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Criminology 9/11
Abstract
9/11 is a historically significant event that was hastily designated by authorities as an act of both terrorism and war. It led to a call for forensics investigations and commissions of inquiry, notably the 9/11 Commission, which reported famously on alleged lapses in intelligence, preparedness and bureaucratic imagination. Some high profile crime events may be understood as ‘apex crimes’, conceptualized here as a subtype of political crime in which the ideological order, official narrative, contested and problematic forensics and third party review are each constitutive features. In support of a sociology of 9/11 as a criminal event and apex crime, the paper considers how 9/11 has ‘played out’ or been understood in criminology. The implication of the analysis is that the absence of serious academic engagement with 9/11 as a crime event is indicative of a lack of critical scrutiny of high-level political crimes in scholarly discourse (in criminology and other disciplines) and that this gives a pass to one of the most significant crime events in the past 50 years.
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In this chapter we contrast intelligence to criminal justice forensics. We identify our terms and approach in the exploration of intelligence crime and also identify the concept of blurring. The chapter relies upon an understanding of intelligence as a power-knowledge that builds on the refinement of procedures and more or less coercive processes and rules for exclusion with respect to what may be made familiar, reasonable or utterable as knowledge or authority. Some space of functional ordering operates between the institutional domains of law and sovereignty. On the basis of this approach we posit that criminal justice brings uncertainties to bear that are anathema to the sovereign. The sovereign seeks to maintain or expand its capacity to identify events according to its own discretionary review of needs and threats. We then provide a conceptualisation of intelligence crime and position these crimes as particularly hostile to ordering by criminal justice and forensic devices.
Introducing the concepts of intelligence crime and critical forensics and its relation to political crime and to the problem of the dark figure of criminality, this chapter sets up the working hypothesis and narrative themes on which subsequent chapters of this book are based. The chapter sets out the intersection between crime, forensics, politics and intelligence and considers the distortions of authority concerning knowledge and discovery that will comprise a major theme in the book.
In this chapter, three cases are examined as intelligence crimes according to the features of investigation set out in Chapter 2. The first—the bombing of the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior—is a straightforward case of a Type II crime, carried out by a dozen agents of the French intelligence service in a friendly country with reckless disregard for human life. The second involves an agent—Raymond Davis—whose cover is blown carrying out two killings, after which the US sought to work with Pakistani authorities to have the agent released. In the third case—Jeffrey Epstein—authorities appear to come against powerful actors when attempting to bring the child molester to trial.
In this chapter we examine the properties of intelligence blurring. Intelligence activities occur everywhere but are obscured from view in what we refer to as counter-forensics. These blurring or obscuring activities begin with information operations which are aimed at beliefs so that people may have a view of matters of strategic interest that are aligned with the objectives of the sovereign. In addition, there is a large body of information, some of which may include inculpatory information pertaining to intelligence crimes, which remains classified. The large secret archive has disciplinary power. Lastly, intelligence actors capitalise on deep relations within the political class to blur party and policy distinctions.
Background
This paper is based on an address given as joint winner with Ronald V. Clarke of the 2015 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. This was awarded for some early studies we worked on together in the UK Home Office which were seen as important in re-focusing the task of preventing crime towards simply reducing opportunities for it. This approach became known as situational crime prevention. It had a hostile academic reception from academic criminologists and earned the label of ‘administrative criminology’. Later, the same label was given to what was portrayed as narrow, unscholarly research done for government to serve their political agenda, in contrast to research with more range and theoretical thrust. Administrative criminology is a term most familiar in relation to UK research supported by its government; this is the paper’s context.
Discussion
Administrative criminology deserves a much more positive appraisal than it has been given to date. First, government research activity through to the 1990s at least was self-generated (not imposed), was influential, and was often controversial. The research establishing situational crime prevention as a generally effective approach has withstood criticism that it lacks intellectual weight and would not work. Second, administrative criminologists have been consistently brought to heel as regards ensuring that they communicate what they know effectively and clearly. Third, administrative criminology has arguably had more influence on policy than academic criminology, since its business is to address the concerns of government to which it is better placed to make its voice heard. Finally, administrative criminology should be credited for keeping the ‘criminological ball rolling’ insofar as it provides a wealth of data from expensive surveys on victimisation and offending, as well as basic ‘facts and figures’ from statistical series on crime and the criminal justice system. These data serve criminologists of all complexions.
