The Confident and the Terrorist

Truth, secret agents and preventive lies in the war on terror

Stopping criminals before they commit a crime is not only the plot of Minority Report, Steven Spielberg’s famous film. It is also the faith that, since the attack on the Twin Towers, has driven the misnamed “war on terror”. In its workings creak not only the detainees (guilty or innocent, seems a secondary concern), but the very concept of crime and even of factual reality. The story of prevention in Spain boasts more than eight hundred detainees, but eight out of ten have been acquitted.

Beyond the scope of jihadism, this chronicle is concerned with the quality of information and its importance for life. The true stories rescued by the authors (and which at times seem to come out of science fiction) explore the crossroads between propaganda and life. Located in that blind spot is the story of a mother who denounced her ex-husband for traveling to Afghanistan in 2001 without anyone paying attention to her; the story of police officers who expertly used a photocopier to set up a scenario that alarmed the United States; that of an informant whose false testimony led to the conviction of eleven immigrants from the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona; and that of some beardless terrorists and their leader, the imam of Ripoll, who went unnoticed by the police until their attack on La Rambla in 2017.