American kill lists and the law

0:00Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated. For Lauren even, like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic! So, whether you need to hire four, 40, or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip.

1:00So imagine it's 1965, and the United States allegedly hands foreign military officials a literal list, like a printed list of political dissidents to be assassinated. Now, today, if some shadow network did that, we would all universally just call it terrorism. Oh, absolutely. Without question. But according to the strict literal letter of U.S. law, it is legally impossible for the American government itself to be a terrorist, which is wild to think about. It really is, and it forces this pretty uncomfortable question for you as a listener who actually gets to write the dictionary. And, you know, who does that dictionary protect? Yeah, and that tension, the gap between what we see happening on the ground and what is officially codified in law, that's the central conflict we're exploring today. Welcome to the deep dive, everybody. Today, we have a really complex mission. We are unpacking a massive, highly detailed Wikipedia article that covers the historical and academic allegations of United States and state terrorism. It's a heavy topic.

2:00It is incredibly heavy. And actually, before we take a single step further, I need to establish a really hard boundary with you, the listener. Yeah, this is a critical boundary. Our goal today is absolutely not to take a political stance. We are not here to point fingers. We're not condemning anyone. And we are certainly not endorsing these highly charged, academic and legal claims. Exactly. The source material here is dense, it's controversial, and it is deeply, deeply contradictory depending on who you ask. Right, both left wing and right wing perspectives are in here fighting it out. Exactly. So we are simply acting as your guides. We're just mapping out the arguments presented in the text, examining the architecture of these ideas completely neutral to the politics. And the architecture of this specific debate, it really flips everything we assume about global conflict completely on its head. How so? When you hear the word terrorism, you almost certainly picture non-state actors, right? Yeah, like insurgencies, clandestine cells. Exactly. Individuals building improvised

3:01explosives to attack a formal government. But what this material does is explore a controversial academic viewpoint. The idea that liberal democracies, and specifically the United States, utilized state terror as a primary systematic mechanism of foreign policy during the cold war. And potentially beyond right into the modern day. Yes, exactly. Okay, let's unpack this because before we can even touch those historical allegations, we have to look at the rulebook. The definitions. Right, reading through the legal definitions in the source text, it struck me that defining terrorism legally is basically like, well, it's like writing the regulations for a sport in a way that ensures your own team is permanently exempt from getting a penalty. That is a perfect analogy, because that structural exclusion is built right into the foundation of the law. Give me an example from the text. So look at U.S. law, specifically title 22 of the United States Code, section 2656FD2. Rules right off the tongue. Right. But the text notes that it defines terrorism as premeditated,

4:03politically motivated violence perpetrated against non combatants by, and this is the key phrase, subnational groups or clandestine agents. Wait, subnational. Yes. That single word does a massive amount of heavy lifting there. Oh, it changes everything because it means recognize state government with a formal military literally cannot meet the legal threshold for terrorism under this framework. Exactly. It creates an airtight, definitional shield for state actors. And the source actually brings in Dr. Miro Williamson's research to point out what a massive historical reversal this is. Oh, right. The part about the French Revolution. Yeah. If we go back to the origin of the term during the French Revolution, the famous reign of terror, terrorism was entirely an instrument of state governance. That's so counterintuitive to how we use it today. Right. It was the newly established French state wielding systematic violence against perceived enemies of the Republic just to maintain order. So originally, the concept of terrorism wasn't a rebellion against the government. It was the government crushing the rebellion.

5:05Precisely. The state was the primary architect of terror. The definition only flipped in modern history to exclusively mean non-state entities attacking a state. Wow. What's fascinating here is why this linguistic shift matters globally today. The text explains that the United Nations has completely failed to reach a consensus on a universal legal definition of terrorism. Well, yeah, because doing that would require states to agree on the exact line where, say, legitimate military action crosses over into state terrorism. Where where rebel group becomes a terrorist organization rather than, you know, freedom fighters. Right. And no one wants to accidentally incriminate their own allies. Exactly. The international community is totally paralyzed by that exact political cowcation. So because the UN leaves that definitional vacuum wide open, American politicians and Western social scientists operate within a framework that definitionally exempts the US and its allies. So if the rulebook says a state cannot be a terrorist, then no matter the scale of the violence, it legally has to be categorized as something else.

