Author Archives: Vanessa Valenti

I do not think we are concentrating too much on terrorism, it legitimately belongs at the very top of the list of national security threats we face today. True, the nature of the transnational threats facing the world today is far different than the ones the U.S. and its allies faced on 9/11. But al-Qaeda itself remains a formidable opponent, with a resurgent core in Northwest Pakistan and affiliates and homegrown cells pose a growing threat as well. READ MORE

Is there a chance that we are concentrating too much on terrorism? If so, how have some of the policy trade-offs manifested themselves? Should the next president de-emphasize terrorism relative to other national security priorities? READ MORE

Thanks, Matt, for following this thread.

On the definition issue, at risk of stating the obvious, the distinction between “terrorists” and “freedom fighters” is given weight it doesn’t deserve because of the inherently political nature of any discussion of who is and who isn’t a terrorist. The fact that the US only recently took Nelson Mandela off of its terrorist list is a reminder of this.

READ MORE

Eric raises excellent points. I’ll just add that on top of the question of whether the existing treaties do in fact cover the full waterfront on possible terrorist offenses, the lack of a common definition of terrorism has several other implications. Among them:

First, much of the debate over terrorism still focuses on the groups themselves and their underlying grievances or political objectives, not the actual acts of terrorism – the criminal terrorist offenses – they carry out. As such, the “terrorism v resistance” argument is given weight it does not deserve since the legal issue at hand is not why one carries out a criminal act of terrorism like a suicide bombing but the fact that such an act was carried out at all. READ MORE

Since one of the questions in the prompt asked whether “our laws – or international law” [emphasis added] are capable of addressing the threat, I thought I would weigh in the international law side of the question.
READ MORE