In a speech delivered in the autumn of 2002, as the United States moved inexorably toward war with Iraq, the late Joan Didion delivered an offhand remark that effectively summed up the flaw at the heart of the logic behind that coming war, and of the logic of a number of wars before it, and of a number of wars to come. Referring to “the ‘war on terror’ that the President had declared” of which the operation against Iraq was the centerpiece, Didion added a parenthetical critique: “…as if terror were a state and not a technique.”
Twenty-three and a half years later, we live in the detritus of a general lack of understanding of precisely that point. This detritus includes interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, a proxy war in Syria, bombings in Somalia and Nigeria and Yemen, a war with Iran and a genocide in Palestine; as well as warrantless surveillance, extralegal deportations for speech, and trillions of dollars of public debt. Through all of this, up to the present, Americans have found ourselves unable to conceptualize much less debate the fact that we are in a war with no modern precedent.
Though we have been in a never-ending war before, from 1941 to 1991, against Nazism and Sovietism, that war was against states representing alternative systems of political economy to our own. Today we are not at war against a state or a system but against a technique; and, though the “terrorists” we label tend to be Muslims, they are not just Muslims, and they are not just foreigners. They are also white Americans identifying with the principles of small government; black Americans at the receiving end of a war on drugs and crime; and advocates for illegal immigrants without criminal offenses. The reason we do not conceptualize or debate this enveloping reality is because terror has become not just a “technique” of war but a technique of rhetoric: one employed by political operators to expand their power.
Tracing how this specter of terror has been created reveals a history of abuse and misuse at the hands of lawyers, policymakers, and politicians. The abuse and misuse turns on systematically misinforming the American people about actions by Washington DC carried out in their name, and it is predicated on the redefinition of the word terror. Investigating the history of this redefinition shows that terror’s real meaning was first narrowed and then conflated with crime to justify repression at home and war abroad, often at the hands of Jewish Zionists operating off a European lineage of colonialism.
To understand how the word “terror’s” application first became narrowed, Joan Didion is a promising place to start. In no way an expert on “terrorism,” she nonetheless was a writer who knew words’ meanings, and she accrued considerable experience seeing the uses of terror by people we have not been encouraged to think of in relation to that term. In 1982, Didion and her husband, the journalist John Gregory Dunne, traveled to El Salvador to report on the American-backed government there: a right-wing junta instrumental in 1980 in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had spoken publicly against massacres and disappearances being carried out by the junta’s agents. The word “terror,” which according to the Cambridge Dictionary means “violent actions or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims,” occurs five times in Didion’s book Salvador. Whether at an airport checkpoint or at a “body dump” or at an evening meal or outside of a mortuary, terror in Didion’s reporting occurs at government hands, an impression backed by statistics in El Salvador and from the State Department.
But this reality, “that government forces do most of the killing,” and that their “vocation for terror” was “the given of the place,” was not the word on El Salvador that filtered out from Washington DC, where President Ronald Reagan heralded the fight for “freedom” by “the people of El Salvador” against “Cuban-backed guerrillas” who “threatened death to any who voted.” Indeed, at the time Didion wrote on El Salvador, thirty-one years after the 1941 inception of American empire, her definition of terror as a “technique” sometimes practiced by western governments was outside-the-margins of public discourse. When “terror” was referenced in American public life, it tended to be in context of Nazi and Communist, or “totalitarian,” repression. These references, while accurate when it came to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, also served another purpose. They justified Washington’s prosecution of the Cold War which involved actions abroad, from the use of deadly chemicals on civilians in Vietnam to the sponsorship of death squads who slaughtered hundreds of women and children at a time in El Salvador, that could be construed as terroristic themselves.
