“No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”--Executive Order 11905, signed by President Gerald Ford (February 18, 1976)
“No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government
shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
--Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan (December
4, 1981)
In December 28 of last year, former U.S. Labor Secretary (and national editor of TAP) Robert B. Reich told the audience of CNN's Crossfire that he hoped upcoming confirmation hearings of Bush appointees would not be a study in "the politics of character assassination." It seems that Reich's last word may have lodged itself a bit too literally in the mind of his guest that night, Bob Barr, Congressman of Georgia, because six days later, the ultraconservative Republican Barr introduced a piece of House legislation designated as HR 19. Its aim: Restore the currently illegal use of assassination as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.
While grandiloquent posing is a common affliction of legislative titles, it's rare that one is as to the point as Barr's "Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001." Save the second word, however, HR 19 is masterfully Orwellian; nowhere in the bill's paltry text do precise-but-messy words like "assassination," "death," "liquidation," or even the more benign "neutralization" appear. The only reference made to them is oblique and indirect, in the bill's final section, which calls for the nullification of the pertinent presidential executive orders that explicitly ban assassination.
Instead, using classic right-wing political correctese, Barr coins a new euphemism for murder-as-statecraft: "swift, sure, and precise action needed by the United States to protect our national security." The presidential bans on assassination, the bill holds, have unduly limited "effective ways to combat the menace posed by those who would murder American citizens simply to make a political point." Indeed, HR 19 laments that "on several occasions the military has been ordered to use a military strike hoping to remove a terrorist leader who has committed crimes against the United States," only to meet with a lack of success. With the passage of HR 19, the swift, sure, and precise action that "our country must maintain" would be restored--though it will only be used, Barr assures us, "sparingly."
Barr's understanding of history is weak. Though assassinations were historically the province of the civilian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Barr says previous orders have "severely limited the use of the military [emphasis added]" in the hit department. Furthermore, Barr seems to have failed to grasp the fundamental fact of U.S.-sponsored assassinations: They usually fail--worse, whatever their outcome, their aftermath ultimately undermines foreign relations. "We really haven't been doing diplomacy well for a long time," says Melvin Goodman, a former senior analyst on the CIA's Soviet desk who is now a professor at the National Defense University. "Things like an assassination policy only make it worse. Every time we have done something like this in the past, it's gained us nothing but ill will in the rest of the world. Unless you can really control the succession of events that happens after an assassination or coup, maybe you can justify this in extreme situations. But from Africa to Vietnam to Chile to Cuba, all we've done is made bad situations far worse."
In the World War II heyday of the CIA's forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), assassination was a much more palatable, and even practical, method for dealing with the Nazis and their collaborators; a convincing case can be made, for example, that if the OSS hadn't taken out Vichy's Admiral Jean François Darlan, the Allies never would have gotten a foothold in North Africa. But in the 15 years following World War II, the nascent Central Intelligence Agency shied away from practice. While it had no compunction about orchestrating coups that might result in the death of a foreign leader, actually pulling the trigger was something to be avoided.
That changed with the ascension of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. Obsessed with eliminating Castro, Kennedy told the CIA to be as creative as possible. Reading over now-declassified documents, it's hard not to chortle at the myriad options the CIA considered in the service of taking out the Cuban leader: exploding and toxin-spiked cigars, exploding conch shells, even a wet suit slathered with fungus spores. Langley's operatives start to seem less like steely agents and more like Maxwell Smart. But however Keystone Kopsish they may have been, the numerous attempts to kill Castro have made rapprochement with Cuba virtually impossible. "Suppose," Jonathan Kwitny wrote in Endless Enemies, his book about U.S.foreign-policy ineptitude, "Castro was behind the assassination of John Kennedy. Would Kennedy and the people of the United States have a just complaint, considering what we tried seventeen times to do to Castro?" The point is that assassinations only exacerbate international problems by encouraging escalation. Look at Israel: Whether hits were carried out by the paramilitary Irgun or Stern Gang at odds with the early Israeli government or--in later years--by the government itself, it's hard to make the case that assassinations of Palestinians have made Israel a safer place.
Assassinations, both failed and successful, also complicated affairs in Indochina. A CIA operative from 1952 to 1962, Paul Sakwa ended his career as chief of covert operations for Vietnam. He was effectively bounced out of the agency for critiquing its approach to Vietnam, including its role in fomenting the fatal coup against the Diem brothers and setting up the infamous Phoenix program, an assassination program that extrajudicially killed at least 20,000 Vietnamese civilians. Years later, Father Robert Drinan--then a U.S. congressman--would cross paths with Sakwa during his own investigation of Phoenix, and both ended up testifying against the confirmation of CIA Director William Colby, who set up Phoenix. "You don't use the word assassination when you've killed tens of thousands of people--that's a massacre," seethes Sakwa, now a retired pensioner living in Washington, D.C.
After leaving the CIA, Sakwa was hired by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Coming out of State's main entrance one evening in 1962 , Sakwa bumped into an effusive Larry Devlin, an old colleague from the CIA's French desk and now chief of the agency's Kinshasa station in Congo. When he asked Devlin why he was so happy, Sakwa was sickened by Devlin's response: He began to brag gleefully about having arranged the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
Originally, Devlin had planned to take out Lumumba himself, using a poison gun developed by the notorious head of the agency's Technical Services Division, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. (Obsessed with finding ways to control and incapacitate potential targets, the late Gottlieb stands as another good reason to forgo assassinations: Most of his experiments were performed on unwitting American citizens, and one, Dr. Frank Olson, killed himself while under the influence of LSD.) Before Devlin could do the deed himself, native Congolese killed the nationalist leader. But as John Stockwell, head of the CIA's Angola task force, noted when he resigned in 1978, "Eventually we learned that Lumumba was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death apparently by men who were loyal to men who had Agency cryptonyms and received Agency salaries. In death he became an eternal martyr and by installing Mobutu in the Zairian presidency, we committed ourselves to the other side, the losing side in Central and Southern Africa." Assassination, Stockwell said, is one of the ways the United States cast itself in foreign affairs as a "dull-witted Goliath in a world of eager young Davids."
The significance of Barr's bill is not so much that it provides
yet more evidence (as if we needed any) that he's a right-wing loon--his
proposal has not attracted a single co-sponsor from either party, and the
chances of it even getting a hearing this session are slim. The really
disturbing question is this: What does it say about both the anemia and
the hubris of U.S. foreign policy today that Barr believes assassination-asforeign-policy
actually has a serious constituency. "We have a habit of approaching foreign
policy as, we will do what we want to, regardless of obvious realities,"
sighs the National Defense University's Goodman. "If this includes going
back to assassination, it shows a real desperation in U.S. policy." Father
Drinan, now at Georgetown University Law Center, agrees. "You can't kill
an idea by killing the person. If he has a constituency, they'll be inflamed
at what you've done, whether they realize it at the time or find out for
sure later. It's counterproductive in so many ways. You just end up creating
new monsters and new problems."
The American Prospect Volume 12, Issue 8. May 1,
2001