What actually is Terrorism

The quest for a consistent definition of an idea is invariably marred with the cultural, social and linguistic biases of it’s invokers. And this is what has been happening with the word ‘Terrorism’. When a person of colored skin does it, it is ‘Terrorism’ while if a white guy does the same or worse, it’s an ‘Act of Violence’. The word ‘Terrorism’ is more of a political tool to divide people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ rather than an academically consistent idea.

Dr Jonathan Brown makes an indepth analysis of the problem of defining Terrorism. Here is an excerpt from his marvellous book ‘Slavery and Islam’.

“A common definition of terrorism (there is no agreed upon definition), similar to those used by the US government, is that it is the use or threat of violence by non-state actors against non-combatants for an ideological cause.25 We can test our definition by inverting it: what is ‘an act of violence by non-state actors against non-combatants for an ideological cause’? It’s terrorism. That seems obvious enough, and the abstraction seems accurate. Except, as in the case of tomatoes, when it is not.

In 2015 Canadian police foiled the plot of several young, white Canadians to open fire in a crowd. When asked if law enforcement considered this an attempted act of terrorism, a police spokesman replied that these were individuals who ‘had some beliefs and were willing to carry out violent acts against citizens’ but that it was not terrorism. ‘It’s not culturally based,’ he explained.26 The next day Canada’s Justice Minister reiterated this point: ‘The attack does not appear to have been culturally motivated, therefore [it’s] not linked to terrorism.’27 In 2010 an American man seeking to strike a blow against  government  tyranny crashed his plane into an IRS building. When a government spokesperson announced that the attack was not terrorism, experts objected that this did indeed fit the standard definitions of terrorism. A Fox News anchor interjected to interpret the comment for the audience: ‘This does not appear to be terrorism in any way that that word is conventionally understood’ (emphasis mine).28

So why are definitions of terrorism as an abstract concept failing when applied to situations they should fit? Because the test for the ‘correct’ definition of terrorism is not whether it encompasses the essence of some external reality, an abstraction ‘out there’ in the world. Terrorism is a word that we have shaped and deployed. It is a category we have called into existence. The definition of terrorism is correct if, and only if, it corresponds to what we mean by terrorism and how we use the word, as the Canadian Minister of Justice, the US Department of Homeland Security and the Fox anchor showed. Even if we come up with a well-crafted definition for the abstract category of terrorism, it is whether a particular incident strikes our speech community as ‘terrorism,’ not whether it fits under our abstract definition, that ultimately governs how we label it.

‘We’ think of terrorism as a bundle of associated features, and ‘we’ identify something as terrorism when it is analogous to what ‘we’ have dubbed terrorism in the past. Scholarly definitions of terrorism, of which there are more than 109 by one count, are all abstractions.29 They make no mention of the race, background, religion or culture of the actors. But when ‘we’ say terrorist ‘we’ think of non-whites and non-Christians, in short, not real Westerners.30 Abstraction here is supposed to discover or inaugurate a category that transcends particular interests or loyalties. But definition carries with it an evaluation. And, as some scholars of terrorism have cynically observed, when ‘we’ think of terrorism what we really mean is ‘violence of which we do not approve,’31 or certainly violence done by people of whom we do not approve.

The act of assertion embodied in abstraction and definition is a preliminary step in a larger process, one by which we give shape and features to our reality. They form part of what Michel Foucault (d. 1984) and others have described as discourses, or those constellations of words, terms, propositions and maxims that form our thought and intellectual cultures. These discourses make up the reality that we ‘know’ around us. They are the background of our minds.32 This is not a neutral process. Reality is made by powerful and dominant forces and interests. Terrorism as a defined concept makes up terrorism discourse, which is used to condemn and delegitimize events and actors. Terrorist is an eminently political label, used to draw lines, exclude and vilify. Governments and policy makers molded the term for just this purpose.33 Of course, this does not mean that a violent act done by a ‘terrorist’ is fabricated or did not really occur, any less than an animal we call a dog does not exist simply because the category of dog is something that we have made up. But that we have a category called terrorism, with its own loaded meaning and purpose, and that we apply it to certain things and not others, is a reality we have manufactured.”

