Concerning Bush's call for "a war to end all terrorism" and
his call to "end" governments that sponsor terrorists...
===============Warren D. Smith Sept 2001====================

As far as I can tell, the list of "governments that have sponsored
terrorism" includes the USA. Also: Russia and France.  The independence
movements that resulted in the formation of the following current governments 
certainly used terrorist tactics: France, India, Israel.

Here are examples of USA-sponsored terrorism through history.

1. Small US Army special forces "CT teams" assassinated
over 41K targeted Vietnamese civilians 
(called "Viet Cong Infrastructure Suspects", or VICS). 
These actions, according to CIA director William Colby testifying 
before congress in 1971, were "necessary to prevent terror."
(However, ultimately the US lost the Vietnam war.)

2. In the early 1980s the CIA created, trained, and financed, and hired all the 
directors of (and later fired some of them) and wrote the press releases for,
the "FDN" or "contras", a group employing terror tactics (including killing nuns,
torture, assassinations, mining Nicaraguan harbors) in Nicaragua.  
(This group did not, e.g., take on the Nicaraguan army in direct battles.) 
The result of this was about 12K killed, about 50K wounded, and
about 300K homeless. This is based on written accounts of this by Edgar Chamorro 
(one of the 7 original FDN directors  hired by the CIA; Chamorro later was fired 
by the CIA after objecting to their policies. He later told his story to Congress &
the World Court and wrote "The Packaging of the Contras: A Case of C.I.A. Disinformation"
[Institute for Media Analysis 1987] and "Confessions of a Contra" 
in the New Republic, 1985). 
This was after the downfall of the US-supported dictator Somoza 
in 1979; Reagan and the CIA were interested in overthrowing or weakening
the resulting "Sandanista" government which had many communistic policies
such as nationalization of the properties of the Somoza family (which had
been ruling with an iron hand since 1936). (However, this CIA attempt to overthrow 
the Nicaraguan government failed, and it later became a democratic
government via peaceful processes. Initially the Sandanistas dominated
the government but later the voters switched loyalties.)

3. The US employed terror tactics including massacres and
destruction of entire villages suspected to have housed rebels, 
in the Phillipines (then a US possession) in about 1900.
(Unlike #1 & #2 above, this and #4 below both succeeded in their ultimate aims.)

Each of these USA-sponsored terrorisms killed more people than the WTC disaster.

4. The Sand Creek Massacre of 500 Cheyenne women and children 
(after their surrender) in 1864, carried out by US army.
[Also various other similar massacres of Indians by US army.]

There have also been terrorist groups operating on US soil but NOT state
sponsored, the most famous being the Puerto Rican nationalists in the 1970s,
the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s, and Christian extremists in the 1990s.  
You might want to ask yourself:
would the USA have been better off if the US govt had reacted to these
terrorist groups by (1) warfare, (2) formation of assassination teams
such as the Vietnam CT teams (CT stood for "counter terror")
carrying out wholesale unannounced pre-emptive assassinations of 
suspects throughout large regions of the US, or (3) peaceful measures.

I suspect the answer, frustrating though it may be, is (3), but
fear that something more like (1) and (2) is what will soon happen.