Posted on April 19, 2001 at 2:30 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) has awarded a $1 million grant to a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) researcher to assist in the development of a national terrorism database. MIPT is creating the database, which for the first time, will give scholars, prosecutors and others a resource they can use to analyze how state and local law enforcement agencies respond to terrorist attacks, the cooperation between law enforcement agencies, the training and equipment needs and the strategies used by prosecutors.

“The [project] is significant because it will provide a foundation for continuous research on American terrorism by creating a quantitative data set for other researchers,” said UAB terrorism expert Brent Smith, Ph.D., who will help develop the National Terrorism Database. “And it will generate practical recommendations regarding the investigation, prosecution and sanctioning of persons indicted for terrorism-related crimes.”

The National Terrorism Database will be housed at the MIPT and is scheduled to be ready for use by the end of the year. The database will have a collection of several databases and will include information on terrorists indicted as a result of an official “terrorism/domestic security investigation” as specified under the U.S. Attorney General’s “Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations.” The database will contain information on the terrorists’ crimes, their ideological and political motives, their intended targets, and their trials and sentences.

Smith will work with Kelly Damphousse, Ph.D., at the University of Oklahoma. Their work will expand and accelerate an existing plan for collecting data on terrorists called the American Terrorism Study. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) initiated funding for the study in 1999 in cooperation with the FBI and the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime.

Smith’s contribution to the National Terrorism Database will be threefold. First, it will merge Smith’s two existing databases. The first database includes information on more than 200 terrorists from 21 terrorist organizations indicted under the FBI’s Counterterrorism Program from 1980 to 1989. His second database has information on approximately 180 terrorists from more than 40 groups indicted between 1990 and 1996. The grant will fund continued data collection on terrorists indicted since 1996.

Second, the National Terrorism Database will help scholars and others study the impact of changes in terrorist tactics, changes in federal sentencing policies and the impact of mandatory sentences on the prosecution and punishment of American terrorists.

Third, the database will be used to identify lessons learned by state and local law enforcement agencies that have been involved in responding to terrorist attacks and related activities over the past five years.

The idea for a national terrorism database followed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Meeting in March 1996, the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice noted the lack of an empirical database from which to study terrorism as one of the most serious impediments to understanding terrorism.

The MIPT is dedicated to preventing and reducing terrorism and mitigating its effects. Established as a non-profit corporation in Oklahoma, the MIPT grew out of the desire of the survivors and families of the Murrah Federal Building bombing of April 19, 1995, to have a living memorial. The MIPT sponsors research into the social and political causes and effects of terrorism and the development of technologies to counter biological, nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction as well as cyberterrorism.

Brent Smith, Ph.D.

Brent Smith, Ph.D., is a criminologist and chairman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Justice Sciences.

For several years Smith has studied how the federal government prosecutes terrorists. In the 1980s, he began creating a database, which contained information about hundreds federally indicted terrorists under the FBI’s Counterterrorism Program. Smith later outlined his findings in his 1994 book, Terrorism in America: Pipe Bombs and Pipe Dreams, in which he examined how the federal government prosecutes terrorists.

Following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Smith testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime on May 3 and November 2, 1995. He talked about the proliferation of militia groups in the United States and listed his recommendations for investigative and prosecutorial strategies.

In addition to discussing the National Terrorism Database, Smith is prepared to:

• Give a historical summary of how the federal government has prosecuted terrorism cases in the past, including the types of charges and the prosecutorial strategies used;
  
  
• Outline the success rates of different federal charges used against terrorist defendants and how the post-arrest and plea decisions of left-and-right-wing defendants have influenced charging decisions;
  
  
• Give a comparison of sentences imposed on terrorists vs. non-terrorist defendants convicted of the same federal crimes.
  
  

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