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Some experts further argue that an indirect hit on Saddam could be justified in situations short of general war. They contend that terrorism can be viewed as a species of armed attack, legitimizing self-defense in the form of military action against terrorists and their sponsors. That was the justification for the 1986 U.S. air raid against Libya, during which planes hit several places where Muammar Gaddafi was known to have lived. Planners insisted that they were not targeting Gaddafi -- that might have been a bit too close to assassination -- but aiming at terrorist command-and-control centers. If Gaddafi had happened to be in one -- well, too bad.
Late last year the Justice Department reviewed how the Executive Order might apply to U.S.-supported coups. Its conclusions are secret. But former CIA counsel Bruemmer has publicly voiced an opinion that the order "does not prohibit U.S. officials from encouraging and supporting a coup, even where there is a likelihood of violence and a high probability that there will be casualties among opponents of the coup." So long as the U.S. does not approve specific plans for the killing of individuals, he says, the "prohibition against assassination has not been violated."
And if the government should determine that these arguments are invalid? Simple: just change the order. That can be done "at the whim of the President," says Michael Glennon, professor of law at the University of California at Davis. Capitol Hill sources assert that President Bush could issue a rewritten order, or, more likely, an "exception" to the standing one, and legally keep it secret. The only way to prevent that would be to write a prohibition against assassinations into law. After congressional investigations in the 1970s turned up evidence of CIA-sponsored assassination plots, attempts were made to enact such a law. But they failed, says one legislator, because "nobody was prepared to say right out that assassination could never be U.S. policy."
Assassination, says a government official, is a "double-edged weapon. If you kill a foreign leader, your President is endangered" by retaliation. Washington, of course, could ask a third country to take on the task of hitting Saddam, but that strategy does not resolve the deep moral questions of ordering someone's death. It is often argued that an assassination of Adolf Hitler before World War II might have saved tens of millions of lives. If killing Hitler would have been morally justified, how about Idi Amin Dada, under whose regime 300,000 Ugandans died? Or Syrian President Hafez Assad, who has given protection to the Palestinian group considered responsible for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland? What level of evil deeds or threat to world peace justifies as asassination, and who is qualified to make such a judgment? Those questions are impossible to answer to universal satisfaction -- but a moral nation must keep on asking.