United States and state terrorism

Several scholars have accused the United States of conducting state terrorism. They have written about the liberal democracies and their use of state terrorism, particularly in relation to the Cold War. According to them, state terrorism was used to protect the interest of capitalist elites, and the U.S. organized a neo-colonial system of client states, co-operating with local elites to rule through terror. However, little of this work has been recognized by other scholars of terrorism or even of state terrorism.[1]

Works include Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s The political economy of human rights (1979), Herman’s The real terror network (1985), Alexander L. George’ Western state terrorism (1991), Frederick Gareau’s State terrorism and the United States (2004) and Doug Stokes’ America’s other war (2005).

Beginning in the late 1970s, Chomsky and Herman wrote a series of books on the United States and state terrorism. Their writings coincided with reports by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations of a new global “epidemic” of state torture and murder. Chomsky and Herman observed that terror was concentrated in the U.S. sphere of influence in the Third World, and documented terror carried out by U.S. client states in Latin America. They observed that of ten Latin American countries that had death squads, all were U.S. client states. Worldwide, 74% of countries that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. client states, receiving military and other support to retain power. They concluded that the global rise in state terror was a result of U.S. foreign policy. …more