Yves here. The fact that Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies have to explain that assassination is a war crime and feel they have to make a case that the US is a serial killer now in Iran, after our support of genocide in Gaza, speaks volumes about their assessment of how deeply propagandized most English-speaking members of the public are.
Iran is putting US savagery front and center of its messaging campaign:
Iran 🇮🇷 just released this emotional video
I don’t think they are stopping until all their objectives have been met pic.twitter.com/0jmyZbkkaY
— . (@LBGamestips) March 25, 2026
By Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Nicolas J. S. Davies, an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Together they are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict
For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase.
On March 17th and 18th, the United States and Israel assassinated three senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister.
The missile that killed Ali Larijani also demolished an apartment building and killed more than a hundred people. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces were now authorized to assassinate any senior Iranian official whenever they can, and they have continued to do so, bringing the number of Iranian officials assassinated in the past year to at least seventy.
The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005.
Larijani had degrees in math and computer science, attended the revered seminary in Qom, and fought in the Iran-Iraq War, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the war, he managed Iran’s state broadcasting service, earned a doctorate in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran, and wrote three books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, before entering politics and government in 2005. In 2024, Larijani wrote a book on political philosophy, titled Reason and Tranquility in Governance.
If the U.S. hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this war suggests that US leaders had no interest in negotiations.
Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues.
That killing was followed by an unprecedented Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field—the largest in the world and a shared resource with Qatar. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on energy infrastructure across Israel and the Gulf. In Qatar, damage to the Ras Laffan LNG terminal—one of the world’s most critical gas hubs—could take years and billions of dollars to repair.
As global energy markets reeled, U.S. officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the South Pars attack had been coordinated with Washington, contradicting denials from President Trump.
The pattern is unmistakable. As one analyst put it, Israel appears to be escalating deliberately—eliminating moderates within Iran while striking critical infrastructure—to provoke a wider regional war that leaves no room for de-escalation.
Analysts debate how much Israel is driving this escalation and how much U.S. officials are fully aligned. But an imperial power cannot outsource responsibility. As Harry Truman’s famous desk sign declared: The buck stops here.
In its alliance with Israel, the United States has normalized the systematic assassination of foreign leaders—from Palestine, and Lebanon, to Syria, Yemen and now Iran. This is not new. In 2020, President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that had joined with US forces to fight the Islamic State.
Yet assassination is explicitly prohibited under U.S. law. Executive Order 12333 states clearly: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
That prohibition emerged from the Church Committee’s investigation into U.S. assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and General René Schneider in Chile.
It also reflects long-standing international law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.
After 9/11, however, the United States systematically ignored or circumvented many of the constraints of U.S. and international law. As U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq led to widespread armed resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began arguing for what he called “manhunts,” to deploy US special operations forces to hunt down suspected resistance leaders and kill them, as Israeli undercover units already did in occupied Palestine.
General Charles Holland, the head of US Special Operations Command, refused to authorize such operations, but his retirement in October 2003 allowed Rumsfeld to appoint more like-minded officials to senior positions and bring in the Israelis to train American death squads in Israel and North Carolina.
“Dead men tell no tales,” as the saying goes, and there has been almost no accountability for the resulting killings, which systematically killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two senior US commanders told the Washington Post that only about 50% of “kill or capture” raids by Joint Special Operations Command targeted the “right” or intended people or homes, while troops involved in these raids said that that assessment greatly overstated their rate of success.
Drone warfare accelerated the trend. Under President Obama, strikes expanded tenfold, turning targeted killing into a central pillar of U.S. policy. By 2011, night raids in Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds each month, alienating the Afghan people and ultimately ensuring the defeat of the US occupation and the return of the Taliban.
Now US and Israeli forces are using air and drone strikes to assassinate Iranian leaders and kill civilians in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. The language of restraint has disappeared, replaced by open celebration of “lethality” and threats of further war crimes.
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
The cumulative effect is stark: the United States has made assassination and extrajudicial killing routine instruments of policy, as it tramples the UN Charter, the Hague and Geneva Conventions and its own laws—undermining the very international legal order it claims to uphold.
