THE NEW TERRORISM Introduction The terrorist a

This question had already been considered by students of terrorism, who saw a new pattern emerging of deadlier attacks on behalf of vaguer causes (Lesser et al., 1999). In the wake of the September 11 attack, these ideas have been reported to a much wider public (e.g., Greenberg, 2001). The argument for regarding "new terrorism" as essentially distinct from "classical" terrorism is based on such factors as the terrorists' failure to claim responsibility for actions, or to associate them (and the threat of future actions) with specific demands that might plausibly be met.

In this model, a classical terrorist act might, for example, might be taking hostages and demanding the release of a prisoner, or killing a number of people, claiming responsibility, and threatening further actions if a particular policy (such as occupation of a territory) is not discontinued. Such classical terrorism is typically associated with a political resistance movement. Actions by the Provisional IRA, for example, fall into this category. In contrast, new terr

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ives might have in and of themselves, the type of terrorism employed by al-Qaeda shares the apocalyptic overtones of Aum Shinrikyo terrorism. As noted at the outset of this essay, the 11 September attacks caused a far larger death toll -- by a factor of about fifteen -- than any previous terrorist action. The previous highest death toll is believed to have been 329 people, killed when an Air India 747 was blown up over the Atlantic in 1985, probably by Sikh terrorists (Ripley, 1999). Indeed, only a handful of previous terrorist attacks have killed as many as 100 people at one time. Among them is a previous al-Qaeda operation, the near-simultaneous bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, which between them killed some 300 people. (Of these only about 14 were Americans, the vast majority of the victims being Africans.) Al-Qaeda is also reported to have planned simultaneous bombings of up to a dozen jetliners over the Pacific in 1995, an operation that if successful would have caused a death toll of a few thousand, on the same order as the 11 September attacks. 3. Al-Qaeda's Apocalypse If the sheer carnage of the 11 September attack has a somewhat apocalyptic quality when compared with classical terrori
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