United States and state terrorism

The United States has been accused of having directly committed acts of state terrorism, as well as funding, training, and harboring individuals and groups who engage in terrorism.

The United States has accused other nations of funding, training, and harboring individuals and groups who engage in terrorism, including terrorist acts against the United States.

Definition of state terrorism

Main article: State terrorism

Terrorism, state terrorism, and international terrorism remain without a single internationally 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." While there is much agreement as to the generalities and specifics, there is as yet no international consensus or treaty among all nations on what legally 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 legally accepted 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. Resolution 1566 gives a definition:

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.

— UN Security Council Resolution 1566

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:

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.

— Alex P. Schmid,

[Terrorism is] 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. ... 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.

— Michael Stohl, Professor of Political Science at Purdue University,

U.S. government's own definitions

In the context of law, U.S. Code, Title 18, Chapter 113B, defines the terms "domestic terrorism" and "international terrorism". Various agencies of the United States government utilize different definitions of terrorism:

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)]]

— Definition under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation operates,

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.

— U.S. State Department's definition,

General allegations against the US

Hypocrisy about state terrorism

After President George W. Bush began using the term "War on Terrorism", Noam Chomsky, anarchist and 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.

— Noam Chomsky, interview, Monthly Review

The manual Military Operations in Low Intensity Conflict states:

Low intensity conflict is a political-military confrontation between contending states or groups ... [and] ranges from subversion to the use of armed force. It is waged by a combination of means, employing political, economic, informational, and military instruments....LIC operations...can advance US international goals such as the growth of freedom, democratic institutions, and free market economies....

US policy recognizes that indirect, rather than direct, applications of US military power are the most appropriate and cost-effective ways to achieve national goals in a LIC environment. The principal US military instrument in LIC is security assistance in the form of training, equipment, services and combat support. When LIC threatens friends and allies, the aim of security assistance is to ensure that their military institutions can provide security for their citizens and government.

The United States will also employ combat operations in exceptional circumstances when it cannot protect its national interests by other means. When a US response is called for, it must be in accordance with the principles of international and domestic law. These principles affirm the inherent right of states to use force in individual or collective self-defense against armed attack.[7]

Chomsky has characterized the tactics used by agents of the U.S. government and their proxies in their execution of U.S. foreign policy — in such countries as Nicaragua — as a form of terrorism and has also described the U.S as "a leading terrorist state." Noam Chomsky also argues that "Washington is the center of global state terrorism and has been for years."[8]

As a consequence of continued U.S. refusal to extradite convicted terrorist Luis Posada, Venezuela considers the US guilty of hypocrisy on terrorism.

Arno Mayer, Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton University, has stated that "since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of 'preemptive' state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled."

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 mass 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 argues 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."

Specific allegations against the US by region

Cuba (1956-present)

After revolutionary forces vanquished Fulgencio Batista’s forces, a new government was formed in Cuba on January 2, 1959 and by early 1959 the C.I.A. had initiated a campaign of regime change. By the spring of 1959 the CIA was planning Castro’s overthrow and by May was arming terrorist groups within Cuba for that purpose. By the the winter of 1959-60, "there was a significant increase in bombing and incendiary raids perpetrated by exiled Cubans based in the U.S. and supervised by the C.I.A."

Operation Mongoose

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

Examining the release of newly declassified materials in 2000, Harvard Professor Jorge I. Dominguez observed that when Castro came to power the Kennedy administration was "obsessed with Cuba and the hoped-for overthrow of the Castro government". The administration implemented "Operation Mongoose”, the codename for a U.S. Policy of sabotage and covert operations" against Cuba. MONGOOSE was led by Gen. Edward Lansdale in the Defense Department and William King Harvey at the CIA. Samuel Halpern, a CIA co-organizer, conveyed the breadth of involvement: “CIA and the U. S. Army and military forces and Department of Commerce, and Immigration, Treasury, God knows who else — everybody was in Mongoose. It was a government-wide operation run out of Bobby Kennedy's office with Ed Lansdale as the mastermind.” . The scope of Mongoose included sabotage actions against a railway bridge, petroleum storage facilities, a molasses storage container, a petroleum refinery, a power plant, a sawmill, and a floating crane. Domínguez revealed that "only once in [the] thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S. government sponsored terrorism." The CIA operation was based in Miami, Florida and among other aspects of the operation, enlisted the help of the Mafia to plot an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro, the Cuban president; for instance, William Harvey was one of the CIA case officers who directly dealt with the mafiosi John Roselli.

While Kennedy put a hold on Mongoose actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the administration fully re-instituted the program's terror tactics once the Soviet danger abated. Noam Chomsky, however, disputes that the terrorist actions were ever halted, claiming that they "continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis,” and that the continued, even though formally ended "several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement." The Executive Committee of the National Security Council made recommendations which included sabotage of Cuban and [Soviet] cargo and shipping and the use of exiled Cubans to attack important installations so the actions could be plausibly attributed to local Cubans. Records in the National Security Archive at George Washington University document that directly after the first executive committee (EXCOMM) meeting on the missile crisis, Attorney General Robert Kennedy “convened a meeting of the Operation Mongoose team” to express disappointment in its results while pledging to take a closer personal attention on the matter. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the archive, judged Robert Kennedy as taking “the most irrational position during the most extraordinary crisis in the history of U. S. foreign policy”, remarking that “Not to belabor the obvious, but for chrissake, a nuclear crisis is happening and Bobby wants to start blowing things up.”.

