An Act of War or Just an Assassination?

As we all still wait for the Trump administration to specify what "imminent threat" provided legal justification for the killing of Qasem Soleimani, it's looking more and more like the provocative act against Iran was just a good old-fashioned assassination (which is technically still supposed to be illegal, not that such a thing matters much to Trump).

In that vein, it might be a good time to review the U.S. history of assassinations.  According to journalist and author William Blum, the U.S. has made more than 50 attempts to assassinate political leaders across the globe.   His 2003 book "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions since World War II" is "far and away the best book on the topic" according to academic Noam Chomsky.  However, most of the claims and allegations in the book are unsubstantiated or not reported upon by otherwise reliable sources.  A more solid list of U.S.-sponsored assassination activities (thought not all have been confirmed by the CIA) is as follows:

Assassination Attempts

1959:  In one of its early attempts (there were perhaps over a hundred) to kill Fidel Castro, the CIA recruited a former lover of the Cuban strongman and provided her with poison pills, which she hid in her cold-cream jar.  The pills melted and the woman decided that the chances of forcing them into Castro’s mouth while he slept were limited.  Castro guessed her intentions and chivalrously offered her his own pistol so she could finish the job. “I can’t do it, Fidel,” she told him.

1960: President Eisenhower authorized a CIA attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo.   CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb devised a poison resembling toothpaste, which he personally brought to the Congo in September of that year.  The attempt was called off at the last minute by Larry Devlin, the local CIA station chief.

1960's:  Newly declassified files reveal that the CIA planned an attempt on the life of Indonesian President Sukarno.  The plotting progressed as far as the identification of an asset who the CIA felt might be recruited for this purpose.  The plan was later abandoned.

1976:  The Washington Post reported that  the CIA  approved a plan to assassinate Jamaican Prime Minister Michale Manley.  According to the report,  three schemes were devised-- one on July 14, 1976, when Manley's jeep was stopped by a roadblock: then on a scheduled Manley visit to Canada in September, 1976, and finally last Dec. 15, the night of the Jamaican elections.  All the plans went awry before any shots were fired.

1985:  The CIA arranged for the Saudi Arabian intelligence service to undertake an assassination attempt aimed at Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah (leader of Hezbollah) in Lebanon.  The operation went awry, killing 80 innocent people when a car bomb exploded in a Beirut suburb.

1986:  Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by U.S. forces when his compound was targeted by air strikes.

2002:  After Afghani politician and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was expelled from Iran, he was targeted for assassination by a CIA drone as his convoy approached Kabul.  The Hellfire missile somehow missed.

2003: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein escaped an attempt on his life by U.S. forces during an airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad in the precursor to the Invasion of Iraq.

Assassinations

1953:  The CIA is suspected of throwing CIA bacteriologist Frank Olson out a 10th-floor window of the Hotel Statler to his death.  Decades after the incident, the CIA admitted covertly dosing Olson with LSD at a CIA retreat in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland just days before his death.  After that fateful retreat, Olson threatened to quit his work on a secret CIA program investigating the use of psychotropic drugs for espionage and the military.  Within days, Olson began suffering severe paranoia and a nervous breakdown (perhaps as a result of the LSD exposure)-- so he was sent to a CIA physician in New York City for treatment.  He died the night before he was scheduled to return to Washington DC.

1963:  The CIA backed the coup and assassination of the Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.

1961:  The CIA supported and provided weapons to dissidents in the planning of the assassination of the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo.

1970: The CIA, who considered Chilean General René Schneider a major stumbling block for military officers seeking to carry out a coup of Salvador Allende, supplied a group of Chilean officers with weapons for the operation to kidnap Schneider, during which the General was shot and killed.

1973:  The CIA helped organize the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, deemed to be too left wing-- he died on the day of the coup.

1981:  There is widespread speculation that Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos was killed when a bomb planted aboard his aircraft by CIA-organized operatives exploded upon approach at the Penonomé airport.