Journal articles on the topic 'Terrorism [Anti-Terrorism, counterterrorism]'

The fight against terrorism is one of the most important factors that has an impact on both international and regional security and the security of the Republic of Serbia. Due to the expansion of terrorism in the world, it is necessary to establish effective mechanisms for protection against terrorism and terrorist activities. The establishment of anti-terrorist and counter-terrorist units and their modernization are key factors in the fight against terrorism. The paper analyzes the theoretical foundations of the elite antiterrorist units of the leading countries of the world, and the counterterrorism units of the Republic of Serbia. Using the AHP method in support of choosing the most effective counterterrorism unit, the conclusion was reached about the most effective counterterrorism unit in order to model an effective counterterrorism unit in the territory of the Republic of Serbia and modernize existing anti-terrorist units. Comparative analysis was carried out on the basis of criteria such as the number of members of the unit, the number of modular units, the type and level of weapons and military equipment used by counterterrorism units, the duration of selective training for entering a special unit, the duration of the training cycle of members of the unit and the average age of members of the unit. The result of this research can be implemented in anti-terrorist units in Serbia, in order to increase the efficiency of the anti-terrorist unit in the fight against terrorism. In the end, the modeling of one type of counterterrorism unit was carried out, which with its organizational-formation structure and equipment could successfully counter terrorism on the territory of the Republic of Serbia.

The article states that one of the most important problems in Ukraine in current conditions is the fight against terrorism. Counterterrorism actors are involved in countering this extremely dangerous phenomenon. The system of counterterrorism actors is a set of entities defined at the level of legislation that interact with each other in order to prevent, detect, suppress and minimize the consequences of terrorist activities. The author points out that improving the activities of these actors involves not only improving their organizational structure in order to increase mobility and flexibility in responding to changes in the dynamics of terrorism, but also strengthening the ties and interaction of relevant departments involved in anti-terrorism activities. Along with this, it is noted that civil society institutions should be involved in countering terrorism. The paper also suggests directions for improving the antiterrorist system of Ukraine. Key words: anti-terrorism actors, system of anti-terrorism actors, the President of Ukraine, Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Anti-terror Center of the Security Service of Ukraine.

The police force is one of the few institutions still trusted by the public today. Yet, whilst the recent waves of terrorism have “stimulated” academic activity on the determinants of public fear of terrorism, much less academic effort has been focused on measuring and assessing the effectiveness of anti-terrorism strategies. The present article makes some contributions towards addressing this gap by investigating what shapes public attitudes towards the effectiveness of terrorism policing. Using Eurobarometer data, our results demonstrate that objective national economic, societal and political indicators do not tend to influence popular opinion on the effectiveness of the police in dealing with terrorism. They also show that individuals’ perceptions about the national socio-economic situation are better predictors of public opinion on terrorism policing than individuals’ financial and social positions or levels of education. The influence of these perceptions on public attitudes towards the effectiveness of counterterrorism seems to be more potent than the one on public fear of terrorism found in the extant literature. The implications of these findings are then considered.

INTRODUCTION. Effective implementation of antiterrorist interstate cooperation is impossible without the creation of an appropriate legal framework. By concluding international treaties, States agree to accept obligations that define the scope of their activities in the areas of cooperation. Moreover, sometimes the necessity arises for emergency antiterrorist response which brings about the application of other than treaty mechanisms like bilateral and multilateral commitments. It seems necessary to pay attention to certain legal mechanisms provided by the UN anti-terrorist treaties, in particular, in the context of the situation in Syria, and some conceptual changes in Russian counter-terrorism legislation.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The article uses treaties, national legislation and doctrinal research. The authors rely on various methods to reach their conclusions, among which treaty interpretation is most frequently used.RESEARCH RESULTS. In the article the author shows different mechanisms and spheres of modern cooperation in counter-terrorism and their ineffectiveness owing to political interests of some states. Special attention is paid to legality of actions of the USA and allies in Syria and criminal liability of members of international terrorist organizations.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. In this article the authors draw attention to disadvantages of international legal regulation of anti-terrorist cooperation. The article concludes that refusal of compliance with international law in the sphere of counter-terrorism brings about negative consequences for maintenance of international peace and security.

Since its enactment on July 2009, Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism proclamation was/is at the very center of almost every political discourse in the nation. Many dissidents fall into its trap and by day its effect is becoming more far-reaching and resonating. The widely written provisions of the law make it susceptible to misapplication and prone to abuse. Whilst the state is staunchly firing back to the detractors of the law and its mis(application), however, it doubled down its implementation by every new day. This paper, after examining one hundred twenty three terrorism charges against nearly one thousand individuals―in a sixty-six months period of time―concludes that: Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law is a colossal failure for counterterrorism, which only exemplifies how not to counter terrorism.

Introduction: Statistics have proven that both the European Union (“EU”) and the Russian Federation (“Russia”) suffer from terrorism in its current form. Intensifying partnerships to combat terrorism would be a good idea. This essay envisages to illustrate a common base for cooperation in the fight against terrorism despite of some general differences in policy and structure between the EU and Russia.Materials and methods: The methodological basis of the research has both an analytical and descriptive nature. As for the analytical nature, sta­tistical, qualitative and comparative analyses were used while researching political phenomena and processes in the sphere of national security and coun­terterrorism. The author also applied the inductive method. The materials observed include the distinct approaches of Russia and the EU in terms of threats to national security including terrorism.Results: The author reveals there are four fundamental issues which ask for more attention in the EU-Russia dialogue on Freedom, Justice and Security and particularly with regard to the fight against terrorism. Firstly, statistics prove that Europe (EU and Russia) are impacted by modern terrorism, yet not by the same cases of terrorism. Secondly, Russia’s experience in counterterrorism is crucial. Thirdly, the scale ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’ versus ‘security’ has not the same ratio in the EU and in Russia. Fourthly, the concept sovereignty is differently interpreted by the EU, the EU Member States and Russia. Despite all the differences in views, it is clear that the EU could learn a lot from Russia, as one of the key States with considerable experience in the fight against terrorism. Although the EU and Russia face different forms and problems and the roots of Western European terrorism sometimes have a slightly different origin, this does not negate the fact that they could foster cooperation.Discussion and conclusion: The governmental approaches of the EU and Russia on national security were discussed as well as the common grounds for cooperation, namely the threat of terrorism. It is proved that both systems have different features and are not always compatible with each other. The following recommendation of setting up an anti-terrorism working group was provided as well as the advice to eliminate the political distrust.

Terrorism has wreaked havoc on today’s society and people. The discovery of the regularity of terrorist attacks is of great significance to the global counterterrorism strategy. In this study, we improve the traditional location recommendation algorithm coupled with multi-source factors and spatial characteristics. We used the data of terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia from 1970 to 2016, and comprehensively considered 17 influencing factors, including socioeconomic and natural resource factors. The improved recommendation algorithm is used to build a spatial risk assessment model of terrorist attacks, and the effectiveness is tested. The model trained in this study is tested with precision, recall, and F-Measure. The results show that, when the threshold is 0.4, the precision is as high as 88%, and the F-Measure is the highest. We assess the spatial risk of the terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia through experiments. It can be seen that the southernmost part of the Indochina peninsula and the Philippines are high-risk areas and that the medium-risk and high-risk areas are mainly distributed in the coastal areas. Therefore, future anti-terrorism measures should pay more attention to these areas.

Attacks from violent extremist organisations have reached unprecedented levels in Africa. Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Islamic State and Sinai Peninsula activities account for the majority of high attacks and fatality rates. Their membership cuts across national borders; some have established a presence in local communities, while others are controlling territories in a number of states. This continues to happen despite regional measures such as the Algiers Plan of Action on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism (2002) and the African Model Anti-Terrorism Law (2011) to contain the activities of violent extremist groups on the continent. The prevailing argument shows that the African Union has initiated several legislations and protocols to contain terrorism on the continent, but the Union lacks the capacity to enforce legislations. Relying on the cost–benefit theoretical explication, we conclude that member states of the East African Community prefer to partner with external organisations in counterterrorism programmes which result in conflicting cross-border rules and challenges in countering violent extremism in Africa.

The objective of the article is to identify, describe, and explain the essence of terrorism as a general civilizational criminal phenomenon, the characteristics of dimensions of its reproduction and the formation of its concept on this basis. The results of the study provided the grounds for several conclusions. First, ethno-religious terrorism is manifested as a cultural phenomenon, a special segment of the inhumane discourse of hostility and aggressive social practices. It appears as a reaction to the systemic planetary crisis of managing economics, culture, consumption of natural resources, and becomes possible in the result of the massive loss of identity, fragmentation of the world-view. Secondly, we have established that the specified type of terrorism is a segment of aggressive and violent crime, in the collective and psychological basis of which there is the religious and ideological and/or ethnic domination in the systems of socio-political practice, which is achieved through intimidation as a result of committed murders, destruction or damage to property, objects of nature and offenses of a preventive nature (financial, human resources, information, and other provision). Thirdly, ethno-religious terrorism exists within three dimensions: individual (the act of sacrifice, catharsis), group (integration, social orientation) and general (administrative practice, political criminal activity, the postmodern phenomenon of the culture). The applied value of the study is that the suggested vision of the nature and dimensions of ethno-religious terrorism can be used to improve the systemic principles of counteracting its reproduction. The latter should be reflected in the improvement of the provisions of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Strategy through the consolidation of a coherent, coordinated system of level differentiation of anti-terrorist activities’ directions and measures. We note that without changing the basic approaches within the cultural, political, and economic aspects of the interaction of nations and peoples of the world with regard to their diversity and parity, proper autonomy, without stopping the global tendency towards marginalization, it is impossible to effectively counteract to ethno-religious terrorism. Value/originality. The new vision of a complex, multidimensional nature of ethno-religious terrorism has been formed in the work. Its nature is grounded as a civilizational phenomenon reflected on the level of discourse, mass social practices, global managerial strategies. It forms an empirically grounded theoretical basis for increasing the effectiveness of counteracting ethno-religious terrorism in Europe and the world in the whole.

