ABSTRACT
CONTENTS Introduction............................................................................................ 131 Implications of September 11 Attacks ..................................................... 132 Distinctiveness of Modern Terrorism...................................................... 134 Misleading Stereotypes ............................................................................ 140 The Al-Qaeda Multicellular Terror Model .............................................. 141 Conclusion.............................................................................................. 145 Endnotes ................................................................................................. 145
Introduction On 11 September 2001, 19 young men, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, commandeered four passenger airplanes and rammed three of them into critical U.S. targets, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The resulting social and economic
impact-some 3000 lives lost and billions of dollars in economic damagecatapulted terrorism onto an entirely new level of strategic importance. Catastrophic or mass-casualty terrorism, once a theory, had now become a reality.1 But the larger issue revolved around the nature of terrorism itself and its emerging modus operandi. Whether the September 11 attacks in the United States were the delayed manifestation of Oplan Bojinka, as some believe, or whether they were an isolated plan, it is clear that terrorism-and particularly that form of terrorism practiced by al-Qaeda-has fundamentally changed.2
