U.S. 1976 Prohibition on Assassinating Foreign Nationals

The U.S. 1976 Prohibition on Assassinating Foreign Nationals is presented as a statutory restraint whose possible revision became part of the debate over responses to the September 11 attacks. The book connects that debate to a larger argument about how governments define terrorism, justify force, and distinguish their own violence from violence attributed to adversaries.

The law in the post-attack debate

A question put to Noam Chomsky noted that Secretary of State Colin Powell had said the U.S. government would review terrorism laws, including the 1976 prohibition on assassinating foreign nationals. The question also pointed to proposed European Union legislation and asked whether counterterrorism could lead to expanded surveillance and restrictions on civil liberties. In this account, the law matters not only as a specific restriction but as a test of whether the response to an attack would loosen constraints on state violence.

Chomsky answered by turning from abstract concerns to contemporary examples of policy. He argued that proposals to relax limits on state violence should be considered alongside the conduct they might enable. His discussion situated the prohibition amid allegations of political assassinations and civilian harm, including Israeli operations against Palestinians carried out with U.S.-supplied attack helicopters. The legal rule thus appears within a wider dispute over whether measures described as counterterrorism protect the public or normalize coercive state action.

Definitions and the problem of consistency

The book sets the prohibition against the U.S. government’s own definitions of terrorism. It describes the official U.S. low-intensity warfare doctrine as closely resembling the official definition of terrorism: coercive means directed against civilian populations to achieve political, religious, or other aims. Chomsky argues that, under such definitions, terrorism is not solely the weapon of non-state actors; it can also form part of state policy. The point bears directly on the law’s significance: a prohibition on one category of violence cannot be assessed separately from the broader rules and labels used to authorize or condemn force.

In a separate interview, Chomsky quotes an official U.S. definition centered on the calculated use or threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological ends, including intimidation, coercion, or the creation of fear. He applies that definition to the September 11 attacks, while distinguishing its literal meaning from the political use of “terrorism” to identify violence by enemies against the United States or its allies. The distinction supplies the article’s central interpretive context: legal and political language may describe similar acts differently depending on who carries them out.

Force, law, and retaliation

Chomsky’s criticism extends from domestic legal restraints to international rules governing force. He argues that the postwar international framework permits force in self-defense against an armed attack, subject to the United Nations Security Council’s role in maintaining peace and security, while prohibiting reprisals. He contends that the United States could not invoke the self-defense exception under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter on the grounds then being advanced, unless international principles were understood to apply equally to the United States and its adversaries.

The book also invokes the International Court of Justice’s 1986 judgment condemning U.S. conduct against Nicaragua as an unlawful use of force, and notes that the United States subsequently vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on states to respect international law. The Nicaraguan case is presented as a contrasting route for addressing violence: Nicaragua pursued a legal judgment and reparations rather than retaliatory attacks, even though the United States rejected the court’s decision and intensified its attacks. These examples frame legal restraint as a reciprocal standard, not a limit imposed only on weaker states or political opponents.

Strategic context and significance

The discussion places legal rules within a critique of the wider “war on terrorism.” Chomsky argues that applying the official definition consistently would expose the role of major powers in violence that could otherwise be classified as terrorism, and that calling a campaign a war against terrorism becomes propaganda if it does not actually target terrorism. The proposed revision of the 1976 prohibition therefore sits within a contest over who may use force, which actions are named as terrorism, and whether legal limits are treated as binding when they constrain U.S. policy.

That contest is also connected to military strategy. The book says that the Bush administration used the new phase of the war on terrorism to consolidate U.S. military dominance, and argues that the 2001 war in Afghanistan advanced broader strategic aims, including a greater capacity for intervention and influence in Central Asia and around the Persian Gulf. It compares this approach with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which, in the account, was defended in terms of alliance credibility. These claims do not establish that revising the assassination prohibition caused those developments; rather, they locate the law within the book’s larger warning that counterterrorism can become a justification for expanding state power and military reach.