TERRORISM

Violence directed primarily and randomly against civilians with the aim of intimidating them, achieving political goals, or exacting revenge for perceived grievances.

Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the twin World Trade Center skyscrapers in New York City and killed nearly 2,800 persons, terrorism arising out of conflicts in the Middle East has been a focus of international media attention. Concern about violence undertaken by groups and states it considered to be terrorists prompted the United States to declare a war on terrorism, two manifestations of which have been the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite this close association of terrorism with the Middle East, with the notable exception of the year 2001, the majority of terrorist incidents committed worldwide and the majority of victims of terrorism have been outside of or unrelated to political conflicts in the Middle East. Nevertheless, it is true that civilians somewhere in the Middle East have been victims of politically motivated violence every year since at least 1992.

Defining Terrorism

In trying to assess the significance of terrorism, the most difficult problem is the lack of an agreed-upon understanding of what the word terrorism means. Political scientists tend to restrict terrorism to acts of violence carried out by nonstate actors against civilians. Historians, sociologists, and experts in international humanitarian law, however, tend to use a broader definition that includes all premeditated acts of violence against civilians, whether carried out by nonstate political groups or by states. Governments—especially those confronting armed opposition groups—and the media generally use the political-science definition of terrorism, often expanding it to include violent acts against military as well as civilian victims. In contrast, the nonstate perpetrators of violence consider their actions to be legitimate forms of resistance to state terrorism aimed at suppressing self-determination, even though they may be directed against civilians (Kimmerling, p. 23). The notion of a legitimate right to resist state oppression is controversial, and no international legal convention addresses this matter. Nonstate groups generally cite the 1960 United Nations General Assembly Resolution on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples as recognizing their right of resistance. Indeed, that resolution declares, "forcible resistance to forcible denial of self-determination . . . is legitimate," and it says that nonstate groups may receive external support from other governments.

Giving a measure of international legitimacy to resistance struggles has complicated the problem of defining terrorism because it essentially has become a political decision whether a nonstate actor is deemed a terrorist or a genuine national liberation movement fighting for independence from foreign control or occupation. During the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States (1947–1991), such decisions tended to be based more on ideological factors than on objective assessments of the goals and motives of particular nonstate groups. For example, the Soviet Union provided clandestine support for the South Yemen independence movement (1963–1967) and for the Dhufar liberation movement in Oman (1965–1971) primarily because both areas at the time were under the control of Britain, a major U.S. ally. Similarly, the United States provided covert assistance to the Kurds in Iraq (1970–1975) and the Mojahedin in Afghanistan (1979–1989) primarily because in both cases the nonstate groups were fighting for independence from Soviet client regimes. The Soviet Union and the United States condemned as
terrorists those nonstate groups that were fighting against regimes the other country favored, and they praised as national resistance heroes those groups fighting against governments they opposed.

Over time, a special vocabulary of terrorism emerged. For instance, the term state terrorism came to be used for violent acts used by disfavored states to suppress resistance movements. The Soviet Union used this term to describe the policies of two U.S. allies: Israel, for the repression of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip after 1967; and Turkey, for the repression of its Kurdish minority after 1984. The United States, in turn, used state terrorism as early as the mid-1970s to describe the repressive domestic policies of states it considered to be Soviet allies, such as Iraq, Syria, and South Yemen. During the 1980s another term, state sponsor of terrorism, emerged to describe the support for nonstate groups provided by countries that clearly were not allied to either the Soviet Union or the United States. Iran and Libya were identified as the main state sponsors of terrorism, the former because of its assistance after 1982 to Hizbullah in Lebanon. In the case of Libya, the United States accused that country of supporting Palestinian groups that targeted U.S. and Israeli interests in Europe and of assisting several terrorist groups operating in north and central Africa.

Origins of Terrorism in the Arab–Israel Conflict

The superpower rivalry in and rhetoric about the Middle East tended both to obscure the local origins of terrorism and to frustrate efforts to address the multifaceted consequences of violence. This problem is best revealed in the Arab–Israel conflict, which began in 1948 separately from but in tandem with the Cold War and still continues unresolved even though the superpower conflict has ended. One significant legacy of the Cold War relationship to the Arab–Israel conflict has been a great volume of partisan literature, especially in the years after the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. The Israeli–Palestinian struggle over pre-1948 Palestine (which became Israel plus the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1948) is the core of the Arab–Israel conflict. The literature on this aspect of the conflict illustrates the controversies in trying to achieve any relatively objective consensus on what groups merit designation as terrorists and what kinds of violent acts constitute terrorism. For this reason, it is a useful case to study.

For nearly thirty years prior to the signing of the Oslo Accord in September 1993, the State of Israel proclaimed the PLO and the various Palestinian resistance groups that comprised its membership to be terrorist organizations. Inevitably, there emerged a body of writings that supported the Israeli position, not just in Israel but also in Europe and North America. Although some of these studies were sophisticated and scholarly analyses of the PLO's goals and methods, other accounts were merely polemical denunciations of PLO tactics. Beginning in 1968 and continuing for more than a decade, armed Palestinian groups known as fidaʾiyyun (guerrillas) carried out numerous, violent operations that resulted in the deaths of civilians. Many of their actions were sensational incidents that attracted considerable media attention—a PLO objective, as the guerrillas hoped publicity would further their cause. The several international airplane hijackings, for example, culminated in September 1970 (known as Black September) with the hijacking of four planes in as many days, precipitating a civil war between the PLO and the army of Jordan. Attacks on Israeli interests abroad culminated in the seizing of Israeli athletes as hostages at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, an incident that left eleven athletes dead. Sporadic cross-border raids into Israel (from Jordan and Lebanon) culminated in the temporary seizure of buildings in the northern Israeli towns of Kiryat Shmona and Maʿalot (April and May 1974) and the deaths of thirty-eight civilians, including many children. Rather than winning sympathy for the Palestinians as the perpetrators expected, such incidents created and reinforced a public image of the PLO as a terrorist organization.

In contrast to the official Israeli and U.S. views, the PLO saw itself as a national liberation movement dedicated to achieving Palestinian rights and resisting what it termed Israeli state terrorism. Its fighters were lauded as heroes and martyrs, and its operations against Israeli civilians were justified as defense of, or reprisals for, Israeli attacks on Palestinian refugee camps and assassinations of PLO leaders. The Soviet Union, the primary international backer of the PLO after 1968, tended to remain silent about many of the more sensational acts of violence by Palestinian guerrillas, but it continued to promote the PLO as a national liberation movement. Soviet support was especially significant after 1974 when Moscow encouraged diplomatic recognition of the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Quite separate from the Soviet backing for the PLO, a few academic studies and advocacy articles appeared that were sympathetic to Palestinian claims and rights. Although these writings were scarcer than the volumes of pro-Israeli literature and never achieved a similar impact on the mainstream U.S. media, they did have some influence on intellectuals in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

The Israeli–PLO conflict affected both regional and international politics by the late 1970s. This is because the PLO used Lebanon, where a large number of Palestinian refugees had lived since 1948, as a base for operations against Israel throughout the 1970s, and Israel responded with retaliatory raids against what it termed "terrorist nests"—suspected PLO facilities in refugee camps. Many Lebanese and Palestinian civilians died in these raids, and their deaths were described officially as "collateral damage" in a larger operation against "terrorist infrastructure." The PLO condemned Israeli air strikes as further evidence of state terror and also cited them as justification for its own continuing attacks across the Lebanon-Israel border. The escalating cycle of attacks and reprisals contributed to the civil war in Lebanon (1975–1989) and also led to an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978. Israeli forces occupied a 6-mile-wide security strip, ostensibly to prevent attacks into Israel; this occupation lasted until 2000. A second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 resulted in a war with the PLO, its forced withdrawal from Lebanon under international protection, and the Israeli occupation of Beirut and all of southern Lebanon. However, almost as soon as the threat from the PLO seemed to be contained, Israel faced a new source of terrorism that stemmed directly from its occupation of Lebanon (which lasted until 1985).

A Lebanese group, Hizbullah, was formed in late 1982 with the initial aim of expelling Israeli forces from Lebanon. Hizbullah's tactics, which included suicide bombings against French and U.S. military forces in 1983 and, beginning in 1984, the kidnapping of European civilians to use as hostages for the release of its members held in Israeli jails, earned it an international reputation as a terrorist organization. Hizbullah, however, neither sought nor received any support from the Soviet Union. Like the revolutionary government that assumed power in Iran in 1979, Hizbullah was equally hostile to Soviet and U.S. policies in the Middle East. Although its objectives were first and foremost political, Hizbullah also was inspired by its own interpretation of Shiʿite Islam. Its frequent use of religious rhetoric to explain or to justify its actions tended to alienate the Soviet Union even more than its direct criticisms did. Thus, Hizbullah became one of the first major nonstate groups in the Middle East to lack a superpower patron. Despite or perhaps because of this status, Hizbullah succeeded in establishing a permanent presence in Lebanon's politics and in becoming a nonstate group whose actions Israel neither could control nor ignore.

Meanwhile, the removal of the PLO to Tunisia did not end its political influence among Palestinians, and when an intifada (uprising) erupted in December 1987 among Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the PLO gradually emerged as a main coordinating force for the resistance. New groups unaffiliated with the PLO also emerged during the intifada, principally HAMAS and Islamic Jihad. Unlike the PLO, which claimed to be inspired by secular ideas, HAMAS and Islamic Jihad cited religious ideals and percepts as at least partial justification for their resistance against Israeli rule. Concern about the increasing influence of groups such as HAMAS and Islamic Jihad may have prompted the leaders of Israel's Labor Party to begin negotiations with the PLO to end the long conflict. The political rapprochement between Israel and the PLO in 1993 not only was unexpected, but it also necessitated a re-evaluation of the negative ways each side had depicted the other. However, the years of intellectual and emotional investment in the terrorism paradigm made it difficult for some people on both sides to view formerly hated terrorists as legitimate partners in peace negotiations.
Thus, from the outset of the Oslo peace process, some Israelis and Palestinians were skeptical of the agreement and even were determined to overturn it. The assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 (by an Israeli opposed to the Oslo Accord) and the first suicide bombings undertaken in 1996 by HAMAS were significant terrorist incidents that led to multiple actions and reprisals that cumulatively undermined popular support for the peace process among both Israelis and Palestinians.

