Terrorism

As she moved through her 40s without a job or any outside hobbies, her boyfriend said, she started spending more time online.

Though her boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, did not consider her religious, and she apparently never joined a mosque, LaRose had by 2008 declared herself "desperate" to help suffering Muslims in the YouTube video.

"In my view, she sort of slipped sideways into Islam. ... There may have been some seduction into it, by one or more people," said Temple University psychologist Frank Farley.

LaRose and Gorman shared an apartment with his father in Pennsburg, a quaint if isolated town an hour northwest of Philadelphia. Just days after the father died last August, she stole Gorman's passport and fled to Europe without telling him, making good on her online pledge to try to kill in the name of Allah, according to the indictment.

From June 2008 through her Aug. 23, 2009, departure, the woman who also called herself "Fatima Rose" went online to recruit male fighters for the cause, recruit women with Western passports to marry them, and raise money for the holy war, the indictment charged.

She had also agreed to marry one of her overseas contacts, a man from South Asia who said he could deal bombs and explosives, according to e-mails recovered by authorities.

He also told her in a March 2009 e-mail to go to Sweden to find the artist, Lars Vilks.

"I will make this my goal till i achieve it or die trying," she wrote back, adding that her blonde American looks would help her blend in.

Vilks questioned the sophistication of the plotters, seven of whom were rounded up in Ireland last week, just before LaRose's indictment was unsealed. Still, he said he was glad LaRose never got to him. Although she had written the Swedish embassy in March 2009 to ask how to obtain residency, and joined his online artists group in September, there is no evidence from court documents that she ever made it to Sweden.

Instead, she was arrested returning to Philadelphia on Oct. 15.

The men were charged by an anti-terrorism court inside a prison in Sargodha, the city in Punjab province where they were arrested in December. They were reported missing by their families in November after one left behind a farewell video showing scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended.

Their lawyer has said they were heading to Afghanistan and had no plans to stage attacks inside Pakistan.

The court also charged the men with planning attacks on Afghan and U.S. territory, said Dastagir. The charges did not specify what was meant by U.S. territory but could be a reference to American bases or diplomatic outposts in Afghanistan.

The men were also charged with contributing cash to banned organizations to be used for terrorism and with directing each other to commit terrorist acts.

"This last charge carries life in prison while the rest of the charges have lesser punishments," said Dastagir.

Recent events -- including surprising electoral success by an anti-Islamic Dutch party, moves to ban veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, and arrests in Ireland and the U.S. this week in an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist -- are signs of the rising tensions.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks says he was defending freedom of speech when he produced a crude black-and-white drawing of Muhammad with a dog's body in 2007. Authorities say that set him in the crosshairs of an assassination plot by extremists including Colleen LaRose, a 46-year-old Muslim convert from Pennsylvania who dubbed herself "Jihad Jane."

Vilks said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that he wasn't interested in offending Muslims as an end in itself, but wanted to show that he could make provocative art about any topic he chose. "There is nothing so holy you can't offend it," he said.

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten also said it was defending free speech in 2005 when it printed 12 cartoons of Muhammad, one in a bomb-shaped turban, setting off protests and the torching of Western embassies in several Muslim countries. And bottle-blond Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders said he was promoting European values by producing Fitna, a 15-minute film that lays images of the Sept. 11 attacks alongside verses from the Quran. The film was shown in Britain's House of Lords this month.

The cases are extreme, but millions of moderate Europeans also are re-examining the meaning of the liberal values widely cherished across the continent. How, many are asking, should a liberal society respectfully deal with immigrants who often espouse illiberal values? Should the immigrants adopt the values of their adoptive land -- or, to the contrary, should society change to accommodate the newcomers who now form part of it?

France, home to at least five million of the estimated 14 million Muslims in Western Europe, launched a parliament-run dialogue on what to do about full-face veils last year. It ended with a parliamentary panel recommending a ban on the veils in buses, trains, hospitals, post offices and public sector facilities. In December, a large majority of Swiss voters backed a ballot initiative banning the building of any new minarets.

The measures sparked some peaceful protests. But the most incendiary provocations have come from the Dutch and their Nordic neighbors, nations with long histories of homogeneity, tradition of provocative artwork and less experience with large-scale immigration than former colonial titans like Britain and France.

Jan Hjarpe, a professor emeritus of Islamic studies at Lund University in southern Sweden, near Vilks' home, said the deliberate provocations were helpful to Islamic extremists, who have been hunting for targets that would win them popularity in the Muslim world.

"It has had almost no effect on the Muslim community in Sweden, who regard it as not very interesting," he said. "These threats against him have to do with extremist groups that want something to react to."

