Article in sais review · January 005 doi: 10. 1353/sais. 2005. 0011 citations 49 reads 3,483 authors

SAIS Review W
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Qaeda members in Yemen, apparently by a CIA drone. One of the four, Abu
Ali al-Harithi, is described as a “senior al Qaeda leader,” but it is not clear
at all whether he could be accurately described as a “political leader.” Sim-
ply being the top al Qaeda operative in Yemen who planned and supervised
the attack in Yemen on the U.S. warship Cole does not make him a politi-
cal leader.
This example shows that acts can be described as “assassinations” in
a descriptive sense even when the persons killed are not political leaders.
We propose to replace ingredient 2—“killing a political leader”—with a
broader condition: “killing a person of prominence.” The background
sphere of one’s prominence is given by the context of expression. Ingredi-
ent 7—“killing for political (including religious) purposes”—does not pre-
suppose that the person killed is a political leader. Prominence is sufficient
for rendering an act of killing one that can be intended and understood as
done for political (including religious) purposes.
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We have, thus, reached the following working definition of the term
“assassination” for the present purposes:
(A) An assassination is an act of killing a prominent person selectively, intentionally,
and for political (including religious) purposes.
This definition leaves open all questions of justification. Evaluations
depend not only on the point of view but also on circumstances. Obviously,
for example, the former U.S. legal approach, written before the related Ex-
ecutive Order of President
Gerald Ford and later formu-
lated in Executive Order 12333,
is different from the present
U.S. legal point-of-view.
12
At this point, we would
like to emphasize the fact that
there is no universal evaluation
of assassination from a moral
perspective. We take it for granted that international relationships between
states, or groups of states, are, in a broad sense (to which we return in the
third section), political in nature. Accordingly, acts of self-defense are po-
litical in nature (in the same broad sense). Hence, the question arises
whether killing a prominent person, selectively, intentionally, and for rea-
sons of self-defense is morally justified. Our present point is that there is
no universal answer to this question either. The example of Hitler, during
the period of the Holocaust, shows that under certain circumstances an
assassination (in the sense of Definition A) is morally justified.
13
This does
not mean that the assassination of a political leader or a person of some
other social prominence and political significance is always sanctioned in
times of war. Most of those persons are non-combatants whose assassina-
tion (in the same sense) is morally, ethically and legally unjustified.
An assassination is an act of
killing a prominent person
selectively, intentionally, and for
political or religious purposes.

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ILLING