US national security policy turned to Hollywood and fiction to imagine terror threats

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. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 753

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the CVE/islamophobia-as-policy cluster and to work on the security-entertainment complex feeding threat inflation. — connects to: The War on Terror formally recruited Hollywood into the national security state — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 753; US national security policy recruited fiction writers to imagine threats; The war on terror institutionalized fiction writers as national-security imaginers. (+2 more)
• SEED: Possible essay angle: the ‘failure of imagination’ framing as state licensing of threat-inflating fictions, and how recruiting novelists into national security guaranteed runaway hyperbole.

Broader Connections

• US national security policy recruited fiction writers to imagine threats #corroborates (1.00)
• The security state formally recruited fiction writers to imagine threats #corroborates (1.00)
• The war on terror institutionalized fiction writers as national-security imaginers. #corroborates (0.95)
• Popular fiction like Homeland shaped real counterterrorism policy #corroborates (0.80)