International Terrorism Threat Analysis.

The last decade has witnessed a marked increase in the incidence of international political terrorism. International political terrorism has emerged as a political weapon employed on a worldwide basis by those who are dissatisfied with, or alienated from, the legitimate international andor national political process. International terrorism is perceived to represent a threat to a wide range of United States national security goals. The hypothesis examined in this thesis is that the threat which international terrorism represents to the United States national security can be measured as a function of the threat perceptions of experts concerned with combating terrorism and is correlated with terrorists methods of operation, perceived saliency of enemy and the treatment of the event by foreign broadcasts FBIS. Scale values are calculated which represent the consensus of expert judges perception of threat. Content Analysis of terrorist statements is employed to measure the saliency of the terrorist enemy perceptions. The methodology of multiple regression analysis is used to determine the underlying aspects of terrorism which combine to explain the level of threat represented by a terrorist incident. The conclusions of this thesis provide the decision maker with valid early warning indicators of emerging terrorist threat and a perspective for allocating resources to counter terrorism. Author