Lone Wolf Terrorism in Legislation : A Legal Overview
Department of State
By statute , the Department of State ( DoS ) maintains the “ official ” list of terrorist groups recognized by the U . S . Government . Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act directed the DoS to create and maintain the Foreign Terrorist Organization ( Foreign Terrorist Organizations n . d .). This list , updated continuously , is used by the federal government as the official list of recognized terrorist organizations . 1 Although the list deals with both state-sponsored and stand-alone terrorist organizations , it does little to incorporate the uniqueness of smaller groups or individuals . Indeed , even the title , Foreign Terrorist Organizations , demonstrates the focus of the list .
The Foreign Terrorist Organization list is a convenient tool for governments and organizations to use as a benchmark when working to consider an organization affiliated with terrorism . Not surprisingly , the emphasis for the DoS is foreign organizations and does not incorporate domestic terrorist groups . One might also question its breadth due to the size of the list ; as of this writing , the DoS lists 59 groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations . In contrast , the Global Terrorism Database catalogs well over 1,000 unique groups ( some of which are now defunct ) ( Global Terrorism Database 2018 ). Within the DoS website , lone wolf terrorism is not mentioned at all and is not incorporated into their guidance or policy .
Analysis — Post 9 / 11
The previous section aimed to describe current U . S . laws and policy as they relate to individuals who commit political or religious violence , the so-called lone wolf terrorists , after 9 / 11 . Except one amendment to cover a loophole in federal law , the IRTPA , the discussion up to this point demonstrates that the legislators and policymakers failed to incorporate lone wolf terrorism , into the body of laws and guidelines used to catch and prosecute them . At some point , at least within the U . S . government , lawmakers realized the need for changes and implemented corrections and amendments to the existing FISA law , but this approach barely fixes a narrow scope of the problem , mostly from the intelligence side , and does nothing regarding criminal approaches to the problem .
Of course , the United States does have legal tools to prosecute those who commit these violent acts . To be sure , laws concerning weapons of mass destruction , trafficking in firearms , fraud , destruction of government property , and many others can be and are frequently used to prosecute terrorists and incarcerate them for significant periods . For example , the government charged Olympic Park Bomber Eric Rudolph with five counts of “… malicious use of an explosive …” and the government charged Faisal Shahzad ( who attempted to explode a truck in New
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