Reports from the Church Committee reveal that from June 1963 onward the Kennedy administration intensified its war against Cuba while the CIA integrated propaganda, "economic denial", and sabotage to attack the Cuban state as well as specific targets within. One example cited is an incident where CIA agents, seeking to assassinate Castro, provided a Cuban official, Rolando Cubela Secades, with a ballpoint pen rigged with a poisonous hypodermic needle. At this time the CIA received authorization for thirteen major operations within Cuba; these included attacks on an electric power plant, an oil refinery, and a sugar mill. Historian Stephen Rabe has observed that the “Kennedy administration...showed no interest in Castro's repeated request that the United States cease its campaign of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba. Kennedy did not pursue a dual-track policy toward Cuba....The United States would entertain only proposals of surrender." Rabe further documents how "Exile groups, such as Alpha 66 and the Second Front of Escambray, staged hit-and-run raids on the island...on ships transporting goods…purchased arms in the United States and launched...attacks from the Bahamas.”

Operation Northwoods

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. This plan included acts of violence on U.S. soil or against U.S. 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 U.S. could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by U.S. 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 Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

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 in Havana's Popular Provincial Tribunal 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.

Cuba also claims 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."Testifying before the United States Senate in 1978, Richard Helms, former CIA Director, stated; "We had task forces that that were striking at Cuba constantly. We were attempting to blow up power plants. We were attempting to ruin sugar mills. We were attempting to do all kinds of things in this period. This was a matter of American government policy."

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.

Allegations of harboring terrorists

The Cuban revolution resulted in a large Cuban refugee community in the U.S., 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 U.S. involvement.

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, according to Cuba's official newspaper Granma, been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States Agency for International Development and, more directly, the CIA.

The U.S. has also been criticized for failing to condemn Panama's pardoning of the alleged terrorists Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, 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.

Luis Posada

Luis Posada

Luis Posada Carriles has been accused by Cuba of terrorism. He resides within the U.S., and his deportation action was denied by a federal court that cited torture and other concerns. His case is important because he symbolizes what Cuba view as the harboring of suspected terrorists by the United States.

The claims around Posada center on 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. Some allege some form of US involvement in these acts. 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 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 an airliner of the Cuban airline Cubana. 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. stated 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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."

US allegations

The US accuses Cuba of supporting international terrorism and terrorist groups. Cuba have a history of supporting revolutionary movements in Latin America and Africa. "Havana openly advocates armed revolution as the only means for leftist forces to gain power in Latin America, and the Cubans have played an important role in facilitating the movement of men and weapons into the region. Havana provides direct support in the form of training, arms, safe havens, and advice to a wide variety of guerrilla groups. Many of these groups engage in terrorist operations." Cuba "encouraged terrorism in the hope of provoking indiscriminate violence and repression, in order to weaken government legitimacy and attract new converts to armed struggle" In 1992, after the Soviet collapse, Fidel Castro stressed that his country’s support for insurgents abroad was a thing of the past. Currently, Cuba is accused by the US of refusing to extradite US fugitives, taking no action against designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and providing safe haven to members of ETA, FARC, and the ELN.[9]

Nicaragua (1979-90)

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

Following the rise to power of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Ronald 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, Director of Central Intelligence, 28 January 1981 - 29 January 1987, 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." U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

— James Bovard, Freedom Daily

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

Colombian writer and former diplomat Clara Nieto, in her book "Masters of War", describes the Reagan administration as "the paradigm of a terrorist state" remarking that this was "ironically, the very thing Reagan claimed to be fighting." Nieto describes direct CIA involvement, noting that "the CIA launched a series of terrorist actions from the “mothership” off Nicaragua’s coast. In September 1983, the agency attacked Puerto Sandino with rockets. The following month, frogmen blew up the underwater oil pipeline in the same port- the only one in the country. In October there was an attack on Pierto Corinto, Nicaragua’s largest port, with mortars, rockets and grenades, blowing up five large oil and gasoline storage tanks. More than a hundred people were wounded, and the fierce fire, which could not be brought under control for two days, forced the evacuation of 23,000 people.”

Historian Greg Grandin describes a disjuncture between official U.S. ideals and support for terrorism. “Nicaragua, where the United States backed not a counterinsurgent state but anti-communist mercenaries, likewise represented a disjuncture between the idealism used to justify U.S. policy and its support for political terrorism... The corollary to the idealism embraced by the Republicans in the realm of diplomatic public policy debate was thus political terror. In the dirtiest of Latin America’s dirty wars, their faith in America’s mission justified atrocities in the name of liberty.” In his analysis, Grandin emphasizes that the behaviour of the U.S. backed-contras was particularly inhumane and vicious: "In Nicaragua, the U.S.-backed Contras decapitated, castrated, and otherwise mutilated civilians and foreign aid workers. Some earned a reputation for using spoons to gorge their victims eye’s out. In one raid, Contras cut the breasts of a civilian defender to pieces and ripped the flesh off the bones of another.”

The United States State Department accused the Sandinistas of many cases of illegal foreign intervention and supporting foreign militants. One was supporting the FMLN rebels in El Salvador with safehaven; training; command-and-control headquarters and advice; and weapons, ammunition, and other vital supplies. As evidence was cited captured documents, testimonials of former rebels and Sandinistas, aerial photographs, tracing captured weapons back to Nicaragua, and captured vehicles from Nicaragua smuggling weapons. There were also accusations of subversive activities in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Colombia and in the case of Honduras and Costa Rica outright military operations by Nicaraguan troops. The Sandinistas has been accused of large scale human rights violations. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights writes that after the Sandinistas lost power in 1990 many mass graves were found. "While most of the graves seem to be the result of summary executions by members of the Sandinista People's Army or the State Security, some contain the bodies of individuals executed by the Nicaraguan Resistance."[10][11]

Nicaragua vs. United States

Main article: Nicaragua vs. United States

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 U.S. personnel and by the supporting Contra guerrillas in their war against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The US was not imputable for possible human rights violations done by the Contras.

