Are You a Terrorist?
As the definition of terrorism expands, NonZero has compiled a handy guide to keep you on the right side of the law.
A few weeks after 9/11, veteran journalist Michael Kinsley warned that President Bush’s declaration of a “war on terrorism” was wrong-headed, for at least two reasons. The first was that Bush, by promising the total defeat of a tactic rather than a group, was “setting America and himself up to turn victory into the appearance of defeat.” The second was wider in scope: “using ‘terrorism’ to win the support of other nations can backfire unless you have a definition you apply consistently”—and “there is no such definition,” Kinsley wrote. By rallying the world in a war against “terrorism,” Bush was legitimizing countless smaller battles between states and the groups they’d like to control.
This warning would prove prescient. In the nearly 25 years since the Global War on Terror kicked off, the terrorist label has expanded to include a remarkable range of people and organizations around the world. China has famously justified its crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang as counter-terrorism. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared the gangs in El Salvador to be terrorists so that he could round up alleged members and throw them in a brutal mega-prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center. Just this month, British authorities designated Palestine Action as a terror organization after some of its members snuck onto a military base and spray painted a pair of planes; scores of activists have since been arrested for peaceful protests in support of these newly minted terrorists.
The impossible task of defining terrorism has also created civil liberties problems here at home—problems that have been exacerbated by President Trump, who has never hesitated to stretch the definition of terrorism to suit his interests. In his first term, Trump broke with the long-standing norm that terror groups could only be non-state actors by designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the backbone of Iran’s military, as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). In his second term, he’s already designated more than a dozen groups with questionable links to terrorism, including Mexican cartels, Haitian and Venezuelan gangs, and even some Palestinian civil society groups.
We at NonZero feel a responsibility to ensure that our readers are up to date on the ever-expanding definitions of terrorism. After all, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, it is a serious crime to even attempt to provide a terror group with “material support”—a category that includes just about any good or service, including “expert advice.” So here is a handy guide to help you think twice before committing any accidental acts of terror.
Scenario 1: Buying Weed
Today, you can buy recreational cannabis in 24 US states. For Americans living in the rest of the country, you’ll have to find a dealer. As the managing editor of an upstanding newsletter, I can’t help you with that. But I can offer one piece of advice: Before buying anything, you should be 100 percent sure that your dealer didn’t get their supply from a cartel.
As legal expert Rachel Levinson-Waldman recently noted, Trump’s decision to designate cartels as terror groups means that “low-level drug users could end up buying from a member of a ‘foreign terrorist organization’”—a transaction that could expose them to prosecution under federal laws that proscribe “material support” for terrorism. And this is no idle threat: In January, a prominent MAGA-aligned think tank explained that one big upside of the cartel designations is that they “exponentially increase the pool of individuals subject to prosecution,” including “even drug clients.”