proxy movement. (Martin 2003, pp. 90 91 ; or iginal emphasis ). In fact, much of the state sponsorship literature is devoted to analysing and describing those states viewed as the main sponsors of terrorism, the groups they support, and the kinds of assistance they provide. The

state sponsors identified in the literature more often than not coincide with the U.S. State Departments annual list of state sponsors of international terrorism, which typically includes countries with which the U.S. has previously had serious conflicts, such as Iran, S yria, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq. 4 One of the most important aspects of this discourse is the way in which the key narratives still focus on non state groups and actions as primary and states as secondary sponsors and supporters. In other words, there is an implicit sense that states do not commit terrorism directly, but they may
support non state groups that do. Certainly, there is little acknowledgement that state actions such as the use of strategic bombing, particular forms of governance, repression, and counter terrorism, or the practice of torture for example, can sometimes constitute acts of terror ism. Moreover, within this literature there

is another important silence, namely, the silence on Western democratic sponsorship of non state terrorism: out of dozens of mainstream books and papers
which discussed the state sponsorship of terrorism, I found only one or two acknowledgements of U . S . sponsorship of anti Castro or Contra terrorism, British sponsorship of loyalist terrorism in Northern Ireland, Italian sponsorship of right wing terrorism, Israeli sponsorship of Christian militia terrorism in Leba non, and other such documented cases . Beyond these ghostly traces of state terror however, a discourse analysis of the field reveals that the

most notable aspect of the state terrorism discourse is its near complete absence; there is almost a total silence on the subject within most books, articles,
papers, and writings in the terrorism studies field today. In the vast majority of the more than 100 texts I examined, the terms state terrorism or state terror did not even appear, much less form the bas is for any kind of sustained analyses or discussion. This basic finding, that there is a profound silence on state terrorism within the field, is supported by a broader set of findings. Andrew Silke for example, found that only 12 or less

than two percent of articles from 1990 to 1999 in the core terrorism studies journals focused on state terrorism (Silke 2004, p. 206) , a finding that echoes Schmid and Jongmans
authoritative survey of the field which concluded that There is a conspicuous absence of liter ature that addresses itself to the much more serious problem of state terrorism (Schmid and Jongman 1988, pp. 179 80) . Similarly, it has been noted that only 12 of the 768 pages in the Encyclopaedia of World Terrorism (1997) examined state terrorism in an y form (quoted in Goodin, 2006, p. 55) . Along the same lines, an analysis of John Thakrahs popular Dictionary of Terrorism demonstrates that reference to, and discussion of, state terrorism makes up less than 8 out of 308 pages (Thakrah 2004) . Extraordina rily, Thakrahs entry on History of Terrorism does not mention a single example of state terrorism (Ibid, pp. 114 120) . My own examination of conference paper titles and

abstracts found that of

113 papers related to terrorism presented at the 2007 ISA annual convention, only one focused on any aspect of state terrorism; and of 95 papers on terrorism at the 2007 APSA annual convention, only 4 focused on aspects of state terrorism. We might also note that the wider terrorism studies field does not include s tatistics on state terrorism in any of its recognised data bases, most notably the highly influential RAND database (see Burnett and Whyte 2005, RAND 2006) . In addition to this silence on the broader subject of state terrorism, we can detect a series of other silences. In particular, there is within the terrorism literature virtually no mention or analysis of Western state terrorism, the terror of strategic bombing, the terror of democratic state torture, Western sponsorship of mostly right wing terrorist groups, Israeli state terrorism, and the terrorism of Western allies during the Cold War and the war on terror among others. In much contemporary terrorism studies publications , there is an ongoing silence on the terrorism of state sponsored death squads in Iraq, the terrorism of Western backed warlords in Afghanistan, and the state terror of Western allies such as Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt ,and the like.

Refusing to talk about terrorism as a state power provides legitimation for both state and non-state terrorism Jackson 2008 - Deputy Director at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the
University of Otago, former Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Honourable Secretary of the British International Studies Association from 2009-2011, editor-inchief of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and the former convener of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group (Richard Jackson, State terror, terrorism research, and knowledge politics, paper presented at the British International Studies Association (BISA), 2008, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1949/BISA-Paper-2008-JacksonFINAL.pdf?sequence=1)
In addition, the broader academic, social, and cultural influence of terrorism studies (through the authority and legitimacy provided by terrorism experts to the media and as policy advisers, for example), means that this restrictive viewpoint is diffused to the broader society, which in turn generates its own ideological e ffects. Specifically, the

distorted focus on non state terrorism functions to reify state perspectives and priorities, and reinforce a state centric, problem solving paradigm of politics in which terrorism is viewed as an identifiable social or individual problem in need of solving by the state, and not as a practice of state power, for example. From this perspective, it functions to maintain the legitimacy of state uses of violence and delegitimize all forms of non state violence ( which has its own ideol ogical effects and is problematic in a number of obvious ways ) . This fundamental belief in the instrumental rationality of political violence as an effective and legitimate tool of the state is open to a great many criticisms, not least that it provides the normative basis from which non state terrorist groups frequently justify their own (often well intentioned) violence (see Burke 2008, Oliverio
and Lauderdale 2005) . There is from this viewpoint an ethical imperative to try and undermine the widespread acceptance that political violence is a mostly legitimate and effective option in resolving conflict for either state or non state actors. Political violence is in fact, a moral and physical disaster in the vast majority of cases. From

an ethical normative perspective, such a restricted understanding of terrorism also functions to obscure and silence the voices and perspectives of those who live in conditions of daily terror from the random and arbitrary violence of their own governments, some of whom are supported by Western states. At the present juncture, it also
functions to silence the voices of those who experience Western policies directly, as in those tortured in the war on terror, and indirectly, as in those suffering under Western supported regimes as a form of terrorism. That is, it deflects and diverts attention from the much greater state terrorism which blights the lives of tens of millions of people around the world today. Related to these broader normative and ideological effects, the

treatment of state terrorism within the discourse the silences to position state terrorism (should it even exist within the dominant framework) as seemingly less important than non state terrorism, and as confined to the actions that states take in support of non state terrorism. This also distorts the field of
on it and the narrow construction of state sponsored terrorism also functions knowledge and political practice by suggesting that the sponsorship of Palestinian groups by Iran for example, is an infinitely more

serious and dangerous problem than the fact that millions of Colombians, Uzbeks, Zimbabweans, and so on, are daily terrorised by death squads, state torture, and serious human rights abuses. Within this discursive terrain, it can also funct ion to provide legitimacy to Western policies such as sanctions, coercive diplomacy, and pre emptive war against politically determined state sponsors of terrorism which may be terroristic themselves, and which ignore the involvement in state sponsors hip by Western states . From a political normative viewpoint, the

silence on state terrorism, and in particular the argument of many functions to furnish states with a rhetorical justification for using what may actually be terroristic forms of violence against their opponents and citizens without fear of condemnation. In effect, it provides them with greater leeway for applying terror
terrorism scholars that state actions can never be defined as terrorism, actually based forms of violence against civilian s, a leeway exploited by many states such as Israel, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, and others who try to intimidate groups with the application of massive and disproportionate state violence. From this perspective, a

discourse which occludes and obscures the very possibility of state terrorism can be considered part of the conditions that actually makes state terrorism possible. In addition, the silence on state terrorism within the field also functions to undermine the political struggle of human rights activists against the use of terror by states by disallowing the delegitimizing power and resources that come from describing state actions as terrorism. It is pertinent to note in this context
that the worlds leading states have continually reject ed any and all attempts to legally define and proscribe a category of actions which would be called state terrorism, arguing instead that such actions are already covered by other laws such as the laws of war (see Becker 2006)

Terror Talk
The terror talk the US engages in his just an irrational construct of our Cold War mentality. Goodall, 8, professor of Human Communications at Arizona State University.
(H.R. Goodall Twice Betrayed by the Truth: A Narrative About the Cultural Similarities Between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Sage journals.) And what do we find? We find that we, as American citizens, have virtually no cultural memory of the Cold War, no real appreciation of the hard political lessons of Vietnam, no recall of the domestic terrorism campaign known as the Red scare, and almost no understanding of the practical
importance of George Santayanas line, Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. For some of us, though, its like Yogi Berra once put it, its dj vu, all over again. I amand you areliving with the ways things are. And once again I have to ask: How

did things as they are ever get his way? How have we once again been betrayed by our leaders and as well by the truth? How have we arrived at this date and place in history so profoundly misled as a free people and so careless in our continuing support of a corrupt government? A government bent on prosecuting an unwinnable war that is fueled now by open sectarian violence and has spawned a well-trained insurgency and given new strength to terrorist organizations from al-Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah? An
administration whose mismanagement of foreign policy and public diplomacy has served to insure the continuing spread of radical fundamentalism worldwide? I ask you: In the war of ideas, have we ever had a time in our history when we needed a President of the United States to be articulate, sensitive to intercultural communication differences, aware of the nuances of language? Instead we have a grand master of ineloquence, a man who said seriously the following words in a public speech designed to rally support for his position on Iraq: We face an enemy that has an ideology. They believe things. The best way to describe their ideology is to relate to you the fact that they think the opposite of the way we think. 2 Who was he speaking aboutal-Qaeda? Or was it the Democrats? Islamic fascists? Or maybe it was those who sponsor stem-cell research? Or perhaps it was those of us who dare to speak out against this man and his failed policies? And how did we end up as passive observers to scene after scene of political chicanery at the highest levels of government, an accumulation of lies, deceits, cover-ups, focused wrongness, and foolish loyalty that sees a sitting Secretary of Defense compare dissent against the way things are with Neville Chamberlains appeasement of the Nazis (Rumsfeld, 2006)? Where is our Edward R. Murrow? Where is the woman or man who will risk a journalistic career in the service of truth?3 Where, in this fearful silence that we each day endure is someoneanyonewho will echo the following historic Cold War words: We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We

must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular. And so good night, and good luck
(Murrow, 1954).

This construct is violent and justifies endless wars Goodall, 8, professor of Human Communications at Arizona State University.
(H.R. Goodall Twice Betrayed by the Truth: A Narrative About the Cultural Similarities Between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Sage journals.)
Whether we like it or not, we are all in this war, whatever adjectives we want to use when we name it. One distinction for this war must be made, however, so that we more fully understand the complexities we face. As was also true with Vietnam,

there are really two wars going on in our post 9/11 world. The first one, the war that President Bush announced after 9/11, is the ill-named and highly ambiguous war on terror. This war is, as I have previously argued, more a war waged between those currently in power in our government who campaign hard to raise our fears and yet have done preciously little to make us safer and our increasingly anxious and politically divided public (See Goodall,

2006b). This war on terror is the war that the 9/11 Commission produced 41 recommendations to address, most of which have not been carried out. This is the war that the Department of Homeland Security was urgently created to combat yet as of this writing has done little more than administer grants that have yet to produce either policies or procedures capable of protecting us from terrorist acts large or small. This is, then, the real war being waged at home. The second meaning of the current war is associated with the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. This war

is being waged not for the reasons that were officially givenfor example, to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction but for reasons that were hidden, such as the protection of our oil supply. This is the war that
has turned the tide of public opinion worldwide against the United States and its allies, and this is the war that has spawned both a new civil war in Iraq and old suspicions about the real aims of U.S. foreign policy throughout the world. This war on terror is, then, the war being waged abroad. At least for the time being. For

the time being meaning at least until the violent worldwide social movement waged under the banner of fundamentalist jihad and fueled by (take your pick) anti-globalization, poverty, disease, lack of economic opportunity, religious fanaticism, fear of Western influences, hatred of U.S. power, fear of the idea of democracy for its replacement of religious rule by secular rule, issues of youth identity that are tied to a strong ideological hunger, etc., etc., etc., coalesce in the West as they have in the Middle East, Indonesia, parts of Africa, parts of Asia, and, no doubt by the time you read this article, elsewhere.

Nationalist Discourse
The terror list enforces a U.S. nationalistic discourse that establishes a monopoly on violence Brunn 2004
(Stanley D. Brunn, 11 September and its Aftermath: the Geopolitics of Terror, 2004, Frank Cass Publishers, pg. 138-139, As of 1998, the United States designated seven countries as sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, and since then Afghanistan would probably have made the list as well.
These are states that, according to the US government, have not responded to economic sanctions or military reprisals to relinquish their support of terrorism as defined by US leaders. How

states create and promote discourses of terrorism is an important matter. Neil Smith has commented on how the events of 11 September 11 have been naturalized to suit a national agenda: The need to nationalize September 11 arose from the need to justify war. Nationalism is the discourse of war under modern capitalism, in which the national state has cornered a monopoly on violence. Part of
the affront of September 11 is that is challenged this state monopoly on violence, indeed that is precisely the traditional definition of terrorism non-state-organized violence. The fraud of the war against terrorism is that the

US government has arrogated to itself the right to decide who does not count as a terrorist. The definition of terrorism is passed off in universalist terms while its operative demarcation is enemy of the United States.

Hypocrisy
Cubas place on the list masks a long history of US violence against it violence that by the lists own standards should only be understood as anti -Cuban terrorism. Bolender, research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 13 *Keith, The Terrorist List, and
Terrorism as Practiced Against Cuba, April 22nd, http://www.coha.org/22355/] On an emotional level, Havana

has long drawn attention to the double standard that permits Washington to label others as a terrorist state, all the while ignoring its own culpability in the multiple acts of terror that have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Cuban civilians. This relatively unreported history stretches back to the early months following Castros victory over the Batista regime, when the United States was determined to eliminate the Cuban revolution not only
through economic and political means, but with violence. Operation Mongoose, a program developed by the State Department under the overarching Cuba Project, coordinated terrorist operations from the period following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in

April 1961 to the October missile crisis 18 months later. During this time State Department officials provided logistical and material support to violent anti-revolutionary groups carrying out terrorist activities on the island. The terrors included torturing and murdering students who were teaching farmers to read and write, blowing up shoppers at Havanas busiest department stores, bombing sugar cane plantations and tobacco fields, killing Cuban fishermen and the innumerable attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other top government officials. [3] Historian Arthur Schlesinger reported in his biography of Robert Kennedy that Operation Mongoose was formulated under the Kennedy administration to bring the terrors of the earth to the Cuban people. [4] It has been called one of the worst cases of state sponsored terrorism of the 20th century. [5] When Operation Mongoose ended, violent anti-Castro groups based in South Florida, such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7, took over operations, often with the tacit approval and knowledge of local and federal authorities. In 1971, the village of Boca De Sam on the northeast coast of Cuba was attacked, leaving two civilians dead and a dozen more injured. Alpha 66 continues to claim credit for this act of terrorism on their website. [6] A series of biological agents were purportedly introduced into Cuba in the 1970s, harming a number of plants and animals. These biological attacks included an outbreak of swine fever that killed a half-million pigs. Perhaps the worst case was the1981 epidemic of Dengue 2, totally unheard of in Cuba prior to this period. More than 300,000 people were affected within a six-month period. An estimated 102 children died as a result of the disease. Cuban-American Eduardo Arocena, former member of Omega 7, testified in 1984 that he travelled to Cuba in 1980 to introduce some germs into the country to start the chemical war, as reported by The New York Times. [7] One of them was Dengue 2. Havana and Varadero tourist facilities were targeted during a 1997 bombing campaign, resulting in the death of Italian-Canadian businessman Fabio di Celmo
when a bomb exploded in the lobby of the Hotel Copacabana. Dozens were injured before the explosions ended with the arrests of a group of Salvadorians who later testified they were being paid to plant the bombs. Claiming

responsibility for the campaign was Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-American long known for his violent actions against the Castro regime. He bragged to a
The New York Times reporter that the intent of the bombings was to discourage tourists from visiting the island just as Cuba was opening up the industry following the collapse of the Soviet Union. [8] In addition

to the tourist attacks, former CIA agent, Posada Carriles, is infamously known for his alleged masterminding of the bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 in October 1976, killing all 73 on board. The incident remains the second worst act of air terrorism in the Americas, exceeded only by the attacks on 9/11. Evidence points to
the involvement of Posada Carriles and fellow Cuban Orlando Bosch with organizing the crime, based on extensive U.S. documentation. [9] Bosch passed away in his Florida residence a few years ago, while Posada

Carriles continues to live unfettered in Miami, despite requests for his extradition from the Cuban and Venezuelan governments. Cubas demands for Posada Carriles to be brought to justice in part rest on former President George

Bush Jr.s own statement in 2003, Any person, organization, or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and equally guilty of terrorist crimes. [10] The Cuban government was motivated by such acts of terrorism to send intelligence officers to Florida
to infiltrate violent anti-revolutionary organizations. The effort led to the arrest and conviction of five Cuban nationals in 1998 on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage. Known as the Cuban Five, the release of these agents, who were attempting to prevent further terrorist attacks on their country, continues to be a high priority with Havana and adds another layer of complexity to rapprochement between the two countries. Those close to the Cuban Five episode have always been troubled by the probity of the whole affair and whether the entire trial was fixed by U.S. legal authorities as well as intelligence officials.

