Noam Chomsky: The Role Of Terrorism In The United States

It seems that the United States has been one of the most dominant, if not the most dominant, countries in the world, since the Declaration of Independence. Yet, on Monday, April 17, 1961, our government experienced incredible criticism and extreme embarrassment when Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba, instantly stopped an invasion on the Cuban beach known as the Bay of Pigs. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his advisors, and many Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials, made the largest error of their political careers. Once the decision was made to invade Cuba, to end Castro and his Communist government, Kennedy and his administration were never looked at in the same light nor trusted again. Russian leader Nikita

Terrorism is a major threat to national and global security that encompasses more than violent means by foreigners and Islamic extremists. This is mainly because most of the recent terror acts in America have been carried out by single-issue individuals and special-interest extremists with the intention of protecting the environment and animals based on their beliefs. Actually, terrorism is described as the illegitimate use of extreme violence and force with the intention of coercing a

During the same time as Cuba and the Soviet Union's relationship, the significant events of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis brought in the United States, Cuba, and Soviet Union into conflict. John F. Kennedy believed that Castro was becoming a threat and that he would become to powerful. So on April 16, 1961, the CIA launched the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Over 2,000 "Anti- Castrolies" stormed up the Bay of Pigs in Southern Cuba. In fact, most of the Anti- Castrolies were Cuban exiles who disagreed with Castro's ideas for Cuba. For some months prior, the CIA had gathered these people to train for an assassination attempt on Castro. This group was given the codename "Brigade 2506," and in less then 24-72 hours 100 were dead and 1,189

International terrorism aspires to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government and transcend national

Imagine that you are John F. Kennedy in 1962, and you find out that your ally, Cuba, has your enemy, Soviet Union, has ICBMS (intermediate- range ballistic missiles) & Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers, that could reach the United States and aimed toward the United States. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a thirteen-day confrontation between the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Cuba had the missiles there for like three months before one of the U.S had a spy plane that figured out that Cuba had the Soviets Missiles. For a while, the U.S had Intel that Cuba had the missiles but JFK did not believe that Cuba was betraying them. These missiles were only ninety miles away from Florida the U.S. issued a military blockade to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba. When all the offensive missiles and light bombers were taken from Cuba the blockade was initially ended on November 21, 1962. Although the Cuban Missile Crisis ruined relations with the United States of America and Cuba, it impacted the blockade between the United States of America and Cuba, the respect for the United States of America, and the Bay of the Pigs.

The CIA initiated the training process by setting up training camps in Guatemala and trained "counter-revolutionary Cubans serving as the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, known as Brigade 2506" (The Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath). Soon, by November the United States had prepared a small army to perform assault landing and guerilla warfare. If the invasion turned out to be a success a former member of Castro's government, José Miró Cardona, was going to take the presidential position of Cuba. However, the plan was already in trouble by October of 1960 when Castro found out about the guerilla training camps that were based in Guatemala. Once John F. Kennedy became president, one of his first decisions in office was authorizing the plan in February of 1961. Although Castro was aware of the United States' intentions, President Kennedy still put in effort to keep the U.S. support disguised. One of the ways he attempted to do this was by assigning The Bay of Pigs as the landing point. "The site was a remote swampy area on the southern coast of Cuba, where a night landing might bring a force ashore against little resistance and help to hide any United States involvement" (The Bay of Pigs). The down side to this was that the Bay of Pigs was 80 miles from refuge in Cuba's Escambray Mountains, giving us an excessive distance which would be a problem if we were faced with an

It all began On April 17, 1961, about 1400 Cubans were launched at what became to be known as the invasion of Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. It lasted two days from April 17, 1961, to April 19, 1961. It became one of United States biggest screw-ups and failed operations. Causing the death of 114 Americans and over 1,100 were taken prisoner each was sentenced to 30 years in prison (“History.com”). After twenty months of negotiation, most of the prisoners were released in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine (. This event gave Fidel Castro a means to claim there was a threat from the USA while in reality the US barely supported the invasion.

