ABSTRACT
The terrorist is a study in contradictions. One such manifestation in the international legal order concerns the issue of effective counterterrorism. Should such terrorists ever acquire the instruments of nuclear violence, the results may well include an unprecedented spasm of gratuitous killing and maiming. In certain cases, terrorists bear a bizarre resemblance to punk rockers, whose dominant rationale is to move, to shock, to goad, to outrage, to reveal potency without any real underlying ideology. Since the close of the eighteenth century, we have had a great many instances of terrorism. During World War II, terrorism took place as an adjunct to conventional warfare, occasioning many people to question the reasonableness of a blanket condemnation of a strategy that clearly had its place under certain conditions. The Red Army Faction of West Germany, sometimes known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, is believed to have extensive ties to the Japanese Red Army Group and to various Palestinian terrorist organizations.