SOLVENCY

Solvency Discourse Focus Key

The role of discourse cannot be underemphasized scholars can produce change through evaluation of security frames Lutjens 6, chair of California state university womens studies department
(Sheryl L., September, Introduction: Cuba and the Security Frame, pg. 5-6, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 5, Cuba and the Security Frame, JSTOR) 06). Carlos Alzugaray addresses the problematic of public diplomacy from a broader perspective. The role of academics in defining and realizing foreign policy may be more consequential than has been traditionally recognized, and, as Alzugaray explains, the nonstate actors that have become an impor tant part of global politics may be especially critical for the normalization of Cuban-U.S. relations. Given the policy predicaments of the 2000s, the real and potential responsibility and influence of academics and intellectu als merit more attention. Despite the irrationalities of current U.S.-Cuba policy, it has been hard to challenge the security frame that maintains it. Looking at the issues of academic relations from the perspective of the homeland security state, my own essay demonstrates how power has been exercised against educational exchange and with what results. Where national insecurities drive a Cuba policy bent on eliminating ongoing academic relationships and the under standing they promote, there may still be ways to defend the rights and responsibilities associated with education and the production of knowledge in a globalized world. If the Cuba policy of the Bush administration is neither dramatically new nor simply old, an understanding of the official frame of U.S. national secu rity in the post-9/11 world may benefit from a historical look at Cuba's foreign policy in a different era. Isaac Saney examines the historical record,
memories, and meanings of Cuba's internationalist foreign policy during the cold war, focusing specifically on military assistance to Angola and the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Describing Cuba's internationalist record and with the objective of showing the agency of a Third World state with little other than the moral motivation to send more than 300,000 vol unteers to Angola (2,000 Cubans died there), Saney

assesses Cuba's pres ence in Angola from 1975 through 1991, including the contributions of the battle of Cuito Cuan avale to the end of apartheid in South Africa and the independence of Namibia. Challenging the silences surrounding Cuba's contributions to southern African politics, Saney suggests that distinct national narratives produce quite different histories. Recognizing the dis cursive framing of foreign policy, whether in the past or today, may well be the first step in rescuing motives of human security from the ravages of pre emptive wars and imperial designs.

It is status quo discourses the justify and perpetuate state violence only counter- discourse effectively dismantles the US exceptionalism. The aff creates a new tool for political engagement Jackson 2008 - Deputy Director at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the
University of Otago, former Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Honourable Secretary of the
British International Studies Association from 2009-2011, editor-in-chief of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and the former convener of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group (Richard Jackson, State terror, terrorism research, and knowledge politics, paper presented at the British International Studies Association (BISA), 2008, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1949/BISA-Paper-2008-JacksonFINAL.pdf?sequence=1)

The silence on state terrorism has another political effect, namely, the way in which it has functioned, and continues to function, to distract from and deny the long history of Western involvement in terrorism, thereby constructing Western foreign policy as essentially benign rather than aimed at

reifying existing structures of power and domination in the international system, for example. That is, by preventing the effective criticism of particular Western policies it works to maintain the dangerous myth of Western exceptionalism. This sense of exceptionalism and the supportive discourse of terrorism studies permits Western states and their allies to pursue a range of discrete political projects and partisan interests aimed at maintaining international dominance. For example, by reinforcing the notion that non state
terrorism is a much greater threat and problem than state terrorism and by obscuring the ways in which counter terrorism can

the discourse functions to legitimise the current war on terror and its associated policies of military intervention, extraordinary rendition, reinforcement of the national security state, and the like. More specifically, the discourse can provide legitimacy to broader counter
morph into state terrorism, insurgency or counter terrorism programmes where the actual aims lie in the maintenance of a particular political economic order such as is occurring in Colombia at present (see Stokes 2006) . Importantly, the

silence on state terrorism also functions to delegitimise all forms of violent counter hegemonic or revolutionary struggle (by maintaining the notion that state violence is automatically legitimate and all non state violence is inherently illegitimate), thereby maintaining the liberal international order and many oppressive international power structures (see also Duffield 2001) . Lastly, the discourse can be used to
selectively justify particular projects of regime change, 14 economic sanctions, military base expansion, military occupation, military assistance for strategic partners, and the isolation of disapproved political movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah. In

the end, the discourse functions to permit the reification and extension of state hegemony both internationally and domestically, and perhaps more importantly, the belief in the instrumental rationality of violence as an effective tool of politics. Despite the intentions of terrorism scholars therefore, who may feel that
they engage in objective academic analysis of a clearly defined phenomenon, the discourse actually serves a number of distinctly political purposes and has several important ideological consequences for society.

Solvency Scholarly Recognition Key

Scholarly recognition of the problems with the terror list key to deconstructing the WOT and cold war mentality Chomsky 1991 professor of language and linguistics at MIT
(Noam Chomsky, International Terrorism: Image and Reality, Western State Terrorism, December 1991, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.html) This review of state-directed international terrorism suffers from a serious flaw: it has adhered to
naive literalism and is thus irrelevant to contemporary debate over the plague of the modern age. The review is, furthermore, very far from comprehensive. It barely scratches the surface even for Central America and the Middle East, and the plague is by no means limited to these regions. But it does suffice to raise a few questions. One stands out particularly:

how is it possible for scholars and the media to maintain the thesis that the plague of the modern age is traceable to the Soviet-based "worldwide terror network aimed at the destabilization of Western democratic society?" How is it possible to identify Iran, Libya, the PLO, Cuba, and other official enemies as the leading practitioners of international terrorism? The answers are not difficult to find. We must simply abandon the literal approach and recognize that terrorist acts fall within the canon only when conducted by official enemies. When the US and its clients are the agents, they are acts of retaliation and self-defense in
the service of democracy and human rights. Then all becomes clear.

AT: Plan is only symbolic

The terror designation is entirely rhetorical removing them from the list is not just symbolic however. Changing the rhetorical designation changes policy Kaplan, 4/13- Author and Writer for the Huffington post (Isabel Kaplan, Cuba and the State
Sponsors of Terrorism List, 04/23/2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/isabel-kaplan/cubastate-sponsors-of-terrorism-list_b_3136419.html)//Modermatt
The first State Sponsors of Terrorism List was issued in 1979, and Cuba was added in 1982 due to its support of terrorist groups like the FARC and ETA. But, according to last year's report, although current and former members of ETA reside in Cuba, "Reports suggested that the Cuban government was trying to distance itself from ETA members living on the island by employing tactics such as not providing services including travel documents to some of them." Further, "There

was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training for either ETA or the FARC." The
report also attested: "The Cuban government continued to permit fugitives wanted in the United States to reside in Cuba and also provided support such as housing, food ration books, and medical care for these individuals." But Cuba

has been increasingly cooperative with the United States. See, for example, the Florida couple who, after losing custody,
kidnapped their children and fled to Cuba just two weeks ago: Cuba refused to shelter these criminals, and Cuban authorities cooperated swiftly and eagerly with U.S. officials in order to return them to the United States for trial. And just last week, after

the Boston Marathon bombing, Cuban Foreign Ministry official Josefina Vidal expressed "the most heartfelt condolences of the people and government of Cuba to the people and government of the United States, particularly those directly affected by this tragedy." Vidal said Cuba "rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism, in any place, under any circumstance, and with whatever motivation." What's more, Fidel Castro himself recently issued a public condemnation and warning to Kim Jong Un and North Korea, warning Kim not to take any actions against the United States. Castro's been there, done that, and learned from the experience. But Cuba is listed as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, while North Korea is not on the list at all. Kerry ended his 2009 op-ed with a call to action: "Today, we have a choice: seek solace in old rhetoric , ignore
change and

resist it, or mold it and channel it into a new policy to help achieve our goals .

AT: Reps/Discourse Dont Matter

U.S. representations of Latin America shape foreign policy NAFTA proves Skonieczny 2001 assistant professor of international relations at San Francisco State
University (Amy Skonieczny, Constructing NAFTA: Myth, Representation, and the Discursive Construction of U.S. Foreign Policy, International Studies Quarterly, 2001, accessed through Wiley Online Library)
The competing NAFTA discourses consisted of representational elements that gave additional meaning to the trade accord beyond conventional understandings of trade as the lowering of tariffs or the establishment of a regional trade block. NAFTA acquired

national significance and importance through its public representation as an extension of the American Dream and tool of U.S. leadership. A discourse is established through representational elements that consist of certain phrases, visual images, myths, analogies, and metaphors ~ Hall, 1997 ! . They are then circulated and through this circulation become symbols of a larger discursive construction that comes to define the thing , in this case, NAFTA, in a very real and formidable manner. Therefore, meaning is produced and assigned through language that constructs a cluster of ideas, images and practices @ that # provide ways of talking about forms of knowledge and conduct associated with a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society ~ Hall, 1997:6 ! . These clusters of ideas, or political symbols, gain currency based on the associations they evoke. By touching cultural values
and myths, symbols evoke an attitude, a set of impressions or a pattern of events associated through time, through space, through logic or through imagination with the symbol ~ Edelman, 1964:6 ! . It is then possible for competing representations to evoke contesting meanings and for some discourses to acquire dominance over others based on the power of these associations. A

discursive approach to foreign policy analysis implies that language has a productive power and
is not simply a conduit of information as assumed in cognitive psychology. 9 Instead, language consists of signifiers that do not necessarily refer back to signifieds with fixed meaning, but can refer to other signifiers thereby constructing a web of symbols that allows the ever expanding circulation of possible meanings ~ Doty, 1993 ! . This understanding has radical implications for foreign policy analysis, as the

locus of power is not always in the dominant players involved in policymaking or in the policy decision itself, but in the discourses that impose meaning and construct possible policy actions. Discursive representations of policy are constrained and enabled by how well they fit
within the cultural system and the already established images of a given society ~ Doty, 1993 ! . If indeed the anti-NAFTA campaign established its arguments early on and they fit within the already established representations of Mexico, that is, the negative image, then each subsequent statement on the trade accord had to fit within this representation. Even

the pro-NAFTA arguments were constrained by these representations, so consequently the debate on NAFTA was limited to a relatively small set of possible issues such as jobs, environment, wages, and immigration. Myths that
connected the dull trade accord to passionate American cultural values formed a central component of the NAFTA discourses. This is not surprising given that myths

are important in forming and solidifying a national identity and are often utilized and deployed by policy-makers to generate support and elevate the national importance of policy. Myths also help produce a common interpretation of the world in a situation where many individuals
possess little information ~ Lotz, 1997:73 ! . Therefore, myths can assist policymakers in explaining to the public why an abstract policy, or one whose outcome may be unknown, is important and worthy of support. Often deployed by policymakers when introducing a policy to the public, myths are used to incorporate the familiar and accepted with the new and questionable ~ Kenworthy, 1995 ! .

AT: Terrorists irrational

Terrorists are not irrational actors acts of violence are triggered by larger factors of oppression Malone, 2008 President of Canadas International Development Research Centre
(David Malone, Terrorism: The United Nations and the Search for Shared Solutions, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 9/30/2008, accessed through Taylor & Francis)
These discussions have served to generate a body of understanding within the United Nations system, and outside, concerning the nature and effects of terrorism. It is common ground that no political goal or cause justifies intentionally at tacking civilians. Terrorism can never be justified or excused (International Peace Academy, 2003a, p. 3). Similarly, commentators and experts agree that the causes of terrorism are difficult to pinpoint. The discussions facilitated by IPA suggest, however, that terrorism

is triggered by a range of factors, including: in equalities of power creating incentives for recourse to asymmetrical warfare tac tics and creating resentment of foreign intervention or repression; failures of state capacity and control; non-democratic, illegitimate or corrupt government; alienation of social groups by the state; rapid modernization or the experience of social injustice or discrimination; and a culture of
violence and extremist ideology and leadership. The discussions also suggest that, contrary to widely held belief, there is only a weak and indirect relationship between poverty and terrorism. At the individual level, terrorists are generally not drawn from the poorest segments of their societies. Typically, they are at average or above average levels in terms of education and socio-economic background. However, poverty has frequently been used as justification for social revolutionary terrorists, who may claim to represent the poor and marginalized without being poor themselves. Perceptions of marginalization and exclusion require long-term initiatives in which the UN should have a key role. Eradicating

terrorism requires new policies toward nontraditional security threats, including finding solutions to economic, environmental and social problems that extremists manipulate and exploit. Equally, these discussions indicate that terrorists are not insane or irrational actors . Symptoms of psychopathology are not common among terrorists. Neither do suicide terrorists, as individuals, possess the typical risk factors of suicide. There is no common personality profile that characterizes most terrorists, who appear to be relatively normal individuals. Alienation breeds terrorists who are isolated. The challenge is how to engage them. One way is to encourage debate within and between open societies. This volume will play an important role in improving our understanding of the psychological aspects of terrorism and in
encouraging the exchange of information on this phenomenon, which open societies must engage in if they are to understand the complexities of engaging terrorists.

