Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

668 • TERRORISM ACT OF 2000accepting the terrorists’ claims that they are actually freedomfighters and that their actions are justified by their allegedlynoble aims.4. International terrorism is really a form of protracted warfarebeing carried out for political aims, often with the sponsorshipof hostile governments.Such political warfare is a form of low-intensity conflict that exploitsthe ambivalence of the Western nation-states toward suchforms of conflict falling between the extremes of declared conventionalwarfare and official diplomatic peace. This warfare is very costeffective for the sponsoring regime but very costly to the targetedcountries, where businesses are forced to spend much on protectingtheir executives and whose citizens are frightened away from travelingabroad. Such warfare allows nations deficient in conventionalmilitary strength to use sophisticated technology to strike at theirenemies easily, as was shown by the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103over Scotland on 21 December 1988 by a small radio bomb.The ambivalent nature of international terrorism creates policyambivalence on the part of its victims: If it is considered mere criminality,then it should be treated as a police matter, requiring minimaluse of force. But if it is viewed as a military matter, then maximalforce ought to be used. And if it is viewed as a political matter, thenattempted negotiation, compromise, and capitulation would be inorder. In short, terrorism is able to thrive on the very ambiguity thatshrouds its nature.TERRORISM ACT OF 2000. The Terrorism Act of 2000 of Great Britainupdates and replaces the previous Prevention of Terrorism Acts.The scope of the act is expanded not simply to deal with 15 namedproscribed groups in Northern Ireland, including splinters of the IrishRepublican Army and the various Ulster Protestant paramilitaries,such as the Ulster Defence Association and others, but also lists 33international terrorist groups, most of them Islamic fundamentalistgroups but also including some surviving anarchistic leftist groups,such as November 17, and ethnonationalist groups, such as BasqueFatherland and Liberty and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.This act has a more expanded and generic definition of terrorism thandid the previous acts. The new act originally allowed for detention