Summary
This paper discusses the two fronts on which administrative criminology has been criticised. It defends its record on both fronts. It also argues that critics overlook the contribution that administrative criminology makes to supplying much of the basic empirical data on which all criminologists draw.
Geopolitical dynamics associated with nuclear proliferation, the Arab Spring, the rapid rise of Chinese power, an oil-fueled Russian resurgence, and the post-Afghan and Iraq eras will demand significant changes in intelligence focus, processes, and resources. Nearly a decade after intelligence failures required a restructuring of the Intelligence Community with mandates for a scientific approach to intelligence analysis, current efforts continue to focus on overly deterministic individual analyst methods. We argue for a process-oriented approach to analysis resembling the collaborative scientific process successful in other professions that is built on shared theory and models. After demonstrating that events in the real world are path dependent and contingent on deterministic and random elements, we highlight the role of uncertainty in intelligence analysis with specific emphasis on intelligence failures. We then describe how human agency in an interconnected and interdependent system leads to a landscape of dancing strategies as agents dynamically modify their responses to events. Unfortunately, the consequences of the present deterministic intelligence mindset are significant time delays in adjusting to emerging adversaries leading to an increased susceptibility to intelligence failures. In contrast with the existing analyst-centric methods, we propose a risk management approach enhanced by outside collaboration on theory and models that embrace lessons from the twentieth-century science of uncertainty, human agency, and complexity.
Prepublication version available at www.davidjhess.net. Repression sometimes can lead to greater movement mobilization: repressive events that are perceived as unjust have the potential to generate enormous public outrage against those seen as responsible. One result of repression - backfire - can contribute to the understanding of the conditions under which some repressive events may become transformative for social movements. Three case studies that highlight the processes involved in backfire are examined: the 1930 Salt March in India, in particular the beatings at Dharasana, that mobilized popular support for independence; the 1991 massacre in Dili, East Timor, which stimulated a massive expansion in international support for East Timorese independence; and the arrest of alternative cancer therapist John Richardson in 1972, which led to a huge growth in the U.S. movement for alternative therapies. The cases generate a preliminary understanding of the potential scope of backfire, the processes involved in backfire, and new hypotheses.
In this article we offer a reconceptualization of security that attempts to reconcile a post-critical and normative agenda. The article proceeds by unpacking features of the dominant security discourse and then resituating the question in a radical politics. We contend that moving forward on this question requires a rejection of the association between security, certainty and authority. Rather than following the classical realist view that security requires exceptions from politics, we choose to see security as dependent on political uncertainty. Borrowing from Hänninen's idea that politics is 'living with ambiguity' and taking from post-Foucauldian thought against the violence of tyranny, we advocate the ongoing repoliticization of the security field informed by harm reduction. We offer 'security in ambiguity' as a conceptualization of this synthesis.
We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approxi-mately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms oc-curring at approximately 43C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.
Since the events of 11 September 2001, terrorism has been the subject of intense media interest, political dialogue and public scrutiny. Through well publicized discussions about its constitution and consequences, the 'new terrorism' has been open to heavy institutional construction. Yet, criminological incursion into the debate about 'new terrorism' has so far been relatively limited. This article seeks to direc tly address this lacuna by employing two distinct theoretical perspectives on risk and demonstrating how each can aid our understanding of the manufacture of the terrorist threat. The risk-society thesis proposed by Beck is employed to examine the novel features of 'new terrorism', including the deployment of hi-tech weaponry, the reproduction of catastrophic effects and the changing geography of danger. Through the Foucauldian looking glass of governmentality, we inspect the means through which risk is rendered thinkable, the discursive construction of terrorism and the intensification of a wider culture of surveillance and control. Our application is governed by two key objectives. First, we wish to critique the ways in which the terrorist threat is being discursively and materially shaped by law and order institutions. Secondly, we wish to explore the possibility of setting a criminological agenda that is both inclusive of and responsive to current concerns about the management of 'new terrorism'.