AT: CASE OFFENSE

AT: Cuba is a threat

The designation is totally unwarranted- Cuba is not a threat BBC 2013
[BBC Monitoring Americas, Cuban ministry condemns USA's policies, BBC Worldwide Limited, June 3 2013, http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1357496097?accountid=14667] In a statement issued on Thursday, the Ministry says that once again, the shameful decision was taken in deliberate disregard of truth and ignoring the large consensus and expressed claim by numerous sectors of US society and the international community for the end of such injustice. The

only objective of this discredited practice against Cuba is that of trying to justify the upholding of the US blockade, a failed policy condemned by the whole world. It
also aims at pleasing a decreasing and small anti-Cuba people group that tries to underpin a policy that has no support and that does not even represent the national interests of the United States, or the majority of the US population, or the Cuban migrants living in that country, the statements points out. The Cuban ministry stresses that the

United States government insists in this arbitrary and unilateral designation despite the total collapse of ridiculous accusations and weak arguments, which Washington has traditionally used over the past years as pretexts with this aim, such as the
presence in Cuba of fugitives of US justice, none of whom has been accused of terrorism, by the way, points out the ministry. The United States also alleges that Cuba protects ETA Basque militants, in full disregard of the fact that such aspect was related to a request by the governments involved in that issue. They also say that Colombian guerrilla members are living in Cuba, which is an absurd accusation because Cuba

has been a warrantor country of the Colombian peace process since 2011. The Cuban Foreign Ministry notes that the island's territory has never been used and will never be used to harbor terrorists of any origin, or to organize, finance or perpetrate terrorist acts against any country of the world, including the United States. The Cuban government rejects and unmistakably condemns all acts of terrorism in any place, under any circumstances and whatever motivations may be alleged, stressed the Ministry. On the contrary, the government of the United States resorts to state terrorism as a weapon against the countries that defy US interests, and this way they kill the civil population. They have used drones to carry out extra-judicial executions of alleged terrorists, including US citizens, as a result of these actions hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed, the Cuban Foreign Ministry points out. The United States has historically harbored terrorists and confessed assassins of Cuban origin, such as Luis
Posada Carriles, who masterminded the first terrorist attack against a civil airliner in the Western Hemisphere, which caused the explosion in mid air of a Cubana jetliner off the coasts of Barbados on October 6, 1976. The action resulted in the death of all 73 people on board, including the Cuban juvenile fencing team. Posada Carriles is freely living in Miami, while Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez remain unfairly incarcerated in US jails for having fought terrorism in the United States, since they were accused of crimes they never committed, the statement stressed. For decades now, Cuba

has suffered the consequences of terrorist acts organized, financed and launched from US territory, which
have resulted in 3 thousand 478 people killed and 2 thousand 99 mutilated. The Cuban government does not recognize the US government to have the slightest moral authority to judge Cuba. Since 2002, the

Cuban government has proposed the US administration the adoption of a bilateral accord to fight terrorism; the proposal was reiterated in 2012 with no response from Washington. The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly rejects
the use of a sensitive issue, such as international terrorism with political aims and demands the end of such shameful designation, which offends the Cuban people, since its only objective is trying to justify at any cost the anachronistic and cruel blockade against Cuba, while such behavior discredits the government of the United States, the statement concludes. (RHC)

Cuba isnt a threat They are only on the list to ensure US coercive intrusions in their policies Payne 11 [John David Payne, PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT (Fighting for Control:
State-Sponsored Terrorism as Foreign Policy in Cuba and Libya, 1959-2010, September 2011)]
From 1994 to the present, State Department reports have noticed no material support for terrorism, but Cuba remains on the list of state sponsors. Only the most minimal support for terrorism has been alleged: safe haven for suspected or indicted terrorists, ties to other state sponsors of terrorism, rhetoric, and lack of cooperation with the United States. Cuba

remains on the list of State Sponsors of Terror, even though it is no longer a significant sponsor of foreign terrorist groups, because it gives the United States leverage on other issues. Two other legislative

measures during this time period expanded American sanctions against Castros Cuba. In 1992, Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act. In 1996 Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act. Neither of these were directly aimed at Cuban sponsorship of terrorism, which had essentially ended. In the last decade, there have been some relaxations of the American sanctions regime. In 2000, Congress passed the
Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act, which relaxed US sanctions against Cuba. In 2009, the US relaxed the travel ban. And the OAS reinstated Cuba as a member. These changes should not have been expected to bring a resurgence in Cuban sponsorship for terrorism, as happened in the late 1970s. Cuba may still be motivated to pursue conflict, and is still constrained from pursuing it directly, but the potential for accountability is too good. Even through the United State can no threaten an intolerable economic sanction, renewed trade relationships would offer an enormous benefit.

Additionally, the United States has proved, with numerous post-Cold War military interventions, to be very capable of regime change- if not of skillful management of occupied states afterward. During the administration of President George W. Bush, two regimes which supported terrorism to one degree or another were depose, making future US interventions against state sponsors of terrorism a more credible possibility. Given Cubas close proximity to the United States, regime change remains an option if Cuba were to give the US a good reason .

AT: War on Terror Good

This doesnt answer the aff. Cubas false designation as a terror threat makes the entire War on Terror ring hollow. Plan is key to ethical statescraft and better international efforts Kayyen 13 [Juliette Kayyem 13-the national security and foreign policy columnist for the Boston Globe and serves on the
faculty at Harvards Kennedy School of Government. She most recently served for President Obama as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.( Diluting the terror watch lists, 4/29/13. http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/04/28/making-terror-lists-matter-cuba-not-state-sponsorterrorism/X2NW0rfYm5A2eJT5VZEuHI/story.html)//Modermatt] SINCE THE attacks on the Boston Marathon, and the investigation of the Tsarnaev brothers, there has been much discussion about terror watch lists. When Russian intelligence officials warned both the FBI and CIA that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a potential threat, he was put on a massive list known as TIDE. The initial FBI investigation found nothing to warrant his entry into more exclusive, and therefore more intrusive, groupings such as the No Fly List or the Selectee List. It seems more confusing than it ought to be and not, it appears, perfectly synched, as each intelligence agency works under different standards and legal guidelines. This week, another terrorism watch list will be announced, known as the state sponsors of terrorism list. It is a formal designation that began in December 1979 and serves as the State Departments ranking of countries that repeatedly provide . . . support for acts of international terrorism. Nations currently on the list include Iran, Sudan, and Syria. It also includes Cuba. Whatever

historical complaints or ideological rifts the United States may have with its close neighbor, Cuba should be off the state sponsor list. It is time to take our terror designations seriously . The state sponsor list is not just name-calling, though there is an element of shaming in the public condemnation. Countries are subject to strict sanctions, including a ban on arms-related sales, controls over commercial exports, and prohibitions of economic assistance. Cuba seems to be on the list because, as previous State Department assessments have determined, it supports revolutionary movements in Latin America and gives direct support in terms of training and arms to guerrilla groups and, note the turn of phrase here,
their terrorist operations. Cubas support includes safe haven to members of Columbias Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as

None of this has to do with the United States and its direct safety and security. Sure, the FARC and other guerrilla groups have destabilized the region, but that has nothing to do with terrorist threats to the United States. The term state sponsor of terrorism means nothing if Cuba is on the list. It is no longer legitimate to
FARC, which has waged an insurgency there but is now engaged in peace negotiations. simply claim that the electoral map with a powerful anti-Castro lobby based in Florida is a sufficient explanation, as if only the politically naive would think otherwise. Even

if such blatantly political justifications were valid, the CubanAmerican community is actually quite divided about overtures to a nation whose progress and fiscal security can benefit the entire region. The Boston Globes Bryan Bender reported this year that Secretary of
State John Kerry was reviewing the policy, hoping to thaw relations with Cuba and make the terrorist state sponsor list be about terrorism. Its not clear if Kerrys views will prevail. Today,

however, the necessity to remove Cuba from the list is immediate. We need to rationalize these terror lists, whether they designate individuals or countries. The term state sponsor of terrorism means nothing if Cuba is on the list: It simply says we kind of dont like you and will find any reason to make it hurt. An over-inclusive list, as
we are seeing in the Boston case, can be as damaging as an under-inclusive one. The Obama administration can make a powerful symbolic statement about Cuba and begin a slow thaw that starts with freeing the island nation from the same designation we give to Syria or Iran. Alone, that is enough. But the United States can also make a significant safety statement about terrorism generally: States that support those who pose a direct threat to the United States will suffer.

Unfortunately, if the United States continues to use one of the most powerful tools in its national security apparatus a figurative arsenal of sanctions to treat a nation as a terrorist threat when it is not, we so dilute the term that it matters little to the countries that we hope to isolate. Cuba is a lot of things, but it is not a direct national security challenge to the United States or its citizens. If Cuba remains on that exclusive list this week, we will do more damage to ourselves than any Castro brother ever did.

AT: Terror is Real

Terror may be real, but that does not make the terror list a good thing - the terror list relies on false threats Ahrari 1, Professor of National Security and Strategy of the Joint and Combined Warfighting School at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia (Dr. M.
Ehsan, "Rogue States" and NMD/TMD: Policies in Search of a Rationale?, Mediterranean Quarterly, Project Muse)
The end of the Cold War initiated the quest for a grand purpose for an American foreign policy defined until then as containment.

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not result in the rise of another equally powerful enemy or a major conflict to divide nation-states. However, this reality did not keep the post-Cold War presidents and their national security teams from coming up with sweeping ideas to drive America's foreign policy. It was the President George H. W. Bush's notion of the new world order, announced during the
euphoria stemming from the sweeping victory in the Gulf War of 1991 that was the first attempt to put forward a new strategic concept. After the realities of the Balkans and Somalia set in, the tone became somewhat more sober, but subsequent notions driving U.S. foreign policy were no less sweeping. When Bush dropped his emphasis on the new world order, he adopted two other sweeping objectives for U.S. foreign policy: the promotion of democracy and the capitalistic economy worldwide. These same twin objectives reappeared in President Clinton's first national security policy document of 1994 as "engagement and enlargement." 2 [End Page 84]

A distinct change emanating from the end of the Cold War was that U.S. foreign policy became increasingly concerned with responding to regional conflicts and promoting regional stability. This was a marked departure from the focus on global struggle between forces of democracy and
totalitarianism of the Cold War years. Until a major power of the caliber of the Soviet Union--the old "focus of evil" and the "evil empire," in the words of President Ronald Reagan--emerges, "smaller foci of evil," the so-called rogue states, will continue to capture the attention of U.S. security policy. President Clinton's first national security adviser, Anthony

Lake, developed the notion of backlash states. According to him, these states "are likely to sponsor terrorism and traffic in weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile technologies." After paying homage to George Kennan's policy of containment, which enabled the United Sates to "win" the Cold War, Lake promoted a policy of "dual containment" to defeat the two rogues of the Middle East--Iran and Iraq. U.S. policy toward these states, observed Lake, "must seek to isolate them diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically." He wanted the United States to be highly proactive toward these states and "be prepared to strike back decisively and unilaterally" when their actions "directly threaten our people, our forces, or our vital interests." 3 The phrase backlash states did not catch on, but rogue states did. Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea were originally so labeled. Iraq was dropped from this list in 1982 but was added again when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Syria has
been on the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism, but not on the rogue state list, since the United States wanted to keep it involved in peace negotiations with Israel. Cuba

was later added to the rogue list, even though the State Department admitted in its 1996 report that there was no credible evidence of Cuba's direct involvement in terrorism. The United States placed Sudan on the list of nations sponsoring terrorism largely as a
retaliation for that country's hosting of Osama Bin Ladin, the Saudi billionaire turned terrorist, whom the Clinton administration accused of being responsible for the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Despite being somewhat divergent in their geographic locations and their ethnic and religious profiles, most of the rogue states or states sponsoring [End Page 85] terrorism are Muslim (five out of seven) and Arab (four out of seven). The members of the core share several other noteworthy characteristics, as well. First, all of them are authoritarian--two as communist states. Second--and this is very important--all of them challenge the primacy of the United States, and all are accused of wanting to alter the political status quo in their respective areas. Whether or not this characteristic remains relevant to the practice of international relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not significant. The fact that such a perception is constantly emphasized and reemphasized by different high-powered presidential or congressional commissions becomes a basis for a continued emphasis within the U.S. domestic arena for arguments to build defensive systems like the NMD and the TMD in order to contain the rogue states. Third, a number of these countries actively pursue the latest ballistic and cruise missile technology (see tables 1 and 2). Most of them are suspected of having active chemical and biological weapons programs. The argument is that a successful chemical weapon development program in these countries may result in chemical-weapon-tipped missiles that will become weapons of mass destruction that can be used against U.S. forces stationed in southwest Asia and South Korea in a military conflict. Finally, three countries of this category have active

nuclear programs--Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The first two are suspected of being very close to building nuclear weapons. Since

there was no country left after the end of the Cold War that could take on the United States force-on-force, the thrust of arguments made by various defense-related panels and commissions was to focus on the threats stemming from missile-proliferation activities of one or more of these states. Saddam's use of SCUD missiles against Saudi Arabia and Israel during the Gulf War of 1991
intensified the already growing U.S. concern about the spread of ballistic missiles in Third World countries. The Missile Transfer Control Regime had already begun to evolve as a U.S.-led global nonproliferation regime to arrest the spread of ballistic missiles, but after the Gulf War, Washington became even more determined to forestall the spread of ballistic and cruise missiles. 4 [End Page 86] The commission, headed by then former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, made a substantial contribution to institutionalizing the missile threats from these states within the U.S. defense establishment. Other commissions--such as the HartRudman Commission on National Security, the National Defense Panel, and the Deutsche Commission--only reiterated the seriousness of missile-related threats stemming from the activities of the rogue states, thereby reinforcing the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission. 5 Not many

people bothered to question why, given the awesome gap between the destructive capabilities of the United States--conventional and nuclear--and the rogue nations, any of those countries would take the risk of attacking and then being wiped off the face of the earth. The urge to demonize the rogue nations necessitated that strategic thinkers of the post-Cold War years label these nations irrational actors. This was in stark contrast to the depiction of Soviet leadership of the Cold War years as highly rational. One wonders whether the fact that none of the rogue states were Western led to their being conveniently labeled "irrational," "nutty," and "crazy," or whether this was just part of an overall process of demonizing the "enemy."

AT: Plan Non-state terror

State violence outweighs non-state terrorism Jackson 2007 - Deputy Director at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the
University of Otago, former Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Honourable Secretary of the British International Studies Association from 2009-2011, editor-inchief of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and the former convener of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group (Richard Jackson, The Study of Terrorism after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges and Future Developments, Political Studies Review, Vol. 7, Issue 2, 2009, accessed through Wiley Online Library)
In the first place, it raises serious questions about the broader focus of the field and the empirical foundations it is based on.That is, while non-state terrorists have killed tens of thousands of people and caused significant damage during the past century-and-a-half,

individual states have been responsible for more terrorism than all non-state terrorist groups put together. A conservative estimate of state-instigated mass murder, forcible starvations and genocide against civilians, for example, suggests that governments were responsible for 170200 million deaths in the twentieth century alone (Rummel, 1994; see also Goodin, 2006, p. 67). Clearly, the few hundred deaths caused every year by non-state terrorists pales beside the massive death,destruction and destabilisation caused by states. And yet the wider terrorism studies field does not include statistics on state
the acceptance that states can be terrorists, too (Goodin, 2006, pp. 5077) reveals that some terrorism in any of its recognised databases, nor does it expend any real effort in trying to understand the nature, causes, strategies and outcomes of state terrorism.

AT: Security Good

Turn the aff doesnt end all security - it produces ethical forms of security Burke 02 Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New
South Wales. (Anthony, "Aporias of Security" 1-27 Jstor accessed 7/20/13 DG)
It is in

this constitutive account of the political that we find the second aporia of security, which is opened up as an impasse within its basic conceptual structure. Sadly, this is a moral impasse that also possesses a malign functionality. This aporia occurs because despite their presumption to universality, realist structures

of secu- rity have always argued that the security of the self (the individual, the nation, or the "way of life") must be purchased at the expense of another. This was starkly laid out by the European political the- orist R. N. Berki, who wrote in his Security and Society,
"Seeking after security for oneself and being a cause of insecurity for others are not just closely related; they are the same thing, with no chance of either logical or existential separation . . . when the chips are down, and to a certain degree, they are always down ... it is my life, my freedom, my security versus the rest of the human race."17 Ur-theorist of realism Hans Morgenthau, surprisingly enough, expressed some qualms about such an image of security, even as he did so much to entrench national security at the apex of modern policy making. With the

advent of the nuclear age, he argued, no state could purchase its security at the expense of another; now diplomacy must seek to make all nations equally secure.18 However, this insight was lost on a generation of later theorists and policy makers, for whom security would inevitably imply the sacrifice of the other. Consider George Kennan's argument, in 1948, that the United States would have to "to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to retain our position of [economic] disparity without positive detriment to our national security. . . . We should cease to talk about vague - and for the
Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and d- mocratisation."19 One of Australia's most senior and influential policy makers of the post- Vietnam era, Richard Woolcott, under- lined the continuing power of this view when he argued in 1995 that "sentimental notions" of self-determination for East Timor and Bougainville were a threat to Australia's national security (a se- curity that for two decades had been premised on close relations and military cooperation with the murderous Soharto regime).20 This highlights

an urgent need to interrogate the images of self and other that animate (in) secure identities, and to expose the vi- olence and repression that is so often relied on to police them.

Plan Solves- only way to get rid of harms of security is to challenge it and reestablish a new political order Burke 02 Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New
South Wales. (Anthony, "Aporias of Security" 1-27 Jstor accessed 7/19/13 DG) The answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence presents an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a new humanist ideal - however laudable - we need to challenge security as a claim to truth, to set its "meaning" aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive and complex system of political, so- cial, and economic power, which reaches from the most private spaces of being to the vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic circulation. It is to see security as an interlocking system of knowledges, representations, practices, and institutional forms that imagine, direct, and act upon bodies, spaces, and flows in certain ways - to see security not as an essential value but as a political technology. This is to move from essence to genealogy: a ge- nealogy that aims, in William Connolly's words, to "open us up to the play of possibility in the present ... [to] incite critical re- sponses to unnecessary violences and injuries surreptitiously im- posed upon life by the insistence that prevailing forms are natural, rational, universal or necessary.

