So imagine it's 1965 and the United States allegedly
hands foreign military officials a literal list,
like a printed list of political dissidents to
be assassinated. Now today, if some shadow network
did that, we would all universally just call
it terrorism. Oh, absolutely. Without question.
Right. But according to the strict literal letter
of US law, it is legally impossible for the American
government itself to be a terrorist. Which is
wild to think about. It really is. And it forces
this pretty uncomfortable question for you as
a listener, who actually gets to write the dictionary?
And who does that dictionary protect? Yeah. And
that tension, the gap between what we see happening
on the ground and what is officially codified
in law, that's the central conflict we're exploring
today. Welcome to the deep dive, everybody. Today
we have a really complex mission. We are unpacking
a massive, highly detailed Wikipedia article
that covers the historical and academic allegations
of United States and state terrorism. It's a
heavy topic. It is incredibly heavy. And actually,
before we take a single step further, I need
to establish a really hard boundary with you,
the listener. Yeah, this is a critical boundary.
Our goal today is absolutely not to take a political
stance. We are not here to point fingers. We're
not condemning anyone. And we are certainly not
endorsing these highly charged academic and legal
claims. Exactly. The source material here is
dense. It's controversial. And it is deeply,
deeply contradictory, depending on who you ask.
Right. Both left wing and and right -wing perspectives
are in here fighting it out. Exactly. So we are
simply acting as your guides. We're just mapping
out the arguments presented in the text, examining
the architecture of these ideas, completely neutral
to the politics. And the architecture of this
specific debate, it really flips everything we
assume about global conflict completely on its
head. How so? When you hear the word terrorism,
you almost certainly picture non -state actors,
right? Yeah, like insurgencies, clandestine cells.
Exactly. Individuals building improvised explosives
to attack a formal government. But what this
material does is explore a controversial academic
viewpoint. The idea that liberal democracies,
and specifically the United States, utilized
state terror as a primary systematic mechanism
of foreign policy during the Cold War. And potentially
beyond, right into the modern day. Yes, exactly.
OK, let's unpack this, because before we can
even touch those historical allegations, we have
to look at the rule book. The definitions. Right.
Reading through the legal definitions in the
source text, it struck me that defining terrorism
legally is basically like, well, it's like writing
the regulations for a sport in a way that ensures
your own team is permanently exempt from getting
a penalty. That is a perfect analogy, because
that structural exclusion is built right into
the foundation of the law. Give me an example
from the text. So look at U .S. law, specifically
Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656FD2.
Rolls right off the tongue. Right. But the text
notes that it defines terrorism as premeditated
politically motivated violence perpetrated against
non -combatants by And this is the key phrase,
subnational groups or clandestine agents. Wait,
subnational? Yes. That single word does a massive
amount of heavy lifting there. Oh, it changes
everything. Because it means recognized state
government with a formal military. literally
cannot meet the legal threshold for terrorism
under this framework. Exactly. It creates an
airtight definitional shield for state actors.
And the source actually brings in Dr. Myra Williamson's
research to point out what a massive historical
reversal this is. Oh, right. The part about the
French Revolution. Yeah. If we go back to the
origin of the term during the French Revolution,
the famous Reign of Terror. Terrorism was entirely
an instrument of state governance. That's so
counterintuitive to how we use it today. Right.
It was the newly established French state wielding
systematic violence against perceived enemies
of the Republic just to maintain order. So originally
the concept of terrorism wasn't a rebellion against
the government. It was the government crushing
the rebellion. Precisely. The state was the primary
architect of terror. The definition only flipped
in modern history to exclusively mean non -state
entities attacking a state. Wow. What's fascinating
here is why this linguistic shift matters globally
today. The text explains that the United Nations
has completely failed to reach a consensus on
a universal legal definition of terrorism. Well,
yeah, because doing that would require states
to agree on the exact line where, say, legitimate
military action crosses over into state terrorism.
Or where a rebel group becomes a terrorist organization
rather than, you know, freedom fighters. Right.
And no one wants to accidentally incriminate
their own allies. Exactly. The international
community is totally paralyzed by that exact
political calculation. So because the U .N. leaves
that definitional vacuum wide open, American
politicians and Western social scientists operate
within a framework that definitionally exempts
the U .S. and its allies. So if the rulebook
says a state cannot be a terrorist, then no matter
the scale of the violence, it legally has to
be categorized as something else. Collateral
damage, counterinsurgency, foreign intervention.
Take your pick. which is just a wild loophole.
It really is. And because that mainstream legal
definition effectively gives state powers a free
pass, dissident academics in the late 1970s decided
to, well, just bypass the legal dictionary entirely.
