Article Summary

articlesudent will prepare a 3 page double-spaced interpretation of the three journal articles, required reading, for the June 8th remote class. The summary should be 12pt font, Times-New Roman, with 1in margins. The required reading are listed on Blackboard and a notice will be sent out on Blackboard as well. The interpretation should an introduction which provides the background of the articles and authors. The main body should include a summary of the artices, a critical analysis of the impact to the field of emergency management, and why these articles are important to understanding terrorism. The conclusion should include the student’s perspective on the readings and tie the articles together.

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gjup20

Download by: [University of North Texas] Date: 30 May 2017, At: 11:42

Criminal Justice Studies
A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society

ISSN: 1478-601X (Print) 1478-6028 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gjup20

Defining terrorism: philosophy of the bomb,
propaganda by deed and change through fear and
violence

Arthur H. Garrison

To cite this article: Arthur H. Garrison (2004) Defining terrorism: philosophy of the bomb,
propaganda by deed and change through fear and violence, Criminal Justice Studies, 17:3,
259-279, DOI: 10.1080/1478601042000281105

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1478601042000281105

Published online: 26 Jan 200

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2044

View related articles

Citing articles: 9 View citing articles

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gjup20

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gjup20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/1478601042000281105

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1478601042000281105

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=gjup20&show=instructions

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/1478601042000281105

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/1478601042000281105#tabModule

Criminal Justice Studies,
Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 259–279

ISSN 1478-601X (print)/ISSN 1478-6028 (online) © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1478601042000281105

Defining Terrorism: Philosophy of the
Bomb, Propaganda by Deed and
Change Through Fear and Violence
Arthur H. Garrison
Taylor and Francis LtdGJUP041018.sgm10.1080/1478601042000281105Criminal Justice Studies1478-601X (print)/1478-6028 (online)Original Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd1730000002004ArthurH.GarrisonArthur.Garrison@state.de.us

The idea that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ has led to the errone-
ous conclusion that defining terrorism is, in the final analysis, a subjective activity about
assigning negative connotations to one’s opponents and positive connotations to one’s
proponents. Terrorism, both as practiced and justified by terrorist themselves, is a tool
used to achieve a specific outcome by using force or violence on one segment of society with
the primary goal of causing fear in the larger society to make change in that society. This
article will review the historical development of the use of terror and demonstrate that
regardless of the actor, all terrorists share the common belief that terror is a tool of change.
The desired change, the chosen target, and the justification of the use of terror can be
specific to the society and the perpetrators. The goal of this paper will be to show the
common strands of uniformity of the understanding of terror as a tool of change through
history. Though there are differences between terrorists and waves of terror, the utility of
terror is not different.

Keywords: Utility of terror; Terrorist; Terrorism; Propaganda by deed; Philosophy of the
bomb; Nature of terrorism

Introduction

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 society asked how 19 men could hijack four
planes with the intent to crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and
into either the White House or the Capitol Building in Washington DC. The attacks

Arthur H. Garrison is the Director of Criminal Justice Planning and Senior Researcher at the Delaware Criminal
Justice Council and is a graduate of the US Department of Justice, Institute for Intergovernmental Research State
and Local Anti-Terrorism Program (SLATT). Correspondence to: Delaware Criminal Justice Council, 820 N.
French Street, Wilmington, Delaware 19801, USA; e-mail: Arthur.Garrison@state.de.us

260 A. H. Garrison

resulted in the death of 3062 people (US State Department, 2002). The question was
asked, were such men insane or simply evil? The literature on terrorism is one of the
most written about and controversial subjects in the study of political science, criminal
justice and international affairs. One of the most debated issues in regard to terrorism
is how to define terrorism. It will be asserted in this article that terrorism can be under-
stood and defined through the writings of terrorists themselves.

In this article terrorist writings from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries will be used
interchangeably to show the continuity of thought among terrorists in regard to the use
of terrorism as a tool to achieve their desired goals. There is a consistent ideology that
connects terrorists regardless of their desired goals or social context. Although there are
clear differences in political ideology, philosophy, desired goals and the social context
between terrorists through history, an examination of their writings reveals that terror-
ists share a common understanding of the utility of terror. To be sure there are vast differ-
ences between Maximilien Robespierre, Johann Most, bin Laden, the Army of God, the
Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, but their adoption of terror
as a tool to achieve their respective goals and their view on the utility and necessity of
violence to achieve those goals are not dissimilar. It is this uniformity in the use of
terrorism as a tool to achieve a desired political, social and/or religious goal that allows
for a neutral and systematic definition of terrorism.

A Terrorist is a Terrorist: The Cause Matters Not

Terrorism: The Unity of Understanding

Terrorists, regardless of issue or cause, hold at least one of ‘three basic concepts [about
society]:

(1.) Society is sick and cannot be cured by half measures of reform.
(2.) The state is itself violence and can be countered and overcome only by violence.
(3.) The truth of the terrorist cause justifies any action that supports it. While some

terrorists recognize no moral law [they] have their own ‘higher’ morality’. (Parry,
1976, p. 12)

The father of modern terrorism thought, Maximilien Robespierre, in his February 1794
address (five months before his own head met the guillotine) entitled Report upon the
Principles of Political Morality Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the
Interior Concerns of the Republic (1794), which was delivered to the National Convention,
made the following clear:

Without, all the tyrants encircle you; within, all tyranny’s friends conspire; they will
conspire until hope is wrestled from crime. We must smother the internal and external
enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your
policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror.

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular
government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal;
terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt,
severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle

Criminal Justice Studies 261

as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most
urgent needs.

Three quarters of a century later, Russian anarchists echoed the ideas of Robespierre.
Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin wrote in 1869 that the ‘nature of Russian
banditry [terrorism] is cruel and ruthless; yet no less cruel and ruthless is that govern-
mental might which has brought this kind of bandit [terrorist] into being by its wanton
acts’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 65). Bakunin continued:

Governmental cruelty has engendered the cruelty of the people and made it into some-
thing necessary and natural. But between these two cruelties, there still remains a vast
difference; the first strives for the complete annihilation of the people, the other endeavors
to set them free. (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 65)

Ninety years later, Mao Tse-Tung’s Public Security Chief wrote in similar fashion in the
People’s Daily on September 28, 1959. Note the similar self-serving distinction between
the use of terror on behalf of the people and terror by his adversary:

In suppressing the resistance of the counterrevolutionaries, the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat cannot, of course, avoid the shedding of blood. But the nature of such bloodshed is
entirely different from the bloodshed under the dictatorship of the exploiting classes; here
the blood that is shed is not the people’s but that of counterrevolutionaries. (Parry, 1976,
p. 225)

More than a century and half before, Robespierre (February 1794) equally reflected on
the necessity of terror as a tool against ‘tyrants’ or other ‘enemies’ of the Republic. Note
the utility of demonizing the target of terror:

The protection of government is only due to peaceable citizens; and all citizens in the
republic are republicans. For it, the royalists, the conspirators are only strangers or, rather,
enemies. Is not this dreadful contest, which liberty maintains against tyranny, indivisible?
Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without? The assassins who tear our
country apart, the intriguers who buy the consciences that hold the people’s mandate; the
traitors who sell them; the mercenary pamphleteers hired to dishonor the people’s cause,
to kill public virtue, to stir up the fire of civil discord, and to prepare political counterrev-
olution by moral counterrevolution – are all those men less guilty or less dangerous than
the tyrants whom they serve?

Osama bin Laden reminds us, two centuries after Robespierre, that the terrorist always
has a justification for terror (oppression and injustice) and is always the defender of the
people against tyrants:

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression,
iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collab-
orators; to the extent that the Muslim’s blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot
in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. (bin Laden, 1996)

In the mind of the terrorist, it is the injustice of the oppressor that justifies the use of
terror and the use of such terror is not only justified, but can be required by the hand
of God.

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual
duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. (bin
Laden, 1998)

262 A. H. Garrison

The terrorist, regardless of the cause, believes that violence is the only avenue to
achieve a desired goal in society. Robespierre justified the use of violence as a tool to
secure his government and as a tool to deal with political enemies. Robespierre
exhorted his countrymen ‘[s]ubdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be
right … Is force made only to protect [from] crime? And is the thunderbolt not
destined to strike the heads of the proud? Show mercy to the Royalists … pardon the
villains! No! [M]ercy for the innocent, mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate,
mercy for humanity’ (Robespierre, 1794). Osama bin Laden similarly encourages the
use of violence to attack the enemies of Allah and his people, namely the USA and the
West. He incites Muslims and Arabs with the invocation of Allah saying, ‘We – with
God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to
comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and
whenever they find it’ (bin Laden, 1996).

Terrorism: The Unity of Method

Although the modern use of terror dates back to Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobin
Party in the French regime de la terreur between May 1793 and July 1794 (Garrison, 2003),
it was the Russian revolutionaries and the anarchists of the 19th century that developed
the use of terror into a systematic tool to achieve specific social goals. Sergey Nechaev
in 1869 wrote Catechism of the Revolutionist, which sets forth 21 principles the
revolutionary or terrorist must be guided by (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 68).
Among these 21 principles is the description of the terrorist who is fully committed to
the revolution, who has no ties to civil order, whose only goal is destruction, who has
no friendships nor pity for anything in the world, and who views the target society itself
as foul and something that must be destroyed because the target society is evil per se and
there is nothing worthy in it.

Carlos Marighella, the leader of the Action for National Liberation in Brazil (Griset
and Mahan, 2003) a century later, wrote in Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (1970) that
the personal qualities of the urban guerrilla include bravery, decisiveness, a good marks-
man, one who is trained in arms and explosives, skilled in the tactics of guerrilla warfare
(assaults, bank robbery, raids, occupation, street combat, execution, kidnapping, sabo-
tage and the use of bombs – terrorism), educated in political thought, and one who is
not afraid of dismantling and destroying the political and social structure of society
(Cronin, 2002). The Catechism of the Revolutionist and the Manual of the Urban Guerrilla
are not dissimilar to the Al Qaeda Manual that was found in England after a police raid
on the home of an Al Qaeda member. The manual provides instruction on military oper-
ations, military organization, religious reasons and justifications for the use of terror,
instructions on counterfeiting, methods for communication, methods of organizational
security, overt and covert operations, and how to behave if captured and placed on trial.

Nechaev explained in Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), the terrorist ‘has no
interest of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a
name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a
single passion – the revolution’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 68). This idea of the

Criminal Justice Studies 263

revolution being the sin qua non of the individual with no mercy or quarter to the
enemies of the revolution was taken to a new level only eighty years later when Mao
Tse-Tung instituted a reign of terror that lasted 22 years starting with the Red Terror,
which was the first wave of public trials (1949–1959), followed by the Great Leap
Forward (1958–1960), followed by the Cultural Revolution (1965–1969), and finally
the second wave of great public trials and executions (1969–1970); ‘[i]n all, the human
toll up to mid-1971 was 34,300,000 at least or 63,794,000 at the most’ (Parry, 1976,
p. 242).

As Mao commented, in July 1957, of those killed during the Red Terror, ‘it was the
demand of the people; it was done to free the masses from long years of oppression

…

and all kinds of local tyrants’ (Parry, 1976, p. 225). During the Red Terror children
were encouraged to inform on their parents in mass governmental trials and executions
(Parry, 1976). As one son said of his father: ‘My father should have been killed long ago.
For the security of the people, for the permanent destruction of the old system, for
truth, for peace, I must firmly approve his execution’ (Parry, 1976, p. 235). Mao
explained that the terror was ‘absolutely necessary. … If we had not done so, the masses
would not have been able to lift their heads’ (Parry, 1976, p. 225). These thoughts are
very similar to those advocated by Robespierre more than a century and a half before,
who elucidated ‘[t]o punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is
cruelty’ (Robespierre, 1794).

What do these and other historical examples prove? They prove that terrorism is not
explained by the cause, because causes change. Terrorism is defined by the rationaliza-
tion, logic and perception of how to effect change. Robespierre, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin
and Mao all used terror to instill fear in the hearts of their countrymen in order to create
and build the society they wanted. Nechaev, Bakunin and Osama bin Laden, asserted
that terror must be used to instill fear in the target governments in order to bring down
the vileness of the government they despised and free the oppressed who suffer under
the hand of the government. Terrorists are different when viewed from the social
context of time, the target selection of the terror, the reason for the use of terror, the
justification of the use of terror, the evil that terrorists seek to address, and the goals
they have. These and other factors will always differentiate terrorists in history, time
and place. But the use of terror as a tool to achieve desired goals has not changed. The
tactics of terror, whether used to instill fear or to free the oppressed, do not change.

The universal view of terrorists that change occurs only through the use of violence,
and that the terrorist is the defender/liberator of the people or victimized segment of
society is also seen in ‘single issue’ terrorists. Craig Rosenbraugh, a spokesman for the
Earth Liberation Front (ELF), ended his testimony before Congress in February 2002
with the following exhortation:

All power to the people. Long live the Earth Liberation Front. Long live the Animal
Liberation Front. Long live all the sparks attempting to ignite the revolution. Sooner or
later the sparks will turn to flame. (Leader and Probst, 2003, p. 3)

Single-issue terrorists use the same tactics of terror as more broad issue terrorists. For
example, the ELF has been responsible for the bombing of factories, hotels, resorts,

264 A. H. Garrison

logging companies, car dealerships, urban development and other industries they
believe are destroying the environment. In their minds the environment is the entity
being abused and victimized. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) uses the same tactics
to defend animals (the abused and victimized group) which they assert are equal to
humans and thus are due equal protection from abuse, harm and exploitation. The
hunting, killing, eating and use of animals in medical research are evils that can only be
stopped through use of direct action. Animal rescues or ‘liberation’ as well as bombing
of research facilities are some of the activities of the ALF. As noted on their crest ‘deeds
not words’ will end animal exploitation. Although the level of violence and the use of
arson, sabotage, vandalism and bombings used by ALF and ELF surely does not rise to
the level of the bombings of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, the idea of using bombs to change
behavior in the society in which the target of the violence resides and their belief in the
utility and justification of such violence is not different.

Terrorism is a Systematic Tool to Achieve a Desired End

Terrorism: A Systematic and Asymmetric Tool

‘The concept of systematic terrorism and its use in revolutionary strategy first appeared
between 1869 and 1881 in the writings of Russian revolutionaries’ (Laqueur and
Alexander, 1987, p. 48). The early modern (pre-World War II) use of systematic terror-
ism did not involve the use of indiscriminate violence to cause the most carnage. As
Russian anarchist Nikolai Morozov wrote in 1880, a ‘[t]erroristic struggle … strikes at
the weakest spot of the existing system’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 73) which are
its leaders. Nechaev explained in Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), the ‘guiding
principle [in selecting targets for terror] must be the measure of service the person’s
death will necessarily render to the revolutionary cause. [The] sudden and violent
deaths [of those targeted] will inspire the greatest fear in the government and, by
depriving it of its cleverest and most energetic figures, will shatter its strength’ (Laqueur
and Alexander, 1987, p. 71). As American anarchist C. S. Griffin explained, ‘by assassi-
nating the head just as fast as a government head appeared, the government could be
destroyed, and, generally speaking all governments be kept out of existence’ (Cronin,
2002, p. 15). Thus was born the concept of individual terrorism. As explained by
Morozov in 1880:

All that the terroristic struggle really needs is a small number of people and large material
means. This presents really a new form of struggle. It replaces by a series of individual polit-
ical assassinations, which always hit their target [avoiding the errors of past] massive revo-
lutionary movements, where people often rise against each other … and where a nation
kills off its own children, while the enemy of the people watches from a secure shelter and
sees to it that the people of the organization are destroyed. (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987,
pp. 73–74, emphasis added)

Individual terrorism is target specific. The target is chosen with the purpose of causing
fear in the larger society in order to effect change. As Morozov explains, the ‘movement
punishes only those who are really responsible for the evil deed. Because of this the

Criminal Justice Studies 265

terroristic revolution is the only just form of a revolution’ (Laqueur and Alexander,
1987, p. 74). As will be discussed below, individual terrorism became the vehicle for the
method of terrorism called Propaganda by Deed.

Terrorism is an asymmetric engagement of the enemy; that is why it does not require
large memberships and why it is difficult to fight. According to Morozov, the ‘revolu-
tionary group is not afraid of bayonets and the government’s army because it does not
have to clash, in its struggle, with this blind and insensible force’ because ‘it can act
unexpectedly and find means and ways which no one anticipates’ after which they
‘disappear without a trace and thus they are able to fight again against the enemy,
to live and work for the cause’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, pp. 73–75). It is only
when a terrorist group bases its operations in a known location, such as Al Qaeda in
Afghanistan, that conventional warfare can be used against them.

Terrorism: A Tool of Direct Action — Propaganda by Deed

Terrorism, in addition to being asymmetric, is an act of propaganda. The terrorist act,
in and of itself, communicates that change can occur and the violence of the act
commands the attention of the society. The propaganda effect is in the act of securing
the attention of the populous and then providing the message through the violence.
Three Italian anarchists (Errico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero and Emilio Covelli) conceived
and developed the idea of Propaganda by Deed through a series of letters to each other
between July and October 1876 (Linse, 1982). Although over time Propaganda by Deed
evolved into a theory of assassination and bombings, Malatesta, Cafiero and Covelli
conceived Propaganda by Deed as a method of insurrection not political assassination
(Linse, 1982). The Italian Federation of the Anarchist International formally adopted
Propaganda by Deed as a strategy in December 1876 (Linse, 1982; Townshend, 2002).
On December 3, 1876 Malatesta published an article affirming that the ‘Italian Feder-
ation (of the International) believes that insurrection, reinforcing socialist principles
through deeds, is the most effective means of propaganda; … [and] is also the only
means of reaching … the lowest social classes and to involve these strongly alive forces
of mankind in the struggle of the International’ (Linse, 1982, p. 202).

In August 1877 anarchist Paul Brousse published an article entitled Propaganda by
the Deed in which he asserted that traditional forms of propaganda were inherently
limited in spreading the anarchist message to the masses and that the message had to
be supplemented by deeds and action (Fleming, 1980). Italian anarchist Carlo Pisacane,
explained that change occurs as a result of the use of violence and violence precedes
change, not the other way around:

The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the
former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they
are free. (Hoffman, 1998, p. 16)

‘Pisacane argued that the masses were too exhausted at the end of their long working
day to read leaflets and listen to speeches; only violent actions could catch their atten-
tion’ (Griset and Mahan, 2003, p. 6).

266 A. H. Garrison

By 1881 the concept of Propaganda by Deed was adopted by anarchist theoreticians
at the London International Congress (Fleming, 1980). German anarchist Johann Most
as well as other anarchists like Bakunin and Morozov advocated and explained the util-
ity of Propaganda by Deed. Johann Most wrote in his London and later New York based
anarchist newspaper Freiheit (November 15, 1884):

We provoke; we stroke the fire of revolution and incite people to revolt in any way we can.
The people have always been ‘ready’ for freedom; they have simply lacked the courage to
claim it for themselves. (Laqueur and Alexander 1987, p. 104)

In an article published on July 25, 1885 in Freiheit Most explained:

What is important is not solely these actions themselves but also the propagandistic effect
they are able to achieve. Hence, we preach not only action in and for itself, but also action
as propaganda. (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 105)

Why? As Bakunin wrote in 1869:

When the whole world of working peasants sleep what seems to be a sleep with no awak-
ening, crushed by the whole burden of the state, the world of bandits in the forests carries
on its desperate fight and battles on until at last the Russian villages awake. (Laqueur and
Alexander, 1987, p. 66)

And as Morozov explained in 1880:

Success of the terroristic movement will be inevitable if the future terroristic struggle will
become a deed of not only one separate group, but an idea, which cannot be destroyed by
people. (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 76)

Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin explained ‘actions which compel general attention
… in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets’ (Townshend,
2002, p. 56). More importantly, according to Kropotkin, an act of terror ‘awakens the
spirit of revolt; it breeds daring …. Soon it becomes apparent that the established order
does not have the strength often supposed … the monster is not so terrible …’
(Townshend, 2002, p. 56). As Fleming explains (1980, p. 4), for ‘some terrorists,
propaganda by the deed came to be accepted as a suitable means of “educating” the
masses (especially when many were not able or had no time or desire to read), to
stimulate them to action, and draw them into the movement’.

