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Israeli and US death squads infesting the world Stuart Littlewood Stuart Littlewood considers the increasing use of assassination by the US and Israel, and reports that Israeli murder squads have been authorized to enter "friendly" countries, including Britain, and kill enemies of the racist Jews-only state of Israel. Some readers will remember the 1969 film, “The Assassination Bureau”, a tongue-in-cheek romp based on Jack London's unfinished novel. The setting is the turn of the century a hundred years ago, a fanciful time for regime change and the purging of corrupt monarchs and cruel tyrants. The bureau's hit team is for hire provided that Ivan Dragomiloff, founder and mastermind, deems the targeted killing "socially justifiable" and there’s proof of the candidate's misdeeds. Eventually, however, the moral rectitude of the enterprise gives way to financial greed, and the day comes when the bureau accepts a mission to eradicate an unnamed but prominent public figure. The fee is paid in advance, proof supplied, job accepted, then the name is revealed. The target is Dragomiloff himself. The Assassination Bureau cannot go back on its word and Dragomiloff finds himself pitted against the killing machine he himself created and perfected.
Assassination is the targeted killing of persons usually for political or ideological (and often insane) motives. This is OK, but not OK. In 1976, US President Ford issued an Executive Order which was enacted after revelations that the CIA had made several attempts on the life of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Henceforth, targeted political killings were outlawed: "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Every US president since then has upheld Ford's prohibition on assassinations – or somehow got round it. Carter and Reagan reaffirmed the ban, although it didn't stop the US bombing Gaddafi's home in 1986 in the hope of rubbing him out, or the Clinton administration firing cruise missiles at suspected guerrilla camps in Afghanistan in 1998, or Bush instructing the CIA to engage in "lethal covert operations" (based on an intelligence “finding”) to destroy Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization. Nice and legal, though Reports suggest the Bush administration has got together with Israel to establish the legal framework for a new American targeted-assassination policy. The Israelis, of course, are world experts. Annoying pockets of resistance to their land-grabs, ethnic cleansing, abductions, illegal settlements and other “criminal” activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are answered with the wholesale imposition of specially concocted warfare laws for the benefit of Israel's “self-defence”, or “homeland security”, but which trample on everyone else’s rights. This is the sort of chicanery that suits Bush admirably as he presses ahead with his war-without-end on terror. Israel's liking for assassination and murder goes way back to pre-state days when such atrocities were practised against Arab and British targets by the Irgun, a thoroughly unpleasant organization that believed political violence and terrorism were legitimate tools for removing obstacles to the Zionist cause and driving the Arabs off their lands. Assassination became official Israeli policy in 1999 when the military planned “initiated attacks” to stop Yasser Arafat's militia, the Tanzim, from firing on illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis demonstrated rare ingenuity in bumping off bomb maker Yahya Ayyesh. In 1996 this master-technician in the art of suicide bombing had been on Israel's most-wanted list for three years. Shabak (Israel's secret service) finally tricked a friend into giving Ayyash a booby-trapped mobile phone. When Ayyash used it, Shabak detonated it. Earlier this year they excelled themselves again by terminating Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh, “the fox”, with an exploding headrest in his Mitsubishi. However, their preferred method of assassination is the air strike, which is lazy, lacking in finesse and often messy. In 2002 Israeli F-16 warplanes bombed the house of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, the military commander of Hamas, in Gaza City, scandalously killing not just him but at least 11 other Palestinians, including seven children, and wounding 120 others. In 2004, at the second attempt on Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, wheelchair-bound since the age of 12, and nine innocent bystanders were killed in a helicopter gunship attack. Yassin had survived an F-16 bomb blast the previous year. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon characterized Yassin as "the mastermind of Palestinian terror" and a "mass murderer", which was comical coming from the war criminal who ran Israel's death squad, Unit 101, and was found indirectly responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem ,231 Palestinians have been assassinated, 385 innocent bystanders murdered and heaven knows how many injured or mutilated by Israel since the second intifada in 2000. "The use of state assassinations by Israel against Palestinian suspects is undermining the rule of law and fuelling the cycle of violence in the region", Amnesty International warns.
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