Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

J. SCAHILL, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. London 2014. Profile Books, 642 pages. ISBN: 9781846688515

Underestimating the Consequences in the 21^st Century of the Middle Ages

Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, (there is also the film from the book, entitled, “Dirty Wars”, a Sundance Film Festival official selection in 2013^[1]) is an exposure of an aspect of covert warfare, focusing upon targeted killings, meaning State sponsored-State directed assassinations, in the 21^st century. Listed as a current affairs title, at more than six hundred pages with footnotes, index and 8 pages of colour photographs, it is certainly a book worth reading as contesting the current spin given to state sponsored assassination-murder since September 11^th 2001^[2]. However, for those with more than a casual passing interested in this morally repellent policy of extra-judicial murder – targeted killings by a State, that is State sponsored assassinations, in modern language “Executive Action”^[3], intentional killing – a practice that has its origin as a methodology of state policy in the Middle Ages, this book unfortunately fails to seriously address the Middle Ages, either in the matter of the historical precedent for this practice, nor in the historical record of the consequences for those states that have chosen to employ this methodology, in effect, if unintentionally, leading the reader to think this employment of a State policy of “Executive Action”, – murder incorporated is something relatively modern, belonging to the 20^th -21^st centuries. Admittedly within a book on current affairs published in 2013 a familiarity with the Middle Ages might seem somewhat irrelevant, if not obtuse and unexpected, given the march of technological fashion, but precedent remains of abiding consequence. As a result of this omission, this book provides a somewhat deceptive, a-historical, post-modern perspective for this practice, isolated from its origin in past precedent and practice, divorced as a practice from its historical origin within a meta-narrative and consequently seemingly lacking in any possible resolution. A few pages in the introduction, or in an afterward, placing this practice of State sponsored assassination within its historical context, setting and pattern, would have been a most valuable addition to this work for any of the many potentially deracinated modern western readers and the followers of The End of History^[4] and the Last Man thesis of Francis Fukuyama^[5], with the occluding thereby of the historical consequences of actions, through the alleged universalization of Western so-called liberal democracy, a form of consumerism^[6], that Jeremy Scahill’s book illuminates, through providing a look at the back-lighting and noises off, to the slogans, media sound-bites and glossy illusions. It is the absence of this historical context that this review makes some slight attempt to redress.

It is of course a matter of the transference from one specific religious-cultural context into a subsequent and different one, the reasons for, the sponsors of, the means and the consequence of this transference that are of considerable interest, not least because the adoption of a State policy of assassination, of ‘Executive Action’ by the President of the Republic of the United States of America is a relatively recent, and a relatively well documented 20^th c. development.

There are serious matters raised by this book concerning the understanding of the historical past, with the inevitable implications for understanding the present and future, even if one evades the post-modernist trap of confusions and anachronisms of time and space, helicopters in World War Two etc.

For example, one reads on page 239, a quote from Al Shabaab (Xarakada Mujaahidiinta Alshabaab – The Youth Striving for the Religion – (striving in the sense of striving in the path described by the Almighty, so far as this can be understood by a human being) jihad fi sabil Allah) describing the United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, later assassinated in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011:

“O Sheik, we would not only look at you as only a soldier, but as the likes of ibn Taymiya (an Islamic scholar known for resisting the Mongols in the thirteenth century)”^[7].

However, the gloss given to this statement by al-Shabaab, the explanatory description added in brackets to Al-Saabab’s text by Jeremy Scahill is factually wrong. ibn Taymiyyah’s three famous fatwas against the Mongols were probably all, two certainly, written in the first decades of the XIV^th century^[8], and he personally fought against the Mongols, matching words with deeds, at the Battle of Marj al-Saffar on the 20^th of April 1303^[9], that is, early in the XIV^th century. The author provides in this gloss a somewhat limited and strange description of this Hanbali jurist and member of the Qadiriya Sufi Order, Taqi ud- Dīn Abu-l-‘Abbas Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halim ibn ‘Abd as-Salam ibn Taymiyyah, who was born in Harran in south-eastern Anatolia (Jazîrah) in 1263, and who, because of his legal rulings (fatwas) spent time in Mamlūke Damascus in prison (1319-21 and 1326-8), where he died in 1328. He was concerned with the spiritual and moral regeneration and re-armament of the Muslim community in the period following the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate by Pagan Mongol, Armenian and Georgian forces five years before his birth, with the Mongol execution of the last Abbasid Caliph al-Musta’sim (1242-58), and of the matter of authority, Caliphal, from the Sultan, or from the religious scholars, drawn from the religion itself – essentially a man concerned with the sources of legitimacy being rooted in the Holy Koran and hadith for actions within and by the Muslim community of his day and of the community’s return to, and its adherence to first principles. Consequently his concerns, like those of the founder of the Qadiriyya Order, Sheik al-Sayyid Muhiyudīn Abu Muhammad Abdal Qadir al-Jilani al-Hasani wa’l-Hussaini al-Baghdadi (1077-1166), were of a much deeper and of a far more long-lasting nature than simply resisting or combatting the Mongol onslaughts on the world of Islam through issuing legal rulings describing the Mongols as pagans against whom was invoked the duty of jihad. Ibn Taymiyyah having the clarity and strength of his faith to even rebuke in person the Mongol ruler Ghāzān Khān on the 1^st of January 1300, as the single articulate member of an otherwise entirely silent delegation which had been sent from the city of Damascus to the Khan outside the city, to remonstrate against the probable Mongol slaughter of the civilian population of the city, to obtain protection – amān for the civilians of Damascus from the Mongol ruler, who had accepted Islam in 694/1295,^[10] which he secured. The account of the actions of this delegation, with its single fearless member, is perhaps the most probable of the historical sources for the well-known teaching tale by the incomparable Mulla-Hoja Nasr ed-Dīn (more properly Nasir al-Dīn, meaning Defender of the Faith, i.e. Defender of Islam), concerning the delegation and the elephant and the Mongol ruler, today usually named Timur, but more probably, Ghāzān Khān, with the location likewise changed from Damascus to Akşehir:

“According to one story, Timur had ordered his battle elephants to be quartered in the vicinity of his field quarters. Accordingly, one elephant was assigned to each nearby village. Since the elephants consume large amounts of food and are fond of tree bark, they began to inflict considerable damage to the crops, orchards and vineyards. The elders of a village, deciding that they could no longer withstand the ruination, sought out Nasreddin and asked him to be their spokesman, to relay their wish to Timur that their elephant be withdrawn. Nasreddin agreed on one condition. The entire delegation was to accompany him to Timur’s throne. Members of the delegation agree. Nasreddin takes the lead, with the elders in tow, and they begin their trek to the encampment. As the delegation approaches the multitudes of guards, some of which are mounted, others on foot, in full battle gear and colourful attires, the members of the delegation begin to have second thoughts. One by one they begin deserting the procession (perhaps unsurprisingly resembling the fortunes of the individual birds in the course of their journey recorded in Farid ud-Dīn Attar’s (ca. 1120-1220) Mantiq ut-Tayr, or, “The conference of the birds”, on the language of the birds, that is, the language of peoples’ spirits). As Nasreddin approaches Timur’s resplendent throne, he realizes that he is alone. Feeling betrayed and becoming furious, he proceeds nonetheless. The Chamberlain announces Nasreddin. Timur queries majestically: “State your business”. After due and proper salutation, Nasreddin begins: “Your Highness, the residents of this village asked me to relay their highest respects to you. They are quartering one of your battle elephants, but they have a small worry”. “May they be blessed. What is their worry?” “Your Highness, they have noticed that the elephant in their charge appears to be unhappy with his lot. He may be suffering from loneliness. They desire a companion for him”. “Let it be”. Timur seems pleased and orders a pouch of gold coins be given to Nasreddin along with a new suit of clothes. Nasreddin leaves the Presence of Timur and on the way back, the delegation reassembles the way it dispersed. They are very curious of the outcome and wish to share in the good fortune of their Chief-Emissary. Nasreddin observes wryly: “You harvest what you sow”^[11].

Or, in a further version of the ending, the delegates ask,

“-Please tell us, Hodja, what happened?

-I have great news for you, beams the Hodja. To keep the male calamity company, a female calamity will soon arrive. Now you can rejoice”^[12]. The elephant symbolising the worldly appetite of the army of Mongol troops the Khan had quartered on the district, eating the population out of house and home etc.

Perhaps more importantly, Ahmad ibn Taymiyya was imprisoned and died in prison in Damascus for having issued 17 years earlier an explosive legal ruling forbidding the visiting of graves, with certain clearly defined exceptions, as any pilgrim undertaking any such visit to a grave, ie. ziyarat al-qubur, would, in his ruling, be probably guilty of the sin of innovation (bidah) and would in consequence, in his view, be a polytheist, practicing ziyara bid’iya/Ziyarat al-mushrikin^[13].