The impact to securitization is and un-ending cycle of violence Kessler 2008 (Oliver Kessler, Sociology at University of Bielefeld, From Insecurity to
Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics Alternatives 33 (2008), 211-232 accesed 7/18/13 DG)
Uncertainty always served as an important "variable" for explaining prevailing insecurity within international relations. Within realist thought, uncertainty is predominantly analyzed in the context of the security dilemma. As John Herz explains: Groups

or individuals . . . must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing unity, power competition ensures, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.18 In contrast to Morgenthau's
anthropological realism, John Herz pointed to a structural condition. The security dilemma roots in anarchical political relations rather than in biological or anthropo- logical condition.19 When there is no central authority that could function as the fixer of signs, uncertainty

about the motives or inten- tions of other states gives rise to paradoxical dynamics: An attempt to increase one's security will ultimately lead to higher insecurity of other actors, will stimulate counterreactions, and will leave every- body worse off in the end.2

Security policy makes the impossible plausable Kessler 2008 (Oliver Kessler, Sociology at University of Bielefeld,

From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics Alternatives 33 (2008), 211-232 accesed 7/18/13 DG)
Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main prob- lem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most

striking is the fact that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat."51 In order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment is, however, that even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By construct- ing a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility."54 This so-called Oth- ello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between Saddam Hussein and AI Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very begin- ning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the improbable yet
possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said:

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncer- tainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty

AT: Security Inevit

The plan results in a rethinking of security AMBROSETTI 08 (DAVID, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) & Paris X
University, Nanterre, France 'Human Security as Political Resource: A Response to David Chandler's `Human Security: The Dog That Didn't Bark accessed 7/21/13 DG) A new principle with a largely acknowledged legitimacy must thus be analysed as a new resource for political mobilization available for traditional actors or newly constituted ones. It will merge with other forms of political resources, according to the rules of use of these existing resources and the capacity of relevant actors for innovation. Nothing makes it possible to
define in advance the outcome of the new competition that will rise around this new principle understood as a new resource, or the new rules and norms that will appear (or not) in the use of this resource and their political consequences. The invocation of

human security can foster emancipation for some and at the same time new submission for others. The outcome of this invocation depends on successful linkages between the practices enacted in the name of human security and this very principle that is, on the acceptability of the former in regard to the latter. This
outcome must be assessed in accordance with the symbolic and material resources mobilized in order to support and secure these linkages. In

this analytical framework, it is useless to contrast and oppose power maximizing practices and ethical, valued-centred motivations, as is often done in both books discussed by David Chandler. Against such an infertile dichotomy, social scientists can only observe transforming or unchanging practices surrounding the invocation of new doctrines such as human security and their political consequences. But, they may also understand more deeply how actual dominant norms and the
practices of state officers and decision makers can (or cannot) practically integrate concerns stressed by human security approaches, and with which potential political consequences. What

remains important here is to avoid hasty overall judgments on the human security principle on a binary (emancipatory or conservative) basis, and to call again for deep empirical research on the practical uses of the human security rhetoric and the shifts such uses may provoke over time in the balance of power and the rules of political competition between different actors.

AT: Realism Good

No link not an indict of realism Realisms fiction has acted as a shadow for ideological justifications of violence Checkel 98 (Jeffrey T., Senior Researcher and Coordinator, Research on European Identity Change, University of Oslo, The
Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory World Politics 50.2 (1998) 324-348, Project MUSE)

The constructivist critique of neorealism and neoliberalism reaches well beyond the level-of-analysis argument of either Image I (individual) or Image II (domestic politics) theorists. Constructivism is concerned not with levels per se but with underlying conceptions of how the social and political world works. It is not a theory but an approach to social inquiry based on two assumptions: (1) the environment in which agents/states take action is social as well as material; and (2) this setting can provide agents/states with understandings of their interests (it can [End Page 325] "constitute" them). Put differently, these scholars question the materialism and methodological individualism upon which much contemporary IR scholarship has been built. The first assumption reflects a view that material structures, beyond certain biological necessities, are given meaning only by the social context through which they are interpreted .
Consider nuclear weapons--the ultimate material capability. Constructivists argue that it is not such weapons themselves that matter. After all,

the United States worries very little about the large quantity of nuclear weapons held by the British; however, the possibility that North Korea might come into possession of even one or two generates tremendous concern. 2 The second assumption addresses the basic nature of human agents and states, in particular, their relation to broader structural environments. Constructivists emphasize a process of interaction between agents and structures; the ontology is one of mutual constitution, where neither unit of analysis--agents or structures--is reduced to the other and made "ontologically primitive." This opens up what for most theorists is the black box of
interest and identity formation; state

interests emerge from and are endogenous to interaction with structures. 3 Constructivists thus question the methodological individualism that underpins both neoliberalism and neorealism. This agent-centered view asserts that all social phenomena are explicable

in ways that involve only individual agents and their goals and actions; the starting point of the analysis is actors (states) with given properties. Ontologically, the result is to
reduce one unit of analysis--structures--to the other--agents. 4
Also implicit in many constructivist accounts is a model of human and state behavior where rule-governed action and logics of appropriateness prevail. Such logics involve reasoning by analogy and metaphor and are not about ends and means. Under them, agents ask "What kind of situation is this?" and "What should I do now?"--with norms helping to supply the answers. Norms therefore constitute states/agents, providing them with understandings of their interests. 5 [End Page 326]

holars of rational choice, by contrast, use a behavioral model based on utility maximization: when confronted with various options, an agent picks the one that best serves its objectives and interests. Much
Sc

rational choice research ("thick" rationalism) also makes assumptions about the content of these interests ,
typically that they are material goods such as power or wealth. State (agent) interests are given a priori and exogenously. Norms and social structures at most constrain the choices and behavior of self-interested states, which operate according to a logic of consequences (means-ends calculations). 6 It is important to note that constructivists do not reject science or causal explanation; their quarrel with mainstream theories is ontological, not epistemological. The last point is key, for it suggests that constructivism

has the potential to bridge the still vast divide separating the majority of IR theorists from postmodernists. With the latter, constructivists share many
substantive concerns (role of identity and discourse, say) and a similar ontological stance; with the former, they share a largely common epistemology. Constructivists thus occupy a middle ground between rational choice theorists and postmodern scholars. 7 To illuminate these differences between constructivists and other schools, it is helpful to explore their understanding of central terms. Consider "norms," a concept that has gained much currency in IR scholarship over the past decade. While realists see norms as lacking causal force , neoliberal regime theory argues that they play an influential rule in certain issue-areas. However, even for neoliberals, norms are still a superstructure built on a material base: they serve a regulative function, helping actors with given interests maximize utility. Agents (states) create

For constructivists, by contrast, norms are collective understandings that make behavioral claims on [End Page 327] actors. Their effects reach deeper:
structures (norms and institutions). 8

they constitute actor identities and interests and do not simply regulate behavior .
As explanatory variables, their status moves from intervening to independent (Finnemore, chaps. 3, 4; Klotz,
chap. 6, for example). Norms are no longer a superstructure on a material base; rather, they help to create and define that base. For constructivists, agents (states) and structures (global norms) are interacting; they are mutually constituted. 9

Realism is intimately related to violence it draws all politics into warfare. The affirmatives peace is impossible. Der Derian 01 (James, Prof of International Relations at Brown, Virtuous War, pg 37-38)
Take a look at some of the principle necroses. Realism

has built a life out of the transformation of

fictions, like the immutability of human nature and the apodictic threat of anarchy, into facticity. With a little digging, realism comes to resemble nothing so much as the undead, a perverse mimesis of the living
other, haunting international politics through the objectification of power, the fetishization of weaponry, the idealization of the state, the virtualization of violence, and the globalization of new media. Now the

fact of its own death lives

on as a powerful fiction, as the morbid customs, characteristics, and habits of the living dead. Realism has become virtual. If this interpretation sounds more like Buffy the vampire slayer than Freddy the
horse savior, so be it. But it does seem uncanny how, without fingering particular administrations or naming names, the

undead of realism might temporarily retreat to universities, think tanks , consultancy firms, and media posts,
but are always there in the wings, ready to come back and to take once again the reins of the national security apparatus. Perhaps it is not possible or even preferable to "interpret" realism into the closed coffin of history. Nietzsche himself recognizes the allure of realism by citing some exemplars in history: My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli's Principe are most closely related to myself by the unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in reality - not in reason," still less in "morality." . . . One must turn him over line by line and read his hidden thoughts. Sophist culture, by which I mean realist culture, attains in him its perfect expression. . . . Courage in face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of realityconsequently he Bees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control-consequently he retains control over things. 14 Nietzsche helps us understand the obduracy of realism as we increasingly interact with a mimetic world that seems to be in the control of virtual "things" that imitate reality (from opinion polls, worst-case scenarios, and Star Wars to Sky TV, Microsoft, and Disney Inc.). In

the realm of diplomatic and strategic theory, realism mirrors a fluctuation of appearances, at one moment fleeing into the ideal of a "democratic peace" underwritten by an expanding neoliberal global order and at the next, retreating into a "fortress America" protected by a ballistic missile defense. It takes more than the courage of
the Sophists to face the seemingly inexorable forces of such virtual realities. Perhaps Nietzsche is right: it takes a virtuous, even poetic willfulness, like Thucydides' or Machiavelli's to confront the reality principle of realism, sovereignty, and its ultima ratio, war. It requires an expression of self-control, as an antidote to the will, born out of resentment and

fear, to control or to isolate the other. Realism's long, intimate history with violence,

whether in the guise of impartial observer or amoral reproducer, requires that if we are to have anything meaningful to say to realism, we too must get up close to the virtual representation, preparation, and execution of war. The social sciences, especially its dominant methodology of rational choice, have shown a reluctance to enter into proximity talks with violence. We are in need of an extra-disciplinary, intersubjective, ethical inquiry into the mimetic relationship of realism to organized violence, beginning with but not stopping at the state violence of political realism, the class violence of social realism, the global violence of nuclear realism, the technoviolence of hyperrealism. Again, as Nietzsche shows us, it is better to embrace than
to beat an old horse.

AT: Realism Inevitable

Ext. aff solvency discourse can break down security mindset. We dont need to win the end of all realism to solve the aff. Their construction of inevitablility effaces human agency. Burke 7 (anthony, prof @ jhu ontologies of war: violence existence and reason theory and
event 10:2 proj muse)

This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat ,
rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right

to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political

discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities
that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence. We

ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of
vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that: ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns , however
minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39 Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in

such thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core
political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also

become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians.

The violent quest to overcome uncertainty in the international arena is doubly dangerous: It has both created the implements that make human extinction possible and the political context that renders it necessary and inevitable. Dillon and Campbell 93 (Michael, Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, and
David, Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, The Political Subject of Violence, pg 163-165) This interpretation of violence as constitutive of identity might, paradoxically, offer the only hope of some amelioration of the worst excesses of violence exhibited by the formation of (political) identity.

The orthodox rendering of such violence as pre-modern abdicates its responsibility to a predetermined historical fatalism. For if these ethnic and nationalist conflicts are understood as no more than settled history
rearing its ugly head, then there is nothing that can be done in the present to resolve the tension except to repress them again. In this view, the historical drama has to be enacted according

to its script, with human agency in suspension while nature violently plays itself out. The only alternative is for nature to be overcome as the result of an idealistic transformation at the hands of reason.
Either way, this fatalistic interpretation of the relationship between violence and the political is rooted in a hypostated conception of man/nature as determinative of the social/political: the latter is made possible only once the former runs its course, or if it is overturned. It might have once been the case that the prospect of a transformation of nature by

reason seemed both likely and hopeful - indeed, many of the most venerable of the debates in the political theory of international relations revolved around this very point. But, having reached what Foucault has called society's 'threshold of modernity', 'we' now face a prospect that radically re-figures the parameters of politics: the real prospect of extinction. As Foucault argues, we have reached this threshold because 'the life
of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity of a political existence: modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being

How the prospect of extinction might materialise itself is an open question. That increasingly it can be materialised, militarily, ecologically, and politically, is not. The double bind of this prospect is that modernity's alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it is deeply complicit in the form of (inter)national life that has been responsible for bringing about the real prospect of extinction in the first place. The capacity of violence to eradicate being was engendered by reason's success; not merely, or perhaps
in question.' even most importantly, by furnishing the technological means, but more insidiously in setting the parameters of the

political (la politique, to use the useful terms of debate in which Simon Critchley engages) while fuelling the violence practices of politics (la politique). The reliance on reason as that which could contain

violence and reduce the real prospect of extinction may prove nothing less than a fatal misapprehension. In support of this proposition, consider the interpretive bases of the Holocaust. For all
that politics in the last fifty years has sought to exceptionalise the Nazis' genocide as an aberrant moment induced by evil personalities, there is no escaping the recognition that modern political life lies heavily implicated in the

instigation and conduct of this horror. In so far as modernity can be characterised as the promotion of rationality and
efficiency to the exclusion of alternative criteria for action, the

Holocaust is one outcome of the 'civilising process'. With its plan rationally to order Europe through the elimination of an internal order, its
bureaucratised administration of death, and its employment of the technology of a modern state, the Holocaust 'was not

an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residence of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who
would not be at home in any other house. The paradoxical nature of modernity is suggested by the emergency of a
Holocaust from within its bosom. And there can be no better indication in contradistinction to those 'modernists' who would like to brand so-called 'postmodernists' with the responsibility for all and future Holocausts - that a reliance on established traditions of reason for ethical succour and the progressive amelioration of the global human condition may be seriously misplaced. The comfort we have derived from the etiological myth of modern politics has occluded the way in which the 'civilising process' of which that myth speaks has disengaged ethics from politics. As Bauman concludes: 'We need to take stock of the evidence that the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms and moral inhibitions.'

AT: War proves realism

Conflicts dont disprove critical theory Wendt, 1995 Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science
at The Ohio State University (Alexander Wendt, Constructing International Politics, International Security, Summer 1995, accessed through JSTOR) Mearsheimer frames the debate between realists and critical theorists as one between a theory of war and a theory of peace. This is a fundamental mistake. Social construction talk is like game theory talk: analytically neutral between conflict and cooperation."3 Critical theory does not predict peace.14 War no more disproves critical theory than peace disproves realism. The confusion stems from conflating description and explanation. The descriptive issue is the extent to which states engage in practices of realpolitik (warfare, balancing, relative-gains seeking) versus accepting the rule of law and institutional constraints on their autonomy States sometimes do engage in power politics, but this hardly describes all of the past 1300 years, and even less today, when most states follow most international law most of the time,15 and when war and security dilemmas are the exception rather than the rule, Great Powers no longer tend to conquer small ones, and free trade is expanding rather than
contracting.16 The relative frequency of realpolitik, however, has nothing to do with "realism." Realism should be seen as an explanation of realpolitik, not a description of it. Conflating other, and

the two makes it impossible to tell how well the one explains the leads to the tautology that war makes realism true. Realism does not have a monopoly on the ugly and brutal side of international life. Even if we agree on a realpolitik description, we can reject a realist explanation.

FW

Definitions
Resolved - Websters 96 [Webster's revised unabridged dictionary, 1996,
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=resolved]*GENDER MODIFIED

Resolved means To determine or decide in purpose; to make ready in mind; to fix; to settle; as, [s/]he was resolved by an unexpected event,

Should - Cambridge Dictionary of American English, 07

(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=should*1+0&dict=A) 4. Ground: Defending discourse increases negative critique ground should (DUTY) auxiliary verb used to express that it is necessary, desirable, advisable, or important to perform the action of the following verb

Ontology First
Ontology and epistemology must precede policy All theories rely on ontological assumptions that produce certain epistemological choices. Hansen 6- Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science
at the University of Copenhagen (Lene, pg. 5-6, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (book), google scholar)
Theories of foreign policy are united by a concern with the way in which states understand arid respond to the world around them.

