Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

THE COVENANT, THE SWORD, AND THE ARM OF THE LORD • 127Military counterterrorism efforts are limited within the UnitedStates by the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of militaryforce for the functions of ordinary police work within the UnitedStates, except in a few narrowly circumscribed situations. Use of theU.S. military for counterterrorism outside the United States has alsobeen limited by Executive Order 12333, which prohibits unlawfulassassination of individuals for political purposes. The qualificationof “unlawful” does allow the military to strike at individuals duringlegitimate military operations, since this is a form of warfare againstcombatants permitted by the laws of war. Legitimate military operationsare considered to include such things as the 15 April 1986 U.S.Air Force bombing of Libya in retaliation for the bombing of theLaBelle Discothèque in Berlin by Libyan agents. For such counterterroristoperations to be effective, they must be used with restraintwith minimal impact on innocent bystanders in order to preserve thelegitimacy of the counterterrorist operation.The United States has several special military counterterrorist responseunits, including the Delta Force and the Naval Special WarfareDevelopment Group (formerly known as SEAL Team Six), whichengage in regular training and terrorist simulations, and which havebeen effectively deployed on certain known occasions. Similarly,Great Britain has its Special Air Service (SAS) counterterrorism unitswhile Germany has its Grenzschutz gruppe-9 (GSG-9) units used inspecial operations against terrorists. Due to the secretive nature of theoperations by such elite response teams, very often their successfuloperations are not publicized in order not to compromise the tacticsand intelligence gathering that have proven to be essential.THE COVENANT, THE SWORD, AND THE ARM OF THELORD (CSA). The CSA was a nonstate religious, revolutionarygroup that developed out of a fundamentalist Christian commune inthe Arkansas Ozarks from 1978 to 1985. The CSA was the militarywing of the Church of Zarephath-Horeb, a commune founded and ledby a former Disciples of Christ minister, Jim Ellison, who eventuallyled his following to adopt the teachings of Identity Christianity, anamalgam of fundamentalist Christianity with white-supremacist,anti-Semitic, and populist ideologies.Ellison’s commune, first organized outside Elijah, Missouri,from 1970 to 1976, was originally millennialist rather than political