Standing in the Hanbali school of law, extending from Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), who was a collector of hadith and a volunteer in a ribat on the frontier of Islam and one who survived the lashing and imprisonment meted out by the mihna instituted by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun to impose the doctrine of the Created-ness of the Holy Koran upon the jurists, a man deeply concerned with adhering to Prophetic precedent as distinct from innovation-bid’at, and passing through ibn Taymiyya who likewise was a physical participant in the jihad (in 1303 against the Mongols, as noted above) and experienced imprisonment, if Mamlūke rather than Caliphal, and extending via his follower, fellow prisoner and exegete Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292-1350), to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87) and the modern Ikwan, the Wahhābis and the Jihadists and Salafists of today, for Jeremy Scahill to characterise the life and work of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya as an, “Islamic scholar known for resisting the Mongols in the thirteenth century” within this context, is not only historically somewhat inaccurate, but seems to be somewhat strange, within the context of this quote from al-Shabaab. Perhaps ibn Taymiyyah could rather to be characterised as an, “Islamic scholar known for resisting what he understood as innovation-bid’at in the religion and for aspiring thereby to return to first principles” or, alternatively, from a quite different perspective, Jeremy Scahill could have cited ʾAbū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah (1304-68), the Maliki jurist and famous traveller and chronicler, who reported that while ibn Taymiyyah was preaching from the mimber of the mosque in 1326 before he was imprisoned, he had said, “God comes down to the sky of this world  just as I come down now”, and ibn Taymiyyah then descended one step of the mimber, leading to the charge of anthropomorphism; while ibn Battutah also notably remarked that Ibn Taymiyyah, being a man of some considerable intemperance, could be characterised as having a “screw loose”^[14], a charge perhaps more related to the matter of realising a particular perspective than one might at first think.

The Hanbalite ibn Taymiyyah can be seen as following on from, and building upon the Shafi-led Jihad preaching in Damascus of the XII^th century against the Fatimids, Nizāris and Crusaders, with works such as, Arba‘un fi l-ijtihad fi iqamat al-jihad, Forty in the Cause of Jihad, a collection of 40 hadith, which were carefully selected by Imam Hafiz Abul Qasim ‘Ali ibn Hasan ibn ‘Asakir (1106-75), a Damascene Shafi’i scholar and master of jihad propaganda for Sultan Nūr ad-Dīn Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn ʿImād ad-Dīn Zangi (1118-74), chosen to serve the Sultan’s purpose in Jihad against the Crusaders, Isma’ilis, Fatimids and others. The Sultan had his Dar al-Hadith in Damascus built for ibn ‘Asakir, following upon the functional precedent of the Fatimid-Isma’ili Dar al-‘Ilm, the House of Knowledge, Dar al-Hikma – House of Isma’ili Wisdom, Dar al-Dawa – House of Propaganda, stemming from the Dar al-‘Ilm founded by the Shii’ite Vizier Abū Nasr Sābūr ibn Ardashīr in Shii’ite run Baghdad in 991-3^[15], to produce propagandists equipped to pass on and deliver the Shii’ite message, be it 12’ver Imami, Fatimi or Nizāri, etc. The importance of this selection of jihad hadith is that they don’t identify the ‘enemy’, which are characterised simply as “enemy, unbelievers, and tyrants”^[16].

The danger inherent in this perspective was recognised by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Tusi al-Shafi’i al-Ghazali (1058-1111) the Proof of Islam – Hujjat al-Islam,  at a somewhat earlier date, in respect to the practice of the bidding to good and the forbidding of evil, “hizba”, in that there was and there is a certain potential towards a worldly anarchic chaos emerging if due restraint, a certain patience in respect to these matters was/is not exercised and, in consequence, although recognising that a bad sultan in theory should indeed be deposed or be obliged to resign, the reality he stated was that:

“An evil-doing and barbarous sultan, so long as he is supported by military force, so that he can only with difficulty be deposed, and that the attempt to depose him would create unendurable civil strife, must of necessity be left in possession, and obedience must be rendered to him”^[17]. So much, was al-Ghazali’s recorded view of the merits of temporal events, such is the patience called for, together with Asharite occasionalism, the Almighty’s on-going Creation – rather than for example the so-called “Arab Spring” unrolling from December 2010 onwards and its consequences for the individual believer and society.

Another problematic passage of the few mentions of the Middle Ages in Jeremy Scahill’s work occurs on page 390 where one reads:

“The other (parcel bomb which was sent to the address of a Jewish organisation in 2010 in “Obama’s city”^[18] of Chicago) was addressed to Reynald Krak, a French knight of the Second Crusade known for his mass murder of Muslims. Krak was eventually beheaded by Saladin, the Muslim warrior who defeated the Crusaders in the twelfth century”^[19].

The name of the intended recipient of the parcel bomb “Reynald Krak” is the Arabic name given to the French Crusader Renaud de Châtillon 1125-1187, who, while Prince of Antioch had been captured and imprisoned from 1161-76 by Sultan Nūr ad-Dīn Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn ʿImād ad-Dīn Zangi (1118-74), but who after his release, when his ransom of 50 kg. of gold was paid, became, through marriage in 1177 to Stephanie (widow of both Humphrey III of Toron and Miles of Plancy, and the heiress of the lordship of Oultrejordain), the Lord of Oultrejordain and was then based in his fortress of Kerak (Krak des Moabiles Ar. Al Karak الكرك‎), 140 km south of Amman, a fort which had been constructed from 1142 onwards by Pagan le Bouteiller (the Butler). Hence where the passage reads, “Krak was eventually beheaded by Saladin”, it should rather read, Renaud of Kerak or Renaud, Lord of Oultrejordain “was eventually beheaded by Saladin”. The Latin Crusader fortress of Kerak was ‘beheaded’, if these words could be understood as meaning such, when it was taken from the Crusaders who surrendered to the besieging Ayyūbid forces in the winter of 1188-9 in the aftermath of Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb’s victory over the Latin Crusader army at the battle of the Horns of Hattīn on the 3^rd and 4^th of July 1187.

It was from the fortress of Kerak that early in 1183 Renaud launched the raid that sealed his fate. Renaud after his years of imprisonment was a fluent Arabic speaker and he certainly understood the importance of the Haram and of pilgrimage to the Holy Cities and the importance of ensuring the protection of Muslim pilgrims for Muslim rulers. Consequently he ordered the construction, which took two years, and then the transport in sections, of five galleys overland from Kerak to Aylah on the Red Sea, where this Crusader fleet was launched in February. Two of these galleys, together with Renaud’s land forces, blockaded the Muslim port of Aqaba-Eilat until it was relieved. The other three galleys, for a period of more than 6 weeks brought sack and pillage to the coastal villages of the Red Sea and death to its Muslim pilgrims, 16 ships were burnt, a pilgrim ship was captured and also a caravan coming from the Nile, and these Crusader raiders were thought to threaten the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina^[20]. The crews and Latin troops on these three galleys were forced to abandon them and flee overland on the approach of the Egyptian fleet of al-Adil, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb’s brother, placed in charge of Egypt, whose ships from Fustāt and Alexandria led by the Armenian Muslim Admiral of the Egyptian fleet, Husām al-Dīn Lu’lu’, had been transported, in response to this Crusader fleet, overland from the Nile to search throughout the Red Sea for these galleys of the Latin pirate trespassers. The 170 survivors surrendered and were then executed on Sultan Salah ad-Dīn’s orders, in Mecca, Medina, Cairo and Alexandria for public edification concerning the consequences of defiling the sacred territory. The last time such a threat to the Holy Places – after the news of a threatened Latin land invasion of the Hejaz in June 1181^[21], followed by Renaud’s reconnaissance of the overland route in the winter of 1181-2^[22], and the sea raid of 1183 – had occurred 250 years earlier, when the Qarmatian, abu Tāhir Sulaymān from his capital of al-Ahsā where he had abolished Sharia law, cut the pilgrimage routes and in 930 raided, sacked and slaughtered perhaps 13,000 people in Mecca and removed the Black Stone (al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) from the Ka’bah (It was only returned 20 years later in 951 at the instigation of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mansur).

It was because Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn had sworn to slay with his own hand Renaud, Lord of Oultrejordain, because he knew that Renaud was the planner responsible for this, in Muslim eyes, sacrilegious operation, the breaker of the truce, that Renaud was beheaded on July the 4^th 1187 following his capture at the Crusader defeat at the Horns of Hattīn. Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn had written to his brother al-Adil, “Their attack was an unparalleled enormity in the history of Islam”^[23]. Renaud was personally executed by Sultan Salah ad-Dīn  (1169-93) being quite beyond the reach of the Sultan’s mercy for his actions, having transgressed all bounds in launching his heart stopping Crusader naval attack on the pilgrimage route and threatening the Haram of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. This presents us with a rather different picture from that which is presented to the reader in this book by J. Scahill, that Saladin  personally executed Renaud because he was, “known for his mass murder of Muslims”, mass murder of Muslims which seems to be otherwise unrecorded of Renaud. Which is not to say Renaud, Lord of Oultrejordain,  wasn’t an intemperate, violent man, a killer, he was recorded as such, ordering some of his prisoners thrown off the battlements of his castle of Kerak etc., but he was not recorded by contemporaries as being a mass murderer of Muslims. Consequently this parcel bomb was not ‘addressed,’ to a ‘mass murderer of Muslims’ but, within this historical context one may rather suggest, to the violators of the Haram, the Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif) at al-Quds-Jerusalem, and so was presumably intended to mark opposition to the passage of Israeli legislation giving the city, al-Quds, legally divided since 1947 between the Palestinian East and Israeli West Jerusalem, the highest national priority status in Israel, through the 2010 law prioritizing Israeli construction throughout the city, and offering grants and tax benefits to Israeli residents to make housing, infrastructure, education, employment, business, tourism, and cultural events more affordable, to completely overwhelm the diminished Muslim population of the city, building more Israeli “facts” on the ground in complete disregard of international law.

