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'NCTC Terrorism Report for 2008,' May 14, 2009 #194
By Dr Dave McIntyre, Director Integrative Center for Homeland Security, 14 May 2009
Sometimes numbers are clear and unambiguous. Sometimes they are slippery and indeterminate. When counting terrorism attacks, they can be both. I will tell you more if you will give me Just a Minute for Homeland Security.
I’m Dave McIntyre, Director of the Integrative Center for Homeland Security at Texas A&M.
The National Counterterrorism Center – or NCTC – was established in 2004, and consists of more than 500 people from 16 intelligence agencies, all working for the Director of National Intelligence. Each year they compile and analyze data on terrorism worldwide. Their report for 2008 is now out. (1)
As it turns out, counting terrorism is not easy. First, you need a data source. NCTC uses unclassified government and media reports. Then you need a definition of terrorism which NCTC gets from U.S. law. (2) Then you have to judge which acts to include. For example, when a fired soccer coach killed several children with poison cake in Iraq, the crime was personal, not terrorism. When vendors from one shop threw a bomb at another shop in Thailand for commercial gain, that was not included in the count either.
Then comes the issue of how to count each event. When a team set off 450 small bombs in Bangladesh on a single morning, was that one attack or 450?
With all this analysis done, the NCTC report for 2008 identified 11,800 terrorist attacks resulting in over 54,000 deaths, injuries and kidnappings. Attacks were down 18 percent and deaths down 30 percent from 2007. The largest number of attacks was in the Near East, especially Iraq. The largest number of fatalities was in South Asia. Kidnappings in Afghanistan and Pakistan were the highest in the world. Terrorist murders in Africa were up 140 percent, but down 25 percent in the Western Hemisphere. Fatalities alone numbered 15,765 world wide in 2008; 33 of those were Americans. Drug violence in Mexico was not considered a terrorist act. About 65 percent of victims worldwide are civilians; 50 percent were Muslim. About 60 percent of the attackers are unknown; 10 percent are women. Children are a large share of victims.
So, what does it all mean? That’s hard to answer. We suspect domestic attacks outnumbered international attacks seven to one, indicating the biggest terrorist threat to the US in 2008 was the destabilization of friends and allies. But one attack with a weapon of mass destruction on US soil would change everything.
This is Dave McIntyre, Director of the Integrative Center for Homeland Security at Texas A&M, inviting you to join us again next week on Just a Minute . . . for Homeland Security.
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(1) “2008 Report on Terrorism,” Washington, DC: Natinal Counterterrorism Center, Director of National Intelligence, 30 April 2009. http://wits.nctc.gov/ReportPDF.do?f=crt2008nctcannexfinal.pdf
(2) Since there is no single definition of terrorism, the NCTC uses one from US law at 22 USC 2656F(d)(2): “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups of clandestine agents.” (see NCTC “2008 Report on Terrorism” p. 1.