This article examines a range of issues surrounding the archive developed by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known and the "9/11 Commission." We provide a partial biography of the 9/11 Commission's archival record as it was being assembled. This contemporaneous analysis of the politics surrounding this archive during its formative stage lends insights into the political and power dynamics shaping this archive. We review how the public record and public knowledge of 9/11 were shaped by the processes surrounding the accretion of this archive by charting records access and control controversies before, during, and years after the Commission submitted its final report. Despite claims from all sides that what was needed was an unfiltered, non-partisan and accurate review of what went wrong and how it went wrong, the story we outline underscores that the composition, accumulation, access to, and control of the archival record surrounding 9/11 was shaped as much by political concerns over blame and responsibility (and evading it) as it was by good faith efforts to get to the heart of the matter. In the charged atmospherics of modern US politics, custodial power over the record and access to it was used to prevent political embarrassment and to submerge-as opposed to surface-basic facts. Those with powers over access were not willing to risk having the documentary record either accessed or analyzed in a truly independent manner. This does not bode well, and in fact represents a deeper structural reality that will confound similar future governmental investigations that require access from those it is investigating. There is no reason to doubt that, absent a seismic shift in how the record is maintained and controlled, the archive will continue to be used as a means to shape and interfere with legitimate inquiries.
Investigators monitoring air quality at the World Trade Center, after the September 11th attacks, found extremely high levels
of volatile organic chemicals as well as unusual species that had never been seen before in structure fires. Data collected
by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency indicate striking spikes in levels of benzene, styrene, and several other products
of combustion. These spikes occurred on specific dates in October and November 2001, and February 2002. Additionally, data
collected by researchers at the University of California Davis showed similar spikes in the levels of sulfur and silicon compounds,
and certain metals, in aerosols. To better explain these data, as well as the unusual detection of 1,3-diphenylpropane, the
presence of energetic nanocomposites in the pile at Ground Zero is hypothesized.
This paper explores the range of strategies employed by states to obfuscate their responsibility in state crime through ‘othering’ both perpetrators and victims. It draws upon a range of frameworks of international humanitarian law, human rights, transitional justice as well as criminological theory to explore the historical and contemporary techniques of obfuscation. The first part of the article focuses upon the ways in which state agency is either exercised covertly or by proxy. Strategies include ‘resort to perfidy’, the expanded use of ‘specialist’ forces, collusion with indigenous para-militaries and the use of private-sector mercenaries and military firms to outsource state deviance. The second part of the article then examines the ‘othering’ of the enemies of the state. These strategies include holding detainees outside national territories, using third-party nations to carry out torture or redefining the status of individuals to designate them as juridical ‘others’, with few national or international legal protections. The authors conclude that the notion of state crime should move beyond a monolithic conceptualization of the state and that a more subtle grasp of the different modalities of proxy agency and othering encourages us to look beyond retributive-centred international and national criminal law as but one of the mechanisms for attributing responsibility for state deviance.
Berkowitz and Goodman examine recent failures of the intelligence community, discuss why traditional principles of intelligence are no longer adequate, and consider the implications for such broad policy issues as secrecy, covert action, and the culture of the intelligence community.
This article offers a theoretical and methodological system for a sociological analysis of the restless nature of historical events. This system, political semiosis, is able to identify and assess the performative speech acts, the demonstrative orientational specifications, and the mimetic representations required to advance historical transformations. The features of political semiosis structure the flow of historical events by managing the specific media and generic forms that are the vehicles through which events take shape. Political semiosis provides a method for analyzing both the circulation and the materialization of events. The exemplary case of September 11 illuminates this approach's capabilities.
We develop an econometric method to detect “abnormal trades” in option markets, i.e., trades which are not driven by liquidity motives. Abnormal trades are characterized by unusually large increments in open interest, trading volume, and option returns, and are not used for option hedging purposes. We use a multiple hypothesis testing technique to control for false discoveries in abnormal trades. We apply the method to 9.6 million of daily option prices.
