Terrorism suspects can be held longer than criminal suspects after arrest without an indictment They can be interrogated without a lawyer present. They receive longer prison sentences. “Terrorist inmates” are subject to extra restrictions known as special administrative measures. The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 gives corporate victims of terrorism special breaks (it is up for renewal) and protects owners of buildings from certain lawsuits. When terrorism is invoked, families of victims, such as of the 2009 Fort Hood attack, win extra benefits such as tax breaks, life insurance and combat-related pay. They can even be handed a New York City skyscraper.
Despite the legal power of this term, however, terrorism remains undefined beyond a vague sense of “a non-state actor attacking civilian targets to spread fear for some putative political goal”.
One study, Political Terrorism, lists 109 definitions. US security specialist David Tucker says wryly: “Above the gates of hell is the warning that all who enter should abandon hope. Less dire but to the same effect is the warning given to those who try to define terrorism.” Jokes Israeli counterterrorism specialist Boaz Ganor: “The struggle to define terrorism is sometimes as hard as the struggle against terrorism itself.”
This lack of specificity wreaks chaos, especially among police, prosecutors, politicians, press and professors.
“Violence carried out in connection with an internationally sanctioned terrorist group” such as Al-Qa’ida, Hezbollah or Hamas has become the working police definition of terrorism. This explains peculiar statements after an attack such as, “We have not found any links to terrorism,” which absurdly implies that “lone wolves” are never terrorists.
If they are not terrorists, the police must find another explanation to account for their acts of violence. Usually, they offer up some personal problem: insanity, family tensions, a work dispute, “teen immigrant angst”, a prescription drug or even a turbulent aeroplane ride. Emphasising personal demons over ideology, they focus on an perpetrator’s (usually irrelevant) private life, ignoring their far more significant political motives.
But then, inconsistently, they do not require some connection to an international group. When Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez shot eight rounds at the White House in November 2011, the US Attorney asserted, “Firing an assault rifle at the White House to make a political statement is terrorism, plain and simple” — no international terrorist group needed. Similarly, after Paul Anthony Ciancia went on a shooting spree at Los Angeles International Airport in November last year, killing a Transportation Security Administration officer, the indictment accused him of “substantial planning and premeditation to cause the death of a person and to commit an act of terrorism”.
This terminological irregularity breeds utter confusion. The whole world calls the Boston Marathon bombings terrorism — except the Department of the Treasury which, 1½ years on, “has not determined that there has been an ‘act of terrorism’ under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act”. The judge presiding over the terrorism trial in January of Jose Pimentel, accused of planning to set off pipe bombs in Manhattan, denied the prosecution’s request for an expert to justify a charge of terrorism.
Government officials sometimes just throw up their hands. Asked in June last year if the US government considered the Taliban a terrorist group, the State Department spokeswoman replied, “Well, I’m not sure how they’re defined at this particular moment.” A shooting in New Orleans in May last year, which injured 19, was even more muddled. An FBI spokeswoman called it not terrorism but “strictly an act of street violence”.
The mayor disagreed; asked if he considered it terrorism, he said, “I think so” because families “are afraid of going outside”. Challenged to disentangle this contradiction, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s New Orleans field made matters even more opaque: “You can say this is definitely urban terrorism; it’s urban terror. But from the FBI standpoint and for what we deal with on a national level, it’s not what we consider terrorism, per se.”
This lack of clarity presents a significant public policy challenge. Terrorism, with all its legal and financial implications, cannot remain a vague, subjective concept but requires a precise and accurate definition, consistently applied.
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum, where Teri Blumenfeld is a researcher.
