When is it an assassination

It is usually done for personal reason such as love, anger, or greed. The motive for murder is usually that the murderer stands to benefit in some way, such as the murder of a rival, which will ensure their own win, or the murder of a family member or benefactor, which may result in inheritance of money.

In fact, love, greed, or revenge is usually the most common motive for murder. Assassination is almost the same as murder, as in it results in the killing of another human being. However, it differs from murder in motive. While, murder is done for person reasons, such as revenge or greed, an assassination is conducted for political or religious reasons. Alternately, it may also be conducted for money, wherein somebody pays another to kill a person; or for a desire for fame or notoriety.

Basically, any murder in which the murderer does not directly benefit from the murder can be classified as an assassination. However, it should also be noted that in order to be called an assassination the victim is typically a famous or important person. He must not know the iden tities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong.

While the Assassin of Trotsky has never revealed any significant information, it was unsound to depend on this when the act was p lanned. When the decision to assassinate has been reached, the tactics of the operation must be planned, based upon an estimate of the situation similar to that used in military operations.

The preliminary estimate will reveal gaps in information and possibly indicate a need for special equipment which must be procured or constructed. When all necessary data has been collected, an effective tactical plan can be prepared. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the oper ation.

In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of rep risal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only i f provoked by excessive brutality.

Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation. The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The spe cific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain.

The attempt on Hitler's life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention. It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative.

However, the simplest local tools a re often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile.

All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded. In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incrimin ating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site.

If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his ident ity. For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated. The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.

Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the "horrified wit ness", no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death. Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject's death and at the same time establish a workable al ibi.

If the subject's personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind. Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.

Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject's car is tampered with, reliability is very lo w. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation. Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building.

Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible. In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective.

If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedat ive will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice. If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.

Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination of Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latte r case is more accurately described as a murder. Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.

Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate. Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true. Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet. Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.

If the subject has been rendered unconscious by other wounds or drugs, either of the above methods can be used to insure death. As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability.

A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illeg] bats are very widely dist ributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of. Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull.

Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from th e eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.

Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Firearms have other drawbacks. Their possession is often incriminating. The development of a formal legal ban on assassination began with the codification of the international laws of war during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The U. Five thousand copies were printed and distributed to the officers of the armies of both the Union and the Confederacy. The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such international outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage.

The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

General Orders further provided that soldiers may be killed as long as they are not individually singled out, or their deaths achieved as a result of a bounty placed upon their head. Within ten years, however, this concept was widely adopted, making the Lieber Code a model for the rules of war of other nations.

The formulation of a body of international treaty law that restricts the practice of assassination began with the Brussels Conference of The Hague Peace Conferences of and produced a number of major international instruments, including the Convention on the Law and Customs of War on Land.

Both the Hague IV Convention and the laws of war permit attacks upon valid military targets at any time or place. Noncombatants and civilians can be designated a valid target if they are sufficiently involved in the war effort. Although the exact level of involvement necessary for a civilian to become a valid target has not been fully defined legally, 41 it is usually viewed as being a decision in practice based on context.

Civilians who work directly to conduct the war, or occupy a role normally held by a soldier, are valid targets. There is also a legal consensus that a civilian head of state who serves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces falls within this category. It is important to note that the Article 23 b ban on treachery does not preclude the use of either stealth or surprise, and does nothing to change the basic rule that combatants are still legally subject to attack at any time or place.

Later conventions on the law of war have further defined and expanded modern treachery-based interpretations. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy.

This additional rule takes the protections against assassination in Article 23 b of the Hague IV Annex and expands them by adding perfidy as an entirely new component of prohibited treachery. From the above, a number of conclusions can be drawn about what attacks against specific individuals during wartime are assassinations, and thus prohibited under the laws of armed conflict.

