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This is snipped from a Criminal Justice Lecture by OConner, on Counter Terrorism.

If you want to know more about criminal justice and how to work with the facts, there is good information on this website, I have never had the time to read all the lectures and chase all the links and had forgotten it, but it turned up in my first newsletter, I thought the #1, was of interest as to the reasons the media does not publish all the facts about incidents.

The last link, will take you to the index.
granny
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http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOConnor/427/427lect17.htm

CONTROVERSIES

There's no shortage of recommendations for what to do
about terrorism. One of the most consistent themes in the
literature is the principle that there should be no bargaining
with terrorists. For most nations, the standard policy is no
concessions. This position has always been strongly advocated
by the law enforcement community, primarily because of
reasoning that bargaining invites repeated attacks (Elliott and
Gibson 1978). Another common recommendation, often made
by criminologists, is that terrorism should be processed by the
criminal justice system the same way as other crimes
(Crelinsten et al. 1978). The argument here is really that
special squads, units, and strike forces cause more problems
than they solve. Others in criminal justice argue for global
police forces, international courts, and using anti-terrorist
ideology to rebuild coalition consensus (OConnor 1994).
Current controversies involve to what extent anti-terrorism
efforts by political democracies corrupt those democracies
because such efforts are always politically motivated and
impact civil liberties (Turk 1982; Ross 2000). The following
points are lessons from those controversies.

POINT #1: Some of the things that best shape a response to
terrorism are derived from simply knowing the functions of
terrorism. This is one of the approaches first suggested by
Brian Jenkins of the RAND think tank. Since one of the
functions of terrorism (at least the revolutionary type) is to
provoke government overreaction, anything the government
can do to keep itself from overreacting will thwart the
terrorists' objectives. Since another function is to gain control
of the media, anything voluntary or involuntary on the part of
the media which stifles exposure also stifles terrorism.
Bombings make the best pictures, so the more media-driven
the terrorists, the more likely bombings will be the mode of
attack. Another common function or demand is the release of
political prisoners, and this is almost never a true objective.
The real objective is politicization of all prisoners, the winning
over of new recruits among the prison population. And finally,
the best strategy may be one of going after the financial
supporters of terrorism, not the terrorists themselves. Ideology
may be able to sustain them, but not for long once the money
runs dry. It's only with narcoterrorism that this "dry well"
strategy fails, since the drug market doesn't respond to simple
supply-demand forces.

POINT #2: The other thing about terrorism (or at least
quasi-terrorism and the more lunatic fanatics) is that they are
imitators, not innovators. That is, their crimes are copycat or
cyclical. The skyjacking phenomenon of the 70s was an
excellent example of this, where terrorists always waited until
some other group made the first move, and then they "jumped
on the bandwagon." Most of the them do this because they are
sorely trying to imitate military strategy; others do it because
of standardized paramilitary training or textbook lessons in
guerilla tactics; and still others do it to throw off suspicion from
themselves. Anyway, the cyclic pattern is quite predictable,
and in general, conforms to a Wave-Crest-Plateau pattern.

POINT #3: Although it's inevitable that the first few
hostages may die, a thing called the Stockholm Syndrome
works in the favor of anti-terrorist forces. The longer the
hostages stay alive, the less likelihood harm will come to the
hostages. With this syndrome, the hostages come to think of
their captors as protecting them from the police and soon start
to identify with their captors. The captors themselves start to
develop a parent/child relationship with their hostages. Other
syndromes include the Penelope Syndrome, where women find
violent criminals sexually attractive. Hostage negotiation and
rescue are perhaps the most complicated type of anti-terrorist
operation.

POINT #4: In assessing the threat of terrorism (in lieu of
information on group skills and capabilities), it's important to
concentrate on counting the number of incidents. Do not count
the number of victims, nor the value of harm. It's hard to do
this especially after some extraordinary incident in which many
people have died, but the only true comparison is the number
of attacks since terrorists often have no idea themselves about
how many victims will be killed by their actions. Nationalist
groups tend to seek a high number of fatalities while
revolutionary groups tend to seek fewer deaths and more
wounds or injuries. Splinter or spin-off groups seem more
interested in death counts and fatalities. The point is that no
matter how many victims are targeted, the group is only a
threat via its number of attacks as a percent of total activity.

