Word: bans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Washington, where they rarely think of anything else, enough Congressmen read the political winds to hand right-to-lifers another reversal on the very day the Florida session ended. After voting for eight straight years to ban Medicaid funding for abortions except when the mother's life is in danger, the House voted 216 to 206 to allow payments for poor women who become pregnant through rape or incest. Twenty-six House members who opposed such funding in 1988 changed sides...
...ban on assassination goes back to President Ford in 1976. It followed the mid-1970s revelations about CIA covert attempts on the life of Fidel Castro and similar pranks, and is a distant echo of the reactions to the assassination of President Kennedy. But there is nothing in the order limiting the ban to covert action or to attempts on heads of state. It simply forbids "assassination." What is assassination? If the word just means killing someone, anyone, for political reasons, then it effectively bans the use of -- or even conspiracy to use -- lethal force. That would make America...
...kill combatants in wartime, or even to kill noncombatant civilians in the course of a legitimate military operation. It is "self- defense" to kill a head of state who is masterminding terrorist operations that threaten the national security of the U.S., the argument goes. But if the assassination ban forbids nothing that is otherwise lawful, it forbids nothing at all. It is like a law that says, "No drinking in places where drinking is not allowed...
What the assassination ban amounts to in practice is a rule against killing people whose names you know. Killing anonymous soldiers or even civilians is merely war. C'est la guerre. Killing someone with a name attached is assassination. Not done, old chap...
...month-old girl while denying any intention to harm one of the kings of international terrorism? That has the U.S. impoverishing a whole country (Panama) through the blunt instrument of economic sanctions because we deny ourselves the use of a more surgical tool? One defense of the assassination ban is cynical. It is part of an unspoken agreement that brings a bit of order to the international chaos by ruling out one especially messy technique of war. Explicitly limiting the ban to heads of state would be too openly cynical, but the deal in essence is: You don't kill...