'Scaring People May Be the Only Way to Avoid the Risks of New-Style Terrorism'

Summary

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It is now commonly argued, especially on the left, that governments overhype the risks from terrorism, and that al-Qaeda is something of a paper tiger. This view was put forward last year, for instance, in two programmes in the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, directed by Adam Curtis. Al-Qaeda, Curtis argued, does not really exist: western intelligence agencies and politicians have turned a few, widely scattered terrorist incidents into a sinister global conspiracy.

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'Scaring People May Be the Only Way to Avoid the Risks of New-Style Terrorism'

The current debate about terrorism, including its implications for civil liberties (which were recently highlighted by the law lords' denunciation of British ministers for imprisoning foreign nationals without trial), is vitiated by a failure to distinguish between two types of threat. One type I shall call old-style terrorism with which we have been familiar for decades. It was practised by groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy or Baader-Meinhof in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, but it is more commonly associated with nationalist struggles, usually involving "n...

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