It is no exaggeration to say that what the two of you did resulted in a blood bath. Aspects of all this were seen, as they were intended to be, by members of the public. Once you had finished, and again in order to achieve maximum effect, you then carried and dragged Lee Rigby’s body into the road in Artillery Place and dumped it there – thus eventually bringing the traffic to a halt.
In the thirteen minutes that passed between then and the arrival of the armed officers, the number of members of the public at the scene grew. You both gloried in what you had done. Each of you had the gun at one point or another and it was used to warn off any male member of the public who looked as though he might intervene.
Between March 2 and 22, 2018, five package bombs exploded in and around Austin, Texas, killing two people and injuring another five. The suspect was 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt of Pflugerville, Texas, who blew himself up inside his vehicle after he was pulled over by police on March 21. The attacks were described as “19 days of terror”2 and hundreds of law-enforcement officers worked around the clock to track down the attacker. Conditt was an unemployed college dropout. In a 2012 blog for a government class he was taking, Conditt identified himself as politically conservative and argued against abortion and gay marriage. In a final audio recording he made, he described himself as a “psychopath” and said he feels as though he has been disturbed since childhood and that he wishes he were sorry but is not. His recoding offered no explanation for his actions nor how he chose his victims, but he acknowledged that his actions would leave family members without loved ones and would cause permanent injury to others.
On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock opened fire from his hotel window into a crowd of approximately 22,000 concertgoers attending a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Paddock fired on the crowd for ten minutes before stopping. He then killed himself in his hotel room. After an extensive review of the case, police reported that there was “no clear motive.” Paddock’s brother (cited in Lemieux, 2018) was reported to have
believed Paddock may have conducted the attack because he had done everything in the world he wanted to do and was bored with everything. If so, Paddock would have planned the attack to kill a large amount of people because he would want to be known as having the largest casualty count. Paddock always wanted to be the best and known to everyone.
Another of his brothers told investigators that “Paddock was suffering from mental illness and was paranoid and delusional.” A Las Vegas doctor, identified as Paddock’s primary care physician, told investigators he believed that Paddock may have had bipolar disorder, but he had refused medication to treat it. He also described Paddock’s behavior as “odd.” Paddock’s attack was the deadliest mass shooting in America, killing 58 and injuring over 800. The previous most deadly attack was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando on June 12, 2016, in which Omar Mateen killed 49 civilians. In his 911 call during the attack, he referred to the Boston Marathon bombers as his “homeboys” and told the negotiators he was a soldier of ISIS.
CASE 5
Jac Holmes was a British volunteer with the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia who fought against ISIL in Syria from January 2015. The YPG is a Kurdish group working in Syria, and Turkish leaders view the YPG as a terrorist organization. The YPG is viewed as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey. In 2019 the US Department of State maintained the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation of the PKK, pursuant to Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended (8 U.S.C. § 1189). The PKK was originally designated as an FTO in 1997. Jac documented his time with the YPG on Facebook, as well as on Instagram, and he even did a few Reddit AMAs (“Ask Me Anything,” about his time in Syria). His Instagram page shows some of his daily activities, including engaging in sniper battles and attacking ISIS-held villages. The post was accompanied by the quote “223 YPG Sniper Team. We have been operating in raqqa for the past 2 months. We’ve been shot to shit, set on fire, surrounded. But we still out here @ypgsniper.” Facebook videos he posted include him showing off the dead bodies of ISIS fighters who had died during a firefight he had just been in. In the two years Jac fought for the YPG, he returned to the UK and gave lectures abroad about the fight against ISIS. He was due to return home in November 2017, but he died in Raqqa on October 23, 2017, while clearing mines from the city. A national news headline read “BRIT HERO TRAGEDY: Brit volunteer fighter Jac Holmes killed by landmine in Syria just days after booting ISIS fanatics out of terror capital Raqqa.”3
CASE 6
Jack Letts was a British-Canadian national who converted to Islam and fled his home in Oxford, England, in 2014 to join the terrorist organization ISIS in its self-declared capital, Raqqa. He is believed to have married an ISIS bride in Iraq and was given the nickname “Jihadi Jack” by British media. In a 2016 interview Letts stated, “I’m not ISIS, but I believe in the Sharia; I also think that whatever I say, the media will probably freestyle with it and make up more nicknames for me” (Shebab, 2016). When questioned about the treatment of Muslims in Syria, he said, “The Muslims in Syria are burned alive, raped, abused, imprisoned and much more. I also think that some of Muslims I met here are living like walking mountains. Full of honour.” When asked if he was a terrorist, he stated: “Do you mean by the English government’s definition, that anyone that opposes a non-Islamic system and man-made laws? Then, of course, by that definition, I suppose they’d say I’m a terrorist, khalas (‘and that’s that’).” He also said, “that doesn’t mean I am with you, the dirty non-Muslims.” Now, Jack Letts is not the subject of this case (he has had his citizenship stripped by the UK government for his involvement in ISIS). In March 2015, after learning that Jack’s parents (John Letts and Sally Lane) had sent £223 (roughly $300) to Jack after he had given his word that the money would have “nothing to do with jihad,” the police seized their computers and devices, and the couple were formally warned that they could be prosecuted for sending their son property or money. The conversation, as cited in Dearden (2019), went as follows: After learning of the raid on his parents’ home, Jack responded, “Please convey to the British police that I’m not planning on coming back to their broken country … convey to them from me ‘die in your rage soon you’ll be the ones being raided!’ ” Police later provided a second warning that “sending money to Jack is the same as sending money to ISIS.” However, in December 2015 Jack indicated that he would like to leave Syria, and his father told their family liaison officer that Jack was “desperate to get out” and “in danger.” Lane told her son, “We know you are in danger, so we feel we have no choice but to help you and send it.” She attempted two more money transfers which were blocked, and the defendants were arrested. Judge Nicholas Hilliard QC, who was presiding over the case, said, “It was one thing for parents to be optimistic about their children and I do acknowledge he is your son who you love very much. But in this context, you did lose sight of realities.”