It should also be noted that neither the jurist, ibn Taymiya (ibn Taymiyya/ ibn Taymīya), nor the Lord of Oultrejordain, Reynald Krak (Renaud de Châtillon), nor yet Sultan Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb) are to be found listed in the index to this book, an index extending over 27 pages, yet an index which fails to register these seminal Medieval figures which are mentioned in the text; yet an index which does however register the Salahuddin Centre, run by al Shabaab in 2004 in Mogadishu, Somalia, as being found on page 200. The Salah ud-Din/Saladin Centre was named after the leader of the jihad that reclaimed from Latin Catholic rule, the third holiest city in the world for Islam, al-Quds-Jerusalem, on Friday the 2^nd of October 1187, that is, Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Salah ud-Din/Saladin), whose name is not itself otherwise listed in this index.

The Original Assassin State

As Umberto Eco wrote a quarter of a century ago in respect to the ‘Western world’:  “The Middle Ages are the root of all our contemporary “hot” problems”^[24]; these problems not derived from antiquity^[25], as, “both Americans and Europeans are inheritors of the Western legacy, and all the problems of the Western world emerged in the Middle Ages: Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (along with banks, cheques (saqh), and prime rate) are inventions of medieval society. In the Middle Ages we witness the rise of modern armies, of the modern concept of the nation state, as well as the idea of a supernatural federation; the struggle between poor and rich, the concept of heresy or ideological deviation, even our contemporary notion of love as a devastatingly unhappy happiness”^[26]. Consequently, the contextualisation, even if only briefly, of the first assassin state, the historical precedent for this modern policy and polity of assassination in the 21^st century, could have aided the diligent reader of this book. Two hundred years ago in a book entitled “An History of Muhammadism (sic)”, written by the historian and follower of Edward Gibbon, Charles Mills (1788–1826), to be read for example by those setting out from London in the course of the long voyage by sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope to make their grave and/or fortune working for the Hon. East India Company in India, there is a passage of some considerable relevance:

“The Assassins appeared in the north of Persia, under the title of Hussunees (from Hussan Subah, their founder), and have obtained eternal infamy, by the introduction of a corruption’ of their name (Assassins) into most of the modern European languages… A blind obedience to the will of their leader was therefore naturally their first principle of action, and the passport to future happiness. He sent them into foreign courts, in order to kill the objects of his hate. Other princes hired them for the same purposes. Their murders and pillages have filled many a dismal page of Oriental history”^[27].

This passage describes the notorious actions of the original Assassin state, as distinct from the modern examples that likewise employ assassination as State policy, pruning dissent and steering the course. It was founded at the end of the XI^th c. by the Nizāri Isma’ili and Fatimid Shii’ite trained, Hasan-i Sabbāh, the originator of the New Preaching (ad-dawah al-jadidah). Neither the Assassin state, nor Alamut its capital from 1090 onwards, nor the Shī’a Imāmī Ismā’īlī Ṭarīqah-the Isma’ilis, nor the Nizāri Isma’ili da’wah-preaching-mission-propaganda, nor yet Hasan-i Sabbāh, nor his Daylamite and Turkoman  fida’i, nor their satellite state-let in the Nusairi Mountains (Jabal al-Anṣāriyyah) of Northern Syria from 1106 onwards, nor its leader Rāshid al-Dīn Sinān b. Salman (or Sulayman) b. Muhammad Abir al-Hasan al-Basri (d.1193), nor the fort of al-Qadmūs and its fida’i, nor the revenue raised through their policy of exploiting the fear-threat they generated, are mentioned in this book, yet it was this medieval assassin state which was the source of this modern practice. To paraphrase the flyleaf synopsis of Bernard Lewis’s book^[28], the Nizāri Isma’ili Assassins were the first group to make planned, systematic and long term use of assassination (targeted killing^[29] – a “liquidations policy”, – “Executive Action”, – terminations – pre-emptive assassinations – extrajudicial killings and the fear of and the threat thereof) employed as a political weapon, using the fida’i (in Arabic and Persian, meaning literally, “one who sacrifices himself in the name of a faith or an idea”; as described in the XIII^th c. in Jelal ad-Dīn Rumi’s Mathnavi: “Men are amazed at the Fida’i, but every one of us is a Fida’i in his behaviour, — inasmuch as everyone is devoted to some calling wherein he spends his life and is killed”^[30]. And, “Several men rushed forward, like Fida’is (desperate assassins), and flung themselves into combat with him”^[31].) to change the political landscape, both through the actual assassination of key figures, including Caliphs, both Abbasid and Fatimid, Sultans, Viziers, Atabeğs, Emirs, judges and religious scholars and Latin Catholic rulers, the Templar Raymond of Tripoli, with the Norman Baron Ralph of Merle in 1152, Prince Edward of England at Acre in 1172, Conrad of Montferrat, the elected king of Jerusalem in 1192, Raymond, son of Prince Bohemond IV of Antioch, in Tortosa, in 1213  and, probably, Phillip de Montford, Lord of Tyre in 1270, and, through the fear that these assassinations caused to the elite and rulers of both East and West, fundamentally changing the balances within state and society through the employment of the politics of fear. In the face of the New Preaching, rulers, Sunni, Shii’ite, Catholic, came under personal threat, while those actively preaching against the New Preaching could be threatened into silence, such as the scholar Fakhr al-Dīn Razi (1149-1209), or were assassinated, such as Ubayd Allah al-Khatib, Qadi of Isfahan in 1108-9. Shades one may think of the fate of the United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, for vocally criticising policy and so assassinated in a drone attack in 2011^[32].

‘The World is a Battlefield’ is the subtitle of this book and in the XII^th and XIII^th centuries, the world likewise was a battlefield and likewise a public theatre that resounded from the shocking actions of these assassins, the fida’i, the targeted assassination of key figures from Jerusalem to Merv, Mardin to Damascus, Cairo to Isfahan, Tiflis to Quhistan, Ghazni, Tabriz and Tyre, the fida’i were seen in Diyarbakır, Mongolia, Marseilles and Antalya, whose envoys reached both England and France. In 1195, Walter Hemingford, the English chronicler recorded the correspondence between the assassin leader in Syria, Rashid al-Dīn Sinan and all the Princes of Europe, as, in the days before mail planes, CNN and the world wide web there was a global audience and the Mongols listened in; as at times the Catholic Order of the Temple, the Knights Templars collected 2,000 gold besants per year from the Syrian branch of the Assassins following the assassination of Count Raymond II of Tripoli in 1152^[33], the Assassins fought alongside the Crusader Raymond of Antioch against Sultan Nūr ad-Dīn Zangi in 1149 and in which both Raymond of Antioch and Ali ibn Wafa, the Assassin leader were killed; they threatened Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn with assassination in both 1175 and 1176; received protection money from the Rum Seljuk Sultan Ala’ ad- Dīn Keykubat I^[34], as also from the Holy Roman Emperor and Crusader, Frederick II Hohenstaufen in 1228; and fought together with the Order of the Hospitaller Knights of St. John of Jerusalem against the Catholic Bohemond IV of Antioch (d.1233) in 1230.

A first-hand account from the XIV^th c. is provided by ibn Battuta:

“From Aleppo I travelled north, visiting Antioch, then turned south once more and entered the mountains. Here I passed by the castle of al-Qadmus, the castle of al-Mainaqah, the castle of al-Ullaiqahy, the castle of Masyaf, and the castle of al-Khaf. These castles belong to a sect called the Isma’iliyah, known as the Fidawis, and none may visit them there save members of their sect^[35]. They are the arrows of al-Malik al-Nasir (the Mamlūke Sultan Muhammad I b. Qalawun, Nasir al-Dīn d.1341), by means of whom he strikes down those of his enemies who take refuge from him in al-Iraq and other lands (like the extra-judicial killings and drone strikes of the 21^st c.), and they receive fixed emoluments. When this Sultan desires to send one of them to assassinate some foe of his, he pays him his blood money. If he escapes after carrying out what is desired of him, the money is his, but if he is caught it goes to his children. They have poisoned knives, with which they strike the victim of their mission, but sometimes their devices do not succeed and they themselves are killed”^[36].

A Passport of Fear: The Modern Omissions

George Bernard Shaw in his 1911 one-act play entitled, Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama, not only recorded a century ago that, “we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate assassination of rulers on the ground that it is “propaganda by deed” or sociological experiment…because no case can be made out in support of assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress”, as Charles Mills had noted a century earlier, but also, and most accurately described the fact that “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship”.

In terms of the English speaking world the key change in the relationship between honour, morality, civic courage and the state and its policies, came in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the response to the realization of, and articulation of fear at the disproportion in numbers/force/power/legitimacy between ruling minority and ruled over majority in the India of the Honourable East India Company, as in British India from 1858, as elsewhere in the British Empire, the consequent descent into fearfulness, and the consequent response, the development of a policy and practice of asymmetrical warfare, “a passport of fear”^[37], “Whatever happens we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not”^[38], “no holds barred”, “no restraint”, “the gloves are off”, “nothing is ruled in or ruled out”, “playing to win”, “playing for keeps”,  as likewise, General Powell and General Schwarzkopf in the 1991 Gulf War, said that they had brought all the “tools in a toolbox”^[39], as in 2007, “We have to use all of the tools in our tool kit, as the 9/11 Commission said”^[40].