The concept of Propaganda by Deed requires that the act have a purpose and that
the purpose is made known to the populous. As Most explains in Freiheit (July 25,
1885):

The great thing about anarchist vengeance is that it proclaims loud and clear for everyone
to hear, that: this man or that man must die for this and this reason …. Once such action
has been carried out, the important thing is that the world learns of it from the revolutionar-
ies, so that everyone knows what the position is… . In order to achieve the desired success
… immediately after the action has been carried out, especially in the town where it took
place, posters should be put up setting out the reasons for the action in such a way as to draw
from them the best possible benefit. (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, pp. 105–106, emphasis
added)

As Laqueur explains, the tactic of bombing by the Russian anarchist group Narodnaya
Volya (‘the will of the people’) put into practice the concept of Propaganda by Deed:

Criminal Justice Studies 267

… it was one of the best weapons of agitation. One had to strike at the center to shake the
whole system. The future belonged to mass movements but terrorism had to show the
masses the way. The program of the Narodnaya Volya Central Committee listed the liqui-
dation … of those who had committed the most glaring oppression as the main tasks of
the terrorist struggle. If ten or fifteen pillars of the establishment were killed at one and the
same time, the government would panic and would lose its freedom of action. At the same
time, the masses would wake up. (Laqueur, 2002, p. 34)

Half a century later, terrorism and Propaganda by Deed found fresh ground and
application on the other side of the world. Jewish terrorist groups (the ‘Stern Gang’
a.k.a. the Lehi, an acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, ‘Fighters for the Freedom of
Israel’ and the Irgun Zvai Leumi) used terror to force the British out of Palestine. The
Stern Gang assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Administrator of Palestine, on
November 6, 1944. The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22,
1946 killing 91 people and injuring another 45. On September 17, 1948 three members
of the Stern Gang assassinated Count Folk Bernadotte, the UN Mediator and Colonel
Andre P. Serot of the French Air Force in Jerusalem. On April 9, 1948, commandos of
the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin (a
village with an estimated population of 750 Palestinians, situated on a hill overlooking
the main highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as well as a number of Jerusalem’s
western neighborhoods), and killed 100 Palestinians. The hotly debated incident (as to
whether it was an act of terrorism, ethnic cleansing or an act of war, i.e., removing an
enemy from a location in order to further military operations) resulted in the removal
of the entire Palestinian population from the town.

In 1943 the Lehi published a publicity sheet, Hechazit, which advocated the utility of
terror in the tradition of Propaganda by Deed:

If the question is, is it possible to bring about liberation by means of terror? The answer is:
No! If the question is, do these actions help to bring liberation nearer? The answer is: Yes!
[Terror] is not aimed at persons, but at representatives and is therefore effective. And if it
also shakes the population out of its complacency, so much the better. (Townshend, 2002,
p. 89)

The terror implemented by the Stern Gang and the Irgun ‘played a central part in
bringing the majority of the Yishuv [the Jewish community living in Palestine who were
committed to reliance on Britain] around to their view [that British friendship was
irrelevant to the goal of securing Palestine as a Jewish state]. Here the classic terrorist
argument that government repression would drive the people on to the side of the
terrorists was borne out’ (Townshend, 2002, pp. 88–89). The British withdrew from
Palestine in 1948 and the UN partitioned Palestine into a state of Israel and a Palestin-
ian state. The resulting wars thereafter have formed the seed of modern late 20th
century terrorism (Garrison, 2002).

Terrorism: At First a Surgical Tool and Later a Blunt Instrument

In addition to the goal of government destruction, Russian revolutionaries and
European anarchists viewed terrorism as a tool to both protect and avenge the people.

268 A. H. Garrison

As Robespierre admonished, ‘[t]herfore let him beware who should dare to influence
the people by that terror which is made only for their enemies. … Death to the villain
who dares abuse the sacred name of liberty or the powerful arms intended for her
defense, to carry mourning or death on the patriotic heart’ (Robespierre, 1794). As
Morozov wrote in 1880, ‘only those who are really responsible for the evil deed’ are
targeted (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 74) because, as Most explains in Freiheit
(July 25, 1885), ‘no action carried out by anarchists can have its proper propagandist
affect if those organs whose responsibility it is’ to carry it out fail to make such actions
‘palatable to the people’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 106). The use of terror
should only be implemented to capture the attention of society in order to promulgate
their message (Propaganda by Deed) or to submit demands to the society (objective
driven terrorism) or to avenge an injustice or to prevent additional injustice (terror
driven terrorism) (Garrison, 2003).

This is not to say that the rule of individual targeting of ‘only those who are really
responsible for the evil deed’ was universal among anarchists and revolutionaries. In
1894 French anarchist Emile Henry ‘walked into the Café Terminus, a large establish-
ment near the St. Lazare railway station in Paris … reached into his overcoat pocket,
withdrew a small bomb, and threw it toward the orchestra’ (Liston, 1977, p. 27) killing
one person and injuring 20 people. At his trial he explained how he committed the act
and prepared for its completion (Liston, 1977). He stated that the attack was commit-
ted because of ‘his contempt for the musical tastes and cultural pretensions of the
white-collar workers who enjoyed the Café Terminus [and] he was punishing the bour-
geoisie for their collaborating with a hateful system’ (Liston, 1977, p. 28). He showed
no remorse for his actions. After being asked, what about the innocents in the Café, he
responded ‘Il n’y a pas d’innocents’ (Liston, 1977; Townshend, 2002).

The words there are no innocents ‘have echoed through the vacant corridors of a
terrorist’s mind ever since’ (Liston, 1977, p. 28). Since the end of World War II,
some ‘variation of the Emile Henry rationale is heard after every terrorist act’ (Liston,
1977, p. 28). On May 30, 1972, three terrorists from the Japanese Red Army took
semi-automatic machine guns out of violin cases and indiscriminately opened fire in
the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel killing 26 people and injuring 78. The attack was
coordinated with the General Command of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. After the attack, ‘the Palestine Liberation Organization said, “There are no
innocent civilians in Israel since we consider every Israeli as either a soldier fighting us
or a colonist occupying our land” ’ (Liston, 1977, p. 28, emphasis added).

Modern Terrorism: The End of Selectivity and the Rise of High Mortality Terror

As the 19th century came to a close and the 20th century began, selectivity in terrorist
targeting remained a significant aspect of terrorism. The Irish Rebellion (1919–1921)
instituted the concept of ‘selective terrorism, acts of terror against representatives of a
target class, to achieve political objectives. The use of terror was limited to members of
the selected class: representatives of the British government operating in Ireland’ such
as police officers, judges, government officials, and military personnel (Garrison, 2003,

Criminal Justice Studies 269

p. 46, emphasis added). After World War II, Jewish terrorist groups used selective
terror to force the British to abandon their occupation of Palestine (Garrison, 2003).

The concept of the use of terror as a tool, selectively applied, to a specific class of indi-
viduals or specific individuals so as to limit collateral injury did not last into the second
half of the 20th century (Garrison, 2002). On September 11, 2001 10 of 19 Islamic
fundamentalists (Al Qaeda operatives) used two transcontinental planes as explosive
devices to destroy the World Trade Center and killed 2,829 people (US State Depart-
ment, 2002). On May 12, 2003, nine Al Qaeda operatives used 400 pounds of explosives
and destroyed three residential buildings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and killed at least 30
people. On April 19, 1995 two members of the American anti-government radical right
used an estimated 4,800 lbs. of fertilizer and fuel oil based explosives to blow up the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people and injuring
more than 500 people. During the 1990s, the members of the radical pro-life movement,
Army of God, were responsible for assassinations of abortion providers, the bombing
of abortion clinics and gay nightclubs as well as the bombing of the Centennial Olympic
Park in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996. The last two decades of the 20th century established
the new reality of terrorism: the use of terror to achieve high victim mortality rates and
the abandonment of selective/individual terror (Garrison, 2003).

Terrorism: The Use of the Bomb and the Philosophy of the Bomb

Terrorists, for the last three decades, have used explosives to destroy buildings, airplanes,
airports, military bases and government offices. Although the amount of destruction
and the scientific sophistication involved in making explosives have changed, the use
of explosives is neither new nor novel. As Most wrote in Freiheit (March 27, 1886), more
than a century ago, the use of dynamite should be ‘willingly accepted and emphatically
recommended from every quarter, with the single observation that rifles, revolvers, and
dynamite are better than dynamite alone’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 107). In his
famous pamphlet entitled, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Handbook of
Instruction Regarding the Use and Manufacture of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton,
Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Arson, Poisons, etc. (1881), Most explained that ‘dynamite
… is a formidable weapon against any force of militia, police or detectives that may want
to stifle the cry for justice that goes forth from plundered slaves. It can be used against
persons and things. It is better to use it against the former than against bricks and
masonry … A pound of this stuff beats a bushel of ballots … and don’t you forget it’
(Cronin, 2002, p. 21). Nor is the advent of the suicide bomber a new phenomenon in
the history of the use of terror. As Hoffman recounts of the March 14, 1881 Narodnaya
Volya assassination of Czar Alexander II, ‘[f]our volunteers were given four bombs each
and employed along the alternate routes followed by the Tsar’s Cortege … the second
bomber emerged from the crowd and detonated his weapon, killing both himself and
his target’ (Hoffman, 1998, pp. 18–19).

The use of explosives as a tool to carry out terrorist acts has a long history, but the
Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HRSA), in the 1929 manifesto the Philos-
ophy of the Bomb, was the first to explain that terrorism and the use of explosives has a

270 A. H. Garrison

positive social and psychological affect on the terrorist personally irrespective of effect
it has on the target of the terror. In 1929 the HSRA attempted to kill the viceroy of India
by blowing up his train. The act failed and was condemned by many Indian leaders
including Mahatma Gandhi (Garrison, 2003). To answer its critics, the HRSA
published the Philosophy of the Bomb.

HRSA explained that a people who are oppressed and humiliated in the eyes of the
world and themselves due to the oppression of another seek ways to address the
oppression in order to regain self-respect. The HRSA asserted that terror is birthed by
humiliation and desperation, concurrent with the presence of occupation, and drives
the desire to make the occupier take notice that the oppression will no longer be toler-
ated as well as to command the attention of the rest of the world in order to make it
take notice of the oppression. Thus terror, according to the Philosophy of the Bomb, can
be effective regardless of its short-term affect on the oppressor; for the terror lifts the
spirits of the youth of an oppressed people and terror is seen by those youth as an effec-
tive tool to defend and regain their honor in their own eyes as well as in the eyes of their
peers.

More than 70 years after the HRSA asserted that terror is birthed by humiliation and
desperation, the Philosophy of the Bomb is espoused by the oppressed youth in the
Middle East. As a Palestinian imprisoned terrorist explained, ‘Recruits were treated
with great respect, a youngster who belonged to Hamas or Fatah was regarded more
highly than one who didn’t belong to a group, and got better treatment than unaffili-
ated kids’ (Post, Sprinzak and Denny, 2003, p. 178). Another terrorist explained that
families who had sons killed, injured or arrested due to terrorist activity ‘enjoyed a
great deal of economic aid and attention. Perpetrators of armed attacks were seen as
heroes, their families got a great deal of material assistance, [the] entire family … won
great respect’ for its sacrifice for the Palestinian people (Post et al., 2003, p. 177).

More than half a century after the British occupation of India ended, the Philosophy
of the Bomb is espoused by the Palestinian youth of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The
Philosophy of the Bomb explains, in part, why the intefada has lasted for three years; the
use of rocks, stones and suicide bombs is as much about regaining Palestinian self-
respect by not accepting the occupation of the territories by Israel and keeping the
attention of the world as it is a tactic to force Israel out of the territories. In a recent
study conducted by Post et al. (2003), 35 Middle Eastern terrorists were interviewed in
order to understand their psychology and justifications for the use of terror. One of the
interviewed terrorists explained, reflecting the concept of the Philosophy of the Bomb,
why suicide bombers targeted Israel:

You destroyed homes and turned children into orphans. You prevented people from
making a living, you stole their property, you trampled on their honor. Given that kind of
conduct, there is no choice but to strike at you without mercy in every possible way. (Post et
al., 2003, p. 178, emphasis added)

The use of terror has always been an appealing option to the young and those who
espouse terror have always sought to recruit and use the young to implement terror.
Bakunin wrote in 1869, ‘the healthy, uncorrupted mind of youth must grasp the fact

Criminal Justice Studies 271

that it is considerably more humane to stab and strangle dozens, nay hundreds, of
hated beings than to join with them to share in systematic legal acts of murder, in the
torture and martyrdom of millions of peasants’ (Laqueur and Alexander, 1987, p. 67).
More than a century later, bin Laden exhorts Arab youth to ‘know that their rewards
in fighting … the USA, is double than their rewards in fighting someone else not from
the people of the book’ (bin Laden, 1996). He praises these youth, proclaiming:

They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of
God like you …

…

Our youth believe in paradise after death. They believe that taking part in fighting will not
bring their day nearer; and staying behind will not postpone their day either.

…

These youths love death as you love life. They inherit dignity, pride, courage, generosity,
truthfulness and sacrifice from father to father. They are most delivering and steadfast at
war. (bin Laden, 1996)

Terrorism: Understanding its Nature

As the people of the USA were shocked by the act of terrorism on September 11, 2001,
an act of terrorism similarly shocked the people of the USA at the beginning of the 20th
century. On September 6, 1901 Leon Czolgosz, an American anarchist of Polish-
Russian descent and a follower of Erma Goodman, assassinated President William
McKinley. Czolgosz is reported to have said at his execution, ‘I killed the President
because he was an enemy of the good people! I did it for the help of the good people,
the working men of all countries!’ (Cronin, 2002, p. 31). At the beginning of two centu-
ries, terrorism was used to strike at the symbols of American democracy and political
power. Little has changed in two centuries.

Griset and Hahan observed:

From all corners of the earth, terrorism has been carried out by ideologues on the left and
the right, by wealthy aristocrats and poverty-stricken farmers, and by men and women. …
The ends sought by terrorists have varied enormously. Some terrorists hoped to overthrow
the government so they could assume power. … Liberating their country from colonial
rule has motivated some … and nationalist and separatist movements have [motivated
others]. Religion has been a driving force for some … whereas others have struck blows
against secular leaders or wealthy industrialists. (2003, p. 10)

President George W. Bush similarly observed:

The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the
same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders
children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a
young reporter for being a Jew.

We’ve seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first
attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the
attack on the USS Cole, and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent
men and women and children on September the 11th, 2001.

272 A. H. Garrison

None of these acts is the work of a religion; all are the work of a fanatical, political ideol-
ogy. The servants of this ideology seek tyranny in the Middle East and beyond. They seek
to oppress and persecute women. They seek the death of Jews and Christians, and every
Muslim who desires peace over theocratic terror. They seek to intimidate America into
panic and retreat, and to set free nations against each other. And they seek weapons of mass
destruction, to blackmail and murder on a massive scale. (Bush, 2004)

Terrorist groups have ranged in size, purpose, causes and have existed in various types
of governmental structures in various periods throughout human history. However,
the variety of terrorist activity and social contexts does not translate into the idea that
the ‘best way to understand terrorism is to examine the social, economic, political, and
religious conditions and philosophies existing at a particular time and place’ (Griset
and Mahan, 2003, p.10).

The use of terrorism as a tool to effect change has remained the same throughout
history. Although the causes asserted to justify terrorism have changed, the tool of
terrorism (and the value of its utility in the minds of those who use terror) has not
changed. Let me be clear about what I mean by the tool of terrorism. Terrorism is a tool
to cause change through the infliction of fear. The use of terrorism as a method to
achieve results remains constant regardless of the desired result. Thus all who use terror
to achieve a desired result, whether to build a society (Robespierre, Stalin or Moa), or
to bring down a societal structure (Most or Lenin), or resist occupation (HRSA, the
Irgun or the PLO), or in vengeance against a perceived indignity or injustice (bin Laden
and Al Qaeda), or to cause a specific single change in society (ALF or ELF), are
terrorists. The cause explains the terrorist but does not define him. The act of using terror
defines the terrorist.

It is not asserted that all terrorists are the same. There are significant differences
between Hamas and ALF; but both use terror as a tool to achieve their desired goals.
Both agree that the use of violence against a target within the larger society will
cause, or is hoped to cause, a change in that society. Both advocate the use of explo-
sives as a tool in their struggle to force their desired change. Although the bomb in
the days of Johann Most has advanced into the airplane of bin Laden today and the
explosive capacity of incendiaries has increased as technology has changed, the use
of explosives as tools of terror and the rationalization for using them has not
changed. Both bin Laden and the Army of God employ explosives to achieve their
respective goals. Both believe that an evil exists and both believe only the use of
violence will achieve their desired goals. Neither has hesitated to kill to achieve their
goals. The fact that the Army of God is a domestic single-issue terrorist group and
Al Qaeda is an international terrorist group does not change their agreement on how
change is made in society nor in their assessment of the value of the lives of those
they kill.

The techniques of terror today are much more destructive and numerous than
those 100 or 200 years ago, but the rationalization for the use of terror in the mind
of those who use terror and their belief in the utility of its implementation as a tool
for change has not changed. It is this fact that allows for an objective definition of
terror.

Criminal Justice Studies 273

Terrorism: The Issue of Definition

Terrorism Defined

I define terrorism as the use of force or violence or the threat of force or violence to change
the behavior of society as a whole through the causation of fear and the targeting of specific
parts of society in order to affect the entire society. The key to this definition is that force
is used (1) against a specific part of society so as to (2) cause fear in the greater society
in order to (3) change the entire society. The key to defining terrorism does not rest in
the targeting of civilians. Terrorism is about the use of violence with the primary
purpose of change caused by fear. Terrorism is not about the victim of the terror. For
example, a Russian anarchist kills a Tsar because such action will cause fear and disrup-
tion in the government as a whole, which the terrorist hopes will lead to the destruction
of society. The Tsar is not significant per se, it is the result of his assassination that the
terrorist is interested in.

A terrorist group blows up a plane over the ocean. The plane is destroyed with all of
its passengers and crew. The terrorist group takes responsibility and asserts that, ‘as
long as the people of Palestine are without homes, Americans will not be safe in the
sky’. They further assert that they ‘will put bombs on planes and at airports at will until
the Palestinians have a homeland’. Can one say that the terrorists blew up the plane
because that particular plane and those particular passengers had a strategic value in
the struggle for a Palestinian homeland? No. The victims of the plane were of little
consequence. The goal was to cause fear about flying in the traveling public as a whole
in order to change the behavior of travelers and put pressure on the USA and the world
to, in turn, put pressure on Israel in regard to the occupied territories. It is the goal and
the intent of the act that separates terrorism from war or criminal activity. For example,
as Weinberg and Davis (1989, p.8) explain:

… a commercial airliner may be skyjacked by individuals seeking to escape from one
nation by having its pilot fly it to another. But another airliner may be taken over by indi-
viduals who demand that newspapers publish their political manifesto in exchange for the
lives of its passengers. The latter is an act of terrorism, while the former is not.

The defining aspect of terrorism is in the intention of the terrorists and the circum-
stances of the act, not in the violence or the level of destruction that occurs per se.

Terrorism: One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Terrorist

Terrorism is not victim based, it is goal and objective based. When terrorism is under-
stood from this point of view, it is clear that one man’s terrorist is not another man’s
freedom fighter. Terrorism cannot be defined by attacks on ‘civilians’ or on ‘innocents,’
because these terms are subjective as the French Anarchist Henry and the PLO taught
us and as bin Laden has more recently reminded us. The post World War II era of
terrorism has adopted the concept ‘there are no innocents’, and the nature of terrorism
has changed from individual or selective targeting to indiscriminate targeting. But
whether targeted or indiscriminate, the goal of a terror incident is the fear that the act

274 A. H. Garrison

will produce and desired change in behavior that will occur due to the act. It is the
intent and the goal of violence that differentiates between terrorism and warfare.

