State terrorism
[10]However, others, including governments, international organisations, private institutions and scholars, believe the term terrorism is applicable only to the actions of violent non-state actors.
It is important to understand that in terrorism the violence threatened or perpetrated, has purposes broader than simple physical harm to a victim.
[22][page needed] In that same year, Edmund Burke decried the "thousands of those hell-hounds called terrorists" who he believed threatened Europe.
[29] Other examples of state terrorism may include the World War II bombings of Pearl Harbor, London, Dresden, Chongqing, and Hiroshima.
The agents responsible pleaded guilty to manslaughter as part of a plea deal and were sentenced to ten years in prison, but were secretly released early to France under an agreement between the two countries' governments.
[31][volume & issue needed] During the Troubles, an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland from the 1960s to the 1990s, the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a counterinsurgency unit of the British Intelligence Corps, was tasked with tracking down members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
[43][44] French DGSE agents Captain Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart sank the Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of the Greenpeace Organisation, in Auckland Harbour on July 10, 1985.
[46] In November 2023, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused Israel of being "a terrorist state" committing war crimes and violating international law in the Gaza Strip.
[48] In December 2023, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel condemned the alleged genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and called Israel a "terrorist state".
[53] Between 9 July and 15 August 1984 seventeen merchant vessels were damaged in the Gulf of Suez and Bab al-Mandeb straits by underwater explosions.
[63] On October 17, the European Parliament approved a request to debate and vote on a resolution recognizing Russia as a terrorist state,[64] which it did on November 23.
In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the former Major-General and Commander of Vlakplaas, Sarel “Sakkie” du Plessis Crafford gave the following three reasons for the Apartheid state's policy of extra-judicial killings: The most notorious of the Vlakplaas operatives were Eugene de Kock and the askari Joe Mamasela, who were linked to several high-profile extra-judicial killings, including that of Griffiths Mxenge.
Following South Africa's transition to democracy, de Kock was later tried and convicted on eighty-nine charges and sentenced to 212 years in prison.
During World War II, the United Kingdom created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which, in the words of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was to "set Europe ablaze" with sabotage and subversion in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany.
The justification ... That we had no other means of striking back at the enemy ... is exactly the argument used by the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the PFLP, the IRA and every other half-articulate terrorist organisation on Earth.
[82][83] British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government had instructed propaganda specialists from the Foreign Office to send hundreds of inflammatory pamphlets to leading anti-communists in Indonesia, inciting them to kill the foreign minister, Subandrio, and claiming that ethnic Chinese Indonesians deserved the violence meted out to them.
[84] Britain has been accused of involvement in state terrorism during the Troubles, an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland from the 1960s to the 1990s by covertly assisting loyalist paramilitaries.
The U.S. supported governments who employed death squads throughout Latin America and counterinsurgency training of right-wing military forces included advocating the interrogation and torture of suspected insurgents.
[89] J. Patrice McSherry, a professor of political science at Long Island University, says "hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans were tortured, abducted or killed by right-wing military regimes as part of the U.S.-led anti-communist crusade", which included U.S. support for Operation Condor and the Guatemalan military during the Guatemalan Civil War.
[90] More people were repressed and killed throughout Latin America in the last three decades of the Cold War than in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, according to historian John Henry Coatsworth.
[91] Declassified documents from the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta in 2017 confirm that U.S. officials directly facilitated and encouraged the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists in Indonesia during the mid-1960s.
[92][93] Bradley Simpson, Director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, says "Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party's unarmed supporters might not go far enough, permitting Sukarno to return to power and frustrate the [Johnson] Administration's emerging plans for a post-Sukarno Indonesia.
[95] Historian John Roosa, who commented on documents which were released by the U.S. embassy in Jakarta in 2017, said they confirmed that "the U.S. was part and parcel of the operation, strategizing with the Indonesian army and encouraging them to go after the PKI.
"[96] Geoffrey B. Robinson, a historian at UCLA, argues that without the support of the U.S. and other powerful Western states, the Indonesian Army's program of mass killings would not have happened.
[98] The National Assembly of Venezuela designated the colectivos as terrorist groups due to their "violence, paramilitary actions, intimidation, murders and other crimes", declaring their acts as state-sponsored terrorism.
Hoffman argues that even in war, there are rules and accepted norms of behaviour that prohibit certain types of weapons and tactics and outlaw attacks on specific categories of targets.