It was in this increasingly tense atmosphere that Israeli politician Ariel Sharon intervened in a manner that would have the effect (albeit at the time, unforeseen) of overturning the peace process. Sharon was one of those Israelis who distrusted and even opposed the Oslo Accord, and it is plausible that he never had changed his conviction that the PLO was a terrorist organization. When in September 2000 he led a group of Knesset members, under armed escort, into the Muslim religious complex in Jerusalem known as al-Haram al-Sharif, his intention was to assert Israeli sovereignty over a site that Jews claim is the Temple Mount—the location of their ancient temple destroyed by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago—and thus to prevent its possible return to Palestinian sovereignty, which had been proposed by some members of the Labor Party. The incident provoked clashes with Palestinian worshipers, and the next day Israeli police killed four protesting Palestinians as they emerged from Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in al-Haram al-Sharif complex. The situation escalated rapidly as Palestinian policemen, in an effort to protect civilians, clashed with Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in the West Bank. The al-Aqsa intifada thus began, and subsequently its characteristic features included targeted assassinations of suspected Palestinian resistance leaders by Israel and retaliatory Palestinian suicide bombings at crowded civilian sites inside Israeli cities. By early 2001, Israel and its supporters were labeling all acts of violence from the Palestinian side as terrorism.

The U.S. "War on Terrorism"

Middle East terrorism, except for incidents such as the attack at the Munich Olympic games in 1972, generally has stayed within the region. However, Middle East–related terrorism acquired a global dimension with the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States by nineteen members of the al-Qaʿida network. Al-Qaʿida is a political organization founded by Saudi Arabian national Osama bin Ladin, and its objectives after 1991 were to attack the United States and its interests because it viewed the U.S. government as the main sponsor of regimes that it defined as "unjust," oppressive, and illegitimate. Ironically, bin Ladin collaborated with U.S. officials during the 1980s when he and the United States shared the same goal of forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. But when the United States dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia in 1990, bin Ladin viewed this development as being no different from the situation of Soviet troops in Afghanistan—in both cases the army of an "imperialist" superpower occupying a weaker and Muslim country. Furthermore, the presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia meant that a non-Muslim army for the first time in more than 1,400 years was occupying the religiously sacred land in which were located Islam's two holiest sites, the cities of Mecca and Medina. Even though bin Ladin believed and practiced a very conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam, his primary objectives vis-à-vis the United States are political, not religious. Beginning with the bombing in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, persons close to his al-Qaʿida organization were implicated in several terrorist attacks. The most sensational incidents included suicide bombings outside the barracks housing U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and outside two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. The 2001 attacks prompted the United States to declare a "war on terrorism," and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan became the first target because it provided sanctuary to al-Qaʿida and rejected requests for the extradition of bin Ladin and other leaders.

Its war on terrorism policy led the United States to focus on groups it designated as terrorist to an unprecedented extent. One consequence of this new preoccupation was that after 2001 Washington accepted the argument of Israeli prime minister Sharon that PLO chairman and Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat was condoning terrorist actions by groups such as HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, and his own Al-Fatah movement. When in spring 2002 the Israeli army reoccupied West Bank towns and villages that were supposed to be under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the United States effectively did not protest. Thus, the peace process between Israel and the PLO, seriously ailing since fall 2000, became an indirect but fatal casualty of the war on terrorism.

The war on terrorism is cause for concern among legal experts in the field of international humanitarian law, especially because states identified as sponsors of terrorism, such as Iraq, become legitimate targets for attack because they are thought to possess weapons of mass destruction that they might provide to terrorist groups. The experts believe that civilians, who have been the primary victims of violent conflicts since the early 1990s, will be the main victims again, and they cite statistics that demonstrate that this has been the case in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The phenomenon of terrorism has prompted the drafting of several conventions, most notably the Rome Statute, that would make the intentional killing of civilians a war crime, no matter who is responsible (i.e., a government or a nonstate group). The intent is to criminalize violence against civilians so that individuals can be prosecuted. The European Union generally, and its member states such as Belgium specifically, have made the most progress in terms of accepting the idea that violence against civilians, whether undertaken by a state or nonstate organization, is terrorism and needs to be punished. Other states, including major countries such as China, Israel, Russia, and the United States, reject categorically the notion of state terrorism and insist that international laws pertaining to terrorism must limit definitions to nonstate groups that target civilians. Ultimately, one of the most effective ways of reducing terrorism is for states to identify and remove the causes that motivates terrorists, such as the denial of freedom and political participation, repressive political occupation, and poverty and despair.

see also aqsa intifada, al-; arafat, yasir; bin ladin, osama; black september; fidaʾiyyun; hamas; hizbullah; hostage crises; islamic jihad; palestine liberation organization (plo); popular front for the liberation of palestine; qaʿida, al-.

Bibliography

Davis, Joyce M. Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Falk, Richard. "Azmi Bishara, the Right of Resistance, and the Palestinian Ordeal." Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 19–33.

Hirst, David. The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 3d edition. New York: Thunder Mouth's Press/Nation Books, 2004.

Picco, Giandomenico. Man without a Gun: One Diplomat's Secret Struggle to Free the Hostages, Fight Terrorism, and End a War. New York: Times Books/Random House, 1999.

Ron, James. Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: Norton, 2000.

Stern, Jessica. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Victor, Barbara. Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2003.

eric hooglund

TERRORISM

The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property in order to coerce or intimate a government or the civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives.

American Citizen Charged in al-Qaeda Plot to Kill President

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, age 23, was charged in late February 2005 in a Virginia federal court for his alleged plot to assassinate President George W. Bush. He was also charged with providing support to al-Qaeda. Abu Ali, an American citizen, allegedly joined al-Qaeda while in Saudi Arabia. He was arrested in Saudi Arabia in June 2003 and was in custody there for more than one and a half years before charges were brought against him.

The United States government has designated al-Qaeda as a foreign terrorist organization. It is illegal to knowingly provide material services or support for the organization, or to attempt or conspire to do so.

Abu Ali's parents moved to the U.S. from Jordan in the 1970s. Ali was born in Houston but was raised in Virginia. His father has worked for many years at the Saudi Embassy. Abu Ali graduated from a private Muslim school in Virginia in 1999, where he was the valedictorian of his class. The school, the Islamic Saudi Academy, is subsidized by the Saudi Arabian government.

Abu Ali traveled to Saudi Arabia to study in 2000. He returned to the U.S. that same year and then visited Saudi Arabia again in the fall of 2002. He was arrested in June 2003 while taking final exams at the Islamic University of Medina.

Authorities searched Abu Ali's Virginia home after his arrest. They seized Arabic tapes promoting jihad and the killing of Jews, an undated document praising the September 11 attacks, a subscription to a handgun magazine, and other items.

The six-count indictment alleges that Abu Ali wanted to "become a planner of terrorist operations like Mohamed Atta and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, well-known al-Qaeda terrorists associated with the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001." It charges that Abu Ali provided material support for terrorism and that he trained overseas with al-Qaeda. Eleven unnamed coconspirators are used to support the indictment. The indictment also alleges that Abu Ali discussed shooting President Bush or detonating a car bomb to kill the president, and that one of the co-conspirators gave him a religious blessing for his plans.

Authorities contend that the plot to assassinate the president did not move beyond the discussion stage. They do believe, however, that the threat was serious.

According to FBI agent Barry Cole, Abu Ali told him about various plots during a four-day interrogation in September 2003 in Saudi Arabia. In addition to the assassination plot, Cole testified that Abu Ali told him about other possible plots, including plans to hijack planes and to use them on U.S. targets, a plan to free Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and to destroy U.S. naval ships in port in the United States. Cole said a captured al-Qaeda leader has confirmed the charges against Abu Ali and that the cell leader gave Abu Ali money to purchase books, a cell phone, and a laptop computer. Abu Ali allegedly made those purchases.

The U.S. government charges that Abu Ali also received forgery instruction and weapons training, including instruction in the use of hand grenades and other explosives. According to the indictment, he allegedly wanted to travel to Afghanistan to participate in violence against American military personnel but was unable to obtain a visa to do so.

Cole testified at the detention hearing that Abu Ali had initially asked to have a lawyer present during his interrogation. Ali allegedly backed down from that request when told that he could face Saudi charges or be held as an enemy combatant. Abu Ali's family claims that this was coercion to force him to talk.

After hearing Cole's testimony, U.S. Magistrate Liam O'Grady ordered Abu Ali to be held without bail pending trial. O'Grady called Abu Ali "a grave, grave danger to this community and this nation."

The magistrate indicated that he would reconsider the bail issue if the defense could provide further evidence about certain statements made by FBI Assistant Director Michael Mason. Mason told a Virginia audience in 2004 that he thought that Abu Ali might soon be released—that the government had no interest in prosecuting him.

Defense attorney John Zwerling argued that Abu Ali's confession had been obtained via torture and that Abu Ali had scars on his back from the mistreatment. In a December 2004 ruling, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates indicated that "at least some circumstantial evidence exists" that Abu Ali had been tortured and that U.S. officials had knowledge of this. Saudi and American authorities denied at the February hearing that Abu Ali had been tortured.

Zwerling further contended that Abu Ali had only been charged after Abu Ali's parents had brought a civil suit to seek further information about his detention in Saudi Arabia. Abu Ali's family claimed that the United States was behind his arrest and detention by Saudi officials. The family tried unsuccessfully to have Abu Ali returned to the United States. Eventually, in an unannounced move, the U.S. government secretly brought him back and indicted him. Judge Bates ordered the government to explain the role that the United States played in his detention.

At his arraignment in mid March, Abu Ali pleaded not guilty and sought "immediate access to medical, psychological and forensic experts to examine and evaluate" his claims that his confession had been obtained through torture. He claimed that Saudi authorities had whipped him across his back, and he offered affidavits from people who claimed to have seen the scars. The court ordered that Abu Ali be given an independent medical exam to corroborate or refute his claims of torture.

