Specially designated global terrorist
United States federal government designation for a global terrorist
A specially designated global terrorist (SDGT) is a person or entity that has been designated as a terrorist by the United States Department of State or the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Designation
An SDGT designation is made under authority of U.S. Executive Order 13224 of September 23, 2001, as amended by Executive Order 13268 of July 2, 2002, and Executive Order 13284 of January 23, 2003, and Title 31, Parts 595, 596, and 597 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, among other U.S. laws and regulations. The main regulatory framework underlying the SDGT designation was established two weeks after the September 11 attacks in 2001 by U.S. president George W. Bush.
One of the first organizations to which Executive Order 13224 was applied was the Palestinian-American charity The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Its offices were raided on 4 December 2001, its assets were seized and the organisation closed. The HLF was the largest Muslim charity in the United States, collecting £13,000,000 in donations in 2000.
SDGTs are entities and individuals who the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) finds have committed or pose a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism, or who OFAC finds provide support, services, or assistance to, or otherwise associate with, terrorists and terrorist organizations designated under OFAC Counter Terrorism Sanctions programs, as well as related persons, subsidiaries, front organizations, agents, or associates. They are designated under OFAC's programs.
The designation SDGT is one of several types of designations of persons to whom one or more OFAC-administered sanctions apply; these include country-specific and counter narcotics trafficking, non-proliferation, and transnational criminal organization-related sanctions, and potentially under sanctions related to illicit trading in rough diamonds, although this had not been applied of early November 2011.
OFAC publishes an integrated list of persons designated under its various sanctions programs that is known as the Specially Designated Nationals List, under which SDGT listings are included.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Specially designated global terrorist” as united States federal government designation for a global terrorist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as united States federal government designation for a global terrorist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3356118. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2000.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Specially designated global terrorist”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Specially designated global terrorist primary sources, Specially designated global terrorist archive and Specially research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Specially designated global terrorist” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.