Denmark's Prophet Muhammad cartoons emerged from a discussion in 2005 about whether Islam was being treated with special sensitivity among Danish artists for fear of reprisals from extremists. Jyllands-Posten said the project was a way to challenge self-censorship and show that Muslims, too, must be ready to put up with mockery in a society based on democracy and free speech.

Denmark has an estimated 200,000 Muslims -- about 4 percent of the population -- while the numbers in Sweden are believed to be somewhat higher.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry. Danish Muslims took the cartoons as an affront, viewing them as symbolic of a backlash against Muslim immigrants in Denmark, manifested by the rise of a nationalist party and sometimes harsh anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Danish press.

An ax-wielding Somali man with suspected al-Qaida links has been jailed since January on preliminary charges of terrorism and attempted murder after breaking into the home of Kurt Westergaard, the 74-year-old Danish artist whose Muhammad-with-bomb-turban cartoon outraged the Muslim world three years ago. The Somali man had won an asylum case and received a residency permit to stay in Denmark, officials said.

Outrage, threats and violence over depictions of Muhammad are nothing new: Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding in England for a decade because the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, ordering Muslims to kill him because his book, "The Satanic Verses," insulted Islam.

Rushdie has survived, but in 2004, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was slain on an Amsterdam street by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent incensed by his film "Submission," a fictional study of abused Muslim women. It featured scenes of near-naked women with Quranic texts appearing on their flesh.

Van Gogh was repeatedly shot, and his throat was cut. A letter pinned to his chest with a knife threatened the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of radical Islam who helped write the film.

The death accelerated the swelling of anti-Islamic populism in the once-tolerant Netherlands, where Muslims now make up some 5 percent of the 16 million population.

In the 1980s and into the 90s, large numbers of immigrants -- mainly Turks and Moroccans encouraged to move to the country as cheap labor -- barely integrated into mainstream society and instead stuck together in low-rent inner-city neighborhoods.

In light of the tragic record of the Dutch toward the Jewish population during the Nazi occupation, when some 70 percent were deported and killed, it was considered impolitic to show resentment against another ethnic group. But that didn't mean the resentment wasn't there. It was only in 2002 when the populist politician Pim Fortuyn began speaking openly against immigration and the threat to the Dutch identity that people felt free to voice their anger. Fortuyn's popularity soared, and the party he founded was hugely popular even after Fortuyn himself was assassinated (by an animal rights activist).

Successive governments clamped down on immigration and forced new arrivals to learn about the Dutch language and culture in an attempt to integrate them into mainstream society.

Wilders is derided by his enemies as a neo-fascist but has been able to turn his provocations into political success: his Freedom Party winning in the town of Almere and coming in second in The Hague this month the only two races it ran out of 394 cities and towns that elected local councils.

If the outcome is any indication of the parliamentary vote in June, Wilders could emerge as a king-maker on the national stage with no combination of parties is likely to be able to form a working majority in the next parliament.

One widely praised new book, journalist Christopher Caldwell's "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" has prompted ongoing discussion of whether Islam can ever truly be integrated into European society. Some see cause for optimism, however faint.

"I wonder whether the liberal order is really quite so weak and inept, whether the story is quite over just yet," Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in one review.

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Associated Press Writers Karl Ritter in Stockholm and Art Max and Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.

Remi Brulin, who teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at NYU, has spent many years -- as part of his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris -- examining the use of the word Terrorism in international relations, the law, and the media (particularly as used by The New York Times).  The history of this term -- how and why it came to be such a politically prominent and consequential label, the radically inconsistent meaning it has based on who is wielding it, the failure to create a universally or even widely recognized definition -- reveals how long it has been manipulated as a propagandistic tool.  

Of course, "the War on Terror" era has made this manipulation even more blatant and destructive -- attacks by Muslims even when aimed at purely military targets (Fort Hood or even armies invading their own countries) are automatically deemed "Terrorism," while attacks designed by the U.S., Israel and their allies with the clear purpose of terrorizing civilian populations into submission are not (nor is it Terrorism when a non-Muslim American flies his plane into the side of a government building or randomly shoots Pentagon police for political ends). 

But the deceit inherent in that inconsistent application has been going on for several decades -- from the Israeli attempt in the 1970s to universalize their local disputes under the rubric of that term, to America's arming of the Nicaraguan contras, El Salvadoran death squads and even the Iranian regime in the 1980s, to the decades-long and ongoing games of who is (and is not) declared a "state sponsor of terror."  Interestingly, while many leading Senate Democrats and many establishment media outlets routinely and publicly accused the U.S. of being a "state sponsor of terrroism" in the 1980s (primarily by virtue of its actions in Central America), the very mention of such a possibility is now one of the greatest taboos.