They had to. Yeah. They realized that if the
official terminology couldn't capture the sheer
scale of violence happening during the Cold War,
they needed to build a brand new framework. And
that leads us directly into some staggering claims
made by scholars in the late 70s and 80s. The
Chomsky numbers. Yes. The scale of the data they
compiled forces a total recalibration of how
we view Cold War casualties. Beginning in 1979,
scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman began
publishing this extensive research. And they
argued that global terror wasn't just a random
byproduct of the Cold War, but was heavily, heavily
concentrated within the U .S. sphere of influence.
Which, the text notes, tracked with reports from
organizations like Amnesty International, who
were suddenly sounding the alarm about a global
epidemic of state torture. Yeah, the timing lined
up perfectly. But let's be precise here, because
the text uses a very specific term for this.
Administrative torture. We aren't just talking
about a rogue prison guard or a battlefield interrogation
getting out of hand, are we? Oh, far from it.
Administrative torture refers to human rights
abuses that are institutionalized. It's a bureaucratic
function of the state. Like they have budgets
for it. Budgets. Standardized procedures. Dedicated
personnel. Their literal daily job is the systematic
application of torture to suppress political
opposition. It is torture as state administration.
Exactly. And Chomsky and Herman's numbers on
this are incredibly heavy. The text states they
claim that 74 percent of regimes worldwide utilizing
this kind of administrative torture were U .S.
client states. Meaning they were governments
actively receiving military, financial, or diplomatic
support from Washington. Right, to remain in
power. And the regional concentration is even
more severe when you look at Latin America. This
part blew my mind. Yeah, they found that out
of the 10 countries operating active state -sponsored
death squads at that time, all 10 were U .S.
client states. OK, but, and I have to play devil's
advocate here, correlation doesn't automatically
equal causation. Just because a regime buys U
.S. weapons or gets foreign aid doesn't necessarily
mean the United States is ordering the death
squads, right? How do these scholars bridge that
gap? They bridge it by looking at the sheer disparity
in body counts and, crucially, the underlying
economic motives. OK, lay that out for me. So
the text cites Frederick Groh's research, which
actually uses the CIA's own estimates. Oh, wow.
Yeah. Between 1968 and 1980, the CIA estimated
there were 3 ,668 deaths caused by non -state
terrorism worldwide. So a few thousand. Right.
But Gereau contrasts that with the casualties
in U .S.-backed regimes. He points to the Guatemalan
Civil War as an example. 150 ,000 people dead,
50 ,000 missing. And Gereau classifies 93 percent
of those casualties as victims of state terrorism.
So the argument is that the obsession with non
-state terrorism, the guys with improvised explosives,
is essentially a distraction from the vastly
deadlier reality of state violence. That's the
core of their argument. but the source material.
provides a motive that goes beyond just the standard
containing communism narrative we usually hear.
Right, the economic angle. Yes. Scholar Ruth
J. Blakely argues the core motive was actually
economic. She contends state terror was deployed
as a deliberate strategy to forcefully expand
neoliberalism throughout the global south. OK,
let me break down what neoliberalism means in
this specific violent context, because it's a
bit of an academic buzzword, but here it's crucial.
In this context, it means using state violence
to aggressively regulate markets, privatize national
resources, and protect the interests of Western
corporate elites. So if a developing nation has,
say, strong labor unions or socialist land reform
movements... Exactly. If those things threaten
foreign investment... State terror becomes the
mechanism to physically eradicate those barriers.
You eliminate the organizers, you eliminate the
threat to the market. That is a massive accusation.
It really is. I mean, it's one thing to say the
U .S. supported unsavory dictators to keep the
Soviets out. That's standard Cold War history.
It's entirely another to claim the U .S. utilized
mass murder as a tool for market restructuring.
Right. And obviously you can't throw around accusations
like global sponsor of state terror. without
intense pushback. The mainstream political science
world absolutely revolted against Chomsky's framework,
didn't they? Oh, the backlash was fierce. And
it centered precisely on the distinction you
raised earlier. The correlation versus causation
thing. Yeah, the difference between funding a
regime and controlling a regime. Yale political
science professor James S. Fishkin delivered
one of the sharpest critiques in the text. He
called Chomsky and Herman's claims shockingly
overstated. Because Fishkin argues that Chomsky
is creating this false illusion of American omnipotence,
right? Like this idea that Washington is secretly
pulling the strings of every single military
dictator in the global south, like some flawless
global puppet master. That is his exact core
argument. Fishkin points out that even if you
accept all the evidence regarding U .S. military
aid and funding, it only proves systematic support,
not direct control. Okay. To illustrate this,
he contrasts U .S. influence in Latin America
with the Soviet Union's role in Eastern Europe.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, Moscow had direct, absolute
structural control over its satellite states.
