When is a murder not a murder? When we call the dismembering and dissolving of bodies a ‘targeted killing’

Murder is murder is murder. Sawing up and dissolving a Saudi journalist and blasting to shreds an Iranian military commander have, of course, more or less the same result. Not quite, though: Jamal Khashoggi’s Saudi murderers didn’t leave us a piece of bone or even a fingernail to bury. Even John Haigh, the “acid bath murderer”, left enough fragments of his victims around to secure his execution.

The Americans didn’t care about Qasem Soleimani’s remains. There must have been enough bits of it to stuff into his much-toured coffin before it was buried in Kerman. He, of course, was “assassinated” – a lot less troubling than down-to-earth “murder” – and Donald Trump even boasted about it.

And yes, yes, I’ll come to our sale of weapons of mass murder to the Saudis in a moment.

For it has been left to Agnes Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary killings to condemn the Saudis for the “extrajudicial execution” of Khashoggi and – now – the Americans for the “violation of international law” in the “arbitrary killing” of Soleimani. In real terms, Callamard is the international organisation’s top Murder Inc detective, and she’s about as close as you can get in the UN to what you and I might call the truth.

It still riles me to find that “murder” is a word that gentlefolk like Callamard don’t like to use. “Murder” is dirty, wicked, grubby, and produces victims whose killers hopefully go to prison for a very long time. Such punishments do not exist for Saudi officials in long, white robes or US officers in military costume. Flying your top agents to Istanbul to liquify your political opponent, or flying your drone to Baghdad airport to splash your military opponent across the local car park (along with an Iraqi militia leader), fall quite outside the grotty notebooks of Lewis, Hathaway, Barnaby or even Fabian of the Yard.

Thus it transpires that the evisceration of General Soleimani was not so much murder most foul, but “extrajudicial” – not ordered by any court – and (hold your breath) “violated the UN charter”.

The Americans, you see, had not produced proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander was actually planning to strike at the United States, despite Trump’s waffle to the contrary, and thus his immolation was a legal faux pas. Had such evidence been forthcoming, the general’s murder would presumably have to be downgraded to a mere “killing” – a crime of passion, perhaps, by a mad president who really did believe that his despicable Iranian enemy was about to let loose the forces of evil on America.

We experts, analysts, writers and correspondents generally go along with this nonsense. Thus we inevitably refer to the destruction of the life of a journalist, human rights activist, blogger or other innocent as a vile murder but the killing of a diplomat, senior military officer or even humdrum militia commander (of the Hamas variety) as an “assassination” or even a “targeted killing” – the “targeted” bit making up in endeavour for the crude and bright red blood emerging from the victim.

The word “assassination” has been around since the 16th century – from the Arabic hashashin Ismaili killers – but my own clippings files suggest that “targeted killing” was first invented for the Israeli murder of Palestinian antagonists and has since passed into the vocabulary of anyone who wants to blow their enemies away. The very word “target” implies a military nature to the crime – deleting the right to life because that person has, by implication, been targeting or planning to target someone else, viz the aforesaid General Soleimani. He supposedly deserved his fate for all the usual reasons. To quote a well-known resident of Palestine, “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” – or at least, that’s what St Matthew’s Gospel tells us he said.

It is of course an irony of recent bloody history in the Middle East that the man the CIA blame for Khashoggi’s murder is close to the man whom Callamard regards as violating international law by murdering Soleimani. Mohammed bin Salman and Donald Trump remain the best of friends. The fact that Khashoggi and Soleimani would have had little time for each other when they were alive is also neither here nor there. Khashoggi was a powerful but gentle voice; Soleimani a powerful and, to his enemies, very dangerous and violent man. But, to call a spade a spade, they were both murdered, and Callamard has done her best to place their different lives in the one casement in which their terrible deaths may be judged: the law.

But – and here we come at last – all those who would argue for some parity of international outrage at the taking of human life must feel the deepest shame at the words of Elizabeth Mary Truss – or Liz Truss, as we are enjoined to call Britain’s secretary of state for international trade and the president of the Board of Trade (and minister for women and equalities). For she it was on Tuesday who announced that despite a judicial ruling to the contrary, Britain’s merchants of death can go back to selling Saudi Arabia all the killer-gizmos it wants in its war against pitiful Yemen, and who described the deaths of innocents in the bombings of wedding parties, schools, hospitals, funerals and markets as “isolated incidents”.

Now I suppose that if they occurred weeks or even months apart you could describe the deaths of hundreds of human beings as “isolated”; spacing out the bombings isolates one massacre from another, you see – although I have to admit that The New York Times (admittedly not my paper of choice on such matters) put it very well when it wrote of US weaponry in Saudi hands. “Year after year, the bombs fell – on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” it stated. “Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign.”

That’s the American version of what Truss is talking about. And one prominent war-statistics organisation has said that direct targeting (including airstrikes, shells and ground fire) by the Saudi-led coalition and its allies has been responsible for more than 8,000 civilian deaths since 2015.

Let’s just remember that the original British arms sales to the Saudis were ruled unlawful by the UK court of appeal in a judgment that accused ministers of ignoring whether the bombings which killed civilians in Yemen broke international humanitarian law. Our old friends Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and Liam Fox, it seems, had agreed to arms exports without correctly assessing the risk to civilians. This judicial ruling, we should also remember, stated that a “close reading” of evidence supplied in secret revealed a covert change of policy towards UK weapons sales to the Saudis in early 2016.

Three judges concluded that “there was a decision, or a change of position, so that there would be no assessment of past violation of IHL [international humanitarian law]” by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. As foreign secretary, Johnson himself had recommended in 2016 that the UK allow the Saudis to buy bomb parts expected to be used in Yemen – only days after an air attack on a potato factory in Sana’a killed 14 people. Today, I suppose, we might say that the 14 dead at the factory were “isolated” (in time) from the sale of the bomb parts.

The very language of Truss does damage to any human being’s sense of honour. There had been, she told the House of Commons, some “credible incidents of concern” in the past relating to the conduct of Saudi forces. Now apply that kind of language to Johnson’s 2016 recommendation and the earlier factory bombing. It would mean that the factory was bombed, which would surely constitute an “incident”; that the bombing was confirmed by reliable sources and was thus a “credible” incident; and that 14 civilians had been splattered over the factory along with the potatoes, and therefore “of concern”. See how these semantics work.

As for the incidents themselves, they “occurred at different times, in different circumstances and for different reasons”, quoth Truss. No doubt that’s how the Russian defence ministry can defend Syrian air raids in Idlib province – in which case the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, would be entitled to sign off on bomb parts to the Syrians if a reasonable number of days had elapsed since the killing of 14 Syrian civilians in a factory.

You can see where all this gets us, can’t you? Britain’s weapons trade with Saudi Arabia has been a scandal for decades, a miserable grab for billions of dollars at the cost of innocent victims whose lives matter not a jot to any of us. Unless, of course, one of their relatives turns up in the UK as a suicide bomber – in which case we can roll out the “war on terror” barrel all over again and supply even more weapons to the Saudis in their own “war on terror” (Houthi terror, Shia terror, Iranian terror – you name it) in Yemen.

And if the Iranians are arming those pesky Houthis, who cares if Soleimani is turned into a red splodge at Baghdad airport? And if the Saudis are really – truly, honestly – our close friends, then those bejewelled allies of ours can hardly be blamed if they get a bit upset at the work of a solitary journalist and decide to do an acid bath on him.

Because murder is murder is murder.