In our national conversations about terrorism, we need to be aware that much terrorism has also come in the form of our own agenda as a nation, our own foreign and domestic politics, which for most of us in the United States have never understood as terrorism. We insist, for example, that we did not intend to bring harm to people on the Middle Passage, along the Trail of Tears, in Hiroshima, Japan, or My Lai, Vietnam; just as we did not intend the slaughter of college students, journalists and housewives in Chile when we helped orchestrate the murder of Salvador Allende and many thousands in the wake of this brutal U.S.-sponsored coup in 1973. And of course our leaders insist we do not intend today to be terrorizing the citizens of the world who are mistakenly hit by our cluster bombs.

Carter Heyward, God in the Balance