The charges could result in Abu Ali's imprisonment up to 80 years. An August 2005 trial date was set.

Congress Approves Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act

On December 17, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, Pub. L. No. 108-458, 118 Stat. 3638, into law. The new statute created a director to oversee U.S. intelligence gathering and to make other changes that were recommended by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. While some lawmakers said that the legislation was necessary, other members of Congress said that the statute did not go far enough to achieve effective reform.

The September 11th attacks on the United States left many people concerned about the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence operations. Intelligence duties often fell under several different agencies within the U.S. government, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 2002, Congress approved the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003, Pub. L. No. 107-306, 116 Stat. 2383, which included a number of provisions related to the funding of U.S. intelligence efforts. Title VI of the statute established the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission.

Congress charged the commission with examining and reporting on the facts related to the September 11th attacks. The commission was required to gather, evaluate, and report on information related to the attack that had been collected by existing government agencies. The commission was then required to "make a full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, and the extent of the United States' preparedness for, and immediate response to, the attacks…." The commission was required to submit its findings, conclusions, and recommendations in a report to Congress and the President.

The commission consisted of ten members, including five Democrats and five Republicans. The commission thoroughly investigated the events leading up to the attacks released its final report 21 months later, and made a number of discoveries about the causes of the attacks. According to the commission's executive summary of its final report, "The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat. The terrorist danger from [Osama] Bin Laden and al-Qaeda was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress. Indeed, it barely came up during the 2000 presidential campaign."

Additionally, the commission determined that a series of failures had led to the success of the attacks. These failures involved diplomacy, the intelligence community, the FBI, immigration control, aviation security, homeland defense, emergency response, and Congress. The report indicated that the U.S. is safer now than it was prior to 9/11, but it noted, "[W]e are not safe."

The commission made a series of recommendations designed to provide greater protection against future terrorist attacks. Some recommendations included attacking terrorists and their organizations, preventing the continued growth of Islamic terrorism, and protecting the U.S. against terrorist attacks. As to the specific means by which the U.S. could protect itself, the commission recommended a reorganization of agencies responsible for combating terrorism and collecting intelligence.

More specifically, the commission recommended the establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center and a new cabinet official with the title of National Intelligence Director. The new cabinet member would oversee the National Counterterrorism Center and would have three deputies. One deputy would be the head of the CIA and would oversee foreign intelligence efforts. Two other deputies would administer defense and homeland intelligence efforts. The commission's goal in recommending these changes was to unify the efforts of the federal government in protecting against future attacks.

In response to the commission's report, both the Senate and House of Representative considered bills that would implement the commission's proposals. Senator Susan M. Collins (R-Maine) introduced S. 2845, which passed by a vote of 96-2 on October 6, 2004. During the same period of time, the House considered H.R. 10, which was introduced by J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). The House approved this bill by a vote of 282-134 on October 8, 2004.

The House and Senate disagreed as to the level of authority to give to the new director of national intelligence. On October 16, the chambers appointed a conference committee to resolve the differences. In December 2004, the House and Senate received the conference committee report. Despite misgivings by some members of both chambers, the bill passed the House and Senate on December 7 and December 8, 2004, respectively.

The new legislation followed most of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The statute established the position of Director of National Intelligence and established a National Counterterrorism Center. The act further doubled the number of border patrol agents over a five-year period, allowed officials to wiretap certain terror suspects, and imposed new standards related to information that must be contained in driver's licenses.

Much of the criticism of the new statute was directed at the position of intelligence director. During negotiations between the House and Senate, the chambers agreed that the new official would not be a member of the president's cabinet. Bush's statements when he signed the legislation indicated that the basic structure of the current intelligence agencies would remain intact. "The new law will preserve the existing chain of command and leave all our intelligence agencies, organizations, and offices in their current departments," Bush said. "Our military commanders will continue to have quick access to the intelligence they need to achieve victory on the battlefield, and the law supports our efforts to ensure greater information sharing among federal departments and agencies, and also with appropriate state and local authorities."

One significant difference between the commission's recommendations and the final legislation was that the intelligence director does not oversee the National Counterterrorism Center. Instead, this center has own director who reports directly to the president. Several commentators noted that the new intelligence director's effectiveness will depend upon the power given to him or her by the president. According to retired Navy Admiral Stansfield Turner, who served director of the CIA under President Jimmy Carter, "Unless the president really gets behind the new director and, in effect, tells the [agency heads] they've got to cede authority" to the new director, then the intelligence director will likely have problems.

In February 2005, Bush nominated John D. Negroponte to serve as the new intelligence director. Negroponte had previously served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. The Senate confirmed Negroponte in April 2005, and he took office later that month. By the first week of May, he had hired several deputies and dozens of staff members. One of Negroponte's more significant tasks has been to brief the president on intelligence efforts, a task formerly handled by the director of the CIA.

Saudi Arabian Computer Scientist Acquitted of Patriot Act Violations

In June 2004, a Saudi Arabian computer science expert was acquitted of charges that he had used the Internet to help terrorists raise money and to recruit followers. Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a 34-year-old Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Idaho, was charged under the Patriot Act, which makes it illegal to provide expert advice or assistance to terrorists. Following a seven-week trial, a federal jury in Idaho acquitted Al-Hussayen on three terrorism charges, one count of making a false statement, and two counts of visa fraud . The terrorism charges carried a potential imprisonment of 15 years for each count.

Congress passed the Patriot Act in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. In addition to making it a crime to help terrorists, the act broadens the government's powers of surveillance and detention. Critics have charged that the Patriot Act infringes upon First Amendment rights and that in this case Al-Hussayen was targeted not for his own speech but for passing along the speech of others.

Authorities arrested Al-Hussayen in February 2003. He remained in jail until his trial, where he worked on his doctorate in his cell. Prosecutors charged that he had used his computer expertise to set up and run web sites that contained religious edicts that justified suicide bombings. The web sites also sought financial assistance for the militant Palestinian organization Hamas, and attempted to recruit new Muslim terrorists, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors linked Al-Hussayen to more than a dozen web sites that praised suicide attacks in Chechnya, Israel, and other places. Al-Hussayen contended that the web sites also contained postings that decried the violence. He also said that he was personally opposed to violence and that he condemned the attacks of September 11.

In his defense, Al-Hussayen said that his involvement with the creation of the material posted had been minimal; he had only been a volunteer who had maintained the web sites, but had had little, if anything, to do with the content posted on them. Moreover, his attorneys argued that freedom of expression, under the First Amendment, protected the material and that the information was not intended to raise money or to recruit extremists.

Al-Hussayen's attorneys called just one witness, Frank Anderson, a former CIA agent who had worked in covert operations in the Middle East for many years. Anderson testified that the web sites had little to do with the recruitment of terrorists. He said that recruitment relied upon a charismatic type who could build a personal relationship with a potential terrorist. He said that relationship was crucial in order to convince people to go against their normal inclinations and to be convinced to kill women and children. In response, prosecutors maintained that Anderson's experience with terrorists had ended when he left the CIA in 1995—just as the Internet was poised to take on a much larger role in disseminating information throughout the world.

Anderson testified that much of the material, including the religious edicts, could be found in many places on the Internet and elsewhere. He told jurors that some it was available through the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, operated by the U.S. government. He said that one of the web sites categorically condemned the use of terror.

The prosecution introduced hundreds of documents that showed the provocative nature of the material posted on the web sites. Defense attorneys argued the material failed to establish that Al-Hussayen actually supported terrorism.

Over objection by the defense, the trial judge granted jurors permission to view the web sites in question. In making his ruling, Judge Edward Lodge agreed that the material was prejudicial, but he said that it was up to the jury to weigh its evidentiary value. Prosecutors argued that Al-Hussayen knew that the information posted on the web sites encouraged people to become terrorists or to provide monetary support. Trial testimony established that the material had been posted to the Internet from Al-Hussayen's home computer, although others might have had access to the computer as well.

The jury deliberated nearly a week before reaching its decision. After the verdict was announced, one of the jurors commented on the government's lack of hard evidence to convince the jury that Al-Hussayen was a terrorist. The juror said that the prosecution's case was based on inference.

The jury was unable to reach a verdict on three other false-statement charges and five counts of visa fraud. The judge declared a mistrial on those charges. In lieu of a retrial, Al-Hussayen agreed to be deported to Saudi Arabia. His wife and children returned to Saudi Arabia earlier in 2004, instead of contesting deportation. Al-Hussayen reportedly is the son of Saudi Arabia's retired education minister and comes from a prominent Riyadh family.

After the trial, Al-Hussayen's attorneys claimed that the government's zeal in prosecuting him could have resulted in inspiring more enemies of the United States. The Idaho U.S. Attorney's Office responded that an acquittal did not mean that the charges should not have been brought at all.

Conviction of Attorney Lynn Stewart

Long known for representing unpopular defendants, attorney Lynn F. Stewart found herself on the wrong side of the bench when she became a federal felon in February 2005 and was automatically disbarred from practicing law. After a widely followed, seven-month trial, the public defender was convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan of providing material aid to Islamic terrorism, conspiracy, defrauding the government, and making false statements to the government (technically, two counts of conspiring to provide material aid to terrorists, and three counts of perjury and defrauding the government). She faced up to 30 years in prison for the five felony counts.

Having practiced law in New York for 30 years, the 65-year-old Stewart was a self-proclaimed "radical human rights lawyer" who publicly professed her belief in armed revolutionary struggle. She legally defended controversial clients such as the Black Panthers, various accused terrorists, drug dealers, and police killers. Her troubles began after her legal defense

of Sheik Abdel Rahman in a 1995 trial that resulted in his conviction. He is now serving a life sentence for inspiring a thwarted 1993 plot to bomb the United Nations building, the FBI building in Manhattan, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and other New York landmarks. He also promoted the assassination of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. Following his conviction and imprisonment, his followers issued a series of threats against the United States, demanding his release.

