Are terrorists, who are not members of a national army, but are carrying out lethal attacks often under civilian cover, open to direct attack as if they were armed military? David L. Gerard F. Your source for jobs, books, retreats, and much more. Signs Of the Times August 3, issue.
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School President. Hidden Mercy. Home Health , Spiritual Resources. Vatican Observatory Foundation seeks Development Director. Retreat Houses. See all Classifieds. The latest from america. Mary of the Angels with economically or socially disadvantaged people. Similar debates have also arisen over the assassination of political leaders such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi. More fundamentally, these actions have taken place in a shifting moral environment, in which the earlier assumption that assassination is morally impermissible no longer seems convincing in an age of terrorism.
In this essay I will analyze the ethics of political assassination from with the context of the Just War tradition, with the aim of moving toward developing a framework within which the question of assassination can be addressed. Just War doctrine involves a strong presumption against the use of violence or killing in peacetime or in war outside of certain limited contexts, specifically the punishment of the guilty, self-defense against an unjust attacker, and the enforcement of natural justice or law.
Even in those contexts, the use of violence is subject to the requirements of necessity, proportionality, noncombatant immunity, and right motive. Neither the desire for revenge, nor the motive of maximizing good consequences, can serve as a legitimate basis for the use of violence in Just War Doctrine. What then is the moral status of political assassination in Just War theory? Let us begin by dismissing the idea that assassination essentially involves treachery, betrayal, or perfidy.
While there may be an additional moral constraint against the use of treachery perhaps derived from the chivalric tradition, as Thomas Wingfield suggests , it is clear that the central moral concern about assassination is not the presence of a betrayal of trust, but rather the morality of premeditated, extrajudicial killing of specific individuals, typically those in leadership positions by treachery or not.
Such actions would ordinarily be considered simply murder, and the question is whether there is sufficient moral basis for permitting such a prima facie wrongful act. A second issue we will have to examine is whether there is an essential difference between military and political leaders as regards the legitimacy of assassination. It is often assumed that military leaders, as they are obviously combatants under Just War principles, are legitimate targets in wartime, and therefore it is permissible to assassinate them so long as no treachery is used.
Political leaders such as Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro, some have argued, are different: they are not obviously combatants, even where he has ultimate control over the military. Similar difficult questions concern countries where the commander of the military is a civilian, as in the United States. But even within terrorist groups one can distinguish between political and military leaders. The question to be faced then is the following: is there a moral basis for a policy of premeditated, extrajudicial killing, and does it depend on whether the target is a military or merely political leader?
Discussion of this question is often muddled by a failure to clearly distinguish the punishment rationale from the self-defense rationale for assassination. Indeed, the idea of justifying a policy of assassination under the rubric of punishment would seem to run into intractable moral problems, for a policy of summary execution without trial or any significant procedural constraints would not ordinarily be considered a legitimate form of punishment.
But the confusions in this argument are legion. More importantly, the syllogism with which Weinberger concludes his essay -- that if killing the leader is permissible, then trying him is permissible -- is not legitimate. What is clear is that capturing an enemy commander and placing him on trial is morally and legally permissible. What is not clear is whether intentionally killing him -- without benefit of trial -- is permissible.
Yet she too fails to clearly distinguish defense from forward-looking consequentialist or punishment motives. But the deterrence rationale is not and has never been a part of the doctrine of self-defense. It is important to acknowledge just how tempting the idea of assassination is even from a moral standpoint. It offers a trade of a single death to avoid the death of millions, and as former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer put it, "The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less" than going to war.
Thus both utilitarian and moral rationales appear to support the practice of assassination. But this temptation is deceptive. If the justification for killing in war is defensive, then neither of the above factors is morally relevant. The doctrine of self-defense, as we have said, is distinct from the consequentialist or Realist rationale which aims to minimize overall costs, or simply adopt the most effective strategy.
But equally important, moral guilt or innocence is not directly relevant to the use of defensive force; force is justified against a guilty or an innocent aggressor. What justifies the force is the unjust aggression, not the innocence or guilt of the aggressor.
Thus it is crucial to understand the nature of the justification for killing, and avoid conflating incompatible moral theories. But suppose we try to address the self-defense issue, shed of the misleading connections to deterrence, punishment, and consequentialism. The question of the ethics of political assassination can be stated more clearly. Do the principles of defensive force justify a policy of targeted assassination of military or political leaders?
More broadly, can a premeditated killing ever satisfy the moral principles of self-defense? Here I understand the moral right of self-defense as a right to use necessary and proportionate force against an imminent unjust attack, with the motive of protecting oneself or others from serious harm. The force must be necessary, in that there are no nonviolent or less harmful alternative means of preventing the attack; it must be also proportionate in the sense that the harm being used is proportionate to the harm being prevented.
The harm must also be imminent, i. Hussein, bin Laden, Hamas leaders ; where the target is neither unjust nor an aggressor the attack will obviously be impermissible in itself. It is often taken as uncontroversial and unproblematic that military leaders are legitimate military targets, given their presence in the chain of command -- and sometimes this is extended to political leaders too, so long as they direct the military.
Rather, it depends on combatant status. The general directing operations miles from battle is as valid a target as the commander leading his troops in combat. The same applies to Saddam Hussein. Once he became a combatant, the law of war clearly permitted targeting him. But this is I think a mischaracterization and an unfair criticism of Just War Theory. The question of whether a political leader is a legitimate target then comes down to the question of whether his role is essentially one connected to aggression.
Kershnar rightfully criticizes this view as clumsy and unconvincing. Indeed, it is not even clear on this view whether the political leader is a combatant or not -- is the nature of his role political leadership, or military leadership?
The formalist doctrine is also unhelpful in its application to terrorism, where there is no war and thus no combatancy in the technical sense. But it is also wrong, I would argue, because it mischaracterizes Just War Theory. He may be captured, but he may not be shot. Correspondingly, a civilian who takes up arms and attempts aggressive action is a legitimate target, despite not being a combatant in the formal or essential sense.
In other words, there is no avoiding a substantive analysis of the notion of combatancy. One is a combatant to the extent one is presently engaging in unjustified aggression; one is a noncombatant to the extent one is not a present or imminent threat.
The paradigm of the combatant, then, is the soldier with the weapon pointed at you. On this view, it is not automatically true that a military leader is a combatant in the strict sense -- and it even more difficult to say whether a political leader — who is typically unarmed and not a fighter -- constitutes a combatant.
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