Beyond this broad focus there are, however, multiple perspectives on how questions should be asked and analysis developed, which is to say that theories rely upon a set of ontological assumptions and make a series of epistemological choices. Comprehending the deeper foundations of foreign policy theories and their research agendas and where and why they differ requires, therefore, a thorough consideration of questions of ontology and epistemology. Poststructuralism's discursive ontology is, as laid out in the first section of this chapter, deeply intertwined with its understanding of language as constitutive for what is brought into being. Language is social and political, an inherently unstable system of signs that generate meaning through a simultaneous construction of identity and difference. The productive nature of language implies that policy discourse is seen as relying upon particular constructions of problems and subjectivities, but that it is also through discourse that these problems and subjectivities are constructed in the first place. Policy and identity are therefore conceptualized as ontologically interlinked. To help situate poststructuralism's
ontology within current International Relations (11R) debates, it is pointed out that the concept of 'discourse' is not equivalent to 'ideas'; discourse incorporates material as well as ideational factors. The poststructuralist view of language as relationally structured and ontologically productive is coupled to a discursive epistemology, which, as the second section 'Discursive epistemology and relational identity explains, produces an analytical focus on the relational construction of identity. This in turn provides for a rather different conception of identity than the one adopted by the most influential conventional constructivist, Alexander Wendt, who claims the possibility of a pre-social intrinsic state identity. Having defined the concept of identity as relational and discursive, the third section 'The

impossibility of causality' returns to the question of causality and argues that it is impossible to conceptualize the relationship between identity and foreign policy in terms of causal effects and that one cannot, as a consequence, formulate hypotheses about the (relative) explanatory power of discourse as opposed to material explanations. As the refusal of
causal epistemology 'breaks with conventional rationalist assumptions, this section points out that poststructuralism produces analysis which can expand upon as well as question causal scholarship.

Focusing on aporias and epistemology are key to break down assumptions Burke 02 Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New
South Wales. (Anthony, "Aporias of Security" 1-27 Jstor accessed 7/19/13 DG)
As an event, Derrida sees the aporia as something like a stranger crossing the threshold of a foreign land: yet the aporetic stranger "does not simply cross a given threshold" but "affects the very ex- perience of the threshold ... to the point of annihilating or ren dering indeterminate all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, be- ginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language."14 Thus it is

important to open up and focus on aporias: they bring possibility, the hope of breaking down the hegemony and assumptions of powerful politi- cal concepts, to think and create new social, ethical, and economic relationships outside their oppressive structures of political and epistemological order - in short, they help us to think new paths. Aporias mark not merely the failure of concepts but a new potential to experience and imagine the im-possible. This is where the criti- cal and life-affirming potential of genealogy can come into play.

Ontology comes first its how international politics is evaluated Burke 02 Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New
South Wales. (Anthony, "Aporias of Security" 1-27 Jstor accessed 7/18/13 DG)
My particular concern with humanist discourses of security is that, whatever their critical value, they leave in place (and possibly strengthen) a key structural feature of the elite strategy they op- pose: its claim to embody truth and fix the contours of the real. In

the ontology of security/ threat or security/insecurity - which forms the basic condition of the real for mainstream dis- courses of international policy - remains powerfully in place, and security's broader function as a defining condition of human ex- perience and modern political life remains invisible and unexam- ined. This is to abjure a powerful critical approach that is able to question the very categories in which our thinking, our experi- ence, and actions remain confined.
particular,

Reps 1st
Representations are at the heart of policy making a new research program is essential for challenging otherness and producing good policy outcomes Hansen 6- Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen (Lene, pg. 5-6, Security as Practice:
Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (book), google scholar)
But even with a narrow definition of `real world relevance, poststructuralist analysis has a research program that speaks directly to the conduct of foreign policy. This

research program is based on the assumption that policies are dependent upon representations of the threat, country, security problem, or crisis they seek to address. Foreign policies mod to ascribe meaning to the situation and to construct the objects within it, and in doing so they articulate arid draw upon specific identities of other states, regions, peoples, and institutions as well as on the identity of a national, regional, or institutional Self. To take an example, the Bosnian war was frequently represented by the Clinton administration as a 'Balkan
war.' It followed from this representation that the war Was seen as fought by a barbaric, violent people with a 'Balkan identity' who had hated each other for at least 500 years. This in turn made the war an intractable 'problem from hell: as 1.JS Secretary of State Warren Christopher called it, which the West did not have the means to solve (Friedman 1993). Western intervention was as a consequence, al dangerous undertaking which should be avoided unless there were clear implications for Western security. The

post structuralist assumption that foreign policies draw upon representations of identity is linked to a conceptualization of identity as discursive, political, relational, and social. To say that identity is discursive and political is to argue that representations of identity place foreign policy issues within a particular interpretative optic, one with consequences for which foreign policy can be formulated as an adequate response. To theorize identity as constructed through discourse, and
for policy to be dependent thereon, is to argue that there are no objective identities located in some extra-discursive realm, hence identity cannot be used as a variable against which behavior and non-discursive factors can be measured. This implies a conceptualization of identity existing only insofar as it is continuously rearticulated and uncontested by competing discourses (Anderson 1981). The emphasis on the political in postructuralism's concept of identity sets it aside from a conceptualization of identity as 'culture,' as in anthropological studies of marriage rituals, or aesthetic analyses of cultural artifacts such as architecture, music, and literature_5 Nor can a conflict be explained 1w 'a people's culture.'

Poststructuralism's relational conception of identity implies that identity is always given through reference to something it is not. To speak of the 'American, non-European: 'barbaric or 'underdeveloped' is to constitute another identity or set of identities as lion-American, non-European, civilized or developed. To
conceptualize identity as social is to understand it as established through a set of collectively articulated codes, not as a private properly of the individual or a psychological conditionnot that individuals do not understand themselves as having identities, instead individual identity is constituted within and through a collective terrain. The

conceptualization of identity as discursive, political_ relational, and social implies that foreign policy discourse always articulates a Self and a series of Others. Security discourses have traditionally constituted a national Self facing one or more threatening Others, whose identities were radically different from the one of the Self. But identities are not necessarily constructed through juxtaposition to a radically different and threatening Other (Campbell 1992). Constructions of identity can take on different degrees of 'Otherness,' ranging from fundamental difference between Self and Other to constructions of less than radical difference, and the Other can be constituted through geographical representations as well as political representations such as 'civilizations: nations,"tribes,"terrorists,"women,"civilians: or -humanity. .
Geographical and political constructions of identity are usually articulated with a particular temporal identity through themes of repetition, progress, transformation, backwardness, or development. Temporal

representations locate a contemporary foreign policy question within a historical discourse, but they are, from a poststructuralist perspective, precisely discourses: framings of meaning and lenses of interpretation, rather than objective, historical truths.

Representations are integral to policy and the exercise of power ignoring their significance is complicit with bad representational constructions Doty, 1996 associate professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State
University (Roxanne Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations, 1996, google book) The question of representation has historically been excluded from the academic study of international relations. This exclusion has, to an important degree, shaped the horizons of the discipline. This has been
especially significant when it comes to North-South relations because in an important sense this whole subfield revolves around the differences between these two entities. Sometimes these differences are represented in primarily economic terms (e.g., levels of development), and sometimes in terms of military power differentials. Representations of economic and military power differences, however, take place within political and social circumstances in which other kinds of differences are explicitly or implicitly presumed. Because the question of representation has been excluded, the historical construction and consequences of these differences have not been considered legitimate realms of inquiry. This

exclusion has in many instances resulted in the complicity of international relations scholarship with particular constructions of the South and of the reality of the Souths place in international relations. This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices that put into circulation representations that are taken as truth. The goal of analyzing these practices is not to reveal
essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine how certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. As Said (1979: 21) notes, there

is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. So, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada,
this is certainly real, though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when American is attached to the troops and Grenada to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an invasion, a show of force, a training exercise, a rescue, and so on. What is really going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To

attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of dichotomies thought/reality, appearance/essence, mind/matter, word/world, subjective/objective that a critical genealogy calls into question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms
the material and performative character of discourse. In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices I am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a reality whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the first world. Focusing

on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce truth and knowledge work and how they are articulated within the exercise of political, military, and economic power.

FW Reps Key to PM
Representations are key to policy making vote aff to solve their offense Hansen 6- Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen (Lene, pg. 5-6, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (book), google scholar)
If representations of identity are always employed in the legitimization of foreign policy, where do representations come from and how do official representations relate to those argued by oppositional political parties and groups, the media, and public intellectuals? Poststructuralist discourse

analysis argues that foreign policy decision-makers are situated within a larger political and public sphere, and that their representations as a consequence draw upon arid are formed by the representations articulated by a larger number of individuals, institutions, and media outlets. Top politicians rarely have detailed knowledge about
the issues put before them and therefore rely upon their advisors. media coverage, and. in some CELSCS., background literature to establish a representational framing of the policy (to be) adopted.

In 'speaking back' their representation of a foreign policy issue, politicians are in turn influencing what count as proper representations within a particular foreign policy issue. This is not to say that there is necessarily a complete congruence between
official foreign policy discourse and the representations argued from other sources: politicians do not always (or even rarely) reproduce media and expert representations slavishly, nor does official discourse determine which representations can be argued by other sources and agents, at least not in democratic societies. It would, however, be extremely unlikelyand politically unsavvy for politicians to articulate foreign policy without any concern for the representations found within the wider public sphere as they attempt to present their policies as legitimate to their constituencies. understanding

official foreign policy discourse as situated within a wider discursive field opens up a theoretical and empirical research agenda that examines how foreign policy representations and representations articulated by oppositional political forces the media, academe, and popular culture reinforce or contest each other (I Iarisen and Wzever 2002., Holm 1993, 1997; Shapiro 1. 1997-, Der Denali 1992: Hansen l)96,
Neumann 1996a). Some foreign policy questions arc less contested than others, leading to less diversity in terms of the representations argued. One might therefore be prone to focus the analysis on official policy and discourse as not much now will be uncovered when including a larger set of actors and media!' But, such a hegemonic situation might also be seen as worthy of an extensive study of nongovernmental sources in as much as this generates important knowledge of the way in which governmental representations are dispersed and reproduced:7 To

study foreign policy by examining patterns of reproduction and contestation ,across official discourse, political oppositional parties, and media discourses, as well as more popular forms of writing, also points to the importance of genre. Official foreign policymakers seek to constitute themselves as having authority to speak about a foreign policy issues: their formal authority is derived from their institutional location, but authority is also built on knowing about a particular issue. Knowledge, therefore, becomes important for establishing authority, and this in turn creates a new, analytical optic for discourse analysis of foreign policy, as different genrespolicy speech, journalistic reportage, and academic analysis_ for instanceestablish particular forms of knowledge as acceptable. How texts construct acceptable knowledge becomes an empirical question in need of analysis; it is not a matter of
deciding upon a proper social science epistemology as in the rationalist-constructivistpoststructuralist debate. That different genres of foreign policy writing adopt different forms of knowledge becomes particularly salient when foreign policy discourses are seen as intertextually linked. An intertextual understanding of foreign policy argues that texts build their arguments and authority through references to other texts: by making direct quotes or by adopting key concepts and catchphrases! In making links to odder texts, new texts rely upon the status or the older, hut this process of reading and linking also produces new meaning: references never reproduce the originals in a manner which is fully identical, but weave them into the present context and argument.

FW Ethical Ed.
Inclusion of our aff is key to ethical education Lutjens 6, chair of California state university womens studies department
(Sheryl L., September, Introduction: Cuba and the Security Frame, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 5, Cuba and the Security Frame, JSTOR)
Not all agree that the global war on terror signals a major shift in the underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy. Some see that major change has occurred but locate it differently in time, scope, and significance. The

national security strategy formalized in 2002 marks a change in post-1945 practices, according to Hurst (2006: 53), who notes "key elements of what is, in fact a conservative radicalism unilateralism, contempt for interna tional institutions and law, an open embrace of hegemonic ambition, readi ness to ignore traditional allies and to use force in a pre-emptive fashion." Gill (2003: 208) observes that since 1989 U.S. global strategy has had two components: "efforts to mobilize and to lock in new constitutional gover nance frameworks" and "threatened/actual use of US military power to police, discipline and extend a globalizing world order." He also sees the rise of the "new American imperialist perspective" within the U.S. state (the "democratic imperialists" [2003: 219]), one that

measures danger and secu rity threats by a state's degree of integration into the globalization project. Stokes (2005) argues, as do others, that the "U.S. state has long been impe rial" and redirects the debate toward the reading of the "national" and "transnational" logics of the state.

The recasting of national security in terms of terrorism has altered the institutional framework of the national security state. President Bush cre ated the Homeland Security
Office by executive order on October 8, 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, Public Law 107-56) was enacted in late October 2001 with overwhelming biparti san support (and in March 2006 Bush signed the U.S.A. Patriot Improve ment and Reauthorization Act).

The Patriot Act granted the government "broad new powers to investigate and detain potential terrorists" (Kettl, 2004: 96), including new standards for gathering information with advanced technologies, fewer controls on how and why surveillance is undertaken, and stronger authority to prevent terrorists from entering or staying in the United States. Patriot Act
standards permit "sneak and peek searches" and "roving surveillance"; library, bookstore, and other third-party records, e-mail, and voice messages all became accessible under Section 215. Money laun dering and computer hacking were targeted, and a broad list of activities was criminalized as terrorist (Kettl, 2004: 96-97). Secrecy prevails in the objectives and implementation of the Patriot Act, contributing to what is called a "surveillance industrial complex." FFurther reorganization for security occurred with the creation in November 2002 of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a grouping of 22 fed eral agencies with homeland security functions, an initial budget of $37.5 billion, and 160,000 employees (Kettl, 2004: 49). The CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the DIA were excluded from the DHS, though the Treasury Department's Customs Service and part of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (which was dismantled) were included. Two new DHS bureaus were created to enforce immigration and entry rules. The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 strengthened control over the entry of foreign visitors, authorizing an information system that was to register all new and continuing students and exchange visitors by August 1, 2003. International students who were male, Muslim, and between the ages of 16 and 45 were required to report for processing. The act directed the secretary of state to implement enhanced security measures in the review of visa applicants; a security advisory opinion was required for some visa requests, including those for citizens of countries on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. A biom?trie identification system (fingerprinting and digital photographing) was also to be implemented. The exclusionary dynamics of security practices suggest that tensions inhere in the national security state and a globalization project that promul gates freedom, democracy, and markets militarily. The

closing of borders to students, scholars, and the "others" identified with new terrorism standards has been criticized, especially given that international student enrollments declined for the first time in many decades in 2002-2003. While the motives pushing for "more open doors" are varied, the traditional public diplomacy of educational and cultural exchange is invoked as part of national security. "Our country is stronger when we welcome young people here. And we must balance security needs
with our historic openness to others," said the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs in remarks to the Education Summit in early January 2006 (Harty, 2006). Kennedy and Lucas (2005: 310) contend that the use of public diplomacy in the post-9/11 period "func tions not simply as a tool of national security, but also as a component of U.S. efforts to manage the emerging formation of a neoliberal empire." In place of the containment pursued during the cold war, efforts now aim "to draw publics into an American designed 'zone of peace.'" Academic life has been affected by the laws, regulations, and rhetoric that support

the global war on terror and the surveillance industrial com plex. The

negative effects on research, freedoms of speech and association, and the flow of international scholars and students, among other problems (see AAUP Special Committee, 2003), raise important issues about a trou bling global strategy that isolates the United States, motivates decision making with little accountability, and denies the positive elements of glob alizing trends in education, technology, and culture.