There are two forms of deconstruction. Radical DECONSTRUCTION is rare. It is a sign of deep crisis and extraordinary skepticism among intellectual workers facing high uncertainty. Moderate deconstruction, however, occurs wherever conflicts over knowledge are built into the competitive and adversarial structure of social fields. We illustrate the social dynamics of moderate deconstruction for two specific cases: making facts in science and building cases in law. There are strategies of deconstruction common to both science and law which generalize untrustworthiness and thus economize on deconstruction costs. These strategies are rhetoric, ideology, procedure (or method), and reputation. Under certain conditions, moderate deconstruction turns into radical DECONSTRUCTION. This is most likely to happen in revolutionary science and in loosely coupled textual fields that have minimal hardware and social solidarity.
Accusations of failure by elements of the US intelligence community (IC) have followed in the wake of nearly every war and terrorist bombing since Japan's successful strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This article will illustrate how some problems that exist inside the ‘intelligence-policy nexus’ are beyond the control of the IC. By investigating the dynamics and tensions that exist between producers of intelligence (the IC) and the consumers of those products (policy-makers), we review three different types of alleged failure. First, by revisiting the Chinese intervention in Korea, we show that a rarely listed case in the literature is in fact a classic example of producer-based failure generated from within the IC. However, in our study of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War (1968), we show that the alleged intelligence failure by producers should be more accurately described as a ‘failure of intelligence’ by consumers. Third, by revisiting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979), we conclude that there existed neither a producer nor a consumer failure. The Carter Administration made a conscious policy choice to act surprised (when it was not).
Despite over a decade of government funding and thousands of newcomers to the field of terrorist research, we are no closer to answering the simple question of “What leads a person to turn to political violence?” The state of stagnation with respect to this issue is partly due to the government strategy of funding research without sharing the necessary primary source information with academia, which has created an unbridgeable gap between academia and the intelligence community. This has led to an explosion of speculations with little empirical grounding in academia, which has the methodological skills but lacks data for a major breakthrough. Most of the advances in the field have come from historical archival research and analysis of a few field interviews. Nor has the intelligence community been able to achieve any breakthrough because of the structure and dynamic of this community and its lack of methodological rigor. This prevents creative analysis of terrorism protected from political concerns. The solution to this stagnation is to make non-sensitive data available to academia and to structure more effective discourse between the academic and intelligence communities in order to benefit from the complementary strengths in these two communities.
The important contributions made by Richard Quinney to the study of corporate crime and the sociology of law, crime, and justice have influenced the development of the concept of state-corporate crime. This concept has been advanced to examine how corporations and governments intersect to produce social harm. State-corporate crime is defined as criminal acts that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution. The creation of this concept has directed attention to a neglected form of organizational crime and inspired numerous empirical studies and theoretical refinements.
After 9/11, public attitudes on numerous social issues changed. While many studies have examined post-9/11 attitude trends on specific topics, such as civil liberties or war, few have investigated the scope and variety of these effects. Did the events of 9/11 have a brief effect on a limited number of attitudes, or did they produce numerous, long-term changes in the way Americans think, feel and act? Drawing on a broad range of pre–post-9/11 studies, this review essay begins to answer this question by developing a framework for categorizing these effects and distinguishing short-term changes from long-term ones. The framework is intended to help facilitate an interdisciplinary social scientific research agenda on the effects of 9/11 and other terrorist acts. The essay concludes by explaining the social importance of the public's response to terrorism and the need for further research on this topic.
