I know after CIA shenanigans in the 50s and 60s were exposed Gerald ford issued an executive order banning assassinations but I heard that either Clinton or bush overturned it but I don’t think it’s been done even after they did … anyone know for sure?
Both the CIA and the U.S. military have killed plenty of people more recently in Afghanistan, Yemen, etc using techniques like drone strikes. Someone would have to try to reconstruct the stats, since we are often talking about classified operations.
Bin Laden and Soleimani, in practice, are evidence that we do not. Technically it’s still in place, though. While it was in place our interpretation of it gradually weakened over time, until eventually we were just acknowledging in public that we killed somebody specific on purpose with a targeted attack, and acted like that isn’t assassinating them.
The so-called ban was strictly a PR move. I doubt anyone in the CIA or military ever took it seriously.
Per Executive Order 12333 (1981):
2.11 Prohibition on Assassination. No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
As far as I know, this prohibition has never been revoked. A few caveats, though.
The term “assassination” is never formally defined. It’s generally been taken to mean targeted killings of specific individuals during peace time. Targeted killings of specific military officials during war time has long been accepted as a legitimate tool of war. In the 1990s, as al-Qaeda emerged and the U.S. began overseas anti-terrorist operations in earnest, there was a lot of discussion about whether EO 12333 applied to terrorist leaders, with most U.S. officials deciding it didn’t, but the issue is murky.
Under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, a formal state of hostilities exists between the United States and al-Qaeda and its affiliates, subsidiaries, and successors. Under the broad understanding that “assassination” doesn’t apply to declared armed conflicts, there is no U.S. ban on targeted killings of members of al-Qaeda and associated groups. There are many scholars outside the U.S. government and some officials inside it that have argued that the AUMF doesn’t extend to the so-called “Islamic State”, but U.S. administrations of both parties have consistently operated under the premise of a formal state of armed conflict with the Islamic State, as authorized by the AUMF. So, again, EO 12333 wouldn’t apply.
The other big caveat is that Executive Order 12333 is, well, an Executive Order. It’s legally binding on subordinate Executive branch officials, but it can’t bind the President himself. A direct order from the President can waive the prohibition, and that order needn’t even be public. Whether that obviates EO 12333 as a meaningful legal prohibition is, I think, a discussion that’s probably beyond the bounds of Factual Questions.
The Soleimani assassination, as @Jimmy_Chitwood points out, was a pretty clear violation of EO 12333. There is no formal state of hostilities between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The targeted killing of an Iranian government official is pretty clearly the sort of “assassination” EO 12333 was supposed to ban. As far as I know, the U.S. government has never acknowledged that or stated that a specific Presidential waiver was granted. U.S. officials initially stated that the killing was to prevent an “imminent attack”, then walked that back, and stated that “it was in response to an escalating series of attacks…”
So, tl;dr, as @Jimmy_Chitwood more succinctly put it, technically, yes, the U.S. still has a ban on assassinations, but in practice it doesn’t really.
Do you have a cite for this? That no one in the CIA or military ever took it seriously?
Well, there’s this one. It states "In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington, a rallying cry has emerged for loosening restrictions on the spy agency’s recruiting of foreign agents and lifting the assassination ban to help fight terrorism. But analysts say taking both those actions would essentially be meaningless because the restriction on the CIA is merely a bureaucratic gesture and has no impact on the way it operates, and killing is allowed in a war scenario regardless of the assassination ban. Emphasis mine. Bureaucratic gesture sounds better than a PR move.
Thank you for the actual cite.
However, your own bolded emphasis says that “killing is allowed in a war scenario regardless of the assassination ban” [bolding mine that time].
That doesn’t mean that the CIA and U.S. military never took the ban seriously, and it was only ever a PR move or bureaucratic gesture. Only that the assassination ban never applied in a war scenario in the first place.
