Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

662 • TARGETS AND TARGETINGfences, walls, barbed wire, or other special barriers, are difficult toattack or to invade and are known as “hard” targets. By contrast,schools, places of worship, shopping malls, or open-air markets,which are frequented by civilians who are largely defenseless andwhose premises themselves offer little protection against machinegunfire or bombings, are “soft” targets attractive to terrorists.Target selection criteria include the following: visibility, vulnerability,shock value, maximum disruption, effect in eroding oppositionto the terrorist perpetrator, and ability to provoke government overreaction.Visibility requires targets that will command media coverageand so multiply the psychological impact on the secondary targetaudience, the foremost example of which would be the World TradeCenter and Pentagon attacks of September 11, 2001. Vulnerabletargets include large gatherings of defenseless civilians or sensitivetechnologies, such as airplanes or electrical power grid systems.Shock value can be illustrated by attacks on iconic institutions orevents, an example being the Munich massacre that occurred duringthe 1972 Summer Olympics. Maximum disruption can be illustratedby the shutdown of transportation caused by the London Undergroundbombings of 2005 and the Madrid railway bombings of2004. The effect of undermining opposition to the terrorist perpetratoris illustrated by the effective use of the dirty war campaign bythe Argentinean military against leftist insurgents, even though thiswas a case of state terror rather than terrorism by a nonstate group.Finally the effect of provoking government overreaction can be seenin the Canadian government’s imposition of the War Measures Actin 1970 to crush the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), which hadthe effect of alienating many non-FLQ French Canadians and givingmore impetus to separatist sentiments within Quebec.Originally airplanes, federal courthouses, places of business, parkinglots, and underground garages were soft targets and consequentlybecome the objects of hijackings, hostage-barricade situations, orbombings. The obvious antiterrorism response was to “harden” suchtargets either by making them less accessible to terrorists, by makingthem less vulnerable to the effects of an attack, or by providing themwith means of self-defense. Airplanes cannot be easily hardened towithstand direct bomb or missile attacks without making them tooheavy to fly, so preemption by screening passengers and luggage forweapons or bombs has become standard practice in most developed