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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Terrorism, freedom fighters, armed struggle > Political assassinations
Looking beyond the events of the second intifada and 9/11, this book reveals how targeted killing is intimately embedded in both Israeli and US statecraft, and in the problematic relationship between sovereign authority and lawful violence underpinning the modern state system. It details the legal and political issues raised in targeted killing as it has emerged in practice, including questions of domestic constitutional authority, the use of force in international law, the law of belligerent occupation, the law of targeting and human rights law. The distinctive nature of Israeli and US targeted killing is analysed in terms of the compulsion of legality characteristic of the liberal constitutional state, a compulsion that demands the ability to distinguish between legal 'targeted killing' and extra-legal 'political assassination'. The effect is a highly legalized framework for the extraterritorial killing of designated terrorists that may significantly affect the international law of force.
Images of the assassination of John F. Kennedy are burned deeply into the memories of millions who watched the events of November 1963 unfold live on television. Never before had America seen an event of this magnitude as it happened. But what is it we remember? How did the near chaos of the shooting and its aftermath get transformed into a seamless story of epic proportions? In this book, Barbie Zelizer explores the way we learned about and came to make sense of the killing of the president. Covering the Body (the title refers to the charge given journalists to follow a president) is a powerful reassessment of the media's role in shaping our collective memory of the assassination-at the same time as it used the assassination coverage to legitimize its own role as official interpreter of American reality. Of the more than fifty reporters covering Kennedy in Dallas, no one actually saw the assassination. And faced with a monumentally important story that was continuously breaking, most journalists had no time to verify leads or substantiate reports. Rather, they took discrete moments of their stories and turned them into one coherent narrative, blurring what was and was not "professional" about their coverage. Through incisive analyses of the many accounts and investigations in the years since the shooting, Zelizer reveals how journalists used the assassination not just to relay the news but to address the issues they saw as central to the profession and to promote themselves as cultural authorities. Indeed, argues Zelizer, these motivations are still alive and are at the core of the controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's movie, JFK. At its heart, Covering the Body raises serious questions about the role of the media in defining our reality, and shaping our myths and memories. In tracing how journalists attempted to answer questions that still trouble most Americans, Zelizer offers a fascinating analysis of the role of the media as cultural authorities.
From the New York Times bestselling authors of The Nazi Conspiracy and The Lincoln Conspiracy comes a true, little-known story about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy, right before his inauguration. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans’ most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don’t know is that JFK’s historic presidency almost ended before it began―at the hands of a disgruntled sociopathic loner armed with dynamite. On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car―a parked Buick―on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida. Pavlick knew the president-elect’s schedule. He knew when Kennedy would leave his house. He knew where Kennedy was going. From there, Pavlick had a simple plan―one that could’ve changed the course of history. Written in the gripping, page-turning style that is the hallmark of Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s bestselling series, this is a slice of history vividly brought to life. Meltzer and Mensch are at the top of their game with this brilliant exploration of what could’ve been for one of the most compelling leaders of the 20th century.
In November 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. His death remains a defining moment for millions of people but few understand the unstoppable forces that were building in the city long before this dramatic event played out before the world. Dallas 1963 is a riveting account of the convergence of a group of unyielding and highly focused protagonists in a city sometimes seemingly filled with hate for JFK. Wicked stabs of fate and circumstance steered these fascinating characters together: the richest man in the world, a combative military general, a Mafia don, a strident Congressman, thundering preachers and even the elegant owner of one of America's most famous stores. This book expertly narrates how the spiralling events surrounding these characters on the ground in Dallas ultimately brewed a toxic environment before the President's assassination. Using a wealth of new information, as well as the first ever examination of key primary documents, Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, both experts in their field, provide a comprehensive and detailed portrait of the place, the time and the people of these extraordinary events in American history. They also provide cautionary and controversial lessons rendering this time increasingly relevant for the modern age.
