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Hunt and kill terrorists, says ex-diplomat
Australia should be willing to track down and assassinate key individuals involved in regional terrorist networks, a former top-ranking diplomat has said.
Duncan Campbell, a former Australian ambassador to Rome and Vienna and once a deputy head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, says targeting and eliminating known terrorists is more efficient and costs fewer lives than waging conventional war.
A policy of state-sponsored assassinations might be more morally justified than taking part in poorly thought-through military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which inevitably inflict casualties on innocents, he argues. Mr Campbell told the Herald that someone like Abu Bakar Bashir, said to be the spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiah, could present a legitimate target for a state-sanctioned but "deniable" poisoning attempt.
"Can you imagine how easy it ought to be in a prison such as the one Bashir is in, to persuade someone for a lump of money to doctor his rice? That wouldn't involve Australian hands at all, except perhaps the passing by someone to someone of a little lump of chemicals of some sort. "
Mr Campbell spells out the reasoning for his controversial proposal in a collection of essays, A Fair Go in an Age of Terror, published this month by the Jesuit Social Justice Centre, UNIYA. The essays flow from a series of seminars the centre ran wrestling with Britain for blundering into the Iraq war without a clear game plan, Mr Campbell argues that a Western democracy like the US sets up far more exhaustive legal processes for executing a single criminal than it does for going to war.
In Indonesia, the prosecution case against alleged terror leader Abu Bakar Bashir has suffered another setback. A series of witnesses, including a number of convicted terrorists, have denied that the Muslim cleric inspired or knew anything about bombings that killed more than 200 people.....
Prosecutors say Bashir is the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, a militant group that hopes to establish an Islamic superstate across much of Southeast Asia. Intelligence experts say the group has ties to the al Qaida network, and that Osama bin Laden's command to attack Western targets also played a part in inspiring the Indonesian attacks.....
Bashir has never made a secret of his hatred of the West, and many of those already convicted of the Bali and Marriott bombings are graduates of the Islamic boarding school he founded and ran.
But analysts say, prosecutors are going to have a hard time proving a direct link between the cleric and the bombings. That difficulty was reflected when none of the six witnesses implicated Bashir directly in the attacks.
The trial is expected to last at least four more months.
Originally posted by Disturbed Deliverer
What's so bad about assassination? It's certainly no worse then war. It's really only better. Cutting the head off can prevent things from getting a lot more bloody.
Ya - but it can also rally fanatics around a cause- ever hear the term martyr?
Originally posted by Phoenix
As useful and expediant as this may seem to be a short term solution to the problem - remember what is your tactic today will be your enemies tactic tomorrow - its a two way street and opening a pandoras box to espouse this doctrine.
Can you say "open season" on politicians.