ALL ABOUT BIN LADEN (3 of 6): IT WAS AN ASSASSINATION

From Firedoglake:

Narrative on Bin Laden Raid Collapses

Two things become clear. One, the SEALs were well-trained and had the element of surprise, and this overmatched their foes, who were not plentiful – there was not a phalanx of bodyguards protecting the Al Qaeda leader. Two, this was obviously a kill mission. There was no hesitation in the commando’s movements or actions. There were weapons in the room where bin Laden was found, and the SEALs claim that he reached for them, but he was unarmed and brought down quickly. About the only resistance they found was a brick wall blocking a door, which they had to blast out. These are the elite of the elite as far as assassination squads go, and they made it look easy.

Now, I’ve seen two schools of thought on this. One questions the legality of shooting unarmed enemy belligerents in a sovereign country against which we are not at war. I maintain that Pakistan, if not inviting us in, at least turned their back while we entered. And in the past, Pakistani leaders like former President Pervez Musharraf made handshake deals with the United States to allow special ops forces inside Pakistan to target Al Qaeda leaders. As for the rest, under the AUMF and perhaps the laws of war, it’s plausible that the man who directed the 9-11 attacks was considered a legitimate military target. It’s likely that there was a Presidential finding allowing for a raid like this. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was ranking member on the Intelligence Committee before becoming Democratic leader, said to me on a conference call yesterday that she was briefed on the intelligence that bin Laden was in Pakistan “at the end of last year,” but added that the Administration was clear that, if they had actionable intelligence, they would act. “This was public knowledge,” she said. This suggests that an additional Presidential finding was not needed, because of some executive order dating back to the Bush Administration authorizing missions to capture or kill terrorists.

More here.

And from the AP via the Houston Chronicle, back in March of 2010:

Holder: Osama bin Laden will never face U.S. trial

Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Tuesday that Osama bin Laden will never face trial in the United States because he will not be captured alive.

In testy exchanges with House Republicans, the attorney general compared bin Laden to mass murderer Charles Manson and predicted that events would ensure “we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden” not to the al-Qaida leader as a captive.

Holder sternly rejected criticism from GOP members of a House Appropriations subcommittee, who contend it is too dangerous to put terror suspects on trial in federal civilian courts as Holder has proposed.

More here.

What miffs me is that we could have captured him and brought him to trial.

Yeah yeah, I am, indeed, glad he's dead, but I'm not at all happy about the way it happened. That is, we had him. There was very little resistance. He wouldn't have gotten away. He would have never plotted another terrorist attack ever again. We could have put him in cuffs, placed him on one of those stealth helicopters, brought him back to New York City, and put the fucker on trial for crimes against humanity, which is what you do with criminals of his ilk.

Instead, we just shot him dead. And the Obama administration had been planning on doing just that for at least a year; apparently, there were never any plans at all for actually bringing him to justice. It was always about killing him in cold blood. How are we any better than he is?

That's a serious question, and it gets to the heart of what is so fucked up about the entire "War on Terror" endeavor. That is, the United States, in its quixotic and endless quest to get the terrorists has compromised its own stated values so many times that it is easy to wonder if such values are actually our own anymore. Since 9/11 we have joined Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, the Spanish Inquisition, and numerous other equally vile regimes as a nation that tortures its prisoners. We have oppressed countless Muslims for nothing more than belonging to the same religion as bin Laden. We have seen our precious civil rights, which are deeply embedded in our cultural identity, deeply eroded as we have lived out Benjamin Franklin's famous and dark maxim that "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." We have waged aggressive war, which was named at Nuremberg as the worst of crimes against humanity because all other such crimes can only happen during aggressive war. We have bombed civilians. We have used chemical weapons such as white phosphorus.

Gunning down bin Laden, instead of capturing him, which we could have easily done, is simply the cherry on top, a new symbol signifying our rapid descent into barbarity. And, as far as the many arguments that a trial would have been too difficult, that it would have given him a platform to spew his vile rhetoric, that it would have invited further terrorist attacks, and so on, I have nothing but disdain. Justice, real justice, isn't easy. But it does prove that we are a civilized people. A trial for bin Laden would have done nothing short of proving to the world that our way of life is superior to his dark, fundamentalist, and backward vision for humanity's existence.

But no. We simply killed him. Just like he killed so many others. I ask again, how are we any better than Osama bin Laden?

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