Terrorism

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TERRORISM

Terrorism was first used to define a systematic policy of violence during the French Revolution and has since undergone important transformations that have been topics of both scientific investigation and efforts at technological control. What is now called terrorism is an old practice that has acquired new dimensions as a result of science and technology in at least three respects: rationale, publicity, and weapons (and other means). Any adequate ethical or policy assessment of terrorism requires consideration of all three aspects of the problem.

Historical Aspects

Terrorism is an ill-defined but ethically charged term, which generally refers to the highly public, calculated use of violence, destruction, or intimidation to gain political, religious, or personal objectives. Yet in this sense many wars and even some police actions might be described as terrorist insofar as they seek to induce or exploit fear. Some observers also argue that there is little principled difference between official U.S. definitions of terror and counterinsurgency measures described in U.S. armed forces manuals (Atran 2003).

From certain Roman emperors to the Spanish Inquisition (beginning in the fifteenth century) and the French Revolution's Reign of Terror (1793–1794), early forms of terrorism were primarily conducted by the state or other parties with high political power such as the Catholic Church. The nineteenth century, however, witnessed the development of complementary efforts by individuals or small groups such as the small band of Russian revolutionaries known as Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) who grew impatient with the slow pace of tsarist reforms. Members of this group are among the few to refer to themselves as terrorists, and, aided by the development of powerful and affordable explosives, they assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American group, planted explosives around London in the mid-1800s to protest the British occupation of Ireland, thus demonstrating one of the main objectives of many terrorist organizations, namely, to attempt to reacquire territory that they feel is legitimately theirs. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Serbian nationalist terrorist organization called the Black Hand, assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, thus triggering the social and political upheavals of World War I.

World War II witnessed the uses of state terrorism by both the Allied and Axis powers. After the war, terrorism continued to broaden beyond the assassination of political leaders. Terrorist movements developed in certain European colonies to both pressure colonial powers and intimidate indigenous populations into supporting a particular group. After colonialism had waned in the 1950s and 1960s, terrorism continued in several areas and for a variety of purposes. These attacks often targeted civilians, as in the case of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972.

Although suicide terrorism has deep historical roots (Atran 2003), it has played a major role in Middle East politics since the early 1980s. Since at least 1993, suicide attacks by groups such as the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) have continually thwarted peace efforts between Israel and Palestine. Although Islamic religious extremism is involved in many of these terrorist attacks, it should be noted that other religious groups have committed acts of terror. The same holds true for secular groups, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka.

In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden, a member of a wealthy Saudi family, rose to prominence as the leader of al-Qaeda (the Base), an Islamist terrorist organization. Determined to resist Western influence in Muslim countries, members of this group killed hundreds in bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Al-Qaeda members have been able to create a complex, networked organization capable of transcending national borders. Such capabilities allowed them to hijack commercial airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. Passengers onboard a fourth plane forced it to crash in a Pennsylvania field. These attacks caused approximately 3,000 deaths and extensive social, psychological, and economic damage, and set off major political changes around the world, much of which bears on the use of science and technology both as potential security threats and as sources of counterterrorist measures.

Rationales

The justifications that terrorists give of their actions are perhaps even more difficult to consider than the definition of the actions themselves. It is easier—and initially appears more accurate—to describe terrorists as cowards or insane. But such a reaction runs the danger of misconstruing the phenomena and feeding into counterproductive responses.

Works by al-Qaeda and Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) suggest that a major underlying rationale for some contemporary forms of terrorism is a condemnation of the dangers and depravity of modernity, including liberalism, capitalism, and a technological materialism divorced from spiritual or ethical guidance. Paul Berman (2003) traces much of the ideological impetus of al-Qaeda back to Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist groups and their "intellectual hero," Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), who presented an extended critique of the modern world and the tyranny that technology holds over life. Qutb traced the source of error back to a split between the spiritual and material realms, which put humans out of touch with their own nature. He did not lament science but did decry the alienating effects of scientific "progress" (and the attendant consumerism) divorced from spirituality. The split between the secular and the sacred, he argued, was the fatal error that rendered the modern world inhospitable to a meaningful human existence and relationship with God.

