Congress Ponders Whether the U.S. Should Ease Ban on Assassinations

With the country entangled in a widening war on terrorism, members of Congress are suddenly weighing whether the United States should ease a ban on assassinations that has been a central tenet of U.S. policy for two decades.

Influential Democrats have joined Republicans in asking whether the broad and vaguely worded executive order should be revised, perhaps to allow targeted attacks on terrorist leaders or greater latitude for opposition groups allied with the United States to strike at a common enemy.

The assassination ban was adopted by President Ford in 1976 at a time of public revulsion at disclosures about covert attempts against such adversaries as Cuban President Fidel Castro; it has been kept in place since then.

But critics contend that the ban has fostered a policy of official hypocrisy as administrations have continued to try to eliminate U.S. enemies--including Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Libyan President Moammar Kadafi and Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden--while insisting that they are targeting military facilities rather than specific individuals.

Critics say this approach is intellectually dishonest and, by using large military operations, risks the lives of more innocent bystanders and U.S. military personnel than would any direct assassination.

“This isn’t morally or ethically preferable in any way,” said L. Paul Bremer III, who served as the State Department’s top counter-terrorism official during the Reagan administration.

Clinton administration officials continue to declare their support for the ban. But, amid a broader rethinking of U.S. tactics, questions about its wisdom are coming from such diverse lawmakers as Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on one side of the aisle, and on the other, from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.).

Earlier this week, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno seeking a clarification of what the order permits.

Congress isn’t likely to pass a law telling the president what to do, for fear of treading on the chief executive’s prerogatives. But it could bring its influence to bear by passing a resolution of intent and quietly opening negotiations with the president on the issue.

The relevant part of Executive Order No. 12333 consists of a single sentence: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

The order thus leaves unanswered a number of questions. Does “assassination” mean the killing of a high government official, or does it apply to leaders of other groups, such as terrorist organizations?

The order prohibits individuals “acting on behalf of” the U.S. from carrying out assassinations. But does that extend to local opposition groups operating in concert with U.S. interests in places like Iraq or Afghanistan?

Lawmakers and administration officials recently have expressed an interest in relying more on Iraqi opposition groups to battle Hussein.

Another unresolved issue: Does the order apply to war, and would it thus bar the United States from trying to kill a tyrant such as Hitler in wartime?

When U.S. citizens are attacked abroad, the United States’ preferred response is to go after the perpetrators in foreign courts or by extradition. But that approach won’t work when the perpetrators are in countries with corrupt judicial systems, such as Colombia, or in countries that are anarchic or hostile to U.S. interests, such as Afghanistan or Libya.

Critics of the ban argue that the case of Bin Laden best illustrates the need for greater flexibility. Bin Laden is believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 260 people in the August bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and has openly called for the killing of more Americans. However, he is basically beyond the reach of U.S. justice in the rocky wastes of Afghanistan.

By all indications, the Clinton administration is willing to kill Bin Laden: It scheduled missile strikes against training camps linked to him on Aug. 20 to coincide with his anticipated presence at a meeting at one of them. Yet, with the assassination ban in place, the United States retaliated for the embassy bombings with missile attacks that killed and wounded dozens at the camps and near a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant where the administration believed that deadly nerve gas had been manufactured.

Assassination should have been an option “because this is an act of war,” Hatch told the Congressional Quarterly. In war, he added, governments are entitled to “a lot of leeway.”

Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, usually identified as an in-house liberal during his White House tenure, argued earlier this year in a Newsweek column for the assassination of Hussein because it “seems more proportionate to his crimes and discriminate in its effects than massive bombing that will inevitably kill innocent civilians.”

Biden wrote to Reno this week in an effort to determine if the ban has, in effect, become just a cover for the executive branch, since the Clinton White House has appeared to go after Bin Laden just as its two predecessor administrations sought to rub out Kadafi and Hussein.

In 1986, U.S. warplanes bombed Tripoli, the Libyan capital, and suspected terrorist camps where officials believed Kadafi might be staying. During the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. used a special bomb to try to hit Hussein in a bunker and went after him again when he was crossing the desert in a convoy.

In each case, officials insisted that they were not trying to assassinate the enemy--although they acknowledged that they wouldn’t shed tears if he were killed.

The ban’s defenders argue that rescinding or revising it would violate America’s democratic ideals, as well as international norms. The danger would be particularly great if the U.S. government began launching covert assassination missions that it didn’t have to disclose or justify.

Supporters of the ban argue that easing the rules could undermine U.S. interests if other countries were encouraged to begin trying to solve their problems with assassinations.

They say the United States would have the most to lose in such an escalation because U.S. leaders move about with limited security in an open society. The Bin Ladens and Husseins of the world tend to be shielded by guards day and night.

“As the sole superpower, we are the greatest beneficiary of the rule of law,” said Kenneth Pollack, a national security specialist at National Defense University in Washington. Sanctioning assassinations, he said, “creates a state of lawlessness that ultimately redounds to our disadvantage.”

The ban’s advocates cite another issue that calls into question the potential value of lifting the prohibition: Hollywood notwithstanding, assassinations are highly difficult to pull off, as demonstrated by the lamentable record of U.S. attempts. This is primarily because of the difficulty of getting people close enough to a target to accurately predict the person’s movements.