INTRODUCTION

Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld observed – just a year after the 9/11 attack – that a sea change had occurred in politics since the attack, but very little had changed in the field of criminology. His case was compelling: Though terrorism differs from crime in one fundamental way – it involves violence for an ideological cause rather than for personal gain – criminologists should study it nonetheless because it shares many other elements with crime, and criminologists may be able to apply their frameworks for analysis fruitfully to terrorism. He added that studying terrorism might even make criminology richer.

The contributors to this anthology have demonstrated that we accept Rosenfeld's argument, and we are not alone. Terrorism courses have emerged in criminal justice and criminology programs throughout much of the academy, and criminologists are engaging increasingly in research on terrorism. Much in the manner that a political scientist (James Q. Wilson), an industrial engineer (Alfred Blumstein), and an economist (Gary Becker) expanded the way we think about crime and analyzed it in the late 1960s, forty years later criminologists from different disciplines and with different skill sets are taking up Rosenfeld's challenge, and thinking about terrorism in ways that are usefully informed by our understanding of violence and its basic elements. We have learned that terrorism is indeed different from crime in important ways, but that it shares essential features that cannot be ignored either by those aiming to enrich our field, or by those wishing to contribute to the public policy debate about how to prevent and respond to the problem.

DESCRIPTION, RATIONALE, AND SCOPE

This is a book of original essays addressing what is widely regarded as the most serious problem confronting America today and for years to come – terrorism – from a unique perspective: that of criminology. The literature on terrorism is framed typically from a geopolitical perspective and using ethnographic narratives, based on case studies that provide essential information about specific terrorist groups, their agendas, how they operate, and how they arise from and influence external political forces. Although scholarly and useful, these conventional approaches to thinking about terrorism overlook a well-developed body of knowledge on the nature and sources of aggression generally and crime in particular, and what can be done to prevent both. The criminological perspective thus provides a potentially useful complement to the standard literature on terrorism. Criminology has amassed a rich body of literature ranging from individual motivations toward crime and antisocial behavior, small-group dynamics in cultivating and reinforcing deviant subgroups, organized and networked crime syndicates and their use of technology to create and exploit criminal opportunities, and more broadly defined cultural orientations toward the social order. Criminology has also studied policies and programs to prevent and respond to crime, as well as ones aimed at mitigating the consequences of criminal behavior. This book explores the prospect of putting this alternative perspective to service to help understand terrorism and develop policies to prevent or mitigate its effects.

THE PROBLEM OF FEAR IN THE ERA OF TERRORISM

Prior to September 11, 2001, people in the United States were especially fearful of rapists and robbers, airplane crashes and cancer, hurricanes and sharks. On that day, and for years afterward, terrorism became Public Fear Number One. Although the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building were sensational events, they did not shake ordinary citizens to their core, as did the 2001 attack. Two great oceans had insulated the United States from serious acts of violence by foreign sources, and its citizens were protected by the strongest military on earth. The jet hijacking and suicide bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people, brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and inflicted major damage on the Pentagon in Washington raised fear in the United States to a new level entirely.

INTRODUCTION

The spectacular attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 brought with it an explosion of books and articles on terrorism in both the academic and popular print media. These writings have focused on political and religious aspects of terrorism; the vulnerability of domestic targets; intangibles like the ethics of preemptive wars to remove governments that support terrorism and ethical aspects of conducting the War on Terror and defending the homeland; and sensational tangibles: dominant figures like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; bombings of buildings, trains, buses, places of worship, and public markets; assassinations, videotaped beheadings, and other carnage. These vivid images and narratives on terrorism occupied center stage in the presidential election campaigns of 2004 and 2008 and have dominated discussions at the United Nations and other international forums, as well as in major news media venues.

Vivid images and sensational narratives capture the public's attention, but they stifle the objective, comprehensive discussion essential to the process of informed democratic choice and the preservation of legitimacy of governmental action. The accumulated writings and discussions on terrorism have been strikingly deficient in one important respect: Although often acknowledging that acts of terror are acts of crime in most places where they occur, most writings overlook the substantial body of pertinent knowledge that has been produced over the past several decades by criminologists and criminal justice scholars on the nature and sources of crime and aggression, and what works to prevent crime and intervene effectively against it.

This chapter addresses principles for and alternative approaches to responding to terrorism. We begin with the most basic questions of how to use diplomacy and when to rely on force to intervene against terrorism, using the “just war” theory as a basis for addressing these fundamental issues. We then turn to the question of collective or unilateral responses. Specific interventions are then discussed, including the tactic of torture to extract information, covert and other special operations, use of bounty programs and extradition treaties to facilitate the capture of terrorists, and international courts and tribunals to decide in such cases.

Investigative, Diplomatic, and Military Responses

After the initial shock, serious terrorist attacks are usually countered quickly by a mix of investigative and diplomatic activities and, in some cases, a military response. The first objective is to establish the source or sources of the attack and then to mobilize power against the terrorists both to deal with immediate threats and deter future attacks. To achieve this first objective, standard crime scene forensic analysis is used to establish the “signature” of the attacker or attackers. Investigative methods include the following:

• Thorough search and photographic documentation of the scene

• Deliberate recovery of evidence

• Chemical analysis of explosives

• Ballistics tests to establish the precise location and impact of the explosion

• Methods to determine the identity of the bomber

• Analysis of earlier intelligence reports of suspected individuals and groups involved

• Analysis of prerecorded confession tapes of suicide bombers

• Interrogation of suspected collaborators

• Interviews of witnesses

• Analyses of telephone records, bank and credit card data, receipts, and computer files

Protecting a nation or community against acts of terrorism can come at the expense of rights to liberty and privacy. This chapter identifies the range of security interventions that intrude on these rights, from relatively benign passive screening systems at one end to torture on the other. It describes the historical foundations of the problem and offers examples of interventions that involve a tradeoff between security and liberty, those that enhance security without an adverse effect on liberty, and those that reduce both security and liberty. It then deals with two specific interventions: profiling to detect terrorists and the USA Patriot Act. It concludes by considering frameworks for identifying and organizing key variables to assist in weighing the effectiveness of alternative interventions and their costs as invasions of the public's rights to privacy and freedom.

The Problem and Its Historical Precedents

Perhaps the most fundamental problem raised by the threat of terrorism is this: How can liberal democratic society and all its fruits be protected against terrorism without intruding on the very properties of liberal democracy that make it worth protecting? The basic problem was raised in the eighteenth century in a frequently quoted statement widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, emphasizing the liberty side of the coin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Clearly, it is preferable to prevent acts of terrorism in the first place than to have to respond to them after they occur. In this chapter and the next we consider ways of preventing individual acts of terrorism, first as a set of tactics and policies for the short term to deal with immediate threats, and then as a long-term strategy to address the deeper sources of terrorism. In this chapter we consider approaches that appear to have merit for the near term, focusing on obtaining and analyzing intelligence information about terrorist plans, the removal of opportunities for terrorists to carry out their acts and, where dialogue and understanding are either impractical or impossible for warding off immediate threats, exploring alternatives such as the use of hard power and homeland security protections.

Introduction

We noted in Chapter 2 that the key to preventing aggression is to understand its sources and that an array of crime prevention strategies have been developed following extensive and systematic inquiry into the nature of crime. This inquiry has been systematic in that it has been based on the accumulation of reliable data and use of research methods that provide a more thorough and unbiased understanding of crime's causes than had ever been available before. Like crime, terrorism is a manifestation of aggression. If we are to prevent terrorism through the design of effective intervention strategies and policies, it will be essential first to better understand its causes too.