The distinction between terrorism and warfare is an important one. As Gates
explains, ‘unlike war or revolution, terrorism is not an entity in and of itself. Instead it
is a tactic or a method that can and has been used by a variety of people in a variety of
contexts’ (Gates, 2002, 116). Weinberg and Davis (1989, p. 7) explains the difference
between the violence of guerrilla warfare and terrorism as follows:

… guerrilla organizations war against weakly deployed government forces, and either by
design or by accident inflict some civilian casualties along the way, terrorist groups usually
avoid attacking their armed opponents, preferring instead to commit acts of violence
against unarmed civilians. Indeed, this is what gives terrorism its shock value. Setting off a
bomb in a crowded department store, taking hostage children in an elementary school:
these are acts which usually generate much publicity.

Notice the difference. The target of guerrilla warfare has intrinsic value as a primary
purpose as opposed to the blowing up of a department store or kidnapping children
to generate fear and public attention. A terrorist will blow up a plane ‘in the hope of
deterring prospective passengers from flying to or from a particular nation.
Saboteurs, on the other hand, may blow up a bridge or railroad line in order to
prevent their enemies from resupplying their forces at a remote location’ (Weinberg
and Davis, 1989, p. 8). Ganor (1998) makes the same distinctions noting that rural
guerrilla warfare is ‘the use of violence against military personnel and security forces
in their area of deployment, activity and transport, in order to attain political aims’ as
supposed to indiscriminate terrorism which entails ‘using violence against a civilian
target, without regard to the specific identity of the victims – in order to spread fear in
a population larger than that actually affected – with the purpose of attaining political
aims’. Although the use of the word ‘civilian’ is problematic for reasons previously
discussed, the point is made.

In war, a target is selected because it has military value and will achieve a specific military
objective. In modern warfare, a specific target is attacked or destroyed because the action
serves a specific military necessity, achieves a specific result (utility) and leads to a specific
goal (objective) while limiting collateral damage (proportional use of force) to the civilian
population. In terrorism, the target is of little interest per se. What is important is that the
target will realize a certain reaction on the part of the greater society. (Garrison, 2003, p. 42)

Although in warfare ‘terror’ may have a tertiary result, the primary purpose is to
achieve a specific military objective. In modern warfare, discriminate targeting is
primary while in terrorism indiscriminate targeting is primary. The children and the
driver of a school bus blown up in the middle of a city are not the targets of the terrorist
nor was the purpose to kill the specific children on the bus. The purpose was to cause
terror in the rest of the city.

Terrorism: Why Words and Definitions Matter

The ability to define terrorism is not just an academic exercise. Note the:

Criminal Justice Studies 275

following exchange [that] took place between Ned Walker, Assistant to the Undersecretary
for Middle East Affairs at the US State Department, and the Honorable Lee Hamilton,
[C]hairman of the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the Committee on
Foreign Affairs [United States] House of Representatives:
Hamilton: Well, how do you define terrorism, do you define it in terms of non-

combatance?
Walker: The State Department definition which is included in the terrorism report

annually defines it in terms of politically motivated attacks on non-
combatant targets.

Hamilton: So an attack on a military unit in Israel will not be terrorism?
Walker: It does not necessarily mean that it would not have a very major impact on

whatever we were proposing to do with the PLO.
Hamilton: I understand that, but it would not be terrorism.
Walker: An attack on a military target. Not according to the definition. Now wait a

minute; that is not quite correct. You know, attacks can be made on
military targets which clearly are terrorism. It depends on the individual
circumstances.

Hamilton: Now wait a minute. I thought that you just gave me the State Department
definition.

Walker: Non-combatant is the terminology, not military or civilian.
Hamilton: All right. So any attack on a non-combatant could be terrorism?
Walker: That is right.
Hamilton: And a non-combatant could include military?
Walker: Of course.
Hamilton: It certainly would include civilian, right?
Walker: Right.
Hamilton: But an attack on a military unit would not be terrorism?
Walker: It depends on the circumstances.
Hamilton: And what are those circumstances?
Walker: I do not think it will be productive to get into a description of the various

terms and conditions under which we are going to define an act by the PLO
as terrorism. (Ganor, 1998)

This exchange shows the difficulties that arise when an act of terrorism is defined by
the victim rather than by the goal of the actor. To answer Congressman Hamilton’s
question – would an attack on a military unit in Israel be a terrorist act – the answer is
yes if the unit were targeted for the purpose of affecting the policy or the behavior of
Israel. If the destruction of the Israeli unit was secondary to the affect it would have on
Israel, the attack was terrorism. It would not be an act of terrorism if the PLO wanted
to remove the unit due to military necessity or strategy. If the unit held a position that
would prevent the implementation of PLO operations and the unit was attacked so as
to remove it from the position to allow PLO activity, then the attack would be an act of
war or guerrilla activity. In such a case, the destruction of the Israeli unit was the
primary purpose of the attack. If the attack produces a secondary effect on the policy
of Israel, such a result does not change the fact that the attack served a specific military
purpose, which is an act of war, not terrorism.

Scholars at the Rand Corporation and the International Policy Institute for Counter
Terrorism have similarly asserted that terrorism should be defined by the nature of the
act rather the nature of the victim (Drake, 1998; Ganor, 1998; Jenkins, 1980). Such an

276 A. H. Garrison

approach allows for a definition of terrorism that can be applied to state governmental
as well as non-governmental terrorism. Wardlaw (1982, p. 16) defined terrorism as
‘the use, or threat of use, of violence by an individual or a group, whether acting for or
in opposition to established authority, when such action is designed to create extreme
anxiety and/or fear inducing effects in a target group larger than the immediate
victims with the purpose of coercing that group into acceding to political demands of
the perpetrators’. Claridge similarly defines terrorism as the ‘systematic threat or use
of violence, whether for or in opposition to established authority, with the intention
of communicating a political message to a group larger than the victim group by
generating fear and so altering the behavior of the larger group’ (Claridge, 1998, 66).
Ezeldin (1987),1 Rosie (1987),2 Fontaine (1988),3 Wells (1996),4 Kushner (1998),5 the
United Nations (1999)6 and Schwartz (2002)7 have asserted similar definitions of
terrorism.

It is conceded that there are various definitions of terrorism (Schmid, 1983) and
that the definition asserted in this article is by no means universal. After 20 years of
teaching and studying terrorism and the use of terror, Cooper concluded that terror-
ism is simply ‘the intentional generation of massive fear by human beings for the
purpose of securing and maintaining control over other human beings’ (Cooper,
2002, p. 3). Researchers have sought to define every possible aspect of terrorism:
defining it from the terrorist’s point of view, from the view of the victim, from its
utility, to viewing terrorism as another side of war (Kushner, 1998). Terrorism has
been defined as a psychological response to oppression and an illegitimate use of
power and violence to make political, social and/or religious change. Although the
definitions in the literature range from the very short to the verbose, the use of
politically sensitive and subjective adjectives like ‘innocent’, ‘civilian’, ‘unarmed’,
‘illegal’, ‘merciless killing’ or ‘unjustified’, fail to provide a clear understanding of
terrorism. ‘[F]ocusing on the nature of the act rather than on the identity of the
perpetrators [,] the nature of their cause’ (Thackrath, 1987, p. 27) or the nature of
the victim, allows for a more objective analysis of the use of terror and the nature of
terrorism.

Conclusion

Terrorism is an old tactic that has been used by governments to suppress revolution as
well as by revolutionaries who have sought to achieve power over a government. It has
been employed by single-issue groups seeking to address a specific evil in society and
by revolutionary governments trying to maintain power. When reviewing the literature
on terrorism, written by the terrorists themselves it becomes evident that there is a
congruence of thought on the utility of terror. Mao taught, ‘hit one, teach a thousand’
and his example of revolutionary terror, Lenin explained, ‘the purpose of terror is to
terrorize’, and centuries before Sun Tzu determined, ‘kill one person, frighten ten
thousand’.

Terrorism has been used by individuals and by organizations. Terror has claimed
the lives of kings, presidents and leaders of all types. Terrorists have justified the use of

Criminal Justice Studies 277

the bomb and the bullet as the only means to ‘free the people’ from oppression, for
never has a terrorist lived that has said terror was used for individual gain. All terrorists
assert that they are the defenders and liberators of oppressed people. Only the tactics
employed and the level of destruction achieved by terrorists have changed. The causes
change but the psychology and utility of terror, as a tool in the mind of the terrorist has
not. The name of the terrorist changes but the view that lives must be lost to achieve
freedom has not. In the end the terrorist, whether in possession of governmental
power or in want of governmental power, uses terror to achieve a political, social or
religious goal. Modern terrorism is at least two hundred years old and she has not aged
a day.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper, ‘Terrorism by Any Other Name is Still Terrorism’, was
presented at the Twentieth International Social Philosophy Conference: War and
Terrorism. Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, July 17–19, 200

Notes
1.

[1] The ‘systematic and persistent strategy of violence practiced by a state or political group
against another state or political group through a campaign of acts of violence … with the
intent of creating a state of terror and public intimidation to achieve political ends’ (Ezeldin,
1987, p. 40).

[2] The ‘use and/or threat of repeated violence in support of or in opposition to some authority,
where violence is employed to induce fear of similar attack in as many non-immediate victims
as possible so that those so threatened accept and comply with the demands of the terrorist’
(Rosie, 1987, p. 7).

[3] Terrorism is ‘political action employing extraordinary violent means to achieve the largely
psychological effect of intimidation and demoralization on the part of a nation’s regime and
its populace’ (Fontaine, 1988, p. 4).

[4] Terrorism is the ‘strategy of employing violence or the threat of violence to escalate peoples
fears in order to achieve or keep political power. Terrorism consists of random violent acts on
persons or property in order to frighten or coerce a large number of people’ (Wells, 1996, p. 454).

[5] ‘Terrorism is the use of force (or violence) committed by individuals or groups against
governments or civilian populations to create fear in order to bring about political (or social)
change’ (Kushner, 1998, p. 10).

[6] Terrorism is any ‘act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any
other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when
the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a
government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act’ (United
Nations, 1999).

[7] ‘[T]errorism is defined as intentional actions (usually violent in word and deed) that are
executed by individuals, groups, organizations and/or governments in order to produce a
sense of extreme fear (i.e. terror) in a large number of other people, including people in
the general “civilian” population beyond the immediate targets and victims. Political
terrorism, a sub-category, is terrorism that is intended to do these things in such a way as
to coerce political leaders to accede to the political demands of the perpetrators’ (Schwartz,
2002, pp. 24–25).

278 A. H. Garrison

References

bin Laden, O. (1996). Declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy
places. Delaware Criminal Justice Council Terrorism Research Page. Retrieved October 13,
2003, from http://www.state.de.us/cjc/binladen.htm

bin Laden, O. (1998). Jihad against jews and crusaders. Delaware Criminal Justice Council Terrorism
Research Page. Retrieved October13, 2003, from http://www.state.de.us/cjc/binladen.htm

Bush, G. (2004). Presidential address to the nation in prime time press conference April 13, 2004.
White House: Washington DC. Retrieved April 15, 2004, from http://www.whitehouse.gov/
news/releases/2004/04/print/20040413–20.html

Claridge, D. (1998). State terrorism? Applying a definitional model. In B. Schechtenan and
M. Slann (Eds.), Violence and terrorism 98/99 (4th ed.) (pp. 64–72). Guilford, CT: Annual
Editions.

Cooper, H. (2002). Terrorism: The problem of definition revisited. In H. Kushner (Ed.), Essential-
Readings on Political Terrorism (pp. 1–16). Lincoln, NE: Gordian Knot Books.

Cronin, I. (2002). Confronting fear: A history of terrorism. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Drake, C. (1998). Terrorists’ target selection. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc.
Ezeldin, A. (1987). Terrorism & political violence: An Egyptian perspective. Chicago, IL: Office of

International Criminal Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Fleming, M. (1980). Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and anarchist theory in late nineteenth-

century Europe. Terrorism, 4, 1–23.
Fontaine, R. (1988). Terrorism: The Cuban connection. New York, NY: Crane Russak and Co.
Ganor, B. (1998). Defining terrorism: Is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter?

International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism: Herzliya, Israel. Retrieved May 23, 2003,
from http://www.ict.org.il/articles/define.htm

Garrison, A. (Ed.) (2002). Terrorism: Past, present and future – a training course. Wilmington, DE:
Delaware Criminal Justice Council.

Garrison, A. (2003). Terrorism: The nature of its history. Criminal Justice Studies, 16(1), 39–52.
Gates, J. (2002). The US Army and irregular warfare. Retrieved May 23, 2003, from http://

www.wooster.edu/history/jgates/
Griset, P., & Mahan, S. (2003). Terrorism in perspective. London: SAGE.
Hoffman, B. (1998). Inside terrorism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Jenkins, B. (1980). The study of terrorism: Definitional problems. Santa Monica, CA: The Rand

Corporation.
Kushner, H. (1998). Terrorism in America: A structured approach to understanding the terrorist threat.

Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas.
Laqueur, W., & Alexander, Y. (Eds.) (1987). The terrorism reader: A historical anthology (rev. ed.).

New York, NY: New American Library.
Laqueur, W. (2002). A history of terrorism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Leader, S., & Probst, P. (2003). The Earth Liberation Front and the environmental terrorism.

Delaware Criminal Justice Council Terrorism Research Page. Retrieved October 13, 2003, from
http://www.state.de.us/cjc/otherarticles.htm

Linse, U. (1982). ‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two concepts of anarchist violence. In
W. Mommsen and G. Hirschfeld (Eds.), Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Europe (pp. 201–229). London: Berg Publishers.

Liston, R. (1977). Terrorism. New York, NY: Thomas Nelson Inc.
Mommsen, W. (1982). Non-legal violence and terrorism in western industrial societies: An

historical analysis. In W. Mommsen and G. Hirschfeld (Eds.), Social protest, violence and
terror in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe (pp. 384–403). London: Berg Publishers.

Parry, A. (1976). Terrorism: from Robespierre to Arafat. New York, NY: Vanguard Press.
Post, J., Sprinzak, E., & Denny, L. (2003). The terrorists in their own words: Interviews with 35

incarcerated Middle Eastern terrorists. Terrorism and Political Violence, 15(1): 171–184.

Criminal Justice Studies 279

Robespierre, M. (1794). Report upon the principles of political morality which are to form the basis
of the administration of the interior concerns of the Republic. Modern History Sourcebook:
Maximilien Robespierre: Justification of the Use of Terror. Retrieved April 10, 2003, from http://
www.fordam.edu/halsall/mod/robespierre-terror.html and Modern History Sourcebook:
Maximilien Robespierre: On the Principles of Political Morality, February 1794. Retrieved April
10, 2003, from http://www.fordam.edu/halsall/mod/1794robespierre.html [Two translations
of the same speech used interchangeably].

Rosie, G. (1987). The dictionary of international terrorism. New York, NY: Paragon House.
Schmid, A. (1983). Political terrorism: A research guide to concepts, theories, data bases and literature.

New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Schwartz, T. (2002). Terror and terrorism in the Koran. In H. Kushner (Ed.), Essential Readings on

Political Terrorism (pp. 22–34). Lincoln, NE: Gordian Knot Books.
Thackrah, R. (1987). Terrorism: A definitional problem. In P. Wilkinson and A. Stewart (Eds.),

Contemporary Research on Terrorism (pp. 24–41). Aberdeen, Great Britain: Aberdeen Univer-
sity Press.

Townshend, C. (2002). Terrorism: A very short introduction. New York, NY: Oxford Press.
United Nations (1999). International convention for the suppression of the financing of terrorism.

Article 2 (b) Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in resolution 54/109 on
9 December 1999. Retrieved May 11, 2004, from http://www.un.org/law/cod/finterr.htm

United States Department of State, Office of International Information Programs (2002). A selected
chronology of key events, September 11, 2001 — Present. Retrieved September 27, 2003, from
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itgic/0902/ijge/gjchron.htm

Wardlaw, G. (1982). Political terrorism: Theory, tactics and counter-measures. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.

Weinberg, L., & Davis, P. (1989). Introduction to political terrorism. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
Publishing.

Wells, D. (Ed.) (1996). An encyclopedia of war and ethics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Citation: 13 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 97 1986
Provided by:
UNT | Dallas College of Law

Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline

Tue May 30 14:38:48 2017

— Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance
of HeinOnline’s Terms and Conditions of the license
agreement available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/License

— The search text of this PDF is generated from
uncorrected OCR text.

— To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope
of your HeinOnline license, please use:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/onulr13&collection=journals&id=107&startid=&endid=126

https://www.copyright.com/ccc/basicSearch.do?operation=go&searchType=0&lastSearch=simple&all=on&titleOrStdNo=0094-534X

Is “Terrorism” Worth Defining?

GEOFFREY LEVITT*

The search for a legal definition of terrorism in some ways resem-
bles the quest for the Holy Grail: periodically, eager souls set out, full
of purpose, energy and self-confidence, to succeed where so many
others before have tried and failed. Some, daunted by the difficulties
and dangers along the way, give up, often declaring the quest mean-
ingless. Others return claiming victory, proudly bearing an object they
insist is the real thing but which to everyone else looks more like the
same old used cup, perhaps re-decorated in a slightly original way.
Still others, soberly assessing the risks, costs and benefits attendant
upon the attempt, never set out at all, preferring to devote their
energies to humbler but possibly more practical tasks. But the long
record of frustrations and failures often seems to spur further efforts;
the 99th Congress, for example, saw a dozen bills containing various
attempts at legislative definitions of terrorism.’

All those who have sought to define terrorism legally, in both
the international and U.S. settings, have taken one of two paths. One
path leads toward the elaboration of an analytical, generic definition,
complete within itself, into which all “terrorist” acts would then fit-
a “top-down” or deductive approach. The other path carves out a
series of narrow, self-contained, sharply defined categories of acts that
together compose an open-ended framework for defining (often impli-
citly) and suppressing terrorism – a “ground-up” or inductive
approach. In order to assess the relative efficacy of these two methods
in providing a definitional foundation for the construction of legal
mechanisms to suppress terrorism, this discussion will survey and
analyze selected international and U.S. efforts to define terrorism in
a legally operative context.

I. INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS

The first organized international legal attempt to grapple with
the problem of defining terrorism came in the series of conferences
collectively known as the International Conferences for the Unifica-
tion of Penal Law, which were held in various European capitals
during the 1920s and 1930s. Most notably, the Sixth (Copenhagen)
Conference in 1935 adopted a model penal provision on terrorism,
the key articles of which covered a series of acts including “wilful
acts directed against the life, physical integrity, health or freedom” of

* International Affairs Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Office of the Legal
Adviser, U.S. Department of State. The opinions expressed herein are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Council on Foreign Relations or
the U.S. Department of State.

1. See infra Part II.

OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

various officials, “causing a disaster” by “impeding” or “interrupting”
transport or utility services, “wilful destruction of . . . public build-
ings,” “wilful use of explosives in a public place,” or “any other wilful
act which endangers human lives and the community,” where any of
these acts “has endangered the community or created a state of ter-
ror calculated to cause a change in or impediment to the operation
of the public authorities or to disturb international relations.”

This prewar international effort to establish a legal regime for
the suppression of terrorism culminated in the 1937 League of Nations
Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism. 3 Article
1(2) of this Convention defines “acts of terrorism” as “criminal acts
directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state
of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons
or the general public.” To be subject to the Convention, an act had
to be (1) an “act of terrorism” within the meaning of Article 1(2);
(2) directed against a party to the Convention; and (3) one of the
enumerated acts set out in Articles 2 and 3, which included “any
wilful act causing death or grievous bodily harm or loss of liberty” to
certain categories of public officials, “wilful destruction of, or damage
to, public property,” or “any wilful act calculated to endanger the
lives of members of the public.”

The imprint of the Conference draft provision on the 1937 Con-
vention is evident. While the Conference text goes into much more
detail about the covered offenses than the Convention, extending even
to such esoterica as “propagating or provoking . . . epizootic or epi-
phytic diseases” (Article 2(1)), the main difference between them is
terminological rather than substantive. The Conference draft distin-
guishes the offenses subject to its coverage by their common effect of
“endanger[ing] the community or creat[ing] a state of terror.” The
Convention similarly pulls together a list of offenses by reference to
their common qualities; in doing so, however, it inserts the additional
step of explicitly labelling the acts so grouped as “terrorism,” and
making the applicability of that label a pre-condition for the applica-
bility of the Convention itself.

