Fast forward 18 years to the assassination of Hamas military leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on Jan. 20, and it is a graphic reminder of just how much the world has changed. Nearly the entire hit was recorded on closed-circuit TV cameras, from the time the team arrived at Dubai’s airport to the time the assassins entered Mr. Mabhouh’s room. The cameras even caught team members before and after they donned their disguises. The only thing the Dubai authorities have been unable to discover is the true names of the team. But having identified the assassins, or at least the borrowed identities they traveled on, Dubai felt confident enough to point a finger at Israel. (Oddly enough several of the identities were stolen from people living in Israel.)

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If in fact Mossad assassinated Mr. Mabhouh in Dubai, it no doubt modeled its planning on targeted killings in Palestinian areas—with the use of overwhelming force, speed and control of the environment. The problem with Dubai, which should be painfully obvious to Tel Aviv, is that it is not the West Bank. Nor is Paris now with its web of closed-circuit TV cameras and the ability of the French to track prepaid telephones. The art of assassination, the kind we have seen over and over again in Hollywood movies, may be as passé as killing people by arsenic or with a garrote. You just can’t get away with it anymore.

via A Perfectly Framed Assassination in Dubai – WSJ.com.

I disagree with the writer’s assertion that the CIA does not conduct assassinations. An assassination by definition is not confined by the weapon of choice, whether it’s a weapon with a silencer attached or a drone firing Hellfire missiles. Nor is the CIA rendered innocent if they use private military contractors or the military (JSOC, for example) to actually do the dirty deed, they are still just as culpable as the driver of a getaway car is.

Assassinations are murder, which is a crime under both U.S. and international law, regardless of how the Bush Administration justified skirting around the ban on assassinations just as they did with torture. Assassinations are destabilizing to local situations and thus cause more violence and killings, the murder of innocent victims of the more heavy-handed or failed targeted killings, in which civilians are often murdered in large numbers. These kinds of things are some, though not all, of the factors that cause “blow back” in international geopolitical conflict. After all of the armed conflicts the U.S. has been involved with post-WW2, you would think that our government and all of its agencies would know better. You would be wrong.