Regime Change By Assassin? Easier Said Than Done.

"Robertson is obviously no statesman," he wrote in an e-mail. "There is no way to legally justify such action against President Chavez."

And quickly, various Bush administration officials performed the ritual political distancing from a figure who, this incident notwithstanding, represents the president's Christian conservative flank.

No administration ever wants to be poised anywhere near a public discussion of assassination. The broad U.S. history of assassinations against foreign leaders is long, colorful and still controversial.

What we know comes, in the main, from investigations by a mid-1970s Senate select committee into a very busy era of hits or attempted hits that were either plotted by the United States or aided and supported by it. Five cases -- in Congo, the Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Cuba and Chile -- were examined by that Senate committee, commonly known as the Church committee after its chairman, Idaho Democrat Frank Church.

The bitter fallout from some of those cases continues to shape national politics in those countries today.

Congo, for instance, has seen 45 years of dictatorship, war and misrule that may come to an end next year if elections go off there as planned -- quite a big if. It would be the first national election since Lumumba was voted in as prime minister in 1960, when the colony called Belgian Congo gained its independence.

Lumumba wouldn't last. The United States, the Belgians and various Congolese factions were after him in what became a race to a kill.

The CIA dispatched an agent with that infamous vial of poison, the Church committee reported. At around the same time, a Congolese military leader named Mobutu Sese Seko and others were hatching a plan to kidnap Lumumba and kill him, which they did. He was beaten to death. The CIA man with the poison dumped it into the Congo River.

In Chile, too, an old assassination still reverberates as that nation grapples with the legacy of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The CIA supported a plot to destabilize President Salvador Allende's government by kidnapping one of his generals. It was believed that Gen. Rene Schneider's removal would open the way for an anti-Allende coup. The CIA supplied weapons to a group of dissidents who would neutralize Schneider, though the Church committee said it was not with CIA weapons that Schneider was ultimately killed in 1970. Pinochet led a coup against Allende three years later -- a move the United States also encouraged, the Church committee said.

On Nov. 2, 1963, just three weeks before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem died in a coup. The U.S. supported the generals who plotted against him, on the theory that the Vietnam War was more winnable without Diem than with him. The rest, of course, is history.

When all these machinations came to light in the 1970s, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order prohibiting political assassination.

But in 1986, the United States bombed Libyan targets where Moammar Gaddafi, the country's ruler, was believed present. This came after a terror attack on a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton authorized the CIA to find and kill Osama Bin Laden.

And the Iraq war began, you might recall, with a U.S. airstrike on a bunker where Saddam Hussein and his sons were believed to be hiding. It might have been a hit, though it was also the start of a war.