Essay Instructions: This week’s topic brings uncomfortably (to my mind), the admonition in the Bible concerning hypocrisy:
"Judge not, that you be not judged……how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." (Matthew 7:1-5 )
This week’s topic is not exactly pleasant, but necessary as it is so very relevant to the course topic. Rotten apples. But then again, in all corners of life are found the odd rotten apple or two and Intelligence work is naturally no exception in that.
Here, sadly, is a case of state sponsored terrorism – by our two nations and others, or at least approved by President, Prime Minister, and King, and obviously at the time, it was concealed from Congress, Parliament, Majlis and the electorates respectively, and needless to say, law enforcement and Interpol.
It was / is not unusual in the slightest for PLO, PFLP, DFLP, PLF, Hizballah, Red Brigades, PIRA, Baader Meinhof, JRA, Alqa’ida and many others to commit a terrorist act and then loudly proclaim it – but with our side, it’s a very different matter.
The Background:
It is widely agreed in international law enforcement, intelligence and academic circles that the 1980s was the ‘decade’ of State Sponsored International Terrorism.
Several UN Resolutions against terrorism were floated in the 1980s, but many weren’t adopted as Resolutions and passed into law.
In 1987, a particularly strong and explicit UN Resolution against International Terrorism was voted upon at the UN. All the world’s nations voted for it (about 180 or so), except three nations.
Honduras abstained, while the US and Israel voted against it, on the grounds of one particular, offending paragraph:
“Nothing in the present Resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self determination, freedom and independence as derived from the United Nations charter, of people forcibly deprived of that right, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation, or could deprive them of the right to obtain support for others in these ends according to the charter of the United Nations”.
To the US, this paragraph raised serious political problems (and friction between State and Justice departments) with the phrase ‘racist regimes’ since at that time, the US were a formal ally of the South African [apartheid] regime. The US also listed the ANC as a terrorist group. Israel had obvious political problems adopting this Resolution, which would in effect condemn itself, since it had occupied the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza illegally, for 20 years (at that time).
On 8th March 1985, a car bomb outside a block of flats next door to a mosque in a densely populated street at Bir el Abed, West Beirut (mostly Shia), was detonated, having been timed to go off when the masses were leaving the mosque after prayers. The Mosque was very close to the home of Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a prominent anti-American Hezbollah cleric.
According to the Washington Post, 80 were killed and over 250 wounded – mostly women and young girls.
The bomb was ordered by William Casey on the premise of assassinating Fadlallah, which failed as Fadlallah survived unharmed. This is all described by Bob Woodward (ex Navy, investigative journalist, now assistant managing editor at The Washington Post) in his book ‘Veil’.
In light of this evidence, I won’t ask the obvious this week, in that are western governments capable of international terrorism, and therefore a root (albeit infrequently) of terrorism, because they obviously are, no matter how distasteful it is – we have bad apples (or terrorists) in the ranks sometimes.
We (the vast majority of us) just don’t massacre random women and children in cold blood. In fact we send people to the chair or the gas chamber (or lethal injection) in some states, for crimes like that. We don’t want to lower ourselves to their level – the level of terrorists – if we do, we lose our compass, the moral high ground, the justification for fighting, law, and so on.
But instead of harping on the breakdown on that occasion, I would like to concentrate on the fix – and ask you how things like this can be prevented from re-occurring ?
How do we impose effective oversight on operations which are already covert ? An assassination of one man with the result of 80 civilians killed and over 250 wounded after all, is an almost incredible use of excessive force - and it amounts to mass murder and legally, an act of war.
It is relevant that the national leaders in this case (if all three knew) almost certainly subscribed only to an assassination of a single man, not blowing up half a street and killing and wounding hundreds of people.
How do we control this, and with whom (the President and Prime Minister can’t start delving into covert operational plans and evaluating explosive charges and effects) ?