That article does cite the U.S. bombing of Muammar Qaddafi’s home during the 1986 U.S. bombing raid on Tripoli. I believe at the time the U.S. military contended they were targeting a military command and control center, not specifically Muammar Qaddafi. But I suppose you could make a pretty good case that justification was just a PR move, and it was in fact an assassination attempt.
The article also cites U.S. cruise missile strikes on al-Qaeda training camps in 1998. That seems even more iffy. U.S. planners were undoubtedly hoping those strikes would also kill Usama Bin Laden, but that wasn’t really their main objective. And there’s at least some plausibility to the argument that those strikes were self-defense, in response to the 1998 African embassy bombings.
But between 1976, when President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, the first official U.S. ban on assassinations, and the Global War on Terror, were there any other instances where the U.S. government attempted peace time assassinations?
I may well be wrong, but while personally I’d probably agree that at this point the assassination “ban” really isn’t much more than a “PR move”, it still seems like an unsupported exaggeration to me to contend that the CIA and U.S. military never took it seriously, and that at the time it was strictly a PR move.
You’re surely right, there was at least one person in the CIA and at least one person in the US Military who took the ban seriously. I retract saying that “nobody ever took it seriously”. That was an obvious exaggeration. The fact of the matter is that assassination attempts were made during the ban, which tells me that at least a few key members of the CIA and US Military didn’t take it seriously.
According to another source " The ban apparently did not prevent the Reagan administration from bombing the residence of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in April 1986 in retaliation for a bombing attack at a Berlin discotheque earlier that month. Nor was it deemed inconsistent with President Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attack on training camps operated in Afghanistan by the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda following the bombings of two U.S. embassies in eastern Africa. Clinton also authorized the covert use of lethal force against al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, and other high-ranking members of al-Qaeda."
I’m honestly wondering: Did you actually read my reply? I directly addressed both of those examples from the cite. I even agreed that the bombing of Qaddafi’s house probably counts as an assassination attempt with a PR cover.
Were there any other instances? Or was it just those two in 25 years? And did those two have explicit Presidential authorization, or was it the U.S. military targeting Qaddafi and Bin Laden on their own recognizance?
If there are cases of CIA or military officers, on their own, deciding to attempt assassinations during peace time, I think you’ve got a strong case that the CIA and the U.S. military never took the ban seriously, and it was only ever a PR move.
But since this is Factual Questions, do you have factual cites that show that the CIA and U.S. military never took the ban seriously, or that it was only ever a PR move?
Do note that, for practical reasons, assassinating someone in a country with nuclear weapons is far more fraught than one without. It creates a ban in practice, even if not by policy.
Here are some, but I would guess other attempts were made that nobody outside of the CIA or US Military would know about. Some of these you have already mentioned, some you haven’t. You can find these listed here.
During the Cold War, the U.S. attempted several times to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.
In 1986, the American airstrikes against Libya included an attack on the barracks where Muammar al-Gaddafi was known to be sleeping. It was claimed that the attack resulted in the death of Gaddafi’s infant daughter but reporter Barbara Slavin of USA Today who was in Libya at the time set the record straight. “His adopted daughter was not killed,” she said. "An infant girl was killed. I actually saw her body. She was adopted posthumously by Gadhafi. She was not related to Gadhafi.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. struck many of Iraq’s most important command bunkers with bunker-busting bombs in hopes of killing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Since the rise of al-Qaeda, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have backed “targeted killings.” In 1998, in retaliation for the al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa, the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles against a training camp in Afghanistan where bin Laden had been hours before. Reportedly, the U.S. nearly killed the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, with a Predator-launched Hellfire missile on the first night of Operation Enduring Freedom. In May 2002, the CIA launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone in an effort to kill the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
On November 3, 2002, a US Central Intelligence Agency-operated MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fired a Hellfire missile that destroyed a car carrying six suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. The target of the attack was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, the top al-Qaeda operative in Yemen. Among those killed in the attack was a US citizen, Yemeni-American Ahmed Hijaz. According to the Bush administration, the killing of an American in this fashion was legal. “I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here. There are authorities that the president can give to officials. He’s well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority,” said Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser. During the press conference, the US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that Washington’s reasons for opposing the targeted killings of Palestinians might not apply in other circumstances and denied allegation that by staging the Yemen operation the US may be using double standards towards Israeli policy: "We all understand the situation with regard to Israeli–Palestinian issues and the prospects of peace and the prospects of negotiation … and of the need to create an atmosphere for progress. … A lot of different things come into play there. … Our policy on targeted killings in the Israeli-Palestinian context has not changed.
