Lone Wolf Terrorism

by Jeffrey D. Simon

  2. Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 134.

  3. Quoted in ibid., p. 5.

  4. A poison-tipped umbrella was used to assassinate Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on a London street in 1978. Markov was waiting for a bus when a man poked him in the thigh with the umbrella and then apologized as though it had been an accident. What he had actually done, however, was fire a platinum pellet from the umbrella containing ricin, a poison derived from the castor bean plant for which there is no antidote. Markov died a few days later. Bulgarian agents working with the Soviet KGB had designed the plot.

  5. Philip B. Heymann, Terrorism and America: A Commonsense Strategy for a Democratic Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 6.

  6. R. Hrair Dekmejian, Spectrum of Terror (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007), p. 25.

  7. Franklin L. Ford, Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 381.

  8. See, for example, Nancy Jo Sales, “Click Here for Conspiracy,” Vanity Fair, August 2006, http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/features/2006/08/loosechange200608 (accessed February 25, 2012); “Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report—The World Trade Center,” Popular Mechanics, March 2005, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center (accessed February 25, 2012).

  9. Lindsay Porter, Assassination: A History of Political Murder (New York: Overlook Press, 2010), p. 154.

  10. Ibid., p. 143.

  11. David C. Rapoport, Assassination and Terrorism (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Company, 1971), p. 19.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ford, Political Murder, pp. 383–84.

  14. See for example, Trevor Burrus, “Get Rid of the Spoils System,” Washington Times, March 11, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/11/run-democrats-run/ (accessed March 26, 2012); “Garfield, James A.: Assassination,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2012, http://www.britannica.com/presidents/article-302549 (accessed March 26, 2012); “History through the Decades, United States Census Bureau,” http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/fast_facts/1880_fast_facts.html (accessed March 26, 2012).

  15. James W. Clarke, American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 198–99, 206–207. During his trial, Guiteau continually referred to the need to “remove the President of the United States for the good of the American people.” See Douglas O. Linder, “Excerpts from the Trial Transcript: Cross-Examination of Charles Guiteau,” University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/guiteau/guiteautranscriptguiteaucrossx.html (accessed January 22, 2012).

  16. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 209–10; Alan Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois: President Garfield's Assassin,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 70, no. 2 (May 1977): 130–31; Charles Guiteau Collection, Georgetown University, http://gulib.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/cl133.htm (accessed January 22, 2012).

  17. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 199–200; Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois,” pp. 130–32.

  18. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 201–202; Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois,” p. 132.

  19. Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois,” p. 132.

  20. Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President (New York: Doubleday, 2011), pp. 30–47.

  21. Ibid., p. 57.

  22. Clarke, American Assassins, p. 204.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois,” p. 135.

  25. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 206–207.

  26. Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois,” p. 136.

  27. Millard, Destiny of the Republic, p. 113.

  28. Peskin, “Charles Guiteau of Illinois,” p. 136.

  29. Clarke, American Assassins, p. 207.

  30. Ibid.

  31. “Guiteau's Day of Torture: The Assassin Driven into Maze of Contradictions,” New York Times, December 2, 1881, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60A17FB3A581B7A93C0A91789D95F458884F9 (accessed January 22, 2012).

  32. Millard, Destiny of the Republic, pp. 119–24.

  33. Ibid., pp. 125–37.

  34. Douglas O. Linder, “The Trial of Charles Guiteau: An Account,” University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/guiteau/guiteauaccount.html (accessed January 22, 2012).

  35. Millard, Destiny of the Republic, p. 215.

  36. Ibid., p. 253.

  37. Ibid., p. 236.

  38. Guiteau Trial, Closing Speech to the Jury of John K. Porter of New York, In the Case of Charles J. Guiteau, the Assassin of President Garfield, Washington, January 23, 1882 (New York: John Polhemus, 1882), p. 54.

  39. “Guiteau's Day of Torture.”

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid.

  42. “Pendleton Act (1883),” Our Documents, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=48 (accessed January 27, 2012).

  43. Millard, Destiny of the Republic, p. 249.

  44. Ibid.

  45. The Boxer Rebellion was a peasant uprising against foreign presence in China. The United States and several other nations sent troops to China to suppress the rebellion and protect their interests in the country.

  46. Clarke, American Assassins, p. 44.

  47. Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 57.

  48. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 44–49.

  49. Miller, President and the Assassin, p. 246.

  50. Ibid., pp. 273–75.

  51. Clarke, American Assassins, p. 55.

  52. Ibid., p. 56.

  53. Ibid., pp. 56–57.

  54. Porter, Assassination, p. 154.

  55. “‘Lights Out in the City of Light’: Anarchy and Assassination at the Pan-American Exposition,” Libraries, University of Buffalo, June 2004, http://library.buffalo.edu/exhibits/panam/law/trial.html (accessed January 29, 2012).

