The War on Terror formally recruited Hollywood into the national security state

Evidence

The 9/11 Commission report, released in 2004, famously identified a “failure of imagination” as the basic problem with US national security policy. “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies,” noted the report’s authors. Preventing terrorist attacks in the future would require finding “a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.” It was noted at the time that Tom Clancy’s 1994 novel Debt of Honor had already imagined an airline pilot flying a Boeing 747 into the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress, yet intelligence agencies themselves had not anticipated this possibility. In the War on Terror, it seemed, the erstwhile inability of security bureaucracies to imagine potential threat scenarios might be remedied by drawing on the creativity of Hollywood scriptwriters and right-wing pulp novelists. What was needed, it was thought, was to get inventive in conjuring up potential threats, as well as breaking down pre-existing assumptions of how best to prevent them. Hollywood was elevated in its role and became as significant as Arlington, Fort Meade, and Langley in the landscape of the US national-security state. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 753

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The 9/11 Commission’s ‘failure of imagination’ framing turned a security failure into a warrant for enlisting fiction writers, a genuinely paradigm-shifting observation about the permeability between intelligence and fantasy industries.
• XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine literatures and to scholarship on the military-entertainment complex (e.g., the Pentagon’s role in Hollywood productions). — connects to: The state wages the War on Terror for spectacle more than effect — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1450; US national security policy turned to Hollywood and fiction to imagine terror threats — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 753; The war on terror institutionalized fiction writers as national-security imaginers. (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: how “failure of imagination” became a bureaucratic mandate to crowd-source threat scenarios from fiction writers — an essay on imagination as a state security resource and its implications for civil liberties.

Broader Connections

• US national security policy turned to Hollywood and fiction to imagine terror threats #corroborates (1.00) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 753
• The war on terror institutionalized fiction writers as national-security imaginers. #corroborates (0.95)
• The security state formally recruited fiction writers to imagine threats #corroborates (0.90)
• TV dramas and government PR jointly normalized torture in the War on Terror. #expands (0.80) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 302
• TV dramas helped constitute a public that could debate the War on Terror #expands (0.75) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 281