As tensions increased between Cuba and the U.S., President John F Kennedy ordered the invasion on the evening of April 17th, 2017. The plan was to fly in around 1400 train cuban exiles undetected, launch attacks on Castro's forces, and overthrow the government with the hopes that the Cuban population would rise upa nd join in on the revolution. However, what some describe as a “Perfect failure”, was a flawed plan from the start. Due to the size of the invasion, the CIA eventually admitted that the operation in fact might be “too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful.” (http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/bay-of-pigs-invasion) The bay of Pigs invasion was, and still is, one of the biggest mistakes in American foreign policy history and can be attributed to the shear poor planing of the operation. Because Castro received word of the invasion, U.S. strategic moves were compromised, like the bombing of Cuban airfields, that of which had no aircrafts because Castro had relocated them. Other examples of poor planning played into the failure of the operation, such as the sinking of supply ships due to coral reefs and backup paratroopers missing their drop locations. Due to the disastrous nature of the operation, Castro's army soon had the fighters pinned down, where around 100 were killed and over 1,000 were taken prisoner. The kennedy administration would face

The key reason for the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba was for the radical change to communism. On 1/1/1959, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista escaped the country for the safety of the Dominican Republic (Goode, Stephen 75). Allowing Fidel Castro and his guerrilla soldiers to overthrow the previous government dictated by Batista. In just the next couple of weeks, Castro was able to establish a new government, and on 2/16/1959, he was officially stated as premier (Finkelstein, Norman H. 127). The United States at first accepted this new regime because it was a relief from the corrupt, harsh, and unpopular government of Fulgencio Batista. Shortly after everything settled down, Castro took advantage of his situation and made a rapid move to change Cuba’s political course. He broadcasted his transformation to Marxism-Leninism and declared his friendship with the Soviet Union (Goode, Stephen 75). These actions upset the US and there were growing concerns about Castro becoming too powerful. One reason was that the friendship Castro had with the Soviet Union was proving to be damaging because Cuba was receiving armed forces to improve and expand its army. Cuba was receiving 31,000 tons of arms a year, which included SU-100 assault guns, Soviet JS-2 51-ton

We live in a day and age of hypocrisy and it seems that a majority don’t acknowledge that we are all total hypocrites. Noam Chomsky, a well-known American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate does an elaborate job in his speech given at Harvard University, to make us question if there really is a war on terror. Chomsky calls everybody a hypocrite and uses the U.S. Army Manual definition of terrorism to argue that there can’t be a war on terrorism because the U.S. is also a terrorist group itself. We can’t fight something if we ourselves do that same thing. Chomsky backs up his claim with many pieces of evidence and facts about the U.S. involvement with terrorist actions. His argument is well put because it does a good job in making us understand what is really happening with the U.S. and the war on terror.

In 1959, the communist leader, Fidel Castro, took over Cuba, turning Cuba into a communist country. Consequently, President Eisenhower started planning the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which was supposed to overthrow the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. What was supposed to happen, was Cuban exiles and some US troops would land at the Bay of Pigs, and start to take control of Cuba. The US government believed that the citizens of Cuba did not like Castro at all, and when the ‘liberating’ force started to invade Cuba, there would be a mass domino effect, and Cuba would fall. However, the next president after Eisenhower, Kennedy, decided not to let US troops be involved, and the fact that the Cuban citizens actually liked Castro, led to the entire invasion’s

Castro intended on helping Cuba’s high poverty, but Castro did not turn Cuba into a democracy like he said he would (“Cuban missile Crisis”2). In 1960 the soviet premier attempted to convince Castro to become communist, soon after this castro became communist, probably influenced by the soviet premier (“Cuban missile Crisis”3). A new american president, that could probably change the war, was coming into office around this time, President Kennedy. The new president would take on the problem of this new cuban leader (International Encyclopedia of the… 1). Before him, Eisenhower trained about 1,500 Cuban Exiles in secret to try to take over Cuba, Kennedy allowed this to go on. On april 17, the exils attempted to invade Cuba(“Cuban missile Crisis”3). Since Castro had found out about the invasion, he was ready and defeated the the incoming force easily(“Cuban missile Crisis”3-4). The failed invasion seemed to help the Cuban opinion of Castro. He was now an obvious threat and so the U.S. decided to start operation Mongoose. Operation Mongoose was a secret operation to get rid of Castro, it was an operation where the U.S. would try to sabotage Cuba, but Operation Mongoose never ended up happening. The U.S.S.R. did not want to lose Cuba so they decided to secretly send weapons into Cuba, including nuclear weapons (“Cuban missile Crisis”4). These arm shipments would lead to one of the

Many changes in Cuba caused tensions to mount between the United States, Cuba, and Russia. At the time before the Bay of Pigs incident, Cuba had a corrupt

Think of the word terrorism. What is the first thing that comes to mind? One might think of kidnapping, assassination, bombing, or even genocide and guerrilla warfare. Because it is such a broad and complex issue, an all-encompassing definition is hard to formulate. The United States Department of Defence defines terrorism as…

From the lips of the FBI, “Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objective.” On September 11, 2001 the United States of America experienced such actions, it was the largest terror attack experienced by any country. The affect this had on America was tremendous,