“That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

A number of moral issues cannot be viewed through the binary lens of right or wrong. Among these we can count abortion versus a woman’s right to choose; ethical questions surrounding a patient’s right to die; dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing thousands of civilians in an attempt to foreshorten an already bloody global conflict; and, well, you get the idea. But there are other questions, some of which we face every day, to which we can answer, “It’s either right, or it’s wrong. No exceptions.”

Every major moral code, whether it be faith-based, from Christianity to Judaism to Islam to Hinduism, or secular, from the many individual nations’ Legal Codes to the international Geneva Conventions to military law as embodied in the U.S. Code of Military Justice, provides a common set of rules which we are expected to use to guide our actions. Two pervasive rules that run through virtually every moral code penned by man are:

1. Murder is wrong, and
2. We are expected to tell the Truth.

The first is most famously embodied in the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not murder.” (While traditional translations of this phrase into English have tended to use the word “kill,” many scholars have suggested that this is not the most accurate translation and that, instead of “Thou shalt not kill,” a more accurate translation is “Thou shalt not murder.” A growing number of scholars agree the Hebrew term for “killing” used in the Ten Commandments is never used in Hebrew Scripture to refer to the type of killing that takes place in a war, when it can be deemed justifiable.)

We generally accept that unless it is committed to protect one’s self, one’s family or other people, or unless it is committed in a war setting, killing becomes murder. Even in a war setting, killing can be deemed to be murder. For instance, shooting an enemy who has surrendered and given up his firearm becomes murder instead of a justifiable war killing.

We learned two things last week that fly in the face of these fairly simple, straightforward, easy-to-follow dictates –

1. The former Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, sponsored a secret intelligence operation that carried out assassinations of foreign individuals, including politicians in countries friendly to the United States; and
2. When CIA director Leon Panetta officially terminated the CIA’s residual role in the assassination program, which appears to have been primarily run out of the Pentagon, after an eight-year involvement, he informed Congress that they had been misled about the nature of the program.

Stories of covert assassination squads have made the rounds since the early days of the Bush administration, but this one first surfaced with substantial credence in March of this year when investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

When Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of “America’s Constitutional Crisis” whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day, he described an area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office…Congress has no oversight of it.”

“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

The report of this assassination squad again hit the news on 13 July in an article entitled CIA Had Secret Al Qaeda Plan by SIOBHAN GORMAN in the Wall Street Journal. In his article, Gorman writes, “A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.”

On the same day as Gorman’s article appeared, Chris McGreal, of the UK’s Guardian wrote, “Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.”

Also in the Guardian, John McQuaid wrote, “Each new report makes it clearer that Cheney’s stated determination to ‘take the gloves off’ resulted in the creation of a shadowy bureaucratic archipelago of highly secret anti-terror programmes accountable to virtually no one (except, theoretically anyway, Cheney himself)…it was a world in which anything might be possible in the service of catching, extracting information from and killing terrorists. If it wasn’t legal, ways were found to make it nominally so.”

There are those who will argue the formation of and actions undertaken by Cheney’s assassination squad were justified because we were fighting a “war on terror.” But that defense fails on several counts –

1. We might have been fighting terrorists, but we were not at war with a recognized, definable enemy.
2. Even in wartime, incursions into countries that are, technically at least, “not involved” are illegal. (Recall, if you will, the uproar over U.S. incursions into Laos and Cambodia while fighting in Vietnam.)
3. Title V, Section 501 of the National Security Act Of 1947, Accountability for Intelligence Activities, states, “The President shall ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity as required by this title.” Further in the same section, the Act states, “The President shall ensure that any illegal intelligence activity is reported promptly to the congressional intelligence committees.”

Maintaining one’s moral compass can be tricky at times; and so it is with a Nation. But attempting to look past or forget transgressions such as these only leads to that slippery slope of compromised moral certitude. From there, it is just a hop, skip and a jump to the redaction of the liberties spelled out by our founding fathers.

As McQuaid went on to write, “America needs to do two things at this juncture: come to terms with what was done in the name of national security post-9/11, and use that knowledge to deploy an effective anti-terror strategy going forward.

“Neither is possible without a thorough investigation of Cheney’s black ops. We still know very little about what these programmes actually did. The lines of responsibility – who authorised what when, who can be held ultimately responsible – remain mostly unknown. And the CIA has damaged its already-tattered credibility by keeping more secrets from congressional leaders and intelligence committees.”

If we condone murder, and if we condone lying about it, there is little reason to expect Washington to be any more than the cesspool of self interest it is so often proclaimed to be. Where we go from here should not even be a question that has to be asked.