Abstract

Al-Qaeda has already upended traditional understandings of terrorism in several important ways. Until the 9/11 attacks, most observers accepted Brian Michael Jenkins’s observation that “terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.” ¹ But on September 11, 2001, the world was given conclusive and grisly proof that some groups did in fact want a lot of people to die in their terrorist attacks and possessed the deadly competence to make it happen.