With the recent declassification of secret documents new light has been shed on old mysteries. For example, we now know that what might be termed the "JFK assassination conspiracy industry" was deliberately fueled and manipulated by the KGB so as to distract the CIA and undermine confidence in successive U.S. administrations. Also, new evidence continues to emerge of Vladimir Putin's commitment to the extra-judicial elimination of "extremists" overseas, as legitimized by the Duma in July 2006. Controversially, the legislation included a definition of "extremists" as "those slandering the individual occupying the post of president of the Russian Federation". The Encyclopedia of Political Assassinations contains a chronology, an introduction, and appendixes. The encyclopedia section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on assassinations, intelligence agencies, politics and foreign relations.
This is a full account of the last attempt to restore James II to the throne, which he lost to William and Mary in 1688. The Assassination Plot of 1696 aroused enormous contemporary interest, and here re-emerges as a fascinating episode of considerable importance for our appreciation of the political world of the 1690s. But the book is as much concerned with personalities as events, and offers a compelling narrative of day-to-day life in late seventeenth-century England as well as insights into the personalities and political attitudes of William III and the exiled James II. Early in 1696, Louis XIV lent ships and men to James to help him regain his kingdom. To coincide with the French invasion, a rising was secretly organized by the Jacobites in England. However, as neither side would take the initiative the murder of William III, planned by a group of Jacobites in London, was seen as a way out of the deadlock. The plot was betrayed on the eve of the murder attempt and most of the conspirators were apprehended.
This volume develops the theory of cultural trauma, a key research program in the Strong Program of Cultural Sociology. In regard to the shattering potential effects of political assassinations, Eyerman examines such effects on political and social life in three different national contexts: Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and Harvey Milk in the U.S.; Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands; and Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Sweden.
Parkland (originally titled Four Days in November) is the exciting and definitive narrative of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Releasing this fall, the movie starring Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron, Jacki Weaver, and Billy Bob Thornton follows a group of individuals making split-second decisions after this incomprehensible event: the doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital, the chief of the Dallas Secret Service, the cameraman who captured what has become the most examined film in history, the FBI agents who had gunman Lee Harvey Oswald within their grasp, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson who had to take control of the country at a moment s notice. Based on Vincent Bugliosi s Reclaiming History Parkland is the story of that day the movie is produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman (Game Change, Charlie Wilson s War), Nigel Sinclair (End of Watch, Snitch), Matt Jackson (End of Watch, Snitch), and Bill Paxton, and written and directed by Peter Landesman."
A thorough work of contemporary history and a distillation of the complex web of the Iranian Kurdish political world, this biography of Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou depicts the character and passionate action of one of the twentieth century's most exceptional and democratic leaders of a national movement. Carol Prunhuber, who knew Ghassemlou from the early 1980s, shows us the many facets of a humanist leader of magnitude and worldwide scope. From revolution that toppled the Shah to the dark and treacherous alleys of the Cold War, Dreaming Kurdistan revives the Kurdish leader's fated path to assassination in Vienna. We know how, why, and who murdered Ghassemlou-and we stand witness to Austria's raison d'etat, the business interests that put a lid on the investigation, and the response of silent indifference from the international community. Professor of economics in Prague, bon vivant in Paris, clandestine freedom fighter in the Kurdish mountains, stalked by the Shah's secret police, Ghassemlou is ultimately assassinated by the hit men of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Prunhuber takes us, through a murky world of equivocal liaisons, complicities, treachery, and undisguised threats, from Tehran to Vienna. While the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to perturb and defy the West, Dreaming Kurdistan is essential for an understanding of Iran and the Kurds' longing for freedom and democracy.
The intimate and personal story behind the man who tried to kill Verwoerd but didn’t succeed. “The raucous wail of sirens pierced the quiet Saturday afternoon, making me drop my book and rush outside to see what drama was taking place. A fleet of cars, their sirens screaming, roared along Oxford Road two hundred yards from our house. I stood on the lawn wondering what on earth it was because sirens were rarely heard near our home. I went back inside; the commotion was over. But within half an hour our telephone started ringing non-stop . . .” 9 April 1960 was the day that changed Susie Cazenove’s life – the day her father, David Pratt, shot the Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd. Verwoerd, commonly known as the architect of apartheid, didn’t die, but Pratt’s family lived with the legacy of his action. A chance encounter with the late David Rattray of Fugitive’s Drift led Cazenove to revisit the memories of that terrible day. With Rattray’s encouragement she put pen to paper to describe the extraordinary events of that day and its consequences. Part family memoir, part ode to the settlement of Johannesburg, Cazenove skilfully weaves her family history and the mood in South Africa in the 1950s and 60s as a background to what may have led her father, a farmer and gentle man, to commit a treasonous act.