The subject of this article is police reform in North America. The article is divided in two parts. The first part reviews the recent past with respect to reforming the police in Canada. I examine the case of the reform of the Montreal police, which tried to implement an approach modelled on COP-POP principles. The reform process lasted for some 18 years and covers two periods. From 1987 to 1993, the service tried unsuccessfully to reform the mentalities of its officers, without changing the structures of the force. From 1994 until today, it introduced significant changes in its structures but was forced after 2002 to reestablish many of the structures it had abolished.The reform suffered from a split of leadership between police and civilians and produced a divorce between the uniformed patrol and plainclothes criminal investigation. In the second part of the paper, I assess the impact on the police reform movement of the moral panic generated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I argue that very deep budgetary cuts in the US, a new reliance on physical coercion and outsourcing to the private sector may bring the COP-POP reform movement to a standstill. I conclude that current developments in policing are deepening the gap between security and justice in policing.
The September 11 attacks on the US dramatized the relationship between media spectacles of terror and the strategy of Islamic Jihadism that employs violent media events to promote its agenda. But US administrations have also used spectacles of terror to promote US military power and geopolitical ends, as is evident in the Gulf war of 1990-1991, the Afghanistan war of fall 2001, and the Iraq war of 2003. In this paper I argue that both Islamic Jihadists and two Bush administrations have deployed spectacles of terror to promote their political agendas; that both deploy Manichean discourses of good and evil which themselves fit into dominant media codes of popular culture; and that both deploy fundamentalist and absolutist discourses. Criticizing the role of the US broadcasting media in presenting the September 11 terror spectacle and subsequent Bush Terror War, I argue against both Islamic terrorism and US militarism, and call for multilateral and global responses to terrorism and rogue regimes. I also argue that the Internet is the best source of information concerning complex events like Terror War, while mainstream US corporate media, especially broadcasting, have become instruments of propaganda for the Bush administration and Pentagon during spectacles of terrorism and war. Finally, I suggest limitations to the politics of the spectacle and argue that the record of the spectacles of Terror War in recent years discloses highly ambiguous, unpredictable, and negative political effects.
The September 11 attacks on the U. S. dramatized the relationship between media spectacles of terror and the strategy of Islamic Jihadism that employs spectacular media events to promote its agenda. But U. S. administrations have also used spectacles of terror to promote U. S. military power and geopolitical ends, as is evident in the Gulf war of 1990-1991, the Afghanistan war of fall 2001, and the Iraq war of 2003.In this paper I argue that both Islamic Jihadists and two Bush administrations have deployed spectacles of terror to promote their political agendas; that both deploy Manichean discourses of good and evil which themselves fit into dominant media codes of popular culture; and that both deploy fundamentalist and absolutist discourses. Criticizing the role of the U. S. broadcasting media in presenting the September 11 terror spectacle and subsequent Bush Terror War, I argue against both Islamic terrorism and U. S. militarism, and call for multilateral and global responses to terrorism and rogue regimes. I also argue that the Internet is the best source of information concerning complex events like Terror War, while mainstream U. S. corporate media, especially broadcasting, have become instruments of propaganda for the Bush administration and Pentagon during spectacles of terrorism and war. Finally, I suggest limitations of the politics of the spectacle and argue that the record of the spectacles of Terror War in recent years disclose highly ambiguous, unpredictable, and negative political effects.
It has now been a decade since a group of nineteen men affiliated with al-Qaeda—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirate, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt—hijacked four US airliners and flew two of them into the World Trade Center towers, another into the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania when the passengers attempted to retake the cockpit. Despite Paul Greengrass’s film United 93 (2006) that depicts the heroics of these same passengers, out of all these coordinated events, the attacks on New York alone have become iconic in the American imagination. That is, in part, because the twin towers themselves were iconic, an immediately recognizable element of the New York City skyline, familiar from countless films, television shows, and even video games. When the terrorist attacks occurred in New York, one of the US media centers, eyes all over the world watched, through the immediate mediation of television, the at-the-time incomprehensible inferno and subsequent collapse of the twin towers, which killed nearly 2700 people.
Whether one believes that 9/11 changed everything or changed nothing, in the aftermath of the attacks the Bush Administration unquestionably generated an Orwellian litany of naming—“coalition of the willing,” “extraordinary rendition,” “War on Terror,” “enhanced interrogation,” “regime change,” “preemptive war,” “homeland security”—that has reshaped America’s political discussion during the 2000s and widened the divide between Red and Blue states, not to mention the divide between the US and other nations.
