“A Complicated and Frustrating Dance”: National Security Reform, the Limits of Parrhesia , and the Case of the 9/11 Families

The case of the 9/11 families represents both disruption and continuity in the rhetorical history of citizen participation in U.S. national security affairs. The 9/11 families were “outsiders” who used parrhesia—speech uniquely characterized by frankness, truth, criticism, danger, and duty—to access inside arenas of national security policymaking. Once inside, however, the families’ inability to sustain their preferred framing of accountability for 9/11—a framing that sought to assign concrete and specific responsibility for the catastrophe—demonstrates the limits of parrhesia in the face of institutional rhetoric that persistently excludes, contains, and suppresses citizen-stakeholder voices. Thus, although national security policymaking remains the domain of technocratic elites, the aftermath of 9/11 nevertheless represents an exigence in which established elements of the relationship between elites and citizens were at least partly and temporarily destabilized. As a result, a critical analysis of the competing rhetorical strategies used by the groups responding to this exigence illuminates tensions useful for conceptualizing the development of a rhetorical democracy.