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.

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 U.S. argued that it was acting for the benefit of El Salvador in order to help it to respond to an alleged armed attack by Nicaragua. El Salvador stated that it had asked the United States to exercise for its benefit the right of collective self-defense. The court found evidence for an arms flow between Nicaragua and to the insurgents in El Salvador in 1979-81. However, there was not enough evidence to show that the Nicaraguan government was imputable for this or that the US response was proportional. The court also found established that certain transborder incursions into the territory of Guatemala and Costa Rica, in 1982, 1983 and 1984, were imputable to the Government of Nicaragua. However, neither Guatemala and Costa Rica made any request for intervention by the US and El Salvador only in 1984, well after the US intervention started.[12]

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.

U.S. foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky argues that the U.S. has been legally found guilty of international terrorism based on this verdict, which condemned the United States federal government for its "unlawful use of force".

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.

— Noam Chomsky, interview on Pakistan Television

One critic of the 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 Court has no jurisdiction over sovereign states unless they themselves so agree, which the U.S. did not since the Soviet Bloc states were outside its jurisdiction but they still sent judges to the court. The U.S. did accept the ICJ's compulsory jurisdiction in 1946, but withdrew its acceptance following the Nicaragua case.

Guatemala (1954-96)

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

Background

The Guatemala Civil War was predominantly fought between the government of Guatemala and insurgents between 1960 and 1996.

In 1999, an independent Guatemalan Truth Commission (the "Historical Clarification Commission") issued a report which, according to Robert Parry writing in Consortiumnews.com, among other things, 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." Parry also writes that the report

...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."

— Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com

The report went on to term the Guatemalan military's campaign in the northern highlands a "genocide," and 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."

In 1984 Human Rights Watch reported on Guatemala, stating: “Previous America’s Watch reports on Guatemala have discussed the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror. The killing continues as we document in this, our third report on Guatemala.”

“As best as we can determine the rural massacres are smaller in scope, which partly reflects the fact that so many of Guatemala’s villages had already been decimated during the army’s terror tactics in the counterinsurgency campaign that it waged in 1982 and the early part of 1983. On the other hand the number of rural killings remains very high, and the number of killings in the cities has risen sharply, coming to resemble the situation that prevailed under President Lucas Garcia (1978-1982)” (Guatemala: A Nation of Prisoners, An Americas Watch Report, January 1984, p. 2-3)

“The government of Guatemala continues to engage in the systematic use of torture as a means of gathering intelligence and coercing confessions. There is also evidence that torture is used for exemplary purposes, to instill fear among those who see themselves as potential victims of arrest or abduction. … We do find that between the Rios Montt and Meija administrations there has been no appreciable difference where the use of torture is concerned. “ (Guatemala: A Nation of Prisoners, An Americas Watch Report, January 1984, p11.)

“In such places, the army faces a crucial dilemma: the resources are not now available to permanently garrison each village. Yet, should they be totally neglected, they could become an important stronghold for opposing the regime. In such situations, the army exercises several options designed to place the community under military control and hold back the development of any opposition. One frequent approach is terror: the burning of houses, beatings, torture, selective killings and even massacres. Distant communities visited in northwest Quiche, near the Huehuetenango border, have experienced some form of military terror…Not one community is what it used to be; a forced transformation has befallen each one. The terror does not simply stem from the cruelty of the armed forces or from the policies of a specific government- although both factors are obviously involved- but from the systematic application of force to maintain effective military control in remote areas of the country-side…the terror is sufficient to ensure that the population understands that no level of dissent, let alone rebellion, will be tolerated. When a village is burned and its people abused, the message is that this is punishment for real or imagined cooperation with the opposition.” (Guatemala: A Nation of Prisoners, An Americas Watch Report, January 1984, p.60)

US involvement

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 argue 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." Professor of History, Stephen G. Rabe, writes in "In destroying the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1950-1954), the United States initiated a nearly four-decade-long cycle of terror and repression that led to the death of 200,000 Guatemalans."

After the U.S.-backed coup, which toppled president Jacobo Arbenz, lead coup plotter Castillo Armas assumed power. Author and university professor, Patrice McSherry argues that 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 1960s.

Patrice McSherry argues that 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. Sociologist Jeffrey M. Paige writes that Arana Osorio "earned the nickname "The Butcher of Zacapa" for killing 15,000 peasants to eliminate 300 suspected rebels."

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 writes:

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.

— Michael McClintock

McClintock writes that this idea was also articulated by Colonel John Webber, the chief of the U.S. Military Mission in Guatemala, who 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.”

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." Robert E. White, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, and president of the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. writes, that the human rights report makes "grim reading", and that:

"the United States was not backing one side in a civil war but rather a campaign of official terror. Of the more than 200,000 victims, the commission found that the army and other state agents killed 93 percent. With direct orders from the government's highest echelons and the military high command, soldiers carried out a scorched-earth policy burning Mayan villages and throwing the still-living victims into common burial pits. Declassified documents reveal that Washington knew of these acts of genocide yet our government continued its assistance to the Guatemalan military."

