September
11 A Year Later Assassination as a weapon
By MARGOT PATTERSON
Osama bin Laden Dead or Alive. Those were the words President Bush
used to describe U.S. policy toward the man believed to have masterminded the
Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So far Osama bin Laden
appears to have eluded U.S. forces and their allies, but the war on terror that
the United States unleashed after Sept. 11 has triggered far-reaching changes
in the United States, ushering in an era of growing police powers at home and
greater bellicosity abroad.
Increasingly, that bellicosity is triggering alarm, as the United
States comes to be perceived as fighting fire with fire. A recent front-page
story in USA Today, headlined Global warmth for U.S. after 9/11
turns to frost, describes how the United States is coming to be seen by
its allies as a rogue state. Internally, too, the United States faces criticism
that it is becoming what it deplores: a society of men, not laws, operating
without either internal or external brakes.
Bush and his administration are pushing the edge on all
moral fronts right now. We are dangerously treading on civil liberties in this
country today, said Robert Ashmore, a professor emeritus of philosophy at
Marquette University.
Civil rights advocates have numerous concerns, not least of which
are the approximately 1,000 people picked up after Sept. 11 and held for months
without charges being filed against them. The American Civil Liberties Union,
which has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information about the
detainees, says it doesnt know how many people are still being held.
Plans for an unprovoked attack on Iraq, the refusal of the United States to
join the International Criminal Court after earlier recognizing its
establishment, the embrace of pre-emptive strikes as new U.S. military
doctrine, and great-er discussion of assassination as a legitimate tactic in
the war against terrorism indicate that the moral boundaries of U.S. policy are
far different from what they were a year ago.
For Robert Johansen, a professor of government and international
studies at the University of Notre Dame, many of the tactics the United States
has adopted in its war against terrorism are counterproductive.
When we talk about terrorism, the single most important
thing the United States can do in combating terrorism is to clarify the
difference between the United States and terrorism, Johansen said.
Those engaging in terrorism want to deny that there is any difference. We
do not intend to kill innocent people, and the moment we begin to move closer
to killing innocent people the differentiation between us and terrorists begins
to diminish.
For Johansen, therefore, assassination is unacceptable policy.
To kill people without some assessment of guilt is morally inappropriate,
and that would mean some kind of trial, he said.
Fundamentally different
Johansen said assassination is fundamentally different from the
conduct of war. Murder is not legitimate killing; killing in war is considered
legitimate. One problem with declaring a war on terrorism and treating the
terrorists as if they were conducting a war is that it gives the other side
some legitimacy, Johansen said. In his view, the attacks of Sept. 11 would be
better considered a crime, not an act of war.
Johansen said the most fundamental principle in international
relations is reciprocity. We will not do anything ourselves that
were unwilling to have done against us. If we dont want U.S.
leaders to be targets of assassins, I dont think the U.S. can
legitimately use a policy of assassination against others. Inevitably this will
come back to haunt us, he said.
Is the United States trying to assassinate Osama bin Laden? Some
would say undoubtedly; others argue that attempts on the life of Osama bin
Laden can be viewed as part of an effort to disable the enemys command
and control center and are covered by the rules of wartime engagement.
It is not against the laws of war in attacking an enemy
force to look especially for a particular individual or individuals, who if
they resist at all youre entitled to kill them, said Col. Dan
Smith, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information. What you cant
do, said Smith, is capture an enemy and then tie him up and execute him.
The confines of warfare
The pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar are
supposedly undertaken within the confines of warfare, within the definition of
warfare, so the fact that we are after them in the same way we were after the
high command of the Nazis or Japanese imperial forces
keeps this from
becoming a legal problem, said Smith.
