Is Killing The Enemy An Illegal Assassination?

Picked this up from ACE (via Instapundit).  Justice Stevens was being interviewed and the issue of the killing of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto in 1943 came up. 

Operation Vengeance began on 18th April 1943, when 18 aircraft led by Major John W. Mitchell, went out to find the plane carrying Yamamoto. At 9.30 am the US pilot, Thomas G. Lamphier, identified Yamamoto’s aircraft approaching Kahili Field on Bougainville. Two bursts from his guns hit the target and the aircraft crashed into the jungle.  

Justice Stevens was a young cryptographer who helped break the Japanese code that led to the information about the enemy commander’s travel plans. 

“[Justice Stevens] won a bronze star for his [World War II] service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.  

Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty. “I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.” Stevens said that, partly as a result of his World War II experience, he has tried on the court to narrow the category of offenders who are eligible for the death penalty and to ensure that it is imposed fairly and accurately. He has been the most outspoken critic of the death penalty on the current court.” 

Eugene Volokh does a thorough job of demonstrating the insanity of this view.  Read it all, but here’s how it starts: 

“First, killing an enemy military leader — and apparently a highly competent one — in the middle of a war almost always is the humanitarian decision. It takes little consideration, it seems to me, for our military to properly come to this conclusion. That Yamamoto was “highly intelligent” and that he had lived among us might have emotionally humanized him to people who are considering his fate. But it surely didn’t entitle him to any exemption from military attack. If anything, it made him only more dangerous to us and our soldiers (living among us made it more likely that he would understand us better).  

There’s nothing humanitarian about preserving an enemy military leader — and instead focusing only on killing enemy line soldiers — when that means more likely deaths for our soldiers (and possibly more likely deaths for his soldiers as well, though that’s harder to tell). There’s everything humanitarian about killing him to protect our soldiers, and to win an indubitably just war. The man’s military job was trying to kill our soldiers, using others’ weapons even if not his own personal ones. We got to him first, likely saving our soldiers’ lives. That’s pretty much the end of the story.” 

So, what’s the big deal?  Stevens is just an 87 year old doddering fool, right? 

Actually, this is a view held by a significant number “enlightened lawyers”.  During World War II, commanders made the decisions and the lawyers, like Stevens, were left to their nuanced reflections of the matter. 

Today however many in the emasculated military leadership have deferred the decision making to the lawyers.  A classic example was General Tommy Franks during the first few days of the Afghanistan war.  From The New Yorker: 

“On the first night of the Afghan war, an unmanned Predator drone identifies a convoy of vehicles fleeing Kabul. Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban, is determined to be inside this convoy. The CIA is in control of the Predator attack drone and wants to use it to kill Omar, but they have to ask for permission from military commanders who are based in Florida. General Tommy Franks decides not to fire any missiles or launch an air strike against the building in which Omar takes shelter. Eventually fighters attack and destroy the building, but by then Omar and his associates have moved on. One anonymous senior official later says of this failure to kill Omar, “It’s not a f_ckup, it’s an outrage.” 

This is the same kind of leadership weakness that resulted in the largest Taliban force in Afghanistan being allowed to escape from the trap at Tora Bora.  We are still fighting those who could have been killed six years ago! 

It’s not just academically under-achieving Field Artillerymen but also senior officers in the Special Ops Command; see LTG Francis Kearney’s relentless legal pursuit of Capt. Dave Staffel and Master Sgt. Troy Anderson. 

Category: Politics