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25. See Jonathan R . White, Terrorism and Homeland Security. Alex Schmid (2012) offered this definition: ‘Terrorism refers, on the one hand, to a doctrine about the presumed effectiveness of a special form or tactic of fear generating, coercive political violence and, on the other hand, to a conspiratorial practice of calculated, demonstrative, direct violent action without legal or moral  restraints,  targeting mainly civilians and non-combatants, performed for its propagandistic and psychological effects on various audiences and conflict parties’; see http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/ schmid-terrorism-definition/html.  See  also  http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terror_08.pdf; http:// www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005; http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2003/31880.htm.
26.  ‘Alleged Halifax mass shooting plot “not culturally based” say police,’ CBC News, Feb. 13, 2015, http:// www.cbc.ca/news/canada/novascotia/alleged-halifax-massshooting-plot-not-culturallybased-say-police-1.2957446.
27. Anna  Mehler  Paperny, ‘Halifax plot: So what is “terrorism,” anyway?,’ Global News, Feb. 14, 2015, https://globalnews.ca/ news/1830795/halifax-plot-sowhat-is-terrorism-anyway/.
28. Devin Neiwert, ‘Huh? Since When is Attempting to Blow Up a Federal Building NOT an Act of Domestic Terrorism?’ Crooks and Liars, Feb. 18, 2010, https:// web.archive.org/ web/20190317023152/https:// crook sandliars.com/david-neiwert/huh-when-attempting-blowfederal-bui. More recently, a young, white, conservative Christian man was found to be behind a spate of package bombings in Austin, Texas. The White House spokesperson stated that the attacks has ‘no known links to terrorism’; ‘No known link to terrorism in Texas bombings: White House,’ Reuters, US, March 20,  2018,  https:// www.reuters.com/article/ustexas-blast-whitehouse/noknown-link-to-terrorism-intexas-bombings-white-houseidUSKBN1GW293. 
29.  Simon Mabon, ‘Locating Terrorism Studies,’ 5–17.
30.  Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger, ‘The FBI’s New U.S. Terrorist Threat: “Black Identity Extremists,” ’ Foreign Policy, Oct. 6, 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/06/the-fbi-has-identified-a-new-domestic-terrorist-threat-and-itsblack-identity-extremists/; Timothy McGrath, ‘Turns out people get angry when you say white Americans are terrorists, too,’ PRI,  July  8,  2015,  https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-08/turns-out-people-get-angry-when-you-saywhite-americans-are-terroriststoo.
31. Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Longman, Political Terrorism, 3; Schmid, ‘Terrorism – The Definitional Problem,’ 375–420.
32. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse,’ 48–78.
33. See the work of Rémi Brulin, ‘Le discours Américain sur le terrorisme: Constitution, evolution et contextes d’enonciation (1972–1992).’ For an admission that US courts see using the label terrorist as ‘prejudicial’ for acts of violence carried out by White Americans, see Ryan J. Reilly, ‘There’s A Good Reason Feds Don’t Call White Guys Terrorists, Says DOJ Domestic Terror Chief,’ Huffpost, Jan. 11, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/white-terrorists-domestic-extremists_us_5a550158e4b003133ecceb74?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004.

Operation Northwoods – A plan to create justification for U.S. to attack Cuba.

Operation Northwoods was indeed a plan which entailed use of violence in the streets of the US to create a pretext for waging war against another sovereign country. Some people say that Pearl Harbor and 911 attacks were the manifestation of this plan, but one can never be certain about things until they are declassified. So after the declassification of Operation Northwoods we can say that such a plan was not just a remote possibility. Here I present an excerpt from the book, The Ghost – The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley about this operation.

“The situation was urgent. In a meeting on May 1, 1963, the Joint Chiefs resurrected a secret plan known by the deceptively bucolic code name of NORTHWOODS. The NORTHWOODS plan, first developed after the Bay of Pigs, sought to create a justification, a pretext, for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Since Castro could no longer be overthrown from within (thanks to Kennedy’s weakness), the only solution was to remove him from without. The idea was to orchestrate a crime that placed the U.S. government “in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government in Havana.” Then the president could declare war and send in the Eighty-second Airborne Division. One NORTHWOODS scenario envisioned the use of violence on the streets of America. “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington.… The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).”19 That merciless parenthetical makes it clear that the Pentagon’s planners were willing to kill innocent persons who opposed Castro and to blame their deaths on the Cuban leader in order to justify a U.S. invasion. Kennedy wasn’t interested in socalled pretext operations. When Lyman Lemnitzer had first presented the NORTHWOODS concept at a White House meeting in March 1962, JFK had brusquely rejected it.20 With Castro emboldened in the spring of 1963, the Joint Chiefs revived the NORTHWOODS option. They recommended an “engineered provocation,” which would provide advantages in “control, timing, simplicity, and security.” The chiefs passed their recommendation to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who ignored it. The Kennedy White House preferred the idea of “autonomous operations” against Castro.”

19. The NORTHWOODS schemes are contained in “Northwoods,” a 197-page compilation of documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discovered and made public by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997. See NARA JFK JCS RIF 202-10002-10104.
20. Brig. Gen. Edwin Lansdale, “Memorandum for the Record, Meeting with the President,” March 16, 1962, U.S. Department of the Army, Califano Papers, NARA CIA JFK RIF 198-10004-10020.

Israel’s botched Attack on Pakistani Nuclear Installments

Following is an excerpt from the book “Deception – Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons” written by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark . It is taken from the book’s sixth chapter titled “A Figment of the Zionist Mind”.

