One of Germany's busiest high-speed rail routes is the link between Hamburg and Berlin. I've been using it for months. On the days when I need to be in Hamburg, I roll out of bed around dawn, shuffle through Berlin before traffic starts and find a seat on the train just in time to scowl out the window over a cup of mediocre coffee. Ninety minutes later I'm in Hamburg. The trip takes three hours by car. When Deutsche Bahn renovated the 160-mile stretch in 2004 to allow the current speeds, it wiped out the market for business flights, just as a good high-speed rail corridor in California ... Read More
Bin Laden Is Dead: A Study on Violence After the Demise of Previous Terrorists
May 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
(With article and data contributions by LaGrange College undergraduates Ashbi Alford, Ryan Bergman, Derecius Cheaves, Katie Hearn, Emmie Trull and Isaiah Whitfield) In the Tom Clancy novel-turned-movie Patriot Games, Professor Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) kills a terrorist in the act of preventing an attack. The terrorist’s brother and his organization spend the entire movie seeking revenge against Ryan, his family and friends. Academics writing before bin Laden’s death on May Day vary in their conclusions about the fallout from decapitating terrorist organizations, as ... Read More
Academics Debate Whether Osama bin Laden’s Death Will Have Impact on al-Qaeda Leaders
May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces is being hailed as an important symbolic victory. But will it lead to the collapse of al-Qaeda, or at least degrade its ability to carry out terrorist activities? Research on terrorist organizations past and present leads academics to different conclusions. But the current consensus is that “leadership decapitation” of such groups is of little long-term value, and may even be counterproductive. “Leadership decapitation seems to be a misguided strategy, particularly given the nature of organizations being currently ... Read More
Muslim-American Terrorism Down in 2010
March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The number of Muslim Americans involved in terrorist threats declined in 2010 from the previous year, although you wouldn’t know that from the tone of a congressional hearing scheduled for Thursday on “the extent of radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Committee chairman Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, has been planning the hearing for months, partly as a response, he says, to the lack of cooperation some law enforcement officials have complained of within the Muslim-American community. Civil liberties groups and Muslim leaders, meanwhile, are decrying what ... Read More
Please Don’t Give Our Money to Terrorists
February 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Somali pirates just had a banner year. Not only have three international naval groups failed to seriously reduce the number of ship hijackings in the Indian Ocean since 2008, the ransoms demanded by Somali negotiators have skyrocketed, and “more people were taken hostage at sea in 2010 than in any year since records began" in 1991, according to an annual report by the International Maritime Bureau. The reason hijackings haven’t slowed is not that naval groups are lazy — in fact they’ve been busy intercepting pirates in dhows and skiffs. But the pirate gangs have responded with a ... Read More
Debunking Theories of a Terrorist Power Grab
December 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
You know all those doom-and-gloomers who get up before Congress and testify about how terrorists are going to attack America's electric grid, sending blackouts toppling across the country like dominoes? Well, here's what Seth Blumsack, a power-system expert at Pennsylvania State University, has to say about the terrifying prospect: "That's a bunch of hooey." Blumsack and his colleague Paul Hines at the University of Vermont have just published a report in the journal Chaos — and we can only imagine what the deadlines there are like — that refutes the drumbeat of warnings, many of which ... Read More
For Some, Might Torture Be Its Own Reward?
November 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Torture. It's an ugly word. Its mere mention conjures images of sadistic villains in dark dungeons or shadowy terrorists in sparse rooms, illuminated by a single light bulb overhead. But regardless of what mental image, it is usually the evil side that tortures the side of good. In recent years, such thinking has shifted as "enhanced interrogation" has been touted as acceptable for getting answers so that good people won't be hurt. But that still assumed that the purpose of torture is to derive vital information. For example, Jack Bauer, the counterterrorism agent in the television show ... Read More
Bad Parenting? Blame bin Laden
November 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
With the recent discovery of explosives hidden in cargo airplanes, fears of a terrorist attack have returned to the front of many people's minds. If the past is any indication, this sense of apprehension is likely to make us less trusting of outsiders, and less tolerant of those who violate social norms. What's more, it may also make us bad parents. That’s the implication of research published in the November issue of the journal Social Psychology. A team of scholars led by Peter Fischer of the University of Graz in Austria reports thoughts of terrorism seem to inspire authoritarian ... Read More
‘Carlos’ Brilliant Look at Real Terrorist
October 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
If further proof were needed that revolutionary terrorists are basically narcissists, it can be found in Carlos, a monumental, and absolutely mesmerizing, film about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious Venezuelan bomber and radical known as Carlos the Jackal. Director Olivier Assayas' five-and-a-half-hour epic, which will be shown in three parts on the Sundance Channel beginning Oct. 11, followed by a simultaneous theatrical and video-on-demand release starting Oct. 15, is a powerful and complex look into the mind of a terrorist and the entities — governmental and non — that supported ... Read More
USB Warfare: The Real Electronic Nightmare
September 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The gist of this column lately has been that threats of "cyberwarfare" waged through the public Internet are the stuff of Hollywood schlock and patriotic pulp fiction. But there are other ways to wage electronic war, and they tend to be more terrifying precisely because they're tougher to fight. Siemens announced in July that a malicious bit of code called Stuxnet could spread on USB thumb drives and try to lift industrial secrets from its clients around the world. It's the first large-scale worm of its kind, an act of sophisticated industrial espionage that indicates the real future of ... Read More