As international concerns about terrorism re-emerged in the
1970s, the United Nations began to devote specific attention to the

2. Sixth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, Copenha-
gen, Aug. 31-Sept. 3, 1935, Actes de la Conference, 1938, 420, reprinted in M. BASSIOUNI,
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM AND POLITICAL CRIMES 472 (1975). Other articles of the
draft text covered such matters as conspiracy, incitement, and assistance.

3. League of Nations Doc. C.546.M383.1937.V. (1937). This convention, which was
signed by 23 states, ratified by one (India), and acceded to by one (Mexico), never
entered into force.

4. It also, not surprisingly for a document negotiated by official representatives
of States rather than drawn up by an international gathering of jurists, adds the con-
junctive requirement that the acts in question be “directed against a State” and omits
the disjunctive requirement of “endangering the community.”

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

issue. Part of that process was the United States 1972 Draft Conven-
tion for the Prevention and Punishment of Certain Acts of Interna-
tional Terrorism, 5 put forward in the Sixth Committee of the U.N.
General Assembly. The word “terrorism” appeared nowhere in the
operative text of the draft Convention. Rather, Article 1 defined an
“offense of international significance” as one committed 1) with intent
to “damage the interests of or obtain concessions from a State or an
international organization,” 2) under certain enumerated transnational
circumstances, 6 3) consisting of unlawfully killing, causing serious
bodily harm, or kidnapping another person (including attempts and
complicity in such acts) and 4) “committed neither by nor against a
member of the armed forces of a State in the course of military
hostilities.”

Like the 1937 League of Nations Convention, the 1972 U.S. Draft
Convention defines a class of offenses that will be subject to its opera-
tion. At the heart of the definition in both cases is an element of
intent: in the 1937 Convention, “to create a state of terror in the
minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general
public;” in the 1972 Draft, “to damage the interests of or obtain con-
cessions from a State or an international organization.” Rounding out
the definition in each instrument are two other kinds of elements:
substantive (1937 Convention: consisting of one of the acts enumer-
ated in Articles 2 and 3 (see supra); 1972 Draft: consisting of unlaw-
fully killing, causing serious bodily harm, or kidnapping (including
attempts and complicity)), and jurisdictional (1937 Convention:
directed against a State Party, 1972 Draft: committed under the trans-
national circumstances enumerated in Article l(a) and (b) (see note
6, supra)). Except for the 1937 Convention’s use of the “terrorism”
label to characterize acts meeting its intent requirement (a usage that
the 1972 Draft avoids by means of the neutral term “offense of inter-
national significance”), the two are structurally quite similar, though
the content each gives to its structural elements differs substantially.

The General Assembly Resolution on international terrorism that
emerged from the Sixth Committee process (the same process in
which the U.S. Draft Convention was advanced) established an Ad
Hoc Committee on International Terrorism to “consider the observa-
tions of States” and “submit its report with recommendations for pos-
sible co-operation for the speedy elimination of the problem . . .to
the General Assembly.”7 The Ad Hoc Committee set up three Sub-

5. U.N. Doc. A/C.6/L.850 (1972).
6. That the act “(a) Is committed or takes effect outside the territory of a

State of which the alleged offender is a national; and (b) Is committed or takes effect
(i) Outside the territory of the State against which the act is directed, or (ii) Within
the territory of the State against which the act is directed and the alleged offender
knows or has reason to know that a person against whom the act is directed is not a
national of that State[.”

7. G.A. Res. 3034, 27 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 30) at 119, U.N. Doc. A/RES/3034
(1972), paras. 9, 10.

1986]

100 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

Committees of the Whole, one of which was concerned with the defini-
tion of international terrorism.

Conceptual unanimity eluded the Ad Hoc Committee. The Non-
Aligned Group’s proposed definition of acts of international terror-
ism, though not intended to possess legal significance and certainly
not constrained by any known principles of legal draftsmanship, none-
theless indicated, when compared with the U.S. Draft Convention, the
depth of the obstacles in store for any real effort in the U.N. context
to achieve an agreed legal definition. The Group would have included
in the term “international terrorism”:

(1) Acts of violence and other repressive acts by colonial, racist and
alien regimes against peoples struggling for their liberation … ;
(2) Tolerating or assisting by a State the organizations of the rem-
nants of fascist or mercenary groups whose terrorist activity is di-
rected against other sovereign countries;
(3) Acts of violence committed by individuals or groups of individu-
als which endanger or take innocent human lives or jeopardize fun-
damental freedoms. This should not affect the inalienable right to
self-determination and independence of all peoples under colonial and
racist regimes and other forms of alien domination and the legiti-
macy of their struggle …;
(4) Acts of violence committed by individuals or groups of individu-
als for private gain, the effects of which are not confined to one
State.8

As contrasted with the 1937 League of Nations Convention and
the 1972 U.S. Draft Convention, in this definition the explicit intent
element, to the extent it is there, has been turned on its head: pri-
vate gain, as opposed to political motivation, is now the determining
factor. The substantive element has been drastically expanded to
include “repressive” acts, not just violent ones, in the first paragraph;
“tolerating or assisting” terrorist activities in the second paragraph;
“acts of violence . . . which endanger or take innocent human lives
or jeopardize fundamental freedoms” in the third paragraph; and simp-
ly “acts of violence” in the fourth paragraph. In addition, a new em-
phasis is given to the identity of the perpetrator. In the first para-
graph, not just any act of violence or other repressive act qualifies;
the act in question must be carried out by a “colonial, racist [or]
alien regime.” In the second paragraph, the “tolerating or assisting”
must be undertaken “by a State.” The “acts of violence” referred to in
the third and fourth paragraphs must be committed “by individuals
or groups of individuals.” Finally, a jurisdictional element of sorts is
present in the fourth paragraph (“effects of which are not confined
to one State”).

The Non-Aligned Group’s proposed definition reflects a distinct
conceptual basis: terrorism is not merely a special category of indi-

8. 28 U.N. GAOR Supp. (1973), reprinted in M. BASSIOUNI, supra note 2, at

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

vidual criminality to be handled in a politically neutral fashion by
cooperating states; it is fundamentally a political problem that arises
from the actions of States, to be addressed by de-legitimizing certain
categories of acts committed by certain States.9 The fundamental con-
ceptual divisions revealed in this early product of the Ad Hoc Com-
mittee persisted throughout its six-year lifetime.’0

Notwithstanding the failure of the international community to
agree in the United Nations on a definition of terrorism that could
serve as the basis of a general legal instrument for its suppression,
some progress in this area has been achieved through another method:
the conclusion of a series of individual conventions that specify cer-
tain limited categories of offenses implicitly considered “terrorist”-
without attempting to define or even employ that term-and impose
the requirement of aut dedere, aut judicare with respect to such
offenses. In these instances the intent element has been set aside in
favor of sharply narrowed and highly elaborated substantive and juris-
dictional elements as a means of defining the various types of offenses
to which the particular instrument will apply.

Thus, aircraft hijacking,” aircraft sabotage,’ 2 crimes against inter-
nationally protected persons, 3 hostage-taking, 4 and crimes involving
nuclear materials’5 have all been subjects of conventions which define
the covered offenses in substantive terms and establish a jurisdictional
framework within which the convention will apply to these
offenses.’ 6 Prototypical of this group of treaties is the 1970 Hague
Convention on aircraft hijacking, Article 1 of which states that:

Any person who on board an aircraft in flight:

(a) unlawfully, by force or threat thereof, or by any other form of

9. For further discussion of this point see Frank & Lockwood, Preliminary
Thoughts Towards an International Convention on Terrorism, 68 AM. J. INT’L L. 69,
73 (1974).

10. See Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on International Terrorism, 34 U.N.
GAOR Supp. (No. 37), U.N. Doc. A/34/37 (1979); for a more comprehensive discussion
of this history see Note, An Analysis of the Achille Lauro Affair: Towards an Effective
and Legal Method of Bringing International Terrorists to Justice, 9 FORDHAM INT’L
L.J. 328, 352 (1986).

11. Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft, Dec. 16, 1970,
22 U.S.T. 1641, T.I.A.S. No. 7192 [hereinafter Hague Convention].

12. Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil
Aviation (Sabotage), Sept. 23, 1971, 24 U.S.T. 564, T.I.A.S. No. 7570 [hereinafter Mon-
treal Convention].

13. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Interna-
tionally Protected Persons, Including Diplomatic Agents, Dec. 14, 1973, 28 U.S.T. 1975,
T.I.A.S. No. 8532 [hereinafter IPP Convention].

14. Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, Dec. 17, 1979, 18 INTL LEGAL
MATERIALS 1457 (1979) [hereinafter Hostages Convention].

15. Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials, Oct. 26, 1979, 18
INT’L LEGAL MATERIALS 1419 (1979) [hereinafter Nuclear Materials Convention].

16. For a concise discussion of these conventions see J. MURPHY, PUNISHING
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISTS 9-11 (1985).

1986]

102 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 13

intimidation, seizes, or exercises control of, that aircraft, or attempts
to perform any such act, or

(b) is an accomplice of a person who performs or attempts to per-
form any such act

commits an offense …. 17

Article 3 supplements this statement of the offense with a definition
of “in flight” (subparagraph 1),18 and establishes the Convention’s juris-
dictional limits in various situations.19

This Hague Convention structure proved resilient, being adopted,
mutatis mutandis, in all of the other international “anti-terrorism”
conventions mentioned above. The approach to the legal suppression
of international terrorism these conventions have taken is essentially
inductive, in contrast to the basically deductive approach of the 1937
League of Nations Convention and the 1972 U.S. Draft Convention.
This contrast highlights an important advantage of the inductive
method: it avoids political conflict over basic definitional principles
(though not political conflict entirely, as the negotiating histories of
the IPP and Hostages Conventions attest 20 ), permitting textual agree-
ment to be reached.

The 1977 European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism
2′

represented a triumph of sorts for the inductive approach. In this
instrument the term “terrorism” found its way into the title and
preamble, but no further. Instead, the Convention’s substantive scope
was defined by reference to a list of five specific types of offenses.

17. Hague Convention, supra note 11, 22 U.S.T. at 1644.
18. Id.
19. The remainder of Article 3 is as follows:

2. This Convention shall not apply to aircraft used in military, customs or
police services.
3. This Convention shall apply only if the place of take-off or the place of
actual landing of the aircraft on board which the offence is committed is
situated outside the territory of the State of registration of that aircraft; it
shall be immaterial whether the aircraft is engaged in an international or
domestic flight.
4. In the cases mentioned in Article 5 [aircraft of joint or international regi-
stration], this Convention shall not apply if the place of take-off and the
place of actual landing of the aircraft on board which the offence is commit-
ted are situated within the territory of the same State where that State is
one of those referred to in that Article.
5. Notwithstanding paragraphs 3 and 4 of this Article, Articles 6 [custody
over an alleged offender], 7 [extradite-or-prosecute requirement], 8 [extradi-
tion generally] and 10 [judicial assistance] shall apply whatever the place of
take-off or the place of actual landing of the aircraft, if the offender or the
alleged offender is found in the territory of a State other than the State of
registration of that aircraft.

Id. at 1644-45.
20. See Sofaer, Terrorism and the Law, 64 FOREIGN AFF. 901, 915-18 (1985).
21. Jan. 27, 1977, Europ. T.S. No. 90 [hereinafter European Convention]. For a

more comprehensive discussion of this Convention see J. MURPHY, supra note 16, at
13.

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

The first four of these offenses correspond respectively to the cate-
gories of offenses covered by the Hague, Montreal, IPP, and Hostages
Conventions-in the former two cases by specific citation, in the lat-
ter two by substantive description. 22 The fifth category was “an offense
involving the use of a bomb, grenade, rocket, automatic firearm or
letter or parcel bomb if this use endangers persons. ‘ 23 Thus, the
European Convention represents a legal “definition” of terrorism as
an enumerated series of specific criminal acts. Moreover, this legal
definition is without any explicit linkage of the acts thus enumerated
through any common characteristics or elements such as intent or
motive, identity of actor, or identity of victim.

II. U.S. EFFORTS

As U.S. concern over international terrorism mounted in the early
and mid-1970s, Congress began to consider legislative approaches to
the problem. An important outgrowth of such consideration was the
1978 “Act to Combat International Terrorism.”25 This bill, which con-
tained a wide variety of authorities in the areas of economic sanc-
tions, foreign airport security, aircraft sabotage and piracy, and nu-
clear material security, sets forth a definition of “international terror-
ism.” This definition includes any act designated as an offense under
the Hague, Montreal and IPP Conventions, as well as “any other unlaw-
ful act which results in the death, bodily harm, or forcible depriva-
tion of liberty to any person, or in the violent destruction of prop-
erty, or an attempt or credible threat to commit any such act,” under
specified transnational circumstances similar to those set forth in the
1972 U.S. Draft Convention, 26 when the act was “intended to damage
or threaten the interests of or obtain concessions from a state or an
international organization,”2 7 with a military exception also similar to
that in the 1972 U.S. Draft. 28 This definition, unlike that of the 1972

22. European Convention, Art. 1 (cited in J. MURPHY, supra note 16, at 13).
The Hostages Convention, of course, had not yet been concluded at this time, though
it had been formally proposed.

23. Id.
24. The Supplementary Treaty Concerning the Extradition Treaty Between the

Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Signed at London on 8 June 1972, June 25, 1985,
Treaty Doc. 99-8, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. (1985), which was based on the European Con-
vention, is a recent example of the application of this approach. A number of amend-
ments not pertinent to this discussion were proposed by the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee following its review of the treaty, 132 CONG. REC. S9120 (daily ed. July 16,
1986).

25. S. 2236, S. REP. No. 908, 95th Cong., 2d Sess. 91 (1978).
26. Id. at § 3(a)(4). For relevant text of the 1972 U.S. Draft Convention see

supra note 6. The one addition in S. 2236 to the circumstances outlined in the 1972
Draft was subsection 3(a)(4)(D): “within the territory of any state when found to have
been supported by a foreign state, irrespective of the nationality of the alleged offender.”

27. Id. at § 3(a)(4)(i).
28. This exception reads as follows: “Provided, That the act of international ter-

rorism is .. . not committed in the course of military or paramilitary operations

19861

OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

U.S. Draft and the others discussed in the preceding section, is not
geared to the establishment of a universe of covered offenses to be
subject to a special legal regime such as aut dedere, aut judicare.
Instead, it emphasizes certain congressional reporting requirements,
and the imposition of economic sanctions against states that support
terrorism. Nevertheless, this definition, when compared with those
mentioned above, is structurally similar. It represents, in fact, a com-
bination of the inductive and deductive approaches, containing both
a list of offenses denoted by specific reference to the relevant con-
vention and a generic description of acts linked by their common
intent, substantive, and jurisdictional elements.

While the 1978 “Act to Combat International Terrorism” did not
become law, the same year saw the enactment of the first (and as of
this writing, still the only) statutory definition of “terrorism” in U.S.
federal law. This came in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
1978:29

International terrorism means activities that-
(1) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a
violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State,
or that would be a criminal violation If committed within the juris-
diction of the United States or any State;
(2) appear to be intended-

(A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or
coercion; or
(C) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or
kidnapping; and

(3) occur totally outside the United States, or transcend national
boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished,
the persons they appear intended to coerce or intimidate, or the
locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.30

Structurally the same elements are present in the FISA defini-
tion as in the other deductive definitions discussed In the preceding
section, with subsection (1) containing the substantive element, (2)
the intent element, and (3) the jurisdictional element. As is charac-
teristic of this type of definition, the substantive element is quite
broad; the focus is on the intent element as the key to distinguishing
what is “terrorist” about the covered acts. In this case, the intent
element is drafted so vaguely as to leave the entire definition almost
nebulous; 3 ‘ this is acceptable because in the context of FISA the defi-

directed essentially against military forces or military targets of a state or an organ-
ized armed group.” Id. at § 3(a)(4)(ii).

29. Pub. L. No. 95-511, 92 Stat. 1783 (1978) (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. §
1801 (1982)) [hereinafter FISA].

30. FISA, supra note 29, at § 101(c), 50 U.S.C. § 1801(c). Paragraphs (1) and
(2) of this subsection were repeated in the definition of “act of terrorism” employed in
the Attorney General’s terrorism reward authority, 18 U.S.C.A. § 3077 (West 1985).

31. What entities, for instance, would fall within the term “civilian population” in
subparagraph 2(A)? The entire population of a given country? The populations of sev-

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

nition has no penal or foreign policy significance, serving only as a
predicate for the application of the special electronic surveillance
regime established by the Act.32

This consideration did not, however, inhibit legislative drafters
from using the FISA definition as a model in later bills that certainly
were intended to have penal or foreign policy significance, or both.
The 99th Congress saw numerous such proposals. S. 275 (the “Anti-
terrorism Act of 1985”), for instance, aimed to “protect the internal
security of the United States by creating the offense of terrorism,

” 3

providing for various criminal penalties up to and including death
for the commission, or for procuring, attempting or threatening the
commission, of an act of “terrorism . . . within the United States or
any State, territory, possession, or district.”34 The definition of the
criminal offense “terrorism” is taken practically verbatim from FISA,
minus the latter’s jurisdictional element.3 5 Several other proposed crim-
inal laws used this device as well, in most cases including the FISA
jurisdictional element along with the substantive and intent elements
in order to reach acts of “international” terrorism committed outside
the United States in addition to, or instead of, acts within U.S. terri-
torial jurisdiction. 6 One such bill did not even bother to repeat the
FISA language, but defined the offense simply by citing the relevant
section of FISA itself.37 Other penal law drafters were slightly more
creative, attempting to adapt the FISA definition to their purposes
by adding or subtracting certain ingredients to or from the basic
model. Thus, the definition of the terrorism offense in H.R. 4294 (the
“Antiterrorism Act of 1986”) adopted all three of the FISA intent
sub-elements verbatim but added a fourth: “to retaliate against or
punish a government or a government official or employee for a pol-
icy or conduct of such government or official or employee.”38 H.R.

eral countries taken together? A particular organized group within a country, such as
a church or labor union? A random assortment of civilians, such as the collection of
persons who happen to be standing in a bank during an armed robbery?. The legisla-
tive history is not particularly helpful on this or other potential internal problems of
the FISA definition. See S. Rep. No. 511, 95th Cong., 2d Sess. 29, reprinted in 1978
U.S. CODE CONG. & ADMIN. NEWS 3904, 3931.

32. The FISA definition has been upheld against court challenges on grounds
that it gives the judiciary unconstitutionally broad authority to make foreign policy,
United States v. Megahey, 553 F. Supp. 1180, 1196 (E.D.N.Y. 1982), aff’d, 729 F.2d
1444 (1983) (the definition calls for “findings of objective fact”), and of overbroadness
in first amendment terms, United States v. Falvey, 540 F. Supp. 1306, 1314 (E.D.N.Y.
1982) (FISA provisions “are not overbroad and unconstitutional on their face”).

33. S. 275, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. (1985).
34. Id. at § 3(a).
35. Id. The only change from the corresponding FISA language is the singular

.activity” vice the plural form.
36. See, e.g., S. 1940, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. § 3(a) (1985); S. 2414, 99th Cong., 2d

Sess. § l(b) (1986); H.R. 3565, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. § 2 (1985); H.R. 4125, 99th Cong.
2d Sess. § 2 (1986).

37. H.R. 4288, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. § 2(a) (1986).
38. H.R. 4294, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. § 2 (1986).

198

106 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

4294 also changed the jurisdictional element to stipulate that the
covered criminal conduct take place outside the United States and
be directed against the United States or a national of the United
States.3 9 H.R. 4786 (also the “Antiterrorism Act of 1986”) similarly
retained the basic content of the FISA definition, but condensed it
considerably and changed the jurisdictional element along the lines
of H.R. 4294:

(a) Whoever coerces, intimidates, or retaliates against, or attempts
or conspires to coerce, intimidate, or retaliate against, a government
or a civilian population by an act of violence against-
(1) a national of the United States; or
(2) the property or facilities of the United States or a national of
the United States;
shall be [punished as provided].

