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gwern comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong
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'a government'? Yeah, it doesn't because it's not a comprehensive list. If you want lists, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_and_assassination_attempts or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_people#Assassinations_in_Europe or heck, for anything to do with Hitler like the Nazi assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, look in Google Books pre-1940.
If you're going to be mind-killed yourself, Vlad, posting endless nitpicking comments here trying to rebut anything anyone says, you should at least be more precise in your demands, because it is trivial to find attempts, even despite all secrecy and faded memories.
(And I believe the mutual wars of assassination between the British and the Irish, eg. Tomás Mac Curtain, have already been pointed out to you, which would have been well-known to any educated person living through the troubles; feel free to dig through Google Books looking for even more assassinations.)
I am disputing your very central claim, so even if I am wrong, I don't see how this can possibly constitute "nitpicking." If it was in fact reasonable in 1939 to consider the possibility of a British plot to assassinate Hitler as wildly implausible, your original points don't stand at all.
And indeed, I do believe that government-orchestrated assassination plots against a head of a foreign state were indeed considered a wholly separate category of wrongdoing back then, and one that was a particular taboo. You just can't put other sorts of assassinations in the same reference class.
If you insist that things like the assassinations during the sectarian struggles in Ireland fall into the same reference class, then the inferential distances may really be too large for us to have a productive discussion here. But still note that you won't find any examples of the particular sort I asked for. (Except arguably for the killing of Dollfuss, something that it actually took the Nazis to do.)
I think that the examples you cited didn't support your claim for the same reasons Vladmir_M gave.
I specifically asked if you had other examples in mind, rather than if they existed, to avoid making a claim that could be refuted by some one of the endless historical facts unknown to me. Your claim was far too strong if you didn't have specific examples in mind, regardless of their existence.
The cases of assassination all seem distinguishable, for example, the premise of the Anglo-Irish war was that Britain did not consider Ireland an independent nation, the assassination of Dollfuss weakens Vladimir_M's claim about the inconceivability of assassination without damaging it overmuch, as it was Nazis who did it, etc.