6:10Collateral damage, counterinsurgency, foreign intervention, take your pick. Which is just a wild loophole. It really is. And because that mainstream legal definition effectively gives state powers a free pass, dissident academics in the late 1970s decided to, well, just bypass the legal dictionary entirely. They had to. Yeah. They realized that if the official terminology couldn't capture the sheer scale of violence happening during the Cold War, they needed to build a brand new framework. And that leads us directly into some staggering claims made by scholars in the late 70s and 80s. The shonski numbers. Yes. The scale of the data they compiled forces a total recalibration of how we view Cold War casualties. Beginning in 1979, scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman began publishing this extensive research. Right. And they argued that global terror wasn't just a random byproduct of the Cold War, but was heavily, heavily concentrated within the US sphere of influence. Which, the text notes, tracked with reports from organizations like Amnesty International,

7:11who were suddenly sounding the alarm about a global epidemic of state torture. Yeah. The timing lined up perfectly. But let's be precise here because the text uses a very specific term for this. Administrative torture. We aren't just talking about a rogue prison guard or a battlefield interrogation getting out of hand, are we? Oh, far from it. Administrative torture refers to human rights abuses that are institutionalized. It's a bureaucratic function of the state. Like they have budgets for it. Budgets, standardized procedures, dedicated personnel. Their literal daily job is the systematic application of torture to suppress political opposition. It is torture as state administration. Exactly. And Chomsky and Herman's numbers on this are incredibly heavy. The text states they claim that 74% of regimes worldwide utilizing this kind of administrative torture were US client states, meaning they were governments actively receiving military financial or diplomatic support from Washington. Right. To remain in power. And the regional concentration is even more severe when you look at Latin America.

8:15This part blew my mind. Yeah, they found that out of the 10 countries operating active state-sponsored death squads at that time, all 10 were US client states. Okay, but, and I have to play a devil's advocate here, correlation doesn't automatically equal causation. Just because a regime buys US weapons or gets foreign aid doesn't necessarily mean the United States is ordering the death squads, right. How do these scholars bridge that gap? They bridge it by looking at the sheer disparity in body counts and, crucially, the underlying economic motives. Okay, lay that out for me. So the text cites Frederick Gros research, which actually uses the CIA's own estimates. Oh, wow. Yeah. Between 1968 and 1980, the CIA estimated there were 3,668 deaths caused by non-state terrorism worldwide. So a few thousand. Right. But Garot contrasts that with the casualties in US back regimes. He points to the Guatemalan Civil War as an example, 150,000 people dead, 50,000 missing. And Garot classifies 93% of those

9:16casualties as victims of state terrorism. So the argument is that the obsession with non-state terrorism, the guys with improvised explosives, is essentially a distraction from the vastly deadlier reality of state violence. That's the core of their argument. But the source material provides a motive that goes beyond just the standard containing communism narrative we usually hear. Right. The economic angle. Yes. Scholar Ruth J. Blakely argues the core motive was actually economic. She contends state terror was deployed as a deliberate strategy to forcefully expand neoliberalism throughout the global south. Okay. Let me break down what neoliberalism means in this specific violent context because it's a bit of an academic buzzword, but here it's crucial. In this context, it means using state violence to aggressively deregulate markets, privatize national resources, and protect the interests of Western corporate elites. So if a developing nation has a strong labor unions or socialist land reform movements. Exactly. If those things threaten foreign investment, state terror becomes the mechanism

10:20to physically eradicate those barriers. You eliminate the organizers, you eliminate the threat to the market. That is a massive accusation. That really is. I mean, it's one thing to say the US supported unsavory dictators to keep the Soviets out. That's standard Cold War history. It's entirely another to claim the US utilized mass murder as a tool for market restructuring. Right. And obviously you can't throw around accusations like global sponsor of state terror without intense pushback. The mainstream political science world absolutely revolted against Chomsky's framework, didn't think. Oh, the backlash was fierce. And it centered precisely on the distinction you raised earlier. The correlation risk causation thing. Yeah, the difference between funding a regime and controlling a regime. Yale political science professor James S. Fishkin delivered one of the sharpest critiques in the text. He called Chomsky and Herman's claims shockingly overstated. Because Fishkin argues that Chomsky is creating this false illusion of American omnipotence, right? Yeah. Like this idea that Washington is secretly pulling the strings

