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Terror on the Internet: the New Arena, the New Challenges
By Gabriel Weimann, United States Institute of Peace Press, 309 pages; $24.95
“The more websites, the better it is for us. We must make the internet our tool.” This could be a message from a chief executive urging his company to embrace the internet. In fact, these words appeared on a website used by jihadists and al-Qaeda for propagating violent anti-American propaganda. As Gabriel Weimann, a professor at Haifa University, demonstrates in this book, the internet has become a tool of vital importance to terrorists around the world. His eight-year survey of terrorists’ use of the internet found that the 40 organisations designated as active terrorist groups by America’s State Department now maintain more than 4,300 websites. Modern terrorists, Mr. Weimann notes, “are not necessarily interested in the death or injury of their direct victims as much as in the impact of this psychological victimization on a wider public.” Aside from communication – both with each other and with the public – terrorists use the internet to solicit money, recruit new supporters, distribute training and weapons-making materials and gather information about future targets. Terrorists regard the internet, it seems, as a tool to facilitate real-world attacks, not an arena for terrorism in itself. Some civil liberties should be traded for increased security, Mr. Weimann suggests. He ends his book with a call for greater use of the internet as a peacemaking tool – an unconvincing conclusion to an otherwise informative and comprehensive analysis.
The Economist - April 29, 2006
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War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from WWI to Al-Qaeda
By Jonathan Tucker, Patheon Books, NY, www.pantheonbooks.com; ISBN 0-375-42229-3
If you asked the average American about the use of chemical warfare agents, they probably will respond about the use of nerve agent used on the Japanese subway system back in 1995. However the use of chemical warfare agents has a long and infamous history. The story starts with US Army troops training in a live agent chamber with nerve agents at Ft. Leonard Wood as they have done for some time now. This book relates this history which today drives both our military and public safety first responders against the threat of chemical warfare agents both on the battlefield and in our cities.
The book covers the first major warfare use of the chemical chlorine during WWI by the Germans during trench warfare at Ypres, France. Then later the Germans added phosgene and mustard to their inventory. As they say " better killing through chemistry".
The book moves forward towards WWII. The German company IG Farben, at the time the world's largest corporation, in an effort to produce an improved insecticide discovered the series of " G' nerve agents. By coincidence, this is the same company that produced the gas Zyklon B used in the German concentration camp.
When WWII ended, as they say, to the victors go the spoils. The US, USSR, UK and French forces got their hands on either information on the agents or on some of the stockpile or both. As the " cold war" became warmer, the chemical arms race was off and running. Each country devoted massive resources to produce huge and better stockpiles of chemical weapons.
As we move ahead to the 1960's and 1980's, other countries gain access to chemical weapons and in some cases used it against their enemies in other countries or sometimes in their own country such as Iraq's use against Iran and against the Kurds.
As the chemical arms race progressed ahead the production, storage, accidents, environmental problems and use of chemical weapons spiraled out of control. The book looks at the use of binary weapons in an effort to safely transport and store chemical warfare agents.
We then move forward to the use of sarin nerve agent by the Japanese group Aum Shinrikyo at Matsumoto and Tokyo. It was this use of a chemical warfare agent against a civilian population by a group instead of a nation state that has opened " Pandora's Box".
All of this has pushed numerous countries to attempt to enter into treaties to limit the production of agents, prohibition of the use of agents, and the elimination of existing stockpiles. Of course, the biggest concern now is the use by terrorist groups rather than nation states that may sign non-proliferation treaties.
This book is probably the best I have seen to cover the history of chemical warfare. The author has written on the subject before and has worked with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies who has done much research in the area of weapons of mass destruction. The book is chock full of footnotes to document the research that was done for the book as well as numerous illustrations and photos. For those interested in the field of WMD, this is a must have book for your library.
Elliott Grollman
MAJ, USAR ( ret)
Adjunct Professor
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