The Harbinger Theory
Oxford University Press, 2015North American law has been transformed in ways unimaginable before 9/11. Laws now authorize and courts have condoned indefinite detention without charge on secret evidence, mass secret surveillance, and targeted killing of U.S. citizens, suggesting a shift in the cultural currency of a liberal form of legality to authoritarian legality. This book traces how this shift has been embraced in politics, scholarship, and public opinion not in terms of a general fear of the greater threat that terrorism now poses, but a more specific belief that 9/11 was the harbinger of a new order of terror giving rise to the likelihood in the near future of an attack on the same scale or greater, involving thousands or more casualties and possibly weapons of mass destruction.
The book examines a range of skeptical evidence about the likelihood of mass terror involving nuclear, biological, or radiological weapons, arguing that a potentially more effective basis for reform is not to dismiss overstated claims of threats as speculative or psychologically grounded, but to challenge them directly through the use of contrary evidence.