Advances in lethal technology are making assassinations exponentially easier against even the most hardened security systems.
What is it that makes assassination attempts so fascinating to fiction writers?
Technology has made assassination, as well as escalatory and asymmetrical reprisals, easier than ever for both the geese and the ganders.
To provide real assurance, President Obama should publish clear guidelines for targeting to be carried out by nonpoliticians, making assassination truly a last resort, and allow an outside court to review the evidence before placing Americans on a kill list.
In a similar vein of perversity, Stephen Sondheim's 1990 musical Assassins looks at the sorry lives of American presidential assassins, from Oswald and Lincoln's killer John Wilkes Booth, to less canonical figures such as Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and John Hinckley, who made assassination attempts, respectively, on presidents Ford and Reagan.
When Charlie shows up for what he expects to be a typically cushy job in the Hollywood Hills, he discovers the house occupied by Lane Madden, a B-movie actress running from the Accident People, a gang of killers who work from ingenious scenarios that make their assassinations appear... well, accidental.
Grabež testified that he and Princip, also at about the time of Easter, agreed between them to make an assassination of either Governor Potiorek or Franz Ferdinand and a little later settled on Franz Ferdinand.
"Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right to independent thought.
Senator Smith was famous for her Declaration of Conscience during the McCarthy era in which she complained that those "who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who... ignore [its] basic principles".
Hariri was scheduled to give a speech later on Saturday at a ceremony making the assassination.
