Wissam Al-Hassan a "puzzling candidate for assassination"

October 23, 2012

Writing in the International Herald Tribune online, Elias Muhanna suggests that the car-bomb killing of Lebanese security chief Wissam al-Hassan last week defies neat explanation. Muhanna, who is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown and faculty in the Institute-housed Middle East Studies program, urges a more nuanced accounting of the assassination. Establishing responsibility for Hassan's death, he writes, is less important than understanding "Why he was killed at all, and why now."