TERRORISM
TERRORISM is a political tactic that uses threat or violence, usually against civilians, to frighten a target group into conceding to certain political demands.
The term "terrorism" was first used to describe the state terrorism practiced by the French revolutionaries of 1789–1795. Through kangaroo courts, executions by guillotine, and violent repression of political opponents, the revolutionaries tried to frighten the population into submission. Two great terrorist states of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, also practiced the threat and use of violence to keep their own citizens in line.
In the nineteenth century, terrorist tactics were adopted by individuals and groups that used assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings to undermine popular support for what the terrorists saw as unjust policies or tyrannical governments. Terrorist acts were first committed on a wide scale in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century. On 4 May 1886, an anarchist bomb killed eight policemen during a demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square, and on 16 September 1920, an anarchist bomb hidden in a wagon on Wall Street killed thirty people and seriously injured more than two hundred.
Although anarchist violence received the most newspaper coverage during this period, the white supremacist KU KLUX KLAN (KKK) was the most important terrorist group in the United States from 1850 to the 1960s. The KKK used marches, beatings, and lynchings to intimidate
African Americans who wished to vote or otherwise participate in the political process.
Beginning in the late 1960s, extreme-left groups like the Weathermen engaged in kidnapping and bombings to protest the Vietnam War, while groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army engaged in armed actions against civilians or the police, hoping thereby to provoke a "people's revolution." These groups disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s only to be replaced by extreme-right terrorist organizations.
On 19 April 1995 a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, destroying the building and killing 168 people. An act of domestic terrorism, the OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING was the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history at the time. Testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1998, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh stated that, "The current domestic terrorist threat primarily comes from right-wing extremist groups, including radical paramilitary [militia] groups, Puerto Rican terrorist groups, and special interest groups."
The period after 1960 saw the rise of international terrorist attacks on Americans in the Middle East and in Latin America. The most dramatic instance of terrorism during this period was the 4 November 1979 attack by
Iranian students on the United States Embassy in Teheran, when sixty-six diplomats were held hostage until their release on 20 January 1981. According to the U.S. State Department, seventy-seven U.S. citizens were killed and 651 injured in international terrorist attacks between 1995 and 2000.
By the mid-1970s, international terrorists began to carry out operations on American soil. On 24 January 1975, the Puerto Rican Armed National Liberation Front killed four people when bombs exploded at the Fraunces Tavern in New York City. Eleven months later, on 29 December 1975, a bomb exploded in the TWA terminal at La Guardia Airport, killing eleven. No group ever claimed responsibility. The next major incident occurred on 26 February 1993, when a truck bomb exploded in the basement of New York's World Trade Center, killing six and wounding thousands. At his 1997trial, bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef stated, "I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States government and against Israel."
On 11 September 2001, in the most murderous terrorist attack American history had yet witnessed, almost three thousand people were killed. Nineteen Middle Eastern terrorists hijacked four airplanes; one crashed into the Pentagon, two destroyed the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center, and one, possibly headed for the White House, crashed in a wooded area of Pennsylvania. Although the hijackers left no message, they were clearly motivated by hatred of the United States and by a desire to force a change in American policy in the Middle East.
The enormity of the attack pushed terrorism to the top of the American political agenda, with President George W. Bush declaring "war on terror" in his 20 September 2001 address to a joint session of Congress. President Bush predicted that this new war could last for years or even decades. The World Trade Center attack also led to a major change in the way the United States deals with terrorism. Before 11 September 2001, the United States followed a police-justice model whereby police and intelligence agencies identified and apprehended terrorists and then turned them over to the justice system. After those attacks, however, the Bush Administration adopted a preemptive-war model, whereby the United States intends to strike at individual terrorists or terrorist groups anywhere in the world and has threatened to use all means necessary, from special forces to massive military force, to attack what it identifies as "terrorist states" that support international terrorism.
The adoption of this model led President Bush in his 29 January 2002 State of the Union address to talk about Iran, Iraq, and North Korea together as an "axis of evil" and to threaten military action against Iraq. This statement led to much uneasiness among allies of the United States, who feared that the administration's war on terrorism signaled a move toward unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy and the destabilization of international relations.
