Bell's AP isn't a Democratic Assassins Program - it's a free-market system. In a free market, when enough people want something enough to pay for it, like buying dope or killing someone, someone may decide it's worth their while and just do it. The catch is that he confuses mechanism with policy; the market doesn't really care _why_ someone has a price on their head. In a Democratic Assassins Program, everybody gets together and haggles about who ought to be killed and why, and if a majority wants someone killed, they go do it, or hire someone to do it for them, and tell the minority what a wonderful thing Democracy is. The US theoretically has a Republican Form Of Assassination - everybody votes on some representatives, and the representatives do whatever they can get away with, given future elections as a moderating threat, such as assassinating hundreds of thousands of Iraqis instead of the one Iraqi they told us we should all Hate for Two Minutes, or sending poisoned cigars to annoying bearded guys. In practice, we have a Capitalist Mixed-Economy Assassination Process - the Representatives decide to assassinate some people because it seems to be popular in the polls, and other people because the Big Business interests want them assassinated, or because the Pentagon wants to advertise their availability for future jobs, and some free-market "work" gets done, since you don't _have_ to annoy the national-scale interests to get assassinated, some things get done by Good Old Fashioned Volunteerism*, government-hired assassins decide ignore some collateral damage or work overtime in the war on Republicanly-Selected Substances and some people are society offenders who might best be underground or just tempt Darwin too many times. [* President's Commission on Volunteerism http://www.whitehouse.gov/volunteer.htm ] ---- Attachment Converted: http://www.cia.odci.gov/assassination/nominations.doc ---- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)