  56. Miller, President and the Assassin, p. 323.

  57. “‘Lights Out in the City of Light.’”

  58. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 10–11. The M'Naghten Rule derived from a case in Britain in 1843. Daniel M'Naghten, a Scottish woodworker, believed that he was the target of a conspiracy between the pope and British prime minister Robert Peel. He attempted to assassinate Peel but instead shot and killed the prime minister's private secretary, Edward Drummond. M'Naghten was acquitted based on his lawyers’ successful argument that their client was insane. The verdict infuriated the British public and government as well as Queen Victoria, who, a few years earlier, had herself been the target of an assassin who was also found not guilty by reason of insanity. The House of Lords and the queen, along with many other people, felt that Britain needed a clear and strict definition of criminal insanity. Therefore, the British Supreme Court ruled, just four months after the M'Naghten verdict, that a defendant could use an insanity defense only if “at the time of committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.” See Millard, Destiny of the Republic, p. 237.

  59. All the doctors who examined Czolgosz found him to be sane. One group of doctors wrote in its report that “the most careful questioning failed to discover any hallucinations of sight or hearing. He had received no special command; he did not believe he had been specially chosen to do the deed. He always spoke of his motive for the crime as duty; he always referred to the Anarchists’ belief that killing of rulers was a duty…. He is the product of anarchy, sane and responsible.” See Miller, President and the Assassin, pp. 347–48.

  60. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 58–59.

  61. Ibid., p. 5
9.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Theodore Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message,” December 3, 1901, Primary Speeches, Addresses, and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt, Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trspeeches.html (accessed February 3, 2012). While many anarchists condemned the assassination and denounced Czolgosz, Emma Goldman came to his defense. In an article in Free Society one month after the assassination, she wrote, “Some people have hastily said that Czolgosz's act was foolish and will check the growth of progress. Those worthy people are wrong in forming hasty conclusions. What results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one thing, however, is certain: he has wounded government in its most vital spot.” See Jewish Women's Archive, “Article by Goldman about Leon Czolgosz's Assassination of President McKinley and the Use of Violence,” http://jwa.org/media/article-by-goldman-about-leon-czolgoszs-assassination-of-president-mckinley-and-use-of-violenc (accessed January 29, 2012).

  65. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 130.

  66. Porter, Assassination, p. 154.

  67. Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), p. xii. Posner wrote the first edition of the book for Random House in 1993.

  68. Ibid., pp. 5–7.

  69. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  70. Clarke, American Assassins, p. 108.

  71. Ibid.

  72. Porter, Assassination, pp. 140–41.

  73. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 109–10.

  74. Ibid., pp. 110–11.

  75. Ibid., pp. 113–20.

  76. There has been speculation that Oswald might have changed his mind about killing Kennedy had his wife, Marina, given him assurances that their rocky relationship would improve. Oswald visited her the night before the assassination. They had been living apart, and Marina was staying with friends in Irving, Texas, while Oswald stayed in Dallas during the week for his job. Marina was surprised to see Oswald on a Thursday and rebuffed his pleas for her to come live with him. She even turned her back on him when he spoke. A panel of doctors told the Warren Commission that if Marina had been warm and affectionate to Oswald during that last visit, he might have changed his mind about the assassination. One doctor said, “I think what Marina had a chance to do unconsciously that night was to veto his plan without ever knowing of its existence, but she didn't. She really stamped it down hard.” See Posner, Case Closed, pp. 220–21.

  77. Simon, Terrorist Trap, pp. 262–63.

  78. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1964), pp. 292–93.

  79. Porter, Assassination, p. 143.

  80. Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966).

  81. Posner, Case Closed, pp. 412–13.

  82. Porter, Assassination, pp. 143–45.

  83. Ibid., pp. 145–48.

  84. Posner, Case Closed, p. 477.

  85. James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), p. xiii.

  86. Sean Wilentz, “What If Kennedy Had Lived?” New York Times, November 21, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/opinion/what-if-kennedy-had-lived.html (accessed January 16, 2012). The Cuban missile crisis occurred in October 1962, when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war due to a US-Soviet confrontation over the placement of Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba and a subsequent US naval blockade of Cuba to prevent Soviet vessels from delivering additional weapons to the island. The crisis ended when the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles already there and dismantle the missile sites in exchange for a US promise not to invade Cuba.

  87. Blight et al., Vietnam, pp. 17–20.

  88. Ibid., pp. 107–108.

  89. Ehud Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right and the Countdown to the Rabin Assassination,” in The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, ed. Yoram Peri (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 122.

  90. Oslo I Accords (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements), Council on Foreign Relations, Essential Documents, http://www.cfr.org/israel/oslo-accords-declaration-principles-interim-self-government-arrangements/p9674 (accessed February 16, 2012).