Stewart and two other defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohammed Yousry, were accused of scheming to obtain Rahman's release. Following his conviction, Rahman was placed in solitary confinement in a maximum-security facility in Colorado. Special prosecutorial administrative rules prohibited Rahman from communicating with anyone outside of prison except for his wife and his lawyers. As his attorney, Stewart signed several documents pledging to obey the federal rules that barred her client from communicating with his followers.

Instead, she was accused of trying to cover up secret conversations between Rahman and his followers and of smuggling messages to and from him during her visits with him. Secret government audio recordings and videotapes confirmed Stewart's role in the message-relaying. At one point, she took a message from Islamic Group members to Rahman, and later received a message from Rahman in response. She then called a media reporter and read him the statement, hoping to make a public announcement that the sheik did not support the cease-fire between the Egyptian government and the Islamic Group, a fundamentalist organization that carried out terrorist attacks on tourists and police officers.

Stewart did not deny her actions. There was little dispute over the facts, and Stewart readily acknowledged that she had violated government regulations. However, proving the commission of the acts was only half of the prosecution's case. The other half was proving that she had committed a crime.

According to defendant Stewart, her conduct represented nothing more than the zealous representation of her client. The difficult issue that the jury had to assess was the extent to which an attorney could aggressively represent a convicted terrorist client without crossing the line into criminal behavior.

In the case before U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl, jurors concentrated on evidence that went to the question of whether Stewart intended to help the sheik's terrorist disciples. They also focused on evidence showing that Stewart knowingly violated the prison rules aimed at preventing Rahman from communicating messages of violence to the outside world. (Stewart's co-defendant, Fattar, later issued a fatwa urging followers to kill Jews everywhere.) In addition to over 1,300 exhibits presented by prosecutors (mostly transcripts of the audio and video recordings), jurors were shown a videotape of Osama bin Laden vowing to "spill blood" unless Stewart's client, Rahman, was released from prison. While on the witness stand during the trial, Stewart sometimes appeared deaf to questions about the violent anti-American preachings of her client. Testifying on her own behalf, she told jurors that she was acting within a lawyer's "bubble" to defend her client as she saw best.

Because of the terror charges at trial, the chosen jury (consisting of eight women and four men) served anonymously and were identified by number only. After 12 days of deliberation, the jury concluded that by becoming the conduit for communications between Rahman and his terrorist Islamic guerrillas, Stewart had crossed the line. Stewart, on the other hand, later told students at NYU School of Law that "[t]he government moved the line." (She had been released on bail pending her sentencing hearing scheduled for September 2005.)

Stewart's conviction on five counts of aiding terrorism raised many questions among legal scholars and practitioners about the line between vigorous defense of a client and conspiring with terrorists. As Steven Lubet, director of Northwestern University's program on advocacy and professionalism, stated in an article for the Washington Post, "There is nothing about 'vigorous defense' that requires a lawyer to facilitate her client's political goals. This case has nothing to do with zealous defense." Said Peter Margulies, law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island who studies terrorism cases, "I think the evidence suggested that Lynn Stewart had crossed the line."

As for Stewart, she vowed to appeal her conviction. Tearful and pale at the rendering of the verdict, she became indignant and unrepenting shortly thereafter, offering no apologies and telling a group of reporters outside the courtroom that she would do it again. "I see myself as a symbol of what people rail against when they say that civil liberties are eroded," she told them.

TERRORISM

Terrorism, whether practiced by states, substate groups, or individuals, is found throughout human history. Most historical accounts, however, focus on what they take to be forms of terrorism that are practiced by substate groups and individuals.

During Biblical times, Jewish Sicarii, known for their use of a short sword (sica), struck down rich Jewish collaborators who were opposed to violent resistance against their Roman conquerors. Later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a group of Shiite Moslems, called the Assassins, opposed efforts to suppress their religious beliefs in Sunni-dominated Persia. Using daggers, the Assassins killed prefects, governors, and caliphs in front of many witnesses, thus ensuring their capture and execution because they believed that by their actions they would gain entry into paradise. Eventually, the group was suppressed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

In India, from the eleventh century on, a group called the Thugs was active until it was destroyed by the British in the nineteenth century. The Thugs ritually strangled their victims with a silk tie. They claimed allegiance to the goddess Kali, who it is said required them to kill in order to supply her with blood for nourishment.

Following the French Revolution, the Jacobins under Robespierre gave us the very term terror, unleashing a Reign of Terror between 1793 and 1794 upon all levels of French society. During this period, those executed included not only those accused of some offense or disloyalty, but sometimes their children, parents, or even grandparents as well.

Yet, it is not clear that all of these historical examples should be regarded, as they usually are, as acts of terrorism. Without a doubt, they are all cases in which terror (intense fear or fright or intimidation) is induced in large groups of people, but terrorism, as many have come to understand it, involves more than just this. First of all, many think that terrorism must have a political purpose—that it must aim to achieve some change in a government or governmental institution or policy. Now, this is true of most of the historical examples just cited, but it is not true of the Thugs of India whose goals were personal and religious rather than political. Second, many also think that terrorism must directly target innocents, a requirement that does not really hold of any of these historical examples except that of the Jacobins. The Sicarii targeted Jewish collaborators who in virtue of their collaboration were clearly not innocent. The Assassins attacked people in positions of political leadership who were responsible for the religious persecution against Shiite Moslems and so were not innocent. So the only really clear example we have here of terrorism is that of Robespierre's Reign of Terror, directed as it was at innocents as well as at those who were considered to be guilty of some offense. However, in the case of Robespierre's Reign of Terror, what we have is an example of state terrorism, not terrorism as practiced by substate groups or individuals.

Since 1983, the U.S. State Department has defined terrorism as follows: "Terrorism is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." In a U.S. State Department document in which this definition is endorsed, there is also a section that discusses state-sponsored terrorism (Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism 2001). It is clear, then, that the U.S. State Department does not hold that only subnational groups or individuals can commit terrorist acts; it further recognizes that states can commit terrorist acts as well. So let us offer the following definition of terrorism, which is essentially the same as the U.S. State Department's definition once it is allowed that states, too, can commit terrorist acts and once it is recognized that it is through attempting to elicit terror (that is, intense fear, fright, or intimidation) that terrorists try to achieve their goals. The definition is: "Terrorism is the use or threat of violence against innocent people to elicit terror in them, or in some other group of people, in order to further a political objective."

Using this definition, there is no problem seeing the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., particularly the attacks on the World Trade Center, as terrorist acts. Likewise, the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 as well as the suicide bombings directed at Israeli civilians are terrorist acts.

But what about the U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with respect to which the United States blocked a United Nation's (U.N.) inquiry and later compensated the owner but not the thousands of victims who were deprived of drugs? Or what about the United States' $4 billion-a-year support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands, which began in 1969 and which is illegal, that is, in violation of U.N. resolutions that specifically forbid "the acquisition of territory by force" and which has resulted in many thousands of deaths? Or to go back further: What about U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua, and of death squads in El Salvador during the Reagan years, and the use of terrorist counter-city threats of nuclear retaliation during the Cold War and the actual use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II resulting in over 100,000 deaths? Surely, all of these actions also seem to be either terrorist acts or support for terrorist acts according to our definition. How can we tell then, which, if any, of these terrorist acts or support for terrorist acts are morally justified?

Let us address this question from the perspective of the just war theory. In traditional just war theory, two requirements must be met in order to justify going to war. First, there must be a just cause. Second, just means must be used to fight the war. In order for there to be a just cause (1) There must be substantial aggression. (2) Nonbelligerent correctives must be either hopeless or too costly. (3) Belligerent correctives must be neither hopeless nor too costly.

Needless to say, the notion of substantial aggression is a bit fuzzy, but it is generally understood to be the type of aggression that violates people's most fundamental rights. To suggest some specific examples of what is and is not substantial aggression, usually the taking of hostages is regarded as substantial aggression while the nationalization of particular firms owned by foreigners is not so regarded. But even when substantial aggression occurs, frequently nonbelligerent correctives are neither hopeless nor too costly to pursue. And even when nonbelligerent correctives are either hopeless or too costly, in order for there to be a just cause, belligerent correctives must be neither hopeless nor too costly.

Traditional just war theory assumes, however, that there are just causes and goes on to specify just means as imposing two requirements: (1) Harm to innocents should not be directly intended as an end or a means. (2) The harm resulting from the belligerent means should not be disproportionate to the particular defensive objective to be attained. While the just means conditions apply to each defensive action, the just cause conditions must be met by the conflict as a whole.

Given the constraints imposed on just means, one might think that from the perspective of just war theory, acts of terrorism could never be morally justified. But this would require an absolute prohibition on intentionally harming innocents, and such a prohibition would not seem to be justified, even from the perspective of the just war theory. Specifically, it would seem that harm to innocents can be justified for the sake of achieving a greater good when the harm is: (1) trivial (e.g., as in the case of stepping on someone's foot to get out of a crowded subway), (2) easily reparable (e.g., as in the case of lying to a temporarily depressed friend to keep that person from committing suicide), or (3) nonreparable but greatly outweighed by the consequences of the action. Obviously, it is this third category of harm that is relevant to the possible justification of terrorism. But when is intentional harm to innocents nonreparable yet greatly outweighed by the consequences?

Consider the following example often discussed by moral philosophers: A large person who is leading a party of spelunkers gets stuck in the mouth of a cave in which flood waters are rising. The trapped party of spelunkers just happens to have a stick of dynamite with which they can blast the large person out of the mouth of the cave; either they use the dynamite or they all drown, the large person with them. Now, it is usually assumed in this case that it is morally permissible to dynamite the large person out of the mouth of the cave. After all, if that is not done, the whole party of spelunkers will die, the large person with them. So the sacrifice imposed on the large person in this case would not be that great.

But what if the large person's head is outside rather than inside the cave, as it must have been in the previous interpretation of the case. Under those circumstances, the large person would not die when the other spelunkers drowned. Presumably after slimming down a bit, the large person would eventually just squeeze out of the mouth of the cave. In this case, could the party of spelunkers trapped in the cave still legitimately use the stick of dynamite to save themselves rather than the large person?

