Killing enemies and opponents by all means is a historical tradition and legacy but within certain rules and laws, even during wars. In ancient days as espoused in Arthashashtra of Kautilya, some kings used to bring up beautiful young girls who were administered small doses of poison since childhood. When grown up they were gifted to enemy Kings who after physical congress and cohabitation got slowly poisoned and died. Of course the attempt to poison food of Kings and others is still prevalent and the food is carefully tested before being served to them.

King Mithradates VI of Pontus (Mithradates meaning “gift of the Aryan god Mithra”), a common name among Anatolian rulers, had contested Imperial Rome’s hegemony in Asia Minor. After many ups and downs, Pompey completely defeated both Mithradates and his son-in-law Tigranes, the ruler of Armenia. Mithradates escaped to Crimea .When cornered on an island in the Black Sea he wanted to commit suicide so as not be caught as POW and humiliated. A powerful man, Mithradates would not die by poisoning himself, since he had made himself immune by taking small doses of poison. So he had to order a slave to kill him.

It was after a victory in 78 BC in a battle lasting barely four hours over Pharnaces II, son of Mithradates VI at a town called Zile (visited many times) , 300 kilometers northeast of Ankara, that Julius Caesar said Veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) .

So after the brutal public assassination of Libyan President Moamar Qaddafi by Washington and NATO supported goons, Muslim extremists and other killers at West behest and instigation, Mme Hilary Clinton crowed; “We came, we saw, he died.” Soon after, a few from the same loony crowd killed US Ambassador Stevens and 4 other operatives in Benghazi. Libya, a prosperous country lies destroyed, divided and in chaos with over hundred thousand dead since its ‘liberation’. Yes, USA and EU countries are pumping away Libyan gas and oil.

An Air India Boeing 707 on a regular Bombay to New York flight crashed near the summit of Mont Blanc in the Alps in 1966 killing 117 people on the aircraft as it prepared to land at Geneva airport in Switzerland. Homi J. Bhabha, India’s brilliant physicist who was the first head of its Department of Atomic Energy, and the founder of the structure and cadres for nuclear technology and later the bomb was the main objective for the crash according to an interview of Robert Trumbull Crowley (1924 - 2000), who was second in command of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which was in charge of covert operations.

Vikram Sarabhai (12 August 1919 – 30 December 1971) an Indian Scientist, considered to be the “Father of the Indian space program” died suddenly on 30 December 1971 at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. He was there to attend the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Thumba railway station being built to service the newly created Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. Was his sudden and untimely death natural! Sarabahi had picked out Dr. Abul Kalam, father of Indian missile system and groomed him. Read Times of India report on Sarabhai’s death.

US’s CIA and other agencies have organized and continue to organize deaths of US perceived enemies and rivals. US ally Israel‘s Mossad does illegal killings regularly. A recent example is the poisoning of Yasser Arafat by Mossad. It has organized killings of Iranian scientists inside Iran itself. Sometimes; it has been outsmarted by Mukhabarat (intelligence agencies) of some Arab states.

‘Official’(old!) US policy on assassinations!

In theory, pursuing with intent to kill violates a long-standing US policy banning political assassination. It was President Ford who had put a ban on assassinations in a 1976 executive order. It was reinforced by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and made no distinction between wartime and peacetime. There are no loop holes. However bad the leader might be, he could not be targeted by US directly or by a hired gun. But winking at assassination or murder seems to have become a normal policy when it suits Washington.

The ban was placed after a Senate committee had disclosed a series of US assassination attempts abroad for many years, and not all successful. There were as many as eight attempts on the life of Cuban president Fidel Castro. Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961 and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in 1963 were both assassinated, with suspicions about the hand of US agencies. There are many other examples. Assassination was also a weapon of retaliation, like against Libya when its agents allegedly killed US soldiers in a disco in Germany in 1986 and the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 in which 270 persons, mostly American, were killed.

When asked if the 1986 bombing of Moammar Gadhafi's residence in 1986 was an effort to kill him, President Reagan said, “I don’t think any of us would have shed tears if that had happened.” Recent U.S. assassination attempts included Osama bin Laden (openly successful), former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic among others.

Abraham Sofaer, a former State Department legal adviser theorized that, “If a leader ... is responsible for killing Americans, and is planning to kill more Americans ... it would be perfectly proper to kill him rather than to wait until more Americans were killed.” Never mind that a White House spokesman had said just before the war on Iraq, “There’s an executive order that prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders, and that remains in place.” Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which kept some kind of check on US illegal activities, Washington has since then ushered in the law of the jungle. But blowback and retribution shall follow.

It is an established fact that the US led invasion of Iraq, against the will of the majority of members of United Nations, was clearly illegal. Even the fig leaf of the causes belli of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s alleged links with Al Qaida were never proved so where is the international law? After coming into office, George W. Bush tore up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world in past 20 years.

The list is familiar, including but not limited to the withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, failure to ratify the Rio Pact on biodiversity, withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the pursuit of National Missile Defense. It appears ready to violate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It opposed the ban on land mines and has sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture so that it could keep foreign observers out of its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay and hide its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners.

It has sabotaged the small-arms treaty and is opposed to new provisions of the biological-warfare convention. It experiments with biological weapons of its own and has refused chemical-weapons inspector’s full access to its laboratories. It is opposed to the International Criminal Court and coerced other countries to sign separate agreements not to charge US citizens. It has permitted CIA hit squads to continue covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. Even its threat to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN Security Council is a defiance of international law.

