Was the killing of bin Laden an act of justice?
He was shot twice in the head.
To date, no photos of his body have been released as they are deemed by the administration to be too gruesome to be made public.
On Wednesday, President Obama decided that none would be issued.
You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football, he said. The administration is worried that graphic pictures could further incite violence against Americans.
Yet, could bin Laden have been captured instead of killed?
Initially, the Obama Administration clearly indicated that the answer was no.
He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered, John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism adviser, told the press on Monday.
In addition, he unequivocally indicated that bin Laden was obviously a coward who preferred expensive mansions to Spartan caves:
Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.
It seems however, that Mr. Brennan spoke too hastily…
The very next day, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, contradicted this version of events.
In the room with bin Laden, a woman-bin Laden’s wife-rushed the US assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed, he said.
Osama bin Laden did not have a weapon nor did he hide behind a human shield when he was shot and killed by Navy Seals.
He did resist however. The resistance was throughout, as I said, the spokesman indicated.
What was the nature of bin Laden’s resistance, since he had no weapon?
Resistance does not require a firearm, Mr. Carney insisted, but he declined to elaborate.
If bin Laden was killed in the circumstances described by Mr. Carney, then should he not have been captured and brought to justice instead?
Indeed, as The Guardian columnist Gary Younge put it, this was not justice, it was an extra-judicial killing. If you shoot a man twice in the head, you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.
That many Americans felt avenged by the killing of bin Laden by US forces was obvious and perfectly understandable given the heinous nature of the crimes committed on 9/11.
As such, shortly after President Obama announced the news, many spontaneously took to the streets of New York and Washington D.C., and chanted USA, USA…
Yet, democracies, by their very nature, are committed to the rule of law.
Professor Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, told The Guardian that the killing of bin Laden did resemble an extrajudicial killing without due process of the law. It may not have been possible to take him alive, but no one should be outside the protection of the law.
Indeed, laws are surely designed to protect the weak and innocent, but everyone else as well, in a civilized society. As Mr. Grief indicated, even the Nazis were given trials at Nuremberg, after World War II.
Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves, they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice, Michael Mansfield, a leading British defense lawyer, told the paper.
Hongju Koh, a State Department legal advisor, did not share this view.
But a state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force, he said.
John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the Sate Department during the preceding administration, concurred. The assassination prohibition also does not apply to killings in self-defense. The executive branch will also argue that the action was permissible under international law both as a permissible use of force in the US armed conflict with al-Qaeda and as a legitimate action in self-defense, given that bin Laden was clearly planning additional attacks, he told The Guardian.
In any case, after 9/11, the Bush Administration decided to pursue what it branded the war on terror through military means, and military means only.
Afghanistan was invaded shortly after 9/11 in order to punish the Taliban government for harboring bin Laden and al-Qaeda, then Iraq, on the specious grounds that it posed an imminent threat to world peace. Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Bush/Cheney narrative, which he would then give to terrorist organizations bent on attacking the US.
In essence, MM. Bush and Cheney transformed al-Qaeda into an existential threat, which had to be annihilated, whatever the cost.
Hence, the US sought to eradicate the terrorists on their own turf, the logic in vogue at the time being that it was preferable to fight them there than here.
The Bush/Cheney administration devised a national security strategy that also militarized the US judicial system.
Guantanamo was transformed into an extra territorial prison for enemy combatants (that only the President had the power to designate as such) who would thus remain beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions.
Military commissions were set up to try these enemy combatants at Guantanamo, characterized by a drastic curtailment of the rights of the defendant. Detainees could aslo be held indefinitely without trial...
The CIA developed its own network of secret prisons, beyond the reach of the ICRC, where high value targets, ghost detainees, could be robustly interrogated, and tortured if need be.
Evidence obtained in such conditions would be admissible in a military commission.
In an age where terrorists could strike any time, anywhere, information needed to be obtained quickly, by whatever means necessary…
Warrantless wiretapping was secretly authorized by the Bush Administration to ensure the intelligence agencies could expeditiously detect any new potential threat to the homeland…
Fear of a second devastating attack was so pervasive in post-9/11 America that these measures hardly encountered any opposition at all (outside of the lefwing and libertarian blogosphere)…
Hence, the preservation of civil and constitutional rights was no longer a priority but subservient to the demands of national security.
Shielding the homeland from a new 9/11, whatever the cost, even if that meant we have to work the dark side, as Vice President Cheney put it five days after 9/11, had become the obsession of the Bush/Cheney White House.
In such a context, the rule of law, the necessity of respecting international law, was an anachronistic hindrance, a weakness that America’s enemies would surely capitalize on.
