Considering that many people in these services apply the term terrorist to a lot more people and groups than Al Quaida, I really don't think it's a false equivalency.
The "War on Terror" is absurd because it's stateless and doesn't describe any one single group of people. It's a war on a very loose set of behaviors.
The average person thinks "War on Terror" and they support it because they have the people who brought down the Twin Towers in mind. Whereas people in the NSA, CIA, FBI, police stations across the country, etc, are thinking Occupy Wall Street, PETA, etc.
But Governments are neither homogenous nor monolithic. Saying 'Governments do X' is like saying 'corporations are at the root of all our problems.' Reason along those lines, and pretty soon the only rational choice is to become a hermit and avoid society entirely. After all, society is made up of people, and people are well-known to engage in murder, rape, robbery, etc. etc. Therefore, people are the problem.
If someone is engaging in murder, rape or robbery, it would make sense to call attention to this fact, and then perhaps do something about it, wouldn't it? Parts of the US government are CURRENTLY misusing the word "terrorist" as a very broad label. This is very dangerous for the reasons discussed above. It's important to call attention to this problem if we have any hope of halting it.
Yes - you call attention to the specific person engaging in those acts. When you overlook that requirement of specificity, you end up accusing people based on their membership in a class, eg 'all gypsies are thieves, X is a gypsy, therefore X is a thief.'
So saying 'the US government is doing X, and I think it's acting illegally because Y' - fine. But 'the US government is doing X and this will end badly because governments always oppress citizens' (an argument that has appeared here a lot lately) isn't fine, because it rests on a false premise.
It's clearly useful to describe a structure independently from its consitutent atoms. Anyone who doesn't do so is virtually unable to communicate.
Social structures do things, and are amenable to institutional analysis. This allows us to act without omniscience. Institutional analysis allows one to analyze institutions independently of individuals; replace all the people, and you may nevertheless expect similar outcomes. Thus we can perform institutional analysis on governments, corporations, mafias, economies, consumers, managers, startups, etc.
If this weren't the case, humans wouldn't form institutions in the first place.
I wholly agree, but surely you've noticed that many people take the observation that 'some governments sometimes do things' to mean that 'all governments inevitably do those things,' which is plainly untrue.
Governments can lie. But terrorist is not an arbitrary term to stifle dissent - it is a specific and identifiable tactic used to achieve certain goals. If somebody says black is white, it doesn't mean black and white are arbitrary labels that can be applied to anything. That's the false dichotomy that is offered to us.
Terrorist is an arbitrary term used to stifle dissent and demonide an opposition. One could use the term "freedom fighter" in it place and suddenly it has a whole new moral meaning.
We Brits know this well, as we referred to the IRA terrorists, while many Americans and Irish called them freedom fighters, while funding them.
Perhaps consider this when Nelson Mandela dies. A man who for years was considered a terrorist, but is now almost universally considered a freedom fighter.
Note: I have mode no moral judgement about either the IRA or Nelson Mandela.
The falseness is this is in the application of morality labels. "Terrorist" implies something wrong and evil. Freedom Fighter implies nobility. Both are people using violence to achieve political aims. Much like the US does. Which means many world wide have every right to consider the US a terrorist state, since that terror is by a democratically elected government.
"The first recorded incident in America occurred in 1766:
Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped
into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, by a mob that
included the town's Mayor."[0]
Claims of US perpetrated terrorism aren't even limited to the founding of the country. Take the downing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 and the Contras in Nicaragua for example[5]
Terrorism implies the use of terror, -choosing targets and tactics not to inflict the biggest/smallest damage but to scare.
Typically this results in attacks on civilians instead of attacking enemy soldiers (who have been trained to handle fear). Other typical traits: using weapons that creates visible damage, injures etc
The sets of freedom fighters and terrorists might intercept but neither is a subset of the other.
I think the main problem the US has with sticking to a clear definition of terrorism is that it usually would apply to itself as well, so that's no good..
But yes, terrorism does mean something; just the way the word is used a lot, kinda doesn't... but this doesn't change what is terrorism and what is not. Even if someone where to argue that the ends justify the means, it would not change what those means are.
