"The Assassination Business"

[Tim Gratz]

Is anyone familar with this book or its author?

The Assassination Business

A History of State-Sponsored Murder

Richard Belfield(ISBN13/EAN 978-0786-71343-1)

Carroll & Graf

Description:

The cost of a bullet can be as little as eight cents. Assassination has long been more common than anyone (particularly anyone in government) likes to admit—it is the great-untold secret at the heart of the nation-state. As President George W. Bush continues to introduce Hollywood cowboy terminology like “dead or alive” and “bring it on” into our international political discourse, we are entering a new era of assassination where the “eight-cent option” has been given a new and disquieting legitimacy.

Belfield’ s darkly fascinating exposé of the business, its hired killers, and their paymasters, includes excerpts from CIA, Al-Qaeda, and Soviet assassination manuals. Placing the most important hits of our time in their proper historical context and examining the business from a remarkably objective yet honest standpoint, Belfield shows how assassinations, while posited by governments and the United Nations as random, isolated acts of violence, are in fact quietly sanctioned examples of ruthlessly strategic statecraft. He offers an eye-opening account of how Kennedy made the Vietnam War inevitable by the elimination of President Diem; and clear evidence of assassinations where the official version simply is not true, including those of Bobby Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, and WPC Yvonne Fletcher.

[Mark Knight]

Tim, just an update for modern, inflationary times...my son, who's in the Army Reserve, tells me that the current phrase regarding the cost of a round of .223 ammunition, is "the eighteen-cent solution."

According to him and his compadres, a lot of the world's political problems merely need to have "the eighteen-cent solution" applied to them.

[Al Carrier]

Tim, just an update for modern, inflationary times...my son, who's in the Army Reserve, tells me that the current phrase regarding the cost of a round of .223 ammunition, is "the eighteen-cent solution."

According to him and his compadres, a lot of the world's political problems merely need to have "the eighteen-cent solution" applied to them.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Mark,

The term "eight-cent solution" was coined in the early fifties when a dry pack box of 20 .38 caliber wad-cutters were going for roughly $1.50. Not positive but I believe it was first used in an article written in the Chicago Tribune. It has been a term handed down since as slang for a bullet to the head would resolve the problem.

Al

[Mark Knight]

Al, I'm not in any way disagreeing with you; I'm just passing along what appears to be an adjusted-for-inflation version in current use within the military [and probably elsewhere as well].

[Al Carrier]

Al, I'm not in any way disagreeing with you; I'm just passing along what appears to be an adjusted-for-inflation version in current use within the military [and probably elsewhere as well].

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I understand that Mark. I was just providing a little background for when the phrase initiated in this context.

Al