COMPARE & CONTRAST

Compare & Contrast



Compare & Contrast

When faced with potential or actual terrorist acts states frequently claim a legitimate right to engage in practices that can bring them into conflict with commitments to human rights. Often states can use this defence as little other than a justificatory screen that allows them to engage in repressive measures against dissident groups and individuals. At other times states may have well founded concerns about terrorist activity. The problem of measuring the appropriateness of state measures in relation to terrorism is particularly acute in democratic states. How far can democratic states deviate from the principles of democracy in order to safeguard democracy? Central to this question is the issue of threat assessment.

Two events have shaped US counterterrorist policy in relation to terrorist threats since the mid-1990s. The first was the Oklahoma bombing of 1993; the second, and arguably more important in terms of US threat perception, was the Tokyo subway attack of 1995. In this attack the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo released the chemical agent sarin, killing a dozen people, injuring more than a thousand and terrifying millions more around the globe. Congress reacted by channelling billions of dollars into counterterrorist programmes in an effort to deal with this newly emerging threat.

But is it really the case, as US Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed, that a lone madman or nest of fanatics with a bottle of chemicals or a batch of plague-inducing bacteria, could threaten to kill tens of thousands? Just how easy is it to acquire, develop and deploy chemical and/or biological weapons and what kinds of terrorist groups and individuals would wish to do so? These are the issues Toxic Terror, edited by Jonathan Tucker, sets out to explore. This excellent volume consists of 12 case studies framed within two chapters by Tucker and an Appendix written by Jerrold M. Post that deals with the psychological and motivational factors behind chemical and biological terrorism.

Tucker's introduction is meticulous but slight and could have been improved by locating the case studies within a general theoretical framework. For example, there is very little consideration given to the problematic and normatively charged use of the term 'terrorism'. Tucker claims that out of 244 recorded incidents of chemical or biological terrorism since World War I only 25 per cent of these were linked to political motives - a link which is often ...