So when you mention black choppers, people will assume you are either being ironic or crazy. There's a particular policy goal affiliated with these attacks, and a spectrum of options for achieving that policy goal. Those options included "There exist certain individually identifiable employees of a foreign government who are personally indispensable to implementing something which goes against our policy goals. We could assassinate them."
If you read the papers you know that that option is neither a joke nor the fevered imaginings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
It is likely that such assassinations are against both International Law (Geneva Conventions) and US law. Carter, Ford and Reagan all prohibited them through executive orders. Even if you think that knocking off some Hamas leaders is a good idea, you will experience scope creep - last year a (sort of) influential policy advisor suggested using drones against Julian Assange.
Honestly, "we" (the West) are best armed, best funded, most free peoples ever to walk the earth. If we cannot put aside assassination and torture, then the human race has no hope.
Here for an interesting review of legality of such assassinations:
edit: for clarity, before I become flamed as a woolly left winger, I think that there are many people in the world, that if they were hit by lightning today, the world would be much better off. but
a) I think the world is nett worse off if democracies 'arrange' that lightning, because it demeans the important point of a democracy - being a beacon of hope for the future generations.
b) the choice of targets, is not discussed in a democratic manner, and almost certainly would not be my choice. (Now thats a referendum I would love to see:-)
c) my guess is that, like crime, taking out the people committing the crime right now, magically someone else steps into their place. Sometimes someone who yesterday was not committing those crimes.
If we cannot put aside assassination and torture,
then the human race has no hope.
We can and should put aside torture. Assassination, however, is still a preferred tool, when often an alternative is a larger scale military conflict. A focused attack has a better chance of avoiding hitting innocent bystanders.
important point of a democracy - being a beacon of hope
for the future generations
I do not think this is a point of "a democracy" at all.
the choice of targets, is not discussed in a democratic manner,
and almost certainly would not be my choice.
This is a serious point. And it arises in any military conflict. How the democratic public controls its military is a matter of serious study; I am not competent in this, but perhaps someone could suggest a few links?
It seems pretty clear that the US public has democratically decided to delegate the commission of war crimes to its military and not be told about the details.
A weird phenomenon that I have observed is the general public does not seem to consider killings that incorporate the use of aircraft to be assassinations.
Drone attacks, Apache missile strikes, and even dropping Navy SEALS on people with helicopters all seem to fall into some sort of "standard act of war" category when talked about in public. If you even merely refer to these things as assassinations you are written off as trying to use exaggerated or at least loaded language.
It's almost like people think "assassinations" are limited to snipers and James Bond figures breaking into your hotel room and making it look like a suicide.
That's because only the Good Guys(tm) have Hellfires, Apaches and Tomahawks to fire at will. The Good Guys also have restraint - the US won't send a cruise missile into an apartment complex in Islamabad, for instance - and only attack people who are both in a war zone and lack public support. The scary thing about covert assassinations is that they could happen anywhere and be committed by anyone (IMO the "anyone" part is the key bit for differentiating "war" and "murder"), whereas large-scale strikes are carried out by political figures who are (presumably) accountable for their actions.
Nice theory. Please try to convince people like Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan and Massoud Ali-Mohammadi that this theory is true.
Oh, you can't. They were assassinated by a western-backed democracy. (There have been many more, those were just the first two names that turned up of Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated by Israel.)
As much as you'd like to believe that assassination does not happen, it does. In the very same conflict that gave us Flame and Stuxnet. In fact I would not be surprised if information from Flame was used to target assassinations.
If it were done using a hellfire missile from a drone would that be called an illegal "assassination"? The idea that assassinations are more illegal or immoral than -- say -- firing hellfire missiles at suspicious looking people in countries we don't care for is pretty silly.
That said, I'm sure that if the US was involved there was some kind of backwards hoop jumping so as not to technically break the law. "I just had a chat with him on a park bench when we bumped into each other. He said he'd look into it."
The point in the first paragraph regarding 'scope creep' is a non sequitur because Julian Assange was in fact not assassinated and public figures calling for his assassination were not taken seriously.
The second paragraph and points a and c are non sequiturs.
down modding stuff is fine, giving reasoned comments is fantastic.
lynch mob - no, but I was struck with concern and amusement by the idea of a quarterly referendum on which world figures we should target for assassination, plus maybe a limit of civilian children whose collateral death would be acceptable in the voting list. In fact its the opposite of a lynch mob. A lynch democracy perhaps.
don't quite understand the non-sequiteur part... could you expand?
FTFY: "Do not pick fights with people who can fly black choppers"