Brulin is my guest today on Salon Radio to discuss these matters, and the 30-minute discussion -- which I genuinely found fascinating -- can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below (as always, the podcast can be downloaded in MP3 here, and ITunes here).  A transcript is here.

I want to make one related point about the contentious exchange I had several weeks ago with various Newsweek editors (both publicly and via email) concerning their internal discussion of the meaning of Terrorism, an exchange I was unable to address fully at the time because I was traveling.  As a result of various email exchanges, I was persuaded that several (though not all) of the Newsweek editors who clearly appeared to be themselves endorsing highly biased definitions of the term were, in fact, intending to describe ironically how the term is typically used by others (that includes Managing Editor Kathy Jones, who defended herself here).  I explicitly noted that possibility in what I first wrote, and now re-affirm the point I made about it:  large media outlets such as Newsweek play a significant role in how the term Terrorism is used and understood (they are not innocent bystanders, or mere "messengers," as they tried to claim).  What was most striking about Newsweek's three-day discussion of what is and is not Terrorism was that virtually nobody attempted to define what the term meant.

It is that lack of definition that is the source of most of the mischief.  The reason no clear definition of Terrorism is ever settled upon is because it's virtually impossible to embrace a definition without either (a) excluding behavior one wishes to demonize and thus include and/or (b) including behavior (including one's own and those of one's friends) which one desperately wants to exclude.  As Brulin explains, this dilemma is often "resolved" by countries trying to create definitions that simply bar the possibility that they themselves could ever engage in Terrorism (as exemplified by the long-standing efforts of the U.S. to insist that Terrorism is, by definition, something that only non-state actors can engage in, even as it labels other governments "state sponsors of terrorism").  But media outlets such as Newsweek shouldn't be parties to those propagandistic efforts; if they're going to use the term -- and they do, promiscuously -- they ought first to decide what it means and then apply it consistently or, if that can't be done, refrain from using it (as Reuters, rare among Western media outlets, has commendably attempted to do).

The discussion with Brulin is here:

Remi Brulin: Yes, thanks for having me, Glenn.

GG: Let me just begin by asking you to summarize what the focal point of your research has been; you've been researching this topic for several years now. What has been the scope of your research, what kinds of things have you been looking at, and what is the general scope of what you're writing about?

RB: As you said, I've been researching this for a while now, about eight years, and what I'm looking at specifically is the American political discourse on terrorism, basically since '45 but what I show is that the discourse, the term 'terrorism' started being used in the discourse only in '81, beginning with the Reagan years. What I also look at is how the media, particularly in the case of my dissertation The New York Times, has used the term over the years.

And the big question, of course, is the question of the definition of terrorism, meaning who do we call terrorists, and who do we not call terrorists, and whether there is questions of double standards and everything. And this is relevant because at the international level, there is no agreed-upon definition of terrorism, and at the US level, meaning for example the Executive Branch, there also is no one single definition of terrorism, and yet the term is used over and over again in our political discourse, and as you've shown in many of your articles, it has consequences, very serious consequences.

GG: If you go back to - and the title of your dissertation indicates that your beginning year that you're looking at is 1945 - over the next several decades after World War II, you can find generalized instances of presidents declaring whoever happened to be the enemy of the day to be terrorists, in kind of like a name-calling, demonizing way.

But when did the term really start to take on international prominence, meaning when did we start struggling to come up with definitions of the term as though there was some kind of hardened scientific meaning that we could ascribe to it?

RB: There was one first attempt at getting to an international definition of terrorism when the League of Nations produced a convention in order to fight terrorism in '37, but it failed. Then after that, basically the term is not used in the US political discourse at all, until the '70s, more or less. The president, we know that today because it is very easy to research, because we have access to the papers of the president and they're digitized and we can use search engines; we could not do that ten years ago. So we know for a fact that presidents until Carter never really used the term terrorism, and Carter used it mostly in '79 and 1980, and it was in reference to the hostage crisis in Iran.

Even then, even when Carter used it, and he used it in, I don't know, 120 speeches or so, even he was not using the term terrorism as a discourse, meaning that the term was used once or twice to refer specifically to that one act of terrorism, namely the hostage crisis. But he did not turn this into a discourse. The term terrorism is not suddenly supposed to explain everything, to tell us who the enemy was, and did not draw a line between those who were the terrorists and those who were not. It was just about that one incident. So there was no discourse. The real discourse appears with Reagan administration in 1981.

In my research, I tried to determine where it's coming from, and I found that there are possibly two origins, two explanations for where the discourse comes from. One is from Latin America, and the other is from Israel.

