Terrorism
There are over 100 definitions of terrorism. Among them, Mingst and others (2001) give us the useless conceit that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” Kegley and Wittkopf (2001) say it is “seeking to further political objectives through the threat or use of violence usually in opposition to state governments,” but that does not distinguish terrorism from conventional methods.
Michael Walzer (1977) gives us “the systematic terrorizing of whole populations is a strategy of both conventional and guerrilla war…its purpose is to destroy the morale of a nation or a class, to undercut its solidarity; its method is the random murder of innocent people. Randomness is the crucial feature of terrorist activity.” Better, but defining terrorism as terrorizing is not helpful.Title 22 of the US Code defines terrorism as “premeditated political violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational or clandestine agents.” This seems largely satisfactory. Under the Geneva Conventions, legal combatants must be in uniforms or wear distinctive insignia, carry arms openly, be under responsible command, and operate under the laws of war. Anyone fighting but not meeting these conditions is an “illegal combatant” and is not entitled to POW status although some terrorist sympathizers would like to change that. Traditionally, combatant status includes civilians who make war materiel but not those who make the normal necessities of life. As noted earlier, that distinction began to erode during the Spanish Civil War and all but disappeared in World War II, partly to rationalize area bombing, partly because nations mobilized every resource for war.
Prisoners are possible sources of information. POW status reserved to legal combatants famously requires them to reveal only their “name, rank, and number” and limits the methods captors may use to extract additional information.
Civilian criminals, at least in Western democracies, have even more protections although they vary from one country to another. Illegal combatants have fewer rights. Where simple questioning has proved ineffective, aggressive interrogation has extracted information that, once confirmed, proved valuable despite what critics say about its reliability. Specifically, it provided information used to prevent attacks and capture additional terrorists including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner and bomb maker for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. In turn, he disclosed valid information after subjection to the controversial technique of waterboarding (Rodriguez & Harlow, 2012).These cases raise the issue of exactly what is permitted in dealing with illegal combatant prisoners. The United States ratified the International Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1994, but took a reservation to its definition of torture.5 In the US, torture “means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control” (US Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C section 2340). “Severe mental pain or suffering” is “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, administering or threatening administration of mind-altering substances or procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality, or the threat of imminent death.” If treatment contains these elements, it is torture. If not, the treatment may be severe, coercive, or humiliating, but it is not torture. Perfectly reasonable people still disagree as to whether some techniques, especially waterboarding or sleep deprivation, are or are not torture.
For this reason, in the interest of avoiding possible prosecution, those responsible for interrogating captured terrorists requested guidance as to just what the legal limits were.
The Department of Justice wrote the so-called “torture memos” of 2002 and 2003 in response. They were advisory legal, not policy documents. Key congressional leaders of both parties were briefed in some thirty sessions. Congress had two opportunities to ban waterboarding but declined. Only when “torture” became a public issue did some in Congress seize the opportunity to pillory the administration despite their own inaction when they had the chance. Not one of the twelve subsequent nonpartisan investigations found that the Administration condoned or tolerated detainee abuse. In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder had to drop his politically motivated investigation for lack of substantiation.When people hear the word “terrorism” today, most think of Muslim groups such as al-Qaeda. In fact, the Israelis invented modern political terrorism with the 26 July 1946 attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 people.6 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Muslims committed about 25% of terrorist incidents. For example, RAND reported 1725 terrorist acts in 2002 (almost five a day), including 441 in Southeast Asia, 447 in the Middle East, and 214 in Europe. Non-Musliim groups such as Aum Shrinri Kyo, Baader Meinhoff Gang, Black Panthers, Earth Liberation Front, ETA, Green Peace, FARC, IRA, PETA, Shining Path, Symbionese Liberation Army, and Tamil Tigers were responsible for many attacks, while independent operators such as Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh accounted for the remainder. They illustrate just how extensive and varied terrorism is.
The current wave of Arab terrorism has its origin in the 1948, 1956, and especially the 1967 defeats by Israel of the Arabs, who began to ask why and answered, as Jewish prophets and Christian preachers also have done in times of disaster, “because we have been faithless.” Unable to defeat Israel and its American sponsor by conventional means, they turned to terror, beginning with the August 1969 hijacking of TWA 840 from Rome led not by Muslim but by Christian Arabs. The hijacking of one British and two American planes in September 1970, the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the bombings of the US Embassy and Marine base in Lebanon in the 1980s, the capture of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, and the in-air bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988 followed.