FW Challenge the State

The US has neglected possible ties with Cuba scholars can work to end such neglect Lutjens 6, chair of California state university womens studies department
(Sheryl L., September, Introduction: Cuba and the Security Frame, pg. 2-3, pg. 6-7, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 5, Cuba and the Security Frame, JSTOR)
How Cuba figures in the insecurity and the hegemonic aspirations of the post-9/11 period is an important question that is not easily answered. Unilateralism has long been part of U.S. policy with regard to Cuba. For example, the United Nations General Assembly has voted against U.S. eco nomic sanctions on Cuba since 1992, yet the sanctions continue. The demand for market capitalism and liberal democracy in Cuba also preceded the war on terror; the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act called explicitly for regime change in Cuba. Yet Clinton's Cuba policy was characterized, too, by the post-cold war con text, by his conceding of authority over sanctions regulations to Congress, and by his faith in people-to-people exchange as the means to bring change to Cuba. In addition to the groups and institutions with a stake in ending economic sanctions and the travel ban, business interests benefited from the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 to allow agricultural and medical exports to sanctioned countries (see Brenner, Haney, and Vanderbrush, 2002). The small and disproportionately powerful Cuban-American lobby has continued to claim special access to policy making, in part associated with its place in Bush electoral strategies of 2000 and 2004. By 2003, Bush's Cuba policy more clearly expressed the anachronistic preoccupations of hard-line ideological positioning (see Anderson, 2005). In the early 2000s Congress made strong attempts to relax or even elimi nate the sanctions on Cuba (see LeoGrande, 2006a), only to be thwarted by Bush-administration purposes at odds with U.S. public opinion, con gressional intentions, and the inclusionary rhetoric of empire.

As Noam Chomsky explained in 2003, the "venomous hostility" of U.S. policy over time can be attributed to Cuba's role as "the symbol for successful defiance" (Dwyer, 2003). Pointing to Hugo Chavez and Venezuela's
material assistance to Cuba as well as to China's entry into regional commerce (with Cuba and others) as feeding U.S. perceptions of the current threats to hemispheric domination, Brenner and Jimenez (2006: 15) conclude that "Cuba
has once again emerged as a foreign policy concern of U.S. national secu rity managers, and they have turned to an old strategy of containment and isolation to address the perceived problem."

Subversion and destabilization are also being pursued, as is evident from the work of the U.S. Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba created by Bush in late 2003. Charged with preparing a study to recommend measures for hastening change in Cuba and chaired by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs Mel Martinez, the commission pre sented its 400-plus-page report to the president on May 6, 2004. The report provided a blueprint for a post-Castro Cuba, and, despite criticism and opposition, its recommendations for promoting transition became regula tions on June 30, 2004. The new regulations establish strict limits on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, students, academics, and humanitarian and religious groups. Officials stress depriving the Cuban government of access to U.S. dollars, and OFAC has aggressively pursued perceived violations of the prohibitions against travel and financial transactions with Cuba and Cubans. At the same time, the recommendations called for $59 million for the work of subversion and public diplomacy, focusing on antigovernment projects and groups in both Cuba and the United States and the cultivation of third-country support for the Bush initiative. Cuba

does not fit neatly into the U.S. global strategy. It remains on the U.S. government's list of states that sponsor terrorism, perhaps as a matter of convenience and despite evidence that it does not do so. Indeed, Cuba has its own historically specific, national understanding of security (see Alzugaray, 1995; Morales,
2004), and Cuban actions, positions, and policies including its restrained concern over the presence of the terrorist Posada Carriles in the United States and the establishment of a U.S. detention center at Guantnamo are important in considering how the United States has framed Cuba.

The incongruencies of the time-worn logic of hard line Cuba policy

include the neglect of areas of cooperation and potential understanding and the devotion of excess energy and resources to isolating Cuba, in good part by scaring, confusing, and punishing U.S. citizens who wish to maintain the academic, humanitarian, or business relations that are the defining features of global society . The danger that the destabilization desired but not achieved in Cuba will be more aggressively pursued may be a real one. Indeed, in fall 2005 the CIA included Cuba on a list of countries in which instability might require U.S. intervention (Bachelet, 2006b).

Agency DA
Their interpretation is incapable of questioning the broader structures that drive policymakers to war. That limits the scope of policy and defers responsibility for action, which means their education is bad. Burke, Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales 2007 *Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence, and Reason, Theory and Event, vol.
10.2]
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war

is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about
its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent

ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for
progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the

challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive
from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When

we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of

the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.

AT: Extra T
We arent extra-topical Normal means includes justifications and clarifications of policy-maker intent Duke Law School 2011 [http://www.law.duke.edu/lib/researchguides/fedleg]
documents created by the legislature during the process of the laws passage. becomes valuable later, when disputes arise from vague or ambiguous statutory language. Although some courts disapprove of using such "extrinsic evidence" to clarify the meaning of a law, the sheer volume of legislation in recent years has resulted in an increasing reliance on legislative history, particularly in the federal court system. Today there is an abundance of legislative history material published for most federal statutes. All
The "legislative history" of a particular law consists of all the This material often legislative history materials have only persuasive legal authority, although courts consider certain types of documents to be more persuasive than others. Normally, the reports of the congressional committees that considered the proposed legislation and recommended its enactment are considered the best source for determining the intent behind a law. Other documents generated prior to enactment include

statements made on the floor of Congress in legislative debate, statements or testimony at committee hearings, and earlier or alternative versions of the bill.
Statements made and reports written after enactment are usually found to be less persuasive, and are not considered part of the "legislative history". This guide should serve as an introduction to the basic documents and procedures for researching the legislative history of a federal law. Resources available at the Goodson Law Library as well as the Perkins/Bostock Library Public Documents & Maps Department are highlighted. II. Getting Started All current general and permanent federal legislation in force is codified in the U.S. Code, which is available in the Law Library's Stevens Federal Alcove (Level 3), as well as online through LexisNexis, Westlaw, and the Government Printing Office's FDsys site. The language of each Code section is based on the original act that created it and any later laws that amended it. To compile a complete legislative history for a current federal law, it is necessary to locate the documents related to both the creating act and any later amendments. To begin the process, it is helpful to locate as much as possible of the following information for each act: its Public Law (or chapter) number; its location in the U.S. Statutes at Large (Federal Alcove; Documents AE 2.111); the date of enactment; the number of the House or Senate bill that was enacted. The Public Law number and Statutes at Large citation are easily found with the text of the codified language in the official U.S. Code. This information may also be found in the two commercial versions of the Code which are shelved in the Federal Alcove (U.S. Code Annotated, also available in Westlaw; and U.S. Code Service, also available in Lexis). Each edition of the Code also provides a short note explaining how the amendments changed the existing text. Prior to 1957, each act was given a separate chapter number in the Statutes at Large. Later laws are identified and cited by individual Public Law numbers and by their volume and page location in the Statutes at Large, e.g.: ch. 347, 61 Stat. 516 (1947) Pub. L. No. 96-374, 94 Stat. 1367 (1980) Although it is increasingly easier to find material with only the Public Law number or Statutes at Large location, much information in the official records of Congress is indexed and organized around the bill number. The bill number for a law enacted since 1903 can be found with its text in the appropriate volume of the Statutes at Large. Bill numbers are also published with the full text of the act in U.S. Code, Congressional & Administrative News (USCCAN) (1941- present) (Federal Alcove; also available on Westlaw). For very recent acts, bill numbers are included with the slip law (a pamphlet version of the new law, which serves as the official version until the next compilation of Statutes at Large is published). Slip laws are available in the Federal Alcove and full-text via FDsys. Bill numbers for earlier laws can be most easily found through the tables in Eugene Nabors, Legislative Reference Checklist: The Key to Legislative Histories from 1789-1903 (1982) (Ref.KF49.L43). They can also be found through the indexes and tables of the Congressional Record and its predecessors (see section V, part B, for more information on the Congressional Record). III. Compiled Legislative Histories Considerable research time can be saved if a legislative history has already been compiled for the law in question. Compiled legislative histories are of two types: those assembled for selected laws by previous researchers, and those issued on a regular continuing basis by commercial sources. Available compilations of the first type are listed by Public Law number and by Statutes at Large location in Nancy P. Johnson's Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories: A Bibliography of Government Documents, Periodical Articles, and Books (Ref.KF49.J63 and HeinOnline's U.S. Federal Legislative History Library), which includes materials dating back to the 1st Congress. Most sources listed by Johnson provide the actual texts of legislative history documents (with many available in the library's book collection); some are journal articles or other sources that provide only citations to relevant documents. Hein's Federal Legislative History Title Collection includes online versions of compiled legislative history publications for a wide variety of laws, making it an excellent starting point for legislative history research. Current members of the Duke Law community have access to have access to various legislative history databases on Westlaw, which compiles the legislative history documents for a number of major laws. Its FED-LH database includes PDFs of legislative histories compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, beginning in 1915. This database provides a comprehensive and searchable collection of documents related to a particular Public Law number, including alternate versions of bills which did not become the final law. Westlaw's Arnold & Porter Legislative Histories collection includes compiled legislative histories for many major federal statutes. A complete list can be accessed in Westlaw by searching the Directory for arnold and porter. Westlaw also includes PDFs of legislative histories compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, beginning in 1915 (FEDLH database). LexisNexis offers similar compiled legislative histories for important laws, particularly in the areas of treasury appropriations and environmental protection. A complete list may be accessed by following the path: Legal > Legislation & Politics, U.S. & U.K. > U.S. Congress > Legislative Histories. The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) indexes Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws on the Internet as part of its Legislative Sourcebook. The site points to compiled legislative histories in Lexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, the Department of Commerce, and other sources. Two other legislative history services that are no longer published are the CIS Legislative History Service, published only for the 97-98th Congresses (1981-84) (Microforms Room) and the Information Handling Service (IHS) Legislative Histories Microfiche Program, that covered selected major laws enacted between the 82d and 93d Congresses, and internal revenue laws back to the 61st (Microforms Room). As noted below, however, since 1984 the annual compilation of the CIS basic set contains a separate volume of Legislative History. IV. Researching Recent Laws (1970 - present) When researching recent laws (generally 1970-present), online resources have greatly simplified the process of locating legislative history documents. The Library of Congress provides free Bill Summary & Status information for the 93rd Congress forward (1973-present), as part of its THOMAS government information service. This site links users to the text of legislation as well as related bills, amendments, and committee documents. The "All Congressional Actions" portion is useful for determining what legislative history materials exist for a particular law, and will link to any available reports and debates (generally 1994-present). Current members of the Duke University community also have access to other legislative history resources. ProQuest Congressional is the online counterpart to Congressional Information Service (CIS). CIS is an index/abstract service and full-text microfiche publisher of congressional documents (print Index/Abstracts in Federal Alcove, Level 3; microfiche in Microforms Room, Level 1). CIS provides detailed and highly specific subject indexing of congressional publications. The CIS index found in ProQuest Congressional is also available in the Law School's LexisNexis as the CIS/Historical Index database, or CISHST. Tips for searching the print volumes are below. From 1970-83, the print service's annual Abstracts volume contains a table of legislative history information for all laws passed that year. The table is arranged by public law number, and provides citations to bills, reports, hearings and dates of consideration on the floor of each house. References are given to each document's CIS accession number ( e.g., S183-4), which provides access to its CIS abstract or to the microfiche text. (Note: The microfiche service does not include the text of the Congressional Record. However, the dates cited can be used to locate debates in both the daily and permanent editions of the Record.) Beginning in 1984, the CIS annual cumulation includes a volume of Legislative History of U.S. Public Laws, which provides detailed references and abstracts for documents accompanying significant laws. Although the basic CIS service (and the Legislative History tables) goes back only to 1970, the publisher has also developed a number of retrospective indexes of congressional publications, some of which are discussed in later sections of this guide. For pre-1970 laws, or if CIS publications are not available, it is a more complicated process both to determine whether useful documents exist and where they can be located. The rest of this guide discusses

the most persuasive sources of legislative history are the written reports that accompany a bill from committee to consideration on the floor of the House or Senate. This is because committee reports are written to explain the proposal, as well as its intended effects, by the legislators who looked at the bill most closely. Normally, there are separate House and
research procedures for several common types of legislative history material. V. Locating Specific Document Types A. Committee Reports Usually Senate reports available for each enacted law, as well as a conference report if the final language was developed by a conference committee of legislators from both chambers.

AT: Fiat/Implementation
The problem solution nature of fiat relies on tautological reasoning Its selfreferential nature ensures flawed outcomes and replicates hegemonic violent Gunning 2007 researcher in Middle East Politics and Conflict Studies at the School of
Government and International Affairs at Durham University
(Dr. Jeroen Gunning, A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?, Government and Opposition, Vol. 12, No.3, 6/21/2007, accessed through Wiley Online Library) Each of these critiques goes some way to explain the shortcomings in terrorism research, although the argument that funding is not available for projects critical of the status quo is perhaps overstated. 30 It will always be difficult to obtain reliable data on clandestine violence, so that scholars will inevitably be tempted to draw heavily on secondary sources or build elaborate theories on very little, and often dubious, information. 31 Equally, given prevailing power structures, the embeddednes of researchers within them, and the shock that terroristic tactics typically seek to induce, it will arguably always be tempting to demonize the terrorist other. However, what most of the critiques overlook is the crucial fact that, beyond these inherent difficulties, many of the observed shortcomings can be traced back to the dominance in terrorism research of what Robert Cox famously called a

problem-solving approach: one that takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action. 32 This is not to say that terrorism research has been devoid of critical voices, if critical is
defined, with Cox, as not tak*ing+ institutions and social and power relations for granted but call[ing] them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing, 33 and, significantly, exploring the extent to which the status quo contributes to the problem of terrorism. Crelinsten, who takes an explicitly critical approach, 34 is a long-standing member of the editorial board of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence , as are Weinberg and Crenshaw, who are critical in the (loose) sense of problematizing existing dichotomies, historicizing political violence and moving beyond a state-centric security approach. 35 Silke, Horgan, Schmid and Jongman can also be considered critical in that they are explicitly selfreflexive about assumptions, methodologies and the shortcomings of terrorism research. However, if we consider the typical characteristics of a problem solving or traditional approach, 37 we find that many of these both dominate terrorism research (including many of the contributions of Silkes one-timers) 38 and can be directly linked to the shortcomings witnessed in this research. In its most uncritical manifestation and it must be emphasised that few scholars are wholly uncritical in a Coxian sense a problem-solving approach does

not question its framework of reference, its categories, its origins or the power relations that enable the production of these categories . 39 It is state centric, takes security to mean the security of the state rather than that of human beings, on the assumption that the former implies the latter, and sees security in narrow military or law-andorder terms, as opposed to the wider conception of human security, as for instance developed by critical security studies. 40 It is ahistorical and ignores social and historical contexts; if it did not, it would have to account for the historical trajectory of the state, which would undermine the states claim to being uniquely legitimate. The problem-solving approach is positivist and objectivist, and seeks to explain the terrorist other from within state-centric paradigms rather than to understand the other inter-subjectively using interpretative or ethnographic methods. It divides the world sharply into dichotomies (for instance, between the legitimate and good state, and the illegitimate and evil terrorists). It posits assumptions based on these dichotomies, often without adequately exploring whether these assumptions are borne out in practice. It sees interests as fixed, and it regards those opposed to the status quo as the problem, without considering whether the status quo is part of the problem and transformation of both sides is necessary for its solution. Not only can many
of these characteristics be found in more or less diluted form in terrorism research 41 a legacy of the fields origins as a sub-field within traditional security and strategic studies but these problem-solving characteristics can also be shown to contribute directly to its observed shortcomings. The reported lack of primary data, the dearth of interviews with terrorists and the fields typical unwillingness to engage subjectively with *the terrorists+ motives, 42 is in part fuelled by the fields over -identification with the state, and by the adoption of dichotomies that depict terrorism as an unredeemable atrocity like no other, that can only be approached with a heavy dose of moral indignation, although other factors, such as security concerns, play a role too. 43 T alking with terrorists thus becomes taboo, unless it is done in the context of interrogation. 44 Such

a framework also makes it difficult to enquire whether the state has used terroristic methods. If the state is the primary referent, securing its security the main focus and its hegemonic ideology the accepted framework of analysis, terrorism, particularly if defined in sharp dichotomies between legitimate and illegitimate, can only be

logically perpetrated by insurgents against the state, not by state actors themselves . State actors
are engaged in counterterrorism, which is logically depicted as legitimate, or at least, justifiable given the terrorist threat and the fields focus on shortterm problem-solving. Where traditional terrorism studies do focus on state terrorism, it is in the context of the other: the authoritarian or totalitarian state that is the nemesis if not the actual enemy of the liberal democratic state. 4

