Talk:United States and state-sponsored terrorism

Pretty mindless and activistic article

 * Indictement of David Carrett does not prove his factual involvement in anything. It is an allegation that resulted in no conviction. Because it's been made up.
 * The Piazza Fontana inclusion as a whole in this article is a bunch of speculation, hearsay, insinuation and conspiracy theories that should not be contained in a factual article.
 * The United States government was also criticized by Iran for its silence following the beheading of a child by the Islamist group Nour al-Din al-Zenki, a group that is a recipient of US military aid and is accused of many war crimes  - The group is not a recipient of US military aid, and was not at the time either. Seems like someone really wants to hammer home some kind of a message he already made up in his mind.
 * Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also accused the United States of supporting ISIS in Syria, claiming Turkey has evidence of U.S. support for ISIS through pictures, photos, and videos, without further elaborating on said evidence - I have added "or providing any". Apparently someone doesn't like me pointing out such large swathes of this article are heresay and pointless allegations, so it's getting deleted.
 * Orlando Bosch's alleged terroristic activities (unless you want to call assassinating Castro that) seem to be quite completely unrelated to USA government, and worse, would be actually at odds with its organisations, if the article's implications are to be believed. But we obviously need to stuff into this article all sorts of random stuff to make it look like USA is being bad through sheer volume of text.
 * Luis Posada Carriles alleged terrorism seems to be consisting of things he was acquited for, or he retracted, and in which he was "implicated" without any real elaboration what is that supposed to be meaning. For some reason in an article about terrorism, an arrest for illegal crossing of border is included. We obviously need to stuff into this article all sorts of irrelevant stuff to make it look like USA is being bad.
 * Yup that guy said it. Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles is WP:UNDUE
 * Armed Forces Directive No. 200-05/91 does not seem to be actually involved in any terrorism despite a lot of text expended.
 * Kosovo Liberation Army part: " In the following years, however, an ethnic Albanian insurgency emerged in southern Serbia (1999–2001) and in Macedonia (2001). The EU condemned what it described as the "extremism" and use of "illegal terrorist actions" by the group active in southern Serbia.[150]" - relation of this event to KLA and more importantly US government is where?
 * Syrian Civil War portion is completely pointless and desperate and does not seem to actually include any instance of US sponsorship of terrorism. If arms ending up on black market is sponsorship of terrorism then I guess Bashar Al Assad and Russia sponsored Islamic State. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:1028:83B0:797E:D5F6:465A:F79C:16A1 (talk) 01:18, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Removing Rene Schneider Section/Fix Introduction
I added the following sentence to the first paragraph: "However, it is important to note that U.S. support for a terrorist organization does not mean the U.S. supports that group's terrorist activities; most groups below were supported for separate geopolitical reasons."

reverted the change, saying "unsourced analysis"

I added the sentence to the first paragraph to address continuous issues with balancing neutral POV. Part of the reason for this is that there is no widely accepted definition of terrorism (see Definitions of terrorism). Similarly, there is no widely accepted definition of what it means to be a state sponsor of terrorism. The article State-sponsored terrorism itself is highly deficient on the matter: the "Definition" section only discusses U.S. law, and the first line seems to be a definition but is not contained in the source given. Calling the U.S. a state sponsor of terrorism can easily connote something that the article is not describing in most instances. The intro has its own specific problems as well. It says the U.S. "at various times" has supported terrorist groups and also supported "numerous" authoritarian regimes. According to the article, U.S. support for terrorists has been "prominent," which implies a larger scale than evidence is provided for. Furthermore, it claims the U.S. has extensively sponsored terrorism in the middle east and southern Africa, but no examples are given in the entire article. These vague generalizations are problematic for balancing POV. Thus, I think the intro should be rewritten to provide a clearer overview of what the article is saying.

The analysis for my addition came from the article itself. The third paragraph says "Various reasons have been given to justify such support. These include destabilizing political movements that might have aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War..." The rest of the paragraph lists several other geopolitical reasons the U.S. have supported groups engaged in terrorist activities. I originally believed there was evidence in many of the sections as well, but having examined them all again I no longer believe this is the case. I agree with Levivich's reversion. It is possible to take the third paragraph the way I understood it, but that is not the only possible understanding of the third paragraph. I think the third paragraph is also vague and needs to be rewritten.

My last problem is mainly with the Rene Schneider section. It already has a mark indicating that its sources are problematic. The entire section only documents an attempted assassination. It fits much better under Human rights violations by the CIA. The definition of terrorism article clearly states that legitimate targets (like a foreign leader) do not count as terrorism. Furthermore, it states that terrorism "reaches more than the immediate target victims and is also directed at targets consisting of a larger spectrum of society." Clearly, assassination does not count as terrorism. Under WP:TERRORISM, something should only be labelled terrorism if in the original source. The sources for the article do not at all label the incident as terrorism. Thus, labelling the incident terrorism is completely unsourced, the main article on definitions of terrorism specifically excludes it from being terrorism, and there is a third article which the incident fits significantly better.

I deleted the Rene Schneider section. I agree with the revision of my first edit, but the entire intro part should be rewritten entirely for both neutral POV and just to be a clearer and more specific introduction to the actual content of the article. There are other problems with the rest of the article with respect to neutral POV (I'll make a separate, shorter talk page section), but the intro doesn't provide an accurate representation either way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ImVeryAwesome (talk • contribs) 04:15, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Idea for reworking the article
Instead of citing individual historical episodes, why not do it country by country? For example, Germany and Cuba etc INFJMcLovin (talk) 23:38, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

No. Like this is better. Episodes with reliable and notable sources.93.86.153.177 (talk) 13:23, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Kosovo Liberation Army
Is there any concrete evidence that KLA was directly supported by the USA and that they received military training? The sources provided in support of this claim appear to be based either on suppositions or an article in the Sunday Times that reports it claiming to have known through sources close to the CIA, but that does not prove the fact. Mmanu54 (talk) 11:37, 25 June 2023 (UTC)