" With commentary by Terry Alford, Burrus Carnahan, Joan L. Chaconis, Percy Martin, Betty Ownsbey, Edward Steers Jr., Thomas R. Turner, and Laurie Verge On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. By April 26, eight of the ten people eventually charged as accomplices in Lincoln's murder were in custody. Booth was killed resisting capture and John Surratt was in Canada, his whereabouts unknown to Federal authorities. In the days that followed, President Johnson issued an Executive Order directing that the persons charged with Lincoln's murder stand trial before a military tribunal. During the fifty-day trial, over three hundred and sixty witnesses gave testimony. Benn Pitman, a recognized expert in the art of phonography (an early form of shorthand), was awarded a government contract to produce a true and accurate transcription of the testimony. Working with four assistants, Pitman produced transcripts that served the general public through daily releases to select members of the press as well as to the prosecution and the defense. Pitman was given the right to publish the transcriptions for public sale, and he skillfully winnowed the 4,300 pages of transcription into a single 421-page volume. Copies of the original 1865 edition, as well as subsequent reprints, are exceedingly rare. Here for the first time, leading experts in the field lend their insight in a series of commentaries that complement Pitman's published transcript-included here in its entirety-exposing various perjuries, explaining testimony that has escaped scholarly attention, and clarifying the events surrounding the assassination as never before.
''A story of intrigue to equal anything by John Le Carre…one of the most remarkable examples of a 'black operation' ever revealed.'' 'A brilliant piece of historical investigation. Not only has Christy Campbell uncovered an Irish terrorist plot to assassinate Queen Victoria on the day of her Golden Jubilee in 1887, but the 'Jubilee Plot' was actually masterminded by the British Government and (Prime Minister) Lord Salisbury.' In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Christy Campbell exposes the true instigators behind one of the most serpentine of all the attempts on Queen Victoria's life. Irish-American bombers had waged a five-year campaign of dynamite attacks against British cities; now they seemed poised to bring off the most spectacular outrage imaginable. But the conspiracy's real target was not the Queen but the entire cause of Irish Home Rule… 'Extraordinary and engrossing…a scrupulously accurate piece of research which tells a dramatic tale but also provides a valuable insight into little-known aspects of the 19th-century relationship between Britain and Ireland.' 'A real page turner…makes 'The Day of the Jackal' look placid by comparison.' 'Enthralling…the pace never slackens.' 'Terrific'
The three shots fired into the back of Israel's prime minister,
Yitzhak Rabin, on the night of November 4, 1995, were a blow to
Israel's social body. The shock, horror, and pain caused by the
murder found direct and overwhelming expression at the funeral and
memorial ceremonies held in Jerusalem, attended by most of the
world's leaders.
This compelling book provides a meticulously documented account of officially sanctioned cannibalism in the southwestern province of Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on his unique access to local archives of the Chinese Communist Party and on extensive interviews with party officials, the victims' relatives, and the murderers themselves, Zheng Yi paints a disturbing picture of official compliance in the systematic killing and cannibalization of individuals in the name of political revolution and "class struggle."The treasure-trove of evidence Zheng Yi has unearthed offers unprecedented insights into the way the internecine, factional struggles of the Cultural Revolution reached a horrifying level of insanity and frenzy among the ethnic Zhuang people of Guangxi. Profoundly moving, acutely observed, and unflinchingly graphic, "Scarlet Memorial" is a shining example of a genre of investigative reporting that courageously and independently records obscure and officially censored historical events, revealing hidden dimensions of modern Chinese history and politics.