While the realm of politics was quick to seize the imaginary of 9/11 to construct a new form of PC (Patriotic Correctness) in order to help justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the last ten years have not been kind to artists’ attempts to represent 9/11. Everyone seems to find something wrong with 9/11 art—both the visual and the literary. At the one-year anniversary of the attacks, the works of two contemporary artists received such hostile public responses that they were effectively censored. Eric Fischl, a prominent New York artist, created Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture of a nude woman in free fall. Fischl did so explicitly to commemorate those who leapt to their deaths from the towers. In September of 2002, the Rockefeller Center contracted to display Fischl’s statue for a two-week period, but a public outcry, fueled by a New York Post columnist, led to the almost immediate suppression of Fischl’s statue: Rockefeller Center officials first covered it in cloth and placed a screen around the statue so that no one could see it and then removed the statue on September 18.1 At the same time, the artist Sharon Paz exhibited a work called Falling; it consisted of numerous cutout silhouettes, all in different attitudes of free fall, that were placed in the windows of the Jamaica Center for the Arts. As Paz has noted, she “found the images of people falling the most disturbing and wanted to deal with them” in the hope that her art might “bring out the reality within the memory that this event burns into our mind.” The piece was supposed to be on view from September 11, 2002 until October 5, but, as was the fate of Fischl’s statue, negative media attention caused Jamaica Center officials to remove Paz’s exhibit two weeks early (Swartz 87–89). Apparently, the one-year anniversary of 9/11 was too soon for artistic representations.
But even the passing of time has not warmed the critical response. In 2006, Graydon Parrish debuted his massive oil painting, “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001” (a detail of which appears on our cover) at the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA). Clearly inspired by classical realism, Parrish attempts to tell an allegorical story of 9/11. As the NBMAA website explains:
The painting should be “read” from left to right but as the title of the work suggests a cycle, the right side and the left are connected so the painting itself becomes a cycle of life. There are children on the far left, youth in the center and old age on the...
The 9/11 terrorist attacks have been intensively examined as both tactical and strategic intelligence failures but less attention has been paid to the policy failures which preceded them. Perhaps this is due to the presumption that intelligence analysis influences decision-making as a precursor to and foundation for policy. This assumption about the influence of analysis on decision deserves a much closer examination. The 9/11 terrorist attacks provide a good case to study for greater understanding of the influence, or lack of influence, that intelligence analysis has on decision-making. Specifically, the 9/11 Commission Report identifies as a significant failure the lack of a National Intelligence Estimate on the terrorist threat between 1998 and 2001, and implies that if one had been produced it might have helped enable decision-makers to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In other words, a failure of strategic intelligence analysis lay at the foundation of the failure to prevent 9/11. But was this really the case? This article takes a closer look at the case of the missing National Intelligence Estimate by first evaluating what decision-makers knew about the threat prior to the 9/11 attacks, the policies they were implementing at the time, and the extent to which the hypothetical National Intelligence Estimate described by the 9/11 Commission would have mattered in terms of influencing their judgement and policy for the better. It concludes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were more a failure of policy than strategic intelligence analysis.
Violations of international criminal law (i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) are a common occurrence around the globe. One need only to read international news, visit intra‐governmental (e.g., United Nations or the International Committee Red Cross), or nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International) to be exposed to the vast numbers of crimes of states, paramilitaries, and/or militias. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid to these types of offenses by criminologists. While there have been developments in creating typologies (Smeulers, 2008) and predictive models for genocide (Harf, 2005), due to the complexities and various forms of these types of crimes, there has been little to no development of a criminological theoretical model that can aid in the analysis of such crimes. Our goal is to firmly place international crimes on the criminological agenda by creating additional awareness of and interest in the most massive, systematic, and gruesome types of crime‐genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression‐and to introduce an integrated theory that can provide a frame for a systematic analysis and understanding of the etiologi‐ cal factors at play.
