Executive Order 11905

Executive Order 11905, executive order issued February 19, 1976, by U.S. President Gerald Ford, which prohibited any member of the U.S. government from engaging or conspiring to engage in any political assassination anywhere in the world. Promulgated in the wake of revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had attempted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the 1960s, it was the first executive order to ban assassinations. It was successively superseded by Executive Order 12036 (issued by President Jimmy Carter on January 26, 1978) and Executive Order 12333 (issued by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981), both of which affirmed the ban in the same language, which differed only slightly from that of Ford’s order.

Because none of the three orders defined the term assassination, the scope of the prohibition has been variously interpreted, some interpretations implying that it is operative only during peacetime. That reading was supported by Ford’s Special Message to the Congress, which accompanied his executive order, in which he stated that he would “support legislation making it a crime to assassinate or attempt or conspire to assassinate a foreign official in peacetime.” It is worth noting that only Ford’s order referred to “political assassination,” whereas Carter’s and Reagan’s used the term assassination only. It is unclear whether that change in language indicated any change in the scope of the ban.

The ban apparently did not prevent the Reagan administration from bombing the residence of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in April 1986 in retaliation for a bombing attack at a Berlin discotheque earlier that month. Nor was it deemed inconsistent with President Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attack on training camps operated in Afghanistan by the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda following the bombings of two U.S. embassies in eastern Africa. Clinton also authorized the covert use of lethal force against al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, and other high-ranking members of al-Qaeda.

Three days after militants associated with al-Qaeda carried out the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.” Although there was no explicit reference to the assassination ban, the joint resolution was arguably broad enough to authorize actions that otherwise would be prohibited under the executive orders banning assassination. Bush later broadened the scope of Clinton’s authorization of covert lethal force, permitting the CIA and U.S. special forces to kill anyone on a secret “high-value target list” without his express approval. Such targeted killings were carried out by military unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and other means against leaders of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan following the U.S.-British invasion of that country in 2001 and against suspected leaders of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries. From 2009 President Barack Obama greatly expanded the targeted killing program. In May 2011 bin Laden died in an apparent targeted killing by U.S. forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.