Despite this fixed focus in the public arena, Didion’s apprehension that terror could also exist at the hands of the United States government was shared inside American by another group: Black Americans at the receiving end of a “War on Crime” waged by the Reagan administration. This War on Crime was in many senses an actual war for those on its receiving end. Helicopters, SWAT teams, military-grade weapons, surveillance, stop-and-frisk, beatings, death threats—this became the reality of law enforcement inside American cities. Nearly two million people, disproportionally black men, were incarcerated from the 1970s to the 2000s in what was described by those affected by it as a “campaign of terror” and “a reign of terror upon honest citizens of the black community.” Nonetheless, as in El Salvador, this action was framed by its backers in a very different way, in this case using the metaphor of foreign relations. According to then-Senator Joe Biden, “Crime is a national defense problem. You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” According to Oklahoma Congressman Glenn English, “We in the Democratic Party realize that the war on drugs has to be fought like World War II—a complete and thorough effort, one dedicated to victory at any cost.” For the Reagan administration, in an America “under siege” from its “inner cities,” militarizing law enforcement gave police “just the weapons they need to fight an effective war.”
But, as the 1980s ended and so did the Cold War, comparisons to Nazism and Communism and traditional wars were no longer adequate justifications for the War on Crime, or for other domestic operations. Increasingly, the word “terror” took their place, applied by the government to what in the past would have been thought of as instances of criminality. In 1985, in a speech on what he called the intersection between terrorism and crime, Director of the FBI William H. Webster said that “another serious crime problem facing our cities [is]…the cold, stark, fear-producing word ‘terrorism.’” In 1989, George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General justified a major escalation of militarized policing by citing “the escalation in drug-connected violence and urban terrorism in many of our major cities.”
In 1995, The Weekly Standard published what became the most influential political diagnosis, by future Bush White House advisor John J. Dilulio, of “the rash of youth crime and violence that has begun to sweep…big cities.” This article put flesh on the rhetorical bone that was “urban terrorism.” In just its first three paragraphs it described “super-predators,” apparently young and violent black men, as people “who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future” and “who…‘kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive.’” In the words of Hillary Clinton in 1996, borrowing from DiIulio’s article to justify the heightened War on Crime crackdown of her husband’s Administration: “[super-predators have] no conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
But, in the schema of terror developed in the 1980s and 1990s, black men were not the only purveyors of terror; so were whites. According to FBI Director Webster, from the same speech, “Here in the United States, right-wing terrorist groups espousing racial hatred have waged a war of arson, robbery, and murder.” In 1995, Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, speaking in the aftermath of the deadly siege of the Branch Davidians at their Waco compound, said that legislators pushing to investigate the siege were engaging in a “diversion” and opposed to “the Administration’s effort…to fight domestic terrorism.” According to John J. DiIulio, writing in the same article, “other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems…even the rural heartland,” where, according to DiIulio, members of the “white working-class” who have “fallen on hard times” testified that “they’re becoming afraid of their own children.”
Within a quarter-century, this “prognosis” of Webster’s and Panetta’s and DiIulio’s was the agenda in Washington DC. Speaking to Politico in 2021, Frances Fragos Townsend, former deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and White House homeland security adviser under President George W. Bush, said that “far too little attention has been paid to…white supremacists [causing] things like…Jan. 6…we now find ourselves having to fight almost equally on two fronts.” Speaking that same year, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas “told senators…that the greatest domestic threat facing the United States came from…‘those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.’” Four years later, in the Trump White House, the wheel had again turned, this time against nonviolent illegal immigrants and Americans opposed to their deportation. Indeed, the three Americans shot by ICE and Border Patrol at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, Marimar Martinez and Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, were all labeled domestic terrorists.
The relentless promotion of this narrative of terror has involved a certain amount of factual desynchrony. Leon Panetta calling investigating what happened at Waco a “diversion” meant ignoring or suppressing the fact that an FBI task force had fired “potentially flammable” devices into the compound: possibly leading to the fires which caused the deaths of seventy-six people including twenty-five children. Merrick Garland mounting a symbolic ‘Defense of Democracy’ by attempting to prosecute all of the approximately 2,000 people who entered the capitol building on January 6 meant relying on the work of private groups of tech-vigilantes as well as online mobs who used the tech vigilantes to settle local political scores. And the Trump administration labeling the three anti-deportation protestors shot and in two cases killed by federal agents “domestic terrorists” ignored the facts of each incident, which showed each protestor engaged in either nonviolent protest or actively trying to exit the scene when he or she was shot. But ascribing the concept of terror to crime allowed the government to move beyond what others might construe as facts, and to justify its own suspect and sometimes extralegal actions in the name of fighting a larger threat.