Suppose there were ten, twenty, 100, or an even a larger number of spelunkers trapped in the cave. At some point, would not the number be sufficiently great that it would be morally acceptable for those in the cave to use the stick of dynamite to save themselves rather than the large person, even if this meant that the large person would be morally required to sacrifice his life? The answer has to be yes, even if you think it has to be a very unusual case when we can reasonably demand that people thus sacrifice their lives in this way.

Is it possible that some acts of terrorism are morally justified in this way? It is often argued that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so justified. President Truman, who ordered the bombing, justified it on the grounds that it was used to shorten the war. In 1945, the United States demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. The Japanese had by that time lost the war, but the leaders of their armed forces were by no means ready to accept unconditional surrender. While the Japanese leaders expected an invasion of their mainland islands, they believed that they could make that invasion so costly that the United States would accept a conditional surrender.

Truman's military advisers also believed the costs would be high. The capture of Okinawa had cost almost 80,000 American casualties while almost the entire Japanese garrison of 120,000 men died in battle. If the mainland islands were defended in a similar manner, hundreds of thousands of Japanese would surely have died. During that time, the bombing of Japan would continue, and perhaps intensify, resulting in casualty rates that were no different from those that were expected from the atomic attack. A massive incendiary raid on Tokyo early in March 1945 had set off a firestorm and killed an estimated 100,000 people. Accordingly, Truman's Secretary of State James Byrnes admitted that the two atomic bombs did cause "many casualties, but not nearly so many as there would have been had our air force continued to drop incendiary bombs on Japan's cities" (Byrnes 1947, p. 264). Similarly, Winston Churchill wrote in support of Truman's decision: "To avert a vast, indefinite butchery … at the cost of a few explosions seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance" (Churchill 1962, p. 634).

Yet the "vast, indefinite butchery" that the United States sought to avert by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one that the United States itself was threatening, and had already started to carry out, with its incendiary attack on Tokyo. And the United States itself could have arguably avoided this butchery by dropping its demand for unconditional Japanese surrender. Moreover, a demand of unconditional surrender can almost never be morally justified since defeated aggressors almost always have certain rights that they should never be required to surrender. Hence, the United States' terrorist acts of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot be justified on the grounds of shortening the war and avoiding a vast, indefinite butchery if the United States could have secured those results simply by giving up its unreasonable demand for unconditional surrender. So, it is difficult to see how the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be justified acts of terrorism.

A more promising case for justified terrorism is the counter-city bombing of the British during the early stages of World War II. Early in the war, it became clear that British bombers could fly effectively only at night because too many of them were being shot down during day raids by German antiaircraft fire. In addition, a study done in 1941 showed that of those planes flying at night that were recorded as having actually succeeded in attacking their targets, only one-third managed to drop their bombs within five miles of what they were aiming at. This meant that British bombers flying at night could reasonably aim at no target smaller than a fairly large city. Michael Walzer (1992) argues that under these conditions, the British terror bombing was morally justified because at this early stage of the war, it was the only way the British had left to them to try to avert a Nazi victory. Walzer further argues that the time period when such terror bombing was justified was relatively brief. Once the Russians began to inflict enormous casualties on the German army and the United States made available its manpower and resources, other alternatives opened up. The British, however, continued to rely heavily on terror bombing right up until the end of the war, culminating in the fire-bombing of Dresden in which something like 100,000 people were killed. Nevertheless, for that relatively brief period when Britain had no other way to avert a Nazi victory, Walzer argues, its reliance on terror bombing was morally justified.

Suppose we agree with Walzer that British terror-bombing during the earlier stages of World War II was morally justified. Could there be a comparable moral justification for Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians? Israel has been illegally occupying Palestinian land since 1969 in violation of U.N. resolutions following the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Even a return to those 1967 borders, which the U.N. resolutions require, still permits a considerable expansion of Israel's original borders as specified in the mandate of 1947. Moreover, since the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 until 2001, Israeli settlements doubled in the occupied territories. Under Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon, some thirty-five new settlements have been established in the occupied territories. In Gaza in 2001, there were 1.2 million Palestinians and 4,000 Israelis, but the Israelis control 40% of the land and 70% of the water. In the West Bank, there were 1.9 million Palestinians and 280,000 Israelis, but the Israelis controlled 37% of the water.

In addition, Israel failed to abide by its commitments under the Oslo Peace Accords to release prisoners, to complete a third redeployment of its military forces, and to transfer three Jerusalem villages to Palestinian control. Moreover, at the Camp David Meeting in 2000, Israel's proposals did not provide for Palestinian control over East Jerusalem upon which 40% of the Palestinian economy depends. Nor did Israel's proposals provide for a right of return or compensation for the half of the Palestinian population that lives in exile, most of them having been driven off their land by Israeli expansion. So the Palestinian cause is arguably a just one, and clearly the Palestinians lack the military resources to effectively resist Israeli occupation and aggression by simply directly attacking Israeli military forces. The Israelis have access to the most advanced U.S. weapons and $4 billion-a-year from the United States to buy whatever weapons they want. The Palestinians have no comparable external support. Under these conditions, is there a moral justification for Palestinian suicide bombers against Israeli civilians? Assuming that the Palestinians lack any effective means to try to end the Israeli occupation or to stop Israel's further expansion into Palestinian territories other than by using suicide bombers against Israeli civilians, why would this use of suicide bombers not be justified in much the same way that Walzer justifies the British terror bombing in the early stages of World War II?

Much depends on what Israel's intentions are. If the Israelis have the ultimate goal of confining most Palestinians to a number of economically nonviable and disconnected reservations, similar to those on which the United States confines American Indian nations, would not the Palestinians have a right to resist that conquest as best they can, even if this involves the use of suicide bombers? Of course, everything here turns on a correct assessment of Israeli intentions and on whether Palestinians (and Israelis) have sufficiently exhausted the use of nonbelligerent correctives. The 2005 political overtures from Sharon might also indicate a new beginning. Only time will tell.

Starting with the just war theory, we have seen that there are morally defensible exceptions to the just means prohibition against directly killing innocents. The cave analogy argument aims to establish that conclusion. British terror bombing at the beginning of World War II, but not the American dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of that war, seems to provide a real life instantiation of that argument. The Palestinian use of suicide bombers against Israeli civilians may or may not be a contemporary instantiation of that very same argument.

Yet, even if some acts of terrorism can be justified in this manner, clearly, most acts of terrorism cannot be so justified, and clearly, there was no moral justification for the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., particularly the attacks in the World Trade Center. For Americans, no act of terrorism compares with the September 11, 2001 (9/11), morning attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Initial estimates put the number of dead from this terrorist attack at more than 5,000, but later the death toll was reduced to around 3,000. Comparisons were made to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 where 2,403 sailors, soldiers, and civilians died. But the attack on a military outpost far removed from the American heartland is hardly comparable to an attack against targets in its largest city and in its capital. Nor was 9/11 carried out with the weapons of previous adversaries but by commandeering commercial aircraft with knives and box cutters and using them in murderous suicidal missions. So, this terrorism now faced is something new, something different, and, as a consequence, many people around the world feel vulnerable in a way they would have never thought possible before.

Even so, the question remains as to what is the appropriate response to unjustified terrorist acts. According to the just war theory, before using belligerent correctives, one must be sure that nonbelligerent correctives are neither hopeless nor too costly. The three weeks of diplomatic activity that the United States engaged in with the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not appear to have been sufficient to determine whether it was hopeless or too costly to continue to attempt to bring Osama bin Laden before a U.S court, or better, before an international court of law, prior to going to war against Afghanistan. The United States demanded that the Taliban government immediately hand over bin Laden and "all the leaders of Al Qaida who hide in your land" (Bush 2001). But was it reasonable to expect compliance from the Taliban, given that even after the overthrow of the Taliban government and the installation of a more friendly regime, the United States and its allies were still unable several years later to apprehend bin Laden and reduce the frequency of terrorist attacks sponsored by Al Qaida around the world? Was it reasonable for the United States to have expected the Taliban government, with its limited resources and loose control over the country, to have done in three weeks what it was not able to accomplish after several years? Similar and even more telling questions can be raised about the decision to go to war against Iraq as a response to the threat of terrorism.

Terrorism, whether practiced by states, substate groups, or individuals, has a long and varied history. Whereas the practice can be generally condemned, many who condemn it most strongly are themselves engaged in terrorism or support for terrorism. More significantly, in order for responses to terrorism or the threat of terrorism to be morally justified, they must meet the requirements of the just war theory by first exhausting nonbelligerent correctives, and frequently, this is not done.

See also Just War Theory.

Bibliography

Bell, J. Bowyer. Terror Out of Zion. New York: St, Martin's Press, 1977.

Bickerton, Ian, and Carla Klausner. A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Byrnes, James F. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper, 1947.

Crenshaw, Martha, "The Logic of Terrorism." In Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind. Edited by Walter Reich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Henderson, Harry. Terrorism. New York: Facts on File, 2001.

Kameel Nasr. Arab and Israeli Terrorism. London: McFarland, 1997.

Laquer, Walter. The Age of Terrorism. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.

Malley, Robert, and Hussein Agha, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors." New York Review of Books 48 (13), 2001.

Nash, Jay Robert. Terrorism in the 20th Century. New York: M. Evans, 1998.

Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Patterns of Global Terrorism-2000, 2001.

Rappoport, David. "Religion and Terror: Thugs, Assassins, and Zealots." In International Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls. Edited by Charles Kegley, 147–149. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Simon, Jeffrey. The Terrorist Trap. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars, 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1992

James P. Sterba (2005)

Terrorism

The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property in order to coerce or intimate a government or the civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives.

Guantanamo Bay Developments

In May 2006, the Pentagon released a list of individuals who are being held in a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under suspicion of terrorist activities. This list was allegedly the first complete list of Guantanamo detainees released to the public since the detention center was established more than four years ago, after the September 11th attacks in 2001.

The Associated Press had requested the names, photos, and other details of current and former detainees under the Freedom of Information Act in January 2006, and had filed a lawsuit in March after the Pentagon had not responded to the request.

A Pentagon spokesman said that the names had been kept classified because of the security operations and intelligence operations that occur at Guantanamo Bay, but he did not comment on why the Pentagon chose not to contest the Associated Press's request.