The paper reviews counterterrorism legislation in Cameroon in relation to (in-) security, human rights and the rule of law. In December 2014, to step up the fight against the terrorist group Boko Haram, the Parliament of Cameroon enacted a new law on the suppression of acts of terrorism. However, owing to both its suppressive nature and serious threat to the security and rights of the people it claims to protect, the content of this law appears to be controversial. The author attempts to break down this legislation and argues that the distinctive feature of the recent counterterrorism legislation in Cameroon is the disappearance of the distinction between the perpetrators of terrorist activities and civilian populations as well as political opponents involved in national protests both being subject to capital punishment. In so doing, the author provides critical insights into a unique anti-terror universe, that is, the current socio-political situation in Cameroon. From the recent unrests and arrests following the controversial outcome of the 2018 presidential elections, to the crisis in the English speaking regions of Cameroon as well as the (bloody) suppression of journalists, emphasis is put on the extent to which the current legal architecture of the state has been overshadowed by a fearsome piece of legislation coupled with the hyperactivity of military judges who have been busy leading Kafkaesque trials almost on a full-time basis. In the end, what is noticeable is the extent to which the counterterrorism legislation of December 2014 unveiled itself as a suppressive device aiming at protecting the regime instead of a security arsenal for the sake of the society.

Abstract This article discusses the vexed relationship between women’s activism, state security, and feminist empowerment by focusing on the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiative, a program that seeks to build partnerships between government agencies and Muslim communities to prevent homegrown terrorism. From its inception, CVE has been controversial among Muslim and non-Muslim leaders within Southern California’s civil rights communities. While some suggest that American Muslims must play a leading role in countering domestic terrorism by working with government agencies, others feel that these partnerships are only meant to extend surveillance into Muslim communities. In this article, the authors critically examine how women are incorporated into local counterterrorism measures via CVE to think about the impact of such incorporation on their intimate, familial, and community relationships in the local politics of the War on Terror. The authors are interested in how liberal feminist discourses of motherhood and empowerment are appropriated in the service of national security and how such articulations of feminism domesticate and delink critique from the politics of racial solidarity and empire in the increasingly xenophobic sociopolitical landscape of the United States. Based on ethnographic research in Southern California’s Muslim communities, the authors trace the complex contours of women’s agency and the transnational politics of “Muslim America.” The authors draw on intersectional and anti-imperialist theories, as well as a body of feminist securitization scholarship to think about the ways that women’s activism, communal resistance, and national security are interlinked in the construction of the discourses around counterterrorism and their affiliated policies.

The authors explore the production of anti-Muslim racial discourse through a study of media coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, widely seen as among the most significant acts of “homegrown” (i.e., born and/or raised in Western societies) Muslim terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11. Drawing on news accounts and accompanying online reader comments from the Boston Globe, CBS Boston, and the New York Times, the authors examine the emergence of frames and narratives about the perpetrators, two brothers who were long-time U.S. residents and Muslims of Chechen origin. Findings point to the development of a color-blind anti-Muslim racial discourse that simultaneously affirms Muslim difference and makes claims to an absence of hostility and discrimination toward Muslims through a narrative of radicalization. Informed by the field of terrorism studies and counterterrorism policy making, the narrative of Muslim radicalization draws attention to individual life trajectories in which psychological and theological factors combine with exposure to radical Islamist groups to propel young “homegrown” Muslims toward extremism and violence. The potential for this narrative to challenge notions of intrinsic Muslim difference is limited by its reliance on a series of nested binaries of good versus evil and the West versus Islam as well as the incorporation of a racialized notion of violent potential whereby Muslims are seen as intrinsically inclined toward extremist violence.

Jesus Christ has never shown an act of solidarity toward men as a result of being cornered by their failures to obey His commands, but as an active conduct that reflected Himself as an all-loving, all-knowing, and most sovereign Individual. This study found that: first, radicalism and terrorism in Indonesia emerged right after the fall of the New Order regime. Initially these movement only demanded justice for the oppressed Muslims. However, in their development during the nation’s post-reformation era, they position themselves as an opposition to the ruling government and threaten the existence and the continuity of the Unitary State of The Republic of Indonesia or known as NKRI (Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia), urging the government to revise Pancasila, the philosophical foundation of Indonesia and the Basic Constitution, UUD (Undang-Undang Dasar) 1945 to suit their own agenda. The Indonesian Goverment has been giving its serious and continous efforts to tackle this matter through the National Counterterrorism Agency or BNPT (Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terorisme). Second, the government, religious leaders and the community must synergise to build good communication among them and to provide a fast and “down to earth” solution as to take down factors that blossom the radicalism and terrorism. Third, the Church needs to engange courageously in positioning itself to support the government that is anti-radicalism and anti-terrorism. A forum for inter-religious communication needs to be improved by advancing contributions with positive impacts rather than just becoming a passive follower; a decent interfaith dialogue and a “SERMIAH” preaching model can be adopted as options for evangelism and for achieving the spiritual maturity of the believers. The types of approaches used in this research are: historical approach, hermeneutical approach, and leadership approach.

Введение. Отражены предварительные итоги реализации курса по управлению антитеррором для студентов-радиотехников кафедры телевидения и управления Томского государственного университета систем управления и радиоэлектроники, обучающихся по магистерским программам, связанным с электромагнитной совместимостью. Включение данной дисциплины в учебный план обусловлено не только уязвимостью электронных систем к преднамеренным силовым электромагнитным воздействиям, но необходимостью повышения интереса к обучению в магистратуре, повышению качества образования и следованию трендам современного образования. Цель – рассмотреть внедрение междисциплинарных курсов в образовательный процесс как фактор, влияющий на качество образования. Материал и методы. Обосновывается ввод междисциплинарного курса по управлению антитеррором, кратко описаны разделы курса и их значимость в программе подготовки магистрантов по электромагнитной совместимости. Результаты и обсуждение. Подготовлен курс для магистрантов, посвященный изучению математических методов управления антитеррором, в рамках реализации магистерских программ, связанных с электромагнитной совместимостью. Заключение. Знания, полученные магистрантами в рамках данного курса в сочетании со знаниями в вопросах надежности электро- и радиотехнических систем, увеличивают возможности противостояния терроризму. Формирование дополнительных знаний, умений и навыков в рамках реализации образовательных программ магистратуры позволяет повышать качество подготовки студентов и их конкурентоспособность на рынке. Introduction. This work summarizes the preliminary results of the implementation of the course on anti-terror management for students-radio technicians of the Department of Television and Control of the Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics, studying under the master’s programs related to electromagnetic compatibility. The inclusion of this discipline in the curriculum is due not only to the vulnerability of electronic systems to deliberate force electromagnetic influences, but the need to increase interest in studying for a master’s degree, improving the quality of education and following the trends of modern education. The purpose of the work is to consider the introduction of interdisciplinary courses in the educational process as a factor affecting the quality of education. Material and methods. The work contains the rationale for the introduction of an interdisciplinary course on counterterrorism management, a brief description of the sections of the course and their significance in the training program for undergraduates in electromagnetic compatibility. Results and discussion. The result of the work is a prepared course for undergraduates, related to the study of mathematical methods of anti-terror control, as part of the implementation of master’s programs related to electromagnetic compatibility. Conclusion. The knowledge gained by undergraduates in this course, related to understanding the nature of terrorism and the skills acquired in creating appropriate models, combined with knowledge in the reliability of electrical and radio engineering systems, increase the capabilities of countering terrorism. The formation of additional knowledge, skills and abilities within the framework of the implementation of master’s degree programs allows to improve the quality of training of students and their competitiveness in the market.

This study critically evaluates the continuing campaign against terrorism. It especially discusses the counter-terrorism policies of Pakistan and the United States of America, which affects Pakhtuns and their culture. Figures show there has been a surge not only in the number but the activities of militants in the Pakhtun region after the inception of the war on terror. It is very important, therefore, to know the effects of the war on terror on Pakhtuns culture. Mostly relying on secondary data and interviews with experts in the area, the study is a qualitative analysis of the counter-insurgency campaigns and the resultant response of the local population in the area. The analysis shows two interrelated facts. The first is that ignoring cultural values in counterinsurgency campaigns can seriously undermine the efforts of combating terrorism. The second is that engaging tribes is a useful strategy in fighting terrorism. Analysis of the war on terror further reveal that disregarding facts on the ground and ignoring strongly-held cultural and religious traditions, in other words, indifference towards Pakhtunwali, has alienated the local population, thereby strengthening the militants cause. It is recommended, therefore, that simply ignoring or deliberately targeting cultural traits can seriously undermine counter-terrorism efforts. For the counterterrorism campaign to be successful, it is necessary to gain the support of the local population. In other words, winning the hearts and minds of the people is required.

