United States and state terrorism

The United States has been accused of funding, training, and harboring individuals and groups who engage in terrorism by legal scholars, other governments, journalists, and human rights organizations. The United States has also been accused by academics and activists of having directly committed acts of state terrorism. Some view the U.S. government as responsible for most acts of terrorism committed since the end of World War II. For example, Arno Mayer, Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton University, claims that "since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of 'preemptive' state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled."

Defenders of U.S. policy argue that American military interventions were justified in response to threats such as terrorism and Soviet aggression, and in the end produced superior governments and freer societies. The theoretical framework for the concept of state terrorism, and the evidence presented for U.S. state terrorism, are matters of considerable controversy.

Definition of state terrorism

Main article: State terrorism

Terrorism, state terrorism, and international terrorism are without a commonly accepted definition.

The Britannica Concise states that terrorism is "Systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective." There is as yet no international consensus or treaty on what constitutes a terrorist act, how to define a terrorist organization, or whether the definition of terrorism even applies to acts by sovereign governments.

The United Nations has never agreed on a final definition of terrorism but has four proposed definitions. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373 discusses terrorism and is a primary UN authority for terrorism because it was issued under Chapter VII UN authority. UN Security Council Resolution 1566 outlines the United Nations and international communities definition for terrorism.

"criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."

Various analysts have attempted to formulate definitions which are neutral with respect to the perpetrators of the act, thus permitting a logically consistent application of the definition to both non-state and state actors. One such analyst Alex P. Schmid states:

Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby - in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperiled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.

Similarly Michael Stohl, Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, defines terrorism as "the purposeful act or threat of violence to create fear and/or compliant behavior in a victim and/or audience of the act or threat." Stohl remarks that "this definition helps to distinguish terrorism from other forms of political violence. Not all acts of state violence are terrorism. It is important to understand that in terrorism the violence threatened or perpetrated, has purposes broader than simple physical harm to a victim. The audience of the act or threat of violence is more important than the immediate victim."

US government's own definitions

Various agencies of the United States government utilize different definitions of terrorism. As an example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation bases its definition on U.S. Code, Title 18, Chapter 113B, and reads as follows:

Domestic terrorism refers to activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5)

International terrorism involves violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or any state. These acts appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping and occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum. 18 U.S.C. § 2331(1)

While the U.S. State Department's definition of terrorism reads:

The term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.

The term "international terrorism" means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country.

The term "terrorist group" means any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.

The US Government has employed this definition of terrorism for statistical and analytical purposes since 1983.

After President George W. Bush began using the term "War on Terrorism", Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT and a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, stated in an interview:

The U.S. is officially committed to what is called "low-intensity warfare"... If you read the definition of low-intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of "terrorism" in army manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they're almost the same.

Chomsky has characterized the tactics used by agents of the US government and their proxies in their execution of US foreign policy — in such countries as Nicaragua, Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, Turkey, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — as a form of terrorism and has also described the U.S as "a leading terrorist state." Keith Windschuttle accuses Chomsky of using evidence that was "selective, deceptive, and in some cases invented" within the works Chomsky has written on this topic.

State terrorism and propaganda

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton, has argued that the U.S. and other first-world states, as well as mainstream media institutions, have obfuscated the true character and scope of terrorism, promulgating a one-sided view from the standpoint of first-world privilege. He has said that "if 'terrorism' as a term of moral and legal opprobrium is to be used at all, then it should apply to violence deliberately targeting civilians, whether committed by state actors or their non-state enemies." Moreover, Falk asserts that the repudiation of authentic non-state terrorism is insufficient as a strategy for mitigating it, writing that "we must also illuminate the character of terrorism, and its true scope... The propagandists of the modern state conceal its reliance on terrorism and associate it exclusively with Third World revolutionaries and their leftist sympathizers in the industrial countries." Turning specifically to past U.S actions, Falk says "The graveyards of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the number-one exhibits of state terrorism... Consider the hypocrisy of an Administration that portrays Qaddafi as barbaric while preparing to inflict terrorism on a far grander scale... Any counterterrorism policy worth the name must include a convincing indictment of the First World variety."

US hypocrisy about state terrorism

Tom Regan claimed that the U.S. government is hypocritical because it regularly asserts a public image and agenda of anti-terrorism, and as such has two foreign policies, one publicly stated and the other covertly applied.

Cuban allegations

Further information: [[:Church Committee, Operation 40, Operation Mongoose, Operation Northwoods]]

Cuban government officials have accused the United States Government of being an accomplice and protector of terrorism against Cuba on many occasions. According to Ricardo Alarcón, President of Cuba’s national assembly "Terrorism and violence, crimes against Cuba, have been part and parcel of U.S. policy for almost half a century.” The claims formed part of Cuba's $181.1 billion lawsuit in 1999 against the United States on behalf of the Cuban people which alleged that for over 40 years, "terrorism has been permanently used by the U.S. as an instrument of its foreign policy against Cuba," and it "became more systematic as a result of the covert action program." The lawsuit detailed a history of terrorism allegedly supported by the United States. The United States has long denied any involvement in the acts named in the lawsuit.

File:Porter Goss, Barry Seal, Felix Rodriguez, et al.jpg

Gathering of Operation 40 operatives including Guillermo Novo Sampol, (left; fourth from camera) wanted in Venezuela for extradition in connection with terrorist acts, Mexico City 22 January 1963.

The claims center on allegations of "concrete advance intelligence" the CIA had of operations against Cuba from the early Sixties to mid-Seventies, notably the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 which killed all 73 people aboard and a series of attacks on tourist sites in the 1990s. No evidence has been offered that the US had any role for this terrorist act. There remain allegations however that this terrorist act directly involved the US. For example, the FBI had multiple contacts with one of the bombers but provided him with a visa to the U.S. five days before the bombing, despite suspicions that he was engaged in terrorist activities.

The evidence also suggests U.S. involvement in the paramilitary group Omega 7, the CIA undercover operation known as Operation 40, and the umbrella group the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations. Cuban Counterterrorism investigator Roberto Hernández testified in a Miami court that the bomb attacks were "part of a campaign of terror designed to scare civilians and foreign tourists, harming Cuba's single largest industry."

Allegations of harboring terrorists as state terrorism

The Cuban revolution resulted in a large US Cuban refugee community, some of whom have conducted sustained long-term insurgency campaigns against Cuba. and conducted training sessions at a secluded camp near the Florida Everglades. Initially these efforts are known to have been directly supported by the United States government. The failed military invasion of Cuba during the administration of John F. Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs marked the end of documented US involvement. There are repeated and sustained allegations that the serious and sustained incidents of international terrorism by Cuban nationals that were granted asylum status by the United States were indirectly acts of state terrorism by the US.

