ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Define terrorism, then, FF.

Backyard terrorism
The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at it

George Monbiot

For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.

Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/30/afghanistan.terrorism19

Terrorism Debacles in the Reagan Administration
by James Bovard, June 2004 [Posted June 9, 2004]
Many Americans are unaware of the dark side of U.S. foreign policy’s past. Some conservatives think that Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy began and ended with the thwarting of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there were many other U.S. actions during his reign that did not reflect favorably on the U.S. government’s devotion to human rights.

There were few common-places that offended Reagan more than the old saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” " a delusion that he said “thwarted ... effective anti-terror action.” As he explained,

Freedom fighters do not need to terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people.
In contrast, “Terrorists intentionally kill or maim unarmed civilians, often women and children, often third parties who are not in any way part of a dictatorial regime,” he declared. He especially admired the “Nicaraguan freedom fighters ... fighting to establish respect for human rights, for democracy, and for the rule of law within their own country.” Similarly, Secretary of State George Schultz declared in a June 24, 1984, speech, “It is not hard to tell, as we look around the world, who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters.”

A few weeks before the 1984 presidential election, news broke that the CIA had financed, produced, and distributed an assassination manual for the Nicaraguan Contras fighting the Marxist Sandinista government. The manual, entitled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War,” recommended “selective use of violence for propagandistic effects” and to “neutralize” (i.e., kill) government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were advised to lead

demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts.
The manual also recommended

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.
This was not the CIA’s first Nicaraguan literary project. In 1983, it had paid to produce and distribute a comic book entitled “Freedom Fighter’s Manual,” a self-described “practical guide to liberate Nicaragua from oppression and misery by paralyzing the military-industrial complex of the traitorous Marxist state without having to use special tools and with minimal risk for the combatant.”

The comic book urged readers to sabotage the Nicaraguan economy by calling in sick, goofing off on their jobs, throwing tools into sewers, leaving lights and water taps on, telephoning false hotel reservations, dropping typewriters, and stealing and hiding key documents (sage advice later followed by numerous high-ranking Reagan administration officials). The comic book also included detailed instructions on making Molotov cocktails, which, it suggested, could be thrown at fuel depots and police offices.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0406c.asp

Under direct US control, Reagan's 'Freedom Fighters' raped, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Nicaragua in an effort to bring down Nicaragua's first democratically elected government. The US had previously ruled Nicaragua through the brutal Somoza family dicatorship, once the dictatorship was overthrown by a popular revolution the US was quick to start an illegal campaign of terror against the government and civilians. The campaign of terror claimed 50,000 lives and crippled the entire nation.

Nicaragua took its case to the World Court. The court found that the U.S. actions constituted "an unlawful use of force .... [that] cannot be justified either by collective self-defence ... nor by any right of the United States to take counter-measures involving the use of force." The court ordered the United States to pay reparations, estimated at between $12 billion and $17 billion, to Nicaragua. Two weeks after the verdict was issued, the U.S. Congress voted to give the Contras $100 million to continue their war of terror against the people of Nicaragua. The US has never recognized the World Court's ruling or paid any of the compensation owed to Nicaragua.

http://www.highstrangeness.tv/articles/reagan.php

War Crimes and Double Standards

(of Ronald Reagan and the press)

by Robert Parry

... The United States invites the charge of hypocrisy when it accuses "enemy leaders" of war crimes, while it turns a blind eye to equally horrific slaughters committed by allies, sometimes guided and protected by the U.S. government.

With release of truth commission reports in several Central American countries - most recently Guatemala - there can no longer be any doubt about the historical reality.

In the 1980s, U.S.-backed forces committed widespread massacres, political murders and torture. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Many of the dead were children. Soldiers routinely raped women before executing them.

There can be no doubt, too, that President Reagan was an avid supporter of the implicated military forces, that he supplied them with weapons and that he actively sought to discredit human rights investigators and journalists who exposed the crimes.

It is also cleat that the massacres at El Mazote and other villages across El Salvador, the destruction of more than 600 Indian communities in Guatemala, and the torture and "disappearances" of dissidents throughout the region were as horrible as what Slobadan Milosevic's Serb army has done in Kosovo.

But for Milosovic and his henchmen, there is talk of a war crimes tribunal. For Reagan, there are only honors, his name added to National Airport and etched into an international trade center, even a congressional plan to carve his visage into Mount Rushmore.

In the apt phrase of New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner, the 1980s were a time of "weakness and deceit." Yet, the continuing blindness to crimes against humanity in Central America in the 1980s has brought that weakness and deceit into and through the 1990s, now as a permanent trait of Washington's political class.

Without doubt, it is safer for an American journalist or politician to wag a finger at Milosovic or at the killers in Rwanda or at the Khmer Rouge than it is to confront the guilt that pervaded Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Reagan, after all, has a throng of ideological enthusiasts - many with opinion columns and seats on weekend chat shows. Nothing makes them madder than to hear their hero disparaged.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/WarCrimes_Reagan_iF.html

G W Bush said he would attack and kill terrorists wherever in the world they happened to be.
There are plenty of IRA terrorists in Boston and New York who have committed mayhem and murder in the UK, known to the security services, and immune from extradition to face trial in the UK because of the US's unilateral extradition laws.

Why did GWB, if he meant what he said, not bomb Boston?

You have everything in reverse order.

Perhaps, he was talking to an American audience and meant terrorists against the U.S.A.?

the stupidity of Americans to think that it wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't happen to them after [the USA's} numerous terrorists attacks against numerous countries around the world.