This modern worldview is a combination of fear^[41] and of the modern perception that the world is all that there is, together with the imperative to exercise power/control over as much of it (Full-spectrum dominance^[42]) and over the peoples inhabiting it, by any and every, that is, by all possible means.

This is the modern phraseology, with this modern phraseology clearly a quite distinct vocabulary from: “an officer and a gentleman”, “play up play up and play the game”^[43], “honour not honours”, “to fight a clean fight”, “to keep a straight bat”, “to maintain a stiff upper lip”, “to be magnanimous towards a beaten foe”. These two vocabularies inhabit entirely different worlds, in civilizational and moral terms, in the perspective on “the other”, quite simply light-years apart.

To personalise this watershed in thought and conduct, even more than language, it is perhaps the difference between General Gordon (Chinese or Gordon of Khartoum) and the New World Order represented by the officer sent to rescue him, the then Baron Wolseley of Cairo, Adjutant-General to the Forces, commanding the Nile Expedition of 1884, with his publicised meticulous planning of details^[44] who was the figure responsible for the late Victorian byword for a smart operation of any kind, “Everything’s all Sir Garnet”^[45] meaning, “all is in order” – even if in fact it wasn’t^[46].

This New Thinking, the modern version of the Nizāri Isma’ili’s New Propaganda was clearly articulated by the subsequent Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley, 1^st Viscount Wolseley, KP, GCB, OM, GCMG, VD, PC, (1833 – 1913) of Anglo-Irish descent, who was “a deeply religious Irish protestant, (with) a profound belief in a destiny willed by God”^[47]. The New Thinking is related in his book, The Soldiers’ Pocket Book for Field Service. This volume which was first published in 1869 when he was a Colonel aged 36, after his experience of the Indian Mutiny in 1857-8, including action in the Relief of Lucknow^[48], and then in China in the Second Opium War 1860-61^[49], and this was a book that was repeatedly republished, going through five editions^[50]. This volume carried the New Thinking throughout the ranks of the officers and gentlemen of the British Army and was the seminal official text on this matter for several generations, it was the key military text for officers and it was read and remembered, its most considerable influence and consequences over the subsequent 150 years, most simply put, were extensive, for it is no flight of hyperbole to describe him thus: “Almost single-handedly, Wolseley transformed the British army from a gentleman’s army into a modern fighting machine”^[51]. There was no place for officers and gentlemen in the modern fighting machine that Wolseley was building under Queen Victoria, there were to be – only fanatics.

In Col. Wolseley’s words from his Soldier’s Pocket Book:

 “He (the soldier) must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers, like missionaries, must be fanatics. An army thoroughly imbued with fanaticism can be killed, but never suffer disgrace”^[52]. It carries the same tone as a letter written to the Times (of London) in 1859 after members of the British and French invasion force in June 1859 in the Second Opium War (1856-60) had suffered losses from the Qing fire from the forts guarding Beijing, “the name of European will hereafter be a passport of fear, if it cannot be of love, throughout their land”^[53].

“Let us sink as far as possible the respective titles of officers, sergeants and pri­vates, merging them into the one great professional cognomen of soldier…let us give up the phrase ‘officer and gentleman’ substituting the title of ‘soldier’ for it;…”^[54].

“As a nation we are bred up to feel it a disgrace ever to succeed by falsehood; the word “spy” conveys something as repulsive as “slave”; we will keep hammering along with the conviction that ‘honesty is the best policy’; and the truth always wins in the long run. These pretty little sentiments do well for a child’s copy book, but a man who acts on them had better sheathe his sword forever”^[55].

A plaque of this same text, “As a nation…” by Col. Wolseley from his Soldier’s Pocket Book of 1869 was hung in the Operations Room of the LCS – London Controlling Section, in charge of the secret policy of strategic deception in 1944 during World War Two, as 75 years after it was first penned, this remained a guiding text, defining the principles of, or rather the lack of them, the culture and doctrine of dishonesty of the modern world’s warfare, that is of modernity and its politics^[56].

William Blum cites the U.S.A. parallel text to, “As a nation…” by Col. Wolseley, a reworking of this same perspective, a trans-Atlantic shared view, a policy that was adopted in 1948-9,^[57] the same world-view which was published in the Report of the Special Study Group (The four panel members were Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle^[58], William B. Franke^[59], Morris Hadley^[60] and William D. Pawley^[61]) on the Covert Activity of the Central Intelligence Agency, September 30^th 1954^[62]:

“It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant policy”^[63].

In effect, it is the implementation of this post-1857 Indian Mutiny policy, the acme of realpolitik, which requires one to believe – that all is possible in a climate of fear and all means are justified – which stands as the justification for the modern state policy of assassinations. There is of course fear, not honour in it, and it represents in a clear and naked fashion the change wrought by modernity, the post 1857 Indian Mutiny military world view spread across the globe, West-Way in action.

Concerning the nature of worldly fear^[64] there is a teaching story related by the incomparable late XIII^th – early XIV^th c. Mulla/Hoja Nasreddin (more properly Nasir al-Dīn, meaning Defender of the Faith, i.e. Defender of Islam), entitled “Fear has No Favourites” it exhibits the fact that with fear there can be no discrimination and had its source within the cultural climate generated by the Nizāri Isma’ili assassinations and the Pagan Mongols, it remains alas and alack, rather fitting for the 20^th and 21^st centuries:

“A lady brought her small son to the Mulla’s school.

‘He’s very badly behaved,’ she explained, ‘and, I want you to frighten him”.

The Mulla assumed a threatening posture, eyes flaming and face working. He jumped up and down, and suddenly ran out of the building. The woman fainted. When she had come to, she waited for the Mulla, who returned slowly and gravely.

‘I asked you to frighten the boy, not me!’”.

‘Dear Madam,’ said the Mulla, ‘did you not see how afraid I was of myself as well? When fear (danger) threatens, it threatens all alike’^[65].

In Winston Churchill’s words spoken in the climate of fear at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, “In wartime truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies”, and of course, in 2015 with,  “a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war”^[66] within a climate of fear extending over generations from the A-bomb holocaust threat of the Post-World War II period, down to post 9-11, considerably more is required today than just, “a bodyguard of lies”; dissimulation and deceit as policy and praxis perhaps?

Assassination has of course remained an “eternal infamy” and, as a policy of state is a “fundamentally repugnant policy” the only cause for its employment being overwhelming fear. However, this abnormality is being quite rapidly normalised for the youth of today, who are being most speedily acculturated to this practice, seeing this policy as being entirely unsurprising and usual, rather than it being one of “eternal infamy” and of being “fundamentally repugnant”. This process is speeded through glimpses on the news, the diet of assassin films, computer games and related books, Assassin’s Creed etc. and the extensive diet of Ninja Assassin films, computer games and related books, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles etc.^[67].

It is unfortunate that one of the more characteristic, but in this case more fully recorded, incidents of the modern on-going state policy of assassination is unmentioned in this book. It is recorded on the 12^th August 1990 in the course of the planning conducted for launching Operation Instant Thunder:

“However, he (Lt. General Jimmy Adams, USAF) saw the air campaign (Instant Thunder) as a unilateral effort—one that called for the takedown of Saddam Hussein but ignored the Iraqi troops poised on the Saudi borders”(my emphasis)^[68].

The ‘takedown,’ aka, the assassination, of Saddam Hussein, through bombing his known and suspected residences was an unchanging part of the USAF plans in 1990 for the bombing campaign, as was the case subsequently in the course of the 2003 “shock and awe” air campaign^[69], precursor to the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, termed “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.

 The military objectives defined in the early versions of Operation Instant Thunder in 1990 were clearly expressed:

“1. Force Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

2. Degrade Iraq’s offensive capability.
3. Secure oil facilities.
4. Render Hussein ineffective as an Arab leader”^[70].

Point four of these objectives, defined as a ‘military’ objective and implemented throughout the course of the Operation Desert Storm Air Campaign from January the 17^th, 1991 onwards, but which, as was the case subsequently in 2003, signally failed in its objective, was that of assassinating President Saddam Hussein. The choice of the word ‘render’ in this statement of military objectives is noteworthy, if fortuitous, one may think the verb to render, relates to the policy of rendition, or is it render, as in making chicken soup, to rip (render) the flesh into pieces, or simply, to make?

Further, perhaps, Jeremy Scahill could also have mentioned the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General Michael J. Dugan, formerly director of United States Air Force Plans and Operations, who became the thirteenth Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force for 79 days, from 1^st July to the 17^th of September 1990, before he was dismissed by the United States Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney, after freely telling reporters that the U.S. military planned to target (= eliminate-assassinate-liquidate-terminate, that is plan the extrajudicial murder of) Saddam Hussein, his family, and even his mistress^[71]. The Washington Post quoted officials on General Dugan’s plane as saying that Israeli officials had advised that the “best way to hurt Saddam was to target his family, personal guards and even his mistress”^[72], together apparently with the planned bombing of the shrines of Najaf and Kerbela^[73].

