In this essay for The New Yorker, published around Veterans Day, Elliot Ackerman recalls his first day as a C.I.A. paramilitary officer, signing an executive order banning assassination, and the gap between that language and the drone war he witnessed months later at a remote outpost in Afghanistan.

Signing Executive Order 12333

Ackerman describes the paperwork of his first day at the agency, including Executive Order 12333's ban on assassination, which felt at the time like a formality unrelated to the actual conduct of intelligence work.

Dossiers and Drone Strikes

Deployed to eastern Afghanistan, Ackerman describes colleagues who spent their days building dossiers on Taliban and Al Qaeda targets for Predator strikes across the Pakistani border, and the discomfort of watching actions that felt, in practice, indistinguishable from the assassinations the order forbade.

A Lie We Tell Ourselves

Ackerman argues that America's insistence on the term "targeted killing" over "assassination" reflects a broader unwillingness to reckon honestly with the clandestine warfare that has come to define its involvement abroad, from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia.

Read the Original Article

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Read “Assassination and the American Language” at The New Yorker →