One of the most important challenges that threaten security and the harmonious development of humankind is terrorism. International counterterrorism is a major task of the world community, and the modern civilization depends of the successful solution of this task. This struggle must be based on some fundamental principles: the scientific validity of a coherent system of anti-terrorist activities; coordination of efforts of all world community; the combination of antiterrorist measures in the political, military, law enforcement, social spheres; improving anti-terrorism legislation. The problem of terrorism should be considered as complex problem consisted of political, economic, ideological, national, religious, social and legal components. The effort of scientific understanding of important issues related to the fight against international terrorism were undertaken at the scientific conference “Legal problems of counterterrorism”, held at the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the Russian Federation on 29 September 2016. Students of the leading universities of our country participated this conference. The article presents an overview of the discussions held in the framework of the conference, and summed up its main results. The participants of the conference noted that currently not all types of terrorism are the objects of international legal regulation. The ideological content of terrorism can be used as criteria for the classification of terrorism and its separation from other social phenomena. International terrorism can be funded from various entities, including philanthropic organizations, there is a strong need to improve the normative legal regulation of activities of these structures.

AbstractThis article investigates recent developments in Spain’s anti-terrorism regime, in particular the 2002 Law on Political Parties which introduced a non-criminal procedure to outlaw political parties. The 2002 Law was adopted as a response to the continuing exist­ence of political violence associated with terrorist group ETA. It therefore constitutes part of the national counterterrorism regime. This article argues that the 2002 Law was a leg­islative novelty and that its immediate application to ban the political party Batasuna brought about substantial changes to the existing system of constitutional protection of political freedoms, as well as modifying the established standards of constitutional review of anti-terrorism legislation. Furthermore, the result of the November 2011 Spanish parlia­mentary elections has brought questions on the effectiveness of the 2002 Law and its pos­sible future application to the fore of political and legal discourse. The article concludes that the outcome of the 2002 Law on Political Parties is rather disappointing and suggests that there are lessons other democracies can learn both for their counterterrorism policies and treatment of political parties.

Abstract Since 9/11 most Arab states in the Middle East and North Africa have introduced anti-terror laws. Are they part of the global-diffusion processes that have spread anti-terrorism legislation worldwide? This paper studies the drivers of anti-terrorism legislation in these Arab states, contributing to the emerging research on authoritarian diffusion. The analysis demonstrates that regional and domestic explanations, rather than diffusion from the international level, are key. This is evident from the chronological order in which anti-terror legislation has appeared, the regionally inspired definitions of terrorism, and the immediate drivers behind such laws. The past few decades have seen two temporal clusters of new anti-terrorism legislation in the Arab world. In the first decade of the new millennium, mainly domestic terror attacks drove the adoption of anti-terror laws. Meanwhile, regional efforts to comply with international counterterrorism efforts after the 9/11 attacks played a subordinate role. In a second wave following the Arab uprisings of 2011, anti-terror legislation was driven increasingly by authoritarian governments’ desire to penalize dissent, as they sought to inhibit the spread of protests on the regional level. A systematic overview of the terrorism definitions contained in the new laws offers evidence for policy convergence. Instead of adhering to internationally recognized understandings of terrorism, the definitions in Arab legislation follow regional examples. The vague definitions of terrorism featured in the new laws allow for repressive measures being taken against challengers of authoritarian rule.

Abstract With ever increasing complexity and intelligence of the modern cities, protecting key public facilities and important targets from any damage is a major challenge for the security sector. In all types of anti-terrorism prediction models, the prediction of attack behaviour is indispensable. Therefore, the attack behaviour model plays an important role in the anti-terrorism security system. This paper builds the attacker’s behaviour model, and carries out the prediction about the possible attack behaviour by the attacker model based on random strategy. According to the attack strategies, analysis and construction of the attack tree and attack graph are carried out based on the state-based stochastic model. The paper describes the security system in detail taking use of the state-based stochastic model method, so as to clarify the state distribution and the transfer relationship between the states of various security resources after threatened by attacks. At the same time, this paper applies the state-based stochastic model to establish the attacker model through the impact of attack on the security system.

Abstract This article analyzes the institutions, procedures, and mechanisms of non-judicial rights review in Germany, focusing on the policy field of national security. Although there is currently a fruitful constitutional debate about the virtues and vices of non-judicial review in the Anglo-Saxon legal world, this debate has virtually gone unnoticed in German scholarship, and the role of political actors in protecting fundamental rights is neglected. This article studies how rights considerations affect the making of antiterrorism policy in Germany and what mechanisms exist in the legislative process to ensure the creation of rights-respecting antiterrorism policy. It is methodologically designed as a case study and focuses on two controversial pieces of legislation: the Data Retention Act and the Anti-Terror Database Act. The article reveals that Germany features a bureaucratic model of rights review in which rights issues are primarily negotiated between the two constitutional ministries—the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior—which are mutually entangled in an institutionalized competitive relationship. This model complements the German strong-form model of judicial review and has the effect that the role of rights is mostly mediated through the Constitutional Court’s case law and the prospect of judicial review. The article further demonstrates that these non-judicial rights-review processes are surrounded by a legalistic and rather formalistic political culture that is not conducive to a principled and deliberative engagement with fundamental rights. Overall, rights are prominently considered and clearly have a constraining effect, however, often ultimately recede when weighed against the objective of ensuring collective security in the wake of the threat of terrorism.

Therefore, this unit as a component of the gendarmerie is built on the principle of a military unit. The gendarmerie, one of the few state institutions in France, has been in existence for over 200 years and has a status as DOI: 10.32370/IA_2021_03_07 a significant component of the country's armed forces and is an extremely important part of the police system. The gendarmerie is subordinated to the Ministry of Defense (on the authority of the Main Directorate), and on the ground - to the command of military districts. At the same time, the gendarmerie is at the operational disposal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. Significant autonomy within the Armed Forces allows the gendarmerie to combine military functions with purely police and administrative ones. The difference between police and gendarmerie is that the police are civilian civil servants. They can wear civilian clothes and trade union and political freedoms. Gendarmes also have the status of servicemen and military ranks, always in uniform, not entitled to strike and are responsible for violations in accordance with military charters - from guardians to dismissal from service (for example, for the use of alcohol "in the performance of official duties" the gendarme is threatened arrest for up to 30 days). The need for the creation of the Austrian Special Forces was conditioned by the urgency of taking measures to ensure the safety of the flow of emigrants of Jewish nationality from the former USSR since in autumn 1973 against them was committed serious terrorist act. Special unit "Cobra" enters the warehouse of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and has got a double subordination: through direct combat engagement to the head of public safety, and in relation to personnel issues and logistics - the central command of the gendarmerie of the Austrian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Among the well-known British Special Political Service (Special Air Service, or SAS) is probably the best counterterrorism unit. Its component - Special Projects (SP) team - the main anti-terrorist squad. The Special Air Service and its Counter Revolutionary Warfare Squadron (CRW) unit, the Antirevolutionary Military Squadron, were founded in 1942. The feature of training SAS servicemen is to teach each soldier to possess all methods and means of combating terrorism. To achieve this, SAS trains all of its squadron through training cycles. Acquired skills are improved later in the SP-team's combat duties. The main thing in the work is the maximum approximation of training sessions to a real combat situation in the conduct of operations on the release of hostages, in the role of which are civilians. Anti-terrorist training of SAS and the development of practical measures for the release of hostages is facilitated by the fact that high-ranking members of the British Government, including the Prime Minister, are personally involved in it.

Existing studies on democracies’ involvement in torture emphasise how governments have been able to circumvent the international anti-torture norm and shape public discourse on the issue through powerful rhetorical strategies of denial and exception. Less attention has been paid, however, to the rhetoric of opponents of torture and how it impacts on governments and security agencies. This article proposes a typology of four common arguments against torture, which make use variously of ethical, utilitarian and ‘shaming’ rhetoric. These arguments often take a narrative form and are extensively contested by governments. Drawing on the literature on rhetorical coercion, I argue that anti-torture narratives can play an important role in constraining democratic states and significantly reducing their perpetration of torture. Yet the multiplicity of narratives at play opens up opportunities for governments to accept some messages against torture while simultaneously contesting others in a way which enables them to continue their involvement in torture. I develop this argument through a comparative analysis of the role of torture in two British counterterrorism campaigns – against Irish republican terrorism in the 1970s and against jihadist violence after 9/11. Differences in the content and salience of the narratives advanced by critics of the government during the two time periods explain much about why the British government contested some arguments against torture, but accepted others. This variation helps to explain in turn why British security agencies carried out coercive interrogations on a wide scale during the 1970s, while their perpetration of torture was significantly reduced in the post-9/11 case.

