4 Herman

Introduction In one important respect confronting the experts on a subject like terrorism is more difficult than on issues like fluoridation or nuclear power. On the latter topics, the public’s health and safety are clearly and directly at stake, its interest in rational inquiry is evident, and antior non-establishment experts or spokespersons, while at a serious disadvantage in reaching the public, can sometimes be heard widely and exert influence. In the case of terrorism, where mainly distant and hazy foreign enemies are claimed to be posing a threat, the public’s interest is more remote, its knowledge is slight, and it is therefore more easily caught up in and manipulated by a web of symbols. For example, political leaders in the United States, with the help of the mass media, have easily mobilised a consensus on the dire threat posed by a demonised foreign enemy like Libyan leader Muammar Kadaffi, that has given them political and popular backing for attacks on Libya and indirect support for larger political agendas. This consensus has been quickly established, and alternative definitions and ways of looking at terrorism have been extremely difficult to introduce into discussions of the subject. This process of “closure” occurs not only because of the symbolic power of the demonised enemy, but also because the mainstream media confine themselves to an exceptional degree to official sources and establishment experts. Given the rapid consensus, unaccredited experts would hardly be understood, would elicit protests by vocal groups (including the government itself), and their participation in public forums is often vetoed in advance by officials and establishment experts, who don’t like open debate any more than Commissars (see below, under “The marginalization process”). It is not at all difficult to deconstruct and reveal terrible flaws and bias in the writings of the establishment terrorism experts; their work is often extremely crude, rhetorical, and bears little resemblance to serious social science scholarship, so that refuting them generally involves merely looking at obvious sources and using the rules of logic, as I describe below. But their work, though technically vulnerable, is immune to critical attack by virtue of the closure process and exclusion of dissenting views. Neither my occasional collaborator, Professor Noam Chomsky, nor I have ever had an opinion column or article in the New York Times. I had a single opinion column on terrorism in my home town newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in 1983, after which I was blacklisted for the next decade. In the US, dissident experts on terrorism have been restricted almost entirely to reaching audiences of 50 to 2,000 in public gatherings, and by writing articles in small circulation journals and books that reach thousands, but in the aggregate with direct access to substantially less than five percent of the public. It is a cliché of the West that under free institutions, truth will eventually conquer falsehood and correct error; but in the terrorism field the question must be asked: what if unconventional views are systematically marginalized by the free institutions throughout the periods when they are socially relevant?