Giorgio Agamben Quotes
The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.
Agamben, Giorgio. "On Security and Terror." Translated by Carolin Emcke, Theory & Event, vol. 5, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
After September 11, the Department of Homeland Security was formed. The new department combined a host of other disparate departments and organizations and one result was that threats and terrorist targets were so broadly defined with a paucity of specific intelligence that almost everything was a target so that nothing could receive more security and protection than anything else.
Two months later the attack of September 11 took place. CIA Director Tenant had been do alarmed by the information that the CIA had obtained that he immediately called the National Security Advisor to arrange a briefing at the White House. This was attended by Rich B, Tenant, and his deputy for counter-terrorism, Cofer Black. Black recommended that the United States immediately go on a “war footing.” It is not known what Rice discussed with President Bush but the nation did not go on a war footing and there was no alert even of the airports where the terrorists started their attack taking over planes. Tenant would later say that one of his biggest regrets was that he did not take the matter to the President personally when his meeting with Rice produced no action.
See {583817} for how France was more assertive in handling this problem.
One myth is that Islamic violence is caused by the dispute over Israel in the Middle East and American and Christian encroachments into Islam. Violence by Muslims against fellow Muslims is responsible for many more deaths than Muslims perpetrate against the West. In this example it shows that Muslim on Muslim violence in Egypt alone is far grater than the violence against the Israelis. In the Iraq war, Muslim insurgents killed many more fellow Muslims than they killed Americans. Many Muslims will kill and intimidate anyone of any religion who simply disagrees with them. Governments fighting the terrorists often, out of desperation, resort to Emergency Laws, suspensing rights or other extra judicial means. Democratic Israel, which has had to cope with terrorism for its entire existence still has a constitutional democracy and has not resorted to undemocratic extra judicial means of counter terrorism.
The Center is in Holland. Chouket is Tunisian
This statement is quoted by many critics of the agency who ask if the threat is so easy and ubiquitous, why have there been so few attacks?
The murder to which he was referring was the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He had been very active in trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Palestinians. A minority of right wing, religious fundamentalists were opposed to any peace treaty that would give the Palestinians control over the land that the fundamentalists believed was given to the Jews by God. Israel’s political system was so fractionated with minority parties having so much influence that Rabin was the only leader on the horizon who was influential and powerful enough to transcend the party politics, Since his assassination the peace process has been stalled, and the murder paid off.
At the time Iran was claiming that its nuclear program was for atomic energy only.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are repugnant to us because they have no respect for Civil and Human Rights and would deny us what we value so highly and for which so many Americans have sacrificed. We are little better off if we surrender our civil rights in order to cope with the problem of losing our civil rights to the likes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
He fought in Algeria and other counterinsurgencies and then studied them. He wrote the classic book on counterinsurgency warfare. After all the mistakes the U. S. made after the successful invasion of Iraq, his book and doctrine were very influential in the change in strategy and tactics that turned the Iraq War in our favor.
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (carried forth from the work of Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings.
