By a Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 1, 2002

The White House press secretary today said the Bush administration would welcome the assassination of Saddam Hussein by his countrymen, arguing that "one bullet" would be a cost-effective way of removing the threat the Iraqi leader represents.

"The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less" than going to war, President Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said when asked at a televised briefing about the cost of military action against Iraq. Asked whether the administration was advocating the assassination of Hussein, Fleischer repeatedly replied: "Regime change is welcome in whatever form that it takes."

Fleischer's unusually colorful remarks created a stir in the White House press corps, and Fleischer called reporters after the briefing to tone down the impact of his words. "I was making a rhetorical point about the cost of the bullet," he said. "The point I'm making is not an administration policy. If the Iraqi people took events into their own hands, the world would not shed a tear. I'm not stating administration policy, I'm stating the obvious."

In the briefing, the press secretary said there is no consideration of relaxing the American ban on assassinations of foreign leaders. Following congressional hearings examining botched CIA assassination attempts, executive orders beginning in 1976 have prohibited such targeted killings.

But the Washington Post reported last year that the CIA was contemplating clandestine missions expressly aimed at killing specified individuals for the first time since the 1970s. Drawing on two classified legal memoranda, one written for President Bill Clinton in 1998 and one since the attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush administration concluded that executive orders banning assassination did not prevent the president from lawfully singling out a terrorist for death by covert action.

Eliot Cohen, a scholar at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, said that while the directives forbid the killing of a political leader, "if you're a military leader, it's somewhat different, and Saddam bills himself as a military leader." Cohen also said that Fleischer's welcoming of an assassination by Iraqis would likely be shared by others in the administration. "Of course they would welcome that," he said. "In many ways it would make things simpler all around."

Fleischer said today that "there are many options that the United States is prepared to see" to end Hussein's reign. Noting that a "one-way ticket" to exile would also suffice, Fleischer said: "There are many options that the president hopes the world and people of Iraq will exercise themselves of that gets rid of the threat."

"I think that it's fair to say that the Iraqi regime is not satisfied with Saddam Hussein, that Saddam Hussein has created a great many enemies inside Iraq," he said. "And it is impossible to last forever as a brutal dictator who suppresses his own people, who tortures his own people, who deliberately brings women in public to be raped, so it can be witnessed by their families."

Bush, speaking before Fleischer's briefing, said he still has not decided whether to go to war against Iraq. "I've made up my mind we need to disarm the man," he said.

Copyright 2002 The Washington Post Company
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articles/A28904-2002Oct1.html