Meanwhile, a multipolar world is emerging, driven largely by nations of the Global South. But the transition to a peaceful, sustainable world is far from certain. The greatest obstacle in its way is the continued reliance of the United States on the illegal threat and use of military force and economic coercion to try to maintain its own dominance.
Iran exercised restraint for decades in the face of false accusations regarding nuclear weapons, “maximum pressure” economic sanctions and escalating threats and attacks by the US and Israel. It quietly built up its defenses and military strategies for the day that it would need them, and that day has come.
The failure of the international community to stop successive U.S. wars of aggression poses an existential threat to the UN Charter and the post–World War II order. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned at the CELAC Summit on March 21: “The more serious humanity’s problems become, the fewer tools we have for collective action. And that path leads only to barbarism.”
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors, as the UN Charter requires.
For Americans—and for the world—that choice is becoming a matter of survival.
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Iran’s promising $25 million for Trump’s assassination – and the enemy says assassination is OK.
who’s the enemy in your view?
Have you read the piece above? Who’s replaced diplomacy with assassination?
You seem to be trying to get me to tell you what you think.
Retaliation in kind is far from saying something is “OK,” especially when you are the aggrieved party.
Israel and the USA attacked Iran aggressively based on upon [deliberately] false assumptions.
No attack on Iran, no bounty on Trump. Hard to see Iran as any kind of aggressor in this matter. They are in fact reminding me a lot of John Wayne who never got into a fight unless the other guy threw the first punch. USA/Israel threw the first punch and now Iran is going all John Wayne on us.
We obviously have different ideas of who the enemy is.
Political assassination has been covert national security state policy for the US since the 1950’s, and is now out in the open for all to see. As the piece by Benjamin and Davies makes plain, the fact that so few seem troubled by such conduct, except as turnabout, is surely a marker of some significance for Western “civilization”.
We have met the enemy and he is US.
Iran has every justification for doing so, given the USA have been assassinating their leadership and people for many years previously. The USA and Israel have eliminated all restraints on this and now you want to blame them for responding in kind? You rotten, corrupted demons who support such filth will have your day and you will be caste into the abyss after your demonic leaders. The endless false accusations against Iran and other victims of your hatred and greed will be the ones to end this and I do not doubt creatures like you will be whining about how unfair it is even as you’re consumed in righteous fire. Read the article again if you even have done once and try to arrange the order of events in your mind, if you have one.
The power of the tsar and the prestige of the empire are inseparable. The empire must stand above the law and be ruled by a tsar who has the power of life and death. The president of the United States—the tsar of the American empire—enjoys impunity, which is no accident but a deliberate feature.
And listen to the chief gangster himself, the US is truly out of control. And only one country seems to have the cojones to stand up to them.
https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW745426032026RP1/
From the Melian dialog:
As it was with Athens, so it is with the US. Fomenting hatred is the goal.
The silence of the US’ organized (Christian is not evident) “religions” is deafening!
Apparently the US and Israel share an assassination list of people to kill. How do I know this?
‘The US and Israel have reportedly removed Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf from their hit list “temporarily” to have someone to engage with in peace negotiations.’
https://www.rt.com/news/636210-us-israel-war-iran/
Murdering your way to victory sounds good to some but how effective is it? With assassinations, the next guy is more wary and self-disciplined. but look at it this way. If the head of a regiment is killed in battle, the regiment does not fall apart. His next in command takes over straight away. And if he gets hit, the same with his second in command and so on. I think that it was in the Battle of Waterloo that a British regiment had nearly all their officers killed or wounded. There was just a lowly lieutenant left but he took command and continued to fight that regiment for the rest of the battle. Even the US has a Presidential line of succession-
https://www.usa.gov/presidential-succession
So sadly true.
I think Trump got confused with his messaging. Not MAGA but MAKA, Make America Kill Again. I just wish we could focus on our own society and be a productive member of the world community. I love my country but all of this makes me sad. Thank you as always for the inspiring content.
About Yves’ comment that the English-speaking public must be deeply propagandized not to know assassination is wrong: I use to not be sure it was wrong. Why should the soldiers be sent to their deaths while the leaders sit safe and unharmed way behind enemy lines? I knew there were laws against it but I thought that was just the powerful making sure they could do what they wanted without consequence.