If this strikes some as a legalistic and linguistic nicety, it
also underscores the fact that to decision-makers the word
assassination can be as flexible and open to interpretation as the
word is famously was to President Clinton. Officially, Washington
is still bound by President Gerald Fords 1976 executive order prohibiting
U.S. government employees from engaging in political assassination, but some
analysts believe that the United States is moving closer to adopting policies
that it previously condemned. In October, The Washington Post reported
that President Bush had signed an intelligence finding authorizing preemptive
covert lethal action against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Washingtons previous position was that assassinations
were basically wrong morally, and politically counterproductive, said
Fawaz Gerges, a Mideast scholar at Sarah Lawrence College. According to Gerges,
Sept. 11 represented a watershed in Washingtons thinking, not just toward
the Mideast but toward other conflicts as well.
Now the new thinking in Washington is that the United States
under certain conditions and in certain situations should be able to empower
the CIA to assassinate terrorists or certain people who represent a threat to
the United States.
We are slowly and steadily injecting life into the policy of
targeted or limited assassination of certain individuals, Gerges
said.
The wisdom of such a policy can and is being debated. Israel, for
instance, the only country that openly uses assassination, is the model and
sometimes the inspiration for this debate. As such, Israels strategy of
what it calls active defense against suspected terrorists is a test
case of the pros and, many would say, the cons of such a policy.
Since the start of the second intifada in the occupied territories
in the fall of 2000, Israel has slain close to 100 Palestinians it alleges were
involved in terrorism. Gerges said there are two narratives about Israels
targeting of Palestinian activists. According to the Israeli narrative, Israel
does not target Palestinian leaders or leaders who do not use violence as part
of struggle. According to the Palestinian narrative, the policy of
assassination has no limits and no checks and balances. Scores of innocent
people have been killed as collateral damage, and Palestinians assert that
Israels policy of preemptive strikes is intended to keep the two sides
from ever sitting down at the negotiating table.
Counterproductive at best
Gerges own take on these different narratives is that
Israels assassination policy has been counterproductive at best.
Violence has not only not resolved the conflict, it has produced opposite
results. It has led to more bloodshed and destruction on both sides.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington,
said Israel conducts surgical targeted strikes against a known terrorist
operative. We use the latest military technologies specifically to hit
only the person we want to hit and to avoid any collateral damage, said
Regev, who rejected the word assassinate to describe Israels
policy of targeting suspected terrorists.
But Israels execution in Gaza of Hamas leader Saleh Shehada
in a July missile strike that also killed 14 civilians shows that Israels
targeted killings are not always so tidy.
Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton
University who was one of three people on a United Nations commission appointed
by U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to investigate human rights
in Israel, said the commission concluded that Israels execution policy
was as much about terrorizing the Palestinian population as defending Israel
against terrorism.
Some of the individuals targeted were very inappropriate
from a security perspective. They were people active in the peace movement,
people with strong contacts with Israeli peace activists. Israel produced no
evidence that validated their selection as dangerous terrorists, Falk
said.
Proponents of adding assassination to the U.S. national security
arsenal say assassination can be a kinder, gentler way of achieving certain
objectives than, say, war. Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National
Security Archive, and the author of The U.S. Intelligence Community and
A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century, said
its absurd to argue that assassination is immoral in all circumstances.
It may be a solution to a particular problem and in some circumstances it
may be morally justified, he said.
Profound failure
Writing in a recent issue of The Journal of Intelligence and
CounterIntelligence, Richelson examines the case for assassination in an
essay titled When Kindness Fails: Assassination as a National Security
Option. While noting that the United States experience in efforts
at assassinating foreign leaders is one of profound failure,
Richelson said the United States should not preclude using assassination in
certain circumstances. Assassination should be employed only, but not always,
to deal with terrorists or with heads of rogue states who are developing
weapons of mass destruction, he said.
Assassination should not be used as attempted in the past --
as a foreign policy tool to eliminate troublesome foreign leaders such as Fidel
Castro or Rafael Trujillo, he wrote. Richelson argued that if the United
States assassinates foreign leaders and terrorists, it should acknowledge it as
the Israeli government does now both as a deterrent to similar individuals and
as a way of making clear under what circumstances the United States will resort
to lethal means. If the president can order such an operation, he should
be able to defend it publicly, Richelson concluded.
