ABSTRACT
Terrorism, the main cause for contemporary concerns about national security law, is not new. The pirates (most of them English) who harassed the Iberian trade ships to the Americas, were international terrorists of a sort. The British certainly regarded George Washington and his confederates as terrorists who had risen in rebellion against the Crown. The twentieth century was filled with acts of terrorism. One at Sarajevo triggered the First World War. Another, shortly after in Dublin, renewed ‘the troubles’. Acts of terrorism helped dismantle the great European empires until, by century’s end, those empires were gone. And the communists were often regarded as terrorists. Their dedication to the destruction of capitalist society as it was organised led to legal responses that were sometimes unnecessary, excessive and unwise.