And it was not just, in these years, the concept of terror that was being ascribed to crime in order to loosen the bonds of legal action by Washington domestically. When it came to actions of belligerents abroad operating on behalf of foreign claimants, the concept of crime was also being ascribed to terror. Continuing with his “Terrorism as a Crime” speech, William H. Webster took as his thesis the idea that “in our recognition of the nature of terrorism as a crime lies our best hope in dealing with it.” According to Webster, delving into specifics:
“American Marines in EI Salvador have fallen victim to terrorists’ bullets, evoking again the terrible tragedy of our Marines in Beirut…a crime by any civilized standard, committed against innocent people, away from the scene of political conflict [that] must be dealt with as a crime.”
The emerging logic here was that acts of what were called terror abroad would be treated as crimes with lessening regard to sovereignty. What it eventually came to mean was that practitioners of “terror” abroad or on behalf of foreign nations were not entitled to the status of enemy combatants and the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The culmination of this shift a little more than fifteen years later was largely the work of David Addington, who got his start in the CIA; moved to the Reagan White House and the George H.W. Bush Defense Department; and, during the George W. Bush administration, became Dick Cheney’s Chief Counsel, responsible for the legal “reforms” for waging the “Global War on Terror.”
According to Addington, the “new paradigm” of the Global War on Terror necessitated distinguishing between “enemy detainees” and “illegal enemy combatants,” or “terrorists,” with the distinguishing left up to the detainers. When it came to “terrorists,” according to Addington, the Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of prisoners of war should not apply because “terrorists will not follow…rules in any event.” Nor did the prosecution of these alleged terrorists only extend abroad; when it came to the home front, Americans’ sovereignty, e.g. the laws they were protected by as nationals, counted for little. When Department of Justice lawyers told Addington that they did not believe that “a [domestic and international] surveillance program being conducted by the NSA” to monitor alleged terrorists was legal, Addington said, “If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.” And, “in a discussion about whether surveillance of communications had to be approved by a court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),” Addington contributed this: “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court.”
The point here went beyond individual shifts in the law. Cumulatively, it was to render a wide range of groups outside the laws of war by unilaterally defining them as terrorists and defining terrorism as a crime, and then to do the same for states which supported those groups. This is how the Bush White House justified its preemptive invasion of Iraq, based on Saddam Hussein’s purported and later disproven links to Al Qaeda. It is why the Obama White House could, circumventing Congress, allow drone strikes in Pakistan, a sovereign nation, without Pakistan’s approval. It is why Donald Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel, which David Addington made assiduous use of during the Bush administration, could opine after strikes against alleged terrorists in Syria in 2018 that “the president ‘is authorized to commit…hostilities, without prior congressional approval.’” It is why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently authorized the bombing of alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers (now deemed “narco-terrorists”) in boats in international waters. It is broadly why, in 2026, the Trump administration contravened legal and diplomatic norms with the possibly extralegal assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader of a “state sponsor of terror.” And it is why, in the name of combating these “terrorists” or “criminals,” America’s government has infringed on Americans’ own sovereignty via warrantless surveillance through the vehicle of FISA 702.
Just as the rhetorical characterization of black and white and Latino and leftist “terrorists” at home involved framings which flew in the face of on-the-ground realities, so these legal redefinitions of terror and terrorists involved the elision or distortion of facts and context. Ronald Reagan’s administration may have called the 1983 Lebanon barracks bombing an act of terrorism, but, as Jim Bovard has written in the Libertarian Institute, describing the bombing as a response by Lebanese Muslims to relentless shelling from America, “a surprise attack on a troop concentration in a combat zone does not fit most definitions of terrorism.” FBI and CIA director William H. Webster may have called the 1985 attack of Marxist rebel groups which killed thirteen Salvadorans and American marines “a crime by any civilized standard,” but this crime came during a 12-year Salvadoran civil war in which more than 71,000 civilians were killed, the vast majority by U.S.-backed governments. And Iran may be labeled a “state sponsor of terror” for its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, but this ignores the fact that both Hamas and Hezbollah owe their support to both Lebanon’s militias and the Palestinian Leadership being de facto bought off by Israel as Israel staged incursions into South Lebanon and the Palestinian territories which “halted daily life, destroyed houses, schools, hospitals, and all types of infrastructure, and left thousands dead and injured.”