Qutb's cultural critique also offered a revolutionary program to save humankind by calling for a small vanguard to establish sharia, the religious law of Islam, for all of society. Competing interpretations of the Koran and the meaning of Islam have created conflicts along the spectrum of liberal and extremist Muslims. For Berman Islamic terrorists are heirs to modern European fascism, with their ideals of submission, absolutism, and "the one instead of the many." William A. Galston (2003) suggests that such an interpretation erases key distinctions such as that between the meaningless self-annihilation of nihilists and the politically motivated acts of suicide terrorists. Furthermore, the thesis of liberalism versus totalitarianism reinforces the belief that terrorists "hate us for what we are, not what we do," which curtails critical scrutiny of policy decisions.

Kaczynski developed a related rationale in his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (published by the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995). Whereas Qutb placed the problems of modernity in religious history and sought solutions in religious texts, Kaczynski appealed to human evolutionary history to explain modern social and psychological problems and relied on Western philosophers to buttress his critique. Nonetheless, both provided similar justifications for taking radical steps to undermine modern techno-industrial society. Alston Chase (2003) argues that (just as with Qutb) Kaczynski's writing cannot be simply dismissed as fringe lunacy or simple-minded Luddism. His ideas were shaped by real experiences as a mathematician at Harvard University in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

First, Kaczynski was subjected to dehumanizing psychology experiments at the hands of Henry A. Murray. Second, the climate of academia (and the wider culture) was saturated by the tenets of logical positivism, which held that ethical claims are meaningless, because science cannot prove them either true or false. Ethical and other values are purely matters of private emotion. As with Qutb, Kaczynski saw this separation of private (moral) and public (material) and other such fundamental schisms in modern industrial society as the root cause of unethical science and technology, vacuous consumerism, and massive human indignities and feelings of meaninglessness. Finally, Kaczynski held that science and technology had become servants of a military-industrial complex in ways that echoed the arguments of other critics such as the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). Such an argument justifies Kaczynski's rejection of the combatant/civilian distinction, because virtually all academic scientists and engineers could be perceived as caught up in a web of culpability. There is no doubt that acts of terror are objectionable, but this does not erase the possibility that their underlying rationale may at least be intelligible.

Although one major way to avoid considering the reasons that terrorists give for their actions is to reject terrorists themselves as irrational, another is to propose a sweeping historical thesis such as Samuel P. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" (1996). In response, Amartya Sen (2002) has argued that the "clash thesis" dangerously oversimplifies the heterogeneity of motives and objectives behind terrorist acts by reducing complex people and organizations to one dimension. Huntington's thesis paints a patina of coherence over the messy reality—that rationales for terrorism are diverse, complex, changing, and poorly understood. Context matters and terrorism cannot be reduced to a single "root cause" such as poverty, political conflict, or the intrusion of Western values on other cultures.

As an alternative to reliance on a large-scale historical thesis, it would perhaps be useful to undertake more detailed psychological and social scientific studies of terrorists and terrorist organizations. According to Scott Atran (2003), for instance, suicide terrorists have no appreciable psychopathology and are at least as educated and economically well-off as their surrounding populations, although there is a fairly strong negative correlation between civil liberties and suicide terrorism. In their studies attempting to uncover the causes of terrorism, Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova (2003) conclude that "any connection between poverty, education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite weak" (p. B10). They suggest that terrorism is a response to political conditions and feelings of indignity and frustration that are only weakly linked to economic circumstances. Marc Sageman (2004) similarly claims that people join terrorist organizations to escape a sense of alienation.

Atran also notes a correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and terrorist attacks against the United States. Adolf Toben˜a and Scott Atran (2004) suggest that understanding terrorists' motivations requires research both on social conditions and individual traits. Hector N. Qirko (2004) proposes a model from evolutionary psychology to explain suicide terrorism. He suggests that this non-kin altruistic behavior can be explained in terms of inclusive fitness, because institutions that train suicide terrorists essentially create "fictive kin."

