Some one should inform Pat Robertson
andrew | Homepage | 02.01.06 - 1:53 am | #

My own take on assassination is ambivalent; true, if just war conditions ad bellum have been met, then assassination could be considered simply as targeting a particularly dangerous enemy combatant, as David did to Goliath. But the means of contemporary warfare and the activities by "Intelligence" agencies blur the line between combat and premeditated murder.

As to spying itself: if the only objection is the breaking of foreign civil law, well, I fail to see the moral issue. Civil law is set up for the common good of a society and is at the service of the natural (moral) law. Therefore, the question of breaking a foreign civil law is no different from the question of breaking a domestic one: is the law standing in the way of the common good? If so, then by all means break it. Obviously, an individual civilian is rarely in a position to make such a judgement, but I can see a legitimate intelligence agent easily put into situations where he (or she) might regularly and justly break a variety of civil laws--again, assuming the basic justice of the assignment and the legitimacy of the government agency. However, as you note about assassination, this still would not be license to break foreign laws at will, and every situation would have to be discerned on its own merits. Something tells me this ain't happening much today.
Robert King, OP | 02.01.06 - 4:54 am | #

Mark:

This is an interesting subject. One of the figures you mentioned as a proper target of assassination in time of war, Reinhardt Heydrich, was actually assassinated on 27 May 1942 by Czech operatives controlled by the British SOE. In reprisal the NASI security services executed several thousand innocent people. Heydrich wore a military uniform and had command authority over uniformed, armed police, security and military personnel. Some of the aforementioned personnel were directly involved, under Heydrich’s supervision, in the extermination of Jews and other undesirables. Heydrich’s assassination was and is very controversial. Just because you can kill a bad guy does not mean that you should. The massive reprisals by the NASI security services against innocent civilians were foreseen and expected by the British SOE and were seen by the British as a catalyst for a possible uprising against NASI rule. However the NASI reprisals were so thorough and brutal that the resistance movement was crushed. Many members of the resistance movement were patriotic anti-Communists who were not around to resist the Soviets when they overran the Czech state.

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Anonymous | 02.01.06 - 10:10 am | #

One thing to bear in mind is that, in traditional moral treatments, the act of "assassination" necessarily involved treachery: the victim is murdered by someone whom he in justice should trust. And yeah, that kind of assassination is immoral.

As an act of war, sending in a hit squad or a guided missile would be goverened by the same principles that govern all acts of war. My guess is you'd have an uphill battle to justify killing the head of state based on the claim that he is the commander of the engine of war. And, as Richard points out, the consequences aren't always susceptible to sound moral evaluation.
Tom | Homepage | 02.01.06 - 1:11 pm | #

The Ecumenical Council of Constance (1415) condemned as contrary to faith and morals the following proposition:

"Any vassal or subject can lawfully and meritoriously kill, and ought to kill, any tyrant. He may even, for this purpose, avail himself of ambushes, and wily expressions of affection or of adulation, notwithstanding any oath or pact imposed upon him by the tyrant, and without waiting for the sentence or order of any judge."(Session XV)

Assasination is deliberate killing, which is always wrong.

Can anyone imagine Christ assasinating anybody ? Nope. He never did and never taught it. He taught instead "do not kill".

It never solves the problem because there's always another fanatical megalomaniac waiting in the wings to asusme power once you've assasinated the current fanatical megalomaniac. Tyrannical regimes are more than one man. They require a whole cadre of followers and subordinate leaders. The whole structure needs to be rooted out, not just the leader.

God Bless
Chris Sullivan | Homepage | 02.01.06 - 3:19 pm | #

Mark:

You posted another interesting comment from a reader: “Since human intelligence often involved breaking laws of other countries, lying, cheating, stealing, and probably killing, wouldn't it be sinful for those who do or set that kind of thing up?”

Please allow me to pontificate. Most intelligence services usually operate most of the time outside the realm of human - agent espionage. For instance: 1) during WWII the most important intelligence tool for the allies was code breaking; 2) after WWII the most important intelligence tool for NATO was still code breaking (signals intelligence) but with photo intelligence from aircraft and satellites a close second; 3) during the cold war the Warsaw Pact services derived an enormous amount of intelligence not from spying but from open sources like the Library of Congress. Even human intelligence is relatively mundane for the most part. For example the only CIA officer who was killed in the line of duty during the entire cold war was Richard Welch in 1979 when he was the CIA Station Chief in Athens.

