Foreign Policy Category Archive

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State Sponsored Assassinations Are the New Norm – It Is Gangsterism

Patrick Cockburn • December 4, 2020

• 1,200 Words • 37 Comments • Reply

I was in Israel on 4 November 1995 when a student named Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. A video shows Amir loitering by an exit to the square for 40 minutes before Rabin appears, when his killer takes out a pistol and... Read More

Lies, the Bethlehem Doctrine, and the Illegal Murder of Soleimani

Craig Murray • January 4, 2020

• 2,300 Words • 129 Comments • Reply

In one of the series of blatant lies the USA has told to justify the assassination of Soleimani, Mike Pompeo said that Soleimani was killed because he was planning “Imminent attacks” on US citizens. It is a careful choice of word. Pompeo is specifically referring to the Bethlehem Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Self Defence. Developed by... Read More

The Killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: Illegal, Disgusting and Degenerate

Ted Rall • November 1, 2019

• 900 Words • 67 Comments • Reply

As a society degenerates, life cheapens. The rhetoric that follows death coarsens. Respect paid to fallen rivals is replaced by triumphalism. Historians observed this trend in ancient Rome. As republic turned to empire and domain expanded — and so also arrogance and hubris — vanquished chieftains who previously might have been allowed to keep their... Read More

President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, minutes before the assassination. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jonathan Freedland’s Trump Assassination Fantasy

Andrew Joyce • July 25, 2017

• 1,200 Words • 68 Comments • Reply

Jonathan Freedland, a British-Jewish journalist infamous for hailing the demographic eclipse of the British people in their own homeland as “a kind of triumph,” has devoted the last twelve months of his miserable journalistic life to neurotic attacks on the Trump presidency. His hyperbolic writings at the Guardian, while making little original contribution to the... Read More

The Strange Death of Hugo Chavez: An Interview with Eva Golinger

Mike Whitney • April 22, 2016

• 2,500 Words • 20 Comments • Reply

MW– Do you think that Hugo Chavez was murdered and, if so, who do you think might have been involved? Eva Golinger– I believe there is a very strong possibility that President Chavez was assassinated. There were notorious and documented assassination attempts against him throughout his presidency. Most notable was the April 11, 2002 coup... Read More

Why Jihadi John's 'Assassination' Is Nowhere Near as Important as You Think

Patrick Cockburn • November 13, 2015

• 700 Words • 6 Comments • Reply

The assassination of Mohammed Emwazi by a US drone is a symbolic success for the US and Britain in a war that is full of symbols. The ritual murders of journalists and aid workers carried out by Emwazi were themselves intended to symbolise the ruthlessness and determination of Islamic State (Isis) and create fear among... Read More

Mainstreaming Assassination

Endorsing a program of targeted killing opens the door for perilous reciprocation

Philip Giraldi • October 30, 2015

• 600 Words • Leave a Comment

The media are reporting a rare “success” in Washington’s ongoing war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. According to confidential, anonymous government sources, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has been engaged in a secret program to assassinate designated “high-value targets,” which means terrorist leaders and other prominent figures, particularly those engaged in propaganda... Read More

The Kingpin Strategy

Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015

Andrew Cockburn • April 28, 2015

• 3,000 Words • 20 Comments • Reply

As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of “high-value targeting,” our preferred euphemism for assassination. Secretary of State John Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of “fifty percent” of... Read More

Andrew Cockburn: How Assassination Sold Drugs and Promoted Terrorism

Tom Engelhardt • April 28, 2015

• 700 Words • Leave a Comment

No one can claim that plotting assassination is new to Washington or that, in the past, American leaders and the CIA didn’t aim high: the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. The difference was that, in those days, the idea of assassinating a foreign leader, or anyone abroad, had a... Read More

Can the President Kill Americans?

Andrew Napolitano • April 16, 2015

• 900 Words • 9 Comments • Reply

Can the president kill you? The short answer is: Yes, but not legally. Yet, President Obama has established a secret process that involves officials from the Departments of Justice and Defense, the CIA, and the White House senior staff whereby candidates are proposed for execution, and the collective wisdom of the officials then recommends execution... Read More

The Real American Exceptionalism

From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Alfred McCoy • February 24, 2015

• 3,300 Words • 7 Comments • Reply

"The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond... Read More

Alfred W. McCoy: the Unwritten American Rules of the Road

Tom Engelhardt • February 24, 2015

• 600 Words • Leave a Comment

My drone is yours, compadre! Or so Washington has now decided. The latest promise of good times in the arms trade comes from an administration that has pioneered a robotic assassination regime organized out of the White House (though credit for groundbreaking drone assassination work should go to Israel as well). Run largely by the... Read More

Obama Administration Calmly Debates Killing More Americans

Who Will Conduct the Slaughter This Time Around?