But the U .S. influence in the global south was
heavily mediated and honestly often pretty chaotic.
So Fishkin is essentially saying we need to downgrade
the charge. The U .S. wasn't the architect pulling
the trigger. The lesser, but maybe more historically
accurate moral failure is that the United States
had the leverage to potentially stop the torture,
but just chose to look the other way for geopolitical
stability. Systematic support versus control.
It's a vital legal and philosophical distinction.
And other mainstream figures took the defense
much further. Right. Like William Bennett. Yes.
The text highlights former U .S. Secretary of
Education William Bennett, who dismissed the
entire premise of the U .S. as a terrorist state
and flat out preposterous. And Bennett's defense
relies on a broader historical trajectory, right?
He reminds people of major military interventions
where the U .S. undeniably used its immense power
to halt violence. He specifically cites the liberation
of Kuwait and the humanitarian interventions
in Bosnia and Somalia. So Bennett's logic is
that a nation fundamentally willing to expend
its own blood and treasure to stop ethnic cleansing
or repel invasions. cannot logically be categorized
alongside regimes whose primary function is terror.
Exactly. But if we are looking for the most rigorous
academic defense of the U .S. against Chomsky's
thesis, the text points us to scholar Stephen
Morris. Morris takes a really interesting approach
here. He essentially accepts Chomsky's challenge.
He tries to find a right wing U .S. backed regime
that actually rivaled the pure industrial scale
brutality of the worst communist dictatorships.
Right. And Morris concedes there is one historical
example that meets that horrific threshold. Yes.
So Harto's government in Indonesia during the
mid -1960s. However, Morris attempts to use Indonesia
as the ultimate defense of U .S. innocence regarding
the actual mechanics of state terror. Which sounds
completely paradoxical. How does a mass slaughter
prove innocence? By analyzing the supply chain
of the violence, Morris argued that when the
Indonesian generals seized power and initiated
the mass killings, the United States was not
the principal foreign supplier of their military.
And more importantly, Morris claimed there was
absolutely no credible evidence of direct American
involvement in orchestrating the coup or the
subsequent massacres. He argued the US was essentially
a bystander to a sovereign nation's internal
bloodbath. And Morris's argument held weight
for a really long time. It reinforced Fishkin's
theory. The US might be standing in the room,
but they aren't swinging the axe. But this is
where the source material delivers a massive
plot twist, because Morris staked his entire
defense on a lack of credible evidence. So what
happens when the actual highly classified receipts
are released decades later? The mainstream narrative
completely fractures. Because in 2017, the U
.S. Embassy in Jakarta declassified a massive
trove of internal telegrams and daily briefings
from that exact 1965 to 1966 period. And just
a year prior to that, right, an international
tribunal in The Hague had already issued a major
ruling based on emerging evidence. Yes. And the
details in these declassified documents are chilling.
They completely obliterate the passive bystander
defense. The U .S. government wasn't just watching
from the sidelines. Not at all. The text documents
that they actively encouraged and facilitated
the army -led massacres. The level of micromanagement
is what really stood out to me. The United States
literally provided the Indonesian armed forces
with detailed lists of Communist Party officials
and sympathizers who were to be targeted. The
kill lists we mentioned at the start. Exactly.
And the text explicitly states U .S. officials
egged on the army. to conduct the massacres.
I mean, handing over a kill list is about as
direct as it gets. It radically shifts the paradigm.
The text brings in historian Brad Simpson, who
reviewed these newly declassified cables. What
did he find? Simpson noted that U .S. officials
weren't horrified by the violence. They were
actually expressing internal anxiety that the
Indonesian military might not take the killing
far enough. Wow. Yeah. Simpson coined the term
efficacious terror to describe this. Efficacious
terror. Meaning, the violence wasn't just chaotic
bloodlust, it was highly efficient and goal -oriented.
Precisely oriented toward the economic goals
we discussed earlier. With Ruth Blakely's neoliberalism
theory. Oh, right. Eradicating the Indonesian
Communist Party wasn't just about winning a geopolitical
chess match with the Soviets. It was an essential
physical building block required to impose Western
economic policies on Indonesia after ousting
the previous leadership. So the terror literally
cleared the political landscape for foreign capital.
Exactly. Which brings us right back to James
S. Fishkin's defense. That idea that the U .S.
only provided systematic support, but never control.
Yeah, that distinction. The Indonesia case study
shows how dangerously thin that distinction is
in practice. I mean, if you are literally handing
the executioner a categorized list of targets
and urging them to accelerate the pace, the philosophical
debate between paying for the gun and pulling
the trigger feels completely irrelevant to the
victim. Completely. And the Hague tribunal certainly
saw no distinction. the text notes they ruled,
the United States and other Western governments,
were directly complicit in crimes against humanity.