The questions have haunted our nation for half a century: Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963? Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, finally provides many of the answers. Though A CRUEL AND SHOCKING ACT began as Shenon's attempt to write the first insider's history of the Warren Commission, it quickly became something much larger and more important when he discovered startling information that was withheld from the Warren Commission by the CIA, FBI and others in power in Washington. Shenon shows how the commission's ten-month investigation was doomed to fail because the man leading it - Chief Justice Earl Warren - was more committed to protecting the Kennedy family than getting to the full truth about what happened on that tragic day. A taut, page-turning narrative, Shenon's book features some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century-Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Justice Warren, CIA spymasters Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, as well as the CIA's treacherous 'molehunter,' James Jesus Angleton. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to the surviving commission staffers and many other key players, Philip Shenon's authoritative, scrupulously researched book will forever change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination and about the deeply flawed investigation that followed.
The personal and professional story of a former FBI agent, this is the journey Don Adams has taken over the past 50 years that has connected him to the assassination of the 35th president of the United States. On November 13, 1963, Adams was given a priority assignment to investigate Joseph Milteer, a man who had made threats to assassinate the president. Two weeks later John F. Kennedy was dead, and Agent Adams was instructed to locate and question Milteer. Adams, however, was only allowed to ask the suspect five specific questions before being told to release him. He was puzzled by the bizarre orders but thought nothing more of it until years later when he read a report that stated that not only had Joseph Milteer made threats against the president, but also that he claimed Kennedy would be killed from an office building with a high-powered rifle. Since that time, Adams has compiled evidence and research from every avenue available to him, including his experiences in Georgia and Dallas FBI offices, to produce this compelling investigation that may just raise more questions than answers.
What is the definition of assassination? Robert Baer's boss at the CIA once told him, 'It's a bullet with a man's name on it.' Sometimes assassination is the senseless act of a psychotic, a bloodletting without social value. Other times, it can be the sanest and most humane way to change the course of conflict: one bullet, one death, case closed. Assassination has been dramatised by literature and politicised by infamous murders throughout history, and for Robert Baer, one of the most accomplished agents ever to work for the CIA, it's a source of endless fascination. Over several decades, Baer served as an operative, from Iraq to India and beyond. In THE PERFECT KILL, he takes us on a wildly entertaining narrative adventure through a history of political murder, interweaving his first-hand experience and his decades-long cat-and-mouse hunt for the greatest assassin of the modern age. A true maverick with an undeniably captivating personal story, Baer pulls back the curtain to give a glimpse of the underbelly of world politics, and the quiet murderers who operate on the fringe of our society.
Death in the Congo "is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century. When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September secretly aided by the UN toppled Lumumba s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks. Fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American bear responsibility for this crime."
A provocative telling of "The Phenix City Story." On June 18, 1954, former state senator Albert Patterson, the Democratic Party's nominee for state attorney general, was shot to death as he left his law office in Phenix City, Alabama, infamous for its prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, and political corruption. Patterson had made cleanup of Phenix City his primary campaign promise. With millions of dollars in illegal income and hundreds of political and professional careers at stake, the question surrounding Patterson's murder was not why the trigger was pulled, but who pulled it. When Good Men Do Nothing is the definitive study of the Albert Patterson murder case. Alan Grady has mined the state's original murder case files; the papers of John Patterson, Albert's son; records from the Office of Alabama Attorney General (who directed the murder investigation); the case files of the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation; National Guard reports; and more than 30 interviews with eyewitnesses and interested parties. Grady takes a complex story of multiple dimensions--a large cast of judicial, criminal, and political players; a web of alliances and allegiances; and a knotted sequence of investigative revelations and dead ends--and transforms it into a readable, incisive analysis of the powers and loyalties that governed, and corrupted to the core, the body politic of the state. Readers will be enthralled and educated by this authoritative account of the most compelling crime drama in Alabama during the 20th century.
