Abstract
The United States—especially since the 9/11 attacks, but beginning even before—ran the biggest counterterror apparatus in the world. It has many components including the military and various national defense and intelligence agencies. A main part of the counterterror effort involves the criminal justice system. The 9/11 attacks transformed this already formidable bureaucracy into a veritable leviathan, or maybe behemoth would be more apt. In any case, after 9/11, the federal government undertook the largest single reorganization in more than forty years by, inter alia, creating the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI alone conducts over 10,000 terror investigations a year (TRAC 2003). As of May 2006, federal agencies maintained surveillance and ongoing investigation of 6,472 individuals as terror suspects (TRAC 2006). Despite over 4,000 referrals for prosecution, the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted only about a third and only about a fifth of the suspects were convicted. The median sentence upon conviction was less than a month—28 days (TRAC 2006). What accounts for such meager results on such an enormous effort?
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© 2010 Geoffrey R. Skoll
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Skoll, G.R. (2010). Law and Terror. In: Social Theory of Fear. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112636_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112636_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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