11:21of every single military dictator in the global South like some flawless global puppet master. That is his exact core argument. Fishkin points out that even if you accept all the evidence regarding US military aid and funding, it only proves systematic support, not direct control. Okay. To illustrate this, he contrasts US influence in Latin America with the Soviet Union's role in Eastern Europe. Oh, interesting. Yeah, Moscow had direct absolute structural control over its satellite states. But the US influence in the global South was heavily mediated and honestly often pretty chaotic. So fishkin is essentially saying we need to downgrade the charge. The US wasn't the architect pulling the trigger. The lesser, but maybe more historically accurate moral failure is that the United States had the leverage to potentially stop the torture. But just chose to look the other way for geopolitical stability. Systematic support versus control. It's a vital legal and philosophical distinction. And other mainstream figures took the defense much further. Right. Like William Bennett. Yes. The text highlights former US secretary of education

12:27William Bennett, who dismissed the entire premise of the US as a terrorist state and flat out preposterous. And Bennett's defense relies on a broader historical trajectory, right? He reminds people of major military interventions where the US undeniably used its immense power to halt violence. He specifically cites the liberation of Kuwait and the humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Somalia. So Bennett's logic is that a nation fundamentally willing to expend its own blood and treasure to stop ethnic cleansing or repel invasions cannot logically be categorized alongside regimes whose primary function is terror. Exactly. But if we are looking for the most rigorous academic defense of the US against Chomsky's thesis, the text points us to scholars Stephen Morris. Morris takes a really interesting approach here. He essentially accepts Chomsky's challenge. He tries to find a right-wing US-backed regime that actually rivaled the pure industrial scale brutality of the worst communist dictatorships. Right. And Morris concedes there is one historical example that meets that horrific threshold. Yes. So Harto's government in Indonesia

13:34during the mid-1960s. However, Morris attempts to use Indonesia as the ultimate defense of US innocence regarding the actual mechanics of state terror. Which sounds completely paradoxical. How does a mass slaughter prove innocence? By analyzing the supply chain of the violence, Morris argued that when the Indonesian general seized power and initiated the mass killings, the United States was not the principal foreign supplier of their military. Okay. And more importantly, Morris claimed there was absolutely no credible evidence of direct American involvement in orchestrating the coup or the subsequent massacres. He argued the US was essentially a bystander to a sovereign nation's internal bloodbath. And Morris' argument held weight for a really long time. It reinforced Fiskins theory. You know, the US might be standing in the room but they aren't swinging the axe. Right. But this is where the source material delivers a massive plot twist. Because Morris staked his entire defense on a lack of credible evidence. Yeah. So what happens when the actual highly classified receipts are released decades later?

14:35The mainstream narrative completely fractures. Because in 2017, the US Embassy in Jakarta declassified a massive trove of internal telegrams and daily briefings from that exact 1965 to 1966 period. And just a year prior to that, right? An international tribunal in the Hague had already issued a major ruling based on emerging evidence. Yes. And the details in these declassified documents are chilling. They completely obliterate the passive bystander defense. The US government wasn't just watching from the sidelines. Not at all. The text documents that they actively encouraged and facilitated the Army-led massacres. The level of micromanagement is what really stood out to me. The United States literally provided the Indonesian Armed Forces with detailed lists of Communist Party officials and sympathizers who were to be targeted. The kill list we mentioned at the start. Exactly. And the text explicitly states US officials eged on the Army to conduct the massacres. I mean, handing over a kill list is about as direct as it gets. It radically shifts

15:35the paradigm. The text brings in historian Brad Simpson, who reviewed these newly declassified cables. What did he find? Simpson noted that US officials weren't horrified by the violence. They were actually expressing internal anxiety that the Indonesian military might not take the killing far enough. Wow. Yeah. Simpson coined the term efficacious terror to describe this. Efficacious terror. Meaning the violence wasn't just chaotic bloodlust. It was highly efficient and goal-oriented. Precisely oriented toward the economic goals we discussed earlier with Ruth Blakely's neoliberalism theory. Oh, right. Eradicating the Indonesian Communist Party wasn't just about winning a geopolitical chess match with the Soviets. It was an essential physical building block required to impose Western economic policies on Indonesia after ousting the previous leadership. So the terror literally cleared the political landscape for foreign capital. Exactly. Which brings us right back to James S. Fishkin's defense. Yeah. That idea that the US only provided systematic support but never control. Yeah, that distinction. The Indonesia case study shows