Bills directed at the foreign policy aspects of terrorism have also
resorted to the FISA definition for inspiration. S. 1941 (the “Interna-
tional Terrorism Deterrence Act of 1985”), would, inter alia, provide
a mechanism for the imposition of a wide range of economic, trade
and aid sanctions against foreign states that support “international
terrorism” – defined precisely as in FISA.4 1 Similarly, S. 2335, which
would authorize the President to “undertake actions to protect Uni-
ted States persons against terrorists and terrorist activity through
the use of all such anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism measures as
he deems necessary,” incorporates the FISA substantive and intent
elements practically verbatim. 42 One of the very few anti-terrorist legi-
slative efforts in the 99th Congress that did not rely on FISA for its
definitional content was H.R. 2781 (the “Act to Combat International
Terrorism”) – a foreign policy-oriented measure providing, inter alia,
for sanctions against terrorism-supporting foreign states. H.R. 2781
turned instead to another historical source, the 1978 “Act to Combat
International Terrorism,”43 adopting the latter’s substantive, intent, and
jurisdictional elements almost wholesale.

The domination of 99th Congress anti-terrorism legislative efforts
by the overworked FISA definition reached its apex in S. Res. 190,
“[e]xpressing the sense of the Senate that the President should call
for international negotiations to make international terrorism a uni-
versal crime prosecutable in the United States.”4 This resolution called
upon the President to seek international negotiations “for the pur-

39. Id.
40. H.R. 4786, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. § 2(a) (1986).
41. S. 1941, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. § 6(2) (1985).
42. S. 2335, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. § 3 (1986). In order to constitute “terrorism”

under this bill the activity must also be directed against United States persons and
must be “committed by an individual who is not a national or permanent resident
alien of the United States.” Id.

43. See supra note 25 and accompanying text.
44. H.R. 2781, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. § 2(a) (1985).
45. S. Res. 190, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. (1985).

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

pose of agreeing on a definition of ‘international terrorist crimes’;”4 6

the definition that the resolution would have the international com-
munity adopt bears a close, and by now not unexpected, resemblance
to that found in FISA. One wonders what the reaction of the draf-
ters of section 101(c) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
would have been had they known that their product would, eight
years later, be put forth in the Senate as the legal standard for defin-
ing the crime of terrorism, not just for the United States, but for the
entire world.

Against this background it is noteworthy that the anti-terrorism
penal legislation that actually emerged from the 99th Congress was
informed essentially by the inductive approach – although with a
novel deductive twist. Section 1202 of the Omnibus Diplomatic Secur-
ity and Antiterrorism Act of 1986, which amends Part I of title 18 of
the U.S. Code by inserting a new chapter 113A entitled “Extraterri-
torial Jurisdiction Over Terrorist Acts Abroad Against United States
Nationals,” provides U.S. criminal jurisdiction over the killing of, or
an act of physical violence with intent to cause serious bodily injury
to or that results in such injury to, a U.S. national outside the Uni-
ted States.

In this statute the substantive and jurisdictional elements are
clearly there, but there is no special intent element. As shown in
part I supra, the absence of a terrorism-oriented intent element in
the definition of the offense, as in the Hague, Montreal, IPP and Hos-
tages Conventions, requires a relatively narrow, precise description of
the substantive element if the definition as a whole is to retain its
coherence. Yet, section 1202 has neither. It maintains its anti-terrorism
focus by a novel device:

(e) LIMITATION ON PROSECUTION.-No prosecution for any offense
described in this section shall be undertaken by the United States
except on written certification of the Attorney General or the high-
est ranking subordinate of the Attorney General with responsibility
for criminal prosecutions that, in the judgment of the certifying offi-
cial, such offense was intended to coerce, intimidate, or retaliate
against a government or a civilian population.

The intent element – firmly rooted, to no great surprise, in FISA
– has surfaced, not as an element of the offense itself, but as a lim-
itation on prosecution of the offense. Thus, in the end, Congress resis-
ted the numerous calls to define deductively a new offense of terror-
ism. Instead, Congress opted for an extension of extraterritorial juris-
diction over offenses the substance of which was already defined in

46. Id.
47. Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986, H.R. 4151, 99th

Cong., 2d Sess., 132 CONG. REC. H5944, H5957 (daily ed. Aug. 12, 1986), Pub. L. No.
i9-399 (1986).

48. 132 CONG. REC. at H5958.

19861

108 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

the federal criminal code, stipulating at the same time that this new
jurisdiction was only to be exercised in cases where the offense was
committed with a terrorist-type political intent.

The preceding section of the same Act, however, goes in the oppo-
site direction. Section 1201 expresses the sense of Congress that “the
President should establish a process to encourage the negotiation of
an international convention to prevent and control all aspects of inter-
national terrorism,”50 and further stipulates that this convention should
provide, inter alia, “an explicit definition of conduct constituting ter-
rorism.”5 Unlike its cousin, S. Res. 190,52 this section fails to supply
future negotiators with guidance as to the actual content of such a
definition. It looks as though in section 1201 Congress is asking the
President to undertake for the entire world what Congress itself
refrained in section 1202 from doing for the United States – to estab-
lish a deductive definition of terrorism in a penal law context –
without even the dubious benefit of being furnished guidelines for
the effort.

III. DISCUSSION

A. General

The two basic approaches to the problem of legally defining ter-
rorism can be analyzed using the three kinds of definitional elements
identified in the preceding discussion, namely substantive, juris-
dictional, and intent-oriented. 53 The deductive method is characterized
by the use of a fairly broad substantive element and a general, polit-
ically oriented intent element. This method aims to abstract the

49. Evidently wary of the inherent vagueness of the FISA intent standard (see
supra note 31) – particularly objectionable in a criminal law context, even though
the standard is not here technically an element of the offense – the conferees
attempted to clarify it by the following report language: “The term ‘civilian population’
includes a general population as well as other specific identifiable segments of society
such as the membership of a religious faith or of a particular nationality, to give but
two examples. Neither the targeted government nor civilian population, or segment
thereof, has to be that of the United States.” 132 CONG. REc. at H5969.

50. Id. at H5957.
51. Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986, supra note 47,

at subsection (c)(1). The previous year Congress had expressed its sense that the
President should “establish a process” to negotiate “a viable treaty to effectively pre-
vent and respond to terrorist attacks,” which should “incorporate an operative defini-
tion of terrorism.” International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985,
Pub. L. No. 99-83, § 507, 99 Stat. 222.

52. Supra note 46.
53. It is recognized that some elements that have been advanced as part of

legal definitions of terrorism do not necessarily fall explicitly into one of these three
categories. In particular, the identity of the victim of an act, or of its perpetrator. may
constitute a component of a definition. Indeed, in some cases this component is given
a position of paramount importance. See, e.g., R. FRIEDLANDER, TERROR-VIOLENCE:
ASPECTS OF SOCIAL CONTROL 158, 167 (1983). Franck & Lockwood, supra note 9, at
72-82, advance a five-part categorization, adding identities of victim and perpetrator
to the three elements adduced in the present article. Analytically, however, this does

[Vol. i3

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

generic qualities of “terrorism,” covering a wide variety of criminal
conduct, but only under certain circumstances – those described in
the intent element. It usually, though not always,5 4 employs the term
“terrorism” explicitly, and strives for conceptual self-sufficiency, i.e. to
set down a legal definition that will be valid once and for all.

The inductive method, on the other hand, relies upon a relatively
precise description of the conduct constituting the substantive element
and omits the political intent element that characterizes the deduc-
tive approach. This method makes no effort at abstraction, but cov-
ers a particular type of conduct that will trigger a given legal result
without regard to political intent. The term “terrorism” is not employed
in an operative context, though it may find its way into a preamble 55
or a title.58 Finally, the inductive approach is open-ended, with no
pretensions to definitiveness; new specific categories of conduct are
always subject to coverage in subsequent instruments.

B. International

The inductive approach has clearly triumphed in the international
legal arena. The reason is not hard to find. The fundamental concep-
tual differences among major segments of the international commun-
ity – so starkly revealed in the work of the U.N. Ad Hoc Commit-
teeV7 – are intractable, and there is very little prospect of this situa-
tion ameliorating in the foreseeable future. The prospect of meaningful
consensus on key elements of a deductive definition, in particular
the substantive element (insofar as it relates to the state versus indi-
vidual identity of the perpetrator) and the intent element (insofar as
it relates to “political” versus “private” motivation), is thus extremely
poor. Put simply, governments that have a strong political stake in
the promotion of “national liberation movements” are loath to sub-
scribe to a definition of terrorism that would criminalize broad areas
of conduct habitually resorted to by such groups; and on the other
end of the spectrum, governments against which these groups’ vio-
lent activities are directed are obviously reluctant to subscribe to a
definition that would criminalize their own use of force in response
to such activities or otherwise. In this light the dictum “one man’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” can be seen as a state-

not appear to constitute a separate element on the same level as the three used in
this discussion; rather, it may form part of one of these three. Thus, it may come
under the substantive heading, such that an act is only an offense in the first place if
it is directed against certain categories of victims or carried out by certain categories
of perpetrators. Or it may be part of the jurisdictional element, where the offense only
comes within the jurisdiction of the given instrument if, for example, the victim is not
a national of the state where the offense is committed. Or it may be part of the
intent element, where the act is only an offense if it is intended to affect a particular
type of entity, such as a “civilian population” or a government.

54. See supra note 5 and accompanying text.
55. As in the Hostages Convention, supra note 14.
56. As in the European Convention, supra note 21.
57. See supra notes 7-10 and accompanying text.

19861

110 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

ment not so much of an inherent moral conundrum, but of an inter-
national political reality.658

In contrast, the inductive approach can result in consensus on
legal instruments for the suppression of terrorism. This is accom-
plished by focusing upon specific types of actions that – regardless
of motivation or context – are either instrinsically morally repug-
nant and/or so clearly interfere with the conduct of international commerce
and relations as to pose a potential threat to all states. Of course,
the practical impact of such instruments may be small, as govern-
ments ignore or violate them with impunity;, but at least through this
approach it has proven possible to create the instruments in the first
place, as a prerequisite to substantive progress in the effort to com-
bat terrorism through legal means.

But the question of how to proceed further in the international
arena is not thereby answered conclusively. Even with the relative
progress achieved through the inductive method to date, and given
that political realities at present and for the foreseeable future make
success through the deductive method doubtful, we still must ask
whether the potential benefits to be derived from such success would
make the effort worthwhile. One prominent scholar in this area be-
lieves it would be, despite the difficulties he recognizes: “The world
community has probably gone about as far as it can with the piece-
meal approach to combatting terrorism; the time may have now come
to consider a more comprehensive step.”6 9 Other authorities have ex-
pressed a preference for a continuation of the more modest induc-
tive approach, primarily on grounds of feasibility.60 Still others take
the position that since just about any act that could conceivably be
called “terrorist” is already a criminal offense under municipal legal
systems – murder, arson, extortion, kidnapping, unlawful interference,
and so on – there is no need for a generic definition of terrorism
on the international level at all.

But what would be the advantages of the deductive approach in
the international setting? Such advantages could come on two levels:
practical and moral-political. On the practical level, it could be said
that it is simply more convenient, neater, and more efficient to encom-
pass all acts of international terrorism in one instrument, rather than
to go on endlessly extending the scope of the concept through suc-
cessive separate conventions. But the significance of this benefit does

58. Cf. the characterization of “terrorism” offered by Soviet legal scholars, which
includes, in addition to the more or less typical elements (act of violence, political
motive, directed against a group of persons, classes, or a state), the peculiarly Leninist
element of “the absence of an opportunity to achieve the declared … objective.” I.
BLISHCHENKO & N. ZHDANOV, TERRORISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW 39 (1984).

59. J. MURPHY, supra note 16, at 129.
60. See Franck & Lockwood, supra note 9, at 89.
61. M. BASSIOUNI, supra note 2, at 486-87; R. FRIEDLANDER, supra note 53, at

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

not seem to justify the effort that would be necessary to employ this
method successfully. Moreover, it is perfectly possible, as the Euro-
pean Convention shows, 62 to employ the inductive method in a way
that is convenient, neat, and efficient: one simply covers a wider var-
iety of specific offenses in a single instrument.

So the possible practical advantages cannot constitute a sufficient
reason to choose the deductive road. Only the potential moral and
political benefits of a general legal instrument based on this approach
would justify a serious effort to utilize it. Such results are self-evident,
though rarely, if ever, explicitly recognized by the proponents of the
deductive approach: a multilateral anti-terrorism legal instrument
based on a generic definition of terrorism would in effect put the
official international seal of disapproval on a whole range of violent
political behavior, with a moral emphasis that the facially apolitical
inductive approach lacks. Those who engage in such behavior would
be effectively branded as international outlaws. This, in turn, could
constitute an important step toward the goal of rendering terrorism
an actually – as opposed to rhetorically – unthinkable device in
international relations.

This is unquestionably a worthwhile goal. But the elaboration of
a generic, deductive legal definition of terrorism is not necessarily a
wise way to aim for it. In the first place, the special effort required
to develop precise legal terminology serves merely to clarify and
sharpen, not soften, the underlying political differences that exist be-
tween governments with regard to terrorism, as the experience of
the U.N. Ad Hoc Committee shows. Further, from a strictly legal point
of view, it may not be possible to develop a generic definition that
will, with sufficient precision, cover all acts that should be covered
and omit all acts that should be omitted. The problem here is inher-
ent in the element that makes a generic definition possible in the
first place – intent. In the context of terrorism this element must
be characterized by reference to some political purpose: “directed
against a State” (1937 League of Nations Convention);6 3 “intended to
damage the interests of or obtain concessions from a State or an
international organization” (1972 U.S. Draft);6 “for a political purpose”
(1986 International Law Association Draft Articles on Extradition in
Relation to Terrorist Offenses). But in many cases, it is simply impos-
sible to determine whether an act of violence is directed against or
intended to damage the interests of a State, or committed for a “poli-
tical” purpose. Terrorists do not necessarily make explicit demands
or openly reveal the ultimate target of their actions. Is a massacre
carried out by extremist Palestinians at Zurich airport in which Swiss,
German, Israeli and Libyan nationals are killed “directed against” a

62. See supra notes 21-24 and accompanying text.
63. See supra notes 3-4 and accompanying text.
64. See supra note 5 and accompanying text.

19861

112 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

State? Which one? Or, was it done to kill a personal enemy of one of
the gunmen, and others who were shot simply got in the way? What
about a bomb on a French airliner somewhere over the Mediterra-
nean Sea en route from Paris to Cairo that kills a Jordanian official
and a British Member of Parliament, along with assorted other pas-
sengers of a dozen different nationalities? Was it done “for a political
purpose,” or did the saboteur have a grievance against Air France –
or an insurance policy on her estranged husband who was a pas-
senger on the flight? Most importantly, who will make these determi-
nations when the time comes for the instrument’s aut dedere, aut
judicare obligation to be applied? The requesting state? The requested
state? The International Court of Justice?

The inductive approach, while it lacks the sweeping potential
moral-political benefits of the deductive approach, has, unlike the
latter, the advantages of practicality as well as clarity – a hijacking
is a hijacking, a hostage-taking is a hostage-taking. Of course, at the
margin there is always room for interpretation, but the confusion, if
any, is not inherent in the definition. Moreover, this approach is not
without potential moral and political benefits of its own, albeit more
modest ones. Surely it is morally and politically significant for there
to exist an international consensus that aircraft hijacking, aircraft
sabotage, attacks on diplomats, and hostage-taking constitute inter-
national crimes whose perpetrators should be denied sanctuary from
prosecution for their acts, even if these acts are not explicitly labeled
as terrorism and even if many other types of terrorist acts are not
thereby covered. Finally, realism compels the recognition that if govern-
ments often do not live up to their obligations under these much
more limited instruments, the chances of a decent record of obser-
vance of a generic anti-terrorism convention are even slimmer. In an
environment of widespread non-observance of obligations under such
a convention, any moral-political benefits it might have brought with
respect to the overall struggle against international terrorism could
be vitiated, and even reversed.

C. United States

In U.S. federal legislation the inductive approach has been strongly
preferred. As the discussion in Part II supra showed, several pro-
posals for the creation of a criminal offense of “terrorism,” either
domestic or international, have been unsuccessful. Similarly, in the
foreign policy area, no generic definition of terrorism has become law,
despite a number of proposals in this direction. It is only in a couple
of very specific and narrow contexts – FISA and (using the same
definition) the Attorney General’s terrorism rewards authority 5 – that
a legislative definition has been enacted. While this situation can
hardly be traced to the same sort of conceptual and political div-

65. See supra note 30.

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

isions that have plagued international efforts, there has apparently
been a realization in the United States as well that the drawbacks of
the deductive approach outweigh its potential benefits.

In a penal setting, those drawbacks largely stem from the same
basic problem discussed above with regard to international legal
efforts: the inherent vagueness of any generic, “political” intent ele-
ment. In the U.S. legal context, this flaw poses fundamental constitu-
tional problems. The due process clause requires that criminal stat-
utes “give a person of ordinary intelligence fair warning that his con-
templated conduct is forbidden by the statute.”66 When first amend-
ment concerns are also involved, as they would of necessity be in
any statute that included a politically-oriented intent element, this
requirement has even greater force.6 7 Even were such problems some-
how resolved, the breadth of a generic intent element would severely
complicate the task of prosecutors, who would be required to prove
beyond a reasonable doubt the presence of a particular political moti-
vation.6 8 Consequently, this would leave the Government open to accu-
sations of selective prosecution based on the political views of defen-
dants.6 9 A separate but substantial problem would be the likely absence
of a similar intent element in the penal law of extradition treaty
partners, thus removing the factor of dual criminality, a prerequisite
to extradition 70 – and one must wonder what the point would be of
an international terrorism offense for which the United States could
not successfully request the extradition of suspected offenders. Evi-
dently, considerations of this nature ultimately led the 99th Congress
to adopt an essentially inductive international terrorism penal law,
as described in Part II supra.

7 ‘

In the foreign policy area several laws now provide for sanctions
of various types against foreign countries involved in international
terrorism. 72 In no case does such a law define “terrorism.” The exec-
utive branch thus has the responsibility, within the limits imposed by

66. Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156, 162 (1972), and cases cited
therein.

67. See Ashton v. Kentucky, 384 U.S. 195, 200 (1966).
68. See Smith, Antiterrorism Legislation in the United States: Problems and Impli-

cations, 7 TERRORISM 213, 221 (1984).
69. See generally Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968).
70. J. MURPHY, supra note 16, at 44.
71. Prior to the enactment of § 1202 of the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and

Antiterrorism Act of 1986, supra note 47, one commentator had called for a federal
penal law employing a generic definition of terrorism. Paust, Terrorism and “Terrorism-
Specific” Statutes, 7 TERRORISM 233, 234 (1984). Professor Paust responds to concerns
of the type noted in the text above, some of which were brought out explicitly in a
companion piece by Professor Smith, supra note 68, with the assertion that “a suffi-
ciently descriptive definitional approach can alleviate the unwanted effects flowing from
… overly broad statutory schemes.” Id. Professor Paust’s approach was supported by
Professor Murphy, supra note 16, at 132-33, also prior to enactment of the new inter-
national terrorism law.

72. See, e.g., International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985,
supra note 51, § 505, 22 U.S.C.A. § 2349aa-9 (West Supp. 1986) (authorizing the Pres-

19861

114 OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW

the framework of the particular statute and by the basic congres-
sional oversight power, of determining precisely what foreign govern-
ment behavior will result in the application of these sanctions. This
situation appears preferable to one in which a foreign government’s
actions would trigger certain punitive consequences based on an anal-
ysis of its behavior in terms of a pre-determined deductive definition
of “terrorism,” as was proposed in several bills in the 99th Congress.

7 3

Such a definition, even if it could be crafted so as to avoid being
facially applicable to the actions of numerous governments upon
which the United States would certainly not wish to impose sanc-
tions of any type,7 4 would serve only to divert attention from the
real to the semantic: legislators, commentators and policymakers would
be led to argue over whether country X’s actions came under the
wording of the definition instead of considering whether it was in
the foreign policy interests of the United States to apply sanctions,
and if so of what type, against country X. Current law provides ample
authority for the U.S. Government to apply a wide range of sanctions
against terrorism-supporting countries with the needed flexibility.
Accordingly, an overall deductive definition of terrorism as a legisla-
tive basis for the imposition of such sanctions appears unneccesary
and undesirable.