Although the list of names will help lawyers and human rights advocates track down detainees in order to investigate allegations of abuse at Guantanamo, the list did not include the names of some top terrorists in custody, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, who have been accused of plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the most recent list included more than 200 names that had not previously been disclosed by the Department of Defense, questions persist about the existence of a "secret prison" at Guantanamo Bay. A spokesperson from the Department of Defense has denied the existence of other detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, however.

The Pentagon had released a list of more than 500 names to the Associated Press in April 2006, when ordered to do so by a federal judge in response the Freedom of Information Act request, but the list was not complete.

"This list takes us one step closer to our goal of fully reporting who has been swept into U.S. military custody in Guantanamo, and how they and their cases are being handled," said David Tomlin, the assistant general counsel for the Associated Press.

The interest in contacting detainees stems in part from allegations of prisoner abuse that surfaced in late 2004, when agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported the use of loud music, bright lights, and growling dogs to disorient and intimidate prisoners. The agents also reported having seen prisoners chained to the floor. An ongoing, high-level military investigation was initiated once the Pentagon became aware of the reports.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied the allegations of torture at Guantanamo during a television interview in Liverpool, England, in April 2006.

"We don't want to be the world's jailer, and we certainly want to try people or release them," Rice said in the interview. "One of the misunderstandings about Guantanamo is the sense that somehow hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people have been there forever with no prospect of release. Indeed, we have released hundreds of people from Guantanamo either because we've deemed them not as dangerous as thought or because we've released them to their governments, as we did with Great Britain."

The U.S. Supreme Court addressed the question of how to manage the legal rights of the Guantanamo detainees in 2006. President Bush had used his prerogative as commander in chief during times of war and mandated that military tribunals would try the detainees, rather than civilian courts. In 2004, the Court ruled that the president could not indefinitely detain prisoners without filing charges. Later in 2004, U.S. District Judge James Robertson found that Guantanamo Bay detainees should be considered prisoners of war and therefore entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Conventions, including the right to hear the charges against them.

Many detainees have challenged their imprisonment. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to rule on whether the detainees would be tried in military or civilian courts. Without a Supreme Court ruling, "it will be difficult for military commissions and status-review panels to decide fairly whether a detainee is a prisoner of war, after top Executive Branch and military leaders have declared all of them enemy combatants, not POWs," said Eugene R. Fidell, a Washington, DC-based lawyer specializing in military justice, in an interview with the Washington Post in 2004.

In an interesting twist, four British citizens who had been held at Guantanamo Bay for three years and then released to Great Britain won the right in 2006 to sue Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, for damages. The former detainees have stated that they will seek $10 million in damages from Rumsfeld and ten other military commanders for violating their religious rights by forcing them to shave their beards, harassing them during their worship activities, and forcing them to watch a Guantanamo guard flush a copy of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, down a toilet.

Cases Against Padilla and Moussaoui Continue

During 2005 and 2006, two terrorist suspects continued their legal disputes. Jose Padilla, who was designated by President George W. Bush as an "enemy combatant" in 2002, petitioned a federal district court in South Carolina for a writ of habeas corpus in an effort to force the U.S. government either to charge him with a crime or release him. Although the trial court agreed with Padilla, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's decision. In a second criminal case, Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged for the September 11th attacks in 2001, received a life sentence by a federal court in Virginia.

According to court records, Padilla, a U.S. citizen and native of Brooklyn, received training from al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001. After the terrorist attacks in 2001, Padilla was present as U.S. forces fought Taliban forces in Afghanistan. He eventually escaped to Pakistan, where he continued to communicate with al Qaeda operatives. One senior planner for the terrorist organization, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, directed Padilla to travel to the United States in order to conduct terrorist activities. Officials accused Padilla of leading a plot to set off a radioactive "dirty" bomb and of planning to blow up apartment buildings.

When Padilla arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately arrested him pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Federal agents transported him to New York, where he was held at a civilian correctional facility. On June 9, 2002, Bush designated Padilla as an enemy combatant pursuant to a federal statute enacted shortly after the terrorist attacks took place. Under this directive, Padilla was held at a naval brig in South Carolina without being formally charged with a crime.

Shortly after Bush issued the directive, Padilla filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the Southern District of New York. Later in 2002, Padilla's attorney, Donna Newman, successfully argued before the New York court that Padilla was entitled to speak with her. Padilla ex rel. Newman v. Bush, 233 F. Supp. 2d 564 (S.D.N.Y. 2002). The government had maintained that he would use Newman as a conduit to transmit information to terrorists. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Padilla's petition, ruling that he had improperly filed them in New York. Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U.S. 426, 124 S. Ct. 2711, 159 L. Ed. 2d 513 (2004). Padilla then filed a petition with the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.

Bush issued his directive based on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution (AUMF), which was approved by Congress on September 18, 2001. Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (2001). This joint resolution provides as follows: "[T]he President is authorized to sue all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons."

In a decision issued on February 28, 2005, U.S. District Judge Henry F. Floyd Jr. determined that neither the AUMF by Congress nor powers inherently possessed by the president allowed Bush to hold Padilla. Accordingly, the judge ruled that the government must either charge Padilla with a crime or release him. Padilla v. Hanft, 389 F. Supp. 2d 678 (D.S.C. 2005). The government appealed the decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the district court's decision in an opinion issued on September 9. Padilla v. Hanft, 423 F.3d 386 (4th Cir. 2005).

The appellate court reviewed the holding of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 124 S. Ct. 2633, 159 L. Ed. 2d 578 (2004), where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the detention of a U.S. citizen who fought with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The Court in a plurality opinion in Hamdi determined that the AUMF authorized the detention of the citizen because the citizen was a combatant of war. The Fourth Circuit decided that like the citizen in Hamdi, Padilla was an enemy combatant and that the result should be the same.

About two months later, the government submitted a motion to the Fourth Circuit, asking the court to allow the government to transfer Padilla to a civilian facility. Padilla had filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, and the apparent purpose behind the government's motion was to avoid consideration of the issues in the case by the Court. The Fourth Circuit on December 21 denied the government's motion, deciding that the Supreme Court was the appropriate body to decide whether to approve the government's request. Padilla v. Hanft, 432 F.3d 582 (4th Cir. 2005). Early in January, however, the Supreme Court issued an order that granted the government's request to transfer custody to civilian authorities. Padilla was transferred to a federal detention facility in January 2006.

Like Padilla, Moussaoui's criminal case has extended over several years, with a number of delays during the process. A self-proclaimed al Qaeda operative, the government alleged that Moussaoui was part of the original September 11th plot. Had he not been arrested weeks before the attacks on an immigration violation, he would have been the twentieth hijacker, according to the government's case. Much of the prosecution's case was based on evidence from other suspected terrorists who were in the custody of the government. In 2004, the Fourth Circuit issued a complicated ruling about which witnesses that Moussaoui's counsel could depose. United States v. Moussaoui 382 F.3d 453 (4th Cir. 2004).

Moussaoui in April 2005 pleaded guilty to six charges of conspiracy related to his alleged terrorist activities. His trial began in February 2006. Government prosecutors sought the death penalty despite reports that the government had in its possession evidence suggesting that Moussaoui was not part of the September 11th plot. On May 3, 2006, a jury rejected the imposition of the death penalty on Moussaoui, and the court sentenced him to life in prison on the following day.

Two days after he was sentenced, Moussaoui's attorneys filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea and request a new trial on the question of whether he was guilty as to the charges. The motion said that Moussaoui "did not have any knowledge of and was not a member of the plot to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on September 11." Because the motion was filed after he was sentenced, the court summarily denied the motion on May 8.

Renewal of PATRIOT Act Delayed but Finally Approved

After months of debate and negotiations, Congress in March 2006 authorized the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act, which was originally passed in 2001 at the urging of President George W. Bush and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Many Democrats charged that the statute had been used to allow the government to infringe upon civil liberties of Americans. These concerns caused Congress to delay the act's reauthorization by several months.

In response to the September 11th attacks in 2001, Congress approved the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-56, 115 Stat. 272. The statute, which was more than 100 pages long, enhanced security and surveillance procedures and authorized the use of a number of tools that the government could use to combat terrorists. Congress approved the act by overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate in October 2001.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticized the statute from the time of its enactment. As the government continued implementing programs to combat terrorism, the ACLU became increasingly vocal about the potential for abuse by law enforcement. By 2005, even some conservative groups, such as the American Conservative Union, had begun to question whether the act went too far in terms of impeding individual rights.

Several of the PATRIOT Act's provisions were set to expire on December 31, 2005. Representatives of the Bush administration, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller, advocated for renewal of the statute throughout much of 2005. In April, Gonzales and Mueller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Gonzales testified that the statute "has been an integral part of the federal government's successful prosecution of the war against terrorism" and that "now is not the time to relinquish some of our most effective tools in the fight."

Just days after one of several bombing incidents in London in July 2005, the House approved a bill that made 14 of the Act's 16 provision permanent. The bill would have extended the other two provisions for an additional 10 years. The bill passed by a vote of 257 to 171, with 14 Republicans voting against it and 43 Democrats voting in favor of it. Although support for the bill was largely partisan, several top Democrats, including Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, voted for the legislation.

While the House was considering its proposed legislation in July, the Senate was also considering its own proposal. As the Act's expiration date neared, members of the House and Senate judiciary committees met in joint session to attempt to negotiate. On December 9, the negotiators announced that they had reached a tentative deal, though other members of Congress immediately attacked the new proposal, saying that it still did not adequately protect civil rights. The House approved the conference committee's version on December 15.

Shortly after the conference committee made its announcement, news reports indicated that Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens in the months that followed the attacks in 2001. For some members of the Senate, this news signified that the government could not be trusted with all of the powers included in the PATRIOT Act. On December 16, members of the Senate successfully filibustered the bill when only 52 senators voted to cut off debate, eight fewer than necessary to end the filibuster.