  91. Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman, Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), pp. 19–20.

  92. Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right,” pp. 121–23.

  93. Karpin and Friedman, Murder in the Name of God, pp. 105–106.

  94. Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right,” p. 121.

  95. Karpin and Friedman, Murder in the Name of God, p. 27.

  96. Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right,” p. 123.

  97. Serge Schmemann, “Rabin Killer and 2 Others Guilty of Related Plots against Leader,” New York Times, September 12, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/12/world/rabin-killer-and-2-others-guilty-of-related-plots-against-leader.html (accessed February 14, 2012).

  98. Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right,” p. 126.

  99. Nadav Gabay, “Peace Begins at Home: Toleration, Identity Politics, and the Changing Conception of Peacemaking in Israel after Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination,” Social Identities 12, no. 3 (May 2006): 358.

  100. Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right,” p. 121.

  101. Yoram Peri, ed., “The Assassination: Causes, Meaning, Outcomes,” in The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 49.

  102. Bill Clinton, “Finish Rabin's Work,” New York Times, November 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/opinion/04clinton.html (accessed February 17, 2012).

  103. Peri, “Assassination,” p. 57.

  104. Dan Perry, “Rabin's Assassin Convicted of Murder by Israeli Court,” Associated Press, March 27, 1996, http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1996/Rabin-s-Assassin-Convicted-Of-Murder-By-Israeli-Court/id-2121d3a0c955c801ad444fa5b0d80c9d (accessed February 17, 2012).

  105. Sprinzak, “Israel's Radical Right,” p. 125.

  106. Karpin and Friedman, Murder in the Name of God, p. 28.

  107. Joel Greenberg, “Rabin Assassin's Testimony: My Goal Was to Paralyze Him,” New York Times, January 24, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/24/world/rabin-assassin-s-testimony-my-goal-was-to-paralyze-him.html (accessed February 14, 2012).

  108. Dekmejian, Spectrum of Terror, pp. 25–38.

  109. Clarke, American Assassins, pp. 14–17.

  CHAPTER 6. STRATEGIES FOR DEALING WITH LONE WOLF TERRORISM

  1. Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. vii.

  2. Ibid., pp. vii–viii.

  3. Ibid., pp. 147–78.

  4. Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, “The ‘Lone Wolf’—The Unknowable Terror,” CNN, September 7, 2011, http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/07/the-lone-wolf-the-unknowable-face-of-terror/ (accessed March 4, 2012).

  5. Tenth Anniversary Report Card: The Status of the 9/11 Commission Recommendations, National Security Preparedness Group, Bipartisan Policy Center, Washington, DC, September 2011, p. 7.

  6. Geraldo Rivera, “Are We Any Safer?” Fox News, September 9, 2011, http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/geraldo/blog/2011/09/09/are-we-any-safer (accessed March 4, 2012).

  7. John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 3.

  8. Jeffrey D. Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America's Experience with Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 396–97.

  9. Paul Cruickshank, Nic Robertson, and Ken Shiffman, “How Safe Is the Cargo on Passenger Flights?” CNN, February 19, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/16/travel/cargo-terror-concerns/index.html (accessed March 8, 2012).

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid.
/>   12. Ibid.

  13. Semiannual Report on the Audit, Investigative, and Security Activities of the United States Postal Service, April 1–September 30, 2008, United States Postal Service, pp. 30–31.

  14. “Postal Strike: Spotting Mailbombs,” Global Security Solutions, http://www.global-securitysolutions.com/scanna-msc-ltd-security-screening-and-detection/postal-strike-spotting-mailbombs.html (accessed March 10, 2012).

  15. Barry Zellen, “Special Delivery: After Two Centuries, Letter-Bombs Continue Their Lethal Legacy,” Security Innovator, March 6, 2009, http://securityinnovator.com/index.php?articleID=15842§ionID=27 (accessed March 9, 2012).

  16. Marcus Wohlsen, “Scientists Man Bioterror Front Lines Post-9/11,” Associated Press, http://www.rdmag.com/News/2011/08/Life-Science-Biotechnology-Analytical-Scientists-man-bioterror-front-lines/ (accessed March 12, 2012). The deployment of the air monitors is known as the national BioWatch system. However, it was revealed in October 2012 that tests of the system by scientists found that BioWatch “operated with defective components that left it unable to detect lethal germs.” See David Willman, “BioWatch Technology Couldn't Detect Lethal Germs, Tests Found,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-biowatch-faulty-assays-20121023,0,6634110.story (accessed November 16, 2012).

  17. There is, however, x-ray technology that has been developed to specifically visualize and enhance powders inside packages. These are being used to inspect suspicious letters and packages. See “Postal Strike.”