On December 3, 2005, the US was blamed for another incident, in which alleged al-Qaeda #3 man (operations chief Abu Hamza Rabia) was reportedly killed in Pakistan by an airborne missile, together with four associates. However, Pakistani officials claim the group was killed while preparing explosives, not from any targeted military operation. The US has made no official comment about the incident.
On January 13, 2006, US CIA-operated unmanned Predator drones launched four Hellfire missiles into the Pakistani village of Damadola, about 7 km (4.3 mi) from the Afghan border, killing at least 18 people. The attack targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri who was thought to be in the village. Pakistani officials later said that al-Zawahiri was not there and that the U.S. had acted on faulty intelligence.
On June 7, 2006, US Forces dropped one laser-guided bomb and one GPS-guided bomb on a safe house north of Baqubah, Iraq, where Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was believed to be meeting with several aides. His death was confirmed the next day.
On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the founder of the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda, was killed by gunshot wounds in a raid by United States special operations forces on his safe house in Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan.
ok i get it … the loophole is “if we lob a few missiles/bombs from our next base over where the target might be at and we could get lucky and actually take out a target” it’s not an assassination attempt because they didn’t directly target anyone and no one was on the ground shooting anyone
with the truth being they damn well know where exactly the target is but have to make it look like it’s just another strike/raid and they did get lucky …
Also, I’m pretty sure that in cases like the bin Laden raid, the official orders were to “neutralize” him. The mission would still have been a success if they had captured him, and I think that may even have been presented as a best-case option. But if they try to capture him, but he resists effectively enough that the Seals needed to fight back, well…
Thank you for the cites.
I think there’s a bit of a disconnect going on here. I originally objected to what seemed to me to be an unsupported one-liner posted in Factual Questions, that the CIA and U.S. military never took the ban seriously, and it was strictly a PR move (emphasis added).
I think it might be helpful to look at the history of the ban.
In 1975, a U.S. Senate select committee known as the Church Committee held a series of hearings into abuses by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Among other abuses, those hearings uncovered a number of assassination efforts by the CIA (including the attempts on Fidel Castro’s life).
Those efforts were often carried out without the full knowledge of the President, and at least some of them were initiated by the CIA itself, without a Presidential directive. And those efforts didn’t just target individuals engaged in armed attacks on the U.S., but individuals who the CIA thought were threats to American interests.
It was in the aftermath of those revelations that President Ford instituted a ban on “political assassinations” in EO 11905 in 1976 (President Carter re-issued the ban without the “political” qualifier in EO 12036).
Now, I personally think that the public ban on assassinations in response to public revelations about U.S. assassination operations was at least in part a “PR move”. It pretty much would have had to have been. But this is FQ, and I don’t have a specific factual cite for that. But I also think that something else that pretty much would have had to have been a factor was to reassert Presidential authority and prerogatives over the CIA, and reign in an agency that was widely perceived as unaccountable and out of control, not just among the general public, but in the halls of power in Washington.
So, not strictly a PR move.
(I’m at work, so I’m going to have to break this post up. I plan to come back and address the “CIA and U.S. military never took the ban seriously” bit. Bottom Line Up Front: I think your own cites show that’s an exaggeration.)
[Part 2]
In the 20 years prior to the first U.S. assassination ban in 1976, the CIA conducted numerous assassination operations, both directly and indirect facilitation, including those famous attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. Those attempts largely, if not entirely, targeted political opponents of the United States.
