The Gazette (Montreal) October 20, 2001
When the state turns assassin
The controversial 'Israeli model' of state-sponsored death squads is one of the tactics the U.S. might adopt in its war on terror.By Alex Roslin
As the war in Afghanistan enters a deadly new phase of ground operations fought by covert special forces, the old rules of conflict have been tossed out the window. In the war against terrorism, conventional bombing and ground assaults in Afghanistan, U.S. officials have warned, won't be enough to rout a shadowy enemy scattered in dozens of countries, including in North America.
They have hinted at a revival of dirty deeds of the past - assassinations, coups d'etat and other covert actions. They are also turning to bounty-hunters with offers of $175 million in rewards for information about 22 terrorist suspects implicated in the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The gloves are off and there are really no rules in that sort of warfare," said Michael Richardson, a former counterterrorism official at Canada's Foreign Affairs Department. But the gung-ho talk raises troubling legal and moral questions, say military experts.
How far will U.S. forces go? Is there an effective way to oversee covert operations from the outside? Also, will assassinations of terrorists in cold blood provoke more terrorism and destabilize U.S. coalition partners in the Middle East?
And where do you draw the line between combat and assassination, especially when the enemy isn't a uniformed soldier and could be hiding in a European or Canadian city?
How much evidence will be required before a suspect can be whacked?
With unprecedented secrecy shrouding information about military operations, how can the public hold authorities accountable? It's a war that could reach around the globe, possibly even to Canada, where people may be forgiven for wondering whether U.S. agents will start gunning down suspected terrorists in the streets of Montreal or Vancouver.
And it worries many intelligence experts who argue that the quick kill will not make the world safer and raises serious problems of international law. The debate is just starting, but the new brand of conflict has already moved into high gear.
This week, the New York Times reported that President George W. Bush has waived a 25-year-old executive order banning assassinations in the case of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. And in the days after Sept. 11, Bush personally authorized the killing of Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in a bombing raid.
Pressure for targeted killings is likely to increase, said Richardson. "The problem with (capturing them) is you need evidence to convict them in a court of law. It's much tidier all around if you just do away with them. The legal system requires proof beyond reasonable doubt," he said. "We're not going to get that. Intelligence is not ever without reasonable doubt."
The current war on terrorism is different from previous U.S. conflicts in Iraq or Kosovo. The bad guys represented a state and had an army. This time, the enemy is a loosely structured terrorist network with hidden agents in dozens of countries, not dependent on any one government. Even the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, a key supporter of bin Laden's terrorist coalition, is not the country's recognized government and the man in charge is less a head of state than a clerical leader.
George Friedman, a U.S. intelligence consultant, said the U.S. can't afford to wage a conventional war against every country that may have harboured terrorists connected to the attacks, a list that includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, not to mention Washington's ally, Pakistan.
Fighting them all - or even just some of them - "is simply not feasible militarily," said Friedman, the chairman of Stratfor Inc., a Texas-based intelligence firm that advises the U.S. government and business. Instead, Friedman advocates what he calls the "Israeli model" of counterterrorism - sending elite undercover soldiers to murder suspected terrorists wherever they may be.
In an opinion piece published after Sept. 11, he predicted that the Israeli model "has already been placed on the table and may well emerge as the solution of choice. The United States can go to war against the attackers themselves, making it clear that neither geographical barriers nor unproven guilt will protect them." In an interview, Friedman acknowledged that an assassination campaign raises many difficult questions. "You're in an area where all moral certitudes evaporate."
But to many military experts, the Israeli model is actually proof that a campaign of assassinations is the wrong solution. "The Israelis have been assassinating people for years and it doesn't seem to have worked as a deterrent. It generally inflames groups," said Joel Sokolsky, dean of arts at Canada's Royal Military College.