Then came the first attack on the World Trade Center, Khobar Towers, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the US Cole, bombings of discos in Germany and Indonesia, and the 11 September 2011 attack that killed more people than the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.7 Authorities thwarted over 100 other attempts. The escalation in numbers, geographical reach, and scale is apparent. To date, authorities have prevented several dozen subsequent planned terror attacks on the US following 9/11.Muslims may not be responsible for all terror incidents, but they are responsible for the ones that kill the most people and do the most damage to the world economy. The great fear is—or should be—the possibility of their obtaining biological or nuclear weapons then using one in a “suitcase” bomb or on a short-range missile fired from a cargo ship just offshore. A well-timed explosion of a nuclear device in Washington DC could leave the United States in a war with no federal government to run it. The presidential succession list is completely Washington-based. One idea is to replace the cabinet secretaries on the succession list with governors, elected officials normally outside Washington. Some suggest basing the order of succession among them on state population, some on the order in which the states ratified the Constitution, and some on an executive order issued by each president. Governors can replace Senators by appointment, but currently a special election is required to fill vacancies in the House. An alternative is to permit governors to appoint interim replacements that preserve the existing proportion of Democrats and Republicans in their state delegation, with a special election required within 90 days. Unsurprisingly, the government has ignored the problem for years.
As suggested above, there are many types of terrorist. Liam Harte (2002) proposed a useful typology differentiating (1) domestic from international (2) state from non-state, (3) mythic from non-mythic, and (4) modernist from anti-modernist terrorism that helps make sense of the similarities and differences among them.
In 2002, neither Harte nor I could think of an actual anti-modernist non-mythic terrorist group. The IRA is the closest we can come to identifying a modernist, non-mythic group. With only one example in all eight non-mythic cells and no tactical difference in responding to them, it seems reasonable to simplify Harte’s taxonomy by eliminating the mythic vs. non-mythic categories, resulting in Figure 15.1 inclusive of representative examples for each type.
Al Qaeda and most other Muslim terror groups are concentrated in the anti-modern, international, non-state cell. There are three distinct cohorts. The “old guard” are the veterans of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union, largely upper and middle class Saudis. The largest cohort, motivated by Bosnia, Chechnya, and Kashmir, are of many nationalities, largely from moderately religious, middle class families sent to university in Europe where, shunned, homesick, and lonely, they formed mosque-related cliques. The smallest and most recent cohort are drawn from semi-skilled and unskilled second- and third-generation children of immigrants, who, denied local acceptance turned to religion. Some discover Salafism, which reduces the world to believers and non-believers (a category including non-Salafist Muslims) and justifies killing the latter. Only about 15% attended madrassas and 10% are converted Christians. Two-thirds are married with children. Sixty percent had at least some university education8 usually in professional and technical fields with little formal exposure to Islamic history and theology. Individuals who think alike coalesce around a charismatic local leader, develop into cells, become still more secretive and insular so reinforcing radical views free from competing ideas, self-identify as holy warriors, and begin to plan attacks of their own. With the decimation of al-Qaeda central, these terror cells increasingly operate independently, using some 6000 websites to recruit and proselytize.
However, al-Qaeda has not yet been destroyed as President Obama claimed in 2012, and it is not to be discounted. The smaller, more independent, cells are harder to identify and stop, but also are less capable of raising money (Hudson 2005; Sageman 2004, 2008; Silber and Bhatt 2007). The general turmoil in the Arab world provides an opportunity for fundamentalists to increase their influence and even obtain a grip on power, reappearing wherever a power vacuum develops that gives them an opening. At this writing, they threaten in Syria and Mali, both more important strategically than Afghanistan.These terrorists are no more or less characteristic of Islam than the KKK and the IRA are of Christians. They are a minority who believe in violence but disagree among themselves as to its purposes and targets. They believe that they are the only true Muslims, that unbelievers control the world and seek to destroy Islam, and that they are conducting a jihad in defense of Islam.9