In the Shadow of 9/11

“The fact that we have dreamt of [9/11], that everyone without exception has dreamt of it … is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience. Yet it is a fact, and one which can indeed be measured by the emotive violence of all that has been said and written in the effort to dispel it.”

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

“On September 10th, if we would have saw a movie on the events that happened on september 11th, we all would have left the movie theater and said ‘that is a phenomenal movie, but it could never happen in the United States”

FBI Special Agent Anthony Velazquez, The Shadow of 9/11

Intro

On June 23, 2006, seven men were arrested in Liberty City on charges of domestic terrorism. Though the Attorney General claimed that the seven men were part of an “Al-Qaeda cell” and intended to “wage a full ground war against the United States,” they were not connected to any non-state actors, nor were they in possession of weapons. Rather, the charges were the result of an elaborate FBI sting operation, which coerced the men into increasingly absurd gestures of commitment to radical Islam, climaxing in a recorded oath of allegiance to Al-Qaeda. I aim to explore the ways in which the arrest and trial of the Liberty City Seven offer unique insight into American anxieties about the fallibility of global hegemony.

Manufacturing a terrorist

Nasriel Batiste (Naz), the “leader” of the Liberty City Seven, always wanted to be an actor. At a young age, Naz was introduced to syncretic spiritualist Master GJG Atheea, who insisted that Naz was the second coming of Jesus. Naz was compelled: he imagined himself to be a sort of prophet, and kitted himself out in vaguely religious iconography. In his words:

“It was interesting to see myself intrigue people over a character… I created my own style of religion. My robes and what I wore was [sic] very unique. My style had something like a much more of a martial arts, Egyptian-type of mixture outfit. I wore a lot of velvets and Indian cotton. Sage rope. A staff in my hand or a rod. That’s what I looked like: an ancient type of holy man.”

Naz did not look like anyone else in the Liberty City projects. His ability to imagine — to scrape together bits and pieces of film and history into a universal persona — earned him a flock of followers. He eventually opened the Moorish Science Temple of America and Universal Divine Saviors, a hybrid non-denominational place of worship and community space. In a vague echo of the Black Panthers or Nation of Islam, the members of the temple (ordained by Naz as Moorish Americans) wore military-style fatigues and spoke of community and self improvement.

After founding the temple, Naz and his followers began a construction business to finance community improvement. Due to a lack of expertise and questionable business practice, the business was soon in hot water.

At the same time, Abbas Saidi, a local smoke-shop owner, friend of the Moors, and part time informant, found himself in jail for domestic abuse. Looking to reduce his sentence, he saw an opportunity: he informed the FBI that he was in contact with a group of Islamic Radicals, while informing Naz that he had found a mysterious backer who would solve his money problems. Soon, Saidi informed Naz that his backer was interested in a global jihad.

Elie Assaad, the alleged money man, is harder to pin down. Anthony Velazquez, the FBI agent who led the sting operation, describes Assaad as possessing “somewhat of an ego.” Assaad is a professional informant who specialized in counter-terrorism, and clearly enjoys his job and its perceived importance (since the Liberty City Seven Case, he has publicly claimed that he knew Mohammed Atta and was positioned to stop the 9/11 attacks).

Over the course of two years, Assaad convinced Naz that he is an Al-Qaeda operative intent on seeding terror cells in America. Absurdly channeling the Libyan nationalists from Back to the Future, Assad represents the perfect American ideal of an Islamic Terrorist: he repeatedly asks Naz how much violence he plans to commit, and is never satisfied with the answer.

In a series of meetings, Assaad makes it clear to Naz that he can only give him money if he agrees to aid in a domestic terror plot. Naz plays in, hoping to get his money and leave as soon as possible.

The plot is entirely ridiculous, and falls into every possible cliche: Naz asks for horses and hand-held machine guns, promises to “kill all the devils,” and picks the Sears tower as his target because it is bigger than the twin towers. In response, Assaad asks Naz to ensure that there are no survivors, that hundreds of thousands die, that the attack extends to the entirety of Chicago’s downtown.

