By Xin Ping
Creating divisions, sponsoring oppositions, instigating coups, plotting regime change, imposing blockades, slapping unilateral sanctions, dropping bombs, and launching outright invasion — none of the dark arts of subversion on foreign soil is off limits to a U.S. hell-bent on tightening its slipping grip on the world. Its litany of sins are well documented by American author William Blum in his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II .
“It’s not a pretty picture” is his conclusion and an understatement.
Yet the most callous and desperate of them all is political assassination. In a short span of decades, the U.S. has carried out a number of interventions through extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances, with the express purpose of removing foreign figures considered to be America’s arch-foes.
Chief among them was the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro. According to U.S. Senate investigations, the CIA conducted eight operations against him between 1960 and 1965; another count by Cuba’s former chief of counterintelligence Fabián Escalante put the total number of U.S. attempts on Castro’s life at 638, most of which were orchestrated on Cuban soil. The CIA is also accused of being behind assassinations against former Dominican President Rafael Trujillo, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Patrice Lumumba, former President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem, etc.
Like an addict trying to cure himself, successive U.S. administrations made efforts to renounce this lethal weapon. In 1976, former U.S. President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, declaring that “no employee of the U.S. Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination”. This was reaffirmed by President Jimmy Carter in another executive order in 1978. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan reiterated the ban in Executive Order No. 12333.
In reality, it has only been “Oops!...I did it again”. On April 14, 1986, Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing raid Operation El Dorado Canyon to take out Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The advent of unmanned drones in 2000 made such operations easier. Bill Clinton was the first American president to try them out; but their first success happened under the Bush administration in Yemen. Obama inherited Bush’s wanton use of drones for killings and increased the frequency tenfold. He oversaw 1,878 drone strikes in his eight years and Donald Trump outdid him by conducting 2,243 only two years into his presidency, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK-based think tank. The latest one was the assassination of Iran's most powerful security and intelligence commander Qassim Soleimani on January 3, 2020.
More distressing is the fact that the U.S. “targeted killing” is not targeted at all. For every figure it has tried to assassinate, on average nine children perished, as was found by the American NGO for human rights Reprieve U.S. The New York Times also reveals that U.S. drone strikes had killed thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including hundreds of innocent bystanders, by the end of President Obama's first term.
There is a global chorus denouncing the U.S. bloody program. The UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions condemns it as a violation of international law through acts trampling on other nations’ sovereignty and their people’s human rights. Nevertheless, U.S. politicians — with their hands dripping blood under the table — are still wagging their tongues about “upholding rules-based international order”.
What audacity!
(The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Xinhua News Agency, Global Times, CGTN, China Daily etc. He can be reached at xinping604@gmail.com.)
