Constellations Volume 12, No 2, 2005. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Democracy and Terror Martín Plot 1. The “War on Terror” On September 11th of 2001 I was in my apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront when a friend of mine gave me a telephone call. Since he woke me up, I was barely able to understand what he said – something he heard on National Public Radio, something about a small airplane having crashed against one of the Twin Towers. I jumped out of my bed and rushed to the window and there it was: one of the towers was in flames, covering the New York Bay with a thick column of smoke. The hours that followed where those of confusion, failed telephone call attempts to friends working in downtown Manhattan, and the slow – although in spurts, each one of them following the falling of the towers – and increasing com- prehension of the human tragedy unfolding right across East River. For many of those who I just mentioned – the friend who called me, the friends I was trying to call in downtown Manhattan – what had just happened was mass murder, a crime that targeted a symbol of American power, but that in essence had produced the most culturally diverse group of victims of a single event in history. For many of us, what had just happened was a crime against the human community, a crime against humanity. Metaphors throw meaning on otherwise incomprehensible events. Metaphors spring from past individual and cultural experience. Moreover, metaphors not only help us to understand events, but also end up shaping them. The metaphor most often used in the United States after September 11 was that of war. The collective experience used to throw light on the event was Pearl Harbor and many in America agreed that a war had just started – the war on terror. Literally speaking, though, September 11 was September 11: nineteen individ- uals killed 3,000 people using airplanes as weapons in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. However, was the action a crime – crimes against humanity are crimes nonetheless – or was it the initiation of war? What determines when a violent act should be thought of as a law enforcement problem or as a matter of warfare? Moreover, what difference does it make if something is assumed to be a law enforcement problem or a matter of warfare? Here I want to suggest that – if we follow the tradition of modern political philosophy – a crime is an act per- formed within a context regulated by some kind of rule of law, while an act of warfare is an act performed in the lawless context of the state of nature. (Leaving aside the fact that in recent times not even warfare was admitted to be a lawless