George Washington and his fellow terrorists attack their British liberators
While the Patriot Act is good for an almost endless supply of gut laughs, my favorite under-the-radar post-9/11 free-for-all piece of pseudo-legislation has to be Executive Order 13224. No clever jingoistic name, just a number. It's the act that designated certain foreign organizations as terrorist groups and allows the United States law enforcement community to freeze financial assets of such groups.
Of course, even if this was more well-publicized, no one would have argued against it. It's a fact that dangerous terrorist groups like Al-Qaida or the Abu Sayyaf used American-owned businesses named things like Al-Hamati Sweets Bakeries ( I'm not making this up) to launder and funnel funds to terrorists.
Here's the rub. In typical kid-in-a-candy-store fashion, this administration chose to indulge its biases, or perhaps simply showcase its base ignorance, by blanketing the terrorist label on basically any group they didn't happen to like. In retrospect, I'm tempted to laud their restraint for not putting the League of Women Voters and Greenpeace on it.
While they're clearly having trouble with their rudimentary macroeconomics lessons and I don't want to interrupt their glacial learning process, I feel compelled to offer the neo-conservative world a quick history lesson: THIS COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED BY "TERRORISTS" if Executive Order 13224 is the definition of terrorism. Remember Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and all the other Revolutionary War heroes? I hate to break it to you, but they were armed with more than colorful language. And they intended to hurt the Brits. In many instances, they did. Once they even made an attack against British private interests in the US…in a harbor somewhere, I think.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. When the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan fought the Soviets in the 80s, we were on their side. We love the idea of the little guy (America / Afghanistan) fighting the bloated colonial oppresors (Britain / Russia). Reagan called them "freedom fighters" and armed them to the teeth. Of course, those Mujahadeen used their CIA training and weapons to eventually found Al-Qaida, but that's another rant.
The point is, most of the groups on that list are vile terrorists. But some of them are groups committed to fighting for freedom in the same way we did 225 years ago. The IRA or Sendero Luminoso or the Tamil Tigers or the June78 group or the ETA or the Nepalese Maoists are as much terrorists as George Washington and Nelson Mandela. Are they violent? Yup. That's pretty much how people win their freedom. Last time I checked it was never handed to anyone. We sure as hell had to fight for it.
Expecting anyone in this political climate to understand such a distinction is obviously unreasonable. But from now on, every time you spend a dollar bill, remember that your money prominently features a terrorist as defined by Executive Order 13224 of these United States of America.