He further states that

"the Guatemalan truth commission was right to single out the CIA for special mention. Between 1965 and 1981, I served in our embassies in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. I watched as the CIA recruited dozens of paid informants from the right-wing fringes of Central American society. These ideologues regarded labor union leaders threatening a strike or student activists protesting the closing of a newspaper as agents of subversion. I watched as CIA reports to Washington characterized as Communist or Communist sympathizers, brave men and women whose only crime was to work for the restoration of democratic government and against the U.S.- supported military dictator. Worst of all, I watched as the CIA shared its "intelligence" with the leaders of these military regimes. Not unnaturally these authorities regarded any person fingered in an official CIA report as a legitimate target for persecution, even death."[13]

Utilizing declassified government documents, researchers Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio from the research institute the National Security Archive document that Guatemalan Colonel Byron Lima Estrada took military police and counterintelligence courses at the School of the Americas. He later served in several elite counterinsurgency units trained and equipped by the U.S. Military Assistance Program (MAP). He 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.

In 1999, the Guatemalan Truth Commission (the "Historical Clarification Commission") issued a report which, among other things, stated that "The CEH recognises that the movement of Guatemala towards polarisation, militarization and civil war was not just the result of national history. The cold war also played an important role. Whilst anti-communism, promoted by the United States within the framework of its foreign policy, received firm support from right-wing political parties and from various other powerful actors in Guatemala, the United States demonstrated that it was willing to provide support for strong military regimes in its strategic backyard. In the case of Guatemala, military assistance was directed towards reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation."[14]

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.

Minor Sinclair writes in the Sojourner 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.

Writing for The Nation, in 1995 Allan Nairn argued 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 stated that Gramajos was a CIA asset and receiving pay from them, and he linked Gramajos to the early 1980s highland massacres.

Gramajos allegedly said that "We aren't renouncing the use of force. If we have to use it, we have to use it, but in a more sophisticated manner. You needn't kill everyone to complete the job. [You can use] more sophisticated means; we aren't going to return to the large-scale massacres. We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted Civil Affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the people while we kill 30 percent. Before the strategy was to kill 100 percent."}} When the Harvard Crimson asked if these statements accurately represented his views, he retreated, suggesting that the transcript reflected a certain lack of linguistic dexterity, his characteristic use of "broken English." "I really did not mean exactly 'kill,'" but rather that soldiers cannot "renounce coercive action" and that the military is now "going to make a very clear distinction between [civilians and insurgents]." The article also stated:

During his tenure as Guatemalan minister of defense from 1987 to 1990, Gramajo oversaw a military accused of butchering dozens of university students, provoking Anne Manuel of Americas Watch to find "a sort of tragic irony" in Harvard's ardor for educating him. Gramajo is believed to have chosen to come to Harvard as part of his plan to run for Guatemala's presidency in 1995. And Harvard, as U.S. Representative Chester Atkins (D-MA) observed, appears to be in the business of "laundering reputations."

From the 1984 Human Rights Watch report on Guatemala in a section entitled “The U.S. Role,":

“On December 4, 1982, President Reagan met with Guatemalan President Rios Montt in Honduras and dismissed reports of human rights abuses in Guatemala published by Americas Watch, Amnesty International and others as a “bum wrap” The following month the Reagan administration announced that it was ending a “five-year embargo on arms sale to Guatemala and had approved a sale of $6.36 million worth of military spare parts to the country. This sale was approved despite U.S. law forbidding arms sales to governments engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. “ (Guatemala: A Nation of Prisoners, An Americas Watch Report, January 1984,p. 135)

“During most of 1983, the Reagan Administration continued to dispute reports of human rights abuses in Guatemala. When Americas Watch published its May 1983 report on Guatemala, Creating a Desolation and Calling it Peace, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, attempted to discredit it publicly. (Guatemala: A Nation of Prisoners, An Americas Watch Report, January 1984, 135)

“In light of its long record of apologies for the government of Guatemala, and its failure to repudiate publicly those apologies even at a moment of disenchantment, we believe that the Reagan Administration shares in the responsibility for the gross abuses of human rights practiced by the government of Guatemala."

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development states: "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 mentioned that the US helped stop a military coup in 1993, further stating that:

"The CIA's successes in Guatemala in conjunction with other U.S. 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 report goes on to state:

"Relations between the U.S. 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 U.S. military aid." "Relations between the two countries warmed in the mid-1980's with gradual improvements in human rights and the Reagan administration's emphasis on curbing the spread of communism in Central America. After a civilian government under President Cerezo was elected in 1985, overt non-lethal US military aid to Guatemala resumed. In December 1990, however, largely as a result of the killing of US citizen Michael DeVine by members of the Guatemalan army, the Bush administration suspended almost all overt military aid."

"The US worked with the De Leon government in attempting to strengthen democracy and human rights ... The US also joined the "Group of Friends of the Peace Process," which continues to work to bring an end to Guatemala's 35-year-old internal conflict ... There has been some improvement over time in the Guatemalan military's accountability with regard to human rights violations. Whereas in the 1980's the army acted with total impunity, in the 1990's military personnel were for the first time charged, convicted, and imprisoned for some of their crimes. Senior officers, however, are still rarely charged for their roles in ordering or covering up such crimes. Human rights problems, including cases involving US citizens, remain a serious concern in US-Guatemalan relations."

"US policy objectives in Guatemala since 1984 have included supporting the transition to and strengthening of civilian democratic government, encouraging respect for human rights and the rule of law, supporting economic growth, combating illegal narcotics trafficking, fighting the communist insurgency, and, in recent years, advancing the peace process."

The report also goes on to highlight:

"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. U.S. 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.

