Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
When I was a kid, I had a discussion with a family
friend who happened
to be a lawyer. I did not understand why the person who executes a
death sentence is not committing premeditated murder.
He explained to me that murder is the _unlawful_ killing of a person.
The execution of a death sentence is lawful, therefore it is not murder.
Regardless of one's position on the morality of capital punishment...
and regardless of whether you _like_ the definition of the word
"murder..." it _is_ the definition, and it is possible to understand
it and to apply it in deciding what acts should be labelled murder.
Similarly, terrorism is "the _unlawful_ use or threatened use of force
or violence by a person or an organized group against people or
property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or
governments, often for ideological or political reasons." Definition
AHD4, emphasis mine.
Now, deciding what is and is not lawful can be difficult enough in
domestic matters (as I am well aware at the moment, living as I do in
Massachusetts) and it is far more complicated in international
affairs. So this doesn't really answer any questions. But it does
_raise_ some questions.
As you say the problem is with the word lawful. (The Massachusetts court
is certainly to be commended for its recent enlightened position.) It
frequently happens that a law is passed and treated as lawful only to be
struck down as unconstitutional (=unlawful) more than a century later.
A more important question can be, "_whose_ law applies?"
Extrapolations are always on dangerous ground, and exporting domestic
law to an international situation is a fine example of that. The US
attack on Iraq may have been perfectly lawful under domestic law, but
was just as unlawful under international law.
If, for the sake of argument, you assume that the
intention of the U.
S. bombing of Nagasaki was not primarily to take out a military
target, but to create "shock and awe" in the Japanese populace,
military, and Emperor, in order to convince them to surrender--that
is, to intimidate or coerce them--then it was terrorism if unlawful,
and was not terrorism if lawful. On the whole, given that the U.S. was
attacked and was in a state of declared war with Japan, I think most
would label it as lawful.
Not so fast. It represented an escalation of weaponry. Even the
Germans showed restraint over the use of poison gas on the battlefield.
Their equipment was set up to use it in Crimea, but they didn't.
On the other hand: would our characterization of the
bombing of
Nagasaki be affected if its purpose was neither military, nor a
psychological message aimed at Japan, but a psychological message
aimed _at Stalin and at the Soviet Union_--one saying "We have these
weapons of mass destruction and we are willing to use them?" Perhaps
that would make it a terrorist act after all--but one directed at the
Soviet Union, not at Japan.
Speculative. The Soviet Union was a non-combatant in the Pacific
theatre until August 10, 1945, i.e. the day after the Nagasaki bomb.
With the end in sight it joined the war for a quick territorial grab.
Something that I don't recall seeing recently in
the arguments about
whether or not 9/11 was terrorism is this. Since we in the United
States were, in fact, terrorized, we are inclined to see it as a
terrorist act. The question is, what specific actions was Osama bin
Laden trying to intimidate or coerce us into taking? I'm not very
clear on this. Now, suppose the psychological message was aimed _at
Arabs_ and was "Al-Qaeda is big, strong, courageous, and capable of
attacking the United States with impunity. Join us." If this was the
nature of the act, then, by the dictionary definition, would it
constitute terrorism?
Looking back at that time, the Anthrax scare was a far more effective
terrorist tactic despite the fact that very few lives were lost. We
still don't know who did it, and the "terrorists" apparantly lived to
fight another day -- thus not only effective but also cost-effective.
Ec