The President’s Kill List: Assassination and US Foreign Policy Since 1945

“The book does two main things. Firstly, it tracks the US government involvement in assassination plots, and secondly, it looks at the politics surrounding assassinations, which to my mind include the degree of involvement of the President in decisions to kill and the language used to internally justify and publicly legitimate assassination. The turning point of the book is the 1970s, when after Congressional investigations of the intelligence community, the Ford administration published an executive order reforming the intelligence community, containing a prohibition on assassination. Some people have argued that, with the executive order, the US stopped being involved in assassinations until after 9/11. I make the argument that what changed with the executive order was not that the US stopped being involved in assassinations but that it started developing internally and—eventually—publicly a series of legal positions and political justifications to establish that what it was doing might look like assassination, but it was something else.” Read more...

The best books on State-Sponsored Assassination

Luca Trenta, International Relation