State-Sponsored Assassinations: A Time to KILL

     

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.

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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.

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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.

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April 19, 2010