Judge, Jury, and Executioner: On U.S. Assassination Policy 1975-2025
ANGLO AMERICA, 22 Dec 2025
Oakley Thomas Hill - TRANSCEND Media Service
17 Dec 2025 – Much has changed since those uncertain days after 11 Sep 2001, when the rubble of the twin towers had yet to cool and the United States had just entered the longest war in its history. But one of the more important changes has gone virtually unnoticed—the decades-long trend expanding presidential powers to kill has begun to slow and in some cases reverse.
By all accounts, the U.S. is still under the weight of what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the imperial presidency,” where the executive acts as judge, jury, and executioner. For example, the Trump administration has recently leaned on Article II of the U.S. Constitution to justify the murder of Colombian and Venezuelan seamen. However, as President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are quickly discovering, Article II is a much narrower legal avenue than the ones Trump had in his first term, and there is reason to believe his powers will continue to deteriorate.
The U.S. Presidency has not always been vested with such ruthless imperial power. In fact, the decades before the War on Terror were years of reckoning when U.S. citizens learned of their government’s Cold-War abuses and demanded reform. Congress’s 1975 Church Committee found troubling abuses of power and no shortage of assassination attempts when they investigated the intelligence community. Their work influenced President Gerald Ford to ban political assassinations in 1976 with the unambiguous Executive Order 11905: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
In the years after Ford’s order, the assassination ban was expanded by Democrats and Republicans alike. President Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12036 dropped the word “political” and President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 added “No person…acting on behalf of the United States Government.” In effect, these orders prohibited anyone employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. Government from assassinating another person. Of course, the ban included exceptions for genuine security threats—a loophole used by every President thereafter. Reagan himself used the loophole in his attempted assassination of Libya’s Colonel Qadhafi, President George H.W. Bush used it in his attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, and President Bill Clinton us it in his attempt to kill Osama bin Laden. The ban was valuable not because it prohibited every assassination, but because it facilitated a short list of attempts. Despite its porousness, the ban was a significant step forward from the Cold War era where U.S. officials up and down the ranks assassinated foreign actors.
In the late 1980s an informal agreement amongst congressional oversight committees went so far as to include terrorists under the ban unless a) they were on their way to commit an attack and b) killing was the only way to stop them. However, immediately after September 11, 2001, the legal trend was reversed. Within a week of al-Qaeda’s attack, the U.S. formally departed from the oversight committees’ informal agreement. Non-state terrorist groups were recast as enemy combatants and effectively excluded from the protections of the ban. Killings that would have been considered assassinations under the informal agreement were recast as “targeted killings,” and the Ford-Carter-Reagan ban was effectively superseded.
Worse yet, Congress’s 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (or “AUMF”) gave President George W. Bush more legal leeway than any previous U.S. President. Congress authorized the use of “all necessary and appropriate force” against anyone including “nations, organizations, or persons” that he deemed to have planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attack. The AUMF also included no sunset clause, meaning every President thereafter wielded the same power.
Rather than challenging his predecessor, President Barack Obama dramatically expanded the frequency of targeted killings and earned himself the nickname “Assassin-in-Chief.” While Bush ordered a total of fifty-seven drone strikes, Obama appears to have ordered nearly ten times that number. He also tested the conceptual boundary of targeted killings when he ordered a drone strike in Yemen on a U.S. citizen named Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki. Thanks to the AUMF, there was no legal ground to hold Obama accountable, despite the absence of due process.
By the time President Trump took office in 2016, the legal constraints of the assassination ban had all but deteriorated as the concept of ‘targeted killings’ was introduced and its use expanded. What was once permissible only as a method of self-defense had become a casual method of imperial violence. Trump not only continued Obama’s drone campaign, he further undermined the assassination ban’s intended limitations. In 2017 he ended the policy restricting military and CIA killings to high-level militants outside of battlefields. This increased the killing of foot-soldiers and removed the requirement of high-level vetting between agencies. While Trump preserved the ‘near certainty’ policy that aimed to limit civilian harm, he ended the Pentagon’s yearly report of bystander deaths outside of war zones. These changes made political assassinations more likely because they decreased oversight while rendering victims less visible.
When Trump referred to his assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani as a “targeted killing,” he illustrated and how far the U.S. had drifted from its 1976 policies. Because the assassination ban was designed to protect foreign leaders, Soleimani’s death was perhaps the moment of total eclipse, where Ford’s ban was utterly superseded. The moment did not go unnoticed. Congress responded by passing a bipartisan resolution limiting Trump’s ability to wage war with Iran. Unfortunately, Trump vetoed the resolution and Congress was unable to organize a two-thirds supermajority to override it.
