Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference. The Lancer conference is being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. The CAPA conference is now being held online. There is also another excellent JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations at the Lancer conference to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!
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The Justice Department is accusing three New York men with conspiring to assassinate Donald Trump. The criminal complaint charges that the government of Iran is directing the assassination effort. U.S. officials are making it clear that foreign state-sponsored assassinations will not be permitted in the United States. After all, a state-sponsored assassination is nothing more than murder, and the Justice Department is making it clear that murder will not be countenanced in the United States, even when the murder is being directed by a foreign regime.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Trump himself got a pass for having assassinated an Iranian general named Qasem Soleimani in 2020 when Trump was serving as president. Given that assassination is murder, why wasn’t Trump criminally charged with murdering Soleimani?
Presumably, the answer is that the U.S. Supreme Court would hold that Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for murder so long as he relates his murders to protecting “national security.”
But what if Iran declares that its purported attempt to murder Trump relates to protecting “national security” in Iran. Does that mean that the U.S. Supreme Court would hold that Iranian officials are immune from criminal prosecution here in the United States? My hunch is that the Court would hold that Iranian officials do not receive the same benefits of immunity for their state-sponsored assassination plots that U.S. officials do for their state-sponsored assassination plots.
Recall the the 1970 conspiracy among U.S. officials to violently kidnap Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s Armed Forces. Schneider was standing in the way of a military coup that U.S. officials were demanding, which would have ousted Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, from office.
Schneider was shot and killed as part of the kidnapping attempt. Under the felony-murder rule in criminal jurisprudence, if a victim is killed during the commission of a felony, the participants to the felony are also criminally responsible for the homicide.
Yet, no U.S. official was ever charged with either conspiracy to kidnap Schneider or murdering Schneider. That’s because U.S. national-security-state officials are immune when they commit felonies, including kidnapping and murder, in the course of ostensibly protecting U.S. “national security.”
So, if I understand U.S. assassination law correctly, it holds that a U.S. president can assassinate Iranian officials to his heart’s content and will be accorded immunity from any criminal prosecutions for murder here in the United States.
But if Iranian officials reciprocate by assassinating a U.S. president (or former president) on grounds of protecting Iranian “national security,” U.S. assassination law holds them criminally accountable as murderers, as the Justice Department is now doing with its criminal complaint against those three individuals who allegedly conspired to do to Trump, on supposed orders from Iranian officials, what Trump did to Iranian Gen. Soleimani.
U.S. assassination law makes a lot of sense, right? No double-standard or hypocrisy there.
