Terrorism background

This summary of the State Department Report on Global Terrorism offers some useful background information—in particular, numbers—mixed with ax-grinding. A difficulty understanding the current situation is the murky nature of terrorism and the difficulty of assessing how serious a threat it really is to the United States. What do you do when you’re attacked by someone who won’t identify himself? Is terrorism in the West an annoyance or a major threat? Was September 11 a one-time anomaly or a sign of things to come? Some aspects of the picture suggest a calmer view than most of us have been inclined toward lately, but I am writing this 3 miles from where the World Trade Center once stood and it’s hard to discount other possibilities in view of what’s actually happened.
Posted by Jim Kalb at September 03, 2002 09:45 AM | Send