This plan and the attempt at assassination simply followed on from the earlier equally unsuccessful attempt to target/eliminate/assassinate Col. Muammar Gaddafi through bombing. The Libyan Head of State being a target in the United States bombing of Libya, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, on Tuesday, the 15^th of April 1986 nearly 30 years ago. Muammar Gaddafi was warned by a telephone call from the Italian socialist politician Bettino Craxi and, moments before the bombs dropped at 2 am, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, together with members of his family rushed out of their residence in the Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli which was bombed^[74]. Of course the text of President Jimmy Carter’s executive order, renewed under President Regan 5 years earlier in 1981, banning assassinations of Heads of State was adhered to, in the breach, if not in its observance, a matter of the terminology employed rather than the deed attempted. The practice of assassination as an arm of state policy for the Republic of the United States of America seems to have sprung out of the Second World War, with the wartime OSS that became the CIA, as from President Truman (1945-53) onwards, notwithstanding the Church Committee’s Assassination Report of 1975^[75], and notwithstanding the Presidential findings against this practice^[76], assassination has since the Second World War been an integral part of presidential policy, with both civilian and military components^[77].

The current Presidential somewhat impersonal drone based system of targeted assassinations as state policy^[78], so vividly described by Jeremy Scahill in this book, although at times an advance upon some other methods of “targeted killing” – “extrajudicial execution” – assassination which have been employed in this 21^st century, such as the 22^nd of July, 2002 assassination through the release of a 2,000-pound bomb dropped from an F-16 on an apartment building in a residential area, obliterating it, together with the Hamas leader Sheik Salah Mustafa Muhammad Shehade (1952-2002), and also murdering at least 14 civilians, including his wife and his daughter and also eight other children, while somewhere between 50 and 150 other human beings were injured in this assassination^[79]; and, with the world perceived by some as a battlefield, and the opponents and suspected opponents of ‘West-way’, together with entirely innocent bystanders (so-called ’collateral damage’), blown into pieces by the appropriately named, Hellfire missiles fired from drones, it seems that we lack today in the 21^st century, both the skill and the precision, as also the courage of the personal touch employed by the originators of the retributive state built through assassination and fear of assassination in the XI^th to XIV^th centuries, the Isma’ili fida’i. The use of drones being perhaps further evidence, not only of the inability to engage in a dialogue, the handicap of the fearful, but also of a fear of taking casualties that will doubtless over time prove counter-productive, as was noted decades ago by James Clavell in his novel set in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 entitled Whirlwind^[80], and which is also clearly recorded in this book^[81].

The CIA Director John Brennan gave a televised press conference on the 11^th of December 2014 from his agency’s headquarters in response to the release by the United States of America’s Senate Intelligence Committee on the 9^th of December of the damming report concerning the matter of CIA torture, (Enhanced interrogation Techniques EIT), and the calls for the prosecution of the responsible high-ranking state officials who both ordered and oversaw the torture program, such as President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden and others, and, in the course of his conference the CIA Director John Brennan declared his nominal support for President Obama’s decision to end the Bush-era program of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT), while at the same time fiercely defending the administration’s expanded program of drone assassinations. He said, “the US military has done some wonderful things with these platforms”^[82]. “And in terms of precision of effort, accuracy and making sure that this country, this country’s military does everything possible to minimize to the great extent possible the loss of life of non-combatants, I think there’s a lot for this country and this White House and the military to be proud of”^[83].

In 1818 a state policy of assassinations was something which was described by an educated man as earning ‘eternal infamy’; a century later by another educated man in 1911 as, ‘the extreme form of censorship’, while a century later, in 2014, this same state policy of assassinations under the New World Order, is publicly stated by a high-ranking state official as being ‘some wonderful things,’ as being something ‘to be proud of’.

Such has been the course of the Anglo-Saxon world’s Orwellian progress^[84] over the last two centuries, with the actualisation of the slogans of the Orwellian doublespeak of the Party in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “WAR IS PEACE^[85] – FREEDOM IS SLAVERY – IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”^[86], and so, perhaps inevitably in 2014, it can be stated by a high state official in public that, ETERNAL INFAMY IS SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF.

Likewise, if suspected of being “off message”, circumstances can certainly conspire to a death sentence without trial for some, for, as Amin Maalouf wrote in his novel Samarkand, but which is as pertinent today as a reflection of the conformist state of mind brought about by a pervasive climate of fear and self-censorship, as it was a millennium ago in the days of the Isma’ili assassins:

“We live in the age of the secret and of fear. You must have two faces. Show one to the crowd, and keep the other for yourself and your Creator. If you want to keep your eyes, your ears and your tongue, forget that you have them”^[87].

The whole question, not of the justification by a state itself for the practice of assassinating its opponents, but rather of the consequences over time of doing so, surely requires both consideration and mention, both in respect to the state and its population(s), of the healthiness of a certain ‘civilizational’ perspective; as also in respect to the nature of the interstate relationships between practitioners of this policy amongst themselves and between those states that do not practice this policy; together with the consequences not only upon the recipients of this attention – individuals, societies and states – but also upon the practitioners and those who come to know about it, in respect to their views of the state, of policy, morality, hypocrisy and justice, judicial and extra-judicial, and realpolitik, and facing the question as to if the resultant corrosive public cynicism and scepticism towards a state that employs the politics of fear and termination as a policy and methodology of censorship-retribution, acknowledged or unacknowledged, outweighs any alleged short term advantage.

Since 2010 it has been the “life patterns” of suspects that has justified their “pre-crime” assassinations^[88]. Like “anticipatory self-defence”, this concept of pre-crime criminality obtains to a degree of doublespeak that has rarely been encountered in human history and was previously unknown to the world of assassins. It is of course this ‘pre-crime criminality’ that justifies the so-called ‘collateral damage’ experienced by those who are killed or wounded through being, often purely coincidentally, if unfortunately for themselves, their friends and relations, in some proximity to the supposed target of the assassination, and so are also assassinated, maimed or otherwise damaged for life, as these people, adults, children and babies are evidently guilty through having some proximate association in space and time, to ‘pre-crime criminality,’ the co-ordinates show proximity and therefore guilt, and so, in consequence, in this exercise of ‘justice’, LIFE PATTERN IS DEATH PATTERN, and so inevitably perhaps, “a group of “military-aged males” in a particular region of Pakistan would be enough evidence of terrorist activity to trigger a drone strike”^[89], although “a group of “military-aged males” in a particular region of Chicago” would of course not “be enough evidence of terrorist activity to trigger a drone strike”, the co-ordinates are at present on a different map.

Evidently from the evidence compiled by J. Scahill in Dirty Wars, the world is seen by some as a war-game, “we all played space invaders as kids” said the generals, who now, like Obama are playing golf, when not pressing the exterminate button and watching with their associates the deed done on a ‘live link’, the latest White House snuff movie^[90]; and it is both evident and indubitable that Obama has the Orwellian, if not entirely the Hasan-i Sabbāh, nor yet the fida’i touch of Rāshid al-Dīn Sinān, as he “has institutionalised the highly classified practice of targeted killing (aka assassination), transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war”^[91]; with, for any reasonable person, the mind-boggling statement that placed, “assassination as the centre piece of US National Security Policy”^[92] in the first year of the Democrat Barack Obama’s Presidency. It certainly reads like a paraphrase from some late XI^th – early XII^th c. chronicle, “assassination as the centre piece of Isma’ili Nizāri retributive security policy” recording the first years of Hasan-i Sabbāh’s New Preaching from the “White House” of Alamut.

Some Conclusions

In conclusion, this book relates in a clear and substantiated manner the practice of assassination utilised as an arm of Presidential policy by successive Presidents of the Republic of the United States of America in the 21^st century. However, something of quite considerable importance has been missed, the unmentioned historical precedents for this practice, which would, if they could have been presented in this book, lead one almost inevitably to suggest, that any state that choses to employ a policy of assassination, is, quite regardless of appearances, a failing state, a declining power, with a leader or ruling clique living in fear bordering upon paranoia, and in the passage of time preceding that state/regime’s dissolution dispersing fear outwards across the world.

This was the case for the state and the state-let of the Isma’ili Nizāri Assassins, the somewhat wild and isolated Imami-messianic offshoot of the Shii’ite Fatimid state; the Fatimid state which in the X^th c. had controlled much of the Mahgrib, Egypt, the Hejaz, Sicily, Syria, Palestine, and which, together with the Shii’ite-leaning Buwayhid (Buyyids) dynasty of mercenary soldiers from the Caspian province of Daylam, (whose descendants went on to provide for Hasan-i Sabbāh many of his cadre of fida’i, in addition to Turkmen and Kurds), who had controlled both the Sunni Abbasid Caliphs in Bagdad and western Iran and Iraq from the mid-X^th c. (until displaced in the mid-XI^th c. by the arrival of the Sunni Great Seljuks), had established over most of the Islamic world between the mid-X^th and the mid-XI^th centuries a considerable degree of Shii’ite rule. The Nizāri assassin mini-state^[93] was founded when the wheel had turned, the sands had run-out for Shii’ite control over most of the Islamic world, although leaving a lasting legacy, and the Imami-messianic offshoot of the Nizāri Assassins consequently employed in the face of the powerful Sunni resurgence, the worldview and weapons to be expected of an endangered voluntarily isolated and threatening and therefore threatened minority.

