Al Qaeda, Terrorism, and Military Commissions

Bibliographic Data

ID9549394
AuthorsRuth Wedgwood (0000-0003-1391-2407, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume96
Issue2
Pages328-337
Publication date2002-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of International Law (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9300 • E-ISSN: 2161-7953
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2693927
OpenAlexW1992154006
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited1

It is now more than an academic question whether one should regard terrorism as crime or as war. The attacks mounted by the Al Qaeda organization on September 11, 2001, were of unprecedented scale, heretofore seen only in wartime, killing three thousand people in a few hours’ time. Most victims were civilians, and most were Americans, yet the dead included people from eighty-seven countries. Had the emergency evacuation of the World Trade Center towers not run efficiently, as many as twenty-five thousand more might have died. The psychological sense that this was an act of war is founded on the extraordinary destructiveness of the act. In the past, even terrorism has evinced an implicit set of expectations—using violence to intimidate or gain publicity, targeting civilians so as to undermine the confidence placed in organized authority, but generally stopping short of this irrational magnitude of destruction. Only nihilism might seem to explain a scale of wreckage that serves no programmatic demands or political ambition

Al qaeda · Criminology · Irrational number · Political science · Politics · Publicity · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Terrorism · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

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