Purpose Pakistan is facing the momentous hazard of money laundering and a substantial risk of terror financing, which are seriously threatening its socioeconomic well-being. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the challenges posed by these threats in contrast with the existing potential and expertise of legal entities. It also examines legal and procedural measures enforced as a counter-strategy for terror financing and money laundering and the AMLA 2010 and National Action Plan (NAP) for countering terrorism financing. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses an analytical and comparative method using figures and comparative data on the success of the NAP and AMLA 2010 as national counterterrorism strategies. Terror financing and anti-money laundering regimes are confronted with grave legal and procedural odds, noncooperation and performance issues and conflicts of interest on the part of the enforcers/politicians. This paper highlights the issues that seriously jeopardize strategies to stop money laundering and terror financing, such as geography, informal financial transfers and exchange systems, un-regulated charities and real estate sectors, the modest performance of enforcement agencies and lukewarm political support for the NAP. Findings The situation requires the improvement of weak legislation and poor coordination and the adaptation of technological advancements and novel counter-strategies, along with properly trained enforcement personnel. Originality/value This paper will prove to be a valuable reference for exploring the shortcomings and insights. This will provide useful information for legal and financial practitioners, academicians, research scholars, policymakers and journalists.

It is now almost 15 years since the world witnessed one of modern history’s most devastating terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. Despite all its promises, the so called ‘War on Terror’ failed to combat a growing tide of violent extremism. 11 years after the US led offensive on Iraq in 2003, the rise of terrorism by non-state actors in the Arab world presents a significant concern to international security and world peace. Since 2001 Australian Muslims have consistently been called upon to openly reject terrorism committed by a minority of Muslims who adhere to an extreme interpretation of Islamic doctrine that justifies attacks on civilians both in the Arab world and abroad.The responsibility placed on Australian Muslims to actively reject terrorism comes from both official channels through government funded programs under the banner of counter terrorism and countering violent extremism and the public through the popular media. Yet, Muslims in Australia who do speak out against religiously motivated non-state terrorism find themselves in an impossible bind. They are expected to speak out as representatives of a fragmented, heterogeneous and diverse mix of communities and ideologies. Often, when they do speak out, they are viewed with suspicion and presumed to be ‘apologists for Islam’ whose claim to tolerance and the peaceful nature of Islamic doctrine purposefully ignores its true nature. Such responses render these spokespersons illegitimate- both as representatives of Muslim communities and as Australian citizens. The question “Why don’t moderate Muslims speak out against terrorism?” is often raised in the popular media in response to attacks against Western interests by jihadi groups. On 15 August 2014 an article in the Daily Telegraph by well-known conservative journalist Piers Akerman raised the question in relation to the Australian government’s announcement of increased powers for law enforcement agencies to deal with the issue of returned foreign fighters who had joined the Islamic State’s conflict in Iraq and Syria. The article, titled “It’s Time for Muslim Leaders to Speak Up” reiterated much of the construction of the silent Muslim majority that has pervaded the Australian popular media since 2001. Akerman states: “They [the Australian government] should be making it clear to Australian Muslims that they expect their leaders to speak out more vehemently against those who groom terrorists from the among the young and stupidly impressionable in their communities”. While he continues by acknowledging that Muslims in Australia are diverse in ethnicity and religious views and that the vast majority of Muslims do not support terrorism, he concludes by stating that “the few are costing the majority of Australians millions in security and those who enjoy leadership titles must accept that some responsibility attaches to their position or they should abdicate in favour of individuals who are prepared to consent to the obligations inherent in their station” (Piers Akerman). The same sentiments were expressed by Pia Ackerman in the Australian who wrote that “AUSTRALIA’S Muslim leaders need to speak out against Islamic State terrorists or risk losing their credibility and ability to reach young men attracted to the extremists’ cause” (Pia Akerman).Other responses in the popular media present a different argument. In an article titled “The Moderate Muslims Are Talking If Only You Will Listen”, David Penberthy of the Herald Sun cites examples of Muslim Australians who are speaking out including the case of prominent Sydney GP Jamal Rifi whose condemnation of terrorist activities in the Arab world has earned him death threats from members of the Islamic State (Penberthy). Yet, as Penberthy rightly acknowledges the questions “where are the moderates? Where are the decent Muslims? Are there any? Why aren’t they speaking out?” are still the most salient questions being asked of Muslims in the public sphere. For Australian Muslims at least, they are questions that pervade their everyday lives. It is these questions for example that leads Muslim women who wear the tradition head covering or hijab to challenge media representations of themselves as complicit actors in terrorism by acting as alternative sources of truth for curious co-workers and members of the broader community (see Aly, A Study).Muslim women who do not wear the hijab can face even more barriers to speaking out because they do not pass the test of ‘legitimate’ Muslims: those who fit the stereotype of the angry bearded male and the oppressed female shrouded in black. This author, who has in the past written about extremist interpretations of Islam, has faced condemnation from anti- Islamic groups who questioned her authenticity as a Muslim. By speaking out as a Muslim against the violent actions of some Muslims in other parts of the world, I was being accused of misinformed. Ironically, those who are vehemently anti- Islamic espouse the very same ideological world view and interpretations of Islamic doctrine as those Muslims they claim to oppose. Both groups rely on an extreme and minority version of Islam that de-legitimises more mainstream, nuanced interpretations and both groups claim legitimacy to the truth that Islam can only ever be violent, aggressive and oppositional.It is not just in the public and media discourses that Muslims who speak out against terrorism face being branded illegitimate. The policy response to home-grown terrorism — acts of violence carried out by Australian citizens within Australia — has, albeit inadvertently, created the conditions through which Muslims must verify their legitimate claims to being Australian by participating in the governments’ program of counter terrorism.In the wake of the 2005 London bombings, the Prime Minister met with selected representatives from Muslim communities to discuss the development of a Muslim Community Reference Group. The Group was charged with assisting the Australian Government by acting as an advisory group and by working with Muslim communities “promote harmony, mutual understanding and Australian values and to challenge violence, ignorance and rigid thinking”. This was iterated through a Statement of Principles that committed members of Muslim communities to pursue “moderate’ Islam (Prime Minister, “Meeting”). The very need for a Muslim summit and for the development of a Statement of Principles (later endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments, COAG), sends a lucid message to the Australian public that not only are Australian Muslims responsible for terrorism but that they also have the capacity to prevent or minimise the threat of an attack in Australia.In 2005, the policy response to terrorism took its first step towards linking the social harmony agenda to the securitisation of the state in the form of the National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security. The stated purpose of the National Action Plan (NAP) notably conflated national security with social cohesion and harmony and clearly indicated an understanding that violent extremism could be addressed through programs designed to reinforce Australian values, social harmony, interfaith understanding and tolerance: “The purpose of this National Action Plan (NAP) is to reinforce social cohesion, harmony and support the national security imperative in Australia by addressing extremism, the promotion of violence and intolerance…”(Commonwealth of Australia, National Action Plan).Between 2005 and 2010, the National Action Plan provided funding for 83 community based projects deemed to meet the Plan’s criteria of addressing extremism and the promotion of violence. Of the 83 projects funded, 33 were undertaken by associations that identified as Muslim or Islamic (some applicants received funding for more than one project or in more than one round). The remaining 50 organisations funded included universities and vocational training organisations (4), multicultural social services or migrant resource centres (14), interfaith groups (3), local councils (4), ethnic organisations (specifically African, East African, Afghan, Hazara, Arabic and Pakistani), sporting clubs (4) and miscellaneous social clubs and service providers. The kinds of projects that were funded were predominantly aimed at Muslim communities, most notably youth and women, and the provision of services, programs, education, information and dialogue. Sixty five of the projects funded were explicitly aimed at Muslim communities and identified their target groups variously as: ‘African Muslim’; ‘Muslim youth’; ‘Muslim women’; ‘at risk Muslims’; ‘young Muslims’; ‘Iraqi Muslims’; ‘Lebanese Muslims’ and ‘young Muslim men from Arabic speaking backgrounds’. Seven projects were described as involving ‘interfaith’ elements, though a further 13 projects described some form of interaction between Muslim and non-Muslim communities and groups through activities such as sport, dialogue, fashion parades, workshops, art and craft programs, music workshops. 