ABSTRACT

Thriller writers, who are ever searching for plots of intrigue and char-

acters worthy of the trumpeted New World Order, increasingly invoke terrorism as a substitute for espionage. The evil other of the Cold War being moribund, we will no longer be taken to Checkpoint Charlie or be presented with a cast of KGB villains. Now we must visit terrorist haunts and contemplate desperate madmen from the beleaguered

corners of the earth or the estranged sectors of society, their hands holding not just guns or conventional bombs but nuclear devices and biological weapons as well. Thus, we confront the new exemplar of inscrutable wickedness, the latest perpetrator of ultraviolent gore. This is all fiction, we know, but what about that other discourse on terrorism, the starkly factual one, the one invoked by politicians, journalists,

and scholars, the one we hear and read about daily in the media? The credibility of the political thriller would imply that the non-

fictional discourse must be deadly real. The definitive evidence of its truth has been presumably provided by the World Trade Center and

the Oklahoma City explosions; terrorism experts have never been so firmly on the side of seemingly unquestionable "reality."