GG: With regard to Latin America, as you just said, that began in 1981 with the Reagan administration, the various wars that it waged there in terms of who was a terrorist, who wasn't, were we funding the terrorists, like with the Contras, who were trying to overthrow the government, or were we fighting against terrorists, and those terms got confused. But when you say that one potential origin was Israel, talk about how Israel began using the term and what relevance that has to the international activity in attempts to come up with an international definition.

RB: Israel started using the term to explain or to characterize its struggle, its conflicts with Palestinians and with the Arab states in general, since early on, in the '60s and '70s. In fact, if you study the debates at the UN, which is something I looked at, you can see that there's a very different way of talking about terrorism on the Israeli side, and on the American side, throughout the '70s, all the way up until the '80s. For Israel, right away, in the '70s, in the early '70s, there is a war against terrorism. The Arab states are terrorist states, and they are at war with Israel. There are parallels with the threat of terrorism and the threat posed by the Nazis. Those are terms that are used over and over and over again by the Israeli representatives at the UN General Assembly and at the UN Security Council in the '70s. And Israel was the only state to say that about terrorism.

But that changed in the '80s, and one thing I looked at is, there were a couple of conferences, one in '79 and one in '84, that were both organized by an organization, an institute, called the Jonathan Institute. It's called the Jonathan Institute after the name of Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, Jonathan Netanyahu, and he was killed in the raid in Entebbe in '76. Basically, this conference was organized in '79, and I can read to you what the official objective was.

GG: So in other words, basically the first conference that was designed to define or come up with a consensus definition of terrorism, was already cast in Middle East terms because the conference was named after Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, who had tried to rescue the hostages from Uganda?

RB: Absolutely.

GG: And... go ahead.

RB: The objective, the official objective is - I have the transcripts of the conference - it says that the objective is "to focus public attention on the real nature of international terrorism, on the threat that it poses to all democratic societies, and on the measures necessary for defeating the forces of terror." And everything in the book is about the fact that terrorism is not something that, is not a threat that Israel only is facing, but it's a threat to all democracies, the whole Western world.

Then there's this idea that terrorism and totalitarianism, meaning the Soviet Union and its allies, are linked, that the terrorists are also the totalitarians. And then there is the focus on state support or state sponsoring of international terrorism, which are issues that were absolutely not in the American discourse on terrorism until then, but at the conference, you look at the list of the people invited, and you have George Bush, the father of W. Bush, who was the ambassador, the American ambassador at the UN in the '70s.

You have Jack Kemp, Republican from New York. You have George Will, you have Norman Podhoretz, you have Henry Jackson, famous senator, you have Richard Pipes, a right-wing ideologue. You have Menachem Begin who is there, you have Shimon Peres, you have Netanyahu, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu who is now prime minister, and so you have a clear link between the American discourse, suddenly, and the Israeli discourse, and from that moment on, in America, people are going to be starting to talk about terrorism in ways similar to how Israel had been talking about it for 10 or 15 years.

GG: In light of that objective, to sort of internationalize the idea of terrorism from what it had been, which was a way of talking about Israel's various enemies, into this concept that the whole Western democratic world ought to recognize as a universal problem, was there an actual definition agreed upon between the members of that conference?

RB: Well, yes. Actually, it's interesting, because they did come up with a definition which is more or less similar to one that you mentioned earlier in one of your pieces, meaning the one from the State Department, and it's a very basic definition - I'm trying to find it here, yeah, it's right here - "terrorism is the deliberate systematic murder, maiming and menacing of innocents to inspire fear in order to gain political ends." So there is nothing that is controversial about that definition; it is very broad. It is nonspecific.

But what is interesting is when you look at the presentations, the speeches during the conference, you have one of the issues of the definition of terrorism is whether there is a difference between terrorism and struggles for national determination, or whether there is a difference between terrorism and freedom fighters. And you have an article here, a speech given on the issue of freedom fighters versus terrorists by Menachem Begin, and of course Menachem Begin was a member of the Irgun, which was according to the British in the '40s, a terrorist organization.

GG: What did it do? What kind of things did it do that warranted that label in the eyes of the British?

RB: They are famous - and that aspect is interesting in itself - they are famous mostly because of the bombing of the King David Hotel in the '40s, and basically it was where the British forces were headquartered. They put a huge bomb in the basement, and there happened to be many many civilians in the building, the building collapsed, and this was front page news around the world. The New York Times called that an act of terrorism at the time. The British called that an act of terrorism. And in fact Begin mentions that incident in his speech, and he says that in fact the Irgun had called in advance, it wasn't really an act of terrorism, but he said that in any case this is a unique case and then says that the method of the Irgun was "to never hurt a civilian or a man, woman or child whether Jew, Arab or British."