IV. CONCLUSION

The search for an authoritative, single legal definition of terror-
ism has gone on for at least the past fifty years at the international
level, and for almost a decade in the United States, without reaching
its goal. But in both these settings, the construction of legal mecha-
nisms that can be used to suppress terrorism has proceeded despite

ident to “ban the importation into the United States of any good or service from any
country which supports terrorism or terrorist organizations or harbors terrorists or
terrorist organizations”); Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, § 6(j), 50
U.S.C. App. § 2405(i) (1982) (requiring notification of congressional committees prior
to approval of license for exports to countries that have repeatedly provided support
for acts of international terrorism, where such exports would make a significant con-
tribution to that country’s military potential or would enhance its ability to support
acts of terrorism); Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, § 620A, 22 U.S.C. §
2371 (1982) (prohibiting various forms of foreign assistance to countries that grant
sanctuary from prosecution to any individual or group which has committed an act of
international terrorism or otherwise supports international terrorism); Trade Act of
1974, § 502(b)(7), 19 U.S.C. § 2462(b)(7) (1982) (requiring that the President not
designate a country as a “beneficiary developing country” for purposes of the General-
ized System of Preferences if such country “aids and abets, by granting sanctuary from
prosecution to, any individual or group which has committed an act of international
terrorism”); Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act of 1986, supra note
47, § 509 (prohibiting export of items on the United States Munitions List to coun-
tries which have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism).

73. See supra notes 41-44 and accompanying text.
74. FISA-derived definitions such as those in S. 1941 or S. 2335 (supra notes

41-42) clearly would not pass even this initial test; under those broad standards many
of the world’s governments, perhaps even including that of the United States, would
have to be said to engage in “terrorist” behavior from time to time.

[Vol. 13

IS “TERRORISM” WORTH DEFINING?

this failure, in effect ignoring the lack of an overarching deductive
definition and focusing instead on specific categories of criminal acts
– building from the bottom up, as it were, a structure of legal author-
ity available for use against those who commit terrorist acts. The
evident conclusion is that a deductive legal definition is not really
necessary. Indeed, it is not clear that such a definition would even
be beneficial. In the international context, given the intractable con-
ceptual and political differences among states on this issue, it would
be at best a watered-down, papered-over, exception-ridden orphan
whose main practical result would provide a further basis for dis-
pute and invective at the United Nations. In the U.S. context, it would
in the penal area add little if anything to the federal prosecutor’s
arsenal, severely complicate the prosecutorial task, and be useless in
securing international extradition; and in the foreign policy area,
would only restrict needed executive branch flexibility and engender
sterile debates over formulas instead of substance.

The fundamental problem with the deductive approach was eluci-
dated definitively by the late Professor Richard Baxter: “We have
cause to regret that a legal concept of ‘terrorism’ was ever inflicted
upon us. The term is imprecise; it is ambiguous; and above all, it
serves no operative legal purpose.” 5 This is not to say that – par-
ticularly in the international setting – the inductive approach repre-
sents the best of all possible worlds, or that the deductive approach
can be discarded without sacrifice. The problem with the inductive
method, from the viewpoint of counter-terrorism, is its lack of spe-
cific focus on terrorism per se. Not all hijackings, sabotages, attacks
on diplomats, or even hostage-takings are “terrorist”; such acts may
be done for personal or pecuniary reasons or simply out of insanity.
The international legal instruments that address these acts are thus
in a sense “overbroad” themselves: the attack of an enraged spouse
on a philandering diplomat who has been cheating with the former’s
partner is hardly of the same international significance as the assas-
sination of the Ambassador by militant separatists.” Such diffuseness
tends to undermine the moral and political force of these instruments
as a counter-terrorism measure. This feature is also, however, pre-
cisely what renders the instruments facially neutral and thereby per-
mits them to be concluded in the first place by a disparate and
fractious international community. In the construction of anti-terrorist
legal mechanisms, as in so many other enterprises, the best may in-
deed be the enemy of the good.

75. Baxter, A Skeptical Look at the Concept of Terrorism, 7 AKRON L. REv. 380
(1974), quoted in J. MURPHY, supra note 16, at 3.

76. This problem has somewhat less weight in the area of unlawful interference
with international civil aviation, presumptively an act of international significance
whether “terrorist” or not.

19861

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 287A R T I C L E

Discourse & Communication
Copyright © 2007

SAGE Publications.
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi

and Singapore)
www.sagepublications.com

Vol 1(3): 287–308
10.1177/1750481307079207

The mass media and terrorism

D A V I D L . A L T H E I D E
A R I Z O N A S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y

A B S T R A C T The mass media promotes terrorism by stressing fear and an
uncertain future. Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially
went unreported and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations.
Notwithstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear
and crime, the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more
pronounced since the United States ‘discovered’ international terrorism on
11 September 2001. Extensive qualitative media analysis shows that political
decision-makers quickly adjusted propaganda passages, prepared as part of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to emphasize domestic support
for the new US role in leading the world. These messages were folded into the
previous crime-related discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive
communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk
are a central feature of everyday life. Politicians marshaled critical symbols
and icons joining terrorism with Iraq, the Muslim faith, and a vast number of
non-western nations to strategically promote fear and use of audience beliefs
and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals,
including expanding domestic social control.

K E Y W O R D S : fear, mass media, propaganda, qualitative media analysis, social
control

The mass media and popular culture have altered how we learn about the world
and how the world is run. This is becoming more apparent with foreign policy
and international affairs (Adams, 1982; Campbell, 1998; Hess, 1996; Kellner,
2003; Wasburn, 2002). Mass media information provides a context of meanings
and images that prepare audiences for political decisions about specific actions,
including war. Citizens are, after all, audience members of various mass media,
which, in the case of most media in the United States, are entertainment oriented
in order to maximize profits. This article draws on extensive qualitative document

288 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

analysis of news reports from newspapers, television, and magazines (Altheide,
2002, 2006) to illustrate how mass media accounts about the ‘war on terror’
were grounded in a discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive com-
munication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a
central feature of everyday life. This was done by selectively framing discourse
(Van Dijk, 1988) to proclaim the moral and social superiority of the United States.
Moreover, the ‘crisis’ of the 9/11 attacks was artfully constructed through news
accounts as the ‘world has changed’ and that future survival would depend on
giving up many basic civil liberties, particularly ‘privacy,’ which could be set aside
like a heavy coat in an Iraqi summer. Indeed, citizens concerned about violation
of civil liberties – including the denial of habeas corpus – were cast as ‘privacy
advocates,’ as though they were lobbyists for special interests. These messages
were folded into the crime-related discourse of fear which implied that caring and
safety are expressed as more control, including surveillance.

News media and popular culture depictions of the US reaction to terror attacks
reflects a culture and collective identities steeped in marketing, popular culture,
consumerism, and fear. Elite news management and propaganda by the military-
media complex produced terrorism scenarios that were reflected in national
agendas and everyday life (Louw, 2003). Major news themes through the first
four years of the Iraq War were molded in a moral framework that permitted the
dehumanization of the enemy, redefined an action as ‘torture’ if the results rise to
‘to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant
body function’ (Umansky, 2006), and also promoted more social control of
citizens to keep them safe.

War stories are told with the flourish of explicit moral discourse. Trade stories are
told with the patient repetition of words suggesting, but not directly stating, that the
rival nation is unreasonable and unfair. (Wasburn, 2002: 125)

The attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 were defined in the
news media and popular culture as an assault on American culture, if not civil-
ization itself (Altheide, 2004). These definitions were aligned with a broad
context and a preexisting discourse of fear, along with symbolic images of ‘Arabs’
as the ‘other,’ or marginalized outsiders, who are threats to personal and national
security (Adams, 1981; Altheide, 1981, 1982).

On 21 September 2001, President Bush said, ‘Al Qaeda is to terror what the
mafia is to crime.’ Consistent with previous war propaganda, the enemy was
immoral, while the US was above reproach, with good intentions, even if things
sometimes went wrong. Indeed, the ultimate derogatory way of referring to the
enemy is to discount an identity of any kind, except for moral epithets. They are not
just against the US, these fighters are ‘evil’ and ‘hateful.’ Thus, in 2004, President
Bush criticized media coverage of the Iraq War, by minimizing the threat to
US forces and plans:

‘What you’re seeing on your TV screens,’ the president said when minimizing the
Iraq insurgency in May, are ‘the desperate tactics of a hateful few.’ (http://www.nytimes.
com/2004/10/17/arts/17rich.html?ex=1098794787&ei=1&en=11955974621c8
ee7, emphasis added)

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 289

Two years later, after former Secretary of State Colin Powell questioned whether
the Iraq War was helpful to the moral reputation of the United States in September
2006, President Bush denied that the United States might lose the high ground
in the eyes of world opinion, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested
on Thursday:

‘It’s unacceptable to think there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of
the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent
women and children to achieve an objective,’ said Bush, growing animated as he spoke.
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14848798/, emphasis added)

The language of ‘we do no wrong’ is exemplified in how killings of civilians were
presented.

Soldiers as gunmen
What we call assailants is a critical definition of the situation vis-à-vis a moral
justification, intentions, as well as a cultural script of legitimacy and social control.
US news reports referred to the Iraqi fighters, at first as criminals and thugs, later,
as ‘insurgents,’ and throughout as ‘gunmen.’ Many journalists accepted military
spokespersons’ definitions of Iraqi fighters as ‘criminals’ and ‘thugs’ in the early
part of the war by those who were promoting propaganda. One journalist found
this to be quite strange:

The US Army propaganda about who the insurgency was – that they were dead-enders
and it was over, a bunch of criminals – was very effective, and that was essentially what
was written for a long time. So I think that, in many ways, there was an enormous
amount of press self-censorship early on, for about almost the first year of the
invasion . . . They were very effective in their propaganda for journalists and for Americans
who didn’t know what was going on, but in Iraq it was a disaster. (Editors, Columbia
Journalism Review, 2006: 30, emphasis added)

The self-censorship extended to treating death by the enemy as barbaric,
while US related deaths were simply unavoidable. One account illustrates the
‘barbarism’ – beheading – attributed to Iraqi ‘gunmen,’ while the killing by US
soldiers is described as simply ‘killed.’

BAGHDAD, Iraq – US forces . . . recovered the bodies of two American soldiers
reported captured by insurgents last week. An Iraqi defense ministry official said the
men were tortured and ‘killed in a barbaric way’ . . . Maj. Gen. Abdul-Aziz Mohammed,
said the bodies showed signs of having been tortured. ‘With great regret, they were
killed in a barbaric way,’ he said . . . Also, just hours before the two soldiers went missing
Friday, a US airstrike killed a key al-Qaida in Iraq leader described as the group’s ‘religious
emir,’ he said.

Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani, or Sheik Mansour, was killed
with two foreign fighters in the same area where the soldiers’ bodies were found, the
US spokesman said. The three were trying to flee in a vehicle.

[S]even masked gunmen, one carrying a heavy machine gun, killed the driver and took
the two other US soldiers captive. (Gamel, 2006, emphasis added)

290 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

Iraqi fighters were ‘gunmen,’ or ‘insurgents,’ rather than an army, soldiers, or
even guerillas – largely because these terms provide a ‘legitimate’ anchorage in
institutions, but also because the term ‘guerillas’ echoes the political and military
failures of Vietnam. And this can most easily be accomplished by using simple
terms to define the enemy (rather than the ‘enemies’), for example, insurgents,
terrorists, but not the terms that were used in unsuccessful wars, for example,
opposition fighters were referred to as ‘guerillas’ in the Vietnam War. A sociologist,
who was quoted in an article that explained how American soldiers could commit
atrocities against civilians, provided one of the only references to Iraqi fighters as
‘guerillas’ (however, note that even this quote about a horrendous slaughter of a
family, which one soldier described as ‘the My Lai of this generation,’ is preceded
by the qualified ‘allegedly’):

Military sociologists who have studied soldiers in battle say incidents such as what
allegedly happened at Haditha tend to increase as insurgencies go on. Charles Moskos,
one of the nation’s leading experts on military personnel, said the nature of the Iraqi
insurgency, particularly as it enters its fourth year, makes it difficult for soldiers to
distinguish friend from foe. ‘There is a guerrilla group that is being supported by the
local populace, and that makes the innocent civilians viewed as part of the bad guys.
In these situations of extreme stress, one can lose one’s moral balance,’ says Moskos.
(Duffy et al., 2006, emphasis added)

Controlling information about death in war is a basic propaganda task.
While my focus here is on information about civilian deaths, the discourse of
death in war is socially constructed for audience approval. Indeed, the control
of information about death – including one’s own soldiers – is very important.
Note the euphemism for troops killed by comrades as ‘friendly fire.’ My analysis
of the news coverage of the ‘friendly fire’ death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, a
professional football player, demonstrated the use of ‘hero scripts’ to cover up a
careless shooting (Altheide, 2006). What we call our ‘dead’ is also critical. The US
media quickly began to refer to dead soldiers as ‘heroes’ and ‘fallen soldiers,’ a less-
than-dead phrase that was quickly also applied to police officers, fire department
personnel, and other uniformed workers. Such discourse joins a plethora of uni-
formed people with soldiers; all are ‘fighting/serving’ on our behalf. Another way
to restrict information, quite simply, is to make it ‘off limits.’ Thus, news media
were forbidden from photographing the fallen when they arrived in flag-draped
caskets at Dover Air Force base, in order to ‘respect the family privacy.’

The killing of civilians poses a moral, strategic, and public relations problem
for any military force that disavows being labeled terrorists, who explicitly use
civilian deaths as a strategy. Legitimate and ‘civilized’ states renounce intentionally
killing civilians, and any deaths that do occur in ‘military operations’ must be
treated as ‘accidental,’ or more commonly as ‘collateral damage.’ However, a ‘public
relations problem’ can be created if an audience perceives that there are too many
accidental deaths (Louw, 2003). Two aspects of ‘managing’ the problem involve
the frequency of news reports about civilian deaths as well as how these reports
are framed, and whose ‘voice’ is heard or implied in such reports.

Military news sources deal with civilian death from a ‘PR’ standpoint by
hiding it, minimizing it, or calling it something else (Editors, Columbia Journalism

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 291

Review, 2006). In many ways this is somewhat easier since citizens of ‘one side’
typically do not care a lot about the fate of those on the ‘other side.’ Still, authorities
seek to minimize journalistic access to civilian killings.

A more common approach to limiting news reports about civilian deaths
is to shape how reports are framed. Discursive framing can be illustrated with
terms used to describe how brutal soldiers are portrayed. A common term used
in coverage of Iraqi and other opposition fighters is ‘gunmen.’ This term is part of
a cultural script that carries clear meanings about legitimate authority, brutality
and the ‘innocence’ of victims for US audiences steeped in popular culture and
decades of propaganda. Thus, legitimate police officers and military personnel are
seldom cast as gunmen. US soldiers’ killing of some 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha
on 19 November 2005, illustrates discourse manipulation. The distinctions drawn
in the humanity of ‘our side’ but not ‘their side’ are also contained in different
vocabulary of motives (Mills, 1940) attributed to the enemy – killing as ‘barbaric
acts’ – while US soldiers, who kill families, are permitted to provide an excuse of
rage to avenge a ‘family/teammate’ member: consider a statement about the same
Haditha killing:

Could the death of an adored comrade have been enough to turn a few well-trained
Marines into cold-blooded murderers? James Crossan, a Marine who was injured by
the blast that killed Terrazas, told ABC News, ‘I can understand because we are pretty much
like one family, and when your teammates do get injured and killed, you are going to get pissed
off and just rage’. (emphasis added)

US military action was virtually never framed as acts of ‘gunmen,’ even though
US reporters, military personnel, and Iraqi leaders (e.g. Prime minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki) have decried violence against Iraqi civilians by American troops as a
‘regular occurrence.’ The US military developed a routine procedure for paying
the survivors of slain Iraqis up to $2500. Soldiers may fire too quickly when
civilians are suspected in the bombing of vehicles and killing US soldiers, but even
well documented cases of rage and revenge killings by US troops were not cast as
‘gunmen.’ But news reports are rare about this fairly common occurrence. An
exceptional statement received very little news coverage, that is, it was ‘picked up’
by only a handful of news outlets:

‘I hate the fact that American soldiers ride around killing civilians,’ said Command
Sgt Major Samuel Coston, 44, from North Carolina. ‘All you got to say is ‘‘I feel
threatened,’’ ‘‘the car was driving aggressively,’’ and you shoot. They have no remorse. They
just keep on driving.’ (Badkhen, 2005, emphasis added)

Yet, these ‘shooters’ are not referred to as gunmen.
Indeed, I found only one report in the Iraq War coverage where US soldiers

were described as ‘gunmen’. The specific incident was the Haditha killings by
marines who gunned down 24 people, including an Iraqi family, after a fellow
marine was killed by a roadside bomb.

The baby’s mother ‘completely collapsed when they killed her husband in front of
her,’ she said. ‘I ran away carrying Asia [the baby] outside the house, but when the
Americans returned they killed Asma, the mother of the child.’

292 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

Abdullah’s 39-year-old husband also slipped out of the house and ran to warn his
nearby cousins about the killings. But he crossed paths with the Americans on his way
back home; he died of gunshot wounds in his shoulder and head, his wife said.

Everybody was at home when the gunmen arrived. Except for one 12-year-old daughter,
the family was wiped out. Four girls and one boy, ranging in age from 4 to 15, were shot
dead by the Marines, neighbors and the surviving child said.

Safa Younis Salim, the 12-year-old, said she lay on the ground, covered with her sister’s
blood, and pretended to be dead while her family died around her. Her sister’s blood
spurted fast; it was like a water tap, she said . . . ‘I feel sorry. I was wishing to be alive,’
Safa said. ‘Now I wish I had died with them.’ (Stack and Salman, 2006)

A key factor in propaganda is geared to not hearing the ‘other’s’ voice, but rather,
using language and discourse to negate the legitimacy – if not the relevance – of
the other. This is easier to accomplish if the other is feared.

Terrorism and fear
The mass media promoted the war on terrorism – especially after the 9/11 attacks –
by stressing fear and an uncertain future, although there was a several decade
context of anti-Arab propaganda (Adams, 1981). One impact of this media
barrage was to promote stereotypes and extreme ethnocentrism that is very close
to the images that many westerners had of Vietnamese adversaries in an earlier
war – ‘Asians’ who ‘did not value life.’ A blue-collar worker told me in 2005 that
his niece came home from Europe ‘when Muslims began exploding car bombs in
France or Spain or somewhere. Those guys think that if they die they’ll see Allah
or someone. They’re crazy’ (emphasis added). He added that there are 24,000
terrorists in the United States waiting for instruction. What this man ‘knows’
was not contradicted by hundreds of news reports, and it is this ‘knowledge’
that enabled leaders to gain leverage over his perception, values, votes and tax
dollars for various policies. Numerous reports about possible terrorist cells in the
United States were part of the strident government efforts to increase government
surveillance, and within a few months of 9/11, justify holding suspects without
due process.

Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially went unreported
and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations (Armstrong, 2002). Not-
withstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear and crime,
the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more pronounced since
the United States ‘discovered’ international terrorism on 11 September 2001.
This discourse was grounded in several decades of the ‘fear of crime,’ but it was
also promoted by political action that sought a reorientation and redefinition of
the role of the United States in world affairs.

This broad story about the Iraq War involved negative terms for the enemy,
but it also included US retaliation, the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders (e.g. Osama bin
Laden), and plans to attack countries and ‘outlaw regimes’ that supported or
harbored terrorists. Implementing these programs involved invading Afghanistan
and expanding the US military presence throughout the world. Other adjustments

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 293

were made in foreign policy, military budgets, domestic surveillance and attacks
on civil liberties (Johnson, 2004; Kellner, 2003). But these were all contextualized
by fresh metaphors that justified extraordinary acts against a very vile enemy.
Threats to invade other countries – the ‘axis of evil’ – that included Iraq, were part
of an effort to ‘defend’ the United States from future attacks. Terrorism became
a very broad symbol that encompassed fear, consumption, and international
intervention (Kellner, 2004). The meaning of terrorism expanded from a tactic
to also mean an idea, a lifestyle, and ultimately, a condition of the world. News
reports contributed to this broad definition of terrorism as a condition (Altheide,
2004). A key source for this news theme was the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC).