It just demonstrates the terrifying gray area
of international relations. It really does. And
it forces us to ask, if state terror is this
heavily insulated by legal definitions and classified
documents, how does this concept apply when we
pull it out of the Cold War and bring it into
the modern era? And that is the exact pivot the
source material makes next. And it is a jarring
one. Yeah. Whiplash. We've spent this entire
time dissecting foreign policy in the global
south during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Yeah. But
the text suddenly drops us right into the present
day. It takes this highly contested academic
label of state terror and applies it domestically
inside the United States. The transition from
the jungles of Guatemala to the streets of America
is incredibly stark. The text highlights events
specifically from the year 2026 during the second
presidency of Donald Trump. Right. And to reiterate
our strict neutrality here, we are simply reporting
the events and rulings documented in our source
text. Exactly. During this 2026 period, the text
notes a significant shift in public and legal
rhetoric. Media sources and politicians began
explicitly describing the activities of U .S.
immigration and customs enforcement. I see. Right.
Specifically, a mass deportation initiative called
Operation Metro Surge. They began describing
this not just as strict law enforcement, but
as terror. And what elevates this beyond mere
political rhetoric, because politicians call
each other terrorists all the time, is the institutional
validation it received. Yes. The text cites a
landmark judicial ruling from February 2026.
A sitting federal judge, Judge Sunshine Sykes,
presided over a major case regarding the executive
branch's immigration policies. And the quote
from her ruling is stunning. Let's hear it. She
wrote, Beyond its terror against non -citizens,
the executive branch has extended its violence
on its own citizens. I mean, that ruling represents
a monumental legal leap. Absolutely. Judge Sykes
essentially bypassed that Title 22 definition
we discussed at the very beginning. The one requiring
perpetrators to be subnational groups. Exactly.
By applying the word terror to the executive
branch, she utilized the legal theory that the
state's monopoly on violence had crossed the
threshold from legitimate law enforcement into
systematic terror impacting both non -citizens
and citizens alike. I really want you, the listener,
to absorb the magnitude of that shift. We started
this deep dive looking at dissident radical academics
in the 1970s, right? Struggling to convince the
mainstream that covert U .S. foreign policy in
Latin America should be labeled state terror.
It was a total fringe theory. Yes. Yeah. Yet
you follow the timeline to 2026 and a sitting
United States federal judge is applying that
exact same framework using that exact same word
to describe highly visible domestic executive
branch operations. It just proves that the language
of conflict is never static. The vocabulary built
to describe the covert horrors of the Cold War
has mutated. And it's now being weaponized within
the domestic legal system to challenge the boundaries
of state power at home. It's incredible. So let's
zoom out and trace the arc we've just traveled.
We began with the dictionary problem, exploring
how the U .S. legally engineered its own exemption
from the definition of terrorism by requiring
actors to be subnational. Which naturally led
dissident scholars to bypass the law entirely.
They compiled staggering statistics to argue
that U .S. client states were actually the primary
drivers of global administrative torture during
the Cold War. And then we examine the intense
mainstream pushback from scholars like Fishkin
and Morris. who argued the U .S. only offered
support, not absolute control, pointing to a
lack of direct evidence. Until, of course, we
hit the declassified cables from Indonesia in
2017, proving the U .S. directly provided kill
lists to military dictators, engaging what historians
termed efficacious terror to clear the way for
Western economic interests. And finally, we followed
the text to 2026, watching this massive, devastating
label of state terror cross the border, being
applied by federal judges to domestic law enforcement
agencies like ICE. And, you know, if you are
wondering how this dense historical debate practically
impacts your life, it fundamentally rewires how
you consume information. Oh, absolutely. The
next time you hear a politician, a pundit or
a judge use the word terrorist on TV, you won't
just passively accept it as an objective. No.
You will immediately ask, who is actively defining
this word right now? What are the mechanisms
of violence they're describing? And most importantly,
who does their definition protect? Which leaves
us with a final provocative thought for you to
consider. The definition of terrorism has mutated
drastically over the centuries. It began in France
as state -led violence against the people. It
eventually flipped to mean non -state actors
attacking the government. And now in 2026, we
see it circling back, potentially being used
by the judiciary to describe domestic law enforcement.
So if the meaning of the word can shift that
radically based on the era, who will hold the
power to define terrorism 50 years from now?
And if the definition is that malleable, does
the label eventually lose all objective meaning?
Exactly. Because if the dictionary is written
in pencil, then terrorist ceases to be a description
of an act and simply becomes the ultimate weapon
of whoever happens to hold political power at
the time. It all comes back to the rule book.
Whoever writes the rules gets to decide who is
committing a foul. Keep an eye on the referees.