What is lacking in framings of “terror” that ignore these facts is, in the words of Queens College Belfast historian Richard English, an “explicable dynamic.” English, who has written a well-regarded history of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), has emphasized that, “however horrific the PIRA’s violence (and my own view remains that it was never justified…) that violence remains incomprehensible unless one recognizes…an explicable dynamic to the PIRA’s politics and to why that politics appealed to those who supported it.” English has a number of persuasive ideas about what, in the case of PIRA, this “explicable dynamic” ended up being. But for thirty years, similar efforts to explain various forms of resistance by blacks and working class whites and Muslims in America have been reliably construed by established political and media institutions as, at best, a case of justifying the actions of people whose perceptions have been “narrowed” by “grievance.” At worst they have been seen as justifying or abetting treason or sedition or, of course, “terror.” This has the advantage of justifying the use of American force against these actors while exculpating Washington DC of its role as a precipitating cause of their actions.
And this is not just the establishment line in the spheres of law and rhetoric. Indeed, probably the starkest window into this framing of terrorism is anti-terrorist literature—and, perhaps more importantly, it is the clearest window into the underlying genesis of anti-terrorist rhetoric and anti-terrorist legalism. An instructive example in this vein is the work of the late Tom Clancy: the bestselling patriotic techno-thriller author with deep connections to actual Washington operators like Oliver North. Clancy’s regular roster of foreign villains included Palestinians, Iranians, communists, and the PIRA (Clancy is a particular devotee of the British royal family); and in his books his “revulsion toward…terrorists [was] so strident and intense…that it verge[d] on the physical.” But terrorists are not the only people toward whom Clancy felt aggressive emotions. In the words of one reviewer, “when [Clancy] creates a female character he cannot…resist humiliating her” and, in the view of another, his “matey populism and his deference and snobbery” were “indissolubly linked” to a “taste for sadistic ruthlessness and…sentimentality.”
There was a lineage to Clancy’s writing. Indeed, similar criticisms were made about another, earlier, well-connected author of anti-terrorist techno-thrillers, Ian Fleming. Fleming’s actual inner circle of fellow ex-spies, journalists, and aristocrats deplored his Bond books for their “descriptions of physical cruelty” by his “sado-masochistic private eye” who doubles as maintainer of civilization against the “primeval” machinations of the sometimes literally black “underworld.” The issue here was not the violence and the violent sex in Fleming’s books, which were the norms in the colonial provinces and the aristocratic bedrooms of imperial Britain; it was that the content had been “mass-produced for less well-educated citizens” and so “the private joke had gone too far; it had been made public.” And in fact, to look at the runners of today’s War on Crime and Wars on Terror, many of whom are exposed in another private joke gone public, the Epstein files, is to recognize a similar dynamic when it comes to their views of blacks and Muslims and women and now “goys.” This is a dynamic in which “snobbery” and “sadism,” “sadistic ruthlessness and sentimentality,” are justified by “physical revulsion” toward “the other.”
There is a theory to these perspectives, and the theory is colonialism. Indeed, colonialism, as Joseph Conrad saw very clearly, is the heart of the darkness that western imperial operators have cast rhetorically over subject populations in Africa and Asia and Latin America and North America to make them less than fully human and justify extractive campaigns against them. What gaining public support for these campaigns and for the laws changed to wage them depended on was a story: the “mythology” of “red terror” or the terror of “darkest Africa” or “Muslim terror,” which “cast [these] peoples as irrational aggressors.” These stories in America and those like them in Europe were framings of the French and British and Belgians and Germans and WASPs. And it was those imperial operators–Cecil Rhodes and Lord Balfour and King Leopold II and Napoleon III—on whom, as I have reported in the past, Theodor Herzl and the French and British Rothschilds and Chaim Weizmann went to school.