So he is very clear as what would be terrorism. The problem is that of course historically, it is absolutely not true that the Irgun "never killed a single civilian, Arab, Jew or British." There were literally dozens of cases of bombs being put in marketplaces, in theaters, in Palestinian quarters throughout the '30s and then in the '40s, and those clearly were acts of terrorism. The way they deal with this during this conference with the definition is basically by not mentioning those acts that would actually qualify under their own definition of terrorism as acts of terrorism. So that way Begin can say that the Irgun were freedom fighters and not terrorists, by simply ignoring the historical record.

GG: As you indicated a little bit earlier, the use of the word terrorism within American political discourse really began to intensify in the 1980s, and not necessarily in connection with a lot of the attacks from Middle Easterners, which we think of as terrorism today, but really with regard to what we were doing in Central America.

Talk about that development, and also related to it, the question of whether or not these definitions of terrorism allow for states, for actual governments, to engage in terrorism, or whether it has to be nongovernment actors.

RB: Yes, that's the other big question when it comes to the definition of terrorism. As I mentioned earlier, the first question is whether there is a difference between a struggle for national liberation and terrorism, and the other question is whether states can be engaging in terrorism, whether the concept of state terrorism exists or not.

In '81, we had indeed the birth of a discourse on terrorism in the US political discourse, and it focuses nearly completely on Latin America and Central America. Reagan when he talks about terrorism in the '80s, very very rarely mentions the Middle East, even rarely mentions Khaddafi, which is surprising to most people probably. He mentions all the time the situation in El Salvador and in Nicaragua, and when he is talking about Nicaragua and El Salvador, he is basically saying that military aid to El Salvador is justified because they're fighting the terrorists, meaning the FMLN in El Salvador, and aid to the Contras is also justified because they're fighting against the Sandinistas, and the Sandinistas are a state sponsoring terrorism.

This is where the question of whether a state can be involved in terrorism comes into play. It is obvious in the American political discourse, in the presidential discourse in the '80s, that a state can be involved indirectly, meaning as a sponsor of terrorism. During the '80s you have very harsh debates in Congress between Republicans and Democrats, because they completely disagree on who are the terrorists. The Democrats throughout the '80s say over and over again that the Contras are terrorists, and they state specifically that they are terrorist because of the methods that they use, and they quote many, many studies by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch and others, and they said the same thing about El Salvador. In El Salvador the Democrats say that because of the methods that they use, the death squads in El Salvador are guilty of terrorism, and because of the links between the death squads and the government of El Salvador, the government is also guilty of state terrorism, and therefore the US should not be sending military aid to the government.

GG: In fact, if that argument were true, and it's hard to dispute it if you settle on a clear definition of terrorism, but if it's true that the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador were themselves terrorist organization, then it would necessarily follow, wouldn't it, that the United States, which was funding and supporting those organizations, was itself a state sponsor of terrorism?

RB: Absolutely, and in fact the Democrats, many, many Democrats in the '80s say that, in the House and in the Senate, they say specifically that if we give aid and support to the Contras or military aid to El Salvador, this will go to the commission of terrorist acts, we know it, and therefore the US will be involved in state sponsoring of terrorism. For that one reason you have an amendment that was proposed by Senator Dodd, Chris Dodd, in '84, and he proposed it twice, in April and then in October of '84, and basically the Senate had just voted in favor of military aid to the Contras, he had voted against, and after having been defeated, he said, well, maybe what we could do at least is add a little amendment saying that no funds that we just voted for, no funds should go to the commission of acts of terrorism. Very clear, simple,...

GG: It was basically an amendment providing that the United States shall be banned from funding terrorist groups?

RB: Funding terrorism and terrorist acts, literally and explicitly that.

GG: What was the vote on that amendment?

RB: The vote was, in both cases, in April and October, every single Democrat senator voted in favor of this, and every single Republican voted against it. So they had a very slight majority, and so the amendment was never passed. What's interesting here, aside from the debates, which were fantastic, which were fascinating, because they had to deal with the definition of terrorism, and Dodd did actually what you did in one of your pieces, where he used one specific definition of terrorism, and then you applied it to specific cases.

That's what Dodd did: he said, I'm using here the definition of the State Department, and according to the State Department's definition, what the Contras do is undoubtedly terrorism. So we should put an end to that. And the Republicans, the very few who actually agreed to take part in the debate - Specter did, Stevens did - their arguments were just striking, and basically they were that the Contras were freedom fighters, they were not terrorists, and that the US could not vote for an amendment like this because doing so would be admitting that the US had been involved in state sponsoring of terrorism, and that's just not something that the US does.

GG: Right. Inherently.

