Killers for hire

No U.S. citizen should be a mercenary overseas

So many of our current political debates surround what should or should not be illegal. Marijuana, abortion, certain types of guns — if you can name something, you can probably find people for it and against it. But while consensus is usually hard to come by, there is at least one thing people might be able to agree should be outlawed: serving as a hired assassin for a foreign government.

As ridiculous as that may sound, there are loopholes and patches of gray in U.S. law that have allowed Americans to receive money from foreign governments for mercenary services.

A recent report from Buzzfeed News revealed that a Pittsburgh-area man named Abraham Golan had been running a for-profit military operation hired by the government of the United Arab Emirates to kill political opponents in Yemen. Mr. Golan described his group’s activities in no uncertain terms: “There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it. We did it.”

According to Mr. Golan, his team, known as Spear Operations Group, was paid $1.5 million a month by the UAE to conduct an unidentified number of assassinations between 2015 and 2016. Isaac Gilmore, Mr. Golan’s business partner, admitted that he wasn’t always sure if the targets identified by the UAE were guilty of any actual wrongdoing.

So how was this allowed? Mr. Golan, Mr. Gilmore and their team were effectively deputized by the UAE. They were given ranks in the Emirati military, and military officials provided weapons, equipment and a list of targets. While it is illegal for an American to “conspire to kill, kidnap [and] maim” people in a foreign country, it legal to serve in the armed services of certain countries. An estimated 1,000 Americans serve in the Israel Defense Forces, for example.

Congress should consider imposing stricter limits on foreign military service. Perhaps Americans should be prohibited from serving in foreign militaries that offer more than $2,000 a month. That particular amount is roughly equal to the pay of a private first class in the U.S. Army. In other words, U.S. citizens would not be allowed to make more serving in a foreign army than they would serving in the American armed forces.

There should be no loopholes available for Americans looking to serve as paid killers for foreign governments.