"(It) seems to be the wrong message to send while trying to rally a global coalition against terrorism. What if Russia went to Chechnya and started assassinating people? Do we want Spain to go and assassinate Basque people? Do we want to set that precedent?" The Israeli assassination program backfired when one of its hit squads killed the wrong man in 1973, noted John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defence think-tank in Washington, D.C.
An undercover team from Israel's Mossad intelligence agency mistakenly shot a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, in front of his pregnant wife as they came home from the movies. Local police caught the team and a public trial exposed the operation.
Making matters worse, documents found by the Norwegians were passed to French authorities who discovered a network of Israeli safe houses in Paris and more evidence of the assassination program. Five members of the hit squad were sentenced to jail in Norway.
Pike said assassinations send a dubious message: "Assassination is not normally considered a state policy of democracies. It's normally considered a policy of terrorist states and dictatorships."
The idea of assassinating terrorists seems to have lots of public support. A National Post/COMPAS poll right after Sept. 11 found 66 per cent of Canadians favoured pre-emptive assassination of known terrorists. In the U.S., a CNN survey found 80 per cent of Americans favour assassinations. Hawkish U.S. politicians have jumped on the opportunity and have mounted a congressional campaign to repeal a ban on assassinations that dates back to a 1976 executive order by then-president Gerald Ford.
The order followed revelations that the CIA had tried to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro and had taken part in the murders of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende.
The CIA had also been rocked by disclosures about its Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War in which bounty hunters murdered an estimated 20,000 suspected communists.
The ban didn't mean an end to CIA dirty tricks. Some experts say it just drove them underground. The CIA was again rocked by scandal in the 1980s and 1990s over arms sales to Iran, illegal support for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels and ties to drug traffickers and members of death-squads.
Some former military personnel find the politicians' calls for blood distasteful. "I love the screaming for blood by people who have never worn a uniform," said Jon Concheff, a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Special Forces. "The purpose is to keep people wound up.
"Yeah, I'd like to eliminate some of these yo-yos and not spend money putting them on trial. (But) as a democratic society, is state-sanctioned murder appropriate? Military people are not enthusiastic about this. The military is not supposed to be an assassination arm," he said.
Instead, Concheff said the U.S. should be trying to capture terrorists alive so they can be questioned and tried. A dead terrorist can't reveal the secrets of how his group works or its plans for future attacks, he said.
There are also important legal questions. Police here don't look kindly on the idea of U.S. agents killing suspected terrorists on Canadian soil. "Murder would not be permitted anywhere in our jurisdiction," said RCMP Cpl. Kevin Fahey. "We would take action against anyone who committed a crime in Canada."
McGill law professor Stephen Toope said assassination of political leaders is "highly problematic" because it violates the UN Charter's ban on intervention in a nation's internal affairs. "International law would say quite clearly that is not acceptable. It goes right to the fundamental principle of the UN Charter," he said.
The question is less black-and-white in the current situation, when a political leader like the Taliban's Mullah Omar has been linked to a terrorist network, Toope said.
Even in times of war, soldiers are bound by rules and can't kill indiscriminately, said Anthony D'Amato, an international-law professor at Chicago's Northwestern University. "The laws of war don't explicitly forbid assassination, (but) there is an implicit ban based on the duty to take prisoners. You can shoot an enemy soldier in combat, but if you are in a position to arrest him and take him prisoner - that is, without risk (of) your own bodily injury - you cannot shoot him."
Could U.S. military personnel be charged with war crimes if targeted assassinations are found to violate laws of armed conflict? Probably not, said Toope, for the simple reason that the U.S. does not recognize the jurisdiction of international war-crimes tribunals over its personnel.
But the U.S. would be on dubious legal ground nonetheless, said D'Amato. "Assassination is a bad business for the U.S. to get into. Assassination deprives the enemy of the safeguards of prisoner-of-war treatment and makes the PoW rules of the Geneva Convention irrelevant. Assassination of individuals in peacetime is a crime against humanity. Assassination of individuals in war is a war crime."
Copyright 2001 Southam Inc.