Others question just how efficacious assassination would be as a
policy. Even as a strategic tool, assassination isnt useful,
said Ashmore, who said that there is no evidence that Israels resort to
extrajudicial executions has made life any more secure for Israelis. He pointed
out that Israel has the ability to go into Palestinian villages and put
Palestinian suspects on trial but refuses to do this. It prefers to act
in the manner of a terrorist, Ashmore said.
Ashmore said that too much attention is focused on the terrorism
of insurgents, those who are opposing government for one reason or other, and
not enough on the terrorist practices of states. Throughout history the
vast majority of the victims of terrorism are the victims of state terrorism.
Our own American history, unfortunately, provides many examples of state
terrorism on the part of the United States, Ashmore said.
Whats tragic about so much of our support for
terrorism is that its blown up in our face, Ashmore said. We
make enemies among the people when we support despotic powers. Its very
short-range strategic thinking to support someone like Pinochet or Mobotu or
the Shah. I think the same thing is going to happen to us in Saudi Arabia and
Egypt. We are supporting repressive regimes.
According to one former CIA analyst who prefers not to be
identified, not only terrorism but also technology is driving some of the new
debate about assassination.
The weapons are so accurate today that its hard to
often avoid putting a weapon in a very precise place, he said. My
problem with assassination is that usually it comes up in the context of covert
action. People are unwilling to accept the risk of war and diplomacy
doesnt seem to be working, so they kid themselves that they have this bad
magic. They also fool themselves that they arent committing an act of
war. If you decide you need to take military action, you shouldnt fool
yourself that youre not taking military action.
Not easy to accomplish
Greg Treverton, a staffer on the Church Committee, the Senate
committee headed by Sen. Frank Church that investigated CIA assassination plots
prior to 1970, is the author of Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age
of Information.
Like many others, Treverton said he sees signs that the United
States is now moving toward easing the ban on political assassination, which
resulted in large part from the discoveries made by the Church Committee. The
ban applies to assassination efforts by U.S. government employees, but not the
military.
The idea at the time was that a willful targeting of a
foreign leader was not a very good idea -- beneath us morally, and not always
easy to accomplish. I think we are reconsidering whether the lesser of evils
might not be targeting leaders, Treverton said. If the alternative
to killing Saddam Hussein is fighting a major war in which Iraqis die like
flies but Hussein stays in power, wouldnt it be morally superior to kill
him directly if we could? If our goal is regime change, then there must be
better way than fighting a major war in which some Americans die and an awful
lot of Iraqis die.
But Treverton said as with any assassination effort, its
unclear whether Saddam Husseins successor would be better or worse.
It still strikes me how good these people are at protecting themselves.
They move all the time. They work hard at personal security.
Indeed, many suspect that if the United States could have
assassinated Saddam Hussein, it would have by now, executive ban or not, which
is one reason why some call post-Sept. 11 talk of revising policies that will
take the gloves off the CIA misleading. According to William Blum, the author
of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II,
since 1976 when Ford signed the executive order, the United States has plotted
on more than a dozen occasions to assassinate leaders. This would include
firing missiles at the home of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and the CIAs
1985 attempt to kill Hezbollah leader Sheikh Fadlallah in Beirut with a car
bomb. Eighty-three people were killed in the explosion, but the sheikh was not
among them.
Margot Patterson is NCR senior writer.
At a glance
In the war on terror sparked by Sept. 11, the United States has
adopted tactics that many criticize as treading on civil rights and pushing
moral boundaries -- including the consideration of assassination as a
legitimate weapon against terrorism.
Some would say that attempts on the life of Osama bin Laden can
be seen as part of the effort to disable the enemys command center, and
therefore permissible under wartime conduct; others say it trespasses on the
1976 executive order prohibiting U.S. government employees from engaging in
political assassination.
The model of a policy of assassination is Israel, a country that
openly uses the tactic. But observers say that the Israeli policy has been
counterproductive, killing civilians and triggering more violence.
Still, some argue, if the U.S. objective is a regime change,
killing a leader such as Iraqs Saddam Hussein is the lesser of evils when
the alternative is a war that kills both Americans and Iraqis.
National Catholic Reporter, September 6,
2002
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