Jason Hirthler • February 14, 2014

• 900 Words • Leave a Comment

The critical reader could be forgiven for feeling like he or she had stepped into a surreal universe while reading The New York Times on Tuesday? When he read, in a demure column on the left-hand side, that the U.S. was debating slaughtering another American by drone strike. And that this “debate” was occurring in... Read More

A Potpourri of Exciting Reading

Paul Craig Roberts • October 19, 2013

• 800 Words

The Man Who Usurped The Constitution Just as you think the Republicans have destroyed themselves with their government shutdown/default antics, along comes Obama and appoints a fascist murderer head of Homeland Security. RT reports that Jeh Johnson, a drone proponent and the Pentagon General Counsel who authorized the unconstitutional extrajudicial murder of American citizen Anwar... Read More

Killing by PowerPoint

Do the president and CIA care more about body counts than accuracy or the law when unleashing aerial assassinations?

Philip Giraldi • June 5, 2012

• 1,600 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

The New York Times has revealed that President Barack Obama hosts a “Terror Tuesday” secure PowerPoint-style teleconference attended weekly by his top 100 intelligence and security officials. After the meeting he goes through a “nominating process” by viewing the “baseball cards” showing suspected terrorists, before personally deciding who is to be assassinated by drones; he... Read More

Assassinating al-Awlaki

Philip Giraldi • October 26, 2011

• 500 Words • 7 Comments • Reply

The successful assassination of alleged al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operative Anwar al-Awlaki was made possible by critical assistance from the Yemeni intelligence service. The U.S. had been targeting al-Awlaki for two years but had not been able to get a fix on him because he was constantly changing location, moving in different vehicles with... Read More

Making America Safer

Philip Giraldi • October 19, 2011

• 400 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

The Obama Administration is clearly developing a taste for executing American citizens in an extrajudicial fashion and hardly a peep is coming out of the mainstream media. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, himself executed by drone on September 30th, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen on October 14th, reportedly while having... Read More

Obama: the Assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki by Fiat

James Petras • October 6, 2011

• 1,300 Words • Leave a Comment

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki a U.S citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on September 30 has been publicized by the mass media, President Obama and the usual experts on al-Qaeda as “a major blow to the jihadist network founded by Osama bin Laden” US officials called Awlaki “the most dangerous figure in... Read More

The Assassination Bureau

Philip Giraldi • October 5, 2011

• 100 Words • 7 Comments • Reply

I am astonished that some otherwise sane and reasonable people cannot see the incredible danger to all Americans resulting from President Obama’s without-due-process execution of a fellow citizen by drone. I recommend that any remaining agnostics out there read this excellent article by Paul Craig Roberts and more particularly view the four minute YouTube that... Read More

Bin Laden Out, Gaddafi Next

Pepe Escobar • May 12, 2011

• 1,000 Words • Leave a Comment

THE ROVING EYE Let's start by invoking a Western cultural icon, Dante; "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" - because international law as we know it has just been delivered a stake through its heart. The "new" sociopolitical Darwinism entails humanitarian neo-colonialism, targeted assassinations - extrajudicial executions - and drone wars, all carried out... Read More

Enlightenment from the Gray Lady

Philip Giraldi • May 14, 2010

• 200 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

Today's NYT featured an article that explains why no one reads newspapers any more: Entitled "US Decision to Approve Killing of Cleric Causes Unease" the article discusses the National Security Council decision to permit the assassination of US citizen and Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, currently residing in Yemen. Al-Awlaki is described as someone "who the... Read More

Shoot Me, I'm American

Philip Giraldi • February 4, 2010

• 300 Words • 30 Comments • Reply

I would have thought that yesterday's House Intelligence Committee comments by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair would have provided an "I can't believe it" moment, but apparently not. The ACLU might be preparing a position paper, but so far not a bleat out of anyone. Blair said that US citizens abroad might be killed... Read More

The US Has No Business Being in the Murder Business

Eric Margolis • July 21, 2009

• 900 Words • Leave a Comment

The new CIA director, Leon Panetta, has just informed the US Congress he canceled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. Panetta said the campaign was authorized soon after 9/11 by the Bush White House, but had not yet become operational in 2009. I respect Panetta, but his claim is not credible. The US has... Read More

CIA Hit Teams

Philip Giraldi • July 14, 2009

• 500 Words • 17 Comments • Reply

My sources are telling me that the secret CIA program involving a Dick Cheney coverup that is currently in the news consisted of dispatching assassination teams to various countries to kill individuals who were known to be al-Qaeda supporters but who, for various reasons, had not been detained by the governments of the countries in... Read More

"Assassinations" Items Across Entire Archive

Category Classics

American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

Ron Unz

• 1,638 Comments • Reply

9/11 Was an Israeli Job

How America was neoconned into World War IV

Laurent Guyénot

• 444 Comments • Reply

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up

The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.

Sydney Schanberg