Likewise in the last years of the British Mandate in Palestine, in the declining days of the British Empire, the state use of what could be characterised as death squads or assassination squads^[94], to combat the assassinations being carried out by the Zionist Stern Gang, the Irgun zvai Leumi and Lehi, after the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and then the British Embassy in Rome in 1946, following on from the assassination of Walter Edward Guinness, Lord Moyne, British Minister in Cairo in 1944, that is, a state using assassination against a state being established through, and which, as is noted above, continues to employ assassination as standard practice and which also recommends the use of assassination to others^[95].  It does seem rather extraordinary that the “doyen of Middle East historians” Bernard Lewis could research and then author a book on the Isma’ili Nizāri assassins^[96], and then write that the problems in the Islamic world did not stem in part from the politics of intellectual conformity, of silence and fear that developed, to some considerable degree, from the consequences, amongst others, of the actions of the assassins of the Nizari Isma’ili state and state-let and the consequences thereof^[97], while acting as éminence grise on the Islamic world to those people, including George Bush junior and Dick Cheney, who have now institutionalised and applied this same practice of assassination as state policy in the first decades of the 21^st century, mirroring that practiced by Zionist Israel.

It was likewise the case in the latter years of the Apartheid regime in South Africa where assassination also became state policy, the assassinated including: ANC activist Vernon Nkadimeng assassinated by a car bomb in Botswana in 1985; ANC representative Dulcie Evonne September, aged 52 shot 5 times in the back in Paris, France in 1988; ANC activist David Webster assassinated in 1989; Chris Hani critic of Apartheid assassinated in 1993; theologian, Johan Adam Heyns, critic of Apartheid assassinated in 1994, in the year the Apartheid constitution was dismantled.

A state-regime employing a policy of assassination, although not noted in this book, would seem to be one of history’s markers, as it seems that the adoption by a state/regime of a policy of assassination can be associated with the decline of the state that employs it, together with isolation – the bunker-mentality and with some threatened, or perceived as threatened formerly powerful minority ideology or faction.

Notlar

[1]     See: dirtywars.org

[2]     Since Jeremy Scahill’s work appeared in 2013, some of the matters concerning drone strikes have been further investigated, see Starr-Deelen 2014, 159-192.

[3]     The title of the CIA Project from the 1950’s to assassinate foreign leaders including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

[4]     “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the cold war, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such”.

[5]     Fukuyama 1992. The liberal theory of the 1990’s that with the fall of communism history had ended, “she (Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright) was a trailblazer in the effort to keep America engaged in the world, at a time at the end of the Cold War when many wondered whether America’s leadership was still needed at the end of history” spoken by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the 14^th of April, 2008, Source: http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/04/103554.htm; “When the West won that struggle, it was natural for it to interpret the collapse of Communism as the end of history (when, as Francis Fukuyama himself warned, life would probably become very boring)” Pfaff 2000. As to if the West in any real sense won that struggle, or the rising proportion of Muslims within the population of the Soviet Union, when combined with military defeat in Afghanistan by the mujahidin, funded in blood and treasure in large part by Muslim states led to Slavic separation and Soviet collapse is however somewhat unclear. But this thesis formed a part of the near systematic assault upon the study and the relevance of history towards the end of the 20^th c. in the United States, and in other parts of Echelon-the English speaking intelligence block, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, largely propagated through the phantom of post-modernist relativism in a process of the detachment of actions from consequences, displacement and amnesia, together with the associated abdication of responsibility that is quite strange, but quite possibly related to the threats inherent through the on-going exposure of the “providential empty land” for white settlers as the ‘big lie’ with of course consequences in respect to a recently founded settler state in the Middle East. As to if this was a re-run of the 1950’s CIA-MI6 Operation Mockingbird researchers will doubtless determine, years after the damage done to the trust of innocent participants, intellectual collateral damage. Academic responses against the marginalisation and the diminishing of the importance of the understanding of our common history include, Churchill 1997; Evans 2000.

[6]     For Plato’s comments on the alimentary tract, of the money men in respect to the ideal city-country-world, “the public city will be just when there is agreement as to which shall rule, and there is no confusion of functions but every occupation is a vocational responsibility. Not, then, where there are no ‘classes’ or ‘castes’ but where everyone is a responsible agent in some special field. A city can no more be called a ‘good’ city if it lacks this ‘justice’ (dikaiosynē) than it could be were it wanting wisdom, sobriety or courage; and these four are the great civic virtues. Where occupations are thus vocations ‘more will be done, and better done, and with more ease than in any other way” (Republic, 370C). “the establishment of justice and well-being of the whole in each case depends upon the answer to the question, Which shall rule, the better or the worse, a single Reason and Common Law or the multitude of moneyed men in the outer city and of desires in the individual (Republic, 441, etc.)?” “What is to be done is primarily one of purgation, to drive out the  money changers (middle-men, komisyoncular), all who desire power and office, and all representatives of special interests; and secondly, when the city has been thus ‘cleaned up’, one of considered imitation of the natural forms of justice, beauty, wisdom and other civic virtues; amongst which we have here considered justice, beauty, wisdom and other civic virtues; amongst which we have here considered justice, or as the word dikaiosynē is commonly translated in Christian contexts, righteousness”. The problem stemming fundamentally from rule by the unfit, “if one who is by nature a craftsman or some sort of businessman be tempted and inflated by wealth or by his command of votes or by his own might or any such thing…”, fn. 35, it is worth reading the chapter “What is Civilisation?” 1-12, in Coomaraswamy 1989, 1-2; 5-6.

[7]     Scahill 2013, 570, source cited: Al-Shabaab: Reply to the Greeting and Advice of Sheikh Anwar, Imam Anwar’s blog. Source: anwar-alawlaki.com, December 27, 2008.

[8]     See on this: Aigle 2007, 195-214. The three Mongol invasions were in: December of 1299 to April 1300 (mid-699 A.H.); October 1300 to January 1301 (first half of 700 A.H.) and, from February to April 1303 (mid-702 A.H.). For further dating of two of these fatwas to the XIV^th century, and one possibly to 1299, see for example; source: https://sites.google.com/site/jhoover363/taymiyyan-studies/jihad-against-the-mongols.

[9]     Aigle 2004, 294.

[10]    Aigle 2004, 293.

[11]    H. B. Paksoy, Keloglan: The Bald Boy and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Texas 2003. Source: http:// www.lightmillennium.org/2004_14th_issue/hbpaksoy_keloglan.html; “One day Sultan Timur presented the people of Akşehir with what he thought was a very wonderful gift, a large male elephant. Of course the poor people of this town couldn’t afford to feed such a large animal and they wanted to get rid of it somehow. They were afraid to approach the King about this, however, as they thought that he might be offended and thereby punish them for not being thankful for the King’s present. So some of the townspeople came up to the Hodja and asked him if he would be their representative and mouthpiece before the king. Nasreddin Hodja agreed but made a condition that fifteen of them must accompany him.

      So the Hodja led the way with all the others following behind. During the journey however, one by one they all disappeared. When the Hodja arrived at the palace he turned around and noticed that he was alone. He became very angry and came before the Sultan and said:

      -O King, the people of my town have pleaded with me that I come and talk to you.

      -Yes, continue, said the King.

      -Well, the people of my town are very pleased and grateful that you have given us such a wonderful present. The problem is that now we have had pity on the poor animal, seeing that it is male and it has no female partner.

      The Sultan was overjoyed when he heard these words and told the Hodja:

      -That is no problem. I will be pleased to present you with another gift by giving you a female elephant!

      -Oh, thank you, your Majesty, that is most kind of you! Said the Hodja.

      Then the Hodja strutted back into town and told all the people the good news”. 202 Jokes of Nasreddin Hodja, No. 77. For a further version see; source: http://www.readliterature.com/h010622.htm

[12]    Source: http://www.naqshbandi.ca/pages/print.php?id_article=281&language=English#sthash.O06ni9Jj.dpuf

[13]    On this matter of continuing importance see for example: Saleh as-Saleh, “Points of Benefit Regarding Visiting the Graves”, (28^th Dhul Qi’dah 1427, Dec. 19^th, 2006) 1-4 at http://abdurrahman.org/finaljourney /VisitingThe Graves.pdf, Dr. Saleh as-Saleh being a pupil of  Shaykh Ibn ul-Uthaymeen (d. 2000) of the salafi da’wah; Beranak – Tupek 2009, 1-40.

[14]    Little 1975, 95.

[15]    Halm 2001, 71-4, where the precedent in a sense at least of the Abbasid Mutazalite Caliph al-Ma’mun’s bayt al-Hikma is noted. It is perhaps a matter of the tools employed, to borrow the opponent’s tools and to re-use them, has perhaps sometimes something of the slave and something of the amorality of Shakespeare’s Edmund in King Lear about it, “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit”. Act 1, sc. II, 174, perhaps exhibiting a certain lack of hygiene-of discrimination.

[16]    Mourad – Lindsay 2012, 50-58.

[17]    Black 2001, 104.

[18]    Scahill 2013, 391.

[19]    Scahill 2013, 390, note, citing R. Grossman and C. Parsons, Bomb Plot Becomes Historical Jigsaw Puzzle. Chicago 2010, 593.

[20]    Lyons – Jackson 1997, 185.

[21]    Lyons – Jackson 1997, 157.

[22]    Lyons – Jackson 1997, 185.

[23]    Lyons – Jackson 1997, 187.

[24]    Eco 1987, 65.

