If I were Prez, this man would be my Attorney General.
On Killing Terrorists [Andy McCarthy]
In my column yesterday, I discussed the Obama administration's stepped up use of targeted assassinations of terrorists. Specifically, I addressed the likelihood that this strategy is being driven by the fact that Leftist lawyers (many of whom now work in the Obama administration) have made it so difficult to detain and interrogate terrorists that killing has become the easier option than capturing.
Victor's post makes the point that Obama supporters appear to have acquiesced in the administration's increased use of targeted assassinations. Victor aptly wonders what the rationale is for this position given the zealous comdemnation of waterboarding and other interrogation tactics that are far less severe than the administration's preference for killing. Importantly, Ed adds that the acquiescence by Obama supporters has been so quiet that Harold Koh, the State Department's top lawyer, has refrained from endorsing the targeted killings strategy.
Those posts got me to thinking ... about 1998. If you take a look at the final report of the 9/11 Commission, pages 131 to 133, a Clinton administration debacle is described. The CIA was pushing for clear authority to kill Osama bin Laden. The Clinton national security team, however, would never provide clear authority. Thus, opportunites to take the terror master out were lost.
The basic message from Team Clinton was that capturing bin Laden would be fine but killing him could only be done lawfully if it were in self-defense (basically, if the people trying to capture bin Laden were fired on and needed to defend themselves, they could shoot back). The biggest obstacle in the administration's internal deliberations (besides President Clinton himself, who gave off conflicting signals about whether he thought assassination would be lawful) was the Justice Department. The report indicates that Attorney General Janet Reno did not pose legal objections to a plan that would authorize killing if capture was not feasible, but she did make various policy objections (e.g., that al Qaeda might retaliate by targeting U.S. officials for assassination). [I think that was an odd concern under the circumstances, but that's neither here nor there for present purposes.]
In 1998, Eric Holder was Deputy Attorney General and Harold Koh was the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. I have no way of knowing whether Dean Koh would have been consulted on a top-secret national security matter like this, but DAG Holder certainly would have been. In any event, it would be interesting to know what they were saying back then about targeted assassination (this would have been the time frame after the August 1998 embassy bombings but before the October 2000 Cole attack).
Please understand, I am not making any accusations. I am just pointing out that the reluctance to give a full-throated defense of targeted killings now could conceivably be explained by positions the relevant players have taken in the past.
The Corner - National Review Online (20 February 2010)
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