Site tracks and charts terrorism information
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published October 10, 2004
That meant, for example, creating a "weapons" category that includes such traditional means as bombs, guns and knives, and also the more terrifying variants of chemical and biological agents, all of which have been employed by terrorists during the last four decades covered in the database.
But it also meant creating another category that remains hidden from public view: the one labeled "nuclear." It's being held in reserve, against the day when some terrorist group might finally lay its hands on a nuclear device or detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb.
"To our knowledge, there have been no acts of nuclear terrorism so far," said Chip Ellis, the chief designer of the database. "But if something happened, yes, it's available to be added to the database."
The database, known as the Terrorism Knowledge Base, is still in its final shakedown stage and has yet to be officially unveiled, but it is already available for public use at www.tkb.org Created by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City, a research institute founded after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the database represents the largest repository of international terrorism information ever made publicly available on the Internet.
More than 18,000 terrorist incidents, and nearly 1,000 terrorist groups and their leaders, are described in detail in the database, which stretches back to 1968. Information sources include the FBI, the CIA and the Rand Corp., a non-profit research think tank that for the first time is making its proprietary terrorism incident database--long regarded by government experts and scholars as the world's most extensive--available to the public. The Department of Homeland Security is providing some of the funding to support the project.
The database allows users to search by more than a dozen criteria, including terrorist group, region, date, type of incident and number of casualties. It can chart results, display them on a map, compare them and suggest further resources to dig more deeply. Indictments, verdicts and other court documents from 120 FBI terrorism cases are also available.
The intended audience ranges from citizens curious about terrorism to journalists, researchers, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and even spies in the field working clandestine assignments.
"We've heard back on this already," Ellis said. "Having a system that's online and unrestricted and has good information is very useful to people who may not be able to find a secure connection back to a secure database."
The database contains some unexpected surprises for Americans focused on the threat posed by foreign terrorists. Of the 18 terrorist incidents recorded in the
Moreover, of the 15 listed incidents of biological attacks that have occurred around the world, 12 occurred in the
There are also some quirks and apparent omissions. One of the world's worst incidents of terrorism employing chemical weapons is not included in the database: the 1988 attack against the Kurdish city of
The database designers say that's because a government, rather than a terrorist group, committed the crime, which qualified it as political oppression and placed it outside the definition of terrorism used to filter incidents for possible inclusion.
Nor are there any entries for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the suspected Al Qaeda militant and Iraqi insurgency leader who has claimed responsibility for the recent spate of kidnappings and beheadings of civilian contractors.
Ellis said that omission would be corrected in a pending update of the database, which will be refreshed about every month.
"It's not a real-time system, and we're not pitching it as that," Ellis said. "The main value of this system is that it contains 36 years of terrorism data. So we see this as not necessarily being the last stop for every question that someone has, but certainly the first."
But even a terrorism database that is refreshed only a dozen times a year, Ellis said, beats the currency of other available resources, such as the State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which is issued annually.
Given the ability of the database to compile, sort and analyze past terrorist incidents, is there any danger that terrorists themselves might find it useful? Ellis thinks not.
"Terrorists know what terrorists do," Ellis said. "There's nothing in here that educates terrorists on how they can better perpetrate acts. If anything, we think that this system helps put terrorism in perspective, so that people can see how often terrorism fails, how infrequently it leads to measurable political change."
He added: "Not to be flippant, but we've always said: Hey, if Osama bin Laden wants to write in and say, `You got this wrong,' we'd happily accept that--as long as he gives us a return address. But to be quite frank, we think it's more important to educate the good guys rather than worrying about the bad guys in this case."
- - -
Terrorism by the numbers
An online database maintained by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism at http://www.tkb.org includes detailed reports on more than 18,000 terrorist incidents dating back more than three decades.
Terrorist incidents, 1968-present*
Terrorism deaths
BY TACTIC
Bombing 9,710
Armed attack 4,031
Assassination 2,062
Kidnapping 1,461
Other 1,267
BY REGION
Other 2,929
BY TARGET
Private citizens 3,056
/property
Businesses 2,987
Diplomatic 2,547
Government 2,401
Other 7,540
*Includes international terrorism events since 1968 and domestic terrorism events since 1998. Totals as of July 8, 2004.
No comments:
Post a Comment