[25]    “From ancient Greece and Rome we acquired a certain idea of tragedy (but our own theatre is based on a medieval model) and an ideal of beauty, as well as our basic philosophical concepts. But from the Middle Ages we learnt how to use them”. Eco 1987, 65; “In the case of the remains of classical antiquity we reconstruct them but, once we have rebuilt them we don’t dwell in them, we only contemplate them as an ideal model and a masterpiece of faithful restoration. On the contrary, the Middle Ages have never been reconstructed from scratch. We have always patched them up, as something in which we still live”. ibid 67-8.

[26]    Eco 1987, 64.

[27]    Mills 1818, 68-69.

[28]    Lewis 2001.

[29]    Kendall 2001-2002. See also: Byman 2006, 95-112.

[30]    Mathnawi V. 3542.

[31]    Mathnawi VI. 3037.

[32]    Scahill 2013, 367-374; 498-506.

[33]    Barber 2010, 102-3.

[34]    Daftary 2007, 390, citing Abu’l Fada’il 335-6.

[35]    For remarks concerning the relationship between the Alevī and the proto-Isma’ilis, see for example, ‘Alawī in, Glassé 2003, 36-37.

[36]    Battutah 33.

[37]    Letter to the Times, “Allied Expedition to China”, The Times, 16^th September, 1859: “We shall teach such a lesson to these perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear”, cited, Lovell 2011, 405, fn. 81.

[38]    Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), in the words of the figure “Blood” in his poem “The Modern Traveller” of 1898, (see Belloc 1898).

“Blood thought he knew the native mind;

      He said you must be firm, but kind.

      A mutiny resulted.        

      I shall never forget the way

      That Blood stood upon this awful day    

      Preserved us all from death.      

      He stood upon a little mound    

      Cast his lethargic eyes around,  

      And said beneath his breath:     

      ‘Whatever happens, we have got             

      The Maxim Gun, and they have not”,

The Maxim Gun being the first recoil-operated machine gun adopted by the British Army in 1889 it fired 11 shots per second. Subsequently, in place of the Maxim Gun, one can substitute as time passes: phosgene and other varieties of poison gas-atom bomb-hydrogen-neutron bomb-Agent Orange-fuel air devices-cluster bombs-cruise missiles- etc.

[39]    Source: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/gulfwar6.htm

[40]    Spoken 10^th of Oct., 2007, by Hon. John F. Tierney, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Washington, DC. “Six Years Later: Assessing Long-Term Threats, Risks and the U.S. Strategy for Security in a Post-9/11 World” Source: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg47590/html/CHRG-110hhrg47590.htm

[41]    As Harry Parkes, a proponent of the Second Opium War put it in 1857 the year of the Indian Mutiny: “it is only by maintaining it and working on the fears of the people that we can be successful or escape defeat which would be most injurious to our interests” Lovell 2011, 257.

[42]    J. Garamone, American Forces Press Service. Washington, June 2, 2000, “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance” – “Full-spectrum dominance” is the key term in “Joint Vision 2020” the blueprint DoD (Department of Defense) will follow in the future. Joint Vision 2020, released May 30 and signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Henry Shelton, extends the concept laid out in Joint Vision 2010. Some things will not change. The mission of the U.S. military today and tomorrow is to fight and win the nation’s wars. How DoD goes about doing this is 2020’s focus. Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations”. Source: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289 Apart from the mind warping hubris this doctrine embodies, one would find it somewhat hard to reconcile this desire to exercise control over the planet with the Almighty’s omnipotence, the All-Knowing. And the authors of the thoughts expressed in this document are perhaps in ignorance of, or find irrelevant the Holy Koran, Surah 8, Sūrat I-anfāl (The Spoils of War) 30, “But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners”. Likewise Surah 35, Sūrat fātir (The Originator) 43.

[43]    From Vitae Lampada, published 1888, by Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938). The sense made explicit in the American Grantland Rice’s poem entitled Alumnus football, it’s final verse, from the 1920’s

“For when the One Great Scorer comes

      To write against your name,

      He marks — not that you won or lost —

      But how you played the game”.

[44]    W. S. Gilbert and A. Sullivan’s comic opera of 1879, The Pirates of Penzance contains the song, “I am the very model of a modern Major General” reportedly a  satire in a lampoon of the then Sir Garnet Wolseley, and it may be that the lines:

“In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,

       I am the very model of a modern Major-General” there was the deliberate pointer in the lyric to a perceived intellect without a heart, nor any feeling for humanity, which the lyricist W. S. Gilbert did his best to remind the public.

[45]    Hence the title of Lehmann’s (1964) biography.

[46]    The bifurcation of reality and PR with PR replacing the reality, as on Wolseley’s Nile Expedition, “where sick and wounded men died of starvation and the advance guard went without food for forty hours in the desert heat”. Home 1982, 58, but all was in order with the very model of a modern Major General; “Wolseley at Ashanti (1874) had learned, if reluctantly, how to court the newspapermen” Ibid 98.

[47]    Oxford DNB. http://odnb2.ifactory.com/view/article/36995?&docPos=2&backToResults=list=yes|group=|fe ature=|aor=|orderField=alpha “He despised foreigners and especially Irish nationalists, frequ­ent­ly alluding to the desirability of his filling some proconsular role in Ireland and, on at least one occasion, of putting himself at the head of the loyalists to resist the raising of a ‘filthy green rag”. Ibid.

[48]    “A letter from him at Lucknow gleefully described the sport of peppering ‘niggers’ trying to escape by swimming the river”. Kiernan 1998, 164.

[49]    On the Second Opium War see: Lovell 2011, 257-266.

[50]    “Written at the suggestion of Sir Richard Airey, the army’s quartermaster-general, Wolseley added to his military reputation through the publication of his Soldier’s Pocket Book. A practical manual of soldiering, which was to go through five editions, it was the only guide of its kind to military organization and tactics in the kind of small wars in which the army was increasingly involved”. Oxford DNB; Heathcote 1999, 312.

[51]    Encyclopedia of World Biography. In Lehmann’s (1964) biography is the self-explanatory sentence: “Man shooting is the finest sport of all; there is a certain amount of infatuation about it, the more you kill the more you wish to kill”. Source: http://biography.yourdictionary.com/garnet-wolseley Clearly not the kind of sportsman that Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton (1653) would have recognised as a sportsman in his The Compleat Angler or Contemplative Man’s Recreation, published in 1653, rather a somewhat dishonest angler, if an angler at all, one who fishes by throwing the grenade in the trout stream and collects the dead, in modern parlance, “a signature strike”. He also wrote after the First Ashanti (Ghana) War in 1874-6, “It is only through experience of the sensation that we learn how intense, even in anticipation, is the rapture-giving delight which the attack upon the enemy affords…all other sensations are but the tinkling of a doorbell in comparison with the throbbing of Big Ben” cited, Lindquist 1997, 54, fn. 27. The thoughts of a thoroughly modern man, doubtless a worthy topic of Freudian analysis, together with the firearm and camera. He married Louisa Erskine in 1867, they had one daughter Frances Garnet Wolseley, who became the 2^nd Viscountess Wolseley (1872-1936) a teacher of, and writer on gardening, with no direct descendants.

[52]    Wolseley 1871, 5. For the revolutionary Christian Protestant Evangelical fervour in the lead up to the Mutiny itself, see Dalrymple 2007, 58-84. The degree of change in attitude towards the local inhabitants is most evident if one reads his White Mughals, see Dalrymple 2003, before the sequel, The Last Mughal, a change in attitude within 60 years perhaps only matched by the global changes in attitude over the past 60 years.

[53]    Lovell 2011, 259.

[54]    Wolseley 1871, 1.

[55]    Wolseley 1871, 81; Kerr 1991, 364; Farrer 1885, 144.

[56]    Cave-Brown 1975. For possible establishment panic concerning the publication of this substantial work on deception, that subsequently reappeared in the controversy surrounding the so-called missile gap, with the various allegations of disinformation, one can perhaps peruse the reviews at this source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1976/oct/14/bodyguard-of-lies-an-exchange/ For the 2007 CIA assessment-review of this book by R. J. Bowen: Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol20no1/html/v20i1a04p

The position in respect to these two ways of thinking, the civilised and the other, that of ‘All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.’ King Lear, Act.1 Sc. 2, the matter of, “the one desired nothing and whole world was too little for the other” of Diogenes and Alexander, was brilliantly described by the Irish Dublin born Protestant mathematician and physicist, J. L. Synge (1897-1995) author of Synge’s theorem in 1936, in 1943 officially appointed Chairman of the Mathematics Department of Ohio State University and US Air Force ballistic mathematician between 1944 and 1945, one of John Nash’s teachers and likewise a thinker in codes and cyphers, in a short story entitled: s.v. “Noblesse Oblige” (Synge 1970, 45-46) concerning the chess playing friends Blogs and Snogs, who in 1930 played a game where Snogs, on the point of being defeated deliberately played a false move. At which Blogs understood, he realised Snogs was not playing the game, but rather was concerned with the winning, with victory at any cost. Their friendship was terminated, as there are certain things that one cannot do. In 1940 in the Blitz in London Blogs was playing solitaire chess, a fragment of burning material from an exploding bomb fell on the chessboard and, rather than play a false move in the game, extinguishing the burning fragment, the board burned, the house burned and Blogs died in the fire and, “nothing now remains of him but the memory of a man who always played the game”. The death of a gentleman. Expediency survives of course, but the choices made in the face of the reductionisms of expediency mean there are certain things that simply cannot be done by a human being, quite simply disregarding any of the suspected or inevitable consequences, a matter of mental and moral clarity and of civil courage, that belongs to a person of principle, unless of course, one chooses to think that this here is all that there is, and so principle has no root or source, it’s only an affectation. And of course, if this is the case, the game certainly isn’t worth the candle. Op. cit. fn. 44.

