Republican congresswoman calls for assassination of Castro [VIDEO]

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 1:10 PM on December 4, 2006.

In the video to the right, from 638 Ways to Kill Castro, Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen "welcomes" the possibility that Fidel Castro should be assassinated.

She goes on to expand her calls for vigilante justice to "any leader who is oppressing the people..."

Geez, that's a fairly wide net. No judge, no jury, just the will of "anyone" who believes their leader is oppressive. I don't want to invite late night knocks on the door, but...

The irony of this call for the assassination of Castro is that the Executive Order that prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders, No. 12333113, came about as a result of an investigation into a series of covert assassination attempts in the 50s and 60s -- one of which targeted Fidel Castro:

Executive Order 12333 and its predecessors indirectly arose from the November 1975 investigation by the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations. Led by Senator Frank Church, the committee was charged with uncovering government operations that were “illegal, improper, or unethical.”115 Responding to continued allegations that the U.S. intelligence committee had plotted to end the lives of several foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s, the Church Committee launched an extensive investigation that culminated in sixty days of formal hearings and more than 8,000 pages of sworn testimony.116 In its 346-page report, the committee concluded that the United States was indeed involved in five different assassination plots.117 In the two most serious cases, CIA officials were found to have actively worked to kill Patrice Lumumba, the Premier of the Congo, [*PG20]and Cuban Leader Fidel Castro.118 In three other incidents—involving Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dihn Diem of South Vietnam, and Rene Schneider of Chile—the U.S. government was not held directly responsible for the actual killings, but did support the coups that brought about their deaths.

Tagged as: republican, assassination, castro, ileana ros-lehtinen

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.