In military and other covert operations, terminate with extreme prejudice is a euphemism for aggressive execution (playing on the expression "termination with prejudice" of an employment contract). In a military intelligence context, it is generally understood as an order to assassinate. Its meaning was explained in a New York Times report on an incident during the Vietnam War.
According to Douglas Valentine in his book The Phoenix Program (1990), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) routinely used the term during the Vietnam War when firing its locally hired operatives. In cases of extreme misconduct, an assassination ("termination with extreme prejudice") was ordered.
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Famous quotes containing the words terminate, extreme and/or prejudice:
“Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)