Assassins

For over a week now, I have been haunted by feelings stirred up by two front-page articles in the Sunday Times of the 19th: the admission of our mistaken assassinations of Afghani Zemari Ahmadi and nine of his extended family, including seven children, and the account of our complicity in Mossad’s assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, chief of Iran’s nuclear program. Both murders were carried out with intent – our mistake was in mis-identifying the victim, not in our eagerness to murder – and both relied on elaborate, technological prowess -- the Afghan murders via a drone-launched Hellfire missile triggered from thousands of miles away, the Iranian murder via an AI-controlled automatic machine gun smuggled into and set up in Iran to intercept Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his family.

Two days prior to those NYT stories, a fellow member of the Olympic Club, Rick H, gave a talk on just wars and examined Afghanistan and Iraq in that context. While we were at war in Afghanistan, we were not at war with Afghanistan nor, thankfully, Iran. Rick’s conclusion? Iraq never was and Afghanistan had long ceased to be “just wars.”

 A few days after the Afghan tragedy, in Syria, a country with whom we also are not at war, we assassinated two more men, a Tunisian and a Saudi. It goes on. 

Under Barak Obama, a President I greatly admire for being reflective, smart, and cool, the CIA and Special Ops carried out with his sanction 563 drone assassinations, usually but not always killing their targets, plus hundreds of innocent bystanders. Most of these strikes were in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – countries with which we are not at war.

The feelings that drag at me? Disgust and Despair: what have we become?

What has war become? In our last declared war, we firebombed Dresden (some 35,000 perished), Nagasaki (39,000), Hiroshima (66,000), and Tokyo (100,000) -- mass murder of nameless citizens. Had a loser done that, they would have hung among the war criminals at Nuremburg or Tokyo. A generation later our fruitless, oxy-moronic “strategic” bombing of the Viet Nams and Cambodia proved mass murder does not work (and that war-criminals can go free.)

Now war, no longer declared and, thus, extra-legal, has shifted to tactics borrowed from the Nizari Isma’ili of the 12thC : targeted assassination. The assassin knows the victim for whom he hunts. Back then he used poison or the garrote but his preferred weapon was the knife, close and silent. Today, he uses poison (Navalny) or the pistol (Nemtsov) or Hellfire missiles or a two-ton, AI-controlled, truck-mounted, automatic 50 caliber machine gun. Assassination none-the-less.

And, like our wars, our assassins are also extra-legal – in fact, illegal. Part 2.11 of Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981: No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. What the hell is going on!?!

What have we become?

What have we become, sentencing to death and intentionally murdering Yemenis, Syrians, Somalis, Pakistanis? And even, in the case of Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen and his son. Where does it stop? Yes, disgusted and despairing . . .

. . .what have we become?    

PS That same week, I was somewhat uplifted by Sam Sperry’s Post Alley encomium to Kay Bullitt. She fought for what was right, expressed her disgust, and did not give in to despair. We need an army of Kay Bullitts.

 https://www.postalley.org/2021/09/19/making-waves-remembering-kay-bullitt/