On May 2, 2011, at 1:03 a.m. in Pakistan, a satellite uplink was sent from the town of Abbottabad crackling into the situation room of the White House in Washington, D.C.: 'Geronimo, Echo, KIA'. These words, spoken by a Navy SEAL, put paid to Osama bin Laden's three-decade-long career of terror. This is the story of Bin Laden's relentless hunters and how they took down the terrorist mastermind, told by Chuck Pfarrer, a former assault element commander of SEAL Team Six. After talking to members of the SEAL team involved in the raid, Pfarrer shares never-before-revealed details of the historic raid and the men who planned and conducted it in an exclusive boots-on-the-ground account of what happened during each minute of the mission - both inside the building and outside. Pfarrer takes readers inside the operation as the SEALs flew over the wall of Bin Laden's shabby compound and then penetrated deeper and deeper into the terrorist's lair, telling us just what it looked, sounded, and smelled like in that sweltering Pakistani suburb. He takes us to the exact spot where the al-Qaeda leader was cowering when the bullet entered his head. SEAL Target Geronimo is an explosive story of unparalleled valour, clockwork military precision, and deadly accuracy carried out by one of the most elite fighting forces in the world - the U.S. Navy's SEAL Team Six.
Late in life, former President Lyndon Johnson told a reporter that he didn't believe the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John Kennedy. Johnson felt Cuban President Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson continued, Kennedy was running "a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean," giving Castro reason to retaliate. Surprisingly, despite continuing public fascination with the CIA and with Kennedy's assassination, no one has written about Murder, Inc. and its connection with Kennedy's death. James Johnston was a lawyer for the 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated and first reported on the assassination plots and their relation to Kennedy's murder, and so brings a special expertise to the subject. Murder, Inc. is a chronological narrative of the CIA's assassination operations from their start, a few months before Kennedy took office, to their end with Kennedy's assassination. It continues through the many subsequent investigations. The book is sourced largely from the National Archives' huge holdings on the Kennedy assassination that have been declassified under the Assassination Records Review Act. While some proponents of the Act expected the secret documents would contain bombshells about the assassination, many deal instead with Murder, Inc. n a nutshell, the story is that in 1960, the CIA engaged the Mafia to kill Castro. One CIA officer termed it simply a "contract." This arrangement continued through the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Frustrated by the lack of results, Kennedy ordered the Agency to come up with a better plan. By the spring of 1963, it proposed that rather than kill Castro, it would orchestrate a coup to overthrow him. This plan moved into high-gear in September 1963 when the CIA began meeting secretly outside Cuba with a friend of Castro who was willing to lead the coup. But, he also said they would need to kill Castro and asked the CIA to provide him with assassination weapons: rifles with telescopic sights and an exotic poison dart-gun. The CIA put off agreeing until four days before Kennedy was killed. As a result, it was meeting with the Castro assassin to arrange delivery of the weapons at the very moment Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Within weeks of becoming President, Lyndon Johnson ordered the operation stopped. His Murder, Inc. comment is an obvious reference to what he was told before making this decision.
The New York Times Bestseller. about the search for the assassins of JFK. "Garrison's book presents the most powerful detailed case yet made that President Kennedy's assassination was the product of a conspiracy, and that the plotters and key operators came not from the Mob, but the CIA."-Norman Mailer More than fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his murder continues to haunt the American psyche and stands as a turning point in our nation's history. The Warren Commission rushed out its report in 1964, but questions continue to linger: Was there a conspiracy? Was there a coup at the highest levels of government? On March 1, 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison shocked the world by arresting local businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy to murder the president. His alleged co-conspirator, David Ferrie, had been found dead a few days before. Garrison charged that elements of the United States government, in particular the CIA, were behind the crime. From the beginning, his probe was virulently attacked in the media and violently denounced from Washington. His office was infiltrated and sabotaged, and witnesses disappeared and died strangely. Eventually, Shaw was acquitted after the briefest of jury deliberation and the only prosecution ever brought for the murder of President Kennedy was over. On the Trail of the Assassins-the primary source material for Oliver Stone's hit film JFK-is Garrison's own account of his investigations into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy, and his prosecution of Clay Shaw in the trial that followed.
