Assassinations
Assassination Rights
By Edward S. Herman
Oct 2011
Assassination is as American as
apple pie. The record-breaking case of assassination-targeting is Fidel Castro.
The 1976 Church Committee report on “Alleged Assassination Plots on Foreign
Leaders” listed “at least” seven attempts to kill Castro, but the book by Fabian
Escalante, the Cuban former official in charge of protecting Castro, claimed
that the number of tries ran into the hundreds. Duncan Campbell pointed out that
Luis Posada Carriles was still living in Florida after his failed effort to
murder Castro (among his other terrorist actions) and Campbell noted
sardonically that Florida is “a place where many of the unsuccessful would-be
assassins have made their home” (see “638 tries to kill Castro,” Guardian,
August 3, 2006). It would be a mistake, however, to think that
Florida is the terror center of the world—that honor falls to
Washington, DC and its
environs. Florida is just one branch of the
center, just as Guantanamo
is one branch of a DC-centered torture network.
Aggression Rights
It is, of course, well established
that the United States has
aggression rights and that international law applies only to others, although
clients like Israel
also have such exemptions by virtue of the power of their protector (see Herman,
“Aggression Rights,” Z Magazine, February, 2004).
U.S. aggression rights were made perfectly clear with the
U.S. attack, invasion and occupation of
Iraq in 2003, which was as clear a violation of the UN
Charter as Saddam’s 1990 invasion/occupation of
Kuwait. In the latter instance, the UN rushed
to condemn Saddam on the same day his tanks and troops rolled into
Kuwait, and that great law-enforcer, the
United States, rushed to oust him by massive
force.
On the other hand, when
Israel invaded Lebanon
in 2006, this was seen as merely a case of tolerable “birth-pangs of a new
Middle East” (Condo- leezza Rice). When the UN came into the
picture, it was more to protect poor little Israel
from future pea-shoots from Lebanon
than to protect Lebanon
from current and future attacks and invasions by a state that had already
aggressed against it twice.
Even more interesting was the
invasion of Rwanda by
elements of the Uganda army
in October 1990, two months after Saddam’s invasion of
Kuwait. Here, as in Lebanon, the invading
forces were supported by the U.S., so the UN imposed no impediment or penalty
and, in various other ways, aided the invading party and facilitated a genocidal
process in the 1990s (which extended into the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Assassination Rights
Assassination rights follow in the
same manner, flowing from military and economic power, arrogance,
self-righteousness, and client status. As of early September 2011, it is not
clear whether Moammar Kadaffi is dead or alive—or, if alive, will long
survive—but it has been openly acknowledged that the United States and its NATO
allies have more than once bombed Kadaffi’s compound in Tripoli in an effort to
kill him, the first incident occurring as early as March 20, the second day of
the war. This is by no means the first time that the West has tried to
assassinate Kadaffi. The British and French both tried and the
United States made an earlier effort in 1986 when it bombed
Kadaffi’s residence in Tripoli,
missing him but killing his baby daughter and many nearby civilians.
Assassination of civilians violates
numerous international prohibitions of such killing beyond military “necessity”
and it violates a stream of U.S. executive orders that declare, for example,
that, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government
shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” This is regularly
ignored by U.S.
leaders, hence by the media and by any potential theoretical national or
international law enforcement bodies.
The rationales for ignoring law and
executive orders can be funny. We can go after Kadaffi because he is
“commander-in-chief” of the Libyan armed forces, hence a military target. One
exposition of assassination law notes that “it seems fairly obvious that
eliminating Qadaffi will go far toward bringing attacks on civilians to an end”
(“Assassination under International & Domestic Law,” on the IntLawGrrls website,
May 2, 2011). This might be especially true if his elimination would have ended
NATO attacks on Libyan civilians, which, along with those of the NATO-supported
insurgents, seem to have far exceeded those of Kadaffi and his forces.
Bringing a war to a quicker end has
long been a rationalization for attacking civilians. During the bombing war
against Yugoslavia in 1999, the stepped up attacks on Serbian civilian
structures and civilian occupants was explicitly designed to force a quicker
surrender and the bombing of the Belgrade state broadcasting station (16 killed)
was explained on grounds that the station served up state propaganda and was,
therefore, a quasi-military target whose destruction would hasten an end to the
war. Then, of course, U.S.
wars are always framed as a matter of self-defense against the threat of
weapons of mass destruction or some other threat to the pitiful giant.