Sister Dianna Ortiz

Main article: Dianna Ortiz

Sister Dianna Ortiz is a U.S citizen and Roman Catholic nun who was serving as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989 when she was abducted and brutally tortured. Among other torments she was gang-raped and suffered over 100 cigarette burns.

In early 1995 Sister Ortiz won a U.S. civil court case against the former Minister of Defense of Guatemala and graduate of the School of the Americas— General Héctor Gramajo.[15] In its ruling, the judiciary stated that "[Gramajo-Morales]...was aware of and supported widespread acts of brutality committed under his command resulting in thousands of civilian deaths...." and further stated that Gramajo-Morales “devised...[and] directed...[an] indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians.”

Sister Ortiz suspects some involvement by US government personnel.

School of the Americas

Main article: Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation

Professor Gareau argues that the School of the Americas (reorganized in 2001 as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a U.S. training institution mainly for Latin America, is a terrorist training ground. He cites 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 alleges that by funding, training and supervising Guatemalan 'Death Squads' Washington was complicit in state terrorism.

Defenders argue that the alleged connection to human rights abusers is often weak. For example, Roberto D'Aubuisson's sole link to the SOA is that he had taken a course in Radio Operations long before El Salvador's civil war began. They also argue that no school should be held accountable for the actions of only some of its many graduates. Before coming to the current WHINSEC each student is now “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 (1980-92)

Background

The Salvadoran Civil War was predominantly fought between the government of El Salvador and guerrilla groups between 1980 and 1992. The US accused the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who took power in 1979, of arming and training the guerrillas.

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.

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.” In the mid-1980s 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.

The rebels also committed human rights violations. It was considered legitimate to physically eliminate people who were labelled military targets, traitors or "orejas" (informers), and even political opponents. The murders of mayors, right-wing intellectuals, public officials and judges are examples of this mentality.[16]

The FMLN, one guerrilla groups, was also accused of human rights violations, using terrorist tactics such as kidnappings, arson, and bombings to destabilize the regime.[17] It is now one of the two major political parties of the country.

US involvement

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.

— Frederick H. Gareau,

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.

The prototype of the El Salvadoran death squads was ORDEN, a paramilitary spy network that allegedly 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 in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, "in recognition of exceptionally meritorious service."

One of Medrano's proteges, Roberto D'Aubuisson, a graduate of the Salvadoran military academy, was also trained at The School of the Americas and the International Police Academy in the suburbs of Washington D.C. D'Aubuisson was founder of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) whose public face was that of a rightist political party, but which allegedly 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. Critics of this view argue that Roberto D'Aubuisson's sole link to the SOA is that he had taken a course in Radio Operations long before El Salvador's civil war began.

The BBC reports on the role of the US in supporting a "death squad war", and "counter-insurgency war", that the U.S. 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. 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 stated 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.” The Reagan administration carried out circumventions and arbitrary re-definitions of laws stipulating the quantity and role of advisers .

US officials say that President Bush senior's policies set the stage for peace, turning El Salvador into a democratic success story.[18] There was substantial developmental aid during the Carter administration but very little military. The Reagan administration pressed for free elections. The Salvadoran right reluctantly joined this process after it became clear that the administration did not favor a conservative military coup.

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.

Iran (1979-present)

An article in the Asia Times Online by an Indian diplomat asserts 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 militant anti-government groups 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. An Asian Times article refers to this as part of a U.S. policy of continuous fomenting of ethnic strife and sponsorship of terrorism in Iran.

Jundullah

The Sunni militant organization Jundallah has been identified as a terrorist organization by Iran and Pakistan. According to an April 2007 report by Brian Ross and Christopher Isham of ABC News, the United States government had been secretly encouraging and advising the Jundullah in its attacks against Iranian targets. This support is said to have started in 2005 and arranged so that the United States provided no direct funding to the group, which would require congressional oversight and attract media attention. The report was denied by Pakistan official sources .

Alexis Debat, one of the sources quoted by Ross and Isham in in their report alleging US support for the Jundullah, resigned from ABC News in June 2007, after ABC officials discovered he faked several interviews while working for the company. .

Brian Ross, the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources. “We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,” he said in regard to the Jundullah report.So far, ABC has found nothing that would undermine the stories Mr. Debat worked on, Mr. Ross said last night. But he acknowledged that as the stories of fabrications continue to roll in, the network “at some point has to question whether anything he said can be believed.”

Fars News Agency, an Iranian state run news agency, reported that the United States government is involved in PRMI's terrorists acts. On April 2, 2007, Abdul Malik Rigi, appeared on the Iranian branch of the Voice of America, the official broadcasting service of the United States government, which identified Rigi as "the leader of popular Iranian resistance movement". This incident resulted in public condemnation by Persian-American communities in the U.S, as well as the Iranian regime.

People's Mujahedin of Iran

In April 2007, CNN reported that the US military and the International Committee of the Red Cross were protecting the People's Mujahedin of Iran, with the US army regularly escorting PMOI supply runs between Baghdad and its base, Camp Ashraf. The PMOI have been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States (since 1997), Canada, and Iran. According to the Wall Street Journal "senior diplomats in the Clinton administration say the PMOI figured prominently as a bargaining chip in a bridge-building effort with Tehran." The PMOI is also on the European Union's blacklist of terrorist organizations, which lists 28 organizations, since 2002. The enlistments included: Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States in 1997 under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and again in 2001 pursuant to section 1(b) of Executive Order 13224; as well as by the European Union (EU) in 2002. Its bank accounts were frozen in 2002 after the September 11 attacks and a call by the EU to block terrorist organizations' funding. However, the European Court of Justice has overturned this in December 2006 and has criticized the lack of "transparency" with which the blacklist is composed. However, the Council of the EU declared on 30 January 2007 that it would maintain the organization on the blacklist. The EU-freezing of funds was lifted on December 12, 2006 by the European Court of First Instance. In 2003 the US State Department included the NCRI on the blacklist, under Executive Order 13224.

