\\server05\productn\C\CPP\6-4\CPP414.txt unknown Seq: 1 17-OCT-07 9:52 BUILD A CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY FOR TERRORISM GARY LAFREE JAMES HENDRICKSON University of Maryland With some notable and mostly recent exceptions, criminologists have been slow to study terrorism and responses to terrorism. This slow response is surprising given that the most widely accepted definition of criminology (Sutherland and Cressey, 1978:3) encompasses research on “. . .the breaking of laws and reactions to the breaking of laws”; both of which fall unambiguously under the subject heading of terrorism. As Clarke and Newman (2007:i) put it, “Terrorism is a form of crime in all essential respects.” Arguments about why ignoring terrorism is a mistake for criminology as a science have been made elsewhere already (LaFree and Dugan, 2004; McCauley, 2006; Rosenfeld, 2004). In this essay, we provide evidence instead for the argument that important policy reasons exist for criminologists to be involved in the fight against terrorism. Generally, policy makers have two major options to respond to terrorism: criminal justice and military approaches. These two approaches were contrasted starkly by U.S. reactions to the first and second attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. On February 16, 1993, a truck bomb in the basement parking garage of the WTC killed six, injured hundreds, and destroyed a half a billion dollars worth of property. The U.S. response to this attack relied on traditional criminal justice system processing. After trials and convictions, six Arab men were sent to U.S. prisons and a seventh is still at large. 1 On September 11, 2001, a second attack on the WTC brought down the Twin Towers and, along with two other coordinated attacks, caused nearly 3,000 deaths. But unlike its response to the 1993 attack, the military response to the 9/11 attacks was evident already in President Bush’s speech (2001) to a joint session of the American Congress a few days after the attack, “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. . ..Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Of course substantial overlap exists between criminal justice and military approaches. Thus, governments frequently emphasize justice as 1. Abdul Rahman Yasin is currently believed to be in Iraq. He was apprehended after the 1993 WTC bombing after having apparently informed on his co-conspirators. He fled to Iraq after being released and disappeared after the 2003 invasion (http:// www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/teryasin.htm). VOLUME 6 NUMBER 4 2007 PP 781–790 R