AT: Policymaking Key

The aff is the best of both worlds in the terrorism context. Endorsing policy while critically interrogating knowledge solves their education offense but avoids the risk of co-option. Jackson et al., professors of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 2007 *Richard, The
Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies, paper delivered for 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30 September 2, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1945/APSA-2007-Paper-final2.pdf?sequence=1]

[Note: CTS = Critical Terrorism Studies]

At the heart of any critical project lies the notion of emancipation, however implicitly it is conceived. The challenge is that contending critical schools approach emancipation in different ways. Some denounce it as too implicated in grand meta-narratives and normative projects, including past and not so past, (neo)-colonial projects.49 Yet, an increasing number of critical voices have observed that all critical projects derive from an underlying conception of a different order.50 Even some of those most critical of the term, notably Derrida, have (re)-embraced the notion.51 To be critical, it seems, one has to have some normative notion of what is wrong and how things should be different. This need not involve a predetermined blueprint of utopia; indeed, such a blueprint is anathema to contemporary conceptions of critical. Rather, critical scholars typically acknowledge the non-exclusivity and revisability inherent to any normative position. 52 If emancipation is central to the critical project, we would argue that CTS cannot remain policy-irrelevant without belying its emancipatory commitment. It has to move beyond critique and deconstruction to reconstruction and policy-relevance.53 The

challenge of CTS is to engage policy-makers as well as terrorists and their communities and work towards the realization of new paradigms, new practices and the transformation of political structures. That, after all, is the original meaning of the notion of
immanent critique. Striving to be policy-relevant does not mean that one has to accept the validity of the term terrorism or stop investigating the political interests behind it. Nor does it mean that all research must have policy-relevance or that one has to limit ones research to what is relevant for the state, since the critical turn implies a move beyond state-centric perspectives. End-users could, and should, include both state and non-state actors, as long as the goal is to combat both the use of political terror by actors and the political structures that encourage its use. However,

engaging policy-makers raises the thorny issue of co-option. One of the fears of critical scholars is that by engaging with policy-makers, either they or their research become co-opted, whether through governments (ab)using independent research findings for
their own ends, allowing ones research to be overly shaped by the agendas of major grant-awarding bodies, or by gradually coming to uncritically adopt the perspectives and values of policy-makers. A more intractable problem is the one highlighted by Rengger that the

demand that theory must have a praxial dimension itself runs the risk of collapsing critical theory back into traditional theory by making it dependent on instrumental conceptions of rationality.54 A related problem is that by becoming embedded in existing power structures, one risks reproducing existing knowledge structures or inadvertently contributing to counterterrorism policy that uncritically reifies the status quo. Such dilemmas have to be confronted and debated; non-engagement is not an option. Engagement is facilitated by the fact that as counterterrorism projects flounder, advisors to policy-makers are increasingly eager for advice, even when it is critical. For obvious reasons, embedded terrorism scholars and traditional think-tanks have enjoyed a much closer relationship with policy-makers, allowing them both more
institutionalized and more direct access. This is partly structural, since critical studies have been seen as inherently adversarial towards existing power structures. Critical

scholars have also at times unnecessarily burned bridges by issuing blanket condemnations of all things associated with the state, whilst failing to engage with the
public safety obligations of the authorities, and the challenges terrorism poses to such safety. Critical scholars cannot indulge in the unilateral demonizing of all state actors, at the same time as arguing against the comprehensive demonizing of all terrorists. Simply because a piece of research originates within RAND does not automatically invalidate it; conversely, a study emanating from a critical scholar is not inherently superior. Just as Fred Halliday critiqued those who privileged voices from the South as somehow more authentic, critical scholars must guard against either privileging terrorist voices or uncritically dismissing state or staterelated actors.55 In sum, critical

scholars have to think carefully about how to engage with the status quo and centres of power without losing critical distance. The establishment of dedicated critical journals,
seminars and conferences which actively seek to engage policy-makers is one way forward, as are collaborative efforts with traditional conferences already habitually attended by policy-makers. The creation of dedicated research centers and think-tanks which strive to hold these tensions in balance may similarly be necessary. Engaging

policy-makers is not the only way forward; engaging terrorists and suspect communities, as well as civil society actors more generally, is equally

important. In

the age of the blog, alternative news websites and transnational grassroots activism, CTS must be at the forefront of broadening the spectrum of discourses and making space for counter-hegemonic accounts. It can do this at universities over the past four and a half years, over 600 students have been exposed to critical perspectives on terrorism at Aberystwyth University alone. This can also be achieved through participative research partnerships with suspect communities, or through publicly challenging new laws or directives, as some have already begun to do.

AT: Cede the Political

They cede the political terrorism policy requires beginning from normative concerns, not just implementation and problem-solving. Jackson, Professor in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 9 *Richard, The Study of
Terrorism after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges and Future Developments, POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2009 VOL 7, 171184, http://www.olympiaseminars.org/2012/readings/Cycle_C/Jackson_Study%20of%20Terrorism.pdf]

Terrorism studies has its theoretical and institutional origins in orthodox security studies and counter-insurgency studies (Burnett and Whyte, 2005, pp. 113). Much of the elds early output has been described as counterinsurgency masquerading as political science (Schmid and Jongman, 1988, p. 182). Consequently, much terrorism research adopts state-centric priorities and perspectives and tends to reproduce a limited set of assumptions and narratives about the nature, causes and responses to terrorism. From this perspective, it can be described as an exemplary form of problem-solving theory (Gunning, 2007a). As Robert Cox suggests, problem-solving theory takes the world as it nds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action, and then works to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble (Cox, 1981, pp. 1289). Importantly, problem-solving theory does not question the extent to which the status quo the hierarchies and operation of power and the inequalities and injustices thus generated is implicated in the very problem of non-state terrorism and other forms of subaltern violence. It is partly for these reasons that the vast majority of terrorism research takes for granted that terrorism is a social problem in need of a solution and attempts to provide policy-relevant advice for governments, an orientation that has greatly intensied since
2001. It is in this context that Giuseppe Nesis (2006) edited volume, International Cooperation in CounterTerrorism, provides an informative and at times illuminating overview of current international attempts to respond to the challenges of non-state terrorism.While much of the book adopts a state-centric approach which assumes for example that international terrorism imperils the entire fabric of the international community (Gioia, 2006, p. 21) and several of the chapters are not much more than descriptions of recent resolutions, conventions and measures by particular international organisations, it also has moments of genuine insight and import for the broader eld. In particular, the analysis does much to illuminate how current state-centric understandings of terrorism have evolved over many decades from initial attempts to outlaw practices such as the assassination of heads of state during the anarchist campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also clearly reveals the ways in which states

have attempted to proscribe terrorism while simultaneously allowing certain nonstate actors to engage in violent liberation struggles. The recognition of legitimate insurgency by
liberation movements has consequently remained one of the primary obstacles to the realisation of a comprehensive counterterrorism treaty and is

the reason why the United States is unlikely ever to extradite anti-Castro terrorists to Cuba to stand trial, for example (Gioia, 2006, p. 16). One of the most important issues tackled in Nesis
book is the question of state terrorism, even though it is not a primary intention of the volume. Several of the chapters demonstrate how there have been numerous international efforts to outlaw systematic terrorism by states during wartime, including measures adopted at the ends of both the First and Second World Wars (Paust, 2006, p. 30). The International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, for example, directly condemned the Nazi policy of terror (Arnold, 2006, p. 127). At the same time, the analysis also makes clear that states have continuously attempted to dene terrorism in ways that would exclude their own actions from the relevant treaties and instruments of international counter-terrorism, often by excluding activities insomuch as they are governed by other rules of international law (Gioia, 2006, p. 17). Nesis book is also useful for revealing the ways in which international organisations and jurists have attempted to criminalise terrorism (see ch. 2), in opposition to the efforts of the great powers to rewrite it as a serious issue of national security (thereby legitimising the use of military force as a primary means of response). It is telling that the term war on terrorism is largely absent from the book, replaced instead by the phrase the ght against terror (Nesi, 2006, p. xi). In the end, and perhaps without realising it, the book reveals the extent to which terrorism is rst

and foremost a social and political construction, negotiated between powerful actors in specic historical circumstances for particular purposes. On the basis of this review, it can be argued that recognition of the fundamental ontological uncertainty of what terrorism actually is should be at the heart of counter-terrorism research, as should the acceptance that counter-terrorism itself can all too easily cross the line into state terrorism. It seems clear that a great many policies of the war on terror, such as the systematic use

of torture, strategic bombing

of internment camps at Guantnamo Bay, have

in Afghanistan and Iraq, extra-judicial killings, disappearances and the maintenance crossed the line from legitimate defensive measures to

state terrorism. As such, they have become justications for further acts of non-state terrorism such as the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. In such a context, terrorism scholars require a heightened critical normative sensitivity to such distinctions in order to provide a more balanced analysis of contemporary counterterrorism efforts and perhaps better advice for government agencies. What is disturbing about much of the recent counter-terrorism literature including Nesis book in parts is that so little attention is paid to these normative issues and that the essential critical attitude is conspicuous by its absence.

AT: DAs

AT: Linear DA Chains

IR predictions fail theres never enough information available Doran 2002 Andrew W. Mellon Professor of International Relations, Director of the Global
Theory and History Program, and Director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Charles F. Doran, Why Forecasts Fail: The Limits and Potential of Forecasting In International Relations and Economics, International Studies Review, Vol. 1, issue 2, accessed through Wiley Online Library) One of the techniques to try to deal with nonlinearities in a trend is to use forecast updating and heavy indicator monitoring. Why is this not likely to help? It is true that the most recent forecast is likely to be the best forecast. But is this latest
forecast good enough? Regarding the prediction of an imminent nonlinearity, the answer must be in the negative. It scarcely matters whether the forecast was done long ago or recently, whether so-called early-warning indicators were attempted, or whether a long base period or a shorter one was attempted. The nonlinearity is so out of character with the previous data recorded in linear terms that its appearance comes as a surprise. Whether the cause of such nonlinearities is largely within the trend itself or is the result primarily of variables outside the system of measurement is very difficult to discern. But in either case, the causal behavior necessary to predict the nonlinearity cannot be captured by the analysis, and the nonlinearity is unpredictable. Sometimes the argument is made that international

politics is like the market assessed by the random-walk theorists. Information is not available, either in historical terms or in future terms, that would be helpful to the analyst . All the information is already in the trend, according to this notion. Information is virtually perfect. Predictions of all kinds, linear and nonlinear, will thus fail. Whether or not this argument is valid in economics, the argument would seem to be less appropriate in
international relations where secrecy is so much more common and uncertainty and deception are so prevalent. Thus in international relations at least, the problem is not that all forecasting is useless, but that forecasting that must contend with nonlinearities is useless. Perhaps a real-world example will help highlight the nature of the challenge in international relations more effectively. Despite the interruption of World War II, Japan has experienced a very rapid rise on its power cycle in the twentieth century. Occurring just prior to World War II, a first inflection point is thought partially responsible for Japans precipitate behavior leading to the war. Following the war, reconstruction Japan accelerated its economic growth unti l it returned to the same power cycle trajectory that would have eventuated if the war had never occurred. Another first inflection point occurs, and a trend of slower growth sets in. What is now very much worth contemplating, both in terms of power cycle analysis and in terms of the ability to forecast more generally, is whether the very slow growth of the last seven years is an indication (1) that Japan has peaked on its power cycle, or (2) that these are mere annual points on a trend that corresponds to a temporary aberration, to be replaced by ebullient growth thereafter. What must be remembered here is that the power cycle is a relative indicator. All that has so far been assessed is what is happening in the numerator (Japans abs olute growth). Now if we also take into account the denominator, as we must in power cycle analysis, namely, what is happening elsewhere in the system, we get a more accurate picture of what has transpired. Slow growth elsewhere, though not experienced in the same precise interval as that of Japans interval of retarded growth, is after seven years of minuscule Japanese growth a much more general phenomenon. With hindsight, the denominator (systemswide growth in capability) may eventually look much more like the numerator (Japans growth in capability) of the pow er ratio. Although such an observation modifies the notion that Japan is in precipitous decline, the observation that growth may be slowing everywhere serves to indicate only that the Japanese peak in its power cycle is more likely a plateau followed by very gradual decline rather than a point or sharp apex. What does power cycle analysis then tell us about the current Asia crisis? Remember, power cycle analysis is always comparative and therefore relative. Its insights are meaningful, for example, in a comparison of Japans changing power relative to that of the other members of the central system. Could the region itself be going through some inflection point on a giant regionwide power curve that includes most Asian countries? How would we know? Are there feedback loops from such knowledge that could in the end affect the behavior that is itself reflected in the cycle? This impa ct might correspond to selfdenying and self-fulfilling forecasts that tend to depress or alternately spur behavior based in a kind of self-fulfilling action that results alone from awareness of the conclusions of the forecast, and that would not otherwise take place. These are very large and speculative questions. Answers are possible to some, not to others. No one has, to our knowledge, attempted to create empirically a regionwide power cycle, much less do the necessary empirical analysis to determine where on such a cycle Asia as a whole currently is positioned relative to the rest of the international system. Despite data shortcomings, this exercise could be undertaken (and indeed partially has already been undertaken). If we were to speculate wildly without having completed the empirical analysis regarding some Asian-wide power cycle, such judgments could not be made without very important qualifications. 22 For example, trying to squeeze Japan and China on the same power curve is very distortive, for the two countries are at such different positions on their respective curves. It would be easier to consider Southeast Asian countries as a group. Based on our sense of the dynamics of these countries relative, for example, to the advanced industrial countries, they have clearly passed the lower turning point and have yet to reach the first inflection point. The present slowdown in growth is quite uneven within the region and must be treated against the slowdown that is happening throughout the global economy now and over the next decade. Placed in this context, the Southeast Asian/Korean/Japanese crisis can be understood for what it is and not as some kind of collective inflection point. When such an inflection point has definitively been passed, we will feel a s well as know the results. The growth of the Southeast Asian group will slow relative to the system as well as relative to its own past rates of growth. Could passage through an inflection point be self-fulfilling? This is unlikely for several reasons. First, growth patterns are normally quite different across countries. More over, countries are located on different positions on their respective cycles. Self-fulfilling policy would need to be defined separately in terms of each of these observations. Second, different policymakers in each country are likely to have different responses to the same reality. Third, there is relatively little that any government can do about changing latent power in the short term. For instance, the capacity of a country to alter its GNP, or its population size, or its wealth is rather constrained. Fourth, whatever a government does is limited to the numerator of the power ratio. Yet what happens to position on the power curve may be affected as much or more by what is happening in the denominator (what others do) over which the state has no control. Because of all of these considerations, passage through a critical point is an especially disturbing experience for a government bent on a world role. There is very little the government can do to alter its own dynamic, especially in the short term. Returning to the

question at the outset of this section, concerning how policymakers ought to deal with the dilemma that forecasting involving

nonlinearities is flawed, the first conclusion is that these decisionmakers should

not allow inflated claims about forecasting to persuade them. Better that they not forecast than that they naively expect success where there is none. Policymakers can get insight from experimental refinements (simulations) of linear
forecasts, such as small changes in slope. Likewise, elimination of error and improvement of reliability can be beneficial (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994:169). Technical breakthroughs can add predictive value to the forecasts that are made over a reality that happens to be linear. More frequent forecasts and the updating of forecasts can assist. Employment of multiple indicators may add information. Throughout, the addition of information and the acquisition of better-quality information is central. The

assumption of a perfect market of information in international relations is not viable. Therefore

those who have better intelligence information will on average be able to conduct better forecasts than those without such information.