Carie Lemack, the co-founder of Families of September 11, alongside other 9/11 family members, had a unique perspective working with Congress, the White House, and the media after her mother was killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. This article outlines some of those experiences and looks at the organization, execution, and effectiveness of the 9/11 families in changing their government, enacting new counterterrorism policies, and interacting with the press. The author shares her perspective on the post—9/11 legislative events that have taken place between 2001 and 2004 and offers lessons she learned in the process.
Uncritical acceptance of the findings of the 9/11 Commission has obscured how the commission intentionally misrepresented pre-attack strategic intelligence on the threat from Al Qaeda. The commission staff used such techniques as highly selective use of material, partial truths, irrelevant references, plays on words, quotations out of context, and suggestive language leading to false inferences to portray as weak what had been a strong strategic analytical performance. The commission's misrepresentation corrupted history, damaged public understanding of the role of intelligence in counterterrorism, and helped to build support for a reorganization scheme that has made US counterterrorist intelligence worse rather than better.
When published in July 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report surprised readers with its accessible prose and narrative power. The report won the respect of the American public as much for its literary qualities as for the findings of the 9/11 commissioners. This article argues that the success of the 9/11 Report depended on its ability to challenge literary classification, and to bring down the walls between personal and national experience. More effectively than any other literary work of its era, the 9/11 Report wed the fortunes of a weakened American government to those of a wounded citizenry.
We develop a statistical approach to detect informed trading in options markets. The method is applied to approximately 9.6 million of daily option prices from a selected set of 31 companies.Empirical results suggest that detected option informed trades tend to cluster prior to certain events, take place more in put than call options, generate easily large gains exceeding millions, are not contemporaneously reflected in the underlying stock price, and involve liquid options during calm times and cheap options during turbulent times. These findings are not driven by false discoveries in informed trades which are controlled using a multiple hypothesis testing technique.Pricing, policy, and market efficiency implications of these findings are discussed. For example, option pricing models should account for all relevant current information. However nearly all option prices involved in informed trades do not show any specific reaction to large increments in open interest and volume. The strong movements in detected options are simply due to subsequent large movements in stock prices originated by specific firm news. As another example, if some of the detected informed trades are indeed illegal, for example originated by insiders, it can be optimal for regulators to expend relatively more monitoring efforts on the options markets.
Since the 1970s, historical sociology in the United States has been constituted by a configuration of substantive questions, a theoretical vocabulary anchored in concepts of economic interest and rationalization, and a methodological commitment to comparison. More recently, this configuration has been destabilized along each dimension: the increasing autonomy of comparative-historical methods from specific historical puzzles, the shift from the analysis of covariation to theories of historical process, and new substantive questions through which new kinds of arguments have been elaborated. Although the dominant responses have centered on methodological elaboration and epistemological debate, greater attention to historical process also informs new strategies for defining cases and framing puzzles, thereby highlighting different categories of empirical questions: social caging, group formation, and multiple orders. The most striking shift is from the imagery of systems-and-crises, which highlighted revolution and state-building, to multidimensional understandings of emergence and destabilization.
Surpassing the low expectations established by previous investigatory commissions and overcoming the political and legal obstacles created by the Bush administration's opposition to its creation, the 9/11 Commission accomplished what appeared to be the impossible: an authoritative investigation, a widely-read final report, and direct influence on significant legislation. At a time when legal scholars have committed themselves to the study of innovative institutional design, the formal legal innovations and administrative operations of the 9/11 Commission warrant close examination to consider whether and how it can serve as a model for similar institutions in the future. This Article argues that the 9/11 Commission indeed offers an important model for encouraging or forcing the executive branch to disclose information about an especially significant and controversial past event or future decision. As such, it suggests that Congress or the President consider establishing such commissions when information held by the executive branch can help the public to hold the state accountable for past actions or decide whether to support important, irreversible decisions the state must imminently make. The 9/11 Commission demonstrates that transparency can be better achieved in a time of crisis through institutional design than through constitutional common law and statute. The Article is less sanguine, however, about the 9/11 Commission as a model for policy formation. With limited accountability and relative independence from the political branches, an ad hoc, independent institution can make errors or misjudgments that can in turn have undue influence over the legislative process. Congress or the President should therefore limit the legal authority granted to investigative advisory commissions established during times of crisis so that political actors can fully deliberate over their prescriptions.