KNOWING IT WHEN WE SEE IT?
There are several different lenses that we may use to decide if something is an act of terrorism or not. Let’s go with the first “lens,” the idea that terrorism terrorizes. In this sense, those acts that cause the most fear and uncertainty, or that scare a population, are acts of terrorism. This is often a natural reaction, and many events that cause terror are instinctively called terrorism. So with this “emotion-based” approach, there are a few cases presented in this chapter that involve the public being terrorized. Cases 3 and 4 specifically involved mass instances of harm in that the incidents targeted the general population with no clear targeting strategy and a mass-casualty approach in which a large portion of the population was now at risk of becoming a victim. Cases 1 and 2 are more borderline in this instance. These attacks did terrorize, but they were targeted against a more focused group/individual. In Case 1 officers of the NYPD were the target, and in Case 2 Fusilier Lee Rigby was targeted as a representative of the armed forces. In both instances, civilian targets were actively avoided despite the opportunity in both cases to target them. Thus, despite being most in tune with the emotional reaction to acts of mass casualty violence, an emotion-based approach is not ideal for defining terrorism because of a tendency to call all acts that cause mass harm or fear terrorism. This is a reaction we often see in the public consciousness after an act that causes large-scale casualties. A good example of this would be when ex-police officer Christopher Dorner committed a series of shootings against police officers, their families, and civilians. He was referred to by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a “domestic Terrorist,”4 and his acts were described as “an act, and make no mistake about it, of domestic terrorism. This is a man who has targeted those who we entrust to protect the public. His actions cannot go unanswered.” Now, definitionally, no scholar would define it as such, but this links into the feeling of being terrorized. Thus, despite involving large-scale terror and significant harm to civilian lives, often we cannot rely solely on being terrorized as a definition of terrorism.
An alternate approach may be a “tactic-based” approach. This view would also favor Cases 3 and 4 in which the individual used weapons that are associated with acts of terrorism. Explosive devices are often associated with acts of terrorism, and in the United States, at least, the use of firearms is relatively frequent in acts of terrorism committed by lone individuals. The problem with this approach is that research on the history of terrorism, and indeed its evolution, has found that tactics change. David Rapoport categorized terrorism into “four waves” that have occurred since the 1880s. The first is anarchic terrorist violence (1880–1920), the second is anti-colonial (1920–1960), the third is the emergence of the New Left (1960–2000), and the fourth (and current) is the rise of religiously orientated (1980s onward). Now there are not distinct boundaries between waves, and some are still ongoing as are the debates on this concept of “waves” and their boundaries.5 What is known about the waves is that different forms of weaponry and attack styles are associated with different types of terrorism. This makes a “tactic-based” approach very hard to enforce because, despite the psychological power of an improvised explosive device, even religious groups who heavily leaned toward improvised explosive devices have had to adapt and adopt new forms of weaponry. Furthermore, when we look at the certain enduring groups who have been associated with the use of explosives (such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army or al-Qaeda), despite an early attachment to a certain form of weaponry, in an effort to endure, such groups have had to adopt new organizational structures and new recruiting practices and in doing so adopt to employ smaller scale, cruder methods of attack. This is why in the United Kingdom, for example (where access to firearms is much lower), we see the use of knives (Case 2), as well as the use of vehicles as a weapon (where the individual drives into large crowds). We have also seen vehicle attacks in the United States and France. Also, with reference to the use of firearms, in the United States this method, while deadly, is also often used by mass shooters who are not terrorists. Thus, despite terrorizing and using weapons that are often deployed in terrorist attacks, we cannot rely solely on the method of the attack.
One alternate approach is to focus on a “legal-based” definition of terrorism, in which we can judge an act as terroristic based on whether the individual was sentenced for a crime that is established as a terrorist-related offense. Such approaches are a good way of consistently deciding what is and what is not terrorism, and academics, for example, often use this approach to decide who to include and not to include in research on terrorist offenders. The issue, however, is that the decision on what is and what is not terrorism would now be based on interpretations of written law (which often have to be amended after acts of terrorism). For example, Dylann Roof (see Chapter 6) was not convicted of terrorist offenses despite being viewed as a white supremacist, posing with symbols of white supremacy, and writing a manifesto in which he outlined his extremist views. GQ magazine even referred to him as “A Most American Terrorist.” The issue in this case, and many others that do not reach the legal threshold for terrorism, is that federal law defines domestic terrorism as violent acts occurring within the United States “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” Hence, legal definitions include an additional hurdle of “intimidation” and coercion. In legal terms, because the Boston Marathon bombers used bombs, they could be charged with “using a weapon of mass destruction,” which is a crime specified in the US criminal code section for terrorism. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, on the other hand, argued that Roof’s manifesto and views (such as his “discriminatory views towards African Americans” and his decision to targ...
