Ben Macintyre: Barack Obama Must Justify Covert Killing Or Halt It
[Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular column.]
David Miliband was diplomatically livid. “Such misuse of British passports is intolerable”. Israel had broken every rule, he said, by cloning British documents that were used by some of the hit-team sent to kill the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. In retaliation for forging Her Britannic Majesty’s signature, the senior Mossad officer in London is heading home — presumably on his own passport.
Mr Miliband is firmly opposed to state-sponsored identity theft. He did not, however, offer an opinion in his Commons statement on whether it is acceptable to break into a hotel room in a sovereign foreign country, inject its occupant with muscle relaxant and smother him with a pillow.
A few months earlier, a notorious Taleban terrorist named Baitullah Mehsud was sitting on the roof of his father-in-law’s farmhouse in Pakistan. He was spotted by an unmanned Predator drone operated from CIA headquarters thousands of miles away in Langley, Virginia, and was blown to pieces by two precisely aimed Hellfire missiles. Twelve others also died.
Both al-Mabhouh and Mehsud were exceptionally nasty pieces of work. Mehsud was linked to a host of terrorist attacks, including the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Al-Mabhouh was involved in the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers.
State-backed assassination — the extrajudicial killing of an enemy outside a war zone — has long been regarded as illegal and immoral. Yet that principle is now being undermined as governments increasingly turn to the bomb and bullet rather than the law to destroy their adversaries.
In 1976 President Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations. When Mossad launched Operation Wrath of God, tracking down and killing the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre in Lebanon, France and Norway, the US was sharply critical.
In July 2001, the US Ambassador to Israel declared: “The United States Government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassination ... They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”
After 9/11, George W. Bush was granted broad executive powers to combat terrorism around the world, and under Barack Obama the programme of killing using drones has accelerated sharply. Unmanned planes are used routinely to pick out specific enemies, not just in the wild Pakistani borderlands but in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.
President Obama has ordered more drone strikes on terrorist targets in his first year in office than President Bush did in two terms. Of the 99 drone attacks carried out in Pakistan since 2004, 89 occurred after January 2008; last year there were a record 50 drone strikes, up from 31 the year before.
America’s preferred euphemism is “targeted killing”; on the ground the procedure is called “find, fix and finish”. The Obama Administration prefers the term “elimination” to “assassination”, yet that is what is taking place.
The CIA’s targeted killings may be justified on legal, ethical and practical grounds: if a gun it pointed at your head, violent self-defence is a reasonable response. The problem is that the Obama Administration has not sought to justify, or even properly acknowledge, its tactics, just as Israel has neither admitted nor defended the al-Mabhouh hit.
Drone strikes take place amid the strictest secrecy. The Obama Administration has made no direct comment on them, nor divulged the criteria by which individuals are selected. The CIA reportedly keeps a constantly updated list of shoot-to-kill targets “deemed to be a continuing threat to US persons or interests”.
But how a person gets on that list — or off it — is unclear. Are terrorists and insurgents singled out for what they have done in the past, or what they might do in the future? The latter may be a defensible rationale for assassination, the former is not. Is the risk of collateral damage factored in? How secure is identification before the trigger is pulled? As Milt Bearden, a former CIA officer, recently observed: “There is precious little intelligence reliable enough to be the basis for a death sentence.”..
Read entire article at Times (UK)
David Miliband was diplomatically livid. “Such misuse of British passports is intolerable”. Israel had broken every rule, he said, by cloning British documents that were used by some of the hit-team sent to kill the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. In retaliation for forging Her Britannic Majesty’s signature, the senior Mossad officer in London is heading home — presumably on his own passport.
Mr Miliband is firmly opposed to state-sponsored identity theft. He did not, however, offer an opinion in his Commons statement on whether it is acceptable to break into a hotel room in a sovereign foreign country, inject its occupant with muscle relaxant and smother him with a pillow.
A few months earlier, a notorious Taleban terrorist named Baitullah Mehsud was sitting on the roof of his father-in-law’s farmhouse in Pakistan. He was spotted by an unmanned Predator drone operated from CIA headquarters thousands of miles away in Langley, Virginia, and was blown to pieces by two precisely aimed Hellfire missiles. Twelve others also died.
Both al-Mabhouh and Mehsud were exceptionally nasty pieces of work. Mehsud was linked to a host of terrorist attacks, including the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Al-Mabhouh was involved in the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers.
State-backed assassination — the extrajudicial killing of an enemy outside a war zone — has long been regarded as illegal and immoral. Yet that principle is now being undermined as governments increasingly turn to the bomb and bullet rather than the law to destroy their adversaries.
In 1976 President Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations. When Mossad launched Operation Wrath of God, tracking down and killing the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre in Lebanon, France and Norway, the US was sharply critical.
In July 2001, the US Ambassador to Israel declared: “The United States Government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassination ... They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”
After 9/11, George W. Bush was granted broad executive powers to combat terrorism around the world, and under Barack Obama the programme of killing using drones has accelerated sharply. Unmanned planes are used routinely to pick out specific enemies, not just in the wild Pakistani borderlands but in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.
President Obama has ordered more drone strikes on terrorist targets in his first year in office than President Bush did in two terms. Of the 99 drone attacks carried out in Pakistan since 2004, 89 occurred after January 2008; last year there were a record 50 drone strikes, up from 31 the year before.
America’s preferred euphemism is “targeted killing”; on the ground the procedure is called “find, fix and finish”. The Obama Administration prefers the term “elimination” to “assassination”, yet that is what is taking place.
The CIA’s targeted killings may be justified on legal, ethical and practical grounds: if a gun it pointed at your head, violent self-defence is a reasonable response. The problem is that the Obama Administration has not sought to justify, or even properly acknowledge, its tactics, just as Israel has neither admitted nor defended the al-Mabhouh hit.
Drone strikes take place amid the strictest secrecy. The Obama Administration has made no direct comment on them, nor divulged the criteria by which individuals are selected. The CIA reportedly keeps a constantly updated list of shoot-to-kill targets “deemed to be a continuing threat to US persons or interests”.
But how a person gets on that list — or off it — is unclear. Are terrorists and insurgents singled out for what they have done in the past, or what they might do in the future? The latter may be a defensible rationale for assassination, the former is not. Is the risk of collateral damage factored in? How secure is identification before the trigger is pulled? As Milt Bearden, a former CIA officer, recently observed: “There is precious little intelligence reliable enough to be the basis for a death sentence.”..