State-Sponsored Assassination in International and Domestic Law
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State-Sponsored Assassination in International and Domestic Law Michael N. Schmittt I. INTRODUCTION ................................................ 610 I1. HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDINGS ...................................... 613 HI. CONTEMPORARY PROHIBITIONS OF ASSASSINATION DURING PEACETIME............... 618 A. Major Treaties ............................................. 618 B. Inferences fom OtherLegal Norms ................................ 619 C. Extradition Treaties .......................................... 621 D. State Practice ............................................. 623 E. Conclusions ............................................... 627 IV. CONTEMPORARY PROHIB1TIONS UNDER THE LAW OF ARMED CONFLICT............. 628 A. From General Order 100 to the Oxford Manual ......................... 628 B. Hague IV and the Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions ............. 629 C. Domestic Manuals on the Law of War ............................... 631 D. Some Conclusions:A Definition of Wartime Assassination .................. 631 1. Targeting Individuals ...................................... 632 2. Treachery .............................................. 632 a. Rationales .......................................... 633 b. Etamples ........................................... 633 c. Civilian Clothes, Irregulars, and Wearing the Enemy's Uniform ......... 635 3. Identity of the Target, Choice of Weapon, and Necessity and Proportionality .... 639 4. Guidelinesfor UnderstandingAssassination in the Law of Armed Conflict ...... 641 V. APPLYING THE PROPER CORPUS OF LAW ................................ 642 A. When the Law of Armed Conflict Governs ............................. 642 B. State-Sponsored Killings as Self-Defense ............................. 644 C. State-SponsoredKilling as Anticipatory Self-Defense ...................... 645 1. The Issue of Imminence ...................................... 646 2. Evaluating the Threat to the State .............................. 648 D. Determining PoliticalMotivation of State-SponsoredKilling in Non-Defensive Situations ............................................... 650 t Major, United States Air Force. LL.M., Yale Law School, 1991; J.D., University of Texas, 1984; M.A., Southwest Texas University, 1983; B.A., Southwest Texas University, 1978. The views, opinions, and conclusions in this article are those of the author and should not.be construed as an official position of the Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, or any other governmental agency. Yale Journal of International Law Vol. 17:609, 1992 VI. DOMESnC PROHmmONS ......................................... 652 A. The Church Committee Investigations ................................ 652 1. PatriceLumumba ......................................... 653 2. Fidel Castro ............................................ 654 3. Rafael Trujillo ........................................... 655 4. Ngo Dihn Diem .......................................... 656 5. General Rend Schneider .................................... 656 6. Findingsof the Church Committee ............................... 657 B. Executive and CongressionalInitiatives in the Aftermath of the Church Report ...... 661 C. The Ban on Assassination Interpreted in Light of U.S. Practice ............... 662 1. LegislationAffecting Assassination ............................... 662 2. The CIA PsychologicalOperations Manual in Nicaragua ................ 663 3. The 1986 Raid on Libya .................................... 665 4. The Failed Giroldi Coup in Panama ............................. 669 5. Executive Memoranda and Opinions .............................. 671 6. The Gulf War ........................................... 673 7. Principlesfor Evaluating Individual Targeting ....................... 675 VII. CONCLUSIONSs ............................................... 675 A. Practical Constraints . ......................................... 675 B. The ProhibitionsEvaluated ..................................... 678 1. The Shortcomings of the CurrentProhibitions ....................... 678 2. A Proposed InternationalConvention ............................ 679 3. Alternative Solutions ........................................ 682 a. Legislation. .......................................... 682 b. A More Precise Eecutive Order ............................ 683 4. Assassination in the Law of Armed Conflict ........................ 683 C. Final Thoughts ............................................. 