It's Wasn't Only Cheney Who Had Assassination Programs: Clinton Did It, and Obama Does It, Too

By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports. Posted July 16, 2009.

But in that brutal apparent contradiction is the truth: The U.S. does not have a ban on assassinations as long as government lawyers can figure out some legal acrobatics for the president to use in sidelining the ban. Every president from Reagan to Obama has reserved the right to assassinate "terrorists" by claiming it as a military operation or a pre-emptive strike.

It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration's assassination policy and ran with it -- albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing, and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.

Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House, and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval.

Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan "terrorist" in Bosnia, saying, "American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 'lethal finding' signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists."

A former senior Clinton official, speaking shortly after the 9/11 attacks, called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying, "We have a war on drugs, too, but we don't kill drug lords." But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, "we have proxies who do."

Clinton-era officials' attempt to hide behind "proxies" is a stunning trampling of the assassination ban as it exists. Not only does it ban U.S. government personnel from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, "assassination," it also bans "indirect participation": "No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order."

The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn't just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.

The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy -- specifically relating to al-Qaida in general, and Osama bin Laden and his top deputies specifically.

CIA operatives such as Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton's attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan.

"[I]n the early 1990s, we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders," recalled Waugh. Among Waugh's rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders. That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton's signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations.

George W. Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Panetta was then Clinton's chief of staff, from 1994 to 1997, and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue.

Under Clinton, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to "military targets or "to attacks carried out in pre-emptive self-defense," according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars.

Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration's "war on terror" targeted-assassination policy, saying on NBC News, "The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn't apply to terrorists." That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban.

Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state, on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO air strike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN's Larry King Live. Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.

Clinton also publicly acknowledged his administration's attempt to assassinate bin Laden. "I worked hard to try to kill him," Clinton said. "I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."

See more stories tagged with: democrats, cia, dick cheney, extraordinary rendition, blackwater, george w. bush, bill clinton, cofer black, ronald reagan, assasination squads, billy waugh

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at Rebel Reports.

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