The Senate blocking of the proposal left Republicans scrambling to save the act prior to December 31. Senators who opposed passage of the act said that they were willing to compromise. Those who supported the bill, however, said that they were more willing to let the statute expire than to agree to a version that they might view as less effective. After the debate continued for several more days, the Senate agreed to a six-month extension of the PATRIOT Act.

Members of the House did not agree with the length of the extension. Representative James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R.-Wis.), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the extension "would have simply allowed the Senate to duck the issue until the last week in June." In a nearly empty chamber on December 22, the House agreed through a voice vote to extend the act until February 3. The Senate approved this extension shortly thereafter.

Negotiation continued during January and February in 2006. Most of the debate centered on the protection of certain civil liberties. At a minimum, critics wanted to limit the government's access to library and business records. Unable to reach a compromise by the February 3 deadline, the House and Senate again agreed to an extension, this time through March 10. In both chambers, negotiators attempted to add procedural safeguards that would protect civil liberties, including the allowance of court challenges to some requests for information by the government.

On March 1, the Senate approved an amended bill that included many of these procedural safeguards by a vote of 89 to 10. About a week later, the House agreed to the proposals by a vote of 280 to 138. Supporters for the final legislation noted that negotiators had added several provisions that were designed to ensure that civil liberties would not be abused. Critics, on the other hand, continued to question whether the government could be trusted with the tools provided for in the statute. Bush signed the bill on March 9.

Millennium Bomber Sentenced

Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian man who was convicted of attempting to blow up the Los Angeles airport at the turn of the millennium, was sentenced in July 2005 to 22 years in prison.

Ressam, who came to be referred to as the "Millennium Bomber," received a lighter sentence than the prosecutors had hoped for because he had helped the federal government as an informant during the years since his arrest. However, Ressam became less cooperative in 2003, and his reluctance to talk to investigators has hamstrung cases against two individuals who have been accused of conspiring with him in the Los Angeles airport bombing plot. The sentencing for Ressam had been scheduled for April of 2005, but it was postponed in the hope of eliciting further cooperation. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said he had hoped that Ressam would testify against Samir Ait Mohamed and Abu Doha, who were waiting to be extradited from Canada and Britain, respectively, and who had also been charged in the airport bombing plot.

Among other useful information, Ressam supplied details that led to the capture of poten-tial bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001 with a bomb secreted in his shoe.

The Associated Press quoted public defender Thomas Hillier as saying that the government sentence did not sufficiently account for Ressam's cooperation. "It is a flat fact that law enforcement, the public, and public safety have benefited in countless ways" as a result of Ressam's cooperation with federal investigators, he said.

Ressam has reportedly provided detailed information about al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and has helped U.S. authorities identify more than 100 individuals with suspected links to al-Qaeda.

U.S. customs agents arrested Ressam in 1999, when he was driving a car filled with bomb-making materials off a ferry that had arrived in Port Angeles from British Columbia.

The prosecutors had asked for a 35-year sentence, and lawyers for Ressam had asked for 12 and a half years. The attorneys for Ressam have said that he is willing to cooperate again and that his valuable help in the past justifies a "substantial reduction" in his sentence.

The government had offered a 27-year sentence, which Ressam accepted in exchange for cooperation. Although defense lawyers have said that the defense felt manipulated by the twenty-seven-year offer, government prosecutors said that Ressam knew that he would be unlikely to receive a shorter sentence, given that had been convicted of nine federal counts related to the Los Angeles airport bombing attempt. In August 2005, the government appealed and requested a longer prison term, but the sentence had not been changed by early 2006. The prosecutors justified their request by arguing that when Ressam stopped cooperating, he became eligible for a harsher sentence that would start at 65 years.

Terrorism

Introduction

Terrorism as a form of war has gained popularity among rebels, anarchists, and radical religious groups in the past fifty years. Though hardly a new form of warfare, it has taken on a high profile in recent years. Perhaps most chilling about a terrorist act is not the carnage that is left behind—though that is truly terrible—but the rationale behind the acts: to control and intimidate through terror, and thereby to instill in others the uneasiness of knowing a terrorist attack can strike anywhere, anytime.

The short poem "The Terrorist, He Watches" (2003) captures the everyday life of a city street in the seconds before a bomb explodes. "The distance keeps him out of danger, / and what a view—just like the movies" writes Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Szymborska. The poem describes the nonchalant details of people coming and going in the moments leading up to a public bombing. The poem compares the utter lack of premonition among the victims with the cold impersonal gaze of the terrorist, freeze-framing the busy street as the moment approaches:

    This waiting, it's taking forever.
    Any second now.
    No, not yet.
    Yes, now.
    The bomb, it explodes.

Literature about terrorism ranges from a dismissal of the action as purely evil to investigations into the minds of terrorists. Some examine the terrorist events themselves and record how these fearful acts affect both individuals and societies. Terrorism literature compels the reader to look beyond surface details and see past the stereotypes and conventions of the image-based mass media that saturates modern society. The terrorists may be watching, but so are the writers.

Terrorism as Evil

Some novelists have emphasized terrorism's evil through portrayals of the perpetrators. They define evil in terms of disposition, malicious ideas, or corrupt social systems. Some, such as the postmodern novelist Don DeLillo, evoke terrorist evil as something that cannot be directly understood. In such authors' works, when the terrorist finally appears in the story, he or she explains nothing, only raising yet more questions.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Devils (1873) (also translated as Demons and The Possessed) levels a critique against the ideologies that were beginning to emerge in nineteenth-century Europe. The novel, like many that address terrorism, is based on a real-life event. In this case, the 1869 murder of one of its own by a five-man terrorist cell organized by Sergei Nechaev, a student revolutionary, provided the inspiration for the fictional character Pyotr Stepanovich. The novel is full of characters corrupted by ideas: liberalism (government with consent of the governed), atheism (the view that there is no divine being), anarchism (opposition to the state), socialism (shared ownership of property and goods by the people), and nihilism (the refusal of all creeds and belief systems). All of these concepts are shown to be satanic ideas that possess humans like demons, forcing them to commit evil. The terrorist cell disrupts a festive day of speeches and dancing, but their planned violence is overshadowed by murder and treachery within the group. They murder Shatov, one of their own members, and use another's suicide to cover up their guilt. Later writers that also hold ideologies responsible for human evil have seen The Devils as a prophetic work. To others, the novel seems to inaccurately describe the ideas that it demonizes and holds responsible for human evil, focusing on those ideas rather than on the people that profess them.

Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907) is based on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894, in which a man unintentionally blew himself up in Greenwich Park, London. Conrad resets the event in 1886 and attaches blame to a fictional group of lazy anarchists. The secret agent is Verloc, the owner of a pornography shop who works for an unspecified foreign agency that pressures his group to bomb the Observatory, an act that has "all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy." Verloc and his fellow anarchists are drawn as caricatures (that is, representations that exaggerate particular features to make a point). For example, Conrad puts the following words in the anarchist Michaelis's mouth:

I have always dreamed … of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and in the service of humanity.

Conrad's anarchists are so flawed that the novel does not condemn anarchism, but rather satirizes a particular type of person that preaches a radical doctrine for transparent personal reasons. According to Conrad, all social rebellion can be accounted for in terms of individuals' shortcomings. He dismisses the "poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries" that make up the revolutionary masses. However, Conrad's scorn for the anarchists does not hinder his ability to evoke the warring social views that lead to terrorist violence. Though Conrad disagrees with the limp radicalism of the terrorists, he notes that "the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence."

Don DeLillo compares writers and terrorists in his novel Mao II (1991), which tells the story of a reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, who emerges from seclusion to intervene on behalf of a Swiss poet taken hostage by a Lebanese terrorist group. The novel's namesake, Mao Zedong, the leader of Communist China from the 1940s through the 1970s, suggests the mass conformity that DeLillo characterizes as a threat to the individual. DeLillo's narrator warns: "The future belongs to crowds." The novel follows Gray's emergence, including a trip he takes to London to intervene for the hostage and then a further trip he takes to Beirut when the London meeting is canceled. During his trip to meet the terrorist Abu Rashid, who he expects will trade the poet for him, Gray dies, and Brita Nilsson, a photographer who earlier photographed Gray, finally interviews the terrorist. DeLillo's novel proposes that writers and terrorists share an intention to mold society:

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists…. Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

As the Western writer approaches the terrorist that he in some ways resembles, he realizes that violence is, in fact, an absence of language. As Anthony Kubiak writes in "Spelling It Out: Narrative Typologies of Terror," "the one who experiences terror in the body and mind … experiences time standing still. For the victim there is only terror and horror—no meaning." The sense of timelessness and loss of language is captured in the novel's descriptions of the Swiss hostage's deterioration in the dulling weeks of deprivation and torture.

The Terrorist In Context

Some novelists approach terrorism as a phenomenon that can be rationally understood, looking past the rhetoric of evil to examine the social and economic global inequalities that breed terrorism. Such novels humanize both terrorist and victim. Although they sometimes risk losing sight of the barbarism at the heart of terrorism, at their best they employ fiction's estimable power to tell the untold stories of those silenced by death, terror, or their own blinding hatred.

Raising Holy Hell (1995), Bruce Olds's novel about the violent abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859), explores the consciousness and historical conditions of an American terrorist. Olds mixes genres and styles to create a multidimensional portrait that includes slave conditions, newspaper accounts, chemical and medical background, the racist rhetoric of politicians, imagined interviews between the author and his subject, and short chapters from the points of view of various acquaintances and from Brown himself.

Olds narrates Brown's early years in Connecticut as the son of a sadistic Christian tanner. His stepmother tells the reader that, even as a boy, Brown was cold and hateful. Olds explores both internal and external influences to account for Brown's later actions. Readers witness his first attack in 1856 on five settlers in Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Brown stalks through the rain, "a great, sombreroed, broadsword-wielding vulture." The novel is at its poetic best in the final account of the 1859 seizure of the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Brown saw two of his sons die there and was finally overpowered by General Robert E. Lee and a contingency of marines. Raising Holy Hell shows how the moral absolutism of nineteenth-century Christianity, combined with psychotic genius, created a figure that remains controversial in American history. Olds does not sugarcoat the harsh reality of Brown's life, but allows him to plead his case with the benefit of hindsight:

The unpleasant truth was, I was right, slavery was wrong, and no violence I ever committed, no blood I ever spilled, no madness I ever participated in can compare to the violence, bloodshed, and madness not only perpetrated against the millions of poor Negroes held in bondage, but visited upon the country in the years following my death.

