Robert Diab

The harbinger theory : how the post-9/11 emergency became permanent and the case for reform

North 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 demonstrates that extreme measures have been consistently embraced in politics, scholarship, and public opinion not in terms of a general fear of the greater threat that terrorism now poses, but in 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 as 9/11 or greater, involving thousands or more casualties and possibly weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The book surveys U.S. and Canadian counterterrorism law and policy marking the shift to authoritarian legality, and traces the role of the harbinger theory across a range of discourses — political, popular, and scholarly — to demonstrate the consistency and pervasiveness of the harbinger theory in support of extreme measures. The book also offers a unique overview of a range of skeptical evidence about the likelihood of mass terror involving nuclear, biological, and radiological weapons, as well as conventional means, arguing that a potentially more effective basis for reform advocacy is not to dismiss overstated claims of threats as implausible or psychologically grounded, but to challenge them directly through the use of contrary evidence.

Terrorism and the administration of justice in Canada

The most reliable study conducted to date indicates that, from March of 2003 to July 2006, there were 654,964 excess deaths in Iraq as a result of the US invasion and occupation.2 The intractable war in Afghanistan, raging since October 2001 has failed to bring any semblance of peace to Afghans.3 These are the results of the so-called “war on terror” initiated after the terrorist attacks within the United States on September 11, 2001. This war has had devastating consequences for the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. The consequences of the “war on terror” here in Canada are qualitatively different. Introduced into the House of Commons just over a month after September 11, the AntiTerrorism Act4 signaled a dramatic shift in government policy relating to national security.5 Several authors, including Robert Diab in Guantánamo North: Terrorism and the Administration of Justice in Canada, have argued that this policy shift has had deleterious effects on the civil and political rights of Canadians.6 In light of the sheer