http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/R ... 6637E80C43

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By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, February 14, 2008

If Imad Mugniyeh - the Hezbollah terrorist mastermind who was responsible for hundreds if not thousands of murders – was indeed successfully targeted for assassination, his untimely death should be cause for celebration. I say untimely, because if he had been killed years ago, many innocent lives would have been saved.


At the time of this writing, no one can be sure whether Imad Mugniyeh is really dead, whether if he is dead he was killed by a car bomb, and who is responsible for his killing. But his targeting makes the strongest case for the appropriateness of targeted killing of terrorists who are being harbored by states that support terrorism.


Mugniyeh has been indicted by the FBI for the murder of hundreds of Americans. Syria, where he made his home, was unwilling to turn him over to the United States for justice. He continued to engage in terrorism.

The case for targeting him is compelling - legally, morally, religiously, and militarily. By any reasonable definition of that term, he is a combatant who has declared war on the United States, Israel, France and other countries whose citizens he has killed. Although he did not wear a uniform, he was a general in the terrorist war. Under the laws of war any combatant is a proper target, so long as the means used to kill him are “proportionalâ€