Contemporary terrorists are usually young males who feel that they have no alternative path to influence and power and that their voice will otherwise be ignored. Humiliation, despair, and loss of economic or social advantage are factors that often play into motivations to join terrorist movements. In many Muslim areas, expanding youth populations cannot find opportunities because of rigidly authoritarian regimes. For many, the allure of martyrdom becomes a strong case for carrying out suicide missions. Indeed Nasra Hassan (2001) reports that there is an excess of young recruits hoping for martyrdom.

Publicity

A primary terrorist objective is the creation of fear in a targeted population in order to use the psychological impact of actual or threatened violence to effect political change. The capability to cause terror has been multiplied not just by more powerful weapons, but also by the expanded media coverage of terrorist acts made possible by innovations in communication technologies. Knowledge of terrorist acts is much more immediate, vivid, and widely disseminated than ever before.

Before the advent of mass media and modern communication technologies, acts of terror were committed in crowds in order to gain publicity. This led Brian M. Jenkins (1974) to describe "terrorism [as] theatre," which was vividly confirmed by the September 11 attacks, designed in part to provide billions of television viewers with images symbolizing the weakness of the United States. Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, chose that target for the open space surrounding it, which allowed for extensive television coverage. The Colombian leftist terrorist group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has its own radio broadcasts, and there are more than 4,000 terrorist websites (Wright 2004). Terrorists have adapted strategies with the emergence of satellite networks such as the Arabic news network Al Jazeera and the video capabilities of the Internet to expand their abilities to gain publicity.

Brigitte L. Nacos (1994) has explored the relationship between terrorism and the media, and suggested that the media unintentionally help terrorists achieve goals of publicity, recognition, instability, and respect. Focusing on the Iranian hostage crisis (1979–1981) and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 (1988), Nacos argued that terrorists successfully manipulated the linkages between the news media, public opinion, and presidential decision-making by staging spectacles of terror. The opposite view is that media attention harms terrorist causes. Images of death and destruction focus attention not on the group's message but on its method, which can delegitimize its cause and alienate potential supporters.

What is not controversial, however, is the fact that media attention can and often has shaped the outcome of terrorist activities. It can disrupt counterterrorist operations and influence the dynamics of hostage situations. Terrorist groups increasingly target the media, which attracts attention and shapes coverage. The decision by managers of two U.S. newspapers (as urged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation) to publish the Unabomber's manifesto led to his identification and capture. Nacos argued, however, that this was a shameful act of government acquiescence to mass-media pressure, which might eventually encourage more terrorism. The mass media holds wider powers too, in the sense that its public representations partially define what counts as terrorism and what counts as legitimate acts of violence.

Such issues raise questions about the responsibility of the media in covering terrorism. Excessive coverage may further terrorist causes and encourage more attacks, but it is also true that too little coverage would not fulfill the media's goal of informing the public. One specific example of this dilemma is posed by the occasional audio and videotapes released by bin Laden. How much coverage should he be granted? An example of self-imposed limits on media coverage emerged in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, when the major media organizations declined to air images of beheadings performed by terrorists. But the explosion of media outlets, especially on the Internet, makes it easier for terrorists to publicize their message.

Media coverage of terrorism also raises the important ethical issue of tradeoffs between freedom of the press and security interests. Democratic governments must walk a fine line to find the proper balance for controlling media actions. In the 1980s the British government banned the broadcasting of statements by members of terrorist organizations and their supporters. Margaret Thatcher, the then prime minister of Britain, justified this policy by claiming that the surest way to stop terrorism was to cut off "the oxygen of publicity." Some argue that coverage of vulnerabilities in U.S. national security (e.g., the susceptibility of nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks) might also help terrorists prioritize future acts.

Finally, the publicity received by Islamic fundamentalist groups has given the impression that they commit the majority of suicide terrorist acts. But Robert A. Pape (2003), in a quantitative study of the 188 documented acts of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2001, concluded that this impression was false. The leading instigator of suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a secular Marxist-Leninist group that was responsible for seventy-five of the incidents.