In 2001, Cuban Ambassador to the UN Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla called for UN General Assembly to address all forms and manifestations of terrorism in every corner of the world, including - without exception - State terrorism. He alleged to the UN General Assembly that 3,478 Cubans have died as a result of aggressions and terrorist acts. He also alleged that the United States had provided safe shelter to "those who funded, planned and carried out terrorist acts with absolute impunity, tolerated by the United States Government." The Cuban government also asserted that in the 1990s, a total of 68 acts of terrorism were perpetrated against Cuba.

Terrorism by Cuban refugees within the US against Cuba

The Cuban Government, its supporters and some outside observers believe that the group Alpha 66, whose former secretary general Andrés Nazario Sargén acknowledged terrorist attacks on Cuban tourist spots in the 1990s and conducted training sessions at a secluded camp near the Florida Everglades, has been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US International Development Agency and, more directly, according to Cuba's official newspaper Granma, the CIA. The National Endowment for Democracy is a U.S. non-profit organization that is partially funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation, whose aid recipients also include the Council on Foreign Relations and the RAND Corporation.

A secret plan, Operation Northwoods, was approved by the the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff and submitted for action to Robert McNamara then Secretary of Defense, and subsequently president of the World Bank. This plan included acts of violence on US soil or against US interests, such as plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities; blowing up a U.S. ship, and contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters 'evacuate' remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." The plan was rejected by the administration prior to John F. Kennedy's assassination but after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

In 1998 the Cuban government charged the Cuban American National Foundation, which was founded in 1981 at the initiative of the Reagan administration and receives U.S. government funding through the National Endowment for Democracy with, according to the official government-controlled Radio Havana Cuba, the continued financing of anti-Cuban terrorist activities. Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba, also reported that U.S. senator Mel Martinez was meeting with Cuban American terrorists and sponsoring them via CANF.

In 2006, a former board member of CANF, Jose Antonio Llama testified that leaders of the foundation had created a paramilitary group to carry out destabilizing acts in Cuba. The foundation’s general board of directors didn’t know the details of the paramilitary group, which acted autonomously, Llama said. He added that current CANF board chairman Jorge Mas Santos was never told of the plan. The plans failed after Llama and four other exiles were arrested in the United States territory of Puerto Rico in 1997 on charges of conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The US has also been criticized for failing to condemn Panama's pardoning of the alleged terrorists Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon, and Gaspar Jimenez, instead allowing them to walk free on U.S. streets. Claudia Furiati has suggested Sampol was linked to President Kennedy's assassination and plans to kill President Castro.

The Case of Luis Posada

Luis Posada at Fort Benning, Georgia, 1962

Luis Posada Carriles has been accused by Cuba and Nicuragua of terrorism although he has never been tried or convicted. He resides within the US, and his deportation action was denied by a federal court that citing torture and other concerns. His case is important because he symbolizes what Cuba and Nicuragua view as the harboring of suspected terrorists by the United States.

The Cubans cite what they describe as the admission by Luis Posada Carriles, a one-time supervisor for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, and former chemist, that he was recruited by the CIA into becoming a trainer of other paramilitary forces in the mid 1960s. Posada, alongside Orlando Bosch, is accused by Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Cuba and Venezuela of organizing the terrorist bombing of the aircraft Cubana 455. As described by researcher Peter Kornbluh at the non-governmental research institute National Security Archive, he "is a terrorist, but he’s our terrorist," referring to Posada's relationship with the U.S. government. In 2006, the U.S. Justice Department described Posada as “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites.”

The Cubans also cite the involvement of FBI attaché Joseph Leo, who admitted multiple contacts with one of the convicted bombers of Cubana 455, Hernan Ricardo, before the attack.

On May 18, 2005, the National Security Archive posted additional documents that purportedly show the CIA had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner. The archive also alleges that while Posada stopped being a CIA agent in 1974, there remained "occasional contact" until June 1976, a few months before the bombing. The Cuban ambassador to the U.N. claimed that Posada had been "doubly employed by the Government of the U.S." both before and after the bombing of the Cubana aircraft. After escaping from prison in Venezuela, Posada, who has boasted of plans to "hit" a Cuban airliner only days before the attack, went to work alongside CIA operative Felix Rodriguez under Richard Secord supplying the Contras.

After serving 10 years for his role in the Cubana bombing and other terrorist attacks, Orlando Bosch was released from jail in Venezuela and given permission to reside in the United States with the assistance of Otto Reich, then US ambassador to Venezuela.

On his arrival in Miami in 1988, Bosch was honored with an "Orlando Bosch Day" celebration by the city politicians in Miami. Despite decisions made by the justice department and FBI to deport Bosch, they were overruled by President George H. W. Bush and he was allowed permanent residency. In an interview in 2001, Cuban Vice President Ricardo Alarcón stated: "The most quoted phrase by President Bush or ever repeated by him refers to the same idea every time he speaks. "'Those who harbor a terrorist are as guilty as the terrorist himself'".

In a series of interviews with the New York Times, Posada claimed responsibility for the bombings at hotels and nightclubs in Cuba in 1997 in which an Italian tourist died and scores more were injured. Posada said his activities were directly supported by Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation. Posada stated "The FBI and the CIA do not bother me, and I am neutral with them," he said. "Whenever I can help them, I do." He later denied that he was involved, stating that he had only wanted to create publicity for the bombing campaign in order to scare tourists.

As more revelations were made public via declassified documents and testimonies from involved parties, journalist Robert Scheer wrote in a column in the Los Angeles Times "For almost 40 years, we have isolated Cuba on the assumption that the tiny island is a center of terrorism in the hemisphere, and year after year we gain new evidence that it is the U.S. that has terrorized Cuba and not the other way around."

Mr. Posada was arrested in Miami in May 2005 and held for entering the US illegally. On September 28, 2005 a U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada cannot be deported because he faced the threat of torture in Venezuela. On May 8, 2007 U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone dismissed seven counts of immigration fraud and ordered Posada's electronic bracelet removed. The ruling criticized the U.S. government's "fraud, deceit and trickery" during the interview with immigration authorities that was the basis of the charges against Posada. He has declared that he no longer believes that the Castro government has long-term viability and he stated "I sincerely believe that nothing would help to go back to the past with sabotage campaigns."