RB: We do not do terrorism, therefore we shouldn't admit that we did, because that would send the wrong signal. That's the level of the arguments that were used by the Republicans, and Dodd points when Stevens used the argument of the freedom fighters, that this is the arguments that the PLO used in the '70s, saying that we're not terrorists, we're freedom fighters. We cannot possibly be terrorists because our ends are good. Of course that's an argument that we refuse when the PLO uses it. But that's the only argument that the Republicans put forward against the amendment.

Of course, another aspect of it that's interesting is that this amendment doesn't exist if you look at the media. It was just never reported in the US media.

GG: You mean the debate over the Dodd amendment to ban the funding of terrorism and the vote that took place?

RB: Yes, exactly. Meaning that you have an amendment on one of major issues of US foreign policy in the '80s, most big-name senators talk about it on the floor, Kennedy talked about it, Dodd talked for, like, half an hour. You have a very clear-cut vote on a central issue of the time, which is international terrorism, and yet in The New York Times the only mention of it is in a column by Anthony Lewis a few months later - because obviously Anthony Lewis was on the left on the political spectrum in the opinion pages of The New York Times, personally knew senators, so he was aware that the debates had happened and that the amendment had been voted on. But it was never reported, not once in the news pages of The New York Times.

GG: Okay. Let me ask you this. The United States for a long time, for several decades now, since this concept arose of state sponsor of terrorism, has maintained a list, as a result of congressional legislation, of the so-called state sponsors of terrorism. Talk a little bit about the history of that list - how and why countries like Iraq or Iran have made their way on the list, and then off the list, and how that has worked.

RB: The list comes from an amendment in '79; it's called the Fenwick amendment, this is Millicent Fenwick, a representative from New Jersey, and what's interesting is that there were previous attempts to come up with a list of states that sponsored terrorism. These attempts were basically led by senators Ribicoff and Javits, and what they wanted to do in the late '70s was to have Congress come up with a list of terrorist states, or state sponsors of terrorism, and then the executive would have to impose sanctions on it.

And as soon as they started to try to figure out how to legislate on this, they of course bumped into the difficult question of the definition of terrorism, and they realized that they couldn't agree on a definition. Basically one among many issues, one problem was for example that in the Middle East, if suddenly you realize that Saudi Arabia is giving aid and support to the PLO, then you have to put Saudi Arabia on the list, and that means sanctions, and of course you don't want to put Saudi Arabia on the list, you only want to put Syria on list, or Iran, enemies basically, but not Saudi Arabia. So basically they couldn't agree on a definition and therefore it didn't go anywhere, and the only reason that the list came into being was because Mrs. Fenwick proposed an amendment and put it as a rider on a larger bill, and it was not discussed - there was no discussion, so it passed, and that's how we got the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

From the very beginning on the list you had South Yemen, you had Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Cuba. Cuba is fascinating, because it's there from the beginning, from '82, and it's still on the list. Basically there are only two states that have been taken off the list. You have South Yemen, because South Yemen doesn't exist, now it's Yemen, so they're off the list, and you had Iraq, and Iraq of course is interesting because Iraq was on the list from the very beginning, and then in '82 it's taken off the list, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Iraqi sponsoring of terrorism going down, but because the US wanted to be able to sell weapons or dual use technology to Iraq because it was taking the side of Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War and so in order to sell those weapons or dual-use technologies, the US had to take Iraq out of the list. So it was out of the list until 1990, when Iraq invades Kuwait, and then suddenly it's back on the list.

GG: Right.

RB: Obviously that has nothing to do with terrorism. I mean, it's a crime, it's a crime of aggression, but it's not terrorism. But it's an enemy again, so it's back on the list. And Cuba is there - of course today there's absolutely no clear reason why Cuba should be on the list, and that's a whole different subject.

GG: Right. Just a couple last questions. With regard to Iran: at the time that the Reagan administration was selling highly sophisticated weapons to the Iranian regime, was Iran on the list of terrorist states?

RB: Iran was, yeah, yeah, yeah, Iran was on the list, absolutely. That was one big part of the problem with the Iran-Contra scandal, right? One side was that the United States was selling weapons against policy, first, the US had always said and Reagan had always said that the United States did not negotiate with terrorists or terrorist states, and of course that's what was happening. The weapons were sent because the US was negotiating to free the hostages, and also the problem was that it was illegal under US law; the US was not allowed to sell weapons to a state that was on the list of the terrorist states.

GG: Right. And then the money that was generated from the sale of those weapons was then used to fund the Contras, a group in Nicaragua that met every definition on terrorism as well, so there was really dealing with terrorism on both sides of the equation, basically.

RB: Absolutely.

GG: Okay. Yeah - go ahead.