Terrorism and the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC)
The Iraq War was a foregone conclusion among key policy-makers. Bringing
about a ‘regime change’ in Iraq was part of a plan for the United States to become
a hegemon, including withdrawing from – if not negating – certain treaties
(e.g. nuclear test ban), and becoming more independent of the United Nations.
The US invasion of Iraq was justified, in the main, by claims that Saddam Hussein
possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD), was in league with the terrorists
who attacked the US, and that he was likely to place these weapons at the disposal
of other terrorists. It took less than a year for the world to learn that none of these
assertions were true, and indeed, there was strong evidence that members of the
Bush administration were quite aware that such WMDs did not exist. On the fifth
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney, made it very clear
that the Iraq War did not hinge mainly on the existence of WMDS. Cheney stated
on the show Meet the Press:

Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that the ‘world is much better off . . .’ ‘It
was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it over again, we’d do exactly the same
thing,’ Cheney said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’

‘The people obviously are frustrated because of the difficulty, because of the cost
and the casualties,’ Cheney said. ‘You cannot look at Iraq in isolation. You have to look
at it within the context of the broader global war on terror.’ Any retreat by the United
States would indicate to the terrorists that the ‘US has lost its will’ in the war against
terrorism and would damage US credibility, Cheney said. (Newsday, 11 September
2006, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&sid=aMuFuSmq5zn
A&refer=special_report)

Cheney knew that Iraq was a prime target because he was part of a group
that drew up a blueprint for US world domination in 1992. The plan and the
people associated with it were called the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), but US audiences learned very little about this from their news media
(Altheide and Grimes, 2005). Many members of the PNAC joined the Bush
administration and became credible claims-makers, who constructed the frames

294 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

for shaping subsequent news reports. Among the members who signed many of
the proclamations laying the foundation for a new American empire (Bacevich,
2002; Kagan, 2003; Kagan and Kristol, 2000) were former and current govern-
mental officials, including: Elliot Abrams, William Bennet, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney,
Steve Forbes, Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz.

The PNAC was very influential in changing US foreign policy as well as pro-
moting the major news frames and favorable news coverage about going to war
with Iraq following the attacks of 9/11 (http://www.newamericancentury.org).
The Iraq War narrative was framed by these efforts and the resulting propaganda
campaign to convince the American people that attacking Iraq was tantamount
to attacking ‘terrorists’ and others who threatened the United States (Armstrong,
2002). The majority of the US news media did little to describe the narrative and
the organization behind it. That this is a key aspect of what news organizations
should do is suggested by veteran journalist, Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times,
who reflected on nearly four years of news coverage:

Well, I always personally found [US government briefings] valuable. I know many
other people didn’t because if you looked at them in terms of objective truth, they
weren’t very useful. But in terms of how the US government wanted us to see things,
they were quite useful. And it’s important to know what the government’s narrative is.
Because in any conflict there are competing narratives, and our job, from my point
of view, is to sort through them and provide a reality check on all of them. (Editors,
Columbia Journalism Review, 2006: 28, emphasis added)

The PNAC emphasized changing American foreign policy to become a hegemon
and police its international interests as a new kind of benevolent American empire
(Bacevich, 2002; Barber, 2003; Johnson, 2004; Kaplan, 2003; Mann, 2003). This
would include expanding the military, withdrawing from major treaties as well as
engaging in preemptive strikes against those who would threaten US interests.
When the plan was leaked to the press, it went through several changes, with
new drafts suggesting that the US would act in concert with allies, when possible.
The First Gulf War (1991) came and went, President George Bush was not re-
elected, and many of the co-authors and supporters of the plan left office for think
tanks, businesses and various publications. The PNAC plan, with revisions, was
promoted repeatedly during the next decade, even though some members were
out of office for eight years, and was in full swing one month before the infamous
9/11 attacks. The most detailed coverage of the history of the PNAC and its
role in shaping US foreign policy was David Armstrong’s essay in Harper’s in
October 2002:

The plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unliateralism,
but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its
overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge
it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not
that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be
absolutely powerful. (Armstrong, 2002: 76)

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 295

Making a pitch for a threatened military budget in 1992, Colin Powell told the
House Armed Services Committee, the United States,

required ‘sufficient power’ to ‘deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging
us on the world stage.’ To emphasize the point, he cast the United States in the role
of street thug. ‘I want to be the bully on the block,’ he said, implanting in the mind of
potential opponents that ‘there is no future in trying to challenge the armed forces
of the United States’. (Armstrong, 2002: 78, emphasis added)

As the above statement by Colin Powell makes clear, the US was not to be challenged
by anyone, nor should the US take direction from or world regulatory bodies,
including the United Nations, because the aim was ‘to prevent the re-emergence
of a new rival’ (Armstrong, 2002: 78).

The election of George W. Bush provided new invitations to join the govern-
ment and work out the plan. The plan was carried forth by the group as the PNAC.
Ultimately, the plan was oriented to freeing the US from several alliances and
treaties that limited military and weapons planning and testing, including the
1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, several nuclear non-proliferation treaties
(Perkovich, 2003). Other global and environmental agreements were also avoided
or broken, including those designed to protect the environment and limit pollution,
for example, the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, ratified or signed by 209 countries.

Most of the Gulf war coverage originated from the White House and the federal
government. A veteran producer for a major network TV news program indicated
that the story was about the preparation for war. In his words, things were set in
motion for over a year and the ‘rock was rolling downhill,’ that’s where the story
was (interview notes).

Network news shows were quite consistent with guests who supported the
war. An analysis by FAIR of network news interviewees one week before and one
week after Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations about
Iraq’s alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, found that two-thirds
of the guests were from the United States, with 75 percent of these being current
or former government or military officials, while only one – Senator Kennedy –
expressed skepticism or opposition to the impending war with Iraq (FAIR, 2003).

The PNAC members, who were now part of the Bush administration, pro-
moted false claims (e.g. WMD, and that Hussein supported the 9/11 attackers)
to justify the war with Iraq. They also required access to the news media for
their claims, as well as assurances that there would be no systematic and widely
publicized opposing points of view. According to Pilger (2002), several advisors in
the administration – including those who were associated with Project for a New
American Century (PNAC) – had been seeking a catastrophic event, a new ‘Pearl
Harbor,’ that could be used as a catalyst to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy:
the attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the ‘new Pearl Harbor,’ described as
‘the opportunity of ages.’ The next 18 months were spent preparing public opinion
for the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003. This preparation included the freedom
to define and use terrorism in a very broad and general way.

The PNAC received very little news media coverage prior to the invasion of Iraq
even though it was part of the ‘public record’ in government documents, and had

296 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

been briefly mentioned in several newspaper and radio reports in the late 1990s
(see Table 1). (Two exemplary documentaries were aired on a Public Broadcasting
System [PBS] documentary program, Frontline, 8 November 2001; 18 March
2003, about the history and context of US involvement in Iraq, including the
role of the PNAC in promoting the Iraq War.) Only a few newspaper articles dealt
with PNAC six months before the United States attacked Iraq on 20 March. No
reports appeared on the major TV networks regular evening newscast during
this time, although Nightline did examine the ‘conspiracy claims’ and interview
William Kristol on 5 March, two weeks before the US invasion of Iraq. Reporter
Ted Koppel dismissed the conspiratorial charges by several foreign newspapers.
He framed it in terms of what could be called ‘it depends on how you look at it.’

They did what former government officials and politicians frequently do when
they’re out of power, they began formulating a strategy, in this case, a foreign policy
strategy, that might bring influence to bear on the Administration then in power,
headed by President Clinton. Or failing that, on a new Administration that might
someday come to power. They were pushing for the elimination of Saddam Hussein.
And proposing the establishment of a strong US military presence in the Persian Gulf,
linked to a willingness to use force to protect vital American interests in the Gulf.
(Nightline, 2003)

After all, the US had already fought the First Gulf War with Hussein, and that effort
was fueled by a massive propaganda campaign headed by the US public relations
firm, Hill and Knowlton, which promoted the lie that Saddam’s troops had killed
babies in a hospital in Kuwait (Stauber and Rampton, 1995). This report was
broadcast just a few days prior to a congressional vote authorizing that war. Thus,
there was a clear sense of urgency to intervene in the First Gulf War.

News organizations implicitly editorialize through their use of news sources
for certain issues (Baer and Chambliss, 1997; Bailey and Hale, 1998; Chermak,
1995; Epstein, 1973; Ericson et al., 1987, 1991; Glasgow University Media Group,
1976; Philo and Glasgow University Media Group, 1982; Surette, 1998; Westfeldt
and Wicker, 1998). The major news agencies in the United States, and particularly
the TV networks, limited their coverage of the role the PNAC played in shaping
the Iraq War. These propaganda efforts occurred as the various PNAC members
served as routine news sources, primarily in TV network news accounts oriented
to infotainment.

The selection of news sources is of paramount importance, particularly when
those sources are able to set the discourse, to provide the vocabulary and mean-
ings of activities, and to set the parameters for discussion. The PNAC was not just
another lobbying group, as Ted Koppel suggested. Their members were centrally
involved in the shaping and operation of US domestic and foreign policy over a
period of several decades.

Analysis of news sources shows that pro-PNAC sources were used 72 times
before 9/11 and 133 times within six months after 9/11, an increase of 85 percent.
Only five references appear for the ‘anti’-PNAC sources (four refer to Joseph Nye),
and eight appear after 9/11 (seven refer to Joseph Nye). The PNAC sources were
used quite often by the NYT prior to 9/11. This is particularly noteworthy for

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 297

FIGURE 1. A partial chronology of news reports about the Project for a New American Century
and plans to invade Iraq

Chronology of Press Reports about the PNAC

26 January 1998 NPR, All Things Considered
4 August 2001 NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday
11 August 2001 NYT, (Jane Perlez) Bombing Iraq and mission change
21 August 2001 WPOST, (Thomas Ricks) Empire or Not: A Quiet Debate Over US

Role
10 September 2001 NPR, Talk of the Nation
23 September 2001 NBC, Meet the Press (Powell) PNAC letter to President mentioned
3 December 2001 NYT, excerpts from 1998 PNAC letter to Clinton
9 December 2001 NYT, article about PNAC position
10 September 2002 NPR, Talk of the Nation
October 2002 Harper’s magazine, David Armstrong, ‘Dick Cheney’s Song of

America’
12 January 2003 LA Times, Chalmers Johnson, about Rumsfeld and urge to attack

Iraq
1 February 2003 NYT, Todd Purdum, the ‘brains’ behind Bush’s foreign policy (on

same day Bush says that he no longer supports containment)
4 March 2003 Soviet Journalist, monitored by BBC
5 March 2003 ABC Nightline
11 March 2003 NYT, David Carr, article about PNAC and Kristol’s Weekly Standard

influence on Bush and foreign policy
16 March 2003 CBS Sunday Morning
16 March 2003 Guardian Newspaper (others, Toronto)
20 MARCH 2003 WAR WITH IRAQ BEGINS
23 March 2003 NBC, Meet the Press (Rumsfeld)
23 March 2003 LA Times, Gary Schmidt (PNAC) writes article
23 March 2003 NYT, Steven R. Weisman, article about history of PNAC influence
6 April 2003 Chicago Sun Times (Lynn Sweet) refers to Wolfowitz denial

(see Senate meeting)
21 April 2003 NPR, Talk of the Nation
9 May 2003 NPR, All Things Considered
5 June 2003 NPR, All Things Considered

Relevant Dates and Events about some publicity of PNAC

27 March 2003 Wolfowitz denial to Senator Durbin about his authorship of
pre-PNAC 1992document and preemptive bombing

William Kristol (N = 42), former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle and
publisher of the very conservative The Weekly Standard, and Richard Perle (N = 21),
former Assistant Secretary of Defense and member of the Defense Policy Board
that advises Donald Rumsfeld. These are prominent Washington sources that
are called upon to discuss a range of foreign and domestic policy issues. The cir-
culation of Kristol’s publication is small but the media play that he gets from his
numerous references extends his influence (Carr, 2003).

298 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

The role of the PNAC in shaping news discourse can be illustrated by an
overview of how the term ‘empire’ was used by proponents and critics. Due to
the relatively little attention paid by the mainstream media to the ambitions of
PNAC and its founders, the following analysis is limited to a small number of news
articles and programs.

Only 11 articles or news programs specifically address the apparent shift in
American foreign policy since the beginning of the current Bush Administration
towards that of embracing the advancement of a new American empire bent
on global domination. Of these reports, four are critical or cautionary, five are
descriptive, and two are supportive of PNAC policy recommendations. Discourse
surrounding the use of the word ‘empire’ as part of the current US foreign policy
agenda involves primarily a two-fold debate: first, debate regarding whether the
United States is indeed acting in a manner as if to pursue imperialistic pursuits;
second, whether the debate is simply one of semantics and whether the United
States as a world leader should be utilizing the extant power at its hands to dis-
seminate American values to the rest of the world. The former argument rests
mainly with activists and others critical of the United States’ actions, while cur-
rent and former members of PNAC primarily represented the latter group. For
example, in a July 2003 article in In These Times titled ‘Seize the Time,’ Arundhati
Roy, who clearly opposed the US emerging empire, states:

But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the
scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that I speak as a subject of
the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king . . . I don’t
care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps
a slight variation on the theme would be more appropriate: The facts can be whatever
we want them to be . . . So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an empire
armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history) . . . Here we are, confronted with
an empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to
deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators,
sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. (Roy, 2003,
emphasis added)

One of PNAC’s fundamental criticisms of those who challenge their ideology
is that they/supporters of a more aggressive foreign policy agenda do not hold ter-
ritorial ambitions, therefore creating a distinction between the US and previous
historical examples of world empires. Note how the definition and meaning of
empire is defused by arguing that it is really a matter of semantics, that the US has
already been an ‘empire,’ or rather, is seen as such, so whatever steps that it takes
now are simply adjusting to ‘reality.’ Two of the articles critical of PNAC and its
political ambitions were released within months of the beginning of the US war
against Iraq, while the other two critiques were published just days before the US
invasion. The discourse of liberation and humanity is used to justify US expan-
sionism around the globe, a kind of benevolent outreach. Both articles supporting
the US’s role as an empire cite Thomas Donnelly, a senior fellow at the Project.
According to Donnelly, who denies an implicit agenda to transform US foreign
policy into one with imperialistic ambitions, ‘. . . the United States is an empire of

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 299

democracy or liberty’ (Ricks, 2001). In a separate article, Donnelly states ‘. . . our
new manifest destiny is to disseminate our values’ (Baker, 2001).

The attacks of 9/11 were interpreted and promoted by the PNAC as requiring
action not only again Afghanistan, but also Iraq. The major news media presented
virtually no strong disclaimers to this scenario, partly because the military worked
very closely with them, even to the point of letting reporters become ‘embedded’
with the troops. The grateful news organizations became even closer to military
sources.

Terrorism and consumerism and national identity
Terrorism became a perspective, orientation, and a discourse for ‘our time,’ the
‘way things are today,’ and ‘how the world has changed.’ The subsequent cam-
paign to integrate fear into everyday life routines was consequential for public
life, domestic policy, and foreign affairs (Kellner, 2003). The tragic loss of lives
and property fueled patriotic slogans, thousands of commercial advertisements,
public contributions of more than $2 billion, major domestic and foreign policy
changes, and the largest increase in the military budget in 35 years. Stores
sold out of flags, businesses linked advertising to patriotic slogans (e.g. General
Motors’ ‘Keep America Rolling’), baseball fans sang ‘God Bless America’ instead
of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’ and children helped raise money for the Afghan
kids who were ‘starving.’ Analysis of news reports and advertisements suggests
that popular culture and mass media depictions of fear, patriotism, consumption,
and victimization contributed to the emergence of a ‘national identity’ and col-
lective action that was fostered by elite decision-makers’ propaganda.

Terrorism discourse was not limited to a specific situation, but referred to a
general worldview. Domestic life became oriented to celebrating/commemor-
ating past terrorist acts, waiting for and anticipating the next terrorist act and
taking steps to prevent it. Terrorism defined reality and became an incorrigible
proposition that could not be questioned, challenged or falsified, and was ‘com-
patible with any and every conceivable state of affairs’ (Mehan and Wood, 1975:
52). Terrorism, as a matter of discourse, became an institutionalized disclaimer
(e.g. ‘We all know how the world has changed since 9/11’), a term or phrase that
documents a general (rather than a specific) situation and conveys a widely
shared meaning (Hewitt and Stokes, 1975).

International order and conduct was consistent with the domestic defin-
ition of a ‘terrorism world,’ as well as an expansive claim that evil terrorists rather
than political gamesmanship governed the ‘new world’. Good and evil turned on
terrorism. International borders, treaties and even US constitutional rights were
mere symbols that could detract from the single greatest threat to civilization and
‘good.’ Such evil was to be feared and constantly attacked. To be against terrorism
and all that it entailed was a mark of legitimacy and membership that would be
demonstrated in various ways. Using similar symbols and expressing opposition
to terrorism promoted communalism by putting the good of the citizenry over
any group or individual (Cerulo, 2002).

300 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

Audience familiarity with terrorism traded on decades of news and popular
culture depictions of crime myths about the ‘crime problem,’ crime victims, and
the drug war (Kappeler et al., 1999). On the one hand, strong action was needed,
including getting armed, and buying guns. The Beretta gun company promoted
its ‘‘‘United We Stand’’ – a nine-millimeter pistol bearing a laser-etched American
flag. The company sold 2000 of them to wholesalers in one day in October’
(Baker, 2001).

The emphasis of the coverage of 9/11 was on the commonality of the victims
rather than the cause or the rationale for the attacks. The popular refrain was
that all Americans were victimized by the attacks, and like the ‘potential victims’
of crime featured in a decade of news reports about the crime problem, all citizens
should support efforts to attack the source of fear (Garland, 2001). The news
media were pressured to toe the line. With network and local nightly newscasts
draped in flag colors, lapel flags, and patriotic slogans reporting events primarily
through the viewpoint of the United States (e.g. ‘us’ and ‘we’), news organizations
presented content and form that was interpreted by the publisher of Harper’s
Magazine as sending: ‘. . . signals to the viewers to some extent that the media are
acting as an arm of the government, as opposed to an independent, objective purveyor
of information, which is what we’re supposed to be’ (Rutenberg and Carter, 2001,
emphasis added). Dan Rather, CBS anchorman, acknowledged the pressure to
comply with propaganda and that many of the tough questions were not being
asked. Rather told a British journalist:

‘It is an obscene comparison . . . but you know there was a time in South Africa
that people would put flaming tyres around people’s necks if they dissented. And in
some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of
lack of patriotism put around your neck,’ he said. ‘Now it is that fear that keeps journalists
from asking the toughest of the tough questions . . .’ (Engel, 2002: 4, emphasis added)

Anyone was denounced who suggested that the ‘cause’ of the attacks was more
complex and that the United States had angered many political groups by previous
actions (e.g. support for Israel). Talk show host, Bill Maher, who argued that the
terrorists were not really cowards, was among those pilloried and lost his job;
Clear Channel, a radio consortium, put out a blacklist of 150 songs with critical
themes (e.g. Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’) that should
not be played (Kellner, 2003).

Identity and commensuration were presented to audiences through various
messages in the mass media. Mass media support of the emerging national iden-
tity was commensurate with moral character and a discourse of salvation or
‘seeing the light’ to guide our way through the new terrorism world. The ‘younger
generation’ was implored to meet the new challenge; this was, after all, their
war, and the mass media carried youthful testimonies of new found loyalty and
awakening that would have made a tent-meeting evangelist proud. For example,
Newsweek magazine, published statements by young people, one ‘confessing’ her
naiveté about the ‘real world,’ and another by a former university student who
criticized ‘antimilitary culture’ with a call to arms:

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 301

Before the attack, all I could think of was how to write a good rap . . . I am not eager to
say this, but we do not live in an ideal world . . . I’ve come to accept the idea of a focused
war on terrorists as the best way to ensure our country’s safety. (Newman, 2001: 9:
note the disclaimer, emphasis added)

The discourse of partriotism turned on being supportive and not critical. Nearly
three weeks later university campuses were chastised in a ‘My Turn’ column from
a Marine Corps officer. Note how critical thinking, especially about racism, and
being different from the majority views, was joined with anti-Americanism:

As anyone who has attended a top college in the past three decades knows, patriotism
in the eyes of many professors is synonymous with a lack of sophistication at best,
racism at worst . . .

