Justifying war on terrorism
city preparing for a terrorist attack involving chemical or biological weapons. justifying war on terrorism Bush terrorist attack. In 1997 alone, more than 20 cities staged such mock attacks in an effort to coordinate the responses of local and federal emergency services workers. While the "victims" are usually volunteers or Boy Scout troops fulfilling their community service requirements, the drills provide essential training for local emergency services workers, who will likely be the first on the scene in the event of a real attack. Such exercises are part of the Defense Department's Domestic Preparedness Program, which will spend more than $40 million to train and evaluate emergency personnel in 120 U. justifying war on terrorism Justifying war on terrorism. S. cities. In recent years, the fear of terrorists using chemical or biological weapons has moved from thriller-novel fantasy to front-page news. justifying war on terrorism American diabetes association diet. Chemical and biological weapons are easier to acquire than nuclear devices: relatively little scientific training is required for their production, and they can be concocted in rather simple laboratories using readily available materials. And at the same time that chemical and biological weapons have become easier to obtain, many in the anti-terrorism field believe there has been an emergence of a "new breed" of terrorist far more likely than any in the past to use such weapons of mass destruction. New rules, new weaponsWhile statistics show that the total number of terrorist attacks worldwide has decreased in the past 10 years, the percentage of those attacks that resulted in fatalities has actually increased. And high-profile attacks in the United States-unheard of even a decade ago-have shown that no country is safe. Since the explosion of a truck bomb under the World Trade Center in Manhattan in 1993, terrorism on American soil has been increasingly in the headlines, from Oklahoma City and the Olympic Park bombing, to efforts to bomb New York's Lincoln Tunnel and a plot-foiled last July-to set off explosives in a Brooklyn subway station during rush hour. While there is no formal relationship between the perpetrators or planners of any of the attacks in the United States, or any single motive behind them, the incidents fit a familiar pattern for terrorist activity: they were not aimed at a specific person, but rather at a random number of people, and all planned to use conventional-rather than chemical or biological-weapons. However, many in the anti-terrorism community wonder how much longer such attacks will be the norm, or if terrorists will begin to strike at greater numbers of people-on behalf of political, religious, ethnic, or racial justifications-through the use weapons of mass destruction. Precedents do exist for the production of homemade arsenals of biological and chemical agents: In 1984, members of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult tried to infect an entire Oregon town with salmonella bacteria. In 1987, a Christian supremacist group in Arkansas was found to have stockpiled 30 gallons of cyanide, which it planned to use to poison municipal water supplies in the United States. In April 1991, the right-wing Patriot's Council of Minnesota used castor beans to produce the biological agent ricin, which members discussed using against federal law enforcement officers. And in 1995, a member of an American neo-Nazi group obtained a lethal quantity of the virus that causes bubonic plague from a Maryland firm that provides biological agents for scientific research. The most serious of these attempts were thwarted by authorities, but Japanese law enforcement agencies were caught completely off guard in the most devastating terrorist use of chemical weapons to date: the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed 12 people and contaminated another 3,000 with sarin gas. But since that incident, crucial questions still remain unanswered: how likely is it that terrorists will use chemical or biological weapons? Is availability the only stumbling block, or is there something about the goals and motives of different terrorist groups that makes some more likely than others to employ weapons of mass destruction? Looking for answersAccording to experts I interviewed, the 1990s have seen the emergence of terrorists who use violence in the name of principles and goals different from those that inspired most past acts of terrorism. In a rudimentary scheme, this "new breed" can be divided into three groups: cults and religious sects (Japan's Aum Shinrikyo being the most notable example), racist and anti-government groups (European neo-Nazis or the American militia movement), and fundamentalist and extremist organizations (such as the Algerian group gia). To Brian Jenkins, the deputy chairman of the security consulting firm Kroll Associates and a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, there are "two kinds of situations that lead entities that use violence to abandon the constraints of moral and political order that stop them from using weapons of mass destruction.
Justifying war on terrorism
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