RB: One aspect of that that's interesting is that clearly if you have a fair definition of terrorism you apply it to all sides. When you look at Iran-Contra, terrorism is on the Iran side and on the Contra side. It is not only on the Iran side. What's interesting is when you look at how the media covered the Iran-Contra Affair, and especially in the case of my research, The New York Times, what you find is that suddenly, as the Iran-Contra scandal bursts onto the scene, The New York Times, indeed the editors of The New York Times, they forget that they called the Contras terrorists, and so for them the Iran-Contra scandal is problematic because of terrorism issues only because of the weapons sold to Iran, but not anymore because of the weapons and the training and the money we sent to the Contras.

Of course it is very significant that the editors of The New York Times took that stance, because we were talking impeachment, possible impeachment, of Reagan, and the charge that the US was not only selling weapons to free hostages, but also using the funds to fund terrorists in Nicaragua would have been immensely stronger than just focusing on the hostages.

GG: Right. Now, let me ask you this, and this will be the last question, but, you referred earlier to the fact that there is no agreed-upon definition on terrorism, even to this day, in terms of any international efforts or even on the part of the US government. What are the difficulties that have prevented those definitions from being agreed upon, and what's been the history of that effort to try and get a definition agreed upon at the UN?

RB: As I said, the two basic difficulties are, the specific questions are, if there is a difference between terrorism and fighting for national liberation, on one hand, and then whether the concept of state terrorism is a valid one, whether it exists or not. At the UN, basically, the debates started in '72, following the terrorist incident at the Munich Olympic Games, you've had a very clear-cut distinction into two groups, essentially, to over-simplify : you had the unaligned states and the Soviet Union on the one side, and then you had the Western world on the other side. And basically for the unaligned states and the Soviet Union, the terrorists are Israel, South Africa, Portugal (because of its remaining colonies) and the US in Vietnam.

Those are the terrorists, and in fact the resolutions that were passed in the '70s - in '72, '73, '76, '79 - they have one paragraph, the fourth one, which is the only paragraph that actually condemns terrorism, and what it says is that it condemns "terrorist acts by racist, alien, and colonial regimes," meaning South Africa, Portugal, and Israel, but it doesn't condemn the "terrorism" quote-unquote of "groups of national liberation movements". And on the other side, on the Western side, there is a rejection of the concept of state terrorism and there is rejection of the idea that the goodness of the cause, for example national liberation, justifies any method use justifies terrorism. So that's the position on the Western side.

But it's not a clear position and very importantly, and that's something I found at the UN that really surprised me, the US position is completely unique at the UN, and it's absolutely not the same one as, for example, Israel. Starting in 1981 the US at the UN said that, if a state is involved directly or indirectly in an act, it's not terrorism because it's already covered by international law. And when the US says that, very clearly the US says that state terrorism doesn't exist but more importantly that state sponsored terrorism doesn't exist. And that position, again, the US is the only state to have ever taken that position.

And that position contradicts everything else that the US says on terrorism outside of the UN. It contradicts the existence of a list of states sponsors or terrorism, obviously, because according to the US at the UN, states cannot be involved in terrorism. It contradicts everything that Reagan has ever said about state sponsored terrorism. It contradicts the idea that the Soviet Union is behind terrorism or that Cuba is behind terrorism, because a state cannot be behind terrorism. If it's a state and it's involved in an act of terrorism, it's not terrorism. That's the US position, and the US has been the only country to make that case, and legally it's very sound reasoning, right? The idea is that if a state is involved, whether directly or indirectly, we already have international law instruments to deal with it. It's already a crime. So we don't need the concept of terrorism.

In that sense, then, that reasoning is immensely clearer and I think legally much more sound that the position of the rest of the Western world. The rest of the Western world at the UN is silent, always, on the issue of state terrorism. State terrorism is something that the rest of the world always talks about; for them it's the real kind of terrorism. And yet the Western world is silent on the issue; it doesn't say if it exists or not, but by voting it clearly shows that it rejects the concept itself.

The problem with that is that, at the same time that they reject the concept of state terrorism, they use the concept of state sponsored terrorism. So basically they separate state terrorism and state sponsored terrorism, and there is no argument for that. There is no legal argument for that. If you decide that state terrorism doesn't exist, and you claim it doesn't exist because it's already covered by international law, then the same argument leads you to the obvious conclusion that state sponsored terrorism doesn't exist either. So you have to either reject both, state terrorism and state sponsored terrorism, or accept both. But you cannot separate the two.

And that's why the West has always been completely silent on the issue at the UN, and again the US, and I think to its merit, has been the only state to actually make this very clear legal case about this provision, but what's fascinating is that no-one knows that, meaning that that position that the US has declared at the UN, it doesn't exist. It has never been reported ever, and by ever I do mean ever, in any US media, by any wire service. It's not mentioned in a single article on terrorism that I've read, a single book on terrorism that I've read. That position, again, legally I think it makes sense, but it contradicts everything else that the US has ever said on terrorism. But that position doesn't exist. It's one of those cases where... and the US repeated it: that position was repeated by the US in '81, in '83, in '85... the last time the US makes that case is in 2000, December 2000, a year before 9-11.

