| | |  Editorials | Issues 
State-Sponsored Assassinations: A Time to Kill
 Mark Medish & Joel Mccleary - New York Times
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April 20, 2010
 |  | While it may be morally justified and legal under the laws of war, political assassination carries with it practical policy issues, not least the law of unintended consequences. |  | | |
State-sponsored assassinations are back in season. Targeted snuff jobs of state enemies are on the rise from Dubai to Dagestan, from Yemen to Waziristan. Even the United States returned to the practice this week when US president Barack Obama ordered the assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki,the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, from where he now inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber. He was pushing the limits of President Gerald Ford's 1976 executive ban against assassinations.
When one factors in the vast human cost of cruder alternatives, assassination seems like a logical option for dealing with foreign foes. Instead of invading Iraq at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, for example, would not a deft poisoning of Saddam Hussein - a "liquid murder" - have been morally justified? Who has ever called the would-be assassins of Hitler and Himmler anything but heroes?
Advances in lethal technology are making assassinations exponentially easier against even the most hardened security systems. Drones, aerosolisation devices, synthetic opiates, new biological agents and radiological weapons can be developed without fear of attribution.
But here's the rub: While it may be morally justified and legal under the laws of war, political assassination carries with it practical policy issues, not least the law of unintended consequences. One must bear in mind that what is sauce for the dictatorial goose can equally be sauce for the democratically elected gander. Further, the old notion, paraphrasing Thucydides, the strong can get away with murder while the weak must bear it, is increasingly unsupportable in today's high-tech world.
The Israelis have never voiced any moral doubts about targeted assassinations, but there was a concern that the latest killing might go down on a list of plots that have misfired in unforeseen wayes. In 1997, for instance, Mossad agents tried to eliminate Khaled Meshal, a senior Hamas official, in Jordan. Two agents posing as Canadians were caught trying to poison him and Israel, under threat that its agents would be executed, agreed to send an antidote. In 1973 Israeli agents murdered a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer in Norway, mistaking him for the leader of Black September,the group behind a massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
These bungles contrast with operations that Israeli spooks recall with defiant pride: the killing of Imad Mughniyeh,a top member of Hizbullah, in Damascus in 2008 (a coup since Syria is hostile territory for Israel); and the dispatch of Abu Jihad, a senior Palestinian official and founder of the Fatah movement, by a squad that swooped into Tunis in 1988.
Israel has no monopoly on killing its foes far from home.European countries,including Britain (since the 1950s,anyway),Russia and several other Western powers claim to eschew such methods.But during the Cold War,both superpowers and their allies conspired eagerly to eliminate people they deemed undesirable.
The last era of unrestrained use of assassination by the US was during the Kennedy regime. So flagrant were the tactics that JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, privately charged that the Kennedy brothers were running a "damned Murder Incorporated." JFK's "executive action" policy was an open season of plots against troublesome foreign leaders such as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Rene Schneider in Chile,Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba.Committees in both the US Senate and House investigated this policy in 1975-1976 to exercise oversight of CIA covert operations.
The inquiries of the Church Committee in the Senate led Ford to issue the 1976 executive order banning "political assassination by the US government employees." Presidents Carter and Reagan issued similar orders, removing the "political" limitation and extending the prohibition to anybody acting on Washington's behalf. These orders did nothing to change the traditional laws of war and self-defence, but they sent clear signals about a change of US policy.
It is important to recall the wider context of the probes. Then, as now, the world's greatest conspiracy theories swirled around the Kennedy assassination. President Johnson, for one, was convinced that Castro's hand was behind Lee Harvey Oswald's trigger finger. In 1968 Johnson said that "Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got him first." At one hearing, Senator Chris Dodd remarked on the eerie coincidence that at the very hour of JFK's assassination, CIA agents were providing a Cuban agent (or double agent) code-named AMLASH with insecticide to poison Castro. Castro was all too aware of the many US-sponsored attempts on his life (the Church Committee identified eight).Two weeks before JFK died in Dallas, the Cuban leader warned those he knew were listening that if one more attempt were made on his life there would be dire consequences.
Does the US want to return to this era of uncertainty? Do democratically elected leaders wish to open this bloody door again, when in fact their own protection is as porous and precarious as ever? Technology has made assassination easier than ever. There may be little choice in using this tactic against non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, as the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have done. However, one should not assume that decapitation works. To the contrary, the history of assassinating "high value targets" such as international drug lords suggests otherwise - the hydra heads easily regenerate, possibly in more radical forms than the ones they replaced.
One need not believe in conspiracy theories about JFK to be concerned about the wisdom of his policy. The laws of war and defence may permit assassination in certain cases, but prudence dictates thinking carefully before pulling the trigger. |
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