29 projects involved some form of leadership training for Muslims: youth, women and young men. Overall, the range of projects funded under the National Action Plan in the five years of its operation reflect a policy approach that specifically identifies Muslim communities (including ethno specific and new and emerging Muslim communities) as the primary target of Australia’s broader security strategy.The National Action Plan was succeeded by the Building Community Resilience (BCR) Program. Despite the positive steps taken in attempting to move the BCR program away from the social harmony policy agenda, it continued to reflect an underlying preoccupation with the assumptions of its predecessor. Between 2011- 2013 it funded 51 community based projects. Of these, 7 projects were undertaken by Islamic or Muslim associations. Ten of the projects specifically target Muslims or Muslim communities, with 6 of these being Muslim youth leadership and/or mentoring programs. The remaining 4 Muslim focussed projects include a project designed to encourage Muslim youth to build positive connections with the broader community, the development of a Common Curriculum Framework for teaching Islamic Studies in Australian Islamic primary and secondary schools, a project to address misconceptions about Islam and promote cultural understanding and the production of a DVD for schools to address misperceptions about Muslims. Notably, only one project specifically targets white supremacist violent extremism. The Australian governments’ progressive policy approach to countering violent extremism at home has disproportionately focussed on the Australian Muslim communities. In an environment where Muslims are viewed with suspicion and as having the primary responsibility as both perpetrators and gatekeepers of terroristic ideologies, Muslims in diaspora communities have been forced to make legitimate claims to their innocence. In order to do this they are required to reaffirm their commitment to Australian values, not just by speaking out against terrorism but also by participating in programs that are based on false assumptions about the nature of Muslim citizenship in Australia and the premise that Muslim Australians are, both individually and collectively, opposed to such values by virtue of their religious affiliation. In 2014 and in response to growing concerns about the number of Australians travelling to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State, the government made a bold move by declaring its intention to overhaul existing terror laws. The new laws would reverse the onus of proof on those who travelled to certain countries deemed to be terrorist hotspots to prove that they were not partaking in armed conflict or terrorist training. They would also give more powers to law enforcement and surveillance agencies by lowering the threshold of arrest without a warrant. The announcement of the new laws by the Prime Minister coincided with the news that the Government would abandon its controversial plans to drop section 18c from the Racial Discrimination Act which makes it unlawful to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people" because of their race or ethnicity" (Aston). The announcement was made under the guise of a press conference on terror laws and inferred that the back down on the Racial Discrimination Act reforms were a measure to win over the Muslim communities cooperation on the new terror laws. Referring to a somewhat curious notion of “team Australia”, the Prime Minister stated “I want to work with the communities of our country as team Australia here” (Aston). “Team Australia” has since become the Government’s narrative frame for garnering public support for its proposed new terrorism laws. Echoing his predecessor John Howard, whose narrative of Australian values pervaded much of the political discourse during his term in office, Prime Minister Abbott stated in a radio interview that "everyone has got to put this country, its interests, its values and its people first, and you don't migrate to this country unless you want to join our team". He followed this statement by emphasising that "What we need to do is to encourage the moderate mainstream to speak out" (Cox).Shortly after the release of a horrific image on social media showing Australian jihadists proudly flaunting the severed heads of their victims, the Australian government reacted with an even bolder move to introduce legislation that would see the government cancelling the welfare payments of persons “identified by national security agencies as being involved in extremist conduct.” According to the Government the reforms would “enable the Department of Human Services to cancel a person’s welfare payment if it receives advice that a person has been assessed as a serious threat to Australia’s national security.”(Prime Minister of Australia) The move was criticised by several groups including academics who argued that it would not only alienate the already disenfranchised Muslim communities, but could also result in greater radicalisation (Ireland). In response to the raft of new measures perceived to be targeting Muslim communities, Australian Muslims took measured steps to voice their opposition through written statements and media releases stating that, among other things: These proposals come in the same style as those which have preceded [sic] since the Howard era. An alleged threat is blown out of all proportion as the pretext, further "tightening" of the laws is claimed necessary and rushed through, without proper national debate or community consultation. The reality of the alleged threat is also exposed by the lack of correspondence between the official 'terror threat' level, which has remained the same since 2001, and the hysterical rhetoric from government ministers. (ABC News, "Australian Muslims")Australian Muslim leaders also boycotted government meetings including a planned meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss the new laws. The Prime Minister promptly branded the boycott “foolish” (ABC News, "Tony Abbott") yet refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the claims made in the media statements and messages by Muslim organisations that prompted the boycotts. As Australian Muslims continue to grapple with ways to legitimize their claims to citizenship, the developing discourse on national security and terrorism continues to define them as the objects of terror. Notably, the media discourse is showing some signs of accommodating the views of Muslim Australians who have found some space in the public sphere. Recent media reporting on terror activities in the Middle East has given some consideration to the voices of Muslim leaders who openly oppose violent extremism. Yet Muslims in Australia are still battling for legitimacy. Those who speak out against the hijacking of their religion by a minority who espouse a rigid and uncompromising ideology in order to justify violence often find themselves the subjects of intense scrutiny. From within their communities they are seen to be mouth pieces for an unfair and unjust government agenda that targets Muslims as objects of fear. From outside their communities they are seen to be apologists for Islam whose authenticity should be questioned if not denied. Attempts by Muslim Australians to have their voices heard through political practices that define the very nature of democracy including peaceful demonstrations, boycotts and written statements have not been taken seriously. As a result, Muslim voices in Australia are deemed illegitimate regardless of the forms or platforms through which they seek to be heard. ReferencesABC News. “Australian Muslims Denounce Proposed 'Anti-Terror' Laws”. ABC Religion and Ethics, 21 Aug. 2014. 23 Aug. 2014 .ABC News. “Tony Abbott Says Muslim Leaders 'Foolishly Boycotted' Counterterrorism Law Meeting.” 22 Aug. 2014. 24 Aug. 2014 .Akerman, Pia. “Muslim Leaders Must Speak Out against Extremists, Academic Warns.” The Australian 13 Aug. 13 2014. 20 Aug. 2014 . Akerman, Piers. “It's Time for Muslim Leaders to Speak Up.” Daily Telegraph 15 Aug. 2014. 20 Aug. 2014 .Alynne, A. A Study of Audience Responses to the Media Discourse about the ‘Other’: The Fear of Terrorism between Australian Muslims and the Broader Community. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2010.Aly, Anne. “Media Hegemony, Activism and Identity: Muslim Women Re-Presenting Muslim Women.” Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations on Gender, Race and Religion, eds. T. Dreher and C. Ho. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. “The Atmosfear of Terror: Affective Modulation and the War on Terror.” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005).Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen.” M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08aly-green.php›.Aston, H. “Tony Abbott Dumps Controversial Changes to 18C Racial Discrimination Laws.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Aug. 2014. 24 Aug. 2014 .Australian Government, Attorney General's Department. Building Community Resilience Grants Program. n.d. 24 July 2014 . Commonwealth of Australia. Transnational Terrorism White Paper: The Threat to Australia. Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2004. . Commonwealth of Australia. National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2006. .Commonwealth of Australia. Counter Terrorism White Paper: Securing Australia, Protecting our Community. Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2010. 19 Nov. 2011 .Cox, L. “'You Don't Migrate to This Country unless You Want to Join Our Team': Tony Abbott Renews Push on National Security Laws.” Sydney Morning Herald 18 Aug. 2014. 24 Aug. 2014 . Ireland, J. “Extremism Warning on Coalition's Move to Cut Welfare Payments.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Aug. 2014. 24 Aug. 2014 .Penberthy, D. “The Moderate Muslims Are Talking If Only You Will Listen. Herald Sun 17 Aug. 2014 .Prime Minister of Australia. “New Counter-Terrorism Measures for a Safer Australia - Cancelling Welfare Payments to Extremists”. 16 Aug. 2014. 23 Aug. 2014 .Prime Minister of Australia. “Meeting with Islamic Community Leaders, Statement of Principles.” 23 Aug. 2005. July 2008 .

