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The Absurd U.S. Definition of Terrorism, Part 1
by James Bovard
Should shooting back be a crime if a government agent is trying to kill you?
According to U.S. terrorism law, people guilty of “retaliating against government conduct” can be charged as a terrorist. The definition in the U.S. statute book is sufficient to condemn any civilian in the world who forcibly resists U.S. aggression.
U.S. terrorism policy is like a crooked wrestling referee who always ignores the first punch and then penalizes the person who strikes back. The government can throw the first punch — or the first thousand punches. But the trouble doesn’t begin until someone hits back.
Terrorism is perhaps the most Orwellian term of our time. President George W. Bush declared in 2002: “Our mission is to make the world free from terror.” But the U.S. government defines terrorism in a way that permits the worst terror to continue unabated. The elastic meaning of terror allows politicians to stretch their power much further than people realize.
Terror, traditional and modern
Terror had been used for thousands of years by despots to crush resistance, but the French revolutionaries were the first to claim to be idealists for maximizing oppression. Maximilien Robespierre gushed that terror is “justice prompt, severe and inflexible” and “a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy.” For Robespierre, terror tactics exemplified “the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” Britain’s Edmund Burke, the most eloquent enemy of the French Revolution, denounced “thousands of those hellhounds called terrorists.”
The term “terrorism” was first used to designate antigovernment individuals in Ireland in 1866 — the same year Britain suspended habeas corpus in Ireland. At that time — barely a decade and a half after a famine that had resulted in almost half the population either dying or migrating — Irish activists were determined to expel foreign rulers. The death toll from Irish terrorism in the 1800s never approached one tenth of one percent of the toll from a famine caused partly by restrictive British trade policy and other policies.
Terror was fervently embraced by revolutionaries in the latter 19th century. Karl Marx proclaimed that the “Revolutionary Terror” was the “only means to curtail, simplify and localize the bloody agony of the old society and the bloody birth-pangs of the new.” In early 1918, a few months after the Russian Revolution brought him to power, Vladimir Lenin declared, “We cannot expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism.” The “Red Terror” became a badge of courage for the communist leaders. As Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times, noted, the most “important characteristic of the Lenin terror was the not the quantity of the victims, but the principle on which they were selected. Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had abandoned the notion of individual guilt.”
The First World War unleashed official carnage in Europe on a level not seen since the Thirty Years War. The Armenian genocide and massacres of civilians throughout Europe were hailed as triumphs of national will. At the same time that governments killed more than ever before, they redoubled the onus on private violence. In 1937, the League of Nations defined terrorism as “all criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons or a group of persons or the general public.”
By the midtwentieth century, the term “terrorism” was routinely used to condemn those who attacked politicians, government forces, or established regimes. The Nazis denounced French Resistance saboteurs as terrorists. Terrorism has permeated Middle East conflicts since the 1940s, when Menachem Begin and his Irgun gang blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. Throughout Africa and Asia, resistance to colonial rulers was castigated as terrorism, regardless of how many natives had perished because of foreign oppression.
The forgotten terrorist origins of the Vietnam War
By the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did.
As the French Foreign Legion struggled to reconquer Vietnam in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government embellished the storyline. A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon. A LIFE magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists. The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.” The press coverage boosted public support for U.S. government aid to the French army fighting the Communists. The fact that a Vietnamese warlord named General Trinh Minh Thé, a CIA collaborator, claimed credit for the bomb was ignored by the U.S. media.
In the wake of the French defeat, U.S. military advisors poured into Vietnam. The U.S. government regarded the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem as corrupt, oppressive, and inept. The Pentagon Papers described a , 1963, debacle in the city of Hue, South Vietnam:
Government troops fire on a Buddhist protest demonstration, killing nine and wounding fourteen. The incident triggers a nationwide Buddhist protest and a crisis of popular confidence for the Diem regime. [The Government of South Vietnam] maintains the incident was an act of [Viet Cong] terrorism.
The Diem government was outraged that the Buddhists demanded legal equality with Catholics and the right to fly the Buddhist flag. In , South Vietnamese Special Forces “carried out midnight raids against Buddhist pagodas throughout the country. More than 1400 people, mostly monks, were arrested, and many of them were beaten,” according to the Pentagon Papers. The CIA was bankrolling these Special Forces, which were supposed to be used for covert operations against the Viet Cong or North Vietnam, not for religious repression. Diem’s terrorizing of the Buddhists swayed the United States to back a coup that led to his assassination a few months later.
