The United States government commits acts of terrorism

For sake of ease, and because these posts are already becoming obscenely long (understandably so given that this is a very dense and complicated topic) I will stick to my two examples in Latin America done under Reagan. Winning either one of these as I had said earlier is sufficient to prove the pro side of the proposition. I assume that you accept this framework given that you did not refute it. Before I start again, I just wanted to give you props. As I had said in the comments, you are defending your position much more coherently than folks more than twice your age. Your ability to defend your position is unfortunately greater evidence of your immense talent than of the accuracy of your position. I guess I'm lucky to have the easier side to defend. That out of the way, I'll cover El Salvador first, and then move on to Nicaragua. To first establish El Salvador within the framework of this discussion, which you dispute, it seems that your own arguments concede that it was the use of violence to influence a third party. You say at the bottom of the paragraph that "you have not presented El Salvador as a scenario of violence to influence a third party" but earlier in the paragraph you argue, "The U.S. didn't intend to slaughter people wholesale; it intended to shore up defenses for its ally government." This is a concession that the violence the U.S. inflicted was intentional and with purpose. It intended to influence the opposition party to give up. Now given that it is not a government, that does not mean that it is not an agent. El Salvador has something that resembles a parliamentary system. This means that opposition parties wield a degree of power and influence and definitely constitute coherent agents. There is much greater cohesion in parliamentary parties than in single member district parties. The attempt to influence the opposition to simply wither away is a definite attempt to influence a third party. To add to the question of whether there was criminal intent, I'll quote another passage from William Blum's book "In January 1982 The New York Times published an interview with a deserter from the Salvadoran Army who described a class where severe methods of torture were demonstrated on teenage prisoners. He stated that eight US military advisors, apparently Green Berets, were present." Later he continues quoting a 1986 British documentary that interviewed another Salvadoran, this time a member of the National Guard, "I was trained in Panama for nine months by the [unintelligible] of the United States for anti-guerilla warfare. Part of the time we were instructed about torture." If we both cannot agree that the deliberate use of torture against a civilian population constitutes terrorism, then you are not abiding by your own definition. Torture constitutes the deliberate use of force with the intention of striking fear and influencing behavior. There is the added issue that many folks responsible for the violence in El Salvador have been residing in the United States for years. When a US court attempted to force one member of death squads to pay damages to a family now living in the US a higher court overruled it claiming a statute of limitations. This would have been the possibility to disavow any connection to torture and terrorism that it may have had. By the way, as I'm sure you know, the Convention against Torture says that there is no statute of limitations on torture. Now to Nicaragua. The argument that you make here becomes very interesting due to its consequences. While it shows how brilliant you are at making arguments, it also makes this topic absolutely meaningless for debate. If we accept the definition that you offered, interpreted as you interpret it in your defense of the US government concerning Nicaragua, it becomes impossible to speak of terrorism in anything but the most obvious examples (aka. organizations that espouse a commitment to terrorism.) It is very easy to find at least one part of an organization that disavows the use of violence. Your definition would actually allow a use with which I'm sure that you would disagree. The PLO under Arafat could very easily argue that they cannot be held responsible for terrorist attacks, because Arafat did not personally sanction them. This didn't stop the US or the Israelis from acting as if it was Arafat himself who picked the targets when they sealed him up inside his compound. As you can see, the US has a radically different conception of terrorism when it comes to folks that they don't agree with. If our friends do it it's one thing, but if it's our enemies, then it is despicable terrorism. I'm against the use of terrorism as a tactic, and the US in Nicaragua exhibited the clear use of terrorism, as I'll further illustrate below. You act in your argument as if words are more important than actions. As I'm sure you know, many of the actions discussed concerning the Contras occured well after Reagans Executive Order put forward in 1981. And just as the mantra goes, actions speak much louder than words. In this case, they were being screamed from mountain tops. This is where I'm going to break this down argument by argument. You say "It is true that prominent elements of the Contras perpetrated terrorist acts against civilians under Sandinista rule. Although the CIA initially funded the Contras to serve as military resistance to the revolutionary Sandinista junta, the U.S. Congress moved to cut military funding once terrorist activities were discovered." As Bush has made very clear under this agency (which he's modeling off his boy Reagan) the president is the Commander in Chief and is responsible for the Foreign Policy decisions of the United States. Here it seems to me that you're conceding that the CIA commited acts of terrorism and you're just trying to back pedal out of the fact that the US is ultimately responsible for the CIA. The CIA doesn't act on its own. I'd be expecting me to be sounding like that. Normally it's the leftists that have the weird sounding conspiracy theories about how the CIA dictates policy and the government just follows. Your argument sounds awfully close to that. The president set the policy for the CIA to carry out. That's the way it always goes. The US government is responsible for the CIA's actions. The CIA chose to fund the Contras knowing full well their choice of tactics. The funding of the Contras even went past the US congress's attempt to block the funding. That's why Ollie North lost his job. You're coming awfully close to admitting it, while not just crossing the line in this argument. Next you say, "Terrorist activities went against policies that President Reagan instated himself, such as the 1981 executive order banning political assassinations." The policies that are on paper mean very little when compared to the way that you choose to actually act. Clinton said he was against NAFTA as framed in 93. That didn't mean much when it came to him signing the actual document. What states do is much more important than what they say. Even Bush still claims that the US is against torture. Next you say, "The U.S. did aim to support conventional military actions against the regime, but did not seek to support terrorist activity." The way that the US attempted conventional military actions in Nicaragua was terrorist activity. They knew it and didn't care. That's in the argument concerning continued support for the Contras. The only way that you could possibly win this argument is if Ronald Reagan, George Bush the first, and that whole cabinent and CIA deparment were sitting in jail for perpetrating terrorism. Instead, Bush got elected president, Negroponte is our new Intelligence Director and Ronald Reagan is all but Jesus for modern day Republicans. Even Ollie North has his own Fox News TV show. If the US cared about terrorism, all of that would be much different.