Description
In 1975, David Belin completed his investigation into the US government’s involvement in the assassination of foreign officials. Belin’s findings were compiled into Chapter 19 of the first draft of the Rockefeller Commission’s report. At the White House, however, Dick Cheney deleted the chapter from the final draft and warned Belin against holding a press conference detailing his findings. Assassination did not appear on the record.
The paper explores the role of assassination in US foreign policy, the discourses surrounding such controversial practice, and the extensive efforts to keep it off the record. The paper traces the emergence of ‘assassination-talk’: the use of euphemisms and circumlocutory language aimed at conveying a message to those on the ‘inside,’ while maintaining plausible deniability. While this language characterised the US approach from the early Cold War, the paper will suggest that the establishment of a ban on assassination in the mid-1970s made ‘assassination-talk’ even more prominent as officials became unwilling to be associated publicly and privately with practices that, in all but name, amounted to assassination. Assassination, the paper will conclude, has been completely erased from the record, in favour of the surgical and aseptic ‘targeted killing.’