Assuming a linear causality instead of the complexity that constitutes international systems only exacerbates the problem they try to solve Ramalingam and Jones, 2008
(Ben Ramalingam, senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute and the London School of Economics, and Harry Jones, research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, Exploring the science of complexity: Ideas and implications for development and humanitarian efforts, October 2008, http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publicationsopinion-files/833.pdf) Organisations in the international development and humanitarian sector deal with complexity every day. As one thinker has put it: ... the questions *faced by+ aid agencies ... are perhaps the most complex and ill-defined questions facing human kind (Ellerman, cited in Roper and Pettit, 2002). Why might this be the case? From the perspective of a complex system, there are

many connections and interactions within the various dimensions of economic and social development, such as between education and the economy, between health and poverty, between poverty and vulnerability to disasters, between growth and environment the list is literally endless. International aid to address these issues takes place in the context of a dense and globalised web of connections and relationships between individuals, communities, institutions, nations and groups of nations. Interactions among the various elements of these different systems are themselves complex and multifaceted. Aid relations run alongside many other kinds of international relations: military and security relations, relations of economic cooperation and trade competition. Naturally, these wider relationships have an effect often a profound one on the aid-related
relationships that exist between countries. If that were not enough, every aid agency operates in a global aid system which is itself characterised by a huge number interacting systems, each of which is made up of multiple parts (Martens, 2005). There are a bewildering number of different relationships and interactions between bilateral aid agencies and multilateral agencies, between multilaterals and country governments, between aid agencies and communities, among neighbouring communities, between NGOs and governments, and among an increasing number of non-traditional development actors such as the media, diaspora communities and the military. Figure 1 conveys some of this complexity by il lustrating the principal routes of resource flows within the humanitarian aid system. Given the above, perhaps the primary implication of seeing international aid through a complexity lens is that aid agencies need to be very careful not to oversimplify the systems being dealt with, whether talking about the developing countries in which they operate to reduce poverty and alleviate suffering, or dealing with the international aid system itself. For example, research has illustrated that, at

the heart of many disasters, there are seldom single causes but instead many interacting and interdependent dimensions and factors (Buckle, 2005). Famine can be
caused by drought, a rise in the price of grain, a drop in the price of livestock, inadequate road infrastructure, a lack of food aid, or by all these factors simultaneously (Pirrotte et al., 1999). Despite

this level of complexity, a bias towards and

reliance on simplistic models pervades the aid system. For example, a study on drought-related work in the Sahel
identifies that many analyses tend to divide causes into immediate and structural factors, with the structural issues largely ignored in agency responses (Sahel Working Group, 2007). The argument for a more holistic approach to problems has also been made on the developmental side of the aid system, among thinkers who argue that the multidimensionality of poverty would be better recognised by those designing and evaluating development interventions. The starting point is that a large number of factors that lead to poverty need to be considered in development work. These dimensions include income consumption poverty, deprivation of capabilities linked to health, education, mortality, under-nourishment, illiteracy and participation in the activities of society, which involves freedom, social inclusion, employment , dignity and human rights (Sen, 1999). These dimensions relate and interact in a dynamic fashion such that, when attempting to address the problem of poverty, it may not be possible to deal with each dimension in isolation, or to quantify the effects of an intervention in terms of direct imp act on the targeted dimension. The implications of complexity for targets is covered in more detail in Concept 10 at this stage it is important to note that there

are inherent dangers that overly focusing on one dimension may pave the way for indirect effects to

produce negative trends in the others . Different perspectives on what the system is also need to be taken into
account. Those who are being affected by aid initiatives need to be part of the process of identifying the important elements of the relevant system, as well as defining the problems and their solutions (Funtowicz and Ravtez, 1994; Rling and Wagemakers, 1998). As there are many perspectives on how to understand the complex social, economic and political contexts of aid work, it is important to bring togeth er as many of these as possible in order to gain a rich picture of constraint s and opportunities. This means that the practical, social and institutional dimensions should be of as much concern to aid agencies as the scientific and scholarly concerns. If development and humanitarian work is to incorporate properly the concept of a system of interconnected and interrelated elemen ts, dimensions and levels, it may be that both qualitative and quantitative data should be used to gain insight into phenomena no mean task and that the task of selection and synthesis becomes as important as an alysis (Haynes, 2003). This will require learning to distinguish between messes, problems and puzzles, and being clear about the kinds of problems that can be handled with what might be termed conventional perspectives, where precise prediction and solution is possible, and the kinds of problems associated with unavoidable complexity, where different kinds of approaches may be needed (Buchanan, 2004). As has already been suggested, explanations

of phenomena based on linear cause and effect are often not viable in systems that consist of numerous interdependent relationships. This means that approaches that have more in common with historical research may prove useful. Instead of asking questions such as did x cause y?, these methods acknowledge the complexity of the real world, asking what happened and why?, thereby moving towards building narratives about events and processes
(OECD, 1999)

The disads linear thinking is useless in the context of complex international systems Ramalingam and Jones 8
(Ben Ramalingam, senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute and the London School of Economics, and Harry Jones, research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, Exploring the science of complexity: Ideas and implications for development and humanitarian efforts, October 2008, http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publicationsopinion-files/833.pdf) In much of modern science and policy, Ackoff identified a bias towards puzzle solving. He argued that the

real-world, complex, messy nature of systems is frequently not recognised, leading to simple puzzlebased solutions for what are in fact complex messes. As one thinker puts it, one of the greatest mistakes when dealing with a mess is not seeing its dimensions in their entirety, carving off a part, and dealing with this part as if it were a problem and then solving it as if it were a puzzle, all the while ignoring the linkages and connections to her dimensions of the mess (Pidd, 1996). This habit extends beyond dealing with big global
problems, such as climate change, into more everyday and relatively mundane realms. For example, most organisations are more comfortable in a world that is run: ... with clockwork precision through a code of rules and consequences ... a predictable world, occasionally shaken by the hand of fate only to return to its meticulous order (Sanders, 1998). Complex systems

are far

harder to model and analyse, especially when considering social, economic and political phenomena. This carries cost implications in terms of time, money and skills that are far from trivial. However, these need to be balanced with the possibility that when dealing with complex systems, linear cause-and-effect thinking may in fact be useless. More may be learned by trying to understand the important patterns of interaction and
association across different elements and dimensions (Haynes, 2003). For more on this, see concept 6 on Phase space and attractors.

Positivist impacts rely on a tautology that replicates violence Gunning 2007 researcher in Middle East Politics and Conflict Studies at the School of Government and International
Affairs at Durham University (Dr. Jeroen Gunning, A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?, Government and Opposition, Vol. 12, No.3, 6/21/2007, accessed through Wiley Online Library) Each of these critiques goes some way to explain the shortcomings in terrorism research, although the argument that funding is not available for projects critical of the status quo is perhaps overstated. 30 It will always be difficult to obtain reliable data on clandestine violence, so that scholars will inevitably be tempted to draw heavily on secondary sources or build elaborate theories on very little, and often dubious, information. 31 Equally, given prevailing power structures, the embeddednes of researchers within them, and the shock that terroristic tactics typically seek to induce, it will arguably always be tempting to demonize the terrorist other. However, what most of the critiques overlook is the crucial fact that, beyond these inherent difficulties, many of the observed shortcomings can be traced back to the dominance in terrorism research of what Robert Cox famously called a

problem-solving approach: one that takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action. 32 This is not to
say that terrorism research has been devoid of critical voices, if critical is defined, with Cox, as not tak*ing+ institutions and social and power relations for granted but call[ing] them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing, 33 and, significantly, exploring the extent to which the status quo contributes to the problem of terrorism. Crelinsten, who takes an explicitly critical approach, 34 is a long-standing member of the editorial board of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence , as are Weinberg and Crenshaw, who are critical in the (loose) sense of problematizing existing dichotomies, historicizing political violence and moving beyond a state-centric security approach. 35 Silke, Horgan, Schmid and Jongman can also be considered critical in that they are explicitly self-reflexive about assumptions, methodologies and the shortcomings of terrorism research. However, if we consider the typical characteristics of a problem solving or traditional approach, 37 we find that many of these both dominate terrorism research (including many of the contributions of Silkes onetimers) 38 and can be directly linked to the shortcomings witnessed in this research. In its most uncritical manifestation and it must be emphasised that few scholars are wholly uncritical in a Coxian sense a

problem-solving approach does

not question its framework of reference, its categories, its origins or the power relations that enable the production of these categories. 39 It is state centric, takes security to mean the security of the state rather than that of human beings, on the assumption that the former implies the latter, and sees security in narrow
military or law-and-order terms, as opposed to the wider conception of human security, as for instance developed by critical security studies. 40 It is ahistorical and ignores social and historical contexts; if it did not, it would have to account for the historical trajectory of the state, which would undermine the states claim to being uniquely legitimate.

The problem-solving approach is

positivist and objectivist, and seeks to explain the terrorist other from within state-centric paradigms rather than to understand the other inter-subjectively using interpretative or ethnographic methods. It divides the world sharply into dichotomies (for instance, between the legitimate and good state, and the illegitimate and evil terrorists). It posits assumptions based on these dichotomies, often without adequately exploring whether these assumptions are borne out in practice. It sees interests as fixed, and it regards those opposed to the status quo as the problem, without considering whether the status quo is part of the problem and transformation of both sides is necessary for its solution. Not
only can many of these characteristics be found in more or less diluted form in terrorism research 41 a legacy of the fields origins as a sub-field within traditional security and strategic studies but these problem-solving characteristics can also be shown to contribute directly to its observed shortcomings. The reported lack of primary data, the dearth of interviews with terrorists and the fields typical unwillingness to engage subjectively with *the terrorists+ motives, 42 is in part fuelled by the fields overidentification with the state, and by the adoption of dichotomies that depict terrorism as an unredeemable atrocity like no other, that can only be approached with a heavy dose of moral indignation, although other factors, such as security concerns, play a role too. 43 Talking with terrorists thus becomes taboo, unless it is done in the context of interrogation. 44 Such

a framework also makes it difficult to enquire whether the state has used terroristic methods. If the state is the primary referent, securing its security the main focus and its hegemonic ideology the accepted framework of analysis, terrorism, particularly if defined in sharp dichotomies between legitimate and illegitimate, can only be logically perpetrated by insurgents against the state, not by state actors themselves. State actors are engaged in counterterrorism, which is logically depicted as legitimate, or at least, justifiable given the terrorist threat and the fields focus on shortterm problem solving. Where traditional terrorism studies do focus on state terrorism, it is in the context of the other: the authoritarian or
totalitarian state that is the nemesis if not the actual enemy of the liberal democratic state. 4

Alarmism Link
Alarmist rhetoric leads to torture as a form of biopolitical control Hannah, 6 professor at Aberystwyth University and co-ordinator of the Cultural and
Historical Geography Research Group (Matthew Hannah, Torture and the Ticking Bomb: The War on Terrorism as a Geographical Imagination of Power/Knowledge, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 96, No. 3, September 2006, accessed through JSTOR) Administration policy since 11 September 2001 (hereinafter 9/11) and the American public's continued willingness to live with it can be explained to a significant degree by a particular discursive construction: the ticking-bomb scenario. To the extent that this scenario frames official and public understandings of the threat of terrorism, it tends to make torture appear more reasonable as a response. The ticking-bomb scenario prompts a reimagining of the landscapes of everyday life as suffused with an unacceptably high level of risk. If unacceptable risk is extrapolated to cover the entire national territory, the imperative to eliminate such risk is intensified. The imagined imperative to eliminate this risk at all costs constitutes an opening for the contemplation of torture. This argument is circumstantial in nature and is probably stronger as an explanation of relative
public complacency than as an explanation of the Bush administration's actual motives. Even on the latter point, however, it is a plausible account of a stance many commentators find difficult to explain fully in other ways.

The threat of terrorism and the response of torture are fruitfully understood in terms of power/knowledge, particularly by means of the concepts of biopower and governmentality. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004, 19) are correct to claim that, "when individualized in its extreme form, biopower becomes torture. " But they do
not fully explain why this is so. Like Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005) and Judith Butler (2004) have also drawn on these Foucaultian concepts to explain the complex of extraterritorial prisons within which torture has occurred. But together these authors have only partly explained the response to terrorism, and little of the perceived threat. Once the threat of terrorism is understood as a threat to forms of power/knowledge, it becomes possible to supplement, to sort out more clearly, and then to tie together the still somewhat loose and incomplete biopolitical analysis found in the writings of Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Butler. No

account of torture in the current geopolitical context can be complete if it is not linked to an analysis of the threat of terrorism that serves as its justification. If forms of power that involve life, knowledge, and the body are indeed as central to the maintenance of modern social order as Foucault and many others believe them to be, it is necessary to attempt to relate torture, which represents an extreme example of the political articulation of life, knowledge, and the body, to wider questions of social order. In his
recent review of geographical approaches to such issues, Colin Flint cautions social scientists against succumbing to the temptation to characterize the present geopolitical conjuncture as one of "chaos" or unfathomable disorder: geographers and other scholars "need to offer parsimonious theories that help uncover the multiple roots of all contemporary geopolitical acts" (Flint 2003, 100). Viewing torture as a geopolitical act of apparently renewed importance, this article is one response to Flint's call.

AT: Pol and Econ DAs

The economic and political threats constructed in their DA is tantamount to authoritarian politics Feldman and Stenner, 1997
(Stanley Feldman, Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Survey Research at Stony Brook University, and Karen Stenner, Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism, Political Psychology, vol. 18, no. 4, December 1997, accessed through JSTOR) Perhaps more importantly, it is not just that threat magnifies the effects of authoritarianism but that the observed consequences of authoritarianism depend heavily upon the presence of threat. In
the absence of threat, we find little connection between authoritarian predispositions and the dependent variables. Thus, threat appears to be critical to the activation of authoritarianism. Any satisfactory explanation of authoritarianism must, therefore, account for the central role of threat. Although it might be possible to incorporate external threat into the Adorno et al. (1950) explanation of authoritarianism, their focus was on the role of childhood socialization and internal conflict. It is not obvious how this account could incorporate our findings. Threat was certainly not a central part of their explanation. It is even less clear how Altemeyer's (1988, 1996) social learning account could accommodate a central role for external threat. Altemeyer does argue that perceptions of a dangerous world help to mediate the effects of authoritarianism, but this is very different from the interactive effect of threat evidenced in our analysis. Moreover, there is nothing in Altemeyer's explanation to suggest why his acquired trait of authoritarianism should be activated only under conditions of threat. What kind of explanations would fare better? In part the answer depends upon the types of threat to which authoritarianism is sensitive. Our analysis indicates that political

threats are especially salient to authoritarians. The most substantial and consistent result was the pronounced interaction
effect of authoritarianism with perceived ideological diversity. The more ideological distance authoritarians perceive between themselves and the two parties and the presidential candidates, the more prejudiced, intolerant, and punitive they become. We also found substantial effects for the interaction of authoritarianism with negative assessments of the presidential candidates. When people consider the candidates to be bereft of positive qualities, arousing feelings of anger and fear, the effect of authoritarian predispositions is greatly exacerbated. Should the political threats work in tandem, the magnitude of impact is very sobering indeed. For example, the influence that authoritarianism exerts on support for the death penalty is magnified by both perceptions of ideological diversity and fear and anger toward political leaders.

Economic threats also interacted with authoritarianism in several cases, but note that it is perception of a deteriorating national economy that is
consequential. In sharp contrast, threats to personal economic conditions-whether unemployment or more general personal economic decline-appear to have no aggravating effect on authoritarians. Taken

together, this pattern of results indicates that authoritarianism is activated and aggravated by threats to the political and social order but not by threats to personal well-being. We think this is a very critical finding. Authoritarianism is activated when
there is a perception that the political or social order is threatened. This is at odds with most previous discussions of the role of threat in authoritarianism, which have focused on direct personal threat.