Insight A Time to Kill?

MAY 9, 2011

Within the space of a week, America and our allies assassinated one international figure and attempted to kill two others, illustrating a potentially troubling trend. A week ago Saturday, a NATO missile strike apparently intended for Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi killed one of his sons and three of his grandchildren. On Sunday, a team of Navy SEALS killed a reportedly unarmed Osama bin Laden. Then on Saturday, the U.S. launched a Predator strike in Yemen intending to kill U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a key leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that instead killed two other al Qaeda operatives.

I wonder what the Nobel Prize Committee would think?

The Administration will argue that the attacks on bin Laden and al-Awlaki were not assassination attempts but rather “targeted killings,” because the men were unlawful combatants and not political figures. The attempt on Qadhafi fits better into the traditional definition of assassination. However, NATO commanders deny that the strike was an assassination attempt per se, and insist they were merely going after Qadhafi’s command and control. Whatever you want to call it, the fact remains that our government is actively trying to kill certain individuals outside of a judicial process, which to most people means assassination.

Let’s be clear: each of these targets is or was an evil man with blood on his hands, whose death would leave the world a better place. American actions to kill terrorists are in no way morally equivalent to the terrorists’ indiscriminate murdering of civilians.

Yet assassinations make most Americans a bit queasy, with good reason. We have been horrified by assassinations in our own country, and are loathe to encourage such behavior. As moral beings, we would prefer to see dangerous people brought into U.S. custody, tried, and then experience appropriate justice.

Assassinations were supposed to be a thing of the past. After scores of CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro and many other foreign leaders, the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s shed light on the practice and helped establish a consensus that this was not a business America wanted to be in. Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan each passed executive orders banning the practice. America still has a difficult legacy in certain parts of the world because of these intrigues.

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Of course, it must be recognized that assassinations can have certain practical advantages. Decapitating an organization will at least temporarily weaken it and disrupt its efforts to kill Americans. Qadhafi’s demise would mean the end of a great deal of suffering for the Libyan people. And isn’t it more expedient to kill a bad guy than to hunt him down, take him prisoner, hold him securely, and put him on trial where he will likely be sentenced to death anyhow?

In trying to decide whether to kill or capture a dangerous enemy, the President and his advisors must consider each individual and his circumstances for the right approach. But overall, most of us would hope that there is a bias toward capturing our enemies rather than simply killing them. Not only does it put us on more comfortable moral ground, but it has significant tactical advantages, foremost the ability to gather intelligence. After all, had we simply assassinated 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we may have never found the trail that led us to Osama bin Laden.

Unfortunately, decisions by the Obama Administration appear to have shifted the bias toward assassination, with air strikes as their preferred method. Air strikes are less expensive, less risky, and quicker to implement than a Special Forces operation, but they are also less accurate and obviously deprive us of the opportunity to take the person alive.

Regrettably, political factors at home, as much as conditions on the battlefield, seem to explain this shift toward killing rather than capturing our enemies. If a terrorist were captured these days, it’s unclear where the Administration would put him. Guantanamo would be the most logical choice, but while Obama has figured out that he can’t close Guantanamo, he has also been complicit in demonizing it, making it politically impossible for him to place any new prisoner at the base. Congress is not happy about the prospect of detaining a foreign terrorist in any of our prisons, which at any rate would have certain legal implications.

Even if we did find a place to put the next terrorist, interrogating him would be another hurdle. As the trail to bin Laden illustrates, intelligence gained through interrogations is invaluable for keeping Americans safe from the next attack. Yet the Obama Administration ended the CIA interrogation program. The only tactics our other interrogators are able to use are limited to the Army Field Manual and posted on the Internet, so terrorists know exactly what to expect and how to withstand it. It’s not clear the Obama Administration is even interested in doing serious interrogations – remember the “Christmas Day” bomber who was never interrogated by our counterterrorism experts?

The Administration is also caught between a rock and a hard place on trials. They let down their liberal base by restarting military commissions for detainees already being held in Guantanamo. Imagine the political heat they

AMERICANACTIONFORUM.ORG would get for picking up new terrorists and putting them through military trials. Yet civilian trials are just not appropriate in most of these cases.

Admittedly, if the SEALS team had captured rather than killed bin Laden, it would have been messy. Finding a place to detain him and a means for putting him on trial would have stirred up controversies. It could have given him a new mouthpiece to spew his hate, and maybe even to restore his image among those in the Arab world who had become disillusioned. This is not to say the SEALS shouldn’t have tried to capture him alive – I perhaps naively like to believe that they did – rather that we’d be having an entirely different debate today if they had.

As many have rightly observed, bin Laden’s death doesn’t remove the threat of terrorism. Hopefully we’ll have opportunities to capture and interrogate, not just kill, other terrorists in the future. The Administration and Congress should work together now on rational policies for detaining, interrogating, and trying foreign terrorists, to shift the bias away from simply assassinating our enemies.

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