684 "Killing a man is murder unless you do it to the sound of trumpets." Voltaire I. INTRODUCTION Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 rekindled a smoldering debate over the legality of state-sponsored assassination. Many thought that the casualties inevitable in a massive land assault on Iraqi forces could easily be avoided by simply killing Saddam Hussein. Indeed, air strikes targeting1 Saddam's command centers were often characterized as an effort to eliminate 1. In military parlance, a "target" is a specific object of attack, and "targeting" involves directing operations toward the attack of a target. This article uses these terms in the context of assassination. 610 State-Sponsored Assassination the Iraqi leader. However, when the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Michael Dugan, suggested that the death of Saddam Hussein might be a coalition objective, he was quickly dismissed.2 Surely few would argue that state-sponsored assassination is, or should be, legal. Yet at the same time the use of force in international relations, often taking the form of intentionally killing one's enemies, has been justified throughout history.' What is it, then, that distinguishes assassination from lawful combat, or even from unlawful murder not amounting to assassination? If assassination is, as will be discussed below, a violation of U.S. and international law, and one for which both states and individuals may be held responsible, the term must be defined as clearly as possible to secure compli- ance. The imposition of responsibility in the absence of notice, even construc- tive notice, violates one of the most basic principle of law-nullum crimen sine lege. Although none of the domestic or international instruments proscribing assassination actually defines the prohibited conduct, scholars and practitioners have struggled to craft a working definition to serve as a guide to states in fashioning their behavior, and also as a prescriptive norm against which other states could judge and possibly sanction that behavior.' Some scholars focus on the killing of internationally protected persons or high-level political figures.' Others ignore the victim's status and instead focus on the purpose of the act and the presence of any political motivations.6 Still others tend to 2. Eric Schmitt, Confrontation in the Guf; Air Force Chief Is Dismissedfor Remarks on Gulf Plan, N.Y. TIMES, Sept. 18, 1990, at Al. 3. Unilateral resort to force was not considered a violation of customary international law until after World War II. For a discussion of the effect of the United Nations Charter on customary norms governing the use of force, see W. Michael Reisman, Coercion and SelfDetermintion: Construing CharterArticle 2(4), 78 Am. J. INT'L L. 642 (1984). 4. The problem arises in part from the fact that the United States prohibition is contained in an executive order, see infra notes 189, 232, 230-232, rather than in legislation. The order does not include a section on definitions ordinarily found in statutes. For a general discussion on assassination and the problems relating to its definition, see MURRAY C. HAVENS ET AL., ASSASSINATION AND TERRORISM: THEIR MODERN DIMENsIONS 1-20 (1975). A sampling of working definitions of assassination is found in W. Hays Parks, Memorandum ofLaw: Executive Order12333 andAssassination,ARMY LAW., Dec. 1989, at 8 app. A. 5. See, e.g., David Newman & Tyll Van Geel, Executive Order 12,333: The Risks of a Clear Declaration of Intent, 12 HAv. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 433, 434 (1989) ("[A]ssassination refers to the intentional killing of a high level political figure, whether in power or not. The assassination must, for our purposes, be authorized or condoned by a responsible official of a sovereign state as an intentional state action expected to influence the policies of another nation."); Bert Brandenberg, Note, The Legality of Assassinationas an Aspect of ForeignPolicy, 27 VA. J. INT'L L. 655, 655 n.1 (1987) (defining assassina- tion as "intentional killing of an internationally protected person" and using definition of 'protected person" from Article 1 of Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, Including Diplomatic Agents, Dec. 14, 1973, art. 1, para. 1, 28 U.S.T. 1975, 1035 U.N.T.S. 167 [hereinafter New York Convention]). 6. See, e.g., Parks, supra note 4, at 4 (defining assassination as "the murder of a targeted individual for political purposes'); Abraham D. Sofher, Terrorism, The Law, and the NationalDefense, 126 ML. L. REV. 89, 117 (1989) (defining assassination as "any unlawful killing of particular individuals for political purposes'). Parks notes that the relevant criterion is not whether the target is politically prominent or 611 Yale Journal of International Law Vol. 17:609, 1992 analogize assassination to the classic law-of-war prohibition on treacherously killing one's enemy.' Although each approach has merits, attempts to grapple with the issue of state-sponsored assassination have been methodologically flawed. These proposals