Central America

Nicaragua

Further information: [[:Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare]]

Following the rise to power of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration ordered the CIA to organize and train the right wing guerrilla group "Contras". In 1981 President Reagan secretly authorized his Central Intelligence Agency under his appointee William J. Casey to recruit and support the guerrillas. Casey was to have testified before Congress about the disastrous Iran-Contra affair, in which a third country was to help sell Raytheon's MIM-23 Hawk missiles to the Islamic Republic of Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages whom Hezbollah kidnapped. Deteriorating health made it impossible for Casey to speak to the committee.

Florida State University professor, Frederick H. Gareau, has written that the Contras "attacked bridges, electric generators, but also state-owned agricultural cooperatives, rural health clinics, villages and non-combatants." US agents were directly involved in the fighting. "CIA commandos launched a series of sabotage raids on Nicaraguan port facilities. They mined the country's major ports and set fire to its largest oil storage facilities." In 1984 the US Congress ordered this intervention to be stopped, however it was later shown that the CIA illegally continued (See Iran-Contra affair). Professor Gareau has characterized these acts as "wholesale terrorism" by the United States.

In 1984 a CIA manual for training the Nicaraguan Contras in psychological operations was leaked to the media, entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War".

The manual recommended “selective use of violence for propagandistic effects” and to “neutralize” government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:

...selective use of armed force for PSYOP psychological operations effect.... Carefully selected, planned targets — judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. — may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA unconventional warfare operations area, but extensive precautions must insure that the people “concur” in such an act by thorough explanatory canvassing among the affected populace before and after conduct of the mission.

Former State Department official William Blum has written that "American pilots were flying diverse kinds of combat missions against Nicaraguan troops and carrying supplies to contras inside Nicaraguan territory. Several were shot down and killed. Some flew in civilian clothes, after having been told that they would be disavowed by the Pentagon if captured. Some contras told American congressmen that they were ordered to claim responsibility for a bombing raid organized by the CIA and flown by Agency mercenaries."

According to author William Blum the Pentagon considered US policy in Nicaragua to be a "blueprint for successful US intervention in the Third World" and it would go "right into the textbooks".

Nicaragua vs. United States

Main article: Nicaragua vs. United States

U.S. foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky, and other scholars, argues that the U.S. has been legally found guilty of international terrorism based on the verdict by International Court of Justice in Nicaragua v. United States, which condemned the United States federal government for its "unlawful use of force".

The Republic of Nicaragua vs. The United States of America was a case heard in 1986 by the International Court of Justice which found that the United States had violated international law by direct acts of US personnel and by the supporting Contra guerrillas in their war against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The Court ruled in Nicaragua's favor, but the United States was not bound by the Court's decision, on the basis that the court erred in finding that it had jurisdiction to hear the case. The court stated that the United States had been involved in the "unlawful use of force"—specifically that it was "in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to use force against another state". The ICJ ordered the U.S. to pay reparations, which this court lacked jurisdiction to order. Noam Chomsky stated in an interview in Pakistan Television that:

The World Court considered their case, accepted it, and presented a long judgment, several hundred pages of careful legal and factual analysis that condemned the United States for what it called “unlawful use of force”--which is the judicial way of saying “international terrorism”--ordered the United States to terminate the crime and to pay substantial reparations, many billions of dollars, to the victim.

One critic of this interpretation is David Horowitz, who argues in the book The Anti-Chomsky Reader, that "unlawful use of force is not another word for terrorism" and that the ICJ has no jurisdiction over sovereign states unless they themselves so agree, which the U.S. did not. The U.S. did accept the ICJ's compulsory jurisdiction in 1946, but withdrew its acceptance following the Nicaragua case.

The ICJ used the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare CIA manual as evidence in the case.

The CIA claimed that the purpose of the manual was to "moderate" activities already being done by the Contras.

The court findings are summarized below:

• The United States of America, by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the Contra forces...acted against the Republic of Nicaragua in breach of its obligation under customary international law.
• The United States of America, by certain attacks on Nicaraguan territory...which involve the use of force, has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to use force against another State.
• The United States of America...has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to violate the sovereignty of another State.
• By laying mines in the internal or territorial waters of the Republic of Nicaragua...the United States of America has acted...in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State, not to intervene in its affairs, not to violate its sovereignty and not to interrupt peaceful maritime commerce.
• The United States of America, by the attacks...and by declaring a general embargo on trade with Nicaragua...has acted in breach of its obligations under Article XIX of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation...signed at Managua on January 21, 1956.
• The United States of America, by producing in 1983 a manual entitled 'Operaciones sicológicas en guerra de guerrillas' ("Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare")[13], and disseminating it to Contra forces, has encouraged the commission by them of acts contrary to general principles of humanitarian law; but [the Court] did not find a basis for concluding that any such acts that may have been committed were imputable to the United States of America as acts of the United States of America.
• The United States of America had to pay reparations for the damage.

Guatemala

Further information: [[:History of Guatemala, Operation PBSUCCESS, CIA sponsored regime change, Church Committee]]

Declassified CIA documents show that the United States was instrumental in organizing, funding, and equipping the coup which toppled the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954. Analysts Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh note that "After a small insurgency developed in the wake of the coup, Guatemala's military leaders developed and refined, with U.S. assistance, a massive counterinsurgency campaign that left tens of thousands massacred, maimed or missing."

After the US-backed coup, which toppled president Jacobo Arbenz, lead coup plotter Castillo Armas assumed power. With Armas at the head of government, "the United States began to militarize Guatemala almost immediately, financing and reorganizing the police and military." Human rights expert Michael McClintock has argued that the national security apparatus Armas presided over was “almost entirely oriented toward countering subversion,” and that the key component of that apparatus was “an intelligence system set up by the United States.” At the core of this intelligence system were records of communist party members, pro-Arbenz organizations, teacher associations, and peasant unions which were used to create a detailed “Black List” with names and information about some 70,000 individuals that were viewed as potential subversives. It was “CIA counter-intelligence officers who sorted the records and determined how they could be put to use.” McClintock argues that this list persisted as an index of subversives for several decades and probably served as a database of possible targets for the counter-insurgency campaign that began in the early 1960’s.