According to a 2003 article by the New York Times, the US 1997 proscription of the group on the terrorist blacklist was done as "a goodwill gesture toward Iran's newly elected reform-minded president, Mohammad Khatami" (succeeded in 2005 by the more conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). In 2002, 150 members of the United States Congress signed a letter calling for the lifting of this designation. The PMOI have also tried to have the designation removed through several court cases in the U.S. The PMOI has now lost three appeals (1999, 2001 and 2003) to the US government to be removed from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and its terrorist status was reaffirmed each time. The PMOI has continued to protest worldwide against its listing, with the overt support of some US political figures.

Past supporters of the PMOI have included Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Rep. Bob Filner, (D-CA), and Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, "who became involved with the [PMOI] while a Republican senator from Missouri." In 2000, 200 U.S. Congress members signed a statement endorsing the organization's cause.

Iraq (1992-95)

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 CIA official said, "the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then."

Lebanon (1985)

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 stated 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)" and the CIA in no way sanctioned or supported the attack. Roger Morris writes in the Asia Times that 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Marine Corps barracks at Beirut airport in October 1983, which, Roger Morris alleges, in turn had been a reprisal for earlier U.S. 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 allegedly "farmed out" the operation to agents of its longtime Lebanese client, the Phalange, a Maronite Christian, anti-Islamic militia. Others allege the 1984 Bombing of the U.S. Embassy annex northeast of Beirut as the motivating factor.

Japan (1945)

Main article: Debate over the 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 commentators hold that it represents the single greatest act of state terrorism in the 20th century.

The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the United States' justification for them has been the subject of scholarly and popular debate for decades. J. Samuel Walker writes in an April 2005 overview of recent historiography on the issue, "the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue." Most interpretations of the atomic attacks as "state terrorism" center around the alleged targeting of innocents to achieve a political goal. Some allege that the Target Committee, on May 10–11, 1945, rejected the use of the weapons against a strictly military objective, instead choosing a large civilian population to create a psychological effect that would be felt around the world. Critics also claim that the attacks were militarily unnecessary and transgressed moral barriers.

The sociologist Kai Erikson has alleged that the attacks "...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...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?"

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."

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 is head of the Australian Research Council Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) and studies political violence, Just War Theory, Terrorism, and Humanitarian intervention. He writes in Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World: "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."

Mark Selden, professor of sociology and history at Binghamton University and author of War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, 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."

Richard A. 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 writes "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 counter terrorism policy worth the name must include a convincing indictment of the First World variety.". He also writes:

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 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.

— Richard Falk, War and State Terrorism

While paying tribute to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hugo Chavez - President of Venezuela - referred to the bombings as "the greatest act of terrorism in recorded history."

Burleigh Taylor Wilkins states in Terrorism and Collective Responsibility that "any definition which allowed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to count as instances of terrorism would be too broad." He goes on to explain "The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while obviously intended by the American government to alter the policies of the Japanese government, seem for all the terror they involved, more an act of war than of terrorism."

The Philippines (1990s-present)

Background

The Philippine government, currently headed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has been linked to assassinations and acts of state terror. In response, it has been placed on the human rights watch list of the United Nations and the US Congress. Some people consider the assassinations and violence justifiable because the Philippines' government is militarily engaged against various rebel groups such as the New People's Army.

As of 2007, there is an increasing international awareness of the extra-judicial harassment, torture, disappearances and murder of Philippino civilian non-combatants by the Philippine's military and police. Since the advent of the "War on Terrorism" in 2001, the people of the Philippines have witnessed the assassinations of more than 850 mainstream journalists and other public figures and the harassment, detention, or torture of untold more.

The human rights watchdog KARAPATAN has documented human rights violations against 169,530 individuals, 18,515 families, 71 communities, and 196 households. One person, it says, is killed every three days under the Macapagal-Arroyo government or a total of 271 persons.

Estimates of killings vary on the precise number; in late 2007 Task Force Usig, a unit of the Phillipine National Police created in 2006 in response to the extrajudicial killings, estimated only 114, while the activist party KARAPATAN placed the number much higher, at something over 874. Notably, Task Force Usig dismissed nearly half of the 114 cases of assassination as "cold" and, of the 58 cases where charges were brought, has secured only convictions only twice. The online publication Bulatlat states that "[A]ccording to a recent international fact-finding mission of Dutch and Belgian judges and lawyers, [Task Force Usig] 'has not proven to be an independent body…the PNP has a poor record as far as the effective investigation of the killings is concerned and is mistrusted by the Philippine people."

Amnesty International states that the more than 860 confirmed murders are clearly political in nature because of "the methodology of the attacks, including prior death threats and patterns of surveillance by persons reportedly linked to the security forces, the leftist profile of the victims and climate of impunity which, in practice, shields the perpetrators from prosecution." The AI report continues:

the arrest and threatened arrest of leftist Congress Representatives and others on charges of rebellion, and intensifying counter-insurgency operations in the context of a declaration by officials in June of 'all-out-war' against the New People's Army . . . [and] the parallel public labeling by officials of a broad range of legal leftist groups as communist 'front organizations'...has created an environment in which there is heightened concern that further political killings of civilians are likely to take place.

