ABSTRACT
After the attacks of 11 September 2001, a dual-headed consensus emerged in various quarters: that human intelligence (HUMINT) was crucial in aiding counter-terrorism efforts against al-Qaeda and that the United States for a variety of reasons had failed to generate the required HUMINT. To address the perceived problem on the domestic front in 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush introduced a new program to, in effect, enlist millions of Americans as potential informers.1 The program, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) sparked a firestorm of political protests, including comparisons to the former German Democratic Republic, stretching from the left side of the American political spectrum all the way to the right. Congress quickly killed the plan before it could be enacted.2 Meanwhile, another program for recruiting informers from outside of the United States to supply information about terrorists and terrorism that predated TIPS, the Rewards for Justice Program, expanded dramatically in the aftermath of 9/11, paying out tens of millions of dollars to informers, while facing little in the way of scrutiny, particularly with respect to its effectiveness. It is the second of these programs, the Rewards for Justice Program, which is the focus of this chapter. Despite its long history, the program remains largely unexamined. The significance of Rewards for Justice in terms of American counter-terrorism is multifold: it reveals the limitations of the human intelligence capabilities of American intelligence agencies both well before and after 9/11; it potentially represents an American challenge to the sovereignty of other countries; it demonstrates a flawed conceptualization on the part of the US government toward al-Qaeda and related ideologically motivated terrorism; it speaks to the evolution in American conceptualizing of counter-terrorism, particularly within a criminal law framework, since the early 1980s.3 Finally, it raises important questions about how complex addressing terrorism can be, and how difficult it can be in assessing the success of counter-terrorists efforts.
