Terror

Joshua Stanton
State Department’s annual “Country Reports” have frequently cited conduct that does not fit the
legal definitions of terrorism or FRAA reporting requirements, such as inadequate legal countermeasures
against terrorist financing and diplomatic relationships among SSOT governments.
Conversely, conduct that the U.S. State Department has not cited (such as North Korea’s
assassinations of activists and émigrés, or its weapons sales to the Tamil Tigers and Hezbollah,
infra Section IV.A.4) often seems more provocative and dangerous than the conduct it has
cited (such as meetings between Iranian and Syrian government officials; infra Section II.E.7).
Eventually, this flexibility would allow the U.S. State Department to remove North Korea from
the SSOT list, and to keep it off the list, despite Pyongyang’s repeated sponsorship of acts of
international terrorism (infra Sections IV and V).
One conclusion that emerges from the U.S. State Department’s annual reporting is that the U.S.
State Department considers both acts of terrorism by a state and a state’s support for any terrorist
organization to be justifications for an SSOT listing. Thus, the precedent strongly suggests
that “support for” and “acts of international terrorism” should be read as disjunctive, rather than
conjunctive criteria for listing. The congressional report cited in Section II.D helps to harmonize
this distinction by specifying that state sponsorship of terrorism includes “planning, directing,
training or assisting in the execution of terrorist activities.”
1. Sponsorship of Terrorist Organizations
The most obvious basis for a SSOT listing is material support for non-state terrorist actors, such
as those the U.S. State Department cited in support of Iran’s listing in its 2012 annual terrorism
report. The same report also cited Cuba, Iran, and Syria for their material support to terrorist
groups, and Iran and Cuba for harboring fugitive terrorists. 38
The U.S. State Department maintains a list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. 39
Separately, the Treasury Department also sanctions individual terrorists and terrorist organizations
under Executive Order 13,224. The U.S. State and Treasury Department lists overlap but do not
match, and the U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism reports may refer to acts of terrorism by,
or the sponsorship of, organizations that appear on only one of the lists, or neither one.
38 U.S. Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Country Reports on Terrorism 2012
(May 2013), http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/210204.pdf, 195-97, 199-200.
39 U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” http://www.state.
gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm.
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