Guerrilla unrest in Guatemala continued into the 1960s, which in 1962 led President John F. Kennedy to approve a “pacification program aimed at the most rebellious provinces…including both ‘civic action’ programs such as digging wells and building clinics and a sharp increase in military assistance.” After a successful (U.S. backed) coup against president Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes in 1963, U.S. advisors began to work with Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio to defeat the guerrillas, borrowing “extensively from current counterinsurgency strategies and technology being employed in Vietnam.” Between the years of 1966-68 alone some 8,000 peasants were murdered by the U.S. trained forces of Colonel Arana Osorio. Arana Osorio earned the nickname "The Butcher of Zacapa" for killing 15,000 peasants to eliminate 300 suspected rebels. [5] McClintock argues that “counter-insurgency doctrine, as imparted by the United States civil and military assistance agencies, had a tremendous influence on Guatemala’s security system and a devastating impact on Guatemala’s people.” He notes:

United States counter-insurgency doctrine encouraged the Guatemalan military to adopt both new organizational forms and new techniques in order to root out insurgency more effectively. New techniques would revolve around a central precept of the new counter-insurgency: that counter insurgent war must be waged free of restriction by laws, by the rules of war, or moral considerations: guerrilla “terror” could be defeated only by the untrammeled use of “counter-terror”, the terrorism of the state.

This idea was also articulated by Colonel John Webber, the chief of the US Military Mission in Guatemala, who reportedly instigated the technique of “counter-terror.” Colonel Webber defended his policy by saying, “That’s the way this country is. The Communists are using everything they have, including terror. And it must be met.”

In 1995 CIA aid was stopped. A 1996 report by the Intelligence Oversight Board stated that "Relations between the US and Guatemalan governments came under strain in 1977, when the Carter administration issued its first annual human rights report on Guatemala. The Guatemalan government rejected that report's negative assessment and refused US military aid." Relations between the two countries warmed in the mid-1980s the Reagan administration's covert funding of several wars in Central America. In December 1990, however, the Bush administration suspended almost all overt military aid."

According to the Center for International Policy, "The CIA established a liaison relationship with Guatemalan security services widely known to have reprehensible human rights records, and it continued covert aid after the cutoff of overt military aid in 1990. This liaison relationship and continued covert aid occurred with the knowledge of the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Congressional oversight committees. Contrary to public allegations, CIA did not increase covert funding for Guatemala to compensate for the cut-off of military aid in 1990."

Utilizing a series of formerly secret government documents, George Washington University historians Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio, document U.S. training, cooperation and political support of Guatemalan Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, despite U.S. Department of State and CIA knowledge of his frequent command of and/or participation in extra-judicial killings, kidnappings and civilian massacres. Colonel Estrada would eventually rise to command D-2, the Guatemalan Military Intelligence services who were responsible for many of the terror tactics wielded throughout the 1980s against the Guatemalan people.

In 1999, an independent Guatemalan Truth Commission (the "Historical Clarification Commission") issued a damning report which, among other things, clearly stated that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some of these state operations." Among the report's conclusions were

...estimate[s] that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20% of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93% of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved....the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages... [which] "eliminated entire Mayan villages... completely exterminat[ing] Mayan communities, destroy[ing] their livestock and crops."

The report went on to term the Guatemalan military's campaign in the northern highlands a "genocide," and noted that besides "carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found."

Sister Dianna Ortiz and General Gramajo

In the early 1990s a US citizen and nun, Sister Dianna Ortiz, brought a US civil court case against the State of Nicaragua, naming the former Minister of Defense -- General Hector Alejandro Gramajo-Morales -- as one of the defendants. In her complaint, Sister Ortiz specified that Gen. Gramajo "made several [official] statements to the effect that Sister Ortiz's injuries did not occur or were self-inflicted." The complaint initiated a firestorm of controversy because Gen. Gramajo was, at the time of the complaint's submission, attending Harvard University by invitation after having given that year's commencement speech at the SOA. Sister Ortiz stated that she was abducted by police officers and military persronnel (i.e.-- men who would have been under Gramajo's command) and taken to a secret prison where she was tortured and raped repeatedly. Sister Ortiz has given formal testimony on several occasions, beginning with a 1992 report to the United Nations General Assembly. A short excerpt from Sister Ortiz' description of her ordeal follows:

When the men returned, they had a video camera and a still camera. The policeman put a machete into my hands. Thinking it would be used against me, and at that point in my torture wanting to die, I did not resist. But the policeman put his hands onto the handle, on top of mine, and forced me to stab the woman again and again...

The policeman asked me if I was now ready to talk, and one of the other torturers...mentioned that they had just filmed...me stabbing the woman. If I refused to cooperate, their boss, Alejandro, would...turn the videotapes and the photographs over to the press.... This was the first I had heard of Alejandro, the torturers’ boss....

The policeman raped me again. Then I was lowered into a pit full of bodies— bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning. Someone was weeping. I didn’t know if it was me or somebody else. A stench of decay rose from the pit. Rats swarmed over the bodies and were dropped onto me as I hung suspended over the pit by the wrists. I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.

The nightmare I lived was nothing out of the ordinary. In 1989, under Guatemala’s first civilian president in years, nearly two hundred people were abducted. Unlike me, they were "disappeared, gone forever." The only uncommon element of my ordeal was that I survived, probably because I was a U.S. citizen, and phone calls poured into Congress when I was reported missing. As a U.S. citizen, I had another advantage: I could, in relative safety, reveal afterwards the details of what happened to me in those twenty-four hours. One of those details: an American was in charge of my torturers

I remember the moment he removed my blindfold. I asked him, "Are you an American?" In poor Spanish and with a heavy American accent, he answered me with a question: "Why do you want to know?" Moments before, after the torturers had blindfolded me again and were getting ready to rape me again, they had called out in Spanish: "Hey, Alejandro, come and have some fun!"

And a voice had responded "Shit!" in perfect American English with no trace of an accent. It was the voice of the tall, fair-skinned man beside me. After swearing, he’d switched to a halting Spanish. "Idiots!" he said. "She’s a North American nun." He added that my disappearance had been made public, and he ran them out of the room.

....He kept telling me he was sorry. The torturers had made a mistake. We came to a parking garage, where he put me into a gray Suzuki jeep and told me he was taking me to a friend of his at the U.S. embassy who would help me leave the country.

For the duration of the trip, I spoke to him in English, which he understood perfectly. He said he was concerned about the people of Guatemala and consequently was working to liberate them from Communism. Alejandro told me to forgive my torturers because they had confused me with Veronica Ortiz Hernandez. It was an honest mistake.

Sister Ortiz has recounted this same story, in formal testimony, on several occasions. Sister Ortiz' testimony initiated a wave of public investigation and scrutiny into the CIA's activities in Guatemala.

