Danny McDonald of Vice interviews Robert Baer, who was once employed by the CIA, about the politics of assassination in "We Talked to a Former CIA Spook About Political Murder". I include some especially noteworthy questions and responses below
Is it fair to say the US can't assassinate the problem away in a place like Afghanistan?
In a place like Afghanistan the only thing you can do is what the Mongols did--go in and kill everybody--which obviously wasn't going to happen. We took sides with a Pashtun tribe that didn't have much support in the rest of the country. And so killing one guy or two or ten or a hundred wasn't going to make any difference.
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You mention the assassination of Anwar Sadat and how that changed very little in Egypt. Talk to me about the main differences between assassinations that prompt political change and those that don't.
If you're going to make an assassination work, the guy you're assassinating has to pretty much be a one-man show. I think the clichéd assassination we all refer to is Hitler. I think the Third Reich would have fallen apart if he would have been killed.
Also I think that [the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin clearly changed any chance of the Israelis and the Palestinians reaching a settlement. It died with him. He was accepted in the military and a large number of Israelis, and if he said this would work, people believed him. Once he was gone, any chance of a settlement disappeared with it.
Sadat was held in power by the military. And it's a group of generals. Any military dictatorship where there's multiple generals and also strong core commanders, it's not going to do any good killing that one guy.
In Pakistan, you can kill the chief of staff, but you have five core commanders. Any one of them could step up into his position and hold Pakistan together. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, when we were looking at him, had eviscerated his military, including his son-in-law. Anybody who was a potential threat was eliminated. There was no bench strength in Iraq, as we've seen with the chaos. There's no general who has stepped forward to hold it together.
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Talk to me about how the legality of assassinations has changed. You make reference to President Reagan issuing an executive order banning assassinations in 1981. How has the law changed in the interim?
It completely changed. It's sort of like our attitude toward torture and renditions and violating the Fourth Amendment. We simply redefined the Constitution and redefined executive law to allow what clearly are assassinations, like Awlaki. By deeming people enemy combatants, we remove all their rights.
In going outside the law, isn't the US opening itself up to all sorts of fuck-ups?
I think we are. I don't think Al Qaeda or ISIS are existential threats to this country at all. It certainly wasn't time to suspend the Constitution, which we effectively did.
What about internationally? What does international law say about assassinations?
It's the problem of reciprocity. If we decide we can assassinate someone in a strange country like Mali, why can't they exert the same right to do it here?
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What can the US learn from a guy like Radwan?
I think we have to learn that the politics have to be right. Hajj Radwan survived because in Lebanon they wanted the foreigners out of their country. He was riding a wave, and it was a matter of his pushing the politics to get what he wanted.
You can't go into a country where everyone is against you and make one political murder work. You're going against history. And you can't do an assassination that goes against history.