Philip G. Alston Quotes
International laws do not prohibit an intelligence agency like the CIA from carrying out targeted killings, provided it complies with the relevant international rules. These rules require … when it’s a matter of being able to kill someone in a foreign country, that all such killings be legally justified, that we know the justification, and that there are effective mechanisms for investigation, prosecution, and punishment if laws are violated.
Many Americans use this opinion to justify our Drone program. Others use it for other targeted killings or assassinations. However, Alston is opining about International Law. When a killing takes place in another country, the biggest problem is the laws of the country where the killing takes place. See {637113}. When a foreign diplomat is assassinated in America, we go after the killers because they have broken U. S. law even if the assassinating nation has convicted the target properly. Whenever we kill someone with a Drone Airstrike, we have the required conditions stated and have not violated International law. However, according to the Pakistani’s for example, we have broken their laws. However, in many occasions, there is little the country where the killing takes place can do anything other than making diplomatic protests unless they want to go to war and use force. Also, targeted killing is perfectly legal if the target is a combatant at war with the killing country, and this is the reason that most of the American Drone killings are legal from a U. S. point of view.
Philip G. Alston, International Law Scholar, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, Quoted in The Atlantic Monthly, September 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This manual was still in force during the Iraq war 50 years later.
The speech is traditionally written by the government.
This was meant as a criticism of Webster, but must people saw it as a compliment. What Clarridge and other old hands at the CIA could never get straight was that they were supposed to break the other countries’ laws but not the laws of the United States. They were supposed to lie to other countries, but not to our President and Congress. This has been a constant problem for United States intelligence agencies. Some scholars of espionage believe that a good spy or spy master lies so often that it is part of his nature to do so as well as break laws. Psychologically it is difficult for them not to lie to anyone and they have little respect for laws. Webster fired Clarridge when Webster reformed the CIA but in the process he alienated most of the “veterans”.
There was a military coup in 1973 which was supported by the United States -- {640618} . Many Chilean left wingers were tortured, murdered or disappeared. Also, two American citizens in Chile were murdered at the time. This case finally brought the murderers of the Americans from the military junta to account. However, it turned out that the murders of the Americans was part of a conspiracy between the Chilean junta and United States military / intelligence officers in Santiago at the time. The American murder victims were fingered by an American Naval Captain, Ray E. Davis, as leftists and they too were killed. Captain Davis had been indicted with the two Chileans, but he died before the trial. The Chilean judge was not able to indicate how high up the decision by the American officers to have the Chileans kill leftist Americans went. One important historical aspect of this case was meaningful because when the trial was finally conducted, there was a major policy debate in the United States over the right of the American government to kill American citizens abroad and under what circumstances with most people thinking that this was a new policy issue brought about by the development of drone technology and the War on Terror. However, this judge’s release of the information showed that Americans had been previously killed before drones. One major difference is that in the War on Terror case the President, Attorney General and other officials were the major decision makers while in the 1973 case in Chile, it may have been limited to a few rabid, over-zealous, mid-level officers, acting on their own. Or perhaps the kill decision went further. The documents relating to the murders are highly classified and the government has not yet released them at the time of this quotation.
Executive Order 12333 prohibits political assassinations. The administration took the position that the prohibition did not apply to war where assassination (targeted killing) of enemy leaders is clearly permitted. The problem was that the George W. Bush Administration did not classify the “War on Terror” as a war. They didn’t want to treat captured jihadists as prisoners of war. The Obama administration also would not ask Congress for a Declaration of war, and this caused the moral, ethical, and legal ambiguity that has plagued targeted killings by drones or other means throughout the Afghan and Iraq Wars which were legally not wars.