Writing for The Nation, in 1995 Allan Nairn exposed that "North American C.l. A. operatives [were] work[ing] inside a Guatemalan Army unit that maintain[ed] a network of torture centers and ha[d] killed thousands of Guatemalan civilians." Nairn also revealed that Gramajos was a C.I.A. asset and receiving pay from them. He also highlights Gramajos link to the early 1980s highland massacres.

While at Harvard, Gen. Gramajo publicly defended himself by saying:

"We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system ... which provides development for 70% of the population while we kill 30%. Before, the strategy was to kill 100%."

Professor Gareau argues that the School of the Americas, a US Army institution where Gramajo-Morales trained as a young officer and taught in later life, is a terrorist training ground. He notes a UN report which states the school has "graduated 500 of the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere." He further argues that people protesting against the school are frequently beaten and arrested, "By the year 2002, 71 demonstrators had served a total of 40 years of jail time for protesting in front of the School of the Americas". This includes an 88 year old nun. Gareau claims that by funding, training and supervising Guatemalan 'Death Squads' Washington was complicit in state terrorism. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, expands on this by stating: "In particular, the U.S. client regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala regularly massacred their own populations, slaughtering over 100,000 civilians during the 1980s and into the beginning of 1990s. Yet the U.S. continued to sponsor such terrorism, propping up the dictatorships responsible for such violence while actively helping them carry it out..."

A 1996 report on CIA's action in Guatemala by the Intelligence Oversight Board states that:

The CIA's successes in Guatemala in conjunction with other US agencies, particularly in uncovering and working to counter coups and in reducing the narcotics flow, were at times dramatic and very much in the national interests of both the United States and Guatemala.

The human rights records of the Guatemalan security services--the D-2 and the Department of Presidential Security (known informally as "Archivos," after one of its predecessor organizations) --were generally known to have been reprehensible by all who were familiar with Guatemala. US policy-makers knew of both the CIA's liaison with them and the services' unsavory reputations. The CIA endeavored to improve the behavior of the Guatemalan services through frequent and close contact and by stressing the importance of human rights -- insisting, for example, that Guatemalan military intelligence training include human rights instruction. The station officers assigned to Guatemala and the CIA headquarters officials whom we interviewed believe that the CIA's contact with the Guatemalan services helped improve attitudes towards human rights. Several indices of human rights observance indeed reflected improvement--whether or not this was due to CIA efforts--but egregious violations continued, and some of the station's closest contacts in the security services remained a part of the problem.

In their 1998 "Report On Guatemala" Rolando Alecio and Ruth Taylor condemn the "legacy of state terror" the nation has inherited from the U.S.-backed and -trained military. Similarly, journalist Minor Sinclair, writing in the Sojourner, stated that

Recent disclosures have revealed the extent of U.S. support for the Guatemalan army despite its reputation as the most repressive military in Latin America. For years Guatemala's elite military officers have been trained in the United States, and at any given time dozens are on the CIA payroll.

Defenders of the former School of the Americas (reorganized as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001) argue that no school should be held accountable for the actions of only some of its many graduates. Before coming to WHINSEC each student is “vetted” by his/her nation and the U.S. embassy in that country. All students are now required to receive "human rights training in law, ethics, rule of law and practical applications in military and police operations."

El Salvador

The United States has been accused by scholars and human rights organizations of complicity in support of State Terrorism in the country of El Salvador, in a conflict characterized by rampant human rights abuses and political terror. In his analysis of the U.N. Truth Commission's Report on El Salvador, Prof. Frederick Garneau argued for significant culpability on the part of United States governments.

As is usually the case with truth commissions, the one for El Salvador did not focus on Washington's support for the government. .. That terror was committed in El Salvador is not disputed. Those who doubt this should reread the above and realize that an estimated 75,000 were killed in this small country in the period 1980 to 1991. The truth commission found that the terrorism that was committed in the country was overwhelmingly governmental terrorism, committed by the Salvadoran army, the National Guard, and their death squads and affiliated agencies. They were responsible for 95 percent of the deaths, the guerrillas for only five percent. These were the same institutions that were the concern and the favorites of Washington—receiving its indoctrination and training and profiting from its largess. El Salvador received six billion dollars in aid from Washington in the period 1979 to 1992. This subsidy to the tiny country during the government repression and terrorism came to average out at $100,000 for each member of its armed forces. This subsidy allowed the government to pay for the terrorist activities committed by the security forces. By virtue of this largess and the military training, notably in counterinsurgency warfare, Washington emerges in this chapter as an accessory before and during the fact. By covering up for San Salvador after it had committed terror, Washington was an accessory after the fact. It gave diplomatic support to state terrorism.

According to the Americas Watch division of Human Rights Watch, “The Salvadoran conflict stems, to a great extent, from the persistent denial of basic socioeconomic rights to the peasant majority. Throughout the past decade systematic violence has befallen not just peasants protesting the lack of land and the means to a decent existence but, in a steadily widening circle, individuals and institutions who have espoused the cause of the peasants and decried their fate." In retrospective assessments, human rights organizations and truth commissions have echoed the claim that the majority of the violence was attributable to government forces.A report of an Amnesty International investigative mission made public in 1984 stated that “many of the 40,000 people killed in the preceding five years had been murdered by government forces who openly dumped mutilated corpses in an apparent effort to terrorize the population.” In all, there were more than 70,000 deaths, some involving gross human rights violations, and more than a quarter of the population were turned into refugees or displaced persons before a UN-brokered peace deal was signed in 1992.

While peasants were primarily victimized, the killing of civilians extended to clergy, church workers, political activists, journalists, union members, health workers, students, teachers, and human rights monitors.The state terror took several forms. Salvadoran security forces, including army battalions, members of the National Guard, and the Treasury Police, performed numerous clearance operations, killing indiscriminately, and perpetrating many massacres and massive human rights violations in the process. The episode of the war responsible for the single largest civilian death toll occurred on December 11, 1981, when the U.S.-trained elite Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran army killed approximately nine hundred men, women, and children in and around the village of El Mozote. Human rights violations included decapitation, raping young girls before killing them, and massacring men, women, and children in separate groups with U.S.-supplied M-16 rifles. A report compiled by the villagers found that more half of the victims were under fourteen. It is reputed to be the worst such atrocity in modern Latin American history, but when news emerged of the massacre, the Reagan administration in the United States dismissed it as FMLN propaganda.