In this article I report the results of a quantitative and qualitative empirical study of how those who were injured or lost a family member in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks evaluated the tradeoff between a cash payment—available through the Victim Compensation Fund—and the pursuit of litigation. Responses make it clear that potential plaintiffs saw much more at stake than monetary compensation and that the choice to forego litigation required the sacrifice of important nonmonetary, civic values: obtaining and publicizing information about what happened, prompting public findings of accountability for those responsible, and participating in the process of ensuring that there would be responsive change to what was learned about how the attacks and deaths happened. The results shed light on the framing component of the transformation of disputes, and in particular on how potential litigants see the decision to sue, or not, as a decision as much or more about how they understand their relationship to their community and their responsibilities as a citizen as how they evaluate monetary considerations.
Just as the taking of the Bastille led to a cascade of further events, so the theoretical reflections touched off by my analysis of that event has led to a cascade of further reflections. And as the analyst must draw an arbitrary boundary to establish analytical closure to an event, so must I bring to a close an article that still seems to me radically open and unfinished. I believe I have written enough to establish that thinking about historical events as I do here - that is, treating them as sequences of occurrences that result in durable transformations of structures - is potentially fruitful. Precisely how fruitful can only be determined by future work on other historical events.
The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development
since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking
area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based
in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for
a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in
the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge
in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology
inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up
around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as
to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around “problematizations”
(Foucault).
KeywordsDiscourse–Knowledge–Foucault–Berger and Luckmann–Symbolic interactionism–Problematization–Controversy
While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientistsâ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in Political Theology that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes Political Theology with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions.
To some of the technicians of the Welfare State, Alvin Gouldner has applied the appellation "zoo keepers of deviance". The term is less attractive than the role, but I am bound to admit that twenty years ago I and many of my generation might not have been greatly bothered by it, since we had been nurtured in a positivistic cocoon with the belief that applied social science held the key to a better world. Some of us have emerged from that position in the intervening years and consequently share many of the moral concerns of the new generation of sociologists of deviance even if not all of the views of society upon which their positions depend... If what has been termed "Fabian criminology" has failed, it has done so, I suspect, in consequence of its failure to recognise in the moral nature of Man the Mark of Cain (Terence Morris, 1976, pp. 11-12). British criminology in the late 1960s was at a cross roads. The social demo- cratic positivism which had been dominant in the post-war period entered into a period of prolonged crisis, out of which emerged the two major contend- ing paradigms: radical criminology and administrative criminology. Of course, parallel processes occurred in other Western countries, but the excep- tional success of radical criminology in this country, together with the particu- lar flair of the state-centred administrative criminology, are a product of specific political and social conditions in Britain. It goes without saying that criminology does not occur in a vacuum. The central problem for social democratic or Fabian positivism was that a wholescale improvement in social conditions resulted, not in a drop in crime, but the reverse. I have termed this the aetiological crisis, and it was, of course, accompanied by grave problems in the prisons and within policing (Young, 1986). Social policies which had a fairly bipartisan support were rendered suspect. And of course the ability of the Welfare State in a situation of high employ-
After September 11, 2001, there was a great deal of speculation that the terrorists or their associates had traded in the option market on advanced knowledge of the impending attacks. This paper generates systematic information about option market activity that can be used to assess the option trading that precedes any event of interest. Examination of the option trading leading up to September 11 reveals that there was an unusually high level of put buying. This finding is consistent with informed investors having traded options in advance of the attacks.
How the 9/11 report defrauds the nation
- De Mott
Incessant chatter: recent paradigms in criminology
- J Young
Young, J. (1994). Incessant chatter: recent paradigms in criminology. In M. Maguire, R. Morgan, & R. Reiner
(Eds.),The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (1st ed., pp. 69-) Oxford: Clarendon.
- Rothe D.
- Wong W.-K