Nevertheless, Congress’s attempt signaled movement in the opposite direction—and we are beginning to see real momentum. For example, Congress preserves the 2001 AUMF in part because they want to maintain the safety of American soldiers stationed abroad. President Trump and President Joseph R. Biden’s evacuation of Afghanistan may have ended badly; but it marked the end of America’s longest war and cut against the interests motivating the preservation of the 2001 AUMF.
After Trump’s aggressive bombing of Iran in June, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution repealing the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs authorizing force in the region. Because these were the very laws Trump cited to justify his assassination of Soleimani in 2020, it is doubtful whether he could do the same today. Furthermore, Pete Hegseth’s recent ‘second strike’ of a Venezuelan ship has drawn the ire of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Republican Senators like Mike Turner and Don Bacon referred to the second strike as “illegal” and Democratic Senators like Tim Kaine and Mark Kelly referred to them as “war crimes.”
This might all sound like a momentary lapse of the United States’ imperial engine—and it may be so. The Trump administration recently used Article II of the U.S. Constitution to designate South American drug cartels as terrorist organizations, bomb Caribbean seamen, and threaten war with Venezuela. In a symbolically meaningful gesture, they even moved the USS Gerald Ford in to assist their assassination campaign. Furthermore, those watching ICE raids, National Guard deployments, and retributive investigations might reasonably believe executive power is expanding in the U.S. However, we should not confuse Trump’s unprecedented use of executive powers with the expansion of power. Nor should we rule out the possibility of political jiu jitsu. Trump is exercising authority long held but seldom used by previous presidents, especially for his domestic agenda. That means many U.S. citizens are experiencing their country’s militancy for the first time. The chant “No Kings!” has emerged as this year’s loudest rallying cry and an unequivocal sign U.S. citizens demand limits on executive power. Congress’s movement to repeal the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs suggests they intend to supply that demand, and underlines Trump’s diminishing power to kill. However, Congress should not shop there.
While the United States’ assassination problem transcends any particular executive, the Trump Administration provides a useful opportunity for those wishing to blunt the emperor’s teeth. The administration’s unique blend of careless militancy, flashy showmanship, and lame-duck determinacy might be what is needed for anti-imperialists to land executive reform on the agenda of a major party. The imperial presidency is, after all, a structural problem that demands strong legal reform; and the time to begin crafting that reform is now.
What the U.S. needs is a Democratic House majority to initiate bipartisan investigations like the Church Committee, but this time into the drone assassination campaigns. And when it reveals the murder of innocents and the various ways power has been abused by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Congress should leverage its legislative authority. They should repeal the 2001 AUMF, ban extra juridical killings, and write an assassination ban into law. If crafted well, such laws could leave the executive open to using Article II for truly defensive operations while ending its unilateral authority for offensive ones.
If the United States are to become a free society, they will need to learn from their past failures and capitalize on present opportunities. On the one hand, they can find hope in the history of Ford’s assassination ban—the possibility of passing something like it is far more likely today than it was then, when the U.S. and U.S.S.R sought every means to out-militarize the other. On the other hand, Ford signed the assassination ban in part to prevent Congress from passing a more lasting and limiting ban. Despite the order never being repealed, every President thereafter has found ways to bypass or supersede it. For too long the U.S. have depended on the good will of their Presidents through norms, executive orders, and informal agreements. However the fact that political norms have deteriorated is as indisputable as the President’s authority to repeal executive orders or defy informal agreements.
The case to be made is neither extreme nor necessarily partisan. If the executive can legally assassinate American citizens without due process, then it has too much power. If the executive can unilaterally sabotage agreements with foreign governments, list their militaries as terrorist organizations, assassinate their leaders, and then refuse to turn over justifiable evidence to Congress, then it has too much power. If the executive can murder unarmed people seeking shelter on a burning boat, then it has too much power. Of course, these are not hypothetical—they describe Obama’s 2011 assassination of al-Awlaki, Trump’s 2020 assassination of Soleimani, and Pete Hegseths recent assassination of Caribbean seamen. However, the point is more about the values of a free society than who happens to be violating them. U.S. drone campaigns have recast the executive as judge, jury, and executioner, thereby violating the principle of transparency and the separation of powers. They have no place in a free society. The wars used to justify such powers are over. It is time for the U.S. to claw back executive authority and recognize the human consequences of their expansion.
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Oakley Thomas Hill is a Ph.D. Candidate and lecturer at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University where he teaches global conflict analysis and researches US political conflict. Ohill@gmu.edu
Tags: Anglo America, Bullying, Colombia, Hegemony, Imperialism, Latin America Caribbean, Law, Politics, South America, Targeted Assassination, Trump, USA, Venezuela
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Dec 2025.
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