In a telling moment, Naz promises that the attacks, which will allegedly lead to a flood that drowns all of Chicago, will be “good or greater than 9/11.” In a later reflection on the conversation, he adds:

“I grabbed that from just “end of the world” type of movies. Because a lot of that was going on at the time. Tidal waves type of movies.”

The FBI, unsure of what to do with this impossible plot, joins the would-be terrorists in the realm of Hollywood tropes. To ensure a conviction, Assaad is told to present Naz and his followers with a pledge of allegiance to Al-Qaeda. Naz, desperately hoping to end the affair and get away with his money as soon as possible, tells his followers to agree to the oath. They oblige through gritted teeth, and are soon arrested as terrorists.

Dreams of another 9/11

In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard argues that the West, prior to 9/11, was gripped with a “terroristic imagination.” This imagination, he explains, is an involuntary reaction to Western hegemony, which has taken hold across the world following the end of the cold war.

In the decades leading up to 9/11, America established itself and its colonial efforts in moral contrast to the Soviet Union (which represented Eastern barbarism, communist repression of freedom, etc.). After the fall of the Soviet Union, America was free to complete its project of neoliberal economic globalization.

In the West, neoliberalism was allowed to thrive unabated, and had to justify its existence without a point of contrast. The liberal educated-class (with a touch of unease) imagined that we had reached The End of History and The Last Man; with the enemy defeated, the only remaining political task was to conquer death itself. By contrast, the “Global South” was demarcated as a plane of never-ending exploitation and resource extraction, and The deadly working conditions and repressive US-backed regimes that allowed for production of western luxury were slated for indefinite extension.

The Soviet Union had represented a concrete Other, with the (nuclear) power to end the empire; without it, anti-hegemonic force was rendered abstract. In the years between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, the West continued to imagine its own spectacular demise. From Independence Day to Armageddon and Jurassic Park, Western media obsessed over the cracks in hegemonic dominance that could lead to its immediate and fiery downfall. The unprecedented success of Titanic embodies this fear in the form of the iceberg – a looming destructive force that we cannot see through the goggles of western complacency. It is no coincidence that Agent Velazquez recounts 9/11 as if it were a film (see above).

Beyond Naz’s explicit citation of cinematic influence, his description of terror is ripped directly from this tradition. In the same way that his robes emulate the vague orientalism of kung-fu films, his terrorist plot is an exaggeration of Hollywood spectacle. His performance in the role of terrorist, as well as Assaad’s, are utterly indulgent of the terroristic imagination.

A sequel?

9/11 proved to Americans that anti-hegemonic forces did still exist, that they were diffuse and decentralized, and that it only takes a few people with box cutters to threaten an empire. How could the imperial core ever regain its sense of safety?

John Pistole, former deputy director of the FBI, describes George Bush’s briefing with robert Mueller after the attack:

“[Mueller] went to brief President Bush. Within a minute of telling the president, vice president and others about the 19 hijackers that we’d already learned about and everything, President Bush cut him off and said, ‘That’s all well and good, Mr. Director, but I want to know what the FBI is doing to prevent the next attack.’ Director Mueller’s job was then to take that mission, to take the FBI from that reactive, crime-solving agency to a preventative national security agency.”

Pistole’s analysis does not extend far enough. The FBI would not succeed in their task by simply ensuring that another 9/11 could not take place; indeed, the Patriot Act and the War on Terror were not powerful enough to quell domestic fears of hegemonic vulnerability.

What is so frightening about the enemy of Western hegemony, especially in the wake of 9/11, is his ability to appear from nowhere and possess nothing other than an anti-hegemonic will. In this state of fear, the line between a capable terrorist and a person who is generally opposed to the American regime becomes almost indistinguishable. Thus, the terroristic imagination itself must be uprooted.

Yet even in a post-9/11 America, this spirit is not dead (Again, it is no coincidence that Velazquez recounts it as a beautiful film). The prosecution of the Liberty City Seven is not an indictment of what a group of people did (nothing), but of what they were theoretically capable of doing. What is actually on trial is the terroristic imagination — the capacity to imagine an act of terror “greater than 9/11.”