Death squads worked in conjunction with Salvadoran Security services to eliminate opponents, leftist rebels, and their supporters. The squads were a means by which members of the armed forces were able to avoid accountability. Typically dressing in plainclothes and using vehicles with smoke-tinted windows and numberless license plates, terror tactics included publishing death lists of future victims, delivering empty coffins to the doorsteps of future victims and sending potential victims invitations to their own funeral. Cynthia Arnson, a long-time writer on Latin America for Human Rights Watch, argues that “the objective of death squad terror seemed not only elimination of opponents, but also, through torture and the gruesome disfiguration of bodies, the terrorization of the population.” The prototype of the El Salvadoran death squads was ORDEN, a paramilitary spy network that terrorized rural regions and which was founded by Col. Jose Alberto Medrano, a former agent on the CIA payroll. Medrano was awarded a silver medal by President Lyndon B. Johnson, "in recognition of exceptionally meritorious service.". One of Medrano's proteges, Roberto D'Aubuisson, was trained at the U.S. army's school in Panama and at The School of the Americas. D'Aubuisson was founder of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) whose public face was that of a rightist political party, but which also ran death squads secretly. In the spring of 1980, when D'Aubuisson was arrested for plotting against the administration of José Napoleón Duarte, a mass of documents was found implicating him in numerous death squad activities, including detailed plans linked to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The Reagan administration was accused of ignoring the evidence implicating D'Aubuisson.

In the mid-1980’s state terror in El Salvador increasingly took the form of indiscriminate air forces bombing, the planting of mines and harassment of national and international medical personnel- “all indicate that although death rates attributable to death squads have declined in El Salvador since 1983, non-combatant victims of the civil war have increased dramatically.

Critics maintain that the U.S. economic and military aid played an essential role in enabling state terrorism in El Salvador. Specifically that the US government--during the period of the worst abuses-- provided El Salvador with billions of dollars, and equipped and trained an army, which kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of the elderly, women, and children.[6] El Salvador became the fourth largest recipient of U.S. aid, behind Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. In a joint 1982 report on human rights in El Salvador, The Americas Watch Committee and the ACLU place emphasis on U.S. military aid and training because it was "being provided to the same units alleged to be engaged in violations of human rights." The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights argued that because of the extensive provision of “funding, military equipment, training and military guidance” to the Salvadoran armed forces, as well as the fact that the U.S. “identified itself unreservedly” with the causes and conduct of the Salvador military, the U.S. “bears a heavy burden of responsibility”, and moreover argued that “there may be no place else where the United States is so directly responsible for the acts of a foreign government.”

Allegations also point to the role that U.S. administrators played in both protecting the responsible military leaders from legal accountability, and the Salvadoran regime from criticism, while simultaneously maintaining the flow of over one billion dollars of military aid. According to the UN Truth Commission report, over 75% of the serious acts of violence reported took place during the Reagan administration’s time in office. Cynthia Arnson argues that when the killing was at its height, “the Reagan administration downplayed the scale of abuse as well as the involvement of state actors.” When Congress passed a law, unpopular with the Reagan administration, which placed conditions of assurances of human rights compliance and progress on agrarian reforms, the administration issued certification reports every six months that drew heavy criticism, particularly from human rights groups. The first certification report was submitted on January 28, 1982. On the eve of the reports The Washington Post and New York Times published feature articles by American investigative journalists describing massacres in early December of 1981 in and around the village of El Mozote. The massacres had been mainly perpetrated by the Atlacatl Battalion, the first "rapid response unit" to be trained in the U.S. The certification report was only six pages long. William Leogrande remarked that the report “contained little evidence to support the declaratory judgments that progress had been made in all of the areas required by law. The report refused to acknowledge any government complicity in human rights violations...Moreover the report flatly denied that the paramilitary death squads were linked to the government.” Leogrande further noted that “no independent human rights group agreed with the Reagan administration’s portrait of the situation.” The Americas Watch Committee and American Civil Liberties Union jointly referred to the report as a "fraud." Subsequent reports by U.S. agencies on the human rights situation were met with similar incredulity and contempt. A review of the Department of State's 1983 report on human rights in El Salvador by Americas Watch, Helsinki Watch and the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights concluded "all in all, this is a dreadful report."The Reagan Administration's actions included vociferous denunciations of their critics. In a retrospective report entitled El Salvador's Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero, Human Rights Watch summarized the administration's behavior thusly, "during the Reagan years in particular, not only did the United States fail to press for improvements...but in an effort to maintain backing for U.S. policy, it misrepresented the record of the Salvadoran government and smeared critics who challenged that record. In so doing, the administration needlessly polarized the debate in the United States and did a grave injustice to the thousands of civilian victims of government terror in El Salvador."

The extensive role of military advisers in El Salvador has also been raised as suggestive of wider systemic abuses of ethical and legal norms. According to William Leogrande’s analysis “a great deal of the Reagan administration’s policy toward Salvador was considered on what former Senator Sam Irvin called ‘the windy side of the law’. The president used his emergency powers, even when there was no emergency, to send $80 million in military aid to El Salvador without congressional review” (Leogrande, 281). The Reagan administration carried out circumventions and arbitrary re-definitions of laws stipulating the quantity and role of advisers.

Defenders of U.S. policies object to these allegations, emphasizing that the U.S. explicitly promotes professional conduct, including observance of human rights within its military and police training programs. They argue that the U.S. should not be held responsible for the actions of individuals trained by them.

Defenders also justify military aid by claiming it was necessary for defending U.S. National Security Interests. The FMLN guerrillas military efforts, including terrorist acts committed by them, seriously threatened the Salvadoran government. This was deemed a threat to "national security." As president Reagan argued in his historic national television address in 1984, "San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas than Houston is to Washington, D.C. Central America is America; it's at our doorstep. And it has become a stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere,". The U.S. State Department provided detailed evidence for the links between the FMLN, Nicaragua, Cuba and the Soviet Union in its White Paper,"The Communist Interference in El Salvador." The document argues that the U.S. chose the most viable middle path between the right and left extremes undermining the country. The U.S. supported the Duarte government which worked with "some success to deal with the serious political and economic problem that most concern the people of El Salvador." Military aid and training given to Salvador eventually professionalized their armed forces and prevented the insurrection by guerrillas from succeeding. The death of many innocent civilians is regarded as regrettable but necessary for Salvadoran and American security, and future prosperity. Concerning the air war campaign involving the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, both the Salvadoran government and U.S. state officials maintained that peasants who stayed in the zones selected as targets are to be assumed to be guerrilla sympathizers.