Image 1: “Oklahoma State Highway Re-imagined.” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using Wikimedia image by Ks0stm (CC BY-SA 3 2013). Introduction This article is divided in three major parts. First a scenario, second its context, and third, an analysis. The text draws on ethnographic research on security practices in the United States among police and parts of the intelligence community from 2006 through to the beginning of 2014. Real names are used when the material is drawn from archival sources, while individuals who were interviewed during fieldwork are referred to by their position rank or title. For matters of fact not otherwise referenced, see the sources compiled on “The Complete 911 Timeline” at History Commons. First, a scenario. Oklahoma, 2001 It is 1 April 2001, in far western Oklahoma, warm beneath the late afternoon sun. Highway Patrol Trooper C.L. Parkins is about 80 kilometres from the border of Texas, watching trucks and cars speed along Interstate 40. The speed limit is around 110 kilometres per hour, and just then, his radar clocks a blue Toyota Corolla going 135 kph. The driver is not wearing a seatbelt. Trooper Parkins swung in behind the vehicle, and after a while signalled that the car should pull over. The driver was dark-haired and short; in Parkins’s memory, he spoke English without any problem. He asked the man to come sit in the patrol car while he did a series of routine checks—to see if the vehicle was stolen, if there were warrants out for his arrest, if his license was valid. Parkins said, “I visited with him a little bit but I just barely remember even having him in my car. You stop so many people that if […] you don't arrest them or anything […] you don't remember too much after a couple months” (Clay and Ellis). Nawaf Al Hazmi had a valid California driver’s license, with an address in San Diego, and the car’s registration had been legally transferred to him by his former roommate. Parkins’s inquiries to the National Crime Information Center returned no warnings, nor did anything seem odd in their interaction. So the officer wrote Al Hazmi two tickets totalling $138, one for speeding and one for failure to use a seat belt, and told him to be on his way. Al Hazmi, for his part, was crossing the country to a new apartment in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, and upon arrival he mailed the payment for his tickets to the county court clerk in Oklahoma. Over the next five months, he lived several places on the East Coast: going to the gym, making routine purchases, and taking a few trips that included Las Vegas and Florida. He had a couple more encounters with local law enforcement and these too were unremarkable. On 1 May 2001 he was mugged, and promptly notified the police, who documented the incident with his name and local address (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 139). At the end of June, having moved to New Jersey, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge, and officers again recorded his real name and details of the incident. In July, Khalid Al Mihdhar, the previous owner of the car, returned from abroad, and joined Al Hazmi in New Jersey. The two were boyhood friends, and they went together to a library several times to look up travel information, and then, with Al Hazmi’s younger brother Selem, to book their final flight. On 11 September, the three boarded American Airlines flight 77 as part of the Al Qaeda team that flew the mid-sized jet into the west façade of the Pentagon. They died along with the piloting hijacker, all the passengers, and 125 people on the ground. Theirs was one of four airplanes hijacked that day, one of which was crashed by passengers, the others into significant sites of American power, by men who had been living for varying lengths of time all but unnoticed in the United States. No one thought that Trooper Parkins, or the other officers with whom the 9/11 hijackers crossed paths, should have acted differently. The Commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety himself commented that the trooper “did the right thing” at that April traffic stop. And yet, interviewed by a local newspaper in January of 2002, Parkins mused to the reporter “it's difficult sometimes to think back and go: 'What if you had known something else?'" (Clay and Ellis). Missed Opportunities Image 2: “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”. In fact, several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Mohamed Atta, usually pointed to as the ringleader, was given a citation in Florida that spring of 2001 for driving without a license. When he missed his court date, a bench warrant was issued (Wall Street Journal). Perhaps the warrant was not flagged properly, however, since nothing happened when he was pulled over again, for speeding. In the government inquiries that followed attack, and in the press, these brushes with the law were “missed opportunities” to thwart the 9/11 plot (Kean and Hamilton, Report 353). Among a certain set of career law enforcement personnel, particularly those active in management and police associations, these missed opportunities were fraught with a sense of personal failure. Yet, in short order, they were to become a source of professional revelation. The scenarios—Trooper Parkins and Al Hazmi, other encounters in other states, the general fact that there had been chance meetings between police officers and the hijackers—were re-imagined in the aftermath of 9/11. Those moments were returned to and reversed, so that multiple potentialities could be seen, beyond or in addition to what had taken place. The deputy director of an intelligence fusion centre told me in an interview, “it is always a local cop who saw something” and he replayed how the incidents of contact had unfolded with the men. These scenarios offered a way to recapture the past. In the uncertainty of every encounter, whether a traffic stop or questioning someone taking photos of a landmark (and potential terrorist target), was also potential. Through a process of re-imagining, police encounters with the public became part of the government’s “national intelligence” strategy. Previously a division had been marked between foreign and domestic intelligence. While the phrase “national intelligence” had long been used, notably in National Intelligence Estimates, after 9/11 it became more significant. The overall director of the US intelligence community became the Director National Intelligence, for instance, and the cohesive term marked the way that increasingly diverse institutional components, types of data and forms of action were evolving to address the collection of data and intelligence production (McConnell). In a series of working groups mobilised by members of major police professional organisations, and funded by the US Department of Justice, career officers and representatives from federal agencies produced detailed recommendations and plans for involving police in the new Information Sharing Environment. Among the plans drawn up during this period was what would eventually come to be the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, built principally around the idea of encounters such as the one between Parkins and Al Hazmi. Map 1: Map of pilot sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Evaluation Environment in 2010 (courtesy of the author; no longer available online). Map 2: Map of participating sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, as of 2014. In an interview, a fusion centre director who participated in this planning as well as its implementation, told me that his thought had been, “if we train state and local cops to understand pre-terrorism indicators, if we train them to be more curious, and to question more what they see,” this could feed into “a system where they could actually get that information to somebody where it matters.” In devising the reporting initiative, the working groups counter-actualised the scenarios of those encounters, and the kinds of larger plots to which they were understood to belong, in order to extract a set of concepts: categories of suspicious “activities” or “patterns of behaviour” corresponding to the phases of a terrorism event in the process of becoming (Deleuze, Negotiations). This conceptualisation of terrorism was standardised, so that it could be taught, and applied, in discerning and documenting the incidents comprising an event’s phases. In police officer training, the various suspicious behaviours were called “terrorism precursor activities” and were divided between criminal and non-criminal. “Functional Standards,” developed by the Los Angeles Police Department and then tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), served to code the observed behaviours for sharing (via compatible communication protocols) up the federal hierarchy and also horizontally between states and regions. In the popular parlance of videos made for the public by local police departments and DHS, which would come to populate the internet within a few years, these categories were “signs of terrorism,” more specifically: surveillance, eliciting information, testing security, and so on. Image 3: “The Seven Signs of Terrorism (sometimes eight).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. If the problem of 9/11 had been that the men who would become hijackers had gone unnoticed, the basic idea of the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was to create a mechanism through which the eyes and ears of everyone could contribute to their detection. In this vein, “If You See Something, Say Something™” was a campaign that originated with the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and was then licensed for use to DHS. The tips and leads such campaigns generated, together with the reports from officers on suspicious incidents that might have to do with terrorism, were coordinated in the Information Sharing Environment. Drawing on reports thus generated, the Federal Government would, in theory, communicate timely information on security threats to law enforcement so that they would be better able to discern the incidents to be reported. The cycle aimed to catch events in emergence, in a distinctively anticipatory strategy of counterterrorism (Stalcup). Re-imagination A curious fact emerges from this history, and it is key to understanding how this initiative developed. That is, there was nothing suspicious in the encounters. The soon-to-be terrorists’ licenses were up-to-date, the cars were legal, they were not nervous. Even Mohamed Atta’s warrant would have resulted in nothing more than a fine. It is not self-evident, given these facts, how a governmental technology came to be designed from these scenarios. How––if nothing seemed of immediate concern, if there had been nothing suspicious to discern––did an intelligence strategy come to be assembled around such encounters? Evidently, strident demands were made after the events of 9/11 to know, “what went wrong?” Policies were crafted and implemented according to the answers given: it was too easy to obtain identification, or to enter and stay in the country, or to buy airplane tickets and fly. But the trooper’s question, the reader will recall, was somewhat different. He had said, “It’s difficult sometimes to think back and go: ‘What if you had known something else?’” To ask “what if you had known something else?” is also to ask what else might have been. Janet Roitman shows that identifying a crisis tends to implicate precisely the question of what went wrong. Crisis, and its critique, take up history as a series of right and wrong turns, bad choices made between existing dichotomies (90): liberty-security, security-privacy, ordinary-suspicious. It is to say, what were the possibilities and how could we have selected the correct one? Such questions seek to retrospectively uncover latencies—systemic or structural, human error or a moral lapse (71)—but they ask of those latencies what false understanding of the enemy, of threat, of priorities, allowed a terrible thing to happen. “What if…?” instead turns to the virtuality hidden in history, through which missed opportunities can be re-imagined. Image 4: “The Cholmondeley Sisters and Their Swaddled Babies.” Anonymous, c. 1600-1610 (British School, 17th century); Deleuze and Parnet (150). CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. Gilles Deleuze, speaking with Claire Parnet, says, “memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object” (150). Re-imagined scenarios take up the potential of memory, so that as the trooper’s traffic stop was revisited, it also became a way of imagining what else might have been. As Immanuel Kant, among others, points out, “the productive power of imagination is […] not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas” (61). The “memory” of these encounters provided the material for re-imagining them, and thereby re-virtualising history. This was different than other governmental responses, such as examining past events in order to assess the probable risk of their repetition, or drawing on past events to imagine future scenarios, for use in exercises that identify vulnerabilities and remedy deficiencies (Anderson). Re-imagining scenarios of police-hijacker encounters through the question of “what if?” evoked what Erin Manning calls “a certain array of recognizable elastic points” (39), through which options for other movements were invented. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative’s architects instrumentalised such moments as they designed new governmental entities and programs to anticipate terrorism. For each element of the encounter, an aspect of the initiative was developed: training, functional standards, a way to (hypothetically) get real-time information about threats. Suspicion was identified as a key affect, one which, if cultivated, could offer a way to effectively deal not with binary right or wrong possibilities, but with the potential which lies nestled in uncertainty. The “signs of terrorism” (that is, categories of “terrorism precursor activities”) served to maximise receptivity to encounters. Indeed, it can apparently create an oversensitivity, manifested, for example, in police surveillance of innocent people exercising their right to assemble (Madigan), or the confiscation of photographers’s equipment (Simon). “What went wrong?” and “what if?” were different interrogations of the same pre-9/11 incidents. The questions are of course intimately related. Moments where something went wrong are when one is likely to ask, what else might have been known? Moreover, what else might have been? The answers to each question informed and shaped the other, as re-imagined scenarios became the means of extracting categories of suspicious activities and patterns of behaviour that comprise the phases of an event in becoming. Conclusion The 9/11 Commission, after two years of investigation into the causes of the disastrous day, reported that “the most important failure was one of imagination” (Kean and Hamilton, Summary). The iconic images of 9/11––such as airplanes being flown into symbols of American power––already existed, in guises ranging from fictive thrillers to the infamous FBI field memo sent to headquarters on Arab men learning to fly, but not land. In 1974 there had already been an actual (failed) attempt to steal a plane and kill the president by crashing it into the White House (Kean and Hamilton, Report Ch11 n21). The threats had been imagined, as Pat O’Malley and Philip Bougen put it, but not how to govern them, and because the ways to address those threats had been not imagined, they were discounted as matters for intervention (29). O’Malley and Bougen argue that one effect of 9/11, and the general rise of incalculable insecurities, was to make it necessary for the “merely imaginable” to become governable. Images of threats from the mundane to the extreme had to be conjured, and then imagination applied again, to devise ways to render them amenable to calculation, minimisation or elimination. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, the Government must bureaucratise imagination. There is a sense in which this led to more of the same. Re-imagining the early encounters reinforced expectations for officers to do what they already do, that is, to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviours. Yet, the images of threat brought forth, in their mixing of memory and an elastic “almost,” generated their own momentum and distinctive demands. Existing capacities, such as suspicion, were re-shaped and elaborated into specific forms of security governance. The question of “what if?” and the scenarios of police-hijacker encounter were particularly potent equipment for this re-imagining of history and its re-virtualisation. References Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34.6 (2010): 777-98. Clay, Nolan, and Randy Ellis. “Terrorist Ticketed Last Year on I-40.” NewsOK, 20 Jan. 2002. 25 Nov. 2014 ‹http://newsok.com/article/2779124›. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia UP 2007 [1977]. 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Madigan, Nick. “Spying Uncovered.” Baltimore Sun 18 Jul. 2008. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-te.md.spy18jul18-story.html›. Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009. O’Malley, P., and P. Bougen. “Imaginable Insecurities: Imagination, Routinisation and the Government of Uncertainty post 9/11.” Imaginary Penalities. Ed. Pat Carlen. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008.Roitman, Janet. Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Simon, Stephanie. “Suspicious Encounters: Ordinary Preemption and the Securitization of Photography.” Security Dialogue 43.2 (2012): 157-73. Stalcup, Meg. “Policing Uncertainty: On Suspicious Activity Reporting.” Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases. Eds. Limor Saminian-Darash and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. 69-87. Wall Street Journal. “A Careful Sequence of Mundane Dealings Sows a Day of Bloody Terror for Hijackers.” 16 Oct. 2001.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Declaring War Soon after Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the “Global War on Terror”. This underpinned the subsequent counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and the United States invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Media pundits quickly applied the Global War on Terror label to the Madrid, Bali and London bombings, to convey how Al Qaeda’s terrorism had gone transnational. Meanwhile, international relations scholars debated the extent to which September 11 had changed the international system (Brenner; Mann 303). American intellectuals adopted several variations of the Global War on Terror in what initially felt like a transitional period of US foreign policy (Burns). Walter Laqueur suggested Al Qaeda was engaged in a “cosmological” and perpetual war. Paul Berman likened Al Qaeda and militant Islam to the past ideological battles against communism and fascism (Heilbrunn 248). In a widely cited article, neoconservative thinker Norman Podhoretz suggested the United States faced “World War IV”, which had three interlocking drivers: Al Qaeda and trans-national terrorism; political Islam as the West’s existential enemy; and nuclear proliferation to ‘rogue’ countries and non-state actors (Friedman 3). Podhoretz’s tone reflected a revival of his earlier Cold War politics and critique of the New Left (Friedman 148-149; Halper and Clarke 56; Heilbrunn 210). These stances attracted widespread support. For instance, the United States Marine Corp recalibrated its mission to fight a long war against “World War IV-like” enemies. Yet these stances left the United States unprepared as the combat situations in Afghanistan and Iraq worsened (Ricks; Ferguson; Filkins). Neoconservative ideals for Iraq “regime change” to transform the Middle East failed to deal with other security problems such as Pakistan’s Musharraf regime (Dorrien 110; Halper and Clarke 210-211; Friedman 121, 223; Heilbrunn 252). The Manichean and open-ended framing became a self-fulfilling prophecy for insurgents, jihadists, and militias. The Bush Administration quietly abandoned the Global War on Terror in July 2005. Widespread support had given way to policymaker doubt. Why did so many intellectuals and strategists embrace the Global War on Terror as the best possible “grand strategy” perspective of a post-September 11 world? Why was there so little doubt of this worldview? This is a debate with roots as old as the Sceptics versus the Sophists. Explanations usually focus on the Bush Administration’s “Vulcans” war cabinet: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who later became Secretary of State (Mann xv-xvi). The “Vulcans” were named after the Roman god Vulcan because Rice’s hometown Birmingham, Alabama, had “a mammoth fifty-six foot statue . . . [in] homage to the city’s steel industry” (Mann x) and the name stuck. Alternatively, explanations focus on how neoconservative thinkers shaped the intellectual climate after September 11, in a receptive media climate. Biographers suggest that “neoconservatism had become an echo chamber” (Heilbrunn 242) with its own media outlets, pundits, and think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and Project for a New America. Neoconservatism briefly flourished in Washington DC until Iraq’s sectarian violence discredited the “Vulcans” and neoconservative strategists like Paul Wolfowitz (Friedman; Ferguson). The neoconservatives' combination of September 11’s aftermath with strongly argued historical analogies was initially convincing. They conferred with scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel P. Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson to construct classicist historical narratives and to explain cultural differences. However, the history of the decade after September 11 also contains mis-steps and mistakes which make it a series of contingent decisions (Ferguson; Bergen). One way to analyse these contingent decisions is to pose “what if?” counterfactuals, or feasible alternatives to historical events (Lebow). For instance, what if September 11 had been a chemical and biological weapons attack? (Mann 317). Appendix 1 includes a range of alternative possibilities and “minimal rewrites” or slight variations on the historical events which occurred. Collectively, these counterfactuals suggest the role of agency, chance, luck, and the juxtaposition of better and worse outcomes. They pose challenges to the classicist interpretation adopted soon after September 11 to justify “World War IV” (Podhoretz). A ‘Two-Track’ Process for ‘World War IV’ After the September 11 attacks, I think an overlapping two-track process occurred with the “Vulcans” cabinet, neoconservative advisers, and two “echo chambers”: neoconservative think-tanks and the post-September 11 media. Crucially, Bush’s “Vulcans” war cabinet succeeded in gaining civilian control of the United States war decision process. Although successful in initiating the 2003 Iraq War this civilian control created a deeper crisis in US civil-military relations (Stevenson; Morgan). The “Vulcans” relied on “politicised” intelligence such as a United Kingdom intelligence report on Iraq’s weapons development program. The report enabled “a climate of undifferentiated fear to arise” because its public version did not distinguish between chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons (Halper and Clarke, 210). The cautious 2003 National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) report on Iraq was only released in a strongly edited form. For instance, the US Department of Energy had expressed doubts about claims that Iraq had approached Niger for uranium, and was using aluminium tubes for biological and chemical weapons development. Meanwhile, the post-September 11 media had become a second “echo chamber” (Halper and Clarke 194-196) which amplified neoconservative arguments. Berman, Laqueur, Podhoretz and others who framed the intellectual climate were “risk entrepreneurs” (Mueller 41-43) that supported the “World War IV” vision. The media also engaged in aggressive “flak” campaigns (Herman and Chomsky 26-28; Mueller 39-42) designed to limit debate and to stress foreign policy stances and themes which supported the Bush Administration. When former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey’s claimed that Al Qaeda had close connections to Iraqi intelligence, this was promoted in several books, including Michael Ledeen’s War Against The Terror Masters, Stephen Hayes’ The Connection, and Laurie Mylroie’s Bush v. The Beltway; and in partisan media such as Fox News, NewsMax, and The Weekly Standard who each attacked the US State Department and the CIA (Dorrien 183; Hayes; Ledeen; Mylroie; Heilbrunn 237, 243-244; Mann 310). This was the media “echo chamber” at work. The group Accuracy in Media also campaigned successfully to ensure that US cable providers did not give Al Jazeera English access to US audiences (Barker). Cosmopolitan ideals seemed incompatible with what the “flak” groups desired. The two-track process converged on two now infamous speeches. US President Bush’s State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on 5 February 2003. Bush’s speech included a line from neoconservative David Frumm about North Korea, Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil” (Dorrien 158; Halper and Clarke 139-140; Mann 242, 317-321). Powell’s presentation to the United Nations included now-debunked threat assessments. In fact, Powell had altered the speech’s original draft by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Cheney’s chief of staff (Dorrien 183-184). Powell claimed that Iraq had mobile biological weapons facilities, linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Mohamed