First, the applicable law, as established in the treaty and customary law that regulates the use of force, primarily serves to narrow the methods by which individuals can be attacked. It is important to note, however, that killings that are not assassinations may be illegal for other reasons. Assassination during peacetime has been generally interpreted to mean the killing of a particular individual for political reasons.

Many scholars believe it to be a subset of murder, with the choice to kill motivated by politics, and the particular target selected because of his identity, prominence, or public status.

An application of this as a legal requirement is problematic, however, as political motive is not an absolute and is based largely on perception and context. Those who employ state-sponsored killing will deny they were motivated by politics, while those who are victimized will argue the opposite. To further complicate matters, the line between wartime and peacetime legal standards for assassination blur together in the face of conflicts less than war, such as self-defense, preemptive self-defense, and counterterrorist operations.

Because the peacetime and wartime bodies of law are so dramatically different in effect and application, any analysis of assassination must concentrate on how to determine which applies. At least in principle, there is manifest evidence to suggest that peacetime assassination has been illegal since the Middle Ages. The severity of murder as a criminal offence is especially evident in its inclusion as a prominent offense in each of the major international extradition treaties.

Although the indications are overwhelming that international law condemns the practice of assassination in principle, beyond the domestic criminalization of murder, there is little concrete international law that specifically forbids it.

In a more general sense, Article 4 of the U. Charter establishes a right to be free from aggression and the use of international armed force, and has been interpreted to provide that citizens of a nation have a right to be immune from international acts of violence by citizens or military forces of other nations.

United States. There are, however, two established scenarios in which the Article 2 4 protections against the use of force would be suspended. The first is a military action sanctioned by the U. Charter, and the second is an attack made by a victim state in self-defense. When a nation employs Article 51 to justify a use of force in its own defense, or the defense of another state, the laws of war control as they would in any formally declared conflict.

Therefore, under an Article 51 action, any state-sanctioned killing by a victim state would not be an assassination so long as it is not accomplished by treachery or outlawry, as described earlier. The only evidence customary international law provides as to its scope arises from a little-known international dispute between the United States and Great Britain.

Secretary of State Daniel Webster rebuffed British claims that the attack was justified, responding with a description of the circumstances when a right to self-defense could be recognized:. It will be for [the British] to show a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation. Caroline does provide some guidance as to the scope of Article 51, but the breadth of its three factors still remains subject to the same range of different interpretations.

The specter of terrorism poses the most serious challenge to this narrow interpretation of Article Most major governments assert that they can employ the requirements of Caroline to justify an attack against threats to their security, including actions inside the states that harbor or encourage such organized groups. Waiting for an actual strike could cost a victim nation hundreds or perhaps thousands of lives, or even eliminate the capacity of the victim state to respond at all.

Advocates of a broader view, which include the majority of nations and the United States, counter that a limited interpretation does not adequately reflect the nature of modern warfare and terrorism. The majority view, in contrast, only requires that the customary rule, as defined in Caroline, be satisfied before a state may legitimately act to eliminate a threat.

Supporters of the broad Article 51 view also point to the vast body of other law that justifies an anticipatory attack against a third-party nation who is harboring a threat. Various sources indicate that a state has a duty to prevent its territory from being used as a base for hostile acts of third parties against another nation.

If, then, there is anywhere a nation of restless and mischievous disposition, ever ready to injure others, to traverse their designs, and to excite domestic disturbances in their dominions. Two other approaches suggest alternatives to relying solely on Article 51 to define what level of violence is needed to activate the right to self-defense.

The first of these relies upon the U. The Charter provides that any first use of violence is prima facie evidence of aggression. It also provides a non-exhaustive list of specific examples, which includes the use of any kind of weapon to attack the territory of another state, blockading the ports or coasts of another state, attacking the armed forces of another state, allowing its territory to be used by a third state to commit acts of aggression against another state, or sending armed groups to attack another state.

The International Court of Justice has also proposed that there may be acceptable defensive measures that fall below the threshold of Article In Nicaragua v.