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3 - The Etiology of Terrorism

Identifying, Defining, and Studying Terrorists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2011

By
Wayman C. Mullins  and
Quint C. Thurman
Edited by
Brian Forst ,
Jack R. Greene  and
James P. Lynch
Brian Forst
Affiliation:
American University, Washington DC
Jack R. Greene
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
James P. Lynch
Affiliation:
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
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Summary

Identification is the first step in assessing, predicting, and ultimately intervening effectively in terrorist actions. To date, there has been limited success in identifying who terrorists are and where they can be found, tracking their activities, and then preventing them from engaging in attacks in the future. Despite successes by law-enforcement authorities at intercepting terrorists, whether reported to the public or not, a single unrestrained terrorist group or individual who succeeds in an attack can render devastating consequences. Just as Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City and al Qaeda in New York demonstrated, even overlooking one terrorist or terrorist cell can have significant, deadly societal and political ramifications.

But how were terrorists in the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11 allowed to slip through the cracks? Sophisticated intelligence-gathering capabilities, state-of-the-art investigative procedures, and other threat-analysis techniques seemingly failed in these instances. What specifically went wrong? Or did anything go wrong that was preventable? Why were we not able to identify these terrorists? Had they been identified, could we have stopped them from committing acts of mass murder against a helpless civilian population? This chapter will address the fundamental issues of defining terrorism and terrorists, and examine our ability to understand these phenomena. It will further examine the challenge of collecting data concerning the threat terrorism poses to public safety.

DEFINING TERRORISM

One of the most significant difficulties in the identification of terrorism and terrorist individuals or groups is that of multiple definitions of basic terms.

Type
Chapter
Information
Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security , pp. 40 - 65
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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