Israel’s
Assassination Rights
Or for our pitiful little client in
the Middle East, which is a kind of pioneer in
“targeted assassinations” and “preventive strikes.”
Israel has been killing Palestinians in extra-judicial
actions for many years, both in the occupied territories and in
Israel
itself. The Palestine Centre for Human Rights estimates 604 targeted killings
of Palestinians between September 2000 and March 2011, plus another 256
“collateral damage” bystanders killed. B’Tselem estimates 228 executions carried
out by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) between September 2000 and October 2006,
plus 154 non-targeted civilians. This just scratches the surface of the forms of
violence carried out by the Israeli state and its settlers against those who
stand in the way. The IDF uses only rubber bullets in Israeli protests, but live
ammunition in dealing with the Palestinians. The assassination programs are
built on the foundation that
Israel
is confronted with “terrorists” who can be dealt with summarily. That the IDF
is the operative body of a system of wholesale terrorism that daily violates
international law is unrecognized, not only in
Israel, but throughout the world. Similarly,
the Israeli wars of aggression in Lebanon
and the genocidal war on Gaza
in 2009 do not elicit sanctions or war crimes tribunals or discredit the
Israeli state or leadership. Its right to aggress and assassinate remains
intact.
In 2006, the Israeli assassination
program received the imprimatur of the Israeli Supreme Court, which found that
the assassinations of “terrorists,” who had not been tried in any court of law,
were legal. “We cannot determine in advance that all targeted killings are
contrary to international law,” the court ruled. “At the same time, it is not
possible that all such liquidations are in line with international law.” But the
Court did make it illegal to carry out an assassination attack where more than
one victim was unidentified and was possibly an innocent (“Israeli court backs
targeted killings,” BBC News, December 14, 2006). Of course, the non-innocence
of the properly liquidated targets had not been determined in a court of law,
but this extra-judicial decision-making, which flies in the face of
international law, was acceptable to the court.
The court also required that, if
feasible, the terrorists should be arrested rather than simply assassinated. If
the target resisted arrest, killing them would be acceptable and assassinating
them where an arrest was not practicle was also acceptable.
This was a de facto “license to
kill,” that would only put the killing establishment to some minor pains to keep
the record clean and lawful. “Targeted Assassinations—a License to kill” was, in
fact, the title of an article published in Haaretz on November 27, 2008
by Uri Blau, using some IDF internal documents that described how the Israeli
Supreme Court’s assassination-approving decision would only slightly
inconvenience the IDF’s assassination program. Blau shows that the Israeli
military regularly carried out assassination operations, planned in advance as
targeted killings, under the guise of planned arrests.
Blau cites evidence that top
Israeli officers approved in advance the killing of Palestinians defined as
“wanted.” This has been a scandal in Israel,
with the alleged leaker of documents (Anat Kam, then a 23-year-old former IDF
soldier) under arrest and Blau, a refugee in
England, fearful of returning to
Israel. Needless to say Blau’s “License to
kill” and its findings have not been widely disseminated in the press, nor has
the freedom of speech scandal gotten much attention.
The
U.S.: From Assassination to Global
Free-Fire-Zone Rights
With its greater capacity to kill
on a global scale, the U.S.
“license” far surpasses
Israel’s. Despite its serious domestic problems
and resource scarcity for its civil society needs, the
U.S. permanent war establishment is
upping-the-ante in pursuing its villain choices across the globe. The
Nation’s Jeremy Scahill testified before the House Judiciary Committee in
December 2010 that the U.S. Special Operations Forces and CIA have steadily
expanded their ongoing “shadow wars” around the world, con- ducting missions in
60 countries during the Bush administration and as many as 75 under Obama’s. As
Scahill added, the Obama “administration has taken the Bush era doctrine that
the ‘world is a battlefield’ and run with it.”
Based on press reports dating back
to June 17, 2004, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK) estimated that by
the end of August 2011, between 2,309 and 2,880 persons had been killed in the
U.S.’s “Covert Drone War” in
Pakistan, with airstrikes by remote-controlled
aerial killers under Obama outnumbering Bush’s by 243 to 52. These researchers
found the reported civilian death-toll to be between 392 and 783—though the
actual civilian toll is likely far greater.
The press reports which form the
basis of this research tend to repeat the
U.S.
and Pakistani government line that every strike kills “militants” and only in
exceptional cases are civilian fatalities acknowledged in the reports (see Chris
Woods, “Drone War Exposed,” and David Pegg, “Drone Statistics Visualized,”
Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 10, 2011).