El-Baradei, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Institute for Science and International Security all strongly doubted this claim, as did international observers (Dorrien 184; Halper and Clarke 212-213; Mann 353-354). Yet this information was suppressed: attacked by “flak” or given little visible media coverage. Powell’s agenda included trying to rebuild an international coalition and to head off weather changes that would affect military operations in the Middle East (Mann 351). Both speeches used politicised variants of “weapons of mass destruction”, taken from the counterterrorism literature (Stern; Laqueur). Bush’s speech created an inflated geopolitical threat whilst Powell relied on flawed intelligence and scientific visuals to communicate a non-existent threat (Vogel). However, they had the intended effect on decision makers. US Under-Secretary of Defense, the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, later revealed to Vanity Fair that “weapons of mass destruction” was selected as an issue that all potential stakeholders could agree on (Wilkie 69). Perhaps the only remaining outlet was satire: Armando Iannucci’s 2009 film In The Loop parodied the diplomatic politics surrounding Powell’s speech and the civil-military tensions on the Iraq War’s eve. In the short term the two track process worked in heading off doubt. The “Vulcans” blocked important information on pre-war Iraq intelligence from reaching the media and the general public (Prados). Alternatively, they ignored area specialists and other experts, such as when Coalition Provisional Authority’s L. Paul Bremer ignored the US State Department’s fifteen volume ‘Future of Iraq’ project (Ferguson). Public “flak” and “risk entrepreneurs” mobilised a range of motivations from grief and revenge to historical memory and identity politics. This combination of private and public processes meant that although doubts were expressed, they could be contained through the dual echo chambers of neoconservative policymaking and the post-September 11 media. These factors enabled the “Vulcans” to proceed with their “regime change” plans despite strong public opposition from anti-war protestors. Expressing DoubtsMany experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. This doubt came from three different and sometimes overlapping groups. Subject matter experts such as the IAEA’s Mohamed El-Baradei and weapons development scientists countered the UK intelligence report and Powell’s UN speech. However, they did not get the media coverage warranted due to “flak” and “echo chamber” dynamics. Others could challenge misleading historical analogies between insurgent Iraq and Nazi Germany, and yet not change the broader outcomes (Benjamin). Independent journalists one group who gained new information during the 1990-91 Gulf War: some entered Iraq from Kuwait and documented a more humanitarian side of the war to journalists embedded with US military units (Uyarra). Finally, there were dissenters from bureaucratic and institutional processes. In some cases, all three overlapped. In their separate analyses of the post-September 11 debate on intelligence “failure”, Zegart and Jervis point to a range of analytic misperceptions and institutional problems. However, the intelligence community is separated from policymakers such as the “Vulcans”. Compartmentalisation due to the “need to know” principle also means that doubting analysts can be blocked from releasing information. Andrew Wilkie discovered this when he resigned from Australia’s Office for National Assessments (ONA) as a transnational issues analyst. Wilkie questioned the pre-war assessments in Powell’s United Nations speech that were used to justify the 2003 Iraq War. Wilkie was then attacked publicly by Australian Prime Minister John Howard. This overshadowed a more important fact: both Howard and Wilkie knew that due to Australian legislation, Wilkie could not publicly comment on ONA intelligence, despite the invitation to do so. This barrier also prevented other intelligence analysts from responding to the “Vulcans”, and to “flak” and “echo chamber” dynamics in the media and neoconservative think-tanks. Many analysts knew that the excerpts released from the 2003 NIE on Iraq was highly edited (Prados). For example, Australian agencies such as the ONA, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Defence knew this (Wilkie 98). However, analysts are trained not to interfere with policymakers, even when there are significant civil-military irregularities. Military officials who spoke out about pre-war planning against the “Vulcans” and their neoconservative supporters were silenced (Ricks; Ferguson). Greenlight Capital’s hedge fund manager David Einhorn illustrates in a different context what might happen if analysts did comment. Einhorn gave a speech to the Ira Sohn Conference on 15 May 2002 debunking the management of Allied Capital. Einhorn’s “short-selling” led to retaliation from Allied Capital, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and growing evidence of potential fraud. If analysts adopted Einhorn’s tactics—combining rigorous analysis with targeted, public denunciation that is widely reported—then this may have short-circuited the “flak” and “echo chamber” effects prior to the 2003 Iraq War. The intelligence community usually tries to pre-empt such outcomes via contestation exercises and similar processes. This was the goal of the 2003 NIE on Iraq, despite the fact that the US Department of Energy which had the expertise was overruled by other agencies who expressed opinions not necessarily based on rigorous scientific and technical analysis (Prados; Vogel). In counterterrorism circles, similar disinformation arose about Aum Shinrikyo’s biological weapons research after its sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on 20 March 1995 (Leitenberg). Disinformation also arose regarding nuclear weapons proliferation to non-state actors in the 1990s (Stern). Interestingly, several of the “Vulcans” and neoconservatives had been involved in an earlier controversial contestation exercise: Team B in 1976. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assembled three Team B groups in order to evaluate and forecast Soviet military capabilities. One group headed by historian Richard Pipes gave highly “alarmist” forecasts and then attacked a CIA NIE about the Soviets (Dorrien 50-56; Mueller 81). The neoconservatives adopted these same tactics to reframe the 2003 NIE from its position of caution, expressed by several intelligence agencies and experts, to belief that Iraq possessed a current, covert program to develop weapons of mass destruction (Prados). Alternatively, information may be leaked to the media to express doubt. “Non-attributable” background interviews to establishment journalists like Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward achieved this. Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has recently achieved notoriety due to US diplomatic cables from the SIPRNet network released from 28 November 2010 onwards. Supporters have favourably compared Assange to Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND researcher who leaked the Pentagon Papers (Ellsberg; Ehrlich and Goldsmith). Whilst Elsberg succeeded because a network of US national papers continued to print excerpts from the Pentagon Papers despite lawsuit threats, Assange relied in part on favourable coverage from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. However, suspected sources such as US Army soldier Bradley Manning are not protected whilst media outlets are relatively free to publish their scoops (Walt, ‘Woodward’). Assange’s publication of SIPRNet’s diplomatic cables will also likely mean greater restrictions on diplomatic and military intelligence (Walt, ‘Don’t Write’). Beyond ‘Doubt’ Iraq’s worsening security discredited many of the factors that had given the neoconservatives credibility. The post-September 11 media became increasingly more critical of the US military in Iraq (Ferguson) and cautious about the “echo chamber” of think-tanks and media outlets. Internet sites for Al Jazeera English, Al-Arabiya and other networks have enabled people to bypass “flak” and directly access these different viewpoints. Most damagingly, the non-discovery of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction discredited both the 2003 NIE on Iraq and Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation (Wilkie 104). Likewise, “risk entrepreneurs” who foresaw “World War IV” in 2002 and 2003 have now distanced themselves from these apocalyptic forecasts due to a series of mis-steps and mistakes by the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda’s over-calculation (Bergen). The emergence of sites such as Wikileaks, and networks like Al Jazeera English and Al-Arabiya, are a response to the politics of the past decade. They attempt to short-circuit past “echo chambers” through providing access to different sources and leaked data. The Global War on Terror framed the Bush Administration’s response to September 11 as a war (Kirk; Mueller 59). Whilst this prematurely closed off other possibilities, it has also unleashed a series of dynamics which have undermined the neoconservative agenda. The “classicist” history and historical analogies constructed to justify the “World War IV” scenario are just one of several potential frameworks. “Flak” organisations and media “echo chambers” are now challenged by well-financed and strategic alternatives such as Al Jazeera English and Al-Arabiya. Doubt is one defence against “risk entrepreneurs” who seek to promote a particular idea: doubt guards against uncritical adoption. Perhaps the enduring lesson of the post-September 11 debates, though, is that doubt alone is not enough. What is needed are individuals and institutions that understand the strategies which the neoconservatives and others have used, and who also have the soft power skills during crises to influence critical decision-makers to choose alternatives. Appendix 1: Counterfactuals Richard Ned Lebow uses “what if?” counterfactuals to examine alternative possibilities and “minimal rewrites” or slight variations on the historical events that occurred. The following counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all. Fact: The 2003 Iraq War and 2001 Afghanistan counterinsurgency shaped the Bush Administration’s post-September 11 grand strategy. Counterfactual #1: Al Gore decisively wins the 2000 U.S. election. Bush v. Gore never occurs. After the September 11 attacks, Gore focuses on international alliance-building and gains widespread diplomatic support rather than a neoconservative agenda. He authorises Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and works closely with the Musharraf regime in Pakistan to target Al Qaeda’s muhajideen. He ‘contains’ Saddam Hussein’s Iraq through measurement and signature, technical intelligence, and more stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Minimal Rewrite: United 93 crashes in Washington DC, killing senior members of the Gore Administration. Fact: U.S. Special Operations Forces failed to kill Osama bin Laden in late November and early December 2001 at Tora Bora. Counterfactual #2: U.S. Special Operations Forces kill Osama bin Laden in early December 2001 during skirmishes at Tora Bora. Ayman al-Zawahiri is critically wounded, captured, and imprisoned. The rest of Al Qaeda is scattered. Minimal Rewrite: Osama bin Laden’s death turns him into a self-mythologised hero for decades. Fact: The UK Blair Government supplied a 50-page intelligence dossier on Iraq’s weapons development program which the Bush Administration used to support its pre-war planning. Counterfactual #3: Rogue intelligence analysts debunk the UK Blair Government’s claims through a series of ‘targeted’ leaks to establishment news sources. Minimal Rewrite: The 50-page intelligence dossier is later discovered to be correct about Iraq’s weapons development program. Fact: The Bush Administration used the 2003 National Intelligence Estimate to “build its case” for “regime change” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Counterfactual #4: A joint investigation by The New York Times and The Washington Post rebuts U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United National Security Council, delivered on 5 February 2003. Minimal Rewrite: The Central Intelligence Agency’s whitepaper “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs” (October 2002) more accurately reflects the 2003 NIE’s cautious assessments. Fact: The Bush Administration relied on Ahmed Chalabi for its postwar estimates about Iraq’s reconstruction. Counterfactual #5: The Bush Administration ignores Chalabi’s advice and relies instead on the U.S. State Department’s 15 volume report “The Future of Iraq”. Minimal Rewrite: The Coalition Provisional Authority appoints Ahmed Chalabi to head an interim Iraqi government. Fact: L. 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