The most enigmatic of the associates of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, Confederate soldier Lewis Thornton Powell, using the alias Lewis Paine, was a key player in the postwar attempt to undermine the Federal Government. On the night Lincoln was shot, 20-year-old Powell burst into the house of William Seward and attempted to assassinate the Secretary of State. Captured shortly after the assassination, Powell stood trial for his crime and was hanged three months later. Powell and his role in the conspiracy has been the subject of debate for many years. Who was this man? What made him tick? This biography attempts to unveil the true character of the man.
In this title, best-selling, Oxford-educated investigative author Joseph P Farrell takes on the Kennedy assassination and the involvement of Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Texas 'machine' that he controlled. Farrell says that a coalescence of interests in the military industrial complex, the CIA, and Lyndon Baines Johnson's powerful and corrupt political machine in Texas led to the event culminating in the assassination. Without the help of the Dallas police chief and others of the Texas underworld, including Jack Ruby, the Kennedy assassination could not have taken place. Farrell analyses the data as only he can, and comes to some astonishing conclusions. Topics of this title include: Oswald, the FBI, and the CIA: Hoover's Concern of a Second Oswald; Oswald and the Anti-Castro Cubans; The Mafia; Hoover, Johnson, and the Mob; The FBI, the Secret Service, Hoover, and Johnson; The CIA and 'Murder Incorporated'; and, Ruby's Bizarre Behaviour. This title also covers: The French Connection and Permindex; Big Oil; The Military; Disturbing Datasets, Doppelgangers, Duplicates and Discrepancies; Two Caskets, Two (or was that Three?) Ambulances, One Body: The Case of David S Lifton; Two (or is that Three?) Faces of Oswald; Too Many (or Was That Too Few?) Bullets; Too Many Films, with Too Many, or Too Few, Frames; The Dead Witnesses: Jack Zangretti, Maurice Brooks Gatlin, John Garret 'Gary' Underhill, Guy F Bannister, Jr., Mary Pinchot Meyer, Rose Cheramie, Dorothy Mae Killgallen, Congressman Hale Boggs; The Alchemy of the Assassination: Ritual Magic and Murder, Masonic Symbolism, and the Darkest Players in the Death of JFK; LBJ and the Planning of the Texas Trip; LBJ: A Study in Character, Connections, and Cabals; LBJ and the Aftermath: Accessory After the Fact; The Requirements of Coups D'Etat; and, more.
Known terrorists are often targeted for death by the governments of Israel and the United States. Several thousand have been killed by drones or by operatives on the ground in the last twenty years. Is this form of killing justified, when hundreds or thousands of lives are possibly at risk at the hands of a known terrorist? Is there anything about it that should disturb us? Ethically-sound and practical answers to these questions are more difficult to come by than it might seem. Renowned political theorists Jeremy Waldron and Tamar Meisels here defend two competing positions on the legitimacy of targeted killing as used in counterterrorism strategy in this riveting and essential for-and-against book. The volume begins with a joint introduction, briefly setting out the terms of discussion, and presenting a short historical overview of the practice: what targeted killing is, and how it has been used in which conflicts and by whom. It then hones in on killings themselves and the element of targeting. The authors tackle difficult and infinitely complex subjects, for example the similarities and differences between targeted killing of terrorists and ordinary killings in combat, and they ask whether targeted killing can be regarded as a law enforcement strategy, or as a hybrid between combat and law enforcement. They compare the practice of targeted killing with assassination and the use of death squads. And they consider the likelihood that targeted killing has been or will be abused against insurgents, criminals, or political opponents. Meisels analyzes the assassination by Israeli operatives of nuclear scientists working for regimes hostile to Israel. Meisels and Waldron carefully consider whether this sort of killing can ever be justified in terms of the danger it, in theory, averts. The conclusions drawn are at once as surprising as they are insightful, cautioning us against a world in which targeted killing is the norm as it proliferates rapidly. This is essential reading not only for students of political and war theory and military personnel, but for anyone interested in or concerned by the future of targeted killing. |
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