There was an executive order made by, I believe, Prez. Reagan making assassinations carried out by the federal government illegal. This means we can’t go out and try to kill Saddam, Slobodan, or whoever else we might like to. Sounds nice at first. Can’t go out offing every foreign power we don’t like. However, it is considered more acceptable to bomb and kill thousands of these dictators’ soldiers and other military personnel. Why? Wouldn’t it be ethically more responsible to kill the person ordering all the atrocities, rather than the ones who are forced to carry them out or die? Why is it better to kill thousands of faceless, anonymous soldiers rather than one dictator? I don’t have an answer, Dopers. Discuss.
It was an act of Congress that made assassinations illegal. Can’t remember the name of the act, though. I think the the first name of the congressman who it was named after is Frank, if it helps.
Incidentally, the US is one of the only Western countries with such a policy.
In other countries, people sent on assassination missions are “deep shipped”- that is, more or less stripped of their identity. The idea is to not be able to connect them with their home country.
I don’t know what the Act of Congress was, or when it was passed, but I know President Ford signed an executive order forbidding them. I suppose this makes sense from the standpoint of a nation’s leader. If you start assassinating other world leaders, what’s to stop some country you don’t like from putting arsenic in YOUR soup?
The Secret Service.
Well, there ARE loop-holes in such “laws”. For example, instead of assassinating, say, Saddam Hussain, just carpet-bomb the city he’s in at the time. then it’s technically not assassinating him, it’s just happening to kill him along with another target. Besides, I don’t exactly think the government is adhering to this law. I’ve heard rumors about the government hiring assassins to kill their own officials because they were supposedly gay or something ridiculas like that. The point is they shouldn’t pass a law that they won’t adhere to.
In the case of the carpet bombing, it was during a war. Killing Hussain during combat was and is honorable.
Do you want any group or any country retailiate against the US over a government-sponsored assasination? Such an act on another government’s official or prominent person is in effect a declaration of war. And please don’t go by rumors.
Executive Order 11905 (full text) was issued by President Ford on February 18, 1976.
The relevant passage comes in *Section Five: Restrictions on Intelligence Activities
The complete order is approximately 20 pages long and also deals with oversight and monitoring committies for the Intelligence agencies of the government.
At least a ban on assassinations makes for some consistent policy. The United States condemns terrorists that act in this manner, so it makes sense to prevent our own government from acting in the same manner.
Of course, our government acts in some reprehensible ways, but those are a matter for another thread.
Sounds like a pretty meaningless law to me. Before 1976, did the US government proudly acknowledge the people it arranged to have assasinated because it was legal? Are they now worried because they might be procecuted? Is anybody out there investigating the deaths of foriegn leaders to see if the CIA was involved, so the perpatrator may be brought to justice? If the federal government wants to kill someone, how is a federal law likely to stop it?
Carpet bombing may be legal. It made be necessary, it may be justified, but it is not honorable.
Congress has not made assassinations illegal. Ford’s executive order can be overturned by any president with a stroke of his/her pen. IIRC, the act of Congress to which you refer (don’t know the name) was inspired by the CIA’s involvement in Angola, and it forbids the CIA from fomenting coups, starting civil wars, and the like without express Congressional consent (usually in the form of consent from the Intelligence committees).
Sua
In Tom Clancy’s second-to-last Jack Ryan novel (Executive Orders, I think), President Ryan promulgates the Ryan Doctrine, which says that the U.S. should go after foreign leaders as a means of stopping conflicts; specifically, as the moral means to stopping a conflict. In the book of which I’m thinking, the death of the leader of Iran (who had sponsored biological warfare against the U.S., and an assassination attempt against Ryan himself, then an invasion of Saudi Arabia) was televised during a presidential speech. As Ryan is telling the U.S. who’s responsible for all the violence, they cut to a shot of Daryei’s house, which is then taken out with a precision bomb.
A very satisfying knee-jerk was had by all, I’m sure.