— Amnesty International,

Human Rights Watch, in a 2008 report, reported

2006 saw a sharp increase in the number of extrajudicial killings, which coincided with President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s June 2006 declaration of an “all-out war” against communist insurgents called the National People’s Army (NPA)...the Philippine government is consistently failing in its obligations under international human rights law to hold accountable perpetrators of politically motivated killings....With inconclusive investigations, implausible suspects, and no convictions, impunity prevails....Out of hundreds of killings and “disappearances” over the past five years, there have been only two successfully prosecuted cases resulting in the conviction of four defendants....The number of senior military officers convicted either for direct involvement or under command responsibility remains zero. The doctrine of command responsibility in international law means that superior officers can be held criminally liable for the actions of their subordinates, and also if a superior had reason to know that subordinates under his command committed an offence and failed to use all feasible means under his command to prevent and punish it, he too may be found guilty for the offence.

— Human Rights Watch,

Most of those killed or "disappeared" were peasant or worker activists belonging to progressive groups such as Bayan Muna, Anakpawis, GABRIELA, Anakbayan, Karapatan, KMU, and others (Petras and Abaya 2006). They were protesting Arroyo's repressive taxation, collusion with foreign capital tied to oil and mining companies that destroy people's livelihood and environment, fraudulent use of public funds, and other anti-people measures. Such groups and individuals have been tagged as "communist fronts" by Arroyo's National Security Advisers, the military, and police; the latter agencies have been implicated in perpetrating or tolerating those ruthless atrocities.

— Dr. E. San Juan, Jr.,

Right from the beginning, Arroyo's ascendancy was characterized by rampant human rights violations. Based on the reports of numerous fact-finding missions, Arroyo has presided over an unprecedented series of harassments, warrantless arrests, and assassinations of journalists, lawyers, church people, peasant leaders, legislators, doctors, women activists, youthful students, indigenous leaders, and workers.

— Dr. E. San Juan, Jr.,

According to commentators James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, "Human rights groups provide evidence that [Philippino] death squads operate under the protective umbrella of regional military commands, especially the U.S.-trained Special Forces.

The number of killings increased after Arroyo's 2006 "Presidential Proclamation 1017", which grants the executive "exceptional unchecked powers", placing the country in a state of emergency and permitting the police and security forces to "conduct warrantless arrests against enemies of the state, including...members of the political opposition and journalists from critical media outlets." As of 2008, 2006 represented the year of the greatest violence, with some 185 confirmed assassinations, most of whome were "left-leaning activists, murdered without trial or punishment for the perpetrators." Human Rights Watch has established that the murders and kidnappings are rarely investigated by the police or other government agencies; they often go unreported because of fears of reprisal against the victims or their families.

The Arroyo government initially made no response to the dramatic increase in violence and killings. In 2007, however, Arroyo was forced by popular outcry to appoint an independent commission led by the Philippine's former Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose Melo. While the Melo commission found "no proof" of an official State policy, it nevertheless established that the military was responsible for the "majority" of the killings and that the superior officers of the perpetrators could be held accountable for the crimes -- in particular, it suggested that "retired major general Jovito Palparan, be held liable under the principle of command responsibility for killings in their areas of assignment.". Later, in February 2007, UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston implicated the Philippine police and military as responsible for the crimes. Alston charged in his report that Arroyo’s propaganda and counter-insurgency strategy “encourage or facilitate the extra-judicial killings of activists and other enemies” of the state, and that "the AFP remains in a state of almost total denial… of its need to respond effectively and authentically to the significant number of killings which have been convincingly attributed to them".

Publicly, Arroyo has condemned political killings "in the harshest possible terms" and urged witnesses to come forward. By 2007 the extrajudicial killings continued but had dropped significantly. Interior Assistant Secretary Danilo Valero attributed the decline to the actions of Task Force Usig. Valero stated that the statistics proved the "the creation of the task force has been a deterrent" against the violence and that it showed "...the Arroyo government’s strong commitment to human rights and its firm resolve to put an end to these unexplained killings and put their perpetrators behind bars."

US involvement

The U.S. influence upon the Philippine military has been condemned as sponsorship or support of state terrorism through the policies implemented by the military aid and advisers it has delivered as part of the War on Terror.

The Ecumenical Movement for Justice and Peace documents that most of the human rights violations were committed by the AFP, the Philippine National Police, and the CAFGU (Civilian Armed Forces Government Units) under the mantle of the anti-insurgency campaign initially created as one arm of the U.S. War on Terror.

According to Reality of Aid, in the period from 2000 to 2003, military loans and grants to the Philippines from the U.S. grew by 1,776 percent. As of 2005, according to President Arroyo the Philippines were the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in Asia and fourth worldwide, with aid increasing through 2008. U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to the Philippines almost trebled from $30 million in 2004 to $80 million in 2005, with the bulk of that money used to upgrade Philippine marine and counter-terrorism capabilities. Development aid has been used

to intensify [military] attack[s]...against unarmed civilians including the leaders and members of legal people's organizations....While development aid may be used for livelihood projects, infrastructure, or social services, we fear that the AFP will only use such projects to gather intelligence or launch special operations in communities that they believe are NPA bases.

— Reality of Aid,

By late 2006 Washington had given roughly US$300 million of aid to the AFP and delivered hundreds of American soldiers to organize and execute extended training exercises with the Filipino police and military apparatus. In May of 2006 the Philippines and the U.S. approved an agreement to establish a formal board to "determine and discuss the possibility of holding joint U.S.-Philippine military exercises against terrorism and other non-traditional security concerns.".