Yet, it is clear to me that the antimilitary culture that exists on many campuses is
remarkably out of step with the views of the vast majority of Americans . . .

Now is the time for America’s brightest young adults to enlist in this good fight
against global terrorism – to join organizations like the military’s Special Forces, the
FBI and the CIA, whose members risk their lives on the front lines of this battle. It is
also time for America’s universities to support and encourage – not undermine – this call to
service. (Sullivan, 2001, emphasis added)

Such pronouncements would be used by elites in the weeks after the attacks to
not only claim a national consensus for a massive infusion of social control and
military intervention, but to push for the reinstatement of ROTC at Harvard and
other campuses.

Academics and other critics were targeted for their critical comments, even
though they were not well publicized. One non-profit group, the American Council
of Trustees and Alumni (one founding member is Lynn Cheney, wife of Vice
President Cheney) posted a web page accusing dozens of scholars, students, and
a university president of unpatriotic behavior, accusing them of being ‘the weak
link in America’s response to the attack’ and for invoking ‘tolerance and diversity
as antidotes to evil’ (The Arizona Republic, 24 November 2001, p. A11). (This
association also issued a report: ‘Defending Civilization: How Our Universities
Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It’, emphasis added.)

Sacramento Bee president and publisher, Janis Besler Heaphy, was booed
off the stage during a commencement address at California State University,
Sacramento, after she suggested that the national response to terrorism could
erode press freedoms and individual liberties. One professor in attendance stated:
‘For the first time in my life, I can see how something like the Japanese internment
camps could happen in our country’ (New York Times, 21 December 2001, p. B1).
Attorney General Ashcroft made it clear that anyone concerned with the civil
rights of the suspicious was also suspect. Ashcroft told members of Senate
committee that critics ‘aid terrorists’ and undermine national unity: ‘They give
ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends’ (Star Tribune,
9 December 2001, p. 30A, emphasis added).

Advertising and the market economy joined with giving and ‘self-less’ assist-
ance to others. The US advertising industry sprang into action (Jackall and Hirota,
2000). For example, the Ad Council (Advertising Research Foundation) adopted a

302 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

strong coalition stand against terrorism, noting in an online communication that
‘it was originally founded as the War Advertising Council during World War II
in the aftermath of the bombings of Pearl Harbor.’ Following an ‘all advertising
industry meeting,’ a strategy was adopted on 18 September 2001 to ‘inform, in-
volve and inspire Americans to participate in activities that will help win the war
on terrorism’ (Foundation, 2001; Shales, 2001: G2).

Terrorism and social control
The discourse of fear was joined with the politics of fear that enabled decision-
makers to couch control efforts as being in the best interests of citizens in order
to protect them (Altheide, 2006). The mass media images and themes about risk
and safety were central. These control efforts included fundamental violations
of international law, custom and the Geneva Accords: ‘torture’ programs and
policies, operation of secret prisons, denial of habeas corpus to detainees – which
can be applied to all who threaten national security (Stolberg, 2006) – kidnapping
and illegal international transport, and domestic and international surveillance
of telephone and computer communication. As noted above, US journalism was
very supportive of US actions against Iraq and any group placed under the broad
umbrella of ‘terrorism.’ Only a handful of American news media carried reports
about German and Italian arrest warrants for CIA agents who kidnapped German
and Italian citizens, respectively, and shipped them to other countries to be tor-
tured and questioned because they were thought to be terrorists (Wilkinson, 2005;
Williamson, 2006).

The power of discourse can be illustrated by comparing the relative emphasis
of language and details provided in several different accounts of the Italian case.
Particularly noteworthy in US news reports is the use of qualifying terms to
defuse the significant international charges (e.g. ‘purported’ CIA agents, ‘allegedly’
kidnapped, and ‘supposedly’ tortured).

The seriousness of the German and Italian charges, along with widespread
revulsion throughout the European Community, can be illustrated by the Bush
Administration’s efforts to have Congress pass legislation that would grant
immunity to key officials – including President Bush – and CIA agents who carried
out their superior’s orders. Torturing suspects was distinguished according to
‘degree’ and not the act of torture itself. According to one report:

Congress has eased the worries of CIA interrogators and senior administration
officials by granting them immunity from US criminal prosecutions for all but ‘grave’ abuses
of terrorism detainees . . .

‘The obstacles to these prosecutions are not legal, they’re political,’ said William
Schabas, director of the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of
Ireland in Galway. (Gordon and Taylor, 2006, emphasis added)

US news audiences, who learned about the most grotesque abuses at the Abu
Ghraib prison, were also told that things were not that bad, that we were ‘at war,’
and this shouldn’t be forgotten. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh
opined that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners wasn’t really that bad after all, but was

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 303

like fraternity fun, even if it got a little carried away. Indeed, he suggested that the
activity could not have been serious since it was carried out by women!

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war – have you people noticed who the
torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

Limbaugh observed that the American troops who mistreated Iraqi prisoners
of war were ‘babes’ and that the pictures of the alleged abuse were no worse than
‘anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage’ (http://mediamatters.
org/items/200405050003, emphasis added).

In response to a caller on his 4 May 2004 show, he replied:

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re
going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and
then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these
people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these
people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off ?
(emphasis added)

During the critical 18-month period between the 9/11 attacks and the US
invasion of Iraq, the American news media essentially repeated administration
claims about terrorism and Iraq’s impending nuclear capacity (MacArthur, 2003).

Rarely has television functioned so poorly in an era of crisis, generating more heat
than light; more sound, fury, and spectacle than understanding; and more blatantly
grotesque partisanship for the Bush administration than genuinely democratic
debate over what options the country and the world faced in the confrontation with
terrorism. (Kellner, 2003: 69)

The drug war and ongoing concerns with crime contributed to the expansion
of fear with terrorism. Messages demonizing Osama bin Laden, his Taliban sup-
porters, and ‘Islamic extremists’ linked these suspects with the destructive clout
of illegal drugs and especially drug lords. News reports and advertisements
joined drug use with terrorism and helped shift ‘drugs’ from criminal activity
to unpatriotic action. A $10 million ad campaign promoted the message from
President Bush, ‘If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.’

Conclusion
Terrorism discourse was part of a general context involving the discourse of
fear, which was mainly associated with crime, as well as nearly three decades
of negative reporting and imagery about the Middle East, and Iraq in particular.
Those experiences contributed to the dehumanization of the enemy, as well as
civilians killed by US troops. The enemy was portrayed as barbaric ‘gunmen,’ who
warranted torture to discover their evil plans, while US atrocities often were cast
as rage or revenge or even as ‘letting off steam.’

The politics of fear was joined with this discourse. Citizens became accustomed
to ‘safety rhetoric’ by police officials, which often required them to permit police
searches, condone ‘overaggressive’ police action, as well as join in myriad crime-
prevention efforts, many of which involved more human as well as electronic

304 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

surveillance of work places, neighborhoods, stores, and even our ‘bodies,’ in the
form of expansive drug screening. The discourse of fear promotes the politics of
fear, and numerous surveillance practices and rationale to keep us safe (Monahan,
2006). By the mid-1990s, many high school students had ‘peed in a bottle’ as a
condition of participating in athletics, applying for a job, and in some cases, apply-
ing for student loans and scholarships. Several legal challenges to this scrutiny
were turned down, as the courts (with a few exceptions) began to uphold the
cliché that was echoed by local TV newscasters and others: ‘why worry if you
have nothing to hide?’ In short, US citizens had been socialized into the garrison
state, no longer being offended by surveillance, and indeed, two-thirds of parents
choose to use the rapidly expanding – and inexpensive – technology to monitor
their own children, including testing them for drugs. Safety, caring, and control
are wrapped in the discourse of fear:

‘It is our responsibility as parents to do everything in our power to protect our children
from the perils of drug abuse, and we believe that fostering greater communication
between parents and their children coupled with utilization of a home drug test are
the keys to preventing drug abuse and addiction,’ said Debbie Moak, co-founder of
notMYkid. (Spratling, 2006, emphasis added)

The 9/11 attacks and the coalescing of the discourse of fear with terrorism
meant that more of our lives would be subject to closer scrutiny, particularly air
travel. A new federal organization was invented, the Department of Homeland
Security, and with its multi-million dollar budget was a requirement to establish
an army of federal airport security personnel, the Transportation Security Admin-
istration (TSA). Rituals of control were embodied in physical screening and
inspection of travelers, including demands that they publicly sacrifice personal
items in line with the ‘terror threat’. Notwithstanding numerous ‘experiments’
which continue to demonstrate that conscientious ‘smugglers’ can bring an array
of weapons and explosives on board, the discourse of terrorism continued to pro-
mote the claim that our screening was keeping us all safe, and that it should
continue, because, after all, the world changed after 9/11.

R E F E R E N C E S

Adams, W.C. (ed.) (1981) Television Coverage of the Middle East. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Adams, W.C. (ed.) (1982) Television Coverage of International Affairs. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Altheide, D. (1981) ‘Iran vs. U.S. TV News! The Hostage Story Out of Context’, in W.C.

Adams (ed.) Television Coverage of the Middle East, pp. 128–58. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Altheide, D. (1982) ‘Three-in-One News: Network Coverage of Iran’, Journalism Quarterly

Fall: 482–6.
Altheide, D. (2006) Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press.
Altheide, D.L. (2002) Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis. Hawthorne, NY:

Aldine de Gruyter.
Altheide, D.L. (2004) ‘Consuming Terrorism’, Symbolic Interaction 27: 289–308.
Altheide, D.L. and Grimes, J.N. (2005) ‘War Programming: The Propaganda Project and

the Iraq War’, The Sociological Quarterly 46: 617–43.

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 305

Armstrong, D. (2002) ‘Dick Cheney’s Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global
Dominance’, Harper’s Magazine, October, pp. 76–83.

Bacevich, A.J. (2002) American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Badkhen, A. (2005) ‘COLONEL’S TOUGHEST DUTY Battalion Commander Pays his
Respects, Apologizes to Iraqis whose Civilian Relatives Have Been Killed by Anonymous
GIs in Passing Patrols and Convoys’, The San Francisco Chronicle, 14 October, p. A1.

Baer, J. and Chambliss, W.J. (1997) ‘Generating Fear: The Politics of Crime Reporting’,
Crime, Law and Social Change 27: 87–107.

Bailey, F.Y. and Hale, D.C. (1998) Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth.

Baker, K. (2001) ‘THE YEAR IN IDEAS: A TO Z.; American Imperialism, Embraced’, The
New York Times, 9 December, p. 53.

Barber, B.R. (2003) Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton.
Campbell, D. (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Carr, D. (2003) ‘White House Listens When Weekly Speaks’, The New York Times, 11 March,

p. 1.
Cerulo, K.A. (2002) ‘Individualism Pro Tem: Reconsidering U.S. Social Relations’, in

K.A. Cerulo (ed.) Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition,
pp. 135–71. New York: Routledge.

Chermak, S. (1995) Victims in the News: Crime and the American News Media. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.

Duffy, M., McGirk, T. and Ghosh, A. (2006) ‘The Ghosts of Haditha’, Time Magazine, 4 June,
available online at: [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200763,0
0.html].

Editors, Columbia Journalism Review (2006) ‘Into the Abyss: Reporting Iraq, 2003–2006:
An Oral History’, Columbia Journalism Review November/December, pp. 14–79, available
online at: [http://www.cjr.org/iraq/].

Engel, M. (2002) ‘War on Afghanistan: American Media Cowed by Patriotic Fever, Says
Network News Veteran’, The Guardian, 17 May, p. 4.

Epstein, E.J. (1973) News from Nowhere. New York: Random House.
Ericson, R.V., Baranek, P.M. and Chan, J.B.L. (1987) Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News

Organization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ericson, R.V., Baranek, P.M. and Chan, J.B.L. (1991) Representing Order: Crime, Law and

Justice in the News Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) (2003) ‘In Iraq Crisis, Networks are Mega-

phones for Official Views’, in ‘Iraq Crisis, Networks are Megaphones for Official Views’,
18 March, available online at: [http://www.fair.org/reports/iraq-sources.html].

Foundation, ARF Advertising Research (2001) ‘The ARF Supports Ad Council Coalition
Against Terrorism’, 20 June.

Gamel, K. (2006) ‘Two Captured U.S. Soldiers Killed ‘‘in Barbaric Way’’’, The Seattle
Times, 20 June, p. 1, available online at: [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/
nationworld/2003073487_webiraq20.html], accessed 29 June 2006.

Garland, D. (2001) The Culture Of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Glasgow University Media Group (1976) Bad News. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Gordon, G. and Taylor, M. (2006) ‘U.S. Interrogators May Not Be in the Clear Yet; Bill

on Abuses Won’t Stop Prosecutions in Other Countries, Experts Warn’, Sacramento

306 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

Bee, 30 September, p. A16, available online at: [http://web.lexis-nexis.com.ezproxy1.
lib.asu.edu/universe/document?_m=d80652d20e771dc3cce2b25851fdad6f&_
docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkVA&_md5=29a184922fe7c2c6ef498c271153e0c3,
accessed 9 October 2006.

Hess, S. (1996) International News & Foreign Correspondents. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution.

Hewitt, J.P. and Stokes, R. (1975) ‘Disclaimers’, American Sociological Review 40: 1–11.
Jackall, R. and Hirota, J.M. (2000) Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos

of Advocacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, C.A. (2004) The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.

New York: Metropolitan Books.
Kagan, R. (2003) Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. New

York: Knopf.
Kagan, R. and Kristol, W. (2000) Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign

and Defense Policy. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books.
Kaplan, R.D. (2003) ‘Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World’, The

Atlantic, July/August, pp. 66–90 (some summary comments available online at:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/polipro/pp2003–04–02.htm]).

Kappeler, V.E., Blumberg, M. and Potter, G.W. (1999) The Mythology of Crime and Criminal
Justice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

Kellner, D. (2003) From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.

Kellner, D. (2004) ‘Media Propaganda and Spectacle in the War on Iraq: A Critique of
U.S. Broadcasting Networks’, Cultural Studies <=>Critical Methodologies 4: 329–38.

Louw, P.E. (2003) ‘The ‘‘War Against Terrorism’’: A Public Relations Challenge for the
Pentagon’, Gazette 65: 211–30.

MacArthur, J.R. (2003) ‘The Lies We Bought: The Unchallenged ‘‘Evidence’’ for War’,
Columbia Journalism Review May/June, pp. 62–3, available online at: [http://www.cjr.
org/year/03/3/macarthur.asp], accessed 31 May 2003.

Mann, M. (2003) Incoherent Empire. London: Verso.
Mehan, H. and Wood, H. (1975) The Reality of Ethnomethodology. New York: Wiley.
Mills, C.W. (1940) ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive’, American Sociological

Review 5: 904–13, available online at: [http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/Mills%201940.
htm].

Monahan, T. (2006) Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday
Life. New York: Routledge.

Newman, R. (2001) ‘The Day the World Changed, I Did, Too’, Newsweek, 1 October, p. 9.
Nightline (2003) ‘THE PLAN’, American Broadcasting Company, 5 March.
Perkovich, G. (2003) ‘Bush’s Nuclear Revolution: A Regime Change in Nonprolifer-

ation’, Foreign Affairs, available online at: [http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030301
facomment10334/george-perkovich/bush-s-nuclear-revolution-a-regime-change-in-
nonproliferation.html].

Philo, G. and Glasgow University Media Group (1982) Really Bad News. London: Writers
and Readers.

Pilger, J. (2002) ‘Axis of Evil; JOHN PILGER Exposes the Frightening Agenda in Washington
that is Behind the United States Threat to World Peace’, Morning Star, 14 December,
p. 19.

Ricks, T.E. (2001) ‘Empire or Not? A Quiet Debate Over U.S. Role’, The Washington Post, 21
August, p. A1.

Roy, A. (2003) ‘Seize the Time’, In These Times, 7 July, p. 14.

Altheide: The mass media and terrorism 307

Rutenberg, J. and Carter, B. (2001) ‘Draping Newscasts with the Flag’, New York Times,
20 September, p. C8.

Shales, T. (2001) ‘Patriotism Advertising’, Washington Post, 30 December, p. 2, available
online at: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&
contentId=A35030–2001Dec28].

Spratling, C. (2006) ‘Most Parents Willing to Give their Teens a Drug Test, Study Finds’,
Detroit Free Press, 26 October, available online at: [http://web.lexis-nexis.
c o m / u n i ve r s e / d o c u m e n t ? _ m = f 1 5 7 6 a e 0 4 9 d 1 a 5 7 9 a c 0 6 c e a 3 9 6 f 5 2 a 4 f & _
docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzz-zSkVA&_md5=1b9b8499928c8718ee873a3ecb0ef306
], accessed 3 November 2006.

Stack, M.K. and Salman, R. (2006) ‘Survivors Say Marines Went House to House in a Rage’,
The Seattle Times, 2 June, p. A1, available online at: [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
html/nationworld/2003031922_hadithatale01.html].

Stauber, J. and Rampton, S. (1995) Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the
Public Relations Industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

Stolberg, S.G. (2006) ‘President Signs New Rules to Prosecute Terror Suspects’, The
New York Times, 17 October, p. 20, available online at: [http://web.lexis-nexis.com/
univer se/document?_m=289b9c72cc5c7a494198c4f4bd73d559&_docnum=
5&wchp=dGLbVzz-zSkVb&_md5=062f8ee8cd924226e71920ccbd75d510], accessed
31 October 2006.

Sullivan, D. (2001) ‘Washington is Calling. Will Anyone Answer? Antimilitary Elitism at
Top Universities Dissuades Our Brightest Young People from Serving their Country’,
Newsweek, 22 October, p. 12.

Surette, R. (1998) Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities. Belmont, CA:
West/Wadsworth.

Umansky, E. (2006) ‘Failures of Imagination: American Journalists and the Coverage of
American Torture’, Columbia Journalism Review September/October, available online at:
[http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp].

van Dijk, T.A. (1988) News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Wasburn, P.C. (2002) The Social Construction of International News: We’re Talking about

Them, They’re Talking about Us. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Westfeldt, W. and Wicker, T. (1998) Indictment: The News Media and the Criminal Justice

System. Nashville, TN: First Amendment Center.
Wilkinson, T. (2005) ‘Court Widens Net for 22 CIA Agents to EU; Italian Prosecutors

Seek to Try the Operatives in the 2003 Abduction of an Imam on a Milan Street. The
Warrants Expand the Hunt to 25 Nations’, The Los Angeles Times, 24 December, p. 3.

Williamson, H. (2006) ‘Germany Pressed to Arrest CIA Team’, The Financial Times,
22 September, p. 11, available online at: [http://web.lexis-nexis.com.ezproxy1.
lib.asu.edu/universe/document?_m=d80652d20e771dc3cce2b25851fdad6f&_
docnum=4&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkVA&_md5=c0dca7191301c7c4f0760353df1a8a41],
accessed 9 October 2006.

D A V I D L . A LT H E I D E is Regents’ Professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at
Arizona State University. Two recent books are: Creating Fear: News and the Construction of
Crisis (Aldine de Gruyter/Transaction, 2002) and Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (AltaMira,
2006), which examines the role of the mass media and propaganda in promoting fear

308 Discourse & Communication 1(3)

and social control. Professor Altheide received the 2005 George Herbert Mead Award for
lifetime contributions from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. A D D R E S S :
Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University, School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Tempe,
AZ 85287–0403, USA. [email: david.altheide@asu.edu]

Turn in your highest-quality paper
Get a qualified writer to help you with

“ Article Summary ”

Get high-quality paper

Guarantee! All work is written by expert writers!

Article Summary

Top-quality papers guaranteed

100% original papers

Confidential service

Money-back guarantee

Enjoy the free features we offer to everyone

Calculate how much your essay costs

How to place an order

What we are popular for

Ask experts to write you a cheap essay of excellent quality