Some of us suspect it has happened for a while however being kept really secret, with some of the more underground patriot leadership fatalities being made to look like natural causes and accidents, but the real question then becomes, what if someone survives the attempt, then it is openly known that it was a sanctioned hit. At that point, there is a state of war between that target and the government that sanctioned the hit. They would have no moral restriction on killing armed forces, police or agents of the government any time or any place. In fact, I am not even so sure how the legal restriction would work.

I also think the functional use of the system would be a "death bounty" sort of thing, not unlike what was already done in the old west, and thus someone could look to the 1800s for the legal precedents. Wasn't Jesse James killed in one of those death bounty actions?

Maybe that twisted logic they exercise when the cops are beating some poor drunk to death and then figure at some point to posthumously accuse him or resisting authority.

Next of course is when the winds of political change put another group of people in power who know the truth and decide not to sanction what their predecessors have done. That is the circumstance where I can see the spy chiefs just quitting the game, taking their retirement and walking away.

We can surmise from examining some past cases that the hits done in recent history were against leadership and individuals strongly believed to have previously participated in terrorist actions where there were fatalities, and were likely to either participate in similar future actions, or strongly advocate them. Earth First will claim the absolute innocence of Judy Bari but she was directly involved in some tree spiking incidents where we are not talking about a nail in a tree trunk, but spikes big enough to shatter a saw mill saw and kill millworkers. I know of one millworker death in Oregon due to that action, and one very near miss in California, where the guy has the piece of log with a railroad spike in it on his mantle as proof.

When the feds did try to kill Bari, they botched the hit with an underpowered bomb, but really accomplished what they set out to accomplish which was to send a big message to the Earth First people and their fellow travellers that "direct action" with fatalities was off limits. On that situation, it was a small, fairly independent and shadowy group or "intelligence operatives" who did the bombing, but they fairly openly orchestrated other government resources to ad credibility to their cover story (the cover story being that she was transporting a bomb in her car on the way to use it).

Given the paranoia that can arise from the widespread belief that someone can be legally and legitimately profiled and targeted by "the government" and then killed also puts responsibility squarely on the government when someone is taken into custody and then for whatever reason, comes out from government custody dead or dying from any health issue they did not go in with. In fact, I would not even be accepting death from "pre-existing health issues" either.

So if situations like the Memphis killings are avoidable, then some response to this needs to include not so much a doctrine of going hard core game on upon contact with any police or military personnel, but a doctrine of retaliation that has real teeth in it. Some of us simply can't roll "heavy" at all times and expect to get away with it, but in a doctrine of retaliation, not unlike what is used in every single nation on earth when they deal diplomatically with each other, if someone agresses the situation and wins, it is NOT over. Someone with loyalty to the aggrieved victim has a duty to retaliate. Don't let anyone fool themselves into thinking that the opposition does not think exactly the same way about it. There are certain laws they operate above, and some laws they simply cannot transcend.