Indeed, even before they began arbitering American empire in the 1980s and 1990s, Zionists have excelled at telling stories. Theodor Herzl made his career as the literary editor of a Viennese newspaper. The mostly Jewish American producers like Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn, Irving Thalberg, Jack Warner, L.B. Mayer, Adolph Zuckor and David O. Selznick who de facto founded Hollywood used movies to “invent,” in John Gregory Dunne’s words, “an empire of their own’” in which eradication of Native Americans and mobilizations against fascism and communism did not threaten civil liberties, and support for Israel did not mean mass displacement. Hollywood, along with finance, was the genesis of power of Jewish Zionists in America from the early twentieth century to the 1980s. From there, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, they branched into academia. And from there, as I have also reported, they branched into journalism and then politics, succeeding the WASPs as arbiters of each of these arenas and putting the protection of Israel as well as its guarantors in Washington at the center of American national security. To look at the turns in the narrative wheel that expanded Washington’s power, creating our Global War on Terror against blacks and whites and illegal immigrants and Muslims since the 1990s, is to see, at each crucial juncture, Jewish Zionists.
The 1995 article by John J. DiIulio that introduced the term super-predator was published in The Weekly Standard, which was edited by William Kristol, the son of Irving Kristol, along with Norman Podhoretz the founder of neoconservatism, and the main journalistic backer of the Iraq War. David Addington’s and the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal contortions to justify the Global War on Terror after 2001 were in collaboration with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was deeply connected to the circles of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clinton White House. The Iraq War was in many ways the product of the efforts of Addington, Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Kenneth Adelman.
The 2018 Office of Legal Counsel Order which “legalized” presidential attacks in Syria, based on “precedent” said to be set during America’s Indian Wars, was released under the purview of Steven Engel, who was later featured by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency as a Jewish contender for Supreme Court Justice. The rhetorical and legal efforts against alleged white terrorism and alleged terrorism by illegal immigrants have been helmed by Merrick Garland and Stephen Miller, while Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be the main mover behind our war with Iran. And Pete Hegseth’s deputy and closest ally at the Pentagon, the person responsible for putting his Clancy-heavy approach of “maximum lethality not tepid legality” into action against considerable internal resistance, is Steve Feinberg, “a billionaire owner of an investment firm.”
During this time, Hollywood has also been busy. For some Jewish Zionist producers and directors like Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein, Ed Zwick, Rob Reiner, Steven Golin, and Aaron Sorkin, Native Americans, Black Americans, Middle Eastern Muslims and Africans feature nobly onscreen, but always in the guise of victims, or else heroes committed to comity and upward mobility and a more perfect union. For others like Jerry Bruckheimer and Mace Neufeld, who produced the wildly successful Tom Clancy films, as well as Megan Ellison, the producer of Zero Dark Thirty, the “resistance” is featured, but to be obliterated not understood. In the last year, Zionists have pushed even further into the entertainment-propaganda game, via Megan Ellison’s father and brother Larry and David Ellison’s control over CBS News, Paramount, and now Warner Brothers. What all of these propaganda pushes have in common is to vilify those belief systems (Islamism, Marxism, constitutional populism, and Christian fundamentalism) offering alternatives to military corporate conglomeration, or what in the propagandists’ debased redescriptionamounts to “radical centrism” or “liberalism.”
Tellingly, Joan Didion, a careful reader of Joseph Conrad and a longtime student of America’s misadventures in Latin America and the Middle East, recognized the effect of both past colonialisms and current Zionism when she described in her speech in 2002 the context for why the definition of terror was no longer open for consideration. Namely, sixty years of American empire which had come to hinge on “our relationship with…Israel,” a relationship which “is not discussed rationally—in fact…rarely discussed at all” because it “has come to be seen…as unraisable, potentially lethal, the conversational equivalent of an unclaimed bag on a bus.” When the subject is raised, “we take cover. We wait for the entire subject to be defused, safely insulated behind baffles of invective and counterinvective. Many opinions are expressed. Few are allowed to develop. Even fewer change.” It is our civil liberties and the lives of others that are the prices of this frozen discourse—and it is the colonialist, unconstitutional inheritance of European empires that this frozen discourse allows to be inflicted both on our shores and abroad.