Weapons and Other Means

As in many other areas of interaction between science, technology, and society, the most dramatic transformation in contemporary terrorism is new technological means. These means come in two forms: means of communication among terrorists that facilitate their planning and execution, and means in the form of weapons. The thousands of deaths resulting from the September 11 attacks signal terrorists' abilities to manipulate modern technologies to cause ever greater devastation. Contemporary terrorist attacks highlight the fact that not just the use of individual technological instruments is at stake. Developed societies' dependency on centralized, complex technological systems looms as a source of vulnerability that gives terrorists enormous power.

Lawrence Wright (2004) uses the March 2004 Madrid train bombings by al-Qaeda to detail the importance of the Internet to terrorist organizations. He argues that the Internet serves two interrelated purposes. First, it is a vehicle for strategic and tactical goals such as planning and organizing attacks, raising funds, and training recruits. The Internet and other communication technologies (e.g., cell phones and satellite phones) allow for highly coordinated international attacks. Al-Qaeda even publishes two online magazines that feature how-to articles on kidnapping and other terrorist tactics. Coded communications are used, and web sites are continually moved in order to avoid detection.

The second purpose served by the Internet is more fundamental. Muslim immigration in Europe is creating massive social and psychological disruptions. Many young Muslims have trouble adapting to their new situations and are confused about whether their adopted homelands are part of "the land of believers" or "the land of impiety." The Internet provides a virtual community and a compassionate, responsive forum that "stands in for the idea of the ummah, the mythologized Muslim community" (Wright 2004, p. 49). This virtual community strengthens feelings of common identity and provides mutual emotional support to combat feelings of alienation. Arabic satellite channels are being replaced by the Internet as the main conduit of information and communication among a growing global "jihadi subculture."

Marc Sageman (2004) sees further implications of the new Internet culture. Al-Qaeda, for example, is a nonhierarchical network, which increasingly uses bottom-up, self-selected recruitment strategies (rather than top-down selection) as a result of emerging Internet communities. Various levels of adherents form according to different interpretations of the ideology and purpose of al-Qaeda. Top-down control is diminished, as leaders no longer approve all attacks. After losing its Afghan sanctuary, the leadership of al-Qaeda is more reliant on such semi-independent cells in diverse regions. Sageman sees such local cells as the wave of the future, a theory supported by the Madrid bombings, which were carried out by a semi-independent cell. Because of the Internet, al-Qaeda is becoming a virtual community (not dependent on any one geographical locale) in the global space of the Internet. It is a "virtual Islamist state that is trying to find a place for itself in the actual world" (Wright 2004, p. 53). The cohesiveness of this virtual community presents fundamental questions about its legitimate recognition in the international arena.

The use of the Internet and other communications technologies has sparked a technological arms race as government entities develop their own innovations to track and monitor terrorist activities. Government intervention such as shutting down web sites that are judged to support terrorism has sparked controversies about the proper limits to free speech (e.g., should instructions on bomb making be available online?).

Terrorists also use technologies in the form of weapons, which span the spectrum from simple to complex. Nasra Hassan (2001) explains that the materials used to build suicide bombs (nails, gunpowder, light switches, acetone, etc.) are not only readily available but so affordable that the most expensive part of some Palestinian suicide missions is the transportation to the site of the attack. Similarly, very little expertise or high-tech equipment is needed to make effective agricultural bioterrorist weapons (Wheelis, Casagrande, and Madden 2002). Timothy McVeigh used an ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) bomb, which was composed of many simple and readily available components (e.g., fertilizer) but was most likely fairly complicated to construct. So-called dirty bombs (combinations of TNT or ANFO explosives with highly radioactive materials) are similar in that radioactive materials are relatively easy to procure (significant quantities have even been found in scrap yards), but constructing and deploying an effective dirty bomb capable of widely dispersing radiation is difficult (Levi and Kelly 2002).

Nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to build and nuclear material is rare and hard to refine, but political unrest in nations possessing them has increased fears that terrorists could acquire existing nuclear weapons. The term loose nukes refers to nuclear weapons, materials, or knowledge that could fall into terrorist hands. The black market in uranium and plutonium and poorly paid Russian scientists are of special concern. Al-Qaeda has repeatedly attempted to purchase highly enriched uranium, and states that sponsor terrorism continually try to build nuclear weapons. The threat of nuclear terrorism raises the old "nuclear dilemma" former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower noted in the 1950s, namely, how to ensure atomic power is used to promote peace rather than threaten war. Fear surrounding these possibilities also spreads rumors of new weapons, such as "red mercury," which could make nuclear fusion weapons easier to build. Controversy surrounds the nature and very existence of red mercury, however (Edwards 1995).

Biological and chemical agents have also been used to kill and terrorize targeted populations. At least one British officer gave blankets used by smallpox patients to Native Americans during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), and reports exist of similar acts by land speculators and settlers. In 2001 an unidentified terrorist mailed letters laced with anthrax to U.S. senators and media icons. Five people died as a result. In the late 1980s Saddam Hussein used a combination of chemical agents including sarin, mustard gas, and possibly VX to kill as many as 5,000 and wound another 65,000 Kurds in northern Iraq.

In addition to both simple and more complex weapons, terrorists have adapted other technologies to serve as weapons. The most dramatic example is the use of commercial airplanes and skyscrapers by terrorists on September 11, 2001. It could also be argued, however, that terrorists even use television as a psychological weapon by creating images that induce fear.

Perhaps the most frightening reality raised by contemporary terrorist acts is the inherent vulnerability of complex sociotechnical systems. As Langdon Winner (2004) argues, life in modern civilization increasingly depends on large-scale, complex, geographically extended, and often centralized technological systems. The Y2K scare vividly raised the specter of vulnerability, as citizens, governments, and businesses alike realized how fragile such highly integrated and tightly coupled systems are. Examples include information and computer networks, dams and water purification systems, nuclear power plants, the energy transmission and distribution infrastructure, the communications infrastructure, chemical plants, gas pipelines, railroads, the mail system, food supply chains, huge fields of monoculture crops, and the containerized cargo system.

The human demands and material costs of policing these systems are, in the long term, unsustainable. Totalitarian societies have "hardened" their technologies to provide the necessary surveillance and protection, but this destroys civil freedom. Reliable engineering can solve only some of the problems. The only alternative left for free, democratic societies, Winner argues, is to embrace an attitude of trust. Citizens expect that key technologies will always work reliably. The relationship is reciprocal as it informs the structure and operation of technological systems themselves. The upshot is that "Many key components are built in ways that leave them open to the possibility of inadvertent or deliberate interference" (p. 156).

When this attitude of openness and trust is undermined by a sense of vulnerability and dread, rights and democratic institutions are threatened. Fears of cyber-, bio-, eco-, and other terrorist plots lead to a society that begins to treat all citizens as suspects, because anyone could potentially cause massive damage given the vulnerability of high-density populations dependent upon tightly integrated systems of all sorts.

Winner speculates that "Although seldom mentioned in the mass media, the ultimate fear driving public and private policies in the post 9/11 [era] is an awareness that seemingly secure, reliable structures of contemporary civilization are, taken together, an elaborate house of cards" (p. 167). This taps into our deepest fears about technology: that the powers we seek to control will come back to destroy us. Winner presents a suite of options based on the premise of designing technical systems that are more loosely coupled and "forgiving." Environmental design and bioregionalism provide models for shifting to locally available resources and decentralized systems.

The vulnerability of sociotechnical systems presents a curious reversal of the technological and power asymmetries in the relationship between terrorists and the groups they attack. The latter are generally regarded as privileged in terms of technology and power, whereas the former must take recourse to terrorist tactics precisely because of their position of weakness. Certainly, many of these groups are oppressed. But power in this dynamic is revealed as a two-way, nonhierarchical affair. The massive vulnerability of technological systems (and the fact that many technologies are becoming easier to manufacture on small scales partially because of the wide dissemination of knowledge) gives to individuals and small groups an inordinate amount of power to inflict damage and spread terror.

ADAM BRIGGLE CARL MITCHAM

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