Stalin's Solution to America's Problems

Democrats are in a furor over Leon Panetta's revelation that he canceled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders that came to his attention upon taking office as the new CIA Director.

Panetta said the campaign was authorized by the Bush White House soon after the 9/11 attacks, but had not yet become operational in 2009. Come again?

The US has been trying to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton administration. These efforts continue today under President Barack Obama. "Al-Qaida" has become a blanket designation for all sorts of anti-American and anti-Western groups.

Does Panetta mean that CIA and its masters in the White House sat on their hands and delayed this CIA project to kill senior al-Qaida cadres for eight long years? Sounds unbelievable. It also sounds illegal.

Claims by outraged Congressional Democrats that VP Dick Cheney hid from them details of CIA's proposed assassination campaign also ring hollow. Either they were blind, deaf and dumb, or hopelessly incompetent. Did they not know that hit teams from CIA and the military were scouring the globe looking for operatives from a variety of anti-American groups, including al-Qaida. Or that Predator and Reaper kill drones were hunting almost daily in the skies over Pakistan and Afghanistan?

More likely, the affronted Democratic legislators did not want to see what was in front of their noses.

The CIA and Pentagon have been in the assassination business since the early 1950's, using American hit teams or third parties. For one graphic example, in 1985, CIA-organized an attempt to assassinate Lebanon's leading Shia cleric, Mohammed Fadlallah, using a truck bomb. The attack failed to blow up Fadlallah, but killed 83 civilians and wounded 240.

In 1975 I was approached to join the Congressional Church Committee investigating CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and, later, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem. The Church Committee turned up a snake pit of illegalities and gangster-style behavior.

Add to America's potential hit list Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan's Gulbadin Hekmatyar, Indonesia's Sukarno, Iraq's Abdel Karim el-Kassem, Chile's Marxist leaders and, very likely, in conjunction with Israel, Yasser Arafat.

Libya's Muammar Khadaffi led me by the hand through the ruins of his private quarters in Tripoli, showing me where a 2,000-lb US bomb hit his bedroom, killing his infant daughter.
Today, he is chummy with the US and EU.

Most Pakistanis believe, rightly or wrongly, the US played a role in the assassination of President Zia ul-Haq. Former US Ambassador to Pakistan John Gunther Dean stated that Zia was indeed murdered when his aircraft was sabotaged by US agents. However, recent claims by a highly questionable Washington blogger that the US killed its favorite Pakistani, Benazir Bhutto, are attention-seeking lies.

To quote Stalin's favorite saying, "No man. No problem."

Assassination was outlawed in the US in 1976, but that did not stop attempts by its last three administrations to emulate Israel's ruthless Mossad in the `targeted killing' of enemies. The Clinton and Bush administration, and now the Obama White House, side-stepped American law by saying the US was at war, and thus legally killing `enemy combatants.' But Congress has never declared war.

Washington is buzzing about a supposed secret death squad run by Vice President Dick Cheney and his protege, the new US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This fire-breathing general led the Pentagon's super secret Special Operations Command which has become a major rival to CIA in the business of "wet affairs" (as the KGB used to call assassination) and covert raids.

Americans are now being deluged by sordid scandals from the Bush years about torture, kidnapping, brutal secret prisons, brainwashing, and mass surveillance of American's phones, email, banking and even its libraries.

We have seen a sordid caste of administration officials who were ready, if not eager, to break or bend the Constitution and international law under the pretext of fighting "terrorism." Stalin inaugurated this pattern in the 1930's by declaring people "anti-state elements," "spies" or "saboteurs," new categories that excluded them from normative Soviet law and allowed their arrest and execution. Hitler would do this later against `terrorists' after the Reichstag was burned down.

The latest outrage: in 2001, as I previously reported, US Special Forces allegedly oversaw the murder at Dasht-i-Leili, Afghanistan, of thousands of captured Taliban fighters by Uzbek forces of the Communist warlord, Rashid Dostam.

CIA was paying Dostam, a notorious Communist war criminal from the 1980's, millions to fight Taliban. Dostam is poised to become vice president of the US-installed government of Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Bush hushed up this major war crime.

America is hardly alone in trying to rub out enemies or those who thwart its designs. Britain's MI-6 and France's SDECE were notorious for sending out assassins. The late chief of SDECE told me he had been ordered by President Francois Mitterand to kill Libya's Khadaffi.

Israel's death squads are feared around the globe. They proved so efficient that they assassinated most of the PLO's moderate leadership, leaving incompetent yes-men and the hardliners of Hamas.

History shows that state-directed murder is more often than not counter-productive and inevitably runs out of control, disgracing nations and organizations that practice it. More important, democracies have no business being in the business of murder.

But US assassins are still at work. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, US drones are killing Pashtun tribesmen almost daily. Over 90% are civilians, not local angry tribesmen or Taliban.

Americans have a curious notion that killing people from the air is not murder or even a crime but somehow clean. US Predator attacks are illegal and violate US and international law. Pakistan's government, against which no war has been declared, is not even asked permission or warned of the attacks.

Dropping 2,000 lb bombs on apartment buildings in Gaza or Predator raids on Pakistan's tribal territory are as much murder as exploding car bombs or suicide bombers -- which are, of course, "terrorism."

Comments

[Henry]

And here I've been thinking that we were the good guys.... christian soldiers. Do you think the c-street christian club of congressmen should take up this subject? I mean, murder. It seems to be in direct violation of the vaunted ten commandments. (Why is it that Gomer Pyle comes to vision has I write this?)