Terrorist Attacks - Essay Example

Terrorist Attacks Until September 11, 2001, United s of America had limited experience concerning terrorist attacks on their soil. They had only experienced attack overseas during the early 1970’s as most terrorists focused on hijackings airlines and overseas bombings. Some terrorist main domestic attack during the 1990s was the Oklahoma City bombing (Rockmore, 2011).All these attacks were addressed through the criminal justice system that existed by then. Under that legal system, the foreign intelligence surveillance act as well as host of other statutes and regulations, government, domestic intelligence collection and also the exchange of information collected by foreign and domestic agencies was determined by a strict and rigid set of rules.

These strict and rigid set of rules prevented intelligence information from being collected for the purpose of law enforcement. As a result, this created difficulties in sharing of the criminal justice –derived data and information with other agencies (Lebovic, 2006). When terrorist were captured either in US soil or overseas they were accorded rights and treatment like any other criminal defendant (Rockmore, 2011). This system which was adopted to deal with terrorist activities was weak and inadequate in addressing the Americas needs to have a strong system to prevent terrorist attack in its soil.

This was evident in 2001, September 11 attack and the consequent vague investigations that followed. It was the inability to coordinate information collected that led to failure to identify patterns of behavior that might have indicated the early warnings of attack. Also, due to those strict rules that were to be followed in courtroom made, it hard for the government to detain a terrorist even after identifying him. In the wake of September 11 attacks, by then president Bush administration worked day and night to update some of the rules that governed terrorism approach by the U.S.A.

The government formed homeland security project to inform the public and policy makers about the complex challenges related to responding and preventing domestic terrorism. Secondly, the government allowed the revision of electronic surveillance rules to allow permission to intercept individuals even in case they changed phones frequently. They also implemented rules to allow routine collection of traveler’s financial information. They implemented U.S visit program that captures fingerprint from all foreign travelers entering Unite States.

The government also exercised its right under the Chicago Aviation convention to collect from the airlines commercial travel data relating to on board traveler. This type of data has proved to be of much help in identifying high-risk travelers who may be connected with suspected and known terrorist groups. This has helped the border security officials to take closer look at these travelers who cross U.S.A borders daily. U.S government also tried to start collecting information from the SWIFT system, an interbank network that exchanges global financial transaction every day.

( Lebovic, 2006). This they thought would help them identify suspicious movement of fund that might be used to support terrorist activities. This successfully served as a warning to all terrorist financiers. Both approach had their own harms as we can see in the above methods they adopted both before and after the September 11th. Like we initially saw, the approach before the attack gave the terrorist a very huge space to carry out their activities both in America and its overseas embassies.

This was due to the strict rules that were to be followed before and even after capturing a terrorist. The approach adopted after the 11th attack also had its own weaknesses. First we see many other European countries resisting the move by America to start collecting information from the SWIFT system as they claimed that it would compromise their vital information which is always of importance to each individual country .( Lebovic, 2006).Definitely the after the attack approaches has proved to be the efficient measures because it has been a decade now since they started to use the new measures and honestly we can see that there has been no other major terror activity that has faced the country since then.

Infact, they have revised better ways of fighting terrorism not only in their own country but also in other terror faced countries like Iraq and Iran. ( Lebovic, 2006). For now we can comfortably say that America is safe from terrorism activities though they need to put up some more measures to prevent cyber terrorism attack. ReferencesLebovic, J. (2006). Deterring International Terrorism: US National Security Policy after 9/11. Taylor & Francis. Rockmore, T. (2011). Before and After 9/11: A Philosophical Examination of Globalization, Terror, and History.

Continuum International Publishing Group.