i've done this before, but in light of recent events and exchanges, i want to again propose the definition of terrorism as military-style action (a liquid concept i admit, but, you know, automatic-weapons fire, high explosives, etc) aimed primarily at non-combatants. so for example, if you blow up cia agents in a war zone, that is not terrorism, even if accomplished by suicide bomb. on the other hand, by this standard, you'd have to regard blowing up hiroshima and nagasaki and covering them in a radioactive cloud to be terrorism, even though it was performed by "state actors." those are consequences i endorse. now it's worth saying that terrorism isn't the only bad thing. a military attack on a military target in which the perpetrators fundamentally don't care about civilian casualties is a war crime etc but it is not terrorism if the basic idea was to take out an enemy's installation. sometimes states go to war for horribly wrong reasons. people murder each other in crimes of passion etc. bad bad stuff but not exactly terrorism in my book. i think it is a useful term - though massively problematic, and horribly abused, for example, by the bush administration. but it does mark a particular kind of completely deranged (as well as evil) action, where you get to the point of killing any given a because you don't like b. a particular moral abyss...