The Johnson administration exploited terrorism to sway Americans to support greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam. LBJ told Congress on , 1964, that “the Viet Cong guerrillas, under orders from their Communist masters in the North, have intensified terrorist actions against the peaceful people of South Vietnam. This increased terrorism requires increased response.” Johnson scorned a proposal by French President Charles de Gaulle for a Geneva conference on the growing Vietnam conflict because LBJ declared the conference would “ratify terror.”
At that time, the United States was carrying out an array of “non-attributable hit-and-run” raids against North Vietnam, including “kidnappings of North Vietnamese citizens for intelligence information, parachuting sabotage and psychological warfare teams into the north, commando raids from the sea to blow up rail and highway bridges, and the bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT boats.” Thai pilots flying American planes bombed and strafed North Vietnamese villages in early , just before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.+
Both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese government were terrorizing people at the time the U.S. involvement rapidly expanded in 1965. But the U.S. government looked only at the Viet Cong’s terrorism to justify launching its own bombing campaign that killed far more civilians than the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese army did prior to the end of the war.
The government terror exemption in modern times
The U.S. State Department defined terrorism in 1981 as “the use or threat of the use of force for political purposes in violation of domestic or international law.” Since government use of force is almost automatically lawful (based on government edicts and sovereign immunity), governments by definition cannot commit terrorist acts.
This definition guided Ronald Reagan’s war on terrorism. A few months before Reagan took office, a jury convicted the former No. 2 FBI official, Mark Felt, and Edward Miller, the head of the FBI’s intelligence division, for conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans by ordering illegal FBI burglaries.
Felt was the mastermind of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. (Bob Woodward in 2006 tagged Mark Felt as the Deep Throat source for Watergate scoops). The FBI conducted thousands of COINTELPRO operations, sparking fatal violent clashes between rival black groups, setting up a Klan organization that brutally attacked Freedom Riders, and bankrolling right-wing paramilitary informants who firebombed, burglarized, and shot up homes. Yet, regardless of how much fear government agents sowed, they were antiterrorist heroes in Reagan’s eyes. He pardoned and commended the two men for “acting on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.”
Reagan sought to make antiterrorism a driving force of American foreign policy. His administration initially redefined terrorist attacks to include any threat of a terrorist attack — a simple jiggering that doubled the number of international terrorist incidents over the previous dozen years. The White House also pressured the CIA to redefine terrorism to include “all acts of violence intended to impact on a wider audience than the victims of the violence.” This expansive definition would have placed George Washington and Robert E. Lee onto the list of terrorists. Edward Peck, the deputy director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, commented, “We produced about six [definitions of terrorism], and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities.” After the Task Force finished its report, Congress amended the definition of international terrorism to include “activities that appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” However, as Peck noted, the U.S. government would still be categorized as a terrorist under that definition.
A license to kill innocent bystanders
Reagan authorized the CIA to covertly train and equip antiterrorist groups in the Middle East. The Washington Post later reported that Reagan signed an order on , 1984, that was widely perceived by intelligence officials as a “license to kill” — providing U.S. agents with “go-anywhere, do-anything” authority, according to one former White House official. The Post reported that “any actions under the orders would be ‘deemed lawful’ if conducted in ‘good faith’.”
On , 1985, a massive car bomb detonated near the Beirut suburban home of a radical Muslim leader, killing 80 people — mostly women and children — and injuring 200. The bomb failed to kill the Muslim cleric who was being targeted. Supporters of the cleric strung a giant “MADE IN USA” banner across the blast site. A few weeks after the bombing, one U.S. government official bragged to the Washington Post that CIA and U.S. military training of antiterrorist units in Lebanon had “been very successful.” National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, in a speech entitled “Terrorism and the Future of Free Society,” announced: “We cannot and will not abstain from forcible action to prevent, preempt or respond to terrorist acts where conditions merit the use of force.”
In , Americans learned that the car bomb attack had been carried out by people hired by a CIA-trained group. The news set off a firestorm of CIA denials and foreign denunciations. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward later wrote that CIA director William Casey told him that he had arranged the bombing via the Saudi government.
Reagan himself at least momentarily clearly grasped the meaning of terrorism. In a press conference, Reagan declared if a U.S. attack against terrorists merely involved “striking a blow in a general direction … the result would be a terrorist act in itself and the killing and victimizing of innocent people.” Reagan did not let any concerns about moral equivalence deter him the following year from ordering the U.S. Air Force to bomb civilian neighborhoods in Tripoli, Libya, in response to alleged Libyan involvement in a bombing of a Berlin nightclub that killed an American soldier. The U.S. bombing killed dozens of Libyan civilians, but they were moral ciphers.
James Bovard is a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of the ebook Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty, published by FFF, his new book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and nine other books.
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NEXT MONTH:
“The Absurd U.S. Definition of Terrorism, Part 2”
by James Bovard
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