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On the road with Murder
Inc
By Ian Urbina
WASHINGTON
- Last week Israel announced that it would begin taking
a more aggressive role in the war on terrorism,
including the use of so-called targeted killings in the
US and other friendly countries.
This was a
significant shift for the Israeli government, which has
since the late 1990s officially steered away from
practicing lethal covert operations beyond its own
borders and throughout the occupied territories. But the
most surprising thing about the announcement was the
subsequent silence from the Bush administration, which
until recently has been a vocal critic of Israel’s use
of extrajudicial killings. Indeed, it seems that both
Washington and Tel Aviv, to some extent in interplay
with each other, have come a long ways toward
rehabilitating the legitimacy of state-sanctioned
assassination.
For the past five years, Washington has undergone a slowly creeping
return to lethal cloak-and-dagger operations
overseas. Officially, the US got out of the business after
1974 congressional hearings aired an embarrassing
laundry list of American activities abroad, many of them
botched, in attempts to knock off such figures as the
Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier,
Indonesia’s Sukarno, and the Dominican Republic's Rafael
Trujillo. The toxic cigars, exploding seashells and
poisoned bathing suits from the list of attempts on
Castro’s life have become notorious examples of a bygone
era. But over the years, the categorical ban on
political assassination, written into law by then
president Gerald Ford, has been diluted by
"interpretations" that allowed for the "offing" of
enemies when it came as the unintended consequence of a
military action against a country involved with
terrorism.
So, in 1986, without
stating any explicit intention of killing Muammar
Gaddafi, Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of the
Libyan leader’s compound, remarking that he would shed no
tear if Gaddafi were killed. President George Bush Sr took a
similar tack in hitting Saddam Hussein's palace in
Baghdad in 1991, offering up the statement, "No one will
weep for him when he is gone." President Bill Clinton
further loosened the military's hands, with a secret
memorandum expanding the use of deadly covert actions
and authorizing in 1998 lethal force against al-Qaeda.
With the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the
subsequent declaration of the war on terrorism, Bush,
with the US Congress at his side, laid claim to
unprecedented global jurisdiction. Washington vowed to
pursue Osama bin Laden's followers with force wherever
they may hide. Over 40 countries were seen to have
al-Qaeda cells on their soil. Nevertheless, some
hesitation remained on the part of the US to a full
return to the use of targeted killing.
As
recently as four months ago, the US displayed this
hesitation over the killing of foreign civilians because
Pentagon advisors worried that such actions might place
the CIA outside Washington's own legal limits. In
October 2001, the air force sought permission to attack
a convoy of Taliban vehicles in Afghanistan, but a
government lawyer argued against the strike - in part
because women and children might be harmed, but also
because the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, might be
considered a civilian. The attack was called off.
But all this seemed to change on November 3 of
last year when Bush gave the green light for operatives
to kill Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a suspect in the
October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. From 150
miles away at a base in the east African country of
Djibouti, the CIA launched a remote-controlled unmanned
drone to track al-Harethi, and when his car reached an
open road in the Yemeni countryside, a Predator missile
was fired from 10,000 feet overhead. Al-Harethi and the
five other passengers in the vehicle were immediately
incinerated.
One of those passengers
subsequently turned out to be an American citizen.
In the past, the Bush administration had been
quite clear when the matter of targeted killings came
up, which was most often in the context of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was especially true
last July when Washington firmly reprimanded the Ariel
Sharon government for having bombed a crowded Gaza
apartment building in the hope of eliminating Hamas
leader Salah Shehade. The explosion killed 11 civilians
in neighboring residences and injured 176 others. The
White House referred to the action as "heavy-handed",
reiterating "we’ve made repeatedly clear that we oppose
targeted killings". The State Department also
subsequently opened a review of whether the Israeli
government had been in violation of rules of US-sold
equipment in the attack.
With the Yemen Predator
attack, though, much shifted. Targeted killings in the
Israeli-occupied territories increased, but the Bush
administration decidedly kept its eyes elsewhere while
State Department reprimands sharply decreased. One
former senior White House official stated the matter
plainly to the New York Times: "Criticism diminished as
the administration sought to move aggressively against
al-Qaeda."
In recently increasing the Mossad
budget, Sharon is certainly not alone in his ambitions.
Certain hawks in Washington are equally eager to declare
open season, while pushing for even broader jurisdiction
for US agents. Eight months before the September 11
attack, in fact, US Representative Robert L Barr Jr
introduced a "Terrorist Elimination Act", which
designated al-Qaeda fundraisers as legitimate targets
for death.
In many respects, the Yemen missile
strike was a first for the US. In the context of the war
on terrorism, it was the first time that the US had
killed an "enemy combatant" outside of Afghanistan; it
was the first time it had done so in a country with
which the US was not at war; and it was the first time
it had assassinated a US citizen. For Israel, the Yemen
strike was also a sign that Tel Aviv could now operate
with more leeway.
But aside from the change in
US posture, Israel was also handed a prime opportunity
to step up its overseas activities several weeks later
in Kenya. In late November, Mossad dispatched a fleet of
agents to Nairobi after terror attacks on a hotel and an
airliner there that killed 16 persons. "Our arm is
long," Sharon remarked to the press, promising "none
shall escape".
Sharon's promise is particularly
reminiscent of the last time Israel was active in
overseas targeted killings. "This is a turning point,
[much] like the massacre at the Munich Olympics in
1972," said Zalman Shoval, a diplomatic adviser to the
prime minister. That event, in which 11 Israeli athletes
taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists were killed in a
botched German rescue attempt, was followed by the
systematic elimination of the organizers. The so-called
"Wrath of God" battalion of Israeli agents combed the
globe searching for the alleged perpetrators. All but
one was ultimately killed.
But this same
period in Mossad history also shows the dangerous potential
for mistake. In 1973, for example, in the midst of
hunting the Munich murderers, Israeli agents conducted
a targeted killing in Norway. But they hit the wrong
guy. Due to mistaken identity, the agents shot a Moroccan
waiter, Ahmed Bouchikhi, who was walking home from the
cinema with his pregnant wife in the ski resort of
Lillehammer.
The gradual drift back toward
assassination has raised criticism. Legal scholars and
human rights organizations have expressed dire concern
over the precedent such actions will have for
international law. As agents operate on foreign soil
with relative impunity, the sovereignty of nation-states
also begins to fall away. Furthermore, it is not
altogether clear whether private contractors, such as
DynCorp, which the US is using to an increasing degree
in overseas operations, will be covered in the new and
expanded jurisdiction of targeted killings.
Many
worry that if the CIA and Mossad begin killing more
suspected terrorists in more countries, it will surely
have the effect of "legitimizing" terrorist attacks
against US military officers at home or abroad. The US
has also attempted to publicly distance Israel from its
war on terror so as not to play into bin Laden's
rhetoric about Christian crusaders being in league with
the Jewish state against the Arab and Muslim world.
Fending off this perception will grow only more
difficult as the two countries' practices of
state-sanctioned overseas targeted killings increasingly
converge.
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