Middle East

Iran

Main article: Covert U.S. regime change actions

The Asia Times Online has reported that the United States is providing aid to rebels in Iran, who are currently engaged in a revolt against the Tehran government. Stratfor, a think tank with ties to the American military and intelligence establishments, reported that rebel groups such as Jundallah are receiving aid from foreign intelligence agencies. In addition Stratfor stated, "The US-Iranian standoff has reached a high level of intensity ... a covert war [is] being played out ... the United States has likely ramped up support for Iran's oppressed minorities in an attempt to push the Iranian regime toward a negotiated settlement over Iraq." The state controlled media of Iran reported that this is an attempt to stir up sectarian violence inside Iran. The Asian Times Online refers to this as part of a US policy of continues fomenting of ethnic strife and sponsorship of terrorism in Iran.

Iraq

The New York Times reported that, according to former U.S. intelligence officials, the CIA once orchestrated a bombing and sabotage campaign between 1992 and 1995 in Iraq via one of the resistance organizations, Iyad Allawi's group in an attempt to destabilize the country. According to the Iraqi government at the time, and one former CIA officer, the bombing campaign against Baghdad included both government and civilian targets. According to this former CIA official, the civilian targets included a movie theater and a bombing of a school bus where children were killed. No public records of the secret bombing campaign are known to exist, and the former U.S. officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. "But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because," as a former C.I.A. official said, "the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then."

Lebanon

The CIA has been accused of being the perpetrator of a 1985 Beirut car bombing which killed 81 people. The bombing was apparently an assassination attempt on an Islamic cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. The bombing, known as the Bir bombing after Bir el-Abed, the impoverished Beirut neighborhood in which it had occurred, was reported by the New York Times to have caused a "massive" explosion "even by local standards," killing 81 people, and wounding more than 200. Investigative journalist Bob Woodward has claimed that the CIA was funded by the Saudi Arabian government to arrange the bombing. Fadlallah himself also claims to have evidence that the CIA was behind the attack and that the Saudis paid $3 million.

The U.S. National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane admitted that those responsible for the bomb may have had American training, but that they were "rogue operative(s)" operating without CIA approval. The next day, a notice hung over the devastated area where families were still digging the bodies of relatives out of the rubble. It read: "Made in the USA". The terrorist strike on Bir el-Abed is seen as a product of US covert policy in Lebanon. Agreeing with the proposals of CIA director William Casey, president Ronald Reagan sanctioned the Bir attack in retaliation for the truck-bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks at Beirut airport in October 1983, which in turn had been a reprisal for earlier US acts of intervention and diplomatic dealings in Lebanon's civil war that had resulted in hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian lives. After CIA operatives had repeatedly failed to arrange Casey's car-bombing, the CIA "farmed out" the operation to agents of its longtime Lebanese client, the Phalange, a Maronite Christian, anti-Islamic militia.

Asia

Japan

Main article: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Some legal scholars, historians, other governments, and human rights organizations have characterized the United States' World War II nuclear attacks against the Empire of Japan as State terrorism. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only time a state has used nuclear weapons against concentrated civilian populated areas. Some critics hold that it represents the single greatest act of state terrorism in the 20th century. Some academics also represent the bombings as a genocide.

The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the United States' justification for them is a subject of much debate; even so, University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings has written of an acceptance among historians of Martin Sherwin's statement that "the Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst."The arguments center around the targeting of innocents to achieve a political goal. Specifically, the fact that the Target Committee on May 10–11, 1945, rejected the use of the weapons against a strictly military objective, choosing a large civilian population to create a psychological effect that would be felt around the world. They also center around claims that the attacks were militarily unnecessary, and transgressed moral barriers.

Historian Howard Zinn writes: "if 'terrorism' has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."[7] "Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," writes Professor Mark Selden.

Similarly, Michael Walzer wrote of it as an example of "...war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender. Hiroshima seems to me the classic case."

Professor C.A.J. (Tony) Coady, head of the ARC Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), studies Political Violence, Just War Theory, Terrorism, and Humanitarian Intervention,[8]. He writes in Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World (Michael P. O'Keefe, eds, Melbourne University Press): "Several of the contributors consider the issue of state terrorism and there is a general agreement that states not only can sponsor terrorism by non state groups but that states can, and do, directly engage in terrorism. Coady instances the terror bombings of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as acts of terrorism."[9]

Quoting the sociologist Kai Erikson, Howard Zinn writes:

"The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not 'combat' in any of the ways that word is normally used. Nor were they primarily attempts to destroy military targets, for the two cities had been chosen not despite but because they had a high density of civilian housing. Whether the intended audience was Russian or Japanese or a combination of both, then the attacks were to be a show, a display, a demonstration. The question is: What kind of mood does a fundamentally decent people have to be in, what kind of moral arrangements must it make, before it is willing to annihilate as many as a quarter of a million human beings for the sake of making a point?"

Mark Selden, a professor of sociology and history at Binghamton University and professorial associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University, author of “War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (War and Peace Library),” writes, "This deployment of air power against civilians would become the centerpiece of all subsequent U.S. wars, a practice in direct contravention of the Geneva principles, and cumulatively 'the single most important example of the use of terror in twentieth century warfare."[10]

Professor Selden writes: “Over the next half century, the United States would destroy with impunity cities and rural populations throughout Asia, beginning in Japan and continuing in North Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan, to mention only the most heavily bombed nations...if nuclear weapons defined important elements of the global balance of terror centered on U.S.-Soviet conflict, "conventional" bomb attacks defined the trajectory of the subsequent half century of warfare." (Selden, War and State Terrorism).

Heads of State have also repeated the claim. President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez paid tribute to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calling the dropping of the A-bomb, "the greatest act of terrorism in recorded history." [11]

Richard Falk, professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University has written in some detail about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as instances of state terrorism. He argues in an article published in The Nation, Vol. 242, June 28, 1986 that“The graveyards of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the number-one exhibits of state terrorism.” Falk discusses the public justifications for the attacks, as follows:

"Undoubtedly the most extreme and permanently traumatizing instance of state terrorism, perhaps in the history of warfare, involved the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in military settings in which the explicit function of the attacks was to terrorize the population through mass slaughter and to confront its leaders with the prospect of national annihilation....the public justification for the attacks given by the U.S. government then and now was mainly to save lives that might otherwise might have been lost in a military campaign to conquer and occupy the Japanese home islands which was alleged as necessary to attain the war time goal of unconditional surrender..." But even accepting the rationale for the atomic attacks at face value, which means discounting both the geopolitical motivations and the pressures to show that the immense investment of the Manhattan Project had struck pay dirt, and disregarding the Japanese efforts to arrange their surrender prior to the attacks, the idea that massive death can be deliberately inflicted on a helpless civilian population as a tactic of war certainly qualifies as state terror of unprecedented magnitude, particularly as the United States stood on the edge of victory, which might well have been consummated by diplomacy. As Michael Walzer puts it, the United States owed the Japanese people "an experiment in negotiation," but even if such an initiative had failed there was no foundation in law or morality for atomic attacks on civilian targets" (Falk, State Terrrorism versus Humanitarian Law in War and State Terrorism).