Nicholas Shakespeare's novel The Dancer Upstairs (1995) is an account of a terror campaign in an unspecified third-world Latin American city, based on actual events in Lima, Peru. The novel's terrorist leader, Ezequiel, is based on the founder of the Shining Path (in Spanish, Sendero Luminoso) movement, Abimael Guzmán. This movement splintered from the Communist party of Peru in the late sixties and during subsequent decades terrorized Peru with bombings and sabotage. Guzmán's 1992 apprehension by Peruvian special forces and the investigator's search leading up to it are the focus of what Tony Gould, in the New Statesman & Society, calls a "very Conradian" novel, referring to The Secret Agent.

The novel tells the story of Agustín Rejas, a police colonel who worked undercover for twelve years trying to find Ezequiel, only to finally discover him living upstairs from the dance studio where Rejas's daughter takes ballet lessons. Shakespeare's terrorist is a product of the West, a philosophy professor who specializes in Immanuel Kant, the central Enlightenment figure of Western philosophy. Ezequiel's movement ominously hangs dead dogs from trees as a Maoist symbol—Chinese peasants revolting under Mao in the 1930s did the same—linking Ezequial with other rebellions that make their appeals to rural populations in opposition to modern urban elites. Like the dancer above whose studio he lives, this terrorist is both a product and critic of first-world culture. He is Westernized, and as a result understands that the wretched conditions of his exploited, impoverished country are caused by globalization and modernization, mostly perpetrated by the United States.

The Event

Some novels that attempt to place terrorism in context make use of the drama provided by the terror event (or events). Such matter lends itself well to suspenseful storytelling. The challenge for works that focus on the terrorist event itself is creating suspense in what are, in reality, usually dull periods of negotiation, isolation, and anticipation. In order to give such stories life, authors often rewrite the reality of terrorist events such as bombings, hostage takings, and assassinations.

The Irish writer Frank O'Connor describes terrorism as a personal encounter with a human face. His short story "Guests of the Nation" (1931) recounts the last days of two English soldiers taken hostage during the Irish civil war (1922–1923), in which O'Connor fought as an Irish Republican Army soldier. The story is based on a conversation he overheard about two hostages who befriended their guards. The first-person perspective allows the reader, like Bonaparte, the Irish guard who narrates the story, to imagine the Englishmen from a personal point of view, playing cards and arguing politics. Bonaparte is then told by his superior officer that the men are hostages, and that they must immediately kill them. The shock and inhumanity that Bonaparte feels is shared by the reader. The narrator's sense of emptiness, after killing the two soldiers point blank in a vividly violent scene, ends the story on a bleak note:

Noble says he saw everything ten times the size, as though there were nothing in the whole world but that little patch of bog with the Englishmen stiffening into it, but with me it was as if the patch of bog where the English were was a million miles away.

John le Carré dramatizes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his novel The Little Drummer Girl (1983), in which a young English actress, Charlie, is recruited by Kurtz, an Israeli intelligence agent, to infiltrate a group of Palestinian terrorists that have been terrorizing Western Europe. The Israelis put Charlie through rigorous brainwashing and role-playing so she will understand and sympathize with the Palestinian perspective. The Israelis assassinate the brother of the Palestinian terrorist leader, Khalil, allowing Charlie to infiltrate their group posing as the girlfriend of the dead brother. Charlie then undergoes another indoctrination, this time from the Palestinians. Charlie stays with Khalil and his sister Fatmeh, and grows attached to them, only to betray them when she sleeps with Khalil in a plan that allows the Israelis to kill him. Well-regarded as a spy thriller, the novel begs the question of whether the romantic thriller genre is capable of addressing the brutal reality of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. In a sense, The Little Drummer Girl's use of a sexy heroine and the sympathetic portrayal of both sides functions as a form of ideological substitution, interpreting complex politics in a psychological romance plot. Perhaps the dissatisfaction of readers on both sides of the conflict is, paradoxically, an affirmation of the novel's balanced approach, which depicts both sides of the conflict using terrorist tactics.

Robert Cormier's young adult novel After the First Death (1979) imagines vaguely Middle Eastern terrorists taking a school bus of preschoolers hostage on the outskirts of a New England town. The children are drugged and their lives are threatened by a group that wants the U.S. government to dismantle a secret agency, Inner Delta. The terrorists are led by the callous Artkin, and include Miro, a sixteen-year-old terrorist whose seduction by Kate, the bus driver, will lead to Kate's death. Deaths on both sides accumulate as a government sniper accidentally fires on the bus and the situation escalates. This book frames terrorism within adolescent interests, bringing together opposing sides of the conflict using sexuality and emphasizing the shortcomings of adult solutions.

Like The Dancer Upstairs, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (2001) is based on a Peruvian terrorist incident. In December 1996, the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, was taken over by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a Marxist insurgent group. Fourteen terrorists held seventy-two hostages for over four months. The crisis ended in April 1997, when President Fujimori ordered the embassy stormed. Patchett's novel is set in a similar home in an unnamed country that throws a lavish birthday party for a prominent Japanese businessman. The hosts have paid the world's greatest soprano, Roxane Coss, to sing for the businessman, an opera aficionado. The terrorists that take the party hostage are sympathetically drawn in a story about the relationships, some of them romantic, that develop between the terrorists and their captives. Patchett's terrorists are mostly underprivileged third-world teenagers who never kill or hurt their charges. Her portrait is humanizing—some would say distortingly so—but also allegorically suggestive of the global economic imbalances and corrupt government regimes that create insurgent resistance and lead to terrorist acts.

Victims

Another way to place terror in context is to focus on the victims of terrorist acts. Rather than exploit the innate drama of evil villains, these novels examine the lingering effects of terrorism, as well as its self-perpetuating nature.

Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping (1997) is a nonfiction account of the kidnapping of ten people in Márquez's home country of Colombia. The book covers events that took place during 1990–1991, as the United States was attempting to extradite Pablo Escobar, head of a massive drug cartel. Then a fugitive, Escobar took hostages in order to pressure Colombia's government not to permit his extradition. This strategy worked; Escobar turned himself in for domestic imprisonment in 1991. Márquez, a writer better known for his novels, returns to his earlier craft of journalism for this work, which draws on survivor interviews. The result is an account that provides the details of the hostage-taking and subsequent negotiations that led to two of the hostages' deaths and the liberation of the others.

The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mafouz portrays terrorism as a media event that resonates in the personal lives of a cluster of characters in Cairo in his novella The Day the Leader Was Killed (1985). The novel is set in the days before the October 6, 1981, assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Rather than focusing on the terrorists themselves, or rewriting real-life events to suit his themes, Mafouz sketches the perspectives of a trio of characters to tell the story of a grandfather, Muhtashimi Zayed, his grandson Elwan, and Elwan's fiancée Randa. Al-Sadat's assassination comes abruptly in the concluding pages of the story as the televised parade broadcast goes dead. The characters know something bad has happened when announcers start reading the Quran on television. Pondering the president's death, Muhtashimi thinks:

He doesn't deserve this end, whatever his misdeeds. On his day of glory? A plot. Surely there's a conspiracy. No doubt. The hell with him!… It was the inevitable end. He was a curse on us. He who kills will ultimately be killed. In a split second, an empire has collapsed. The empire of robbers.

The fight between tradition and modernity that the novel's three main characters struggle with is underscored by the assassination. Old Muhtashimi's apocalyptic thoughts lead to the novel's conclusion that suggests that he himself may be on the verge of making a commitment to religious militarism. Such characterizations of Muslims by Mafouz have led to the issuing of a fatwa (Islamic religious proclamation) calling for his death, and a subsequent 1994 stabbing attack by two extremists, which he survived.

Jonathan Saffran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) approaches the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center from the perspective of a precocious nine-year-old, Oskar Schell, who attempts to understand why his father died in one of the towers. After the attack, Oskar finds a key in his father's room marked with the word "Black." He begins interviewing every person with that last name in New York City. Joined by a 103-year-old former war journalist, Oskar travels the city, meeting diverse characters. Oskar's story is interspersed with those of his grandfather, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden, and with stories from the bombing of Hiroshima. The inclusion of these acts of massive military violence broaden terrorism's definition from its typical meaning of acts by insurgent groups and balance Oskar's limited understanding of why the attack occurred.

Conclusion

In these works, terrorism appears as, among other things, an incomprehensible horror, a mournful loss, a suspenseful mystery, a rival discourse, a psychotic religious fundamentalism, and a political fable. Taken as a whole, these novels reveal the human cost and annihilation of meaning accomplished by terrorist violence. Just as there is little consensus regarding the best way to address terrorism, so do novels on the subject take diverse stances on its causes, although they all confirm its bloody destructiveness. Despite their richness, one can only hope that the future calls for fewer stories of terrorism.

SOURCES

Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, edited and introduced by Martin Seymour-Smith, Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 67, 74, 82, 102.

DeLillo, Don, Mao II, Viking, 1991, pp. 16, 41.

Foer, Jonathan Saffran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p. 244.

Gould, Tony, Review of "The Dancer Upstairs," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 8, No. 371, September 22, 1995, p. 33.

Kubiak, Anthony, "Spelling It Out: Narrative Typologies of Terror," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 294-302.

Mahfouz, Naguib, The Day the Leader Was Killed, translated by Malak Mashem, Anchor Books, 2000, p. 96.

O'Connor, Frank, "Guests of the Nation," in A Frank O'Connor Reader, edited by Michael Steinman, Syracuse University Press, 1994, pp. 3-14.

Olds, Bruce, Raising Holy Hell, Henry Holt and Co., 1995, pp. 153, 209.

Shakespeare, Nicholas, The Dancer Upstairs, Doubleday, 1997, p. 48.

Szymborska, Wislawa, "The Terrorist, He Watches," in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace, 1995, pp. 108-09.