The United States — through the person of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley — has broadly "congratulated the government of the Philippines...for [its] achievements [in anti-terror military actions] while at the same time acknowledging the valuable role of [its] partnership with the United States".

President Arroyo invited thousands of U.S. Special Forces to engage in police actions together with the AFP, thus violating an explicit Constitutional provision against the intervention of foreign troops in local affairs. She followed Fidel Ramos in implementing the Visiting Forces Agreement, together with other onerous treaties, thus maintaining U.S. control of the Philippine military via training of officers, logistics, and dictation of punitive measures against the Moro insurgents as well as the New People's Army guerrillas. The Philippines became the "second front in the war on terror," with Bush visiting the Philippines in October 2004 and citing the neocolony as a model for the rebuilding of devastated Iraq.

— Dr. E. San Juan, Jr.,

[The] U.S....fashioned..."low-intensity warfare" to deal with upheavals in the post-Vietnam period. Its military field manuals endorsed tactical tools of...psychological warfare, forced mass evacuations or "hamletting," imprisonment of whole communities in military garrisons, militarization of villages, selective assassinations, disappearances, mass executions, etc. Tried in Indochina, Korea, Central America, it continues to be implemented in Colombia, Iraq, and the Philippines....With U.S. help, the AFP mobilized vigilante and paramilitary death squads with license to kill revolutionary militants, immune from prosecution. U.S. military force midwived the restoration of U.S.-backed oligarchic oppression of the Filipino masses.

— Dr. E. San Juan, Jr.,

In March 2007, the Permanent People’s Tribunal at The Hague, Belgium, rendered a judgment of guilty for “crimes against humanity” against the Philippine government and its chief backer, the Bush administration. The Arroyo government was found responsible for human rights abuses "with the support and full awareness of the government of George Walker Bush." The Dutch ambassador to the Philippines stated that the Netherlands, along with other European nations, was concerned about the human rights situation in the Philippines.

As early as 2001 the U.S. State Department admitted its awareness that "Members of the [Philippines'] security services were responsible for extra-judicial killings, disappearances, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention," and also that the presence of U.S. Special Forces and other military advisers had "helped create an environment in which human rights abuses increased", commenting that 'there were allegations by human rights groups that these problems worsened as the Government sought to intensify its campaign against the terrorist Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG).'" Further, in 2003 the U.S. government — in anticipation that its military personnel would be charged with human rights abuses — offered the Philippines' government an extra US$30 million of military aid in exchange for "an agreement that would exempt U.S. soldiers operating in the Philippines from the International Criminal Court".

General Jovito Palparan has been widely condemned for his roles in the killings; notorious as the 'Butcher of Mindoro", Palparan has been officially condemned by official Philippine investigations as responsible for an extensively documented, long list of gross human rights abuses. For instance, "[w]hen Palparan was assigned to Central Luzon in September 2005, the number of political assassinations in that region alone jumped to 52 in four months. Prior to his promotion, the regions with the largest number of summary executions like Eastern Visayas and Central Luzon were under then-Colonel Palparan." In an opinion article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer Palparan was quoted as saying:

The killings are being attributed to me but I did not kill them. I just inspire the triggermen...Their disappearance is good for us but as to who abducted them, we don’t know....I encourage people victimized by communist rebels to get even.

President Arroyo's promotion of him to one-star general has been widely condemned as a gesture of support for military-backed state terrorism. Palparan has received advanced training and official support from the U.S. government, as well as heading up the Philippine forces in the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Europe (1945-1989)

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, such as political assassinations in Belgium, and military coups in Greece (1967) and Turkey (1980).

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 $60 million 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. Aldo Giannuli, a historian who works as a consultant to the parliamentary terrorism commission, see the release of the Left Democrats' report is a manoeuvre dictated primarily by domestic political considerations. "Since they have been in power the Left Democrats have given us very little help in gaining access to security service archives," he said. "This is a falsely courageous report."

The U.S. 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 It denies any involvement in terrorism. The United States maintains that several researchers have been influenced by a Soviet forgery, US Army Field Manual 30-31B.

Opposing views

See also: Foreign_relations of the United States#Support

War crimes, such as rapes and killing POWs, are not not legally sanctioned by the US government or the US military.[19] They are not the official policy of the US government.

Bias in media coverage is also argued. Advocates of this stance point to studies that claim that the New York Times coverage of worldwide human rights violations predominantly focuses on the human rights violations in nations where there is clear U.S. involvement, while having relatively little coverage of the human rights violations in other nations.[20][21]

US allegations of state sponsored terrorism

Main article: State Sponsors of Terrorism

State Sponsors of Terrorism is a designation applied by the United States Department of State to nations who are designated by the Secretary of State "to have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism." [22] Inclusion on the list imposes strict sanctions.

Other allegations of state sponsored terrorism against the United States

• The April 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing by Islamic Jihad Organization, allegedly by Hezbollah, an organization supported by Iran and Syria.
• The Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, allegedly with the assistance of Libya.
• The 9/11 attack by Al-Qaeda, a militant Islamic terrorist organization alleged by the US government to have received assistance from the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

See also

• Allegations of state terrorism by Iran
• Allegations of state terrorism by Russia
• Allegations of state terrorism in Sri Lanka
• American terrorism
• Command responsibility
• Economic terrorism
• List of terrorist incidents
• U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals

External links

• Paper argues that US State Terrorism is a function of the global capitalist economy, described as Imperialism.

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)
• Menjívar, Cecilia and Rodríguez,Néstor, 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 Brenner,Arthur D.,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)
• Wright,, Thomas C. (February 28, 2007). State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-0742537217. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)