These claims have prompted historian Robert Newman, a supporter of the bombings, to argue that the practice of terrorism is justified in some cases.

Eastern and Western Europe

Anti-communism

Main article: Operation Gladio

On October 24, 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti told the Italian Parliament that NATO had long held a covert policy of training partisan groups in the event of a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe. Under Operation Gladio the CIA, British MI6 and NATO trained and armed partisan groups in NATO states to fight a guerrilla war if they were captured during a future Soviet invasion. It has been alleged that these groups and individuals in them were responsible for various acts of violence perpetrated against leftists during the cold war, political assassinations in Belgium, military coups in Greece (1967) and Turkey (1980) The supposed aim of this group was to prevent Communist movements in Western Europe from gaining power and thus contain the expansion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose "iron curtain", as Winston Churchill termed it, had "descended across the Continent."

In 2000, a report from the Italian Democratic Party of the Left (formerly the Italian Communist Party) claimed that the strategy of tension had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI (Communist Party) (itself sponsored to the tune of over $60million from Moscow during the Cold War), and to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching executive power in the country." Intending to drawing a pejorative linkage to the atrocities of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, during which millions were persecuted and an estimated half million killed, the centrist Italian Republican party said the report was worthy of a 1970s Maoist group.

The US State Department has admitted the existence of Gladio only as a plan which was to be activated in the event of Soviet occupation of Western Europe during the Cold War, but has continued to deny it qualified as terrorism. The United States maintains that several researchers have been influenced by a Soviet Cold War forgery.

Opposing views

Defenders of US policy have argued that the United States and other Western nations support certain right-wing dictatorships in part because they are concerned about the economic development of the target developing nations. In this view, it is rare for democracy to exist in nations with low economic development. In these nations the population often lacks literacy, education, and is otherwise too poor to be able to fully participate in the democratic process. Thus supporting a dictatorship that promotes economic growth has often been seen as the best option available, anticipating that this will eventually lead to democratization. However, this view has been challenged recently by arguing that research shows poor democracies perform better than poor dictatorships by enjoying better economic growth, with the exception of east Asia. However, it is unclear how any of this relates to US terrorism, the subject of the present article; these defenders do not contend that US terrorism advances economic development or democracy in the target countries. In addition, many communist countries opposed by the U.S. have also become democracies, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Croatia, Albania, Serbia, and Mongolia. Many US supported dictatorships have not become democracies, such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Morocco, etc.

Defenders of the United States point out the US has rarely used violence against another democracy. However, the U.S. has toppled many democratically-elected governments, including those of Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, and Chile when it suited its interests, showing a lack of real concern about whether or not countries in the developing world are democratic, but very real commitment, like most great powers in history, to furthering its own political and economic objectives.

When the United States was involved in coups d'état against other democratic states, one explanation given was the believed perception that these states were on the verge of becoming Communist dictatorships or under communist influence. Also complicit was the role of semi-transparent, or non-transparent United States government agencies, such as the C.I.A., who sometimes did not implement the decisions of or mislead elected officials. Covert actions have been facilitated by the establishment of a policy known as "plausible denial," according to which, elected officials, including the president, could plausible deny actual knowledge of illegal or unsavory operations by the CIA. Thus, these operations, if they came to light of day, could be conveniently denied and the elected officials insulated from crtique.

Though US soldiers have committed war crimes such as rape and murdering POW's, these actions are not allowed by the laws of United States, nor are they the official policy of the US military. Thus, even when perpetrated by the army or secret police of the regime installed by the United States and using U.S. funding, and even when the suppression of the labor leaders, civil rights activists, left-leaning clergy, independence-minded politicians or the like is necessary for the continued existence of the regime installed by the U.S., the organized rapes, terror or and crimes could be conveniently denied as "ultravires", not official policy. If rendered necessary by publicity, a few "bad apples" could even be held accountable. The same applies even more so to acts committed by foreign groups supported by the US, but outside direct US control.

The US is blamed for human rights violations in nations committed by groups they have supported, even if indirectly, regardless of whether this was approved of by the foreign leadership or not, and regardless of whether the US had tried to use its influence to stop this or not. For example, stating that 200,000 people died during the long civil war in Guatemala and implying that the US was responsible is misleading, despite the US having for long periods of time cut off its military aid just because such violations helped stop a coup in 1993 and made efforts to improve the conduct of the security services.

Quotes

One has to ask whether there was transparency in the invasion of Iraq. The world knows President Bush lied openly about Iraq having chemical weapons, They keep on bombing cities, killing children, they have become a terrorist state.--Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, 2005.

Actually, who is the terrorist, who is against human rights? The answer is the United States because they attacked Iraq. Moreover, it is the terrorist king, waging war. --Indonesian Vice President Hamzah Haz, 2003

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. --Noam Chomsky

See also

• American terrorism
• Command responsibility
• Economic terrorism
• List of terrorist incidents
• Torture manuals

• Allegations of state terrorism by Iran
• Allegations of state terrorism by Russia
• Allegations of state terrorism in Sri Lanka

References

• Alexander, George (December 1991). Western State Terrorism. Polity Press. p. 276. ISBN 9780745609317.
• Chomsky, Noam (January 1988). The Culture of Terrorism. South End Press. p. 269. ISBN 9780896083349.
• Sluka,, Jeffrey A., editor (1999). Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-1711-7. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Selden,, Mark, editor (November 28, 2003). War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-0742523913. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez editors, When States Kill:Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, University of Texas Press 2005,isbn=978-0-292-70647-7
• Pilger, John (December 12, 2002). "Bush Terror Elite Wanted 9/11 to Happen". Third World Traveler. Retrieved 2007-07-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Perdue, William D. (August 7, 1989). Terrorism and the State: A Critique of Domination Through Fear. Praeger Press. p. 240. ISBN 9780275931407. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help)
• Campbell, Bruce B., and Arthur D. Brenner, eds. 2000. Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability. New York: St. Martin's Press
• "Understanding Terrorism". Public Broadcasting Service. August 15, 1997. Retrieved 2007-07-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Vann, Bill (November 21, 2001). "Bush nominee linked to Latin American terrorism". World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved 2007-07-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)