[Sharifuddin] Pirzada remembered well Khan’s proclivity for speaking out. The flurry of interviews in January and February 1984 had a purpose. “Khan found it hard to keep his trap shut. This is true. But these prolonged interviews were for a reason. Zia believed in nuclear ambiguity, a strategy whereby it could be inferred that Pakistan had the bomb without Pakistan losing its lucrative US aid. The plan was to give the impression that Pakistan’s nuclear mission was unstoppable in order to bring about its international acceptance and to warn India that should they choose to strike we were ready to respond.”19

Khan had spoken out on Zia’s instruction, the CIA having warned Islamabad that India had finally snapped and was planning a preemptive military strike against Kahuta.20

“The problem with Khan was that he always set out to do one thing and then invariably achieved another,” Pirzada recalled. “Khan went further than his brief and sent our American friends apoplectic.” Zia was advised to draft a clarification, carried by state television and the newspapers. Gilded in semantics, the president’s statement made no mention of Khan’s claim that Pakistan had enriched uranium to weapons grade and the president insisted there were no plans to build a bomb, even though Khan had been right to say that “Pakistan could build a bomb if it needed to.”21

The Pakistanis were masterful word-smiths and there were many in the West who were glad that they were. The timing of Khan’s outpourings could not have been worse. Reagan was due in Beijing. The aid package to Pakistan was up for renewal on Capitol Hill. In New Delhi, too, there was anger at Khan and at the US. The talk was that Washington had betrayed India’s secret plans to strike at Pakistan’s nuclear project. K. Subrahmanyam, chairman of India’s joint intelligence committee, picked over the Khan interviews. “We knew we were being challenged by Islamabad,” Subrahmanyam recalled.22

“Our intelligence people also had evidence of the Pakistan air force increasing their levels of readiness, further proof, if any more were needed, that our covert intentions to hit Kahuta were not secret any more.” But what made India’s joint intelligence committee livid was that it had been sitting on the plan to strike KRL for a year. A committee of soldiers and intelligence people had first come together to discuss what became known as “the Osirak contingency” in 1981, after Lieutenant General Krishnaswami Sundarji had published his Pakistan war-gaming manual. Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi had consented and placed Air Marshal Dilbagh Singh, chief of air staff, in charge of the operation. He had ordered Indian Air Force Jaguar squadrons to practice low-level flying, simulating runs with 2,000-lb bombs.23

In February 1983, with the strike plan at an advanced stage, Indian military officials had travelled secretly to Israel, which had a common interest in eliminating Khan, to buy electronic warfare equipment to neutralize Kahuta’s air defenses.24

On 25 February 1983, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi had accused Pakistan of “covertly attempting to make nuclear weapons,” and three days later, Raja Ramanna, director of India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center, had revealed that India, too, was developing a uranium enrichment facility.25

Suspecting something was brewing, the ISI sent a message to their Indian intelligence counterparts in RAW that autumn, and as a result Munir Ahmed Khan of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission met Dr. Ramanna at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna. 26

He warned Ramanna that if India were to strike at Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India’s nuclear facilities at Trombay. It lay downwind from the teeming Indian city of Mumbai and an attack would result in the release of “massive amounts of radiation to a large populated area, causing a disaster.”27

New Delhi paused. Israel stepped in, suggesting that it carry out the raid, using India’s airbase at Jamnagar to launch Israeli air force jets and a second base in northern India to refuel. A senior Israeli analyst close to the operation recalled that the plan was to enter Pakistan beneath the radar, with jets tracking the line of the Himalayas through Kashmir. As Reagan’s staff finalized arrangements for the president’s visit to China in March 1984, prime minister Indira Gandhi signed off the Israeli-led operation, bringing India, Pakistan and Israel to within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear conflagration. It was at this point that the CIA tipped off President Zia, hoping the chain reaction would defuse the situation. And after Khan’s outbursts in the Pakistani newspapers, India and Israel had backed off. But these were high-stakes games, played between a known nuclear nation—India—and another— Pakistan—that Reagan continued to insist had no capability, the US deception bringing the region even further towards an apocalyptic conflagration.

General retd. Mirza Aslam Baig recounting another Israeli/Indian botched attempt on Pakistani Nuclear Installations during Benazir era.

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19 Author interview with Sharifuddin Pirzada, Islamabad, spring 2006.

20 Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi had ordered her chief of air staff to draw up plans for such an operation. For details on the planning and US intervention in the raid, see below.

21 Zia’s statement was issued on 13 February 1984.

22 Author interview with K. Subrahmanyam, New Delhi, spring 2006.

23 Bharat Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (Macmillan, New Delhi, 2002), pp. 346–7.

24 During this shopping trip, the Israelis had proposed a trade. If New Delhi gave Jerusalem technical data on the MiG-23 combat aircraft supplied to India by the Soviet Union, the Israelis would pass to India classified manuals it had obtained from the US that would enable New Delhi to jam the radar frequencies used by the new F-16 fighters that had recently arrived in Islamabad from Fort Worth, Texas. The electronic warfare equipment bought from Israel arrived at the Indian air force’s Jamnagar base in Gujarat in March 1983. See Karnad, p. 346.

25 An interview with Raja Ramanna, director of India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center, appeared in “India Is Pursuing Uranium Enrichment Technology,” Nuclear Fuel, 28 February 1983, pp 3–4.

26 They met during an IAEA session in the autumn of 1983.

27 Author interviews in New Delhi in the winter and summer of 2006. For another account, see George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999), p. 241.

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