Conflating Terrorism and Gangs--John Cornyn

There has been a concerted effort among politicians to link gang-related activity to terrorism-related activity. We pointed out many months ago that the phrase “narco-terrorism” was becoming an increasingly common watchword. When the USA PATRIOT Act was proposed and passed in Congress, one of the rationales and main arguments was—and continues to be—that law enforcement should not be denied the ability to track and monitor terrorists as it is able to track and monitor organized crime.^[1] (The question about whether the tools used to track and monitor organized crime are appropriate was never asked.)

In some ways, it makes sense to see things through this lens. After all, terrorist organizations seem to take the same form as that seen in The Godfather or The Sopranos; Osama bin Laden takes the role of Vito Corleone or Tony Soprano, and he is surrounded by his dutiful assistants, who dispatch hit-men to do the dirty work. The hinterlands of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border may not necessarily be New York in the 1940s or New Jersey in the 2000s, but the general idea is similar, even though, as we pointed out earlier, this approach to terrorism is being rethought.

Nonetheless, terrorism and gangs are becoming conflated, and Texas Senator John Cornyn was in Texas recently where he stressed this line of thought. At a meeting at Rice University with local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, Sen. Cornyn said that these agencies “need to tap federal resources to readily identify potential terrorist threats.”^[2] He also argued that task forces for drugs and gangs “need to be realigned to meet new challenges posed by homegrown or imported terrorism,” because, as he puts it,

”Gangs operate off of money. Money comes from drugs, guns, smuggling human beings. … Obviously this becomes not only a local law enforcement issue but it becomes a national security issue.”^[3]

Gang activity, he argues, should be scrutinized for a possible terrorist connection, and local law enforcement officials should be given the appropriate resources to conduct intelligence gathering, share information, and have better technology, thus creating an infrastructure that would “enable[] all agencies … to have (access to a) database so that whenever we do a routine stop we can run a check on an individual.”^[4]

Saying that terrorist organizations have the hallmarks of gang hierarchy is one thing, but it doesn’t mean, ipso facto, that gangs exhibit terrorist behavior. The United States, in its definition of terrorism, still largely requires a political end, and there is still the widely-held belief that terrorism is generally the use of violence against a civilian population to bring about a political result.^[5] Defining “terrorism” down, by linking gang activity to terrorism, runs the very real risk of dismantling efforts to establish a universal definition of terrorism, which in turn hurts the movement toward universal jurisdiction for terrorism crimes. Indeed, it is reminiscent of Canada’s attempts to equate terrorism with gangs, something that we discussed in June.

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[1] See, e.g., US DOJ, The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life and Liberty, last visited Aug. 29, 2006.
[2] Armando Villafranca, Cornyn Ties Gangs to Potential Terrorism, Houston Chronicle, Aug. 28, 2006.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] This, of course, begs the question of how to differentiate terrorists from freedom-fighters. Like so many Courts of Appeals, we will simply say that that question is not before us today, and we therefore decline to address it.