By Alasdair Palmer
News: Al-Qa'eda massacre Taliban
IT is open season on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Dick Cheney, the US Vice President, has said he would be "happy to accept bin Laden's head on a platter". Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, insisted last week that should American servicemen encounter members of al-Qaeda and "they are the kind you want to shoot, then - you shoot them". President Bush has insisted all along that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive". It is now clear that he wants him dead.
Tony Blair has been more cautious, vacillating between maintaining the polite fiction that he would like to bring bin Laden to justice - where "justice" means something like a fair trial, in which lawyers argue over whether or not he is guilty, and a judge specifies the appropriate punishment - and admitting that a trial is the last thing that he wants. Even if he cannot bring himself to say it with the candour of the American President, the Prime Minister evidently realises that "justice" for bin Laden can no longer mean months listening to lawyers in a courtroom in New York, the Hague, or anywhere else. It means a bullet in the back of the head, or immolation in a cave hit by a "bunker-buster" bomb.
The sanctioning of assassination marks a new departure in the kind of foreign policy which our politicians are prepared to pursue. "We do not," insisted Douglas Hurd, who was the Foreign Secretary when the Intelligence Services Act was debated in Parliament in 1994, "go in for assassination in peacetime". Part of the point of declaring that we are engaged in a "war" with bin Laden has been to make it easier to justify dispensing with normal legal process. Even so, having revoked President Ford's 1976 executive order which banned the CIA from assassinations, President Bush has thought it necessary to diguise it with the fig-leaf of "military tribunals". These are to be a new kind of court in which the defendant would lose virtually all his rights, but which would create the facade of a legal process before a death sentence is carried out. Whether or not he precedes it with an impromptu military tribunal, however, an American soldier or agent who blasts bin Laden will not face a trial for murder when he gets home. Nor will a British one: the provisions of the Human Rights Act do not apply in Afghanistan, and there would be no investigation of the kind that followed the killing by the SAS of three members of the IRA in Gibraltar.
President Ford's ban on assassination was a reaction to the publicity around the botched and bungled attempts on Fidel Castro: the exploding cigars, the poison that was meant to make his beard fall out and the diving-suit that was meant to suffocate him. It was also because, even when a government-sponsored assassination was carried out, it did not always have the desired effect. The most notorious instance was President Kennedy's decision to have Ngo Dihn Diem, the South Vietnamese leader, murdered in 1963 on the grounds that Diem was an obstacle to peace. (His death in fact accelerated Vietnam's headlong rush to war.)
There is a large body of domestic opinion - and not all of it is composed of pacifists or lawyers - which finds it profoundly alarming that political leaders in America and Britain are willing to countenance assasination once again. No civilised nation, it is argued, should follow such a course: doing so "diminishes us all". The only morallly acceptable choice is to arrest bin Laden and bring him to trial, perhaps before an internationally-constituted court.
This drastically overestimates the power of the law to solve a threat as serious as that created by bin Laden and his cohorts. A trial might make us feel better about our own moral superiority but it would do nothing to tackle the mortal threat posed by al-Qaeda. Indeed, it would have the opposite effect. A trial would be a gigantic recruiting opportunity, a wonderful occasion to attract the next generation of suicide bombers prepared to perpetrate an outrage worse than September 11 - an attack on a nuclear power station, the detonation of a "dirty" radioactive bomb, the release of some deadly chemicals.
The historical evidence does not support another often-expressed fear: that once governments grant themselves the power to assassinate people, they will use it indiscriminately. America's decision to stop assassinating people was taken after three decades of commitment to precisely the opposite policy. Britain followed a policy of targeted assassinations in the war against Communist insurgents in Malaysia - but it did not result in the adoption of the policy by the government everywhere, or indeed anywhere, else. The only time assasination was mooted after that was when Anthony Eden asked MI6 to come up with ways of killing President Nasser of Egypt. But Eden never proceeded with the idea, and that was the end of it.
Although our forces finally seem to be closing in, it remains unlikely that bin Laden will be killed by an American or a British soldier. Those in the Special Forces know that there is only one way to pull off a successful assassination, and that is to be told that the target will be at a particular location at a particular time. Despite the $25 million reward on offer, neither the British nor the Americans have - as far as we know - a source inside al-Qaeda able to provide that kind of information. This should not be surprising. Our forces in the Balkans have been trying to locate Radovan Karazdic, the Bosnian Serb leader, for five years. They have yet to succeed, despite a $5 million reward, and the fact that Bosnia has few mountains and no caves.
"I love death as much as you love life", bin Laden told a Pakistani journalist who interviewed him last week. As the net closes around him, he may start to reconsider that judgment. He might now come to realise that he can inflict more damage on his enemies if, rather than dying in some vast blood-soaked conflagration, he decides to give himself up. The worst outcome for the West would be if bin Laden uses one of his televised appearances to tell the world that he wants to be tried by an international court. The Americans have already tried to make that option more difficult for him, by bombing his only outlet - the al-Jazeera television centre in Kabul - to smithereens. Let us hope that he stays in love with death, and never looks for a way to ensure that he receives a trial. For if he does, we might be forced to give him one.
-- Anonymous, November 17, 2001