In the hothouse atmosphere of the Cold War-era Directorate of Operations, a lot of CIA officials seem to have convinced themselves that those individuals presented a clear and present danger to the United States. But few if any of them were actually involved in armed attacks on U.S. personnel or facilities, much less on the U.S. homeland.
You raise a very good point that by definition, we don’t really know what covert actions the CIA may have undertaken after the assassination ban in 1976. And if they carried out a successful clandestine operation, we wouldn’t even know that there had been an assassination. Still, as far as I know, and as far as your cites indicate, between the implementation of the ban in 1976 and the operations against Usama Bin Laden in 1998, the CIA conducted no assassination operations.
Going from multiple assassinations in the 20 years before the ban to none in the 20 years after the ban would indicate to me that the CIA actually took the ban quite seriously.
And even in 1998, note that the President personally authorized the operations against Bin Laden. You might dismiss that as a mere bureaucratic maneuver, but the fact that the first known CIA assassination operation since the 1976 ban required an official, explicit Presidential order would seem to indicate to me that, again, the CIA actually took the ban quite seriously.
The 1986 attempt on Muammer Qaddafi’s life is admittedly a bit different. That was a part of a much larger combat operation, and at the time, the official line was that the U.S. military was targeting a command and control center. I mean, the commander-in-chief counts as a command and control center, right? (Well, actually, yes, but if you’re bombing the head of a foreign state with whom the U.S. was not officially in state of armed conflict, it’s a real stretch to say that doesn’t count because you’re also bombing a bunch of his unnamed subordinates). So that does seem to be a genuine instance of a targeted assassination, although rather clumsy and limited (we didn’t keep trying to bomb him after the initial raid). But still, it does seem like that should count.
But that’s pretty much it until 1998.
The U.S. military, as you note, did target Saddam Hussein in 1991. But that was a part of a formal state of armed conflict, in which an enemy commander is a legitimate military target. The 1976 and subsequent assassination bans have never been understood to apply to enemy combatants and commanders in actual, formal wars.
Then, in 1998, the U.S. military targeted Usama Bin Laden, but from what I’ve read, that really was ancillary to destroying the al-Qaeda training camps. And, again, they were acting under direct Presidential orders.
You then have a long list of “targeted killings”, aka assassinations, which took place after September 11th, 2001. Those were all conducted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, as a part of a declared military conflict.
Still, even if you count all of those as being assassinations that violate the bans under EOs 11905, 12036, and 12333, there was still a twenty-some year interregnum, in which the CIA undertook no know assassination operations and the U.S. military undertook two. As against the multiple operations in the previous twenty years.
I’d actually agree that the “ban” wasn’t really a true ban, and that it never really stopped the U.S. from conducting assassinations. But I think it’s an exaggeration to say it was strictly a PR move, and the the CIA and U.S. military never took it seriously.
Due to the nature of how the CIA works, and their long history of secretly eliminating threats, I think it’s safe to assume they have always been willing and able to take them out whenever they can. I obviously can’t prove they’ve performed assassinations because as you said these would have been clandestine operations, but you certainly can’t prove they didn’t, you just seem to assume they didn’t because we don’t know about it.
There is no factual answer since we don’t know what they did or didn’t do. Bad people die all the time, and it’s oftentimes hard to prove if they were murdered. I’ve already retracted my glib comment. I don’t know what else you want me to do. I still believe that the ban was mostly about public relations and to assuage the public and that internal policies at the CIA didn’t really change as a result. Believe what you want, it’s a free country.
Well, we’re at an impasse there. You’re assuming facts not in evidence, not just that the CIA conducted assassinations, which we know that they did, but that they continued to do so in violation of multiple Executive Orders. I don’t think I am just assuming that they didn’t, I’m going by the available facts, while admitting that in an area like this, facts are hard to come by.
I actually think that’s fair enough.
I don’t think it’s a matter of what you or I “believe”, but in a Factual Questions thread, a matter of what can be factually demonstrated.
But especially since you’ve now reiterated that you’ve retracted your initial comment, I retract my objection to it.