The Guardian | Ed Pilkington: There has been no shortage of US attempts to remove foreign adversaries through highly dubious legal or ethical means�

The US government is no stranger to the dark arts of political assassinations. Over the decades it has deployed elaborate techniques against its foes, from dispatching a chemist armed with lethal poison to try to take out Congo�s Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s to planting poison pills (equally unsuccessfully) in the Cuban leader Fidel Castro�s food.

But the killing of Gen Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran�s elite military Quds force, was in a class all its own. Its uniqueness lay not so much in its method � what difference does it make to the victim if they are eviscerated by aerial drone like Suleimani, or executed following a CIA-backed coup, as was Iraq�s ruler in 1963, Abdul Karim Kassem? � but in the brazenness of its execution and the apparently total disregard for either legal niceties or human consequences.

�The US simply isn�t in the practice of assassinating senior state officials out in the open like this,� said Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

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