16:41how dangerously thin that distinction is in practice. I mean, if you are literally handing the executioner a categorized list of targets and urging them to accelerate the pace. Right. The philosophical debate between paying for the gun and pulling the trigger feels completely irrelevant to the victim. Completely. And the Hague Tribunals certainly saw no distinction. The text notes they ruled. The United States and other Western governments were directly complicit in crimes against humanity. It just demonstrates the terrifying gray area of international relations. It really does. And it forces us to ask if state terror is this heavily insulated by legal definitions and classified documents. How does this concept apply when we pull it out of the Cold War and bring it into the modern era? And that is the exact pivot the source material makes next and it is a jarring one. Yeah. Whiplash. We've spent this entire time dissecting foreign policy in the global south during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Yeah. But the text suddenly drops us right into the present day. It takes this highly contested academic label of

17:43state terror and applies it domestically inside the United States. The transition from the jungles of Guatemala to the streets of America is incredibly stark. The text highlights events specifically from the year 2026 during the second presidency of Donald Trump. Right. And to reiterate our strict neutrality here, we are simply reporting the events and rulings documented in our source text. Exactly. During this 2026 period, the text notes a significant shift in public and legal rhetoric. Media sources and politicians began explicitly describing the activities of U.S. immigration and customs enforcement. I see. Right. Specifically a mass deportation initiative called Operation Metro Surge. They began describing this not just a strict law enforcement, but as terror. And what elevates this beyond mere political rhetoric because politicians call each other terrorists all the time is the institutional validation it received. Yes. The text cites a landmark judicial ruling from February 2026. A sitting federal judge,

18:43Judge Sunshine Sykes, presided over a major case regarding the executive branch's immigration policies. And the quote from her ruling is stunning. Let's hear it. She wrote, beyond its terror against non-citizens, the executive branch has extended its violence on its own citizens. I mean, that ruling represents a monumental legal leap. Absolutely. Judge Sykes essentially bypassed that title 22 definition we discussed at the very beginning. The one requiring perpetrators to be subnational groups. Exactly. By applying the word terror to the executive branch, she utilized the legal theory that the states monopoly on violence had crossed the threshold from legitimate law enforcement into systematic terror, impacting both non-citizens and citizens alike. I really want you the listener to absorb the magnitude of that shift. We started this deep dive looking at dissident radical academics in the 1970s, right? Struggling to convince the mainstream that covert US foreign policy in Latin America should be labeled state terror. It was a total fringe theory. Yes. Yeah. Yet you follow the timeline to

19:452026. And a sitting United States federal judge is applying that exact same framework using that exact same word to describe highly visible domestic executive branch operations. It just proves that the language of conflict is never static. The vocabulary built to describe the covert horrors of the Cold War has mutated. And it's now being weaponized within the domestic legal system to challenge the boundaries of state power at home. It's incredible. So let's zoom out and trace the arc we've just traveled. We began with the dictionary problem exploring how the US legally engineered its own exemption from the definition of terrorism by requiring actors to be subnational. Which naturally led dissident scholars to bypass the law entirely. They compiled staggering statistics to argue that US client states were actually the primary drivers of global administrative torture during the Cold War. And then we examine the intense mainstream pushback from scholars like Fishkin and Morris who argued the US only offered support, not absolute control pointing to a

20:46lack of direct evidence. Until of course we hit the declassified cables from Indonesia in 2017. Moving the US directly provided kill lists of military dictators, engaging with historians termed efficacious terror to clear the way for Western economic interests. And finally we followed the text to 2026 watching this massive devastating label of state terror cross the border being applied by federal judges to domestic law enforcement agencies like ICE. And you know if you are wondering how this dense historical debate practically impats your life, it fundamentally rewires how you consume information. The next time you hear a politician, a pundit or a judge use the word terrorist on TV, you won't just passively accept it as an objective truth. No, you will immediately ask who is actively defining this word right now. What are the mechanisms of violence they're describing? And most importantly, who does their definition protect? Which leaves us with a final provocative thought for you to consider. The definition of terrorism has mutated drastically over the centuries.

21:49It began in France as state led violence against the people. It eventually flipped to mean non-state actors attacking the government. And now in 2026 we see it circling back potentially being used by the judiciary to describe domestic law enforcement. So if the meaning of the word can shift that radically based on the era, who will hold the power to define terrorism 50 years from now? And if the definition is that malleable, does the label eventually lose all objective meaning? Exactly. Because if the dictionary is written in pencil, then terrorist ceases to be a description of an act and simply becomes the ultimate weapon of whoever happens to hold political power at the time. It all comes back to the rule book. Whoever writes the rules gets to decide who is committing a foul. Keep an eye on the referees. Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated for Lauren even. Like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people only to get flooded with candidates

22:51who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people, get ready to meet first straight talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With rss.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music,

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