The morals problem in my opinion usually involves informants. Intelligence officers often choose potential informants because of observable character flaws which can be exploited and made worse by the intelligence officer. Essentially the intelligence officer corrupts his informant like a pimp corrupts a new prostitute. It is very nasty business. On the other hand there is a documented history of legitimate deception and law breaking in intelligence operations such as the Jesuit priests who infiltrated Elizabethan England with false disguise, documents and legends.

I hope the foregoing is helpful to the discussion.

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Anonymous | 02.01.06 - 3:29 pm | #

Assasination is deliberate killing, which is always wrong.

Just war, anyone?
Mary | 02.01.06 - 8:02 pm | #

Just because you can kill a bad guy does not mean that you should.

That's a prudential judgment.

Just because you can go to war to solve a problem not otherwise fixable doesn't mean you should. If the evil caused by problem is, in your judgment, smaller than the evil caused by the war, war is not justified. One could also cause the slaughters of thousands by -- let's see, a larger country is harboring pirates, and you attack, and as a foreseeable consequence they conquer your country and enslave everyone they don't kill.
Mary | 02.01.06 - 8:08 pm | #

The Stephen Spielberg film MUNICH, IMHO, raises some very interesting and poignant questions about this topic.
Tom Haessler | 02.01.06 - 8:46 pm | #

Heydrich wore a military uniform and had command authority over uniformed, armed police, security and military personnel.

IOW, Heydrich was a combatant, and thus a legitimate military target. The people who killed him, on the other hand, were not in uniform, which means they were unlawful combatants. Had they been taken prisoner by the Germans, would it therefore have been legitimate to interrogate, using waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation (but not "torture," heaven forfend) in order to find out about their accomplices and prevent future attacks?
Seamus | 02.02.06 - 9:51 am | #

Seamus:

I am responding to your post in which you wrote in part: “would it therefore have been legitimate to interrogate, using waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation (but not "torture," heaven forfend) in order to find out about their accomplices and prevent future attacks?”

In my pompous opinion legitimacy has nothing to do with it. It is for instance legitimate to murder unborn babies in the land of the free. I believe that we have legitaimately killed about 40 million so far. However how about utilitarianism?

So called “water boarding”, a derivation of which U.S. forces used during the Moro rebellion in the Philippines, will in my judgment break a subject’s will very quickly. However a subject with a broken will also looses his will to tell the truth. You cannot trust what a subject says after you have broken him. So as an intelligence tool it is pretty useless.

“Stress positions” will work only if the subject will cooperate with you. What happens if the subject rolls up in the fetal position and ignores you? You then have to apply something like electric shock to gain the subject’s attention. Now you are involved in a war of wills over how the subject is going to stand. Useful as a disciplinary tool but you are not collecting too much truthful information for processing into actionable intelligence.

“Sleep deprivation”: If a subject is tired enough he will fall asleep no matter what you do. You cannot interrogate a sleeping subject. If, on the other hand, he is awake but so sleep deprived that he has lost his will to hold his tongue then you cannot trust what he says.

No one ever said that interrogation would be easy.

Forgive my long post.

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Richard W. Comerford | 02.02.06 - 10:12 am | #

In my pompous opinion legitimacy has nothing to do with it.

It does if you are trying to judge the morality, rather than merely the expediency, of certain interrogation measures.

I was trying to get readers to focus on the question that often has been raised about these techniques: would we call it torture if it were being used on our side? If the answer is yes, then you can't claim it's not really torture when we're doing it to jihadists. (And yes, I was being deliberately cute when I said "not 'torture,' heavan forfend." My point was to determine whether those things *are* torture.)
Seamus | 02.02.06 - 3:05 pm | #

Seamus:

I am a little confused..as usual. Human nature and natural law do not change. They are the same for all men, in all places at all times.

So if both we and the other side do a bad thing which is contrary to natural law then objectively speaking both sides are wrong.

Is this what you mean?

God bless

Richard W. Comerford
Richard W. Comerford | 02.02.06 - 4:31 pm | #

Mr. Comerford:

Yes. (Or, conversely, that if waterboarding, etc., is not an intrinsically immoral means when employed by the good guys at Gitmo, then it's not an intrinsically immoral means when employed by the bad guys in occupied Czechoslovakia. The bad guys' *ends* may be immoral (that's, after all, what makes them bad guys), so that it's immoral for them to employ *any* means to further those ends, but that's an entirely different question. We have to condemn them for their choice of ends, not for their choice of means.)
Seamus | 02.02.06 - 5:50 pm | #