"The only thing I know certain about him is that he's evil." So said President George W. Bush (of Osama bin Laden) in a November 2001 press conference. Though one might be tempted to dismiss this as merely the rhetorical bravado of a public figure in the aftermath of attack, this proclamation encapsulates a central presupposition about the role of expertise in the American "global war on terror" that emerged after the attacks of 9/11/2001. While studies have often focused upon the role of Orientalism in depictions of the Middle East, and particularly in the expert knowledges mobilized by "Western" states as they intervene in the region, the war on terror was not, for the most part, characterized by the mobilization of Orientalist knowledge, but by a disavowal of the need for expert knowledge at all (and particularly expert knowledge of the localized or cultural variety). Although there have been projects that aim to incorporate "cultural" knowledge into the war on terror (perhaps most notably via the "Human Terrain Systems" program), these have been relatively subordinated, despite the sometimes outsize levels of attention they have been given in the media. This paper examines the records of government-funded research on terrorism between 2001 and 2010, via the NTIS (National Technical Information Service) database, to show that the production of expert knowledge on "terrorism" after 9/11 was dominated not by "cultural" analysis, but by techniques such as network analysis, which eclipsed the need to actually "know" individual terrorists or their social worlds. This paper then draws on historical research into the construction of the problem of "terrorism" and the field of "terrorism expertise" in the U.S. since 1972 to show how it was that the problem it came to be enacted in such a way that not only was contextualized social, historical, and cultural "local knowledge" not necessary to "understand" and act upon the problem. Not only did local knowledge come to be seen as unnecessary for managing the problem, it could even be seen as detrimental to the production of expertise. Those who got too close to the problem, in a context where explanation can to be seen as justification, were liable to being discredited by their very knowledge.