A photographic exhibit in
London last summer by the Pakistani Noor Behram, titled Gaming in
Waziristan, detailed the wreckage caused by the
U.S.
drone war. Behram’s theme, in his own words, was that “far more civilians are
being injured and killed than the Americans and Pakistanis admit.” As he told
the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont: “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe
they get one militant. I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to
count how many children, women, innocent people are killed” (“US drone strikes
in Pakistan
claiming many civilian victims, says campaigner,” July 17, 2011).
A lawsuit filed in
Islamabad
against the retired CIA lawyer John A. Rizzo on behalf of two surviving family
members of drone attacks accuses him of having played a role in determining
targets for the attacks and thus deciding who should die. This and similar
evidence in other U.S. free-fire zones—Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya (until
the overthrow of Kadaffi in August), and elsewhere—stands in dramatic contrast
with the reassuring words of White House’s Homeland Security and
Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan, who said, in answer to a question on June
29, that in the “types of operations the U.S. has been involved in in the
counterterrorism realm...there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of
the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able
to develop.”
During the same speech, Brennan
previewed the U.S.
strategy in its Global War On Terror for the years ahead. Unsurprisingly,
remote-controlled drones and U.S. Special Forces Operations in different
countries where no official U.S.
declaration of war has ever been made were featured prominently (“U.S.
Counterterrorism Strategy; Ensuring Al-Qaida’s Demise,”
Johns Hopkins University, Washington,
DC, June 29, 2011).
Brennan was lying about the
sure-sightedness of this method of kill. Six weeks later the New York Times
helped him get-off-the-hook when he “adjusted the wording of his earlier comment
on civilian casualties,” no longer saying that “there hasn’t been a single
collateral death” in the past year, but that “American officials could not
confirm any such deaths.” In an amazing gloss on the argument,
Georgetown University Pakistan
expert C. Christine Fair also told the Times: “This is the least
indiscriminate, least inhumane tool we have” (Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Disputed
On Civilian Toll In Drone Strikes,” August 12, 2011).
Given the monumental scale of the
violence and of the death and destruction caused by U.S. military attacks
against multiple countries around the world (formally or informally; in uniform
or by hired-hands), the reported deaths in Pakistan to date are relatively small
when compared to the deaths of one to two million Iraqis caused by the United
States and its allies from August 1990 to the present. But perhaps the most
important point to note is the institutionalization, growth, and normalization
of the work of the U.S.
military machine. The CIA has grown in size, especially in its killing
activities, featuring its drone war management, which Gareth Porter contends is
unstoppable because of bureaucratic imperatives and power (“CIA’s Push for Drone
War Driven by Internal Needs,” IPSnews, September 5, 2011). It is, in the words
of one CIA official, “one hell of a killing machine.” However, it is probably
exceeded in its death-dealing by the semi-secret Joint Special Operations
Command, which “has killed even more of
America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11
attacks” (Dana Priest and William Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A look at the
military’s Joint Special Operations Command,” Washington Post, September
2, 2011).
These, along with the Pentagon,
have made the entire globe a free-fire- zone in which people are assassinated
without trial at U.S.
discretion. NATO has been integrated into this process, expanded greatly since
the break-up of the Soviet Union, whose alleged
threat was the rationale for building NATO. NATO is now stressing “out of area”
operations that gear well with the
U.S.
“projection of power.” It was noted recently in a reflection on 9/11 that
America’s wars have greatly increased rather than decreased since the demise of
the Soviet Union and the ending of their supposed threat to international peace
and security (see Greg Jaffe, “On a war footing, set in concrete,” Washington
Post, September 5, 2011).
But that seeming paradox rested on
the belief that it was the Soviets who needed to be contained, rather than the
United States
and its allies. The latter still do. And, as during the Vietnam war where U.S.
policy—free-fire zones, chemical warfare, massive killings of civilians in
napalm and bombing raids—created a steady stream of recruits to keep fighting
the aggressor, so today the U.S. (and Israeli) killing machine continues to
produce recruits and resistance to its “out of area” advances. As this is a
permanent self-fulfilling enemy- and war-generating process, it is ominous and
may be an Armageddon March.
Z
Edward S. Herman is
an economist, media critic, and author of numerous articles and books. His
latest is The Politics of Genocide (with David Peterson).
http://www.zcommunications.org/assassination-rights-by-edward-s-herman