[57]    Porter 1989, 189-190.

[58]    USAF, Leader of the 1942 bombing raid on Japan and friend of Frank G. Wisner, former Wall Street lawyer, head of OSS operations in south-eastern Europe (he worked in Turkey in 1944) at the end of World War II, the precursor of the CIA. In 1947, Wisner established Operation Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and foreign media, including the literary journal Encounter, the CCF, Congress for Cultural Freedom etc., see, F. Stonor Saunders 1999 passim. Around the same time he oversaw the creation of stay-behind networks all over Europe, Gladio, and then became the head of the Directorate of Plans of the CIA during the 1950’s directing pro-American forces who brought down Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh leader of the National Front in Iran in 1953.

[59]    A public accountant and subsequent to this report, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management and Comptroller) from 1954 to 1957.

[60]    A New York lawyer and friend of the head of the CIA, Allen W. Dulles

[61]    Adventurer, entrepreneur and U.S. Ambassador to Peru in 1945, named Ambassador to Brazil in 1948. A close friend of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and CIA director Allen W. Dulles, he took part in a policy that later become known as Executive Action, the plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power. Pawley played a role in Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA plot to overthrow the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in 1954 after Arbenz introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company. Pawley is thought to have served in Peru, Brazil, Panama, Guatemala, Cuba and Nicaragua between 1945 and 1960.

[62]    Commissioned by the 34^th President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61) on July the 26^th 1954, report presented Sept, 1954, released 2007 at: Source: archive.org/…Doolittle…/doolittle_report_djvu

[63]    Blum 2003, 42, citing from, Corson 1977, 347; also cited in James A. Barry, Managing Covert Political Action, with the comment, “But it is clear that even the authors of the Doolittle Report were uncomfortable with the “repugnant philosophy” that they deemed necessary. Indeed, although covert political action became an important tool of US policy America never completely abandoned its moral traditions”. Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kentcsi/vol36no3/html/v36i3a05p_0001.htm. One perhaps should pass rather quickly over the expressed opinion, “never completely abandoned” an altogether interesting if not entirely comforting US official opinion; one rather wonders what the rescuing of its partially abandoned moral traditions amounts to? Also quoted in, Leary 1984, 144. Porter 1989, 189-190, who however incorrectly states (much prior to the report’s release from secrecy) that this report was produced by a committee chaired by Gen. Mark Clark, who was also tasked in 1954 with investigating aspects of the CIA which was headed by the 31^st USA President, Herbert Hoover, it forming a part of the Hoover Commission, but did not address its covert activities and remit as an aspect of its task.

[64]    As distinct from the fear of the Almighty, regarded as the beginning of wisdom,

“O sons of men,

      When you give yourselves to the sweet trap of life

      Leave one limb free for God.

      The fear of death is the beginning of wisdom

      And the fair things you do

      Shall blow and smell like flowers

      On the dry and fiery day” quoted in, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night vol. 2 (Trans. J. C. Mardrus – P. Mathers 1996), The Extraordinary Tale of the City of Brass, 341^st Night, 300-1, “the dry and fiery day” being the Day of Judgement.

[65]    Shah 1973, 30.

[66]    Scahill 2013, 514.

[67]    Ninja assassins were employed from the XIII^th c. onwards by a variety of feudal states in the isolated Japan of the Shogunate from the Kamakura Shogunate (1192–1333) until 1868.

[68]    Reynolds 1995, 81.

[69]    Including the air strike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad on the 19^th of March, 2003.

[70]    Reynolds 1995, 29.

[71]    Broder 1990.

[72]    Cited by Schmitt 1990. See also the reasons cited in, Davis 2002, 100-101:

1. General Dugan’s bad judgment,
2. The discussion of operational plans and a priority listing of targets,
3. Acting as the self-appointed spokesman for the JCS and the CINC,
4. The setting of a bad example, especially for USAF personnel,
5. The cavalier treatment of casualties,
6. The citing of an intent to break the executive order banning participation in assassinations, (“No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination”. The text of President Jimmy Carter’s executive order banning assassinations, Scahill 2013, 5).

“7. The potential revelation of classified information about size and disposition of American forces,

8. Denigration of the role of the other services, and
9. Raising sensitive matters of diplomacy, including obtaining targeting information from Israel”.

[73]    Although the targeting of Saddam Hussein continued, a change in targeting in respect to these shrines was recorded by January 1991, see Davis 2002, 131, “Several important Shia Muslim shrines, including Husayn’s (sic) Tomb in Karbala and Ali’s tomb in An Najaf, also required protection. The final, pre-conflict JNFTL, issued January 16, 1991, listed a wide range of such targets exempt from attack”.

[74]    The bombing killed scores and wounded hundreds, Muammar Gaddafi’s youngest daughter was killed and other family members hospitalised.

[75]    The Church Committee hearings included the investigation of attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles’s plan (approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower) to use the Sicilian Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba, for these reports see:  Source: http://history-matters.com/archive/contents/church/contents_ church_reports_ir.htm. For further relating to the state policy of assassinations see the Hart-Schweiker Com­mittee hearings.

[76]    President Gerald Ford’s Executive Order 11905, replaced in 1981 by President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, banning the assassinations of heads of state, the same President who then gave assent to Operation El Dorado Canyon which, given the nature of an exploding bomb – an imprecise weapon, could be understood to be in legal terminology an unintentional killing, a by-product of bombing, rather than an assassination, wonderful these legal interpretations; Scahill 2013, 5-7.

[77]    Scahill 2013, 350-1, respectively the CIA and JSOC.

[78]    There were 1,000 drone attacks in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2012, and many civilians of all age groups were killed in drone attacks between 2009 and 2014, at; Source: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ 2014/01/23/more-than-2400-dead-as-obamas-drone-campaign-marks-five-years/.

[79]    Byman 2006, 95-112.

[80]    Clavell 1986, 1342-3, re Hussain Kowissi’s final remarks concerning the matter of casualties: “They believe the life of an individual is priceless, any individual. We know all life comes from God, belongs to God, returns to God and any life only has value doing God’s work. Do you understand my son? Using what the pilot taught, one Believer can put his foot on the neck of ten millions. We will spread this word you and I…We are neither Eastern, nor Western, only Islam. Do you understand, my son?”.

[81]    Scahill 2013, 177, 248-251; 501-2; 516.

[82]    Source: http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1412/11/cnr.05.html; TRANSCRIPT: CIA Director John Brennan Addresses Senate’s Report on CIA Interrogation Program at; Source: http://abcnews.go.com/International/ transcript-cia-director-john-brennan-senates-report cia/story?id=27539690&page=2

[83]    Source: http://counterjihadreport.com/2014/12/11/brennan-claim-that-detainees-didnt-provide-valuable-in teL-after-eits-lacks-any-foundation-at-all/

[84]    As in the quote from George Orwell’s 1984, see Orwell 1983: “Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain”.

[85]    As in: pre-emptive wars, pre-emptive strikes, pre-emptive actions, anticipatory self-defence, preventive (sic) self-defence, as likewise, the “pre-crime justice” of assassination based upon the “life patterns of suspects”; “Their potential to commit future acts could be a justification for killing them”, Scahill 2013, 352; “Preventive force to…counter threats before they are imminent, even if the use of force would appear to be illegal”. Sofaer 2013.

[86]    Orwell 1983, 25.

[87]    Maalouf 1994, 13, or if you prefer, “If you have nothing to say, you can say it as loud as you want”.

[88]    Scahill 2013, 352.

[89]    Scahill 2013, 352.

[90]    Scahill 2013, 444-445.

[91]    Scahill 2013, 514.

[92]    Scahill 2013, 353.

[93]    It minted its own coinage, one of the indicators of a state, at times in Iran under Muhammad I, Hasan II and Muhammad III, although not in Syria.

[94]    Cesarani 2009, passim. As likewise the “shoot to kill policy” said to have been practiced by the Military Reaction Force (MRF) in Northern Ireland prior to the conclusion of the Peace Process.

[95]    Op. cit. fn. 73. Point 9; for support for the assassination policy, see for example Luft 2003, 3-13, on The Middle East Forum promoting American Interests; source: http://www.meforum.org/515/the-logic-of-israels-targeted-killing.

[96]    Lewis 1967. As to if the Nizāri assassins were in fact within the Islamic community in the XI^th and XII^th centuries as Bernard Lewis suggests through the choice of the subtitle for his book, in terms of their recorded beliefs and because they adopted the term New Muslims under Hassan III, is perhaps open to some considerable doubt, although this association of the religion of Islam and assassins in the context of 1967 in the Middle East and since, was obviously entirely fortuitous, however the title of the earlier work on this subject, see Hodgson 1955, perhaps reflects more precisely the focus of the early Nizari Isma’ilis’ attention.

[97]    Lewis 2002; 2003.