Why Can the CIA Assassinate People?
Why Can the CIA Assassinate People?
Written by Jacob G. Hornberger Tuesday December 4, 2018
Given
that we have all been born and raised under a regime that has the CIA,
hardly anyone questions the power of the CIA to assassinate people. The
CIA’s power of assassination has become a deeply established part of
American life.
Yet, the Constitution, which called the federal
government into existence and established its powers, does not authorize
the federal government to assassinate people.
If the
proponents of the Constitution had told the American people that the
Constitution was bringing into existence a government that wielded the
power to assassinate people, there is no way that Americans would have
approved the deal, in which case they would have continued operating
under the Articles of Confederation.
Under the Articles, the
powers of the federal government were so weak, it didn’t even have the
power to tax, much less the power to assassinate people. That’s because
our American ancestors wanted it that way. The last thing they wanted
was a federal government with vast powers.
In fact, the purpose
of the Constitutional Convention was simply to amend the Articles of
Confederation. During the 13 years of operating under the Articles,
problems had arisen, such as trade wars between the states. The
convention was intended to fix those problems with amendments to the
Articles.
Instead, the delegates came out with an entirely
different proposal, one that would call into existence a federal
government that had more powers, including the power to tax.
Americans were leery. The last thing they wanted was a powerful central
government. They had had enough of that type of government as British
citizens under the British Empire. They believed that the biggest threat
to people’s freedom and well-being lay with their own government. They
believed that if they approved a federal government, it would become
tyrannical and oppressive, like other governments had done throughout
history.
They were especially concerned with the power of the
government to murder people, including citizens. They knew that
state-sponsored murder was the ultimate power in any tyrannical regime.
When a government can kill anyone it wants with impunity, all other
rights are effectively nullified. And our ancestors were sufficiently
well-versed in history to know that tyrannical regimes were notorious
for killing their own citizens, especially those people who challenge,
criticize, or object to the tyranny.
The proponents of the
Constitution told Americans that they had nothing to be concerned about.
The Constitution wasn’t calling into existence a government with
general powers to do anything it wanted. Instead, by the terms of the
document that would be calling the federal government into existence,
its powers would be limited to the few powers that were enumerated
within the document. Thus, if a power wasn’t enumerated, it didn’t exist
and, therefore, couldn’t be exercised. Since the Constitution wasn’t
giving the federal government the power to murder people, it couldn’t
exercise that power.
On that basis, our American ancestors
approved the deal, but only on the condition that the Constitution would
be immediately amended after approval with a Bill of Rights. To make
sure that federal officials understood that they didn’t have the power
to murder people, the Fifth Amendment was enacted. It prohibited the
federal government from killing people without first according them due
process of law. It’s worth noting that the protections of the Fifth
Amendment are not limited to American citizens. The Amendment prohibits
the federal government from murdering anyone, including people who are
not US citizens.
What is due process of law? It’s a phrase that
stretches all the way back to Magna Carta in 1215, when the barons of
England forced their king to acknowledge that his powers over them were
limited. Magna Carta prohibited the king from killing British citizens
in violation of the “law of the land,” a phase that evolved over the
centuries into “due process of law.”
Essentially, due process
means notice and hearing. It says to the government: “You cannot kill
anyone unless you first give him formal notice of the particular
criminal offense that you are claiming warrants killing him.” Then,
after notice, there has to be fair trial in which the accused has the
right to be heard. The Sixth Amendment ensured that people would have
the right of trial by jury because our ancestors didn’t trust judges or
tribunals.
And so it was that the American people lived in a
society for more than 150 years in which the federal government lacked
the power to assassinate people, which is really just a fancy word for
murder. A governmental assassination is the state-sponsored killing of a
person without notice and trial — that is, without due process of law.
The situation changed after World War II, when the federal government,
in a watershed event, was converted from a limited-government republic
into what is known as a “national-security state,” a type of
governmental system that is inherent to totalitarian regimes. US
officials maintained that the conversion was necessary in order to
confront the Soviet Union, a communist state, which itself was a
national-security state. The idea was that in order to defeat the Soviet
Union in the Cold War, it would be necessary for the United States to
adopt, temporarily, its same type of national-security state system.
In 1947, the CIA was called into existence as part of this new
national-security state. President Truman, the president who was
responsible for the federal government’s conversion to a
national-security state, intended for the CIA to be strictly an
intelligence-gathering agency. But someone slipped a bit of nebulous
language into the law that called the CIA into existence, which the CIA
seized upon to justify the adoption of omnipotent powers, including the
power to assassinate people with impunity, so long as the assassination
was to protect “national security.” Needless to say, the CIA had the
omnipotent power to make that determination.
As monumental as
the conversion to a national-security state was, it was not done through
a constitutional amendment. The Constitution continued to be the
supreme law that governed the operations of the federal government,
including the CIA. Thus, since the Constitution did not give the federal
government the power to assassinate people and since the Fifth
Amendment expressly prohibited the federal government from assassinating
people, the US Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary had
the responsibility to declare the CIA’s power to assassinate people
unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, however, in a
national-security state power is everything and especially omnipotent
power. Recognizing that as a practical matter, there would be no way
that the federal judiciary could keep the CIA from assassinating people
in the name of protecting “national security,” the federal courts went
silent or even supportive.
In 1989 the Cold War ended. Yet, we
still have a national-security state and we still have a CIA with the
power to assassinate people, including Americans. Why is that?
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
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