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Introduction
The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (henceforth, 9/11 Commission) was made public in 2004. Convened to investigate "facts and circumstances" relating to the attacks, the Commission reviewed 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewed 1,200 people and heard testimony from 160 witnesses (9/11 Commission, p. xv). One question posed by the Commission assumed salience: "how did the U.S. government fail to anticipate and prevent it?" (9/11 Commission, p. 2). The Commission concluded: "the most important failure was one of imagination" (9/11 Commission, Executive Summary, p. 9). The theme of imagination recurs throughout the report. 9/11 had occurred because "across the government, there were failures of imagination" (9/11 Commission, Executive Summary, p. 9); importantly, "the possibility was imaginable, and imagined" (9/11 Commission, p. 345). While acknowledging that "imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies", the Commission recommended "institutionalizing imagination", arguing that "it is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination" (9/11 Commission, p. 344).
This paper addresses issues relating to both the rationales of this fusion of bureaucracy and imagination and to ways to make operational this component of U.S. domestic security policy. The central thesis of the paper is that the bureaucratization of imagination might not seem the most obvious basis for the determination of a security paradigm. Independently, both bureaucracy and imagination have their own assumed merits. Bureaucracy is associated with the characteristics of formal responsibility, expertize, prescribed procedure and supervision: characteristics that might be favorably related to a security paradigm premised upon routine protocol. Imagination refers to a process of experimentation and invention, also relevant security attributes since the 9/11 Commission had been "struck with the unimaginative menu of options for action offered to both President Clinton and President Bush" (9/11 Commission, p. 350). Yet, very practical imperatives drove this linking of bureaucracy and imagination and the ensuing necessity to establish boundary conditions between the two.
The bureaucratization of imagination was employed to generate knowledge about security. In establishing the boundary conditions between bureaucracy and imagination, boundary conditions were created between other security requirements. Boundaries between security and insecurity, between risk and uncertainty, and between insurance and misfortune prevention were determined by this alignment of bureaucracy...