US intel report: Major increase in terrorist incidents | csmonitor.com

US intel report: Major increase in terrorist incidents
But experts say a common definition of terrorism is a great challenge and a global issue.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
original

In a report to be released next week, US government figures will show that the number of terrorist attacks in the world jumped sharply in 2005, totalling more than 10,000 for the first time. That is almost triple the number of terrorist attacks in 2004 -- 3,194. Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that counterterrorism experts say that there are two reasons for the dramatic increase: a broader definition of what consitutes a terrorist attack, and the war in Iraq.

More than half the fatalities from terrorism worldwide last year occurred in Iraq, said a counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data haven't been made public. Roughly 85 percent of the US citizens who died from terrorism during the year died in Iraq. The figures cover only noncombatants and thus don't include combat deaths of US, Iraqi and other coalition soldiers.

"There's no question that the level of terrorist attacks in Iraq was up substantially," said the official, who's familiar with the methods used by the National Counterterrorism Center to track terrorist trends. The center is part of the US intelligence community.

Knight Ridder also reports that the new definition was used in 2004, but 2005 was the first year that analysts had more time to use the new method. In past years, only terrorist attacks that involved people from more than one country were counted. But officials realized this would, for instance, leave out incidents like the one in the Philippines where terrorists sank a ferry killing 132 Filipinos.

The latest figures will be released in conjunction with the US State Department's annual report on terrorism.



04/20/06
Iraq corruption probe to expand
04/19/06
Israel to forgo military response to bombing
04/18/06
Report: Blair will not back Iran strike




Sign up to be notified daily:


Find out more.

Subscribe via RSS Feed:
Feed for Daily Update (RSS file) What is this?
Add to My Yahoo!
Add to Google
Subscribe with Bloglines
Add to My AOL

Earlier this month, the EUobserver.com reported that two officials from the US State Department slammed Europe's policies on the integration of Muslim communities into broader communities, saying that Europe's failure to do so is creating a "particularly dangerous mix." Daniel Fried, the undersecretary for European affairs, told a US Senate committee that "the failure to integrate Muslim minorities in Europe constitutes a security risk for the US."

Mr Fried said unemployment, discrimination and lack of integration among Europe’s Muslim communities had created an "audience" open to extremist messages, according to Reuters. He added that some European countries’ far-reaching freedom of expression laws helped radical elements to spread anti-democratic ideologies.

"Add to this a deeply negative perception and a distorted perception of US foreign policy among Western European Muslim communities, and relative freedom of movement across the Atlantic, and you have a particularly dangerous mix," he said.

Both European and US experts also say that a key difference is that what the US considers terrorism, Europe often considers a criminal act.

The Philippines' Sun Star reports that a universal definition of what constitutes terrorism was discussed Friday at the Counter-terrorism Experts’ Conference being held in Cebu, attended by 500 people from around the world. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta, minister for foreign affairs, referred to a paragraph defining terrorism in a draft act before the Philippine House of Representatives.

"Terrorism is the premeditated, threatened, actual use of violence, force or by any other means of destruction perpetrated against person/s, property/ies, or the environment, with the intention of creating of sowing a slate of danger, panic, fear or chaos to the general public, group of persons or particular person, or of coercing and intimidating the government to do or abstain from doing an act,” the draft stated. Horta said in a press conference that the draft “provides useful contribution towards the definition of terrorism.”

The Sun Star reports that Mr. Horta also said that government had to be wary "not [to] trample on human rights as they seek to crush terrorist cells". He said that putting a "'greater premium on sophisticated law enforcement and intelligence operations' would help to both force more terrorists out into the open, and protect citizens caught in the middle."

In a United Press International opinion piece last week on the problem of coming up with a universal definition of terrorism, Jennie Kim writes that there are real-world consequences of the application of any definition of terrorism.

Distinguishing between terrorists and legitimate resistance groups remains notoriously difficult in the international arena. Witness the United Nations' ongoing effort to define the term without neglecting "the legitimate right of peoples under occupation to struggle for their independence and in defen(se) of their right to self-determination."

Further complications arise for the United States when its designated foreign terrorist groups – such as the ANC in 1980s South Africa, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories – come to be accepted as legitimate political actors by both their domestic constituents and international players ...

These conflicting definitions represent more than a problem of semantics – they reflect decades of struggle, bloodshed and humiliation. History itself imbues these words with layers of sometimes conflicting meanings, and there is little reason to believe a resolution acceptable to all will be reached soon.

In an opinion piece for the South Korean news site, OhMyNews.com, Amin George Forji argues that this lack of agreement raises the question of whether there can be a real definiton of terrorism at all.

As Jarna Petman [Research Fellow at The Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Finland] writes, the problem with defining terrorism is this. On the one hand, any such definition will have to encompass any serious enemy that one might have in the future. But the future remains unknown and the experience of the past is insufficient to grasp it. She asked the following hypothetical questions. What if one's Mujahedeen friend turns into tomorrow's Taliban adversary? Or if one's former Kosovo Liberation army ally is transformed into a saboteur of one's future governance plans? So the definition would have to be open-ended enough so as to govern future perceptions of the enemy. On the other hand, it should not be such as to enable the definition of one's own action, or those of one's ally, as terrorism.

But again, she adds, it is impossible to know what kinds of action may be needed in order to protect important values in the future. What if one's country is invaded by a foreign occupier and one needs to set up a clandestine organization of military resistance? Such a definition should not cover such actions. In other words, any definition should be binding so as to bite hard on the acts of one's adversaries, but open-ended as to be adjustable as needed in changing circumstances. This analogy leads us to the next problematic (perhaps the most outstanding) question when it comes to defining terrorism: Is one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter?

Finally, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that Russia and NATO announced Thursday they will make joint efforts to fight international threats, including terrorism and criminal activities.