The past three weeks of the Iran war really being in my face have caused me to revise that opinion. I see now that there are both practical objections— bystanders (sometimes scores of them) being killed and killing the wrong person (either mistaken identity or bad evidence against the person) and theoretical—even if you always kill the correct person and nobody else, it is a bad idea.
Man, you start with the position that you have to assassinate terrorists because they will always hide in groups of innocent people so if you don’t attack them there then you can never attack terrorists at all. Why should you worry about bystander casualties when the terrorists don’t? Rules of engagement must be on both sides.
You end up with killing 100 random people in a random building and blowing up fishing boats off the coast of South America. You end up killing someone for being a spokesman on tv. Oh, and that old cliche about decapitation strikes not working? Turns out to be true.
You end up with death squads. You end up at My Lai again, having gotten there by a different route.
I remember when we were supposed to be horrified to hear that an enemy used death squads. See, that is why the enemy is evil and we should stop at nothing to stop themz
I still think it was not wrong to assassinate admiral Yamamoto in WWII. But clearly where we are now is wrong.
It reminds me of when my USA government tried to tell me it was ok to torture people. The propaganda was: but what if there is a ticking time bomb and this is the only way to get the information out? There were tv shows where the hero heroically tortured the terrorist to save innocent lives. That was wholly unconvincing. The propaganda-assignation arguments were not so obviously false to me.
With all these assassinations, what is put in the background are the “root causes”, while individuals are presented as the “root causes”. Nice sleight of hand, no?!
I note that Iran was not behind 9/11. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was, the same people who sawed-up journalist Jamal Kashoggi.
I further note that the only Israeli leader to have been murdered was Yitzak Rabin, assassinated by a Kahanist who is still honored by the Likudnik fascist Revisionist Zionists.
I also strongly suspect that the October 7 infiltration was secretly manipulated by Likudniks inside Shin-bet and Mossad towards a left-wing kibbutz and a secular rave in order to trigger a “Mass Hannibal” false flag.
Murder is a choice any of us can make. Those who would justify it are pure evil.
But the bigger issue is that we are now being ‘conditioned’ for first use of nuclear weapons. Not by ‘fanatics’ like Kim Jong Un but by ‘our’ fanatics. Shame on us all.
The “Rules of War” are the Geneva Convention:
• civilians may not be intentionally targeted
• area bombing of civilian populations is prohibited
• civilian infrastructure is protected, eg, schools, hospitals, schools, water systems, power stations and food supplies
• special protection for hospitals, medical units, cultural sites and dams/nuclear facilities
• starvation and destruction of survival infrastructure prohibited
• violations may be prosecuted under international criminal law
• The US has formally agreed to the Geneva Convention and is bound by it. Violations are also illegal under US law.
The decline in standards has been steady with 9-11 being a turning point:
• Vietnam – expansion of what is a ‘military target (civilian areas containing military is okay)
• Cambodia/Laos bombing was concealed from Congress and the public
• Undeclared wars by presidential authority, eg, Grenada and Panama
• And Iran-Contra – an attempt to bypass Congress
• ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of civilian infrastructure in Iraq
• The turning point – pre-emptive war doctrine after 9-11- the National Security Strategy of 2002 was NOT approved by Congress and is no different from the recent version that relates to Latin America, Canada and Greenland
• Extra-judicial imprisonment and torture during the ‘War on Terror’
• Targeted killing and drones under Obama
• Recent urban wars – Aleppo, Mosul, Gaza
• Now, widespread civilian bombing and assassinations by the US and Israel
Who are the ‘barbarians’? Who have lost sight of civilization, morality, virtue, and humanity? And when did our media become barking propagandists.
I am surprised that the article failed to mention the ongoing serial mass murders of Venezuelan boaters. These extra-judicial murders based on claims of drug smuggling without any evidence or due process certainly fall within the same psychotic mind set as detailed by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies above.
Trump and his henchmen, Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Crimes, Marco Rubio, should all be facing prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But you needn’t stop there, as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden ought to be included as well.