ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Tokyo subway, and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City seems to signal the emergence of a new trend in terrorism, mass casualty attacks. Like the World Trade Center bombing, the African embassy bombers sought to deliver their weapon underneath the building in order to pull it down. However, Osama bin Laden's followers have conducted a number of serious terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in the Middle East and Africa, but all with conventional explosives. Similarly, while Ramzi Yousef and Timothy McVeigh were the masterminds of terrorist strikes and they had other accomplices, one would not describe these collections of individuals as established groups beyond these single attacks. Mark Juergensmayer argues that some of the individuals view themselves as fighting a 'cosmic war', which helps justify their violence and define their role in the world.
