Terror Trends Bulletin

Peter Huessy, who has assisted with the Divest Terror Initiative in both California and Maryland, has an excellent article appearing today on the Family Security Matters web site.

Huessy has been associated with the National Defense University and has a great deal of expertise on national security matters and he focuses on the threat of nuclear terrorism in his column today.

For our purposes, the article brings up the issue of state sponsorship of terrorism and the way the State Department treats that label.

First of all, despite what you might read and hear elsewhere, state sponsorship is still absolutely vital for Jihadist groups in particular. The idea of totally independent, non-state terrorists is largely a myth.

Even Al Qaeda and its affiliates require state sponsorship and have benefited from it for years. In the 1990s, Sudan hosted them and facilitated their relations with Hezbollah and HAMAS. The Sauds have either paid Al Qaeda protection money, or looked the other way as members of the royal family have funded them. The Sauds have also funded HAMAS, in particular the surviving families of Islamikaze bombers. Iran’s support for Al Qaeda has received less publicity, but it is true nonetheless. Iran’s longstanding and massive support for Hezbollah is well known. And of course the old Taliban regime in Afghanistan gave safe haven to Al Qaeda, as have the Pakistanis as well. These are but a few examples of state support for Jihadist terrorists.

Jihadists need places to train and rest and they need funding. Nation states provide these things, either overtly, or simply by looking the other way as terrorists set up shop in their territory.

For decades, the US State Department has kept a list of terrorist-sponsoring nations. Currently, three nations on that list support Jihadist terrorist groups: Iran, Syria and Sudan. Cuba is the fourth nation on the list, though they do not appear to have any ties to Jihad. In fact, there are no active ties between Cuba and any known terrorist group at the moment.

This State Department list has always been inadequate. For instance, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan never made the list, yet without them, where would Osama Bin Laden have hidden?

And nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan aren’t on the list, but both are most assuredly state sponsors of Jihadist terrorism. But since they are what we call “allies,” they will never be on the list. 

(Incidentally, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was on the list for many years, yet the Left seems to have selective amnesia when ever that point is brought up.)

Even for the countries who do get listed, the convoluted and acrobatic State Department language experts (in this case the foreign language is English) manage to write their descriptions in such a way that the reader doesn’t know whether the country is a terror sponsor or an ally against terrorism. This is especially true of Sudan. State lists Sudan as a terror sponsor and then typically devotes the whole section on Sudan to what a wonderful job the genocidal regime is doing to fight terrorism. Huessy writes about this in his excellent article, which should be considered a must read…