POINT #5: Do count the number of victims saved by any
preventive action. If you manage through some leverage to
get the terrorist leader to stop things with a cease-fire
agreement, regardless of whether further negotiation follows
or not, it will significantly help your agency and your career if
you have calculated how many lives you've saved, and can
report this information to policymakers. Everyone in a
leadership position wins by a cease-fire. The terrorist leader
looks good; your leaders look good; and if the experts that say
terrorist leaders have low self-esteem are right, it should be an
easy job to feed their egos and get leverage on them through
negotiation. After the cease-fire, it's important to also
measure the resumed level of violence and compare it to
pre-cease-fire levels. Does the violence resume at a higher or
lower level? It may be that your short-term (e.g., 30-day)
truce resulted in a 16% short-term reduction in violence (e.g.,
6 months), but in the long-run, you've instigated a more
heinous pattern of violence.

POINT #6: Giving into terrorist demands for political change
only changes the pattern of violence, not the violence itself.
Economic and political reforms aimed at helping the group's
ethnic or religious group and resolving its grievances will win
over some supporters among the general population, but in the
long-run, will create new problems and a new set of grievances
over the precise implementation of policy and the degree of
power sharing. A much better strategy is to initiate economic
and political reforms for all the people of a nation. Economic
development solutions have worked in Ireland, Uruguay, and
Italy.

POINT #7: The thing that works best is reduction of recruits,
supplies, and support. You've got to reduce the number of
active trainee members of the terrorist organization. Capture
and imprisonment works (it's helped to keep Spain fairly
terrorism-free), as well as preemptive strikes against training
camps. The number of terrorists captured or killed should be
counted, and this can be put as the denominator in a fraction
with the number of government security forces killed in the
numerator. You've also got to keep weapons, ammo, and
supplies out of the hands of terrorists. Destruction of their
"stash" houses is the best preemptive strategy. Unfortunately,
many religious terrorist groups operate under the cover of
religion and it doesn't look good to blow up religious buildings.
Whenever a dragnet or raid takes place, the number of
weapons found should be counted. Finally, cutting off support
should be done with precision and not indiscriminately. Too
often, governments are willing to engage in "collective
punishments" against all (suspected) aliens, all unfriendly
foreign powers, and even its own citizens, in what are all only
symbolic efforts with no discernable short-term or long-term
effect. A more precise focus would go beyond identifying
support countries by name, and identify support by type,
amount, seasonality, and displacement. The latter two mean
that cutting off support at certain times of the year will have
more effect than a random cutoff, and that cutting off two or
more sources of support will be effective since groups may
simple displace or find new sources of support once old ones
dry up.

POINT #8: Things that don't work, or have questionable
value, include the notion that swift and harsh retaliation is the
best policy. This is a popular notion, but the degree of moral
certainty and justification empowering terrorism does not
respond to displays of overwhelming force or "lines drawn in
the sand." The standard doctrines of deterrence as
punishment (that punishment be swift, certain, and severe)
don't apply to terrorism. Justice has a longer timeline in this
context. If you're going to play the retaliation game right,
wait until things have cooled off and hit them when they least
expect it.

POINT #9: Terrorism doesn't respond to coalition-based
sanctions which are intended to express the international
community's disregard for them. Terrorists are people who
have long ago felt rejected by mainstream society. In fact,
their desire is often to be further rejected. If they are broken
up from receiving any psychological rewards or sympathy from
their social support groups, this strategy might work.
Terrorists long ago crossed the line of ethical and moral
restraint. Rebuilding this in all the diverse places of the world
is going to take some time.

POINT #10: Sharing of information and intelligence by
counterterrorism agents is essential. Unfortunately, turf
battles, credit claiming, stovepipes, and unnecessary secrecy
permeates the counterterrorist community. Agency
cooperation, however, also fragments the jurisdictional
grounds and/or changes the perceived level of threat, so there
tends to be more intelligence/policy disconnects. Law
enforcement agencies typically separate terrorists into
criminal, political, or mentally unstable categories, and this
may be too simplistic a classification. Terrorist behavior differs
from that of ordinary criminals. Criminal investigation
techniques must be modified to reflect these differences when
examining terrorist cases.