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As others have observed, palling around with terrorists has a long and sordid history in America. Just take the six decades I’ve been alive. Venerated Senators and Representatives made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk, whose murders were the ultimate backstop for maintaining American apartheid. That system, you may recall, rested on ruthless white rule over the portion of the United States which allegedly lost the Civil War. It reinstituted slavery in a visible but widely ignored form, and for 90 years it destroyed every civil right of African-Americans, enforcing this with terror, including lynchings and other murders.
Fast forward to Henry Kissinger, the architect of raining terror on Cambodia, a policy that led to tens of thousands of dead civilians and contributed to the ascendance of the previously minuscule Khmer Rouge. Their astounding butchery and terrorism against their own people was not enough to persuade the United States to stop supporting them in their effort to keep control of Cambodia’s U.N. seat after their cross-border aggression was defeated, government overthrown and genocide stopped by Vietnam. Not to mention Kissinger’s role in Indonesia and Chile.
Ronald Reagan continued the hoary U.S. policy of supporting (and installing) surrogates who were expected to and trained to and funded to keep the populace in line in the interests of American corporadoes, as the much-quoted Marine General Smedley Butler pointed out nearly 75 years ago. With or without fake elections, terror was the preferred technique for this keeping-in-line process in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, causing guerrilla movements to arise.
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At this point some readers no doubt want to go all definitional on me. What is terrorism, anyway? Distinctions, it will be said, must be made between the official actions of leaders of nation-states and those of non-state organizations. That game is as duplicitous as the "no moral equivalence" argument of the empire-mongers who, to support America’s "interests," clink glasses and make financial arrangements with big-time murderers in various armies and presidential palaces. However, for the benefit of those who demand that such distinctions be discussed and measured, let me just say that the Weather Underground’s outrageously wrongheaded attacks nearly 40 years ago were magnitudes removed from U.S.-sponsored terrorism and the lethal campaigns of radical anti-abortionists, right-wing militias and cells like Tim McVeigh’s. To say this does not, let me not be misunderstood, justify or excuse what the Weathermen did.
Which brings me back to where I started.

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