Recent US administration's foreign policies have undermined the fragile structure of international law and conventions built up during the past three centuries, to which the United States made important contributions. The latest innovation is US drone war against almost all comers.

Reproduced below is an article by Dr. Kevin Barrett which appeared on Iran’s presstv on March 6, 2013.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, the author (below) after reading my articles on US war on Iraq etc., telephoned me a few times and persuaded to have me on his Radio program lasting almost an hour (15 minutes break for ads) but when I asked him for the transcripts, he said that I must pay for it. He had not paid me. I was not amused.

Chavez: Another CIA assassination victim?

 The Venezuelan president himself, before he died yesterday, wondered aloud whether the US government - or the banksters who own it - gave him, and its other leading Latin American enemies, cancer.

A little over a year ago, Chavez went on Venezuelan national radio and said: “I don’t know but… it is very odd that we have seen Lugo affected by cancer, Dilma when she was a candidate, me, going into an election year, not long ago Lula and now Cristina… It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange, very strange.”

Strange indeed… so strange that if you think Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Paraguayan Fernando Lugo, and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - Latin America’s top anti-US empire leaders - all just happened to contract cancer around the same time by sheer chance, you must be some kind of crazy coincidence theorist.

Am I 100% certain that the CIA killed Hugo Chavez? Absolutely not.

It could have been non-governmental assassins working for the bankers.

But any way you slice it, the masters of the US Empire are undoubtedly responsible for giving Chavez and other Latin American leader’s cancer. How do we know that? Just examine the Empire’s track record.

Fidel Castro’s bodyguard, Fabian Escalante, estimates that the CIA attempted to kill the Cuban president an astonishing 638 times. The CIA’s methods included exploding cigars, biological warfare agents painted on Castro’s diving suit, deadly pills, toxic bacteria in coffee, an exploding speaker’s podium, snipers, poison-wielding female friends, and explosive underwater sea shells.

The CIA’s assassination attempts against Castro were like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with the CIA as the murderously inept cat, and the Cuban president as a clever and very lucky mouse. Some might even argue that Castro’s survival, in the face of 638 assassination attempts by the world’s greatest power, is evidence that El Presidente’s communist atheism was incorrect, and that God, or at least a guardian angel, must have been watching over “Infidel Castro” all along.

Theology aside, the CIA’s endless attempts on Castro’s life provide ample evidence that US authorities will stop at nothing in their efforts to murder their Latin American enemies.

John Perkins, in his bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, supplies more evidence that the bankers that own the US government routinely murder heads of state, using private assassins as well as CIA killers.

Perkins, during his career as an “economic hit man,” gained first-hand knowledge about how the big international bankers maintain their empire in Latin America and elsewhere. Perkins’ job was to visit leaders of foreign countries and convince them to accept loans that could never be paid back. Why? The bankers want to force these nations into debt slavery. When the country goes bankrupt, the bankers seize the nation’s natural resources and establish complete control over its government and economy.

Perkins would meet with a targeted nation’s leader and say: “I have a fist-full of hundred dollar bills in one hand, and a bullet in the other. Which do you want?” If the leader accepted the loans, thereby enslaving his country, he got the payoff. If he angrily chased Perkins out of his office, the bankers would call in the “asteroids” to assassinate the uncooperative head of state.

The “asteroids” are the world’s most expensive and accomplished professional killers. They work on contract - sometimes to the CIA, sometimes to the bankers, and sometimes to wealthy private individuals. And though their specialty is causing plane crashes, they are capable of killing people, including heads of state, in any number of ways.

This isn’t just speculation. John Perkins actually knows some of these CIA-linked professional killers personally. And he has testified about their murders of Latin American leaders. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is dedicated to Perkins’ murdered friends Gen. Torrijos of Panama and President Jaime Roldos of Ecuador. Both were killed by CIA-linked “asteroids” in engineered plane crashes.

Do CIA-linked killers sometimes induce cancer in their victims? Apparently they do. One notable victim: Jack Ruby (née Jack Rubenstein), a mobster who was himself a professional killer, and whose last hit was the choreographed murder of JFK-assassination patsy Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. Ruby begged to be taken to Washington to tell the real story of the JFK murder, but instead died in prison, of a sudden and mysterious cancer, before he could reveal what he knew.

Have the CIA-bankster “asteroids” ever tried to kill Latin American leaders with cancer? The answer is an unequivocal “yes.”

Edward Haslam’s book Dr. Mary’s Monkey proves what JFK assassination prosecutor Jim Garrison had earlier alleged: Child-molesting CIA agent David Ferrie, one of President Kennedy’s killers, had experimented extensively with cancer-causing viruses for the CIA in his huge home laboratory. The purpose: To give Fidel Castro and other Latin American leaders cancer. (Ferrie himself was killed by the CIA shortly before he was scheduled to testify in court about his role in the JFK assassination.)

To summarize: We know that the bankers who own the US government routinely try to kill any Latin American leader who refuses to be their puppet. We know that they have mounted thousands of assassination attempts against Latin American leaders, including more than 600 against Castro alone. We know that they have been experimenting with cancer viruses, and killing people with cancer, since the 1960s.

So if you think Hugo Chavez died a natural death, I am afraid that you are terminally naïve.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 big lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com