GG: I think the most amazing and striking part of all of this is it's incredible that there's a word that plays such a central role in so many of our policy disputes, our government actions and our sense of moral right and wrong, and that's been that way for several decades and yet there's literally no definition of that term. And not only is there no formal adopted definition, there's no de facto definition either because it's been applied so self-servingly and inconsistently, and it's just amazing to really see the history.

Well, this has been really fascinating and I know... Go ahead.

RB: Just a little thing. Since '87 there has been a proposal at the UN to convene an international conference to define terrorism and differentiate terrorism from struggles of national liberation. That's the wording of it, and it's been proposed by Syria. Every other year it's voted on; every other year the rest of the world, meaning the unaligned states, votes, the majority of member states votes in favor of it, and every other year, the Western world, every single Western state votes against it. So there is a clear decision on the Western side, that we don't want a definition, and it's interesting because as I said, even within the Western world, there is no agreement, right?

Where the US takes that one position and is the only one to take that position, one that's very different from the Israeli position for example. The Western world doesn't want to have a conference, and the excuse is that we're not going to get to an agreement. That is the only argument that they use is that it's not going to lead to an agreement, so we shouldn't have a conference. But the rest of the world they want to have a conference, and that tells you a lot about how power is wielded in the world, and of course for those countries that are not powerful, the UN is the one place where they have a voice, where they feel like they have some power, so of course they do want the definition. We don't, because it serves our interests to not have the definition.

GG: Absolutely, it definitely serves our interests in lots of ways to have that term be undefined and malleable, to put that mildly.

Again, thanks so much for taking the time; I find this a topic very fascinating, and I know there's a lot more to your research than what we just talked about, that we really have been just skimming the surface, and I'm sure I will talk to you again and have you back, and we can delve into it a little further.

RB: Alright.

GG: Thanks so much.

RB: Thank you so much for having me, Glenn.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]

This last point is inevitably brushed away by proponents of racial profiling, who think it should be obvious that Arab men are far more likely to be terrorists than, say, middle-aged white ladies, and that justifies far more scrutiny of the former group. Stories about men of color being killed by police who presumed too much, or white English men boarding planes with explosives, or white Texan men flying planes into federal buildings never seem to make a dent in such opinions. But the indictment this week of American Colleen "Jihad Jane" LaRose, who along with foreign terrorists was involved in a plot to kill a Swedish artist, has produced an unusually large onslaught of commentary on the limits and dangers of the practice. Are people finally getting the picture?

They should be, since even LaRose herself pointed out the obvious. "On the Internet, she allegedly boasted that her appearance and nationality would allow her to travel freely and without scrutiny as she went about her mission," writes The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. As Patrick Smith has written in his "Ask the Pilot" column something like five billion times since September 11, 2001, the greatest weapon those 19 al-Qaeda members had going for them was not box-cutters but the element of surprise. That was also what made pregnant Irish woman Anne-Marie Murphy seem like a good choice to (unwittingly) carry a bomb onto an El-Al plane for her boyfriend in 1986. Obviously, it's not that hard for terrorist organizations to recruit someone who looks nothing like the men Newt Gingrich thinks should be "actively discriminated against" -- so what do you suppose their next strategy would be if racial profiling became official policy? (Or probably already is, given the unofficial discrimination happening at airports all over the place.)

And the idea that we all know what a terrorist looks like is dangerous not only because it means people like LaRose might teach us the hard way that we don't, or because it puts innocent people at risk of tragic overreactions by authority figures, but because it reinforces the idea that "terrorism" is only committed by one kind of person. Colleen LaRose is nothing but the latest in a long line of white American terrorists: Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Shelley Shannon, Eric Rudolph, Bruce Ivins, Scott Roeder, James von Brunn, Andrew Stack III -- the list goes on. This country is crawling with hate groups and disturbed loners with axes to grind, many of whom share a race and at least loosely a religion, but somehow, you never hear calls for increased scrutiny of white people or Christians. You never hear anyone suggest those groups should be expected to give up their rights, privacy and dignity for the good of us all.

Nor should anyone suggest that, since it would undoubtedly lead to -- get this -- wasted law enforcement resources, harassment of innocent people and missed opportunities to catch criminals who don't fit the profile. If all "looking like a terrorist" means is that you share a race with someone who's committed an act of terrorism, then guess what, every single American qualifies. So even if you believe racial profiling is appropriate, the only logical move is to treat us all as equally suspicious.