On shooting the president

It would appear that calling for George Bush’s assassination, far from being a terrible breach of etiquette, is entirely legitimate under international law.

"The prohibition on assassinating heads of state comes from the Geneva Convention. Now I seem to recall that Mr Bush ordered explicit attempts on Saddam Hussein’s life, both allegedly using assassins and more directly using – er – "precision" bombing of the odd palace. And Saddam was at the time a serving head of state – even Bush acknowledged that.

"So since Mr Bush has chosen to opt out of this particular protection, surely it follows that it’s quite legal for him to be assassinated? So what’s the fuss about?" (from here, with some reference to this.)

However, as previously discussed, I’d still counsel against such a move for pragmatic reasons. And moral ones, although for obvious reasons, I try and keep my personal morality out of discussions on assassination wherever feasible.

Relatedly, Nathan Barley really is rather excellent. The Monday night repeats are strongly recommended, since on a Friday and Saturday night one really ought to be attending videomedia installations with vacuous VJs and/or playing cock, muff and bumhole in gastrified clubpubs.

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4 thoughts on “On shooting the president

  1. I think you’re forgetting that, because some people in the world want to kill George Bush, it should therefore be illegal to make jokes about anything at all.

  2. In fairness the prohibition on assassinating heads of state is a very stupid bit of the Geneva convention. Why is better to machine gun your way through thousands of people than to use a sniper to take out one guy? There’s a good chance that that one bloke is far more deserving of death than any of his unfortunate foot-soldiers…

  3. AH BUT! The marksman might not be accurate, so there might be a lot of pain and suffering. At least with hounds you know the job is done properly. Hold on, sorry, wrong topic.

    I’d imagine if the conventions were drawn up by a group of bakers, there’d be a lot more stuff about not killing bakers.

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