Yet, how many people have died, needlessly died, to avenge the 9/11 tragedy, and ensure that America is not attacked again?
In Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, over 100,000 civilians have been killed since 2003.
The Lancet study estimated that during the 2003-2006 period, 650,000 died.
In Afghanistan, another 10,000 civilians have lost their lives.
In both countries, the casualties keep mounting…
Was the Bush/Cheney militaristic approach, largely co-opted , alas, by Obama, the wisest and most efficient one in order to honor those who died on 9/11 and seek justice for the unconscionable crimes committed on that day?
Does the shedding of so much blood, so much innocent blood, constitute a fitting tribute to the victims of 9/11?
The Islamic extremists skillfully exploited this brutal, belligerent approach responsible for so many victims.
By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless?
By what school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water? Therefore, it is [only] just to respond in kind, and the one who started it is more to blame, bin Laden wrote in April 2004.
The extremists are adept at taking advantage of America’s prowess to further their own agenda.
Each civilian casualty at the hands of US forces is a propaganda victory offered to its enemies, who can then exploit it as a recruiting tool.
It is precisely that American capacity, propensity to destroy and kill that bin Laden hoped to harness by attacking the US on 9/11
He knew what the American response would invariably be: to lash out militarily against the ummah (the Muslim world), a senior al-Qaeda operative, Saif al-Adl said.
The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap, he added.
Indeed, two days before 9/11 bin Laden engineered the assassination of the most prestigious and powerful foe of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance, in anticipation of the upcoming invasion of the country…
The Afghan mujahidin had succeeded in defeating the Soviet empire after ten years of war, which eventually led to its collapse.
Such was bin Laden’s interpretation of the Soviet withdrawal and downfall.
If the mighty Soviet empire could be defeated, then there was no reason to believe that the US would not suffer a similar fate on Afghan soil. The strategy that had been so successful once only needed to be replicated. Bin laden defined it thus: employ guerilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.
His objective was, therefore, clear: continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, he said in 2004.
The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush, he gleefully concluded in 2007.
The paradox here is that bin Laden’s central objective was to drive out all US troops from the Muslim world, and then reestablish the Caliphate. Yet, he considered that only a massive influx of US troops to the region could ultimately bring this about…
Bin Laden believed that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Holy Land, Mecca being the birthplace of the Prophet, and Medina the place where he first established an Islamic state, was sacrilegious. But that was not his only grievance.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples, he wrote in his Fatwa Urging jihad Against America, in February 1998..
The US presence was thus not only sacrilegious, but also posed a threat to the region’s valuable resources and independence.
The fact they had been invited there by the Saudi royal family after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 was particularly humiliating, for he had proposed his services to the Saudi leadership: he would lead an army of mujahidin to confront Saddam Hussein…The Saudi leadership ignored his offer, preferring American assistance instead.
Secondly, bin Laden resented America’s policy towards Iraq, where the UN embargo, spearheaded by the US, was progressively strangling the country.
Iraq holds a special status for Muslims, for it was the seat of the Caliphate for some five hundred years.
Thirdly, the US’s indiscriminate and unflagging support for Israel, which was occupying the third holiest Muslim sanctuary, Jerusalem, was unacceptable.
He decreed these policies to be a clear declaration of war on God.
As such, he issued the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill Americans and their allies-civilian and military- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
Hence, and contrary to what is often stated, bin Laden did not target the US because he hates our freedom and is jealous of our way of life.
He did so because of its policies and their effects on Muslims…
After all, other democracies such as Switzerland or New Zealand share America’s values and way of life, yet have never been attacked by al-Qaeda…
They have no troops in Muslim lands and therefore have never harmed the local populations.
It must be made clear however, that nothing and certainly not US foreign policy, no matter what we may think of it, can ever justify mass terrorist attacks againstg civilians…
Nevertheless, It is important to place al-Qaeda’s agenda in its relevant political context.
Has bin Laden’s strategy succeeded, and is the American empire wobbling?
According to Nobel recipient, Joseph Stiglitz, the Iraq War will eventually cost the nation over $3 trillion and the conflict in Afghanistan slightly less
Homeland Security, a direct legacy of 9/11, has probably cost another trillion since September 2001.
The rise in oil prices also should be noted, as well as the economic slowdown that followed the attacks.
The US debt now stands at $14.3 trillion (compared to $9.8 in 2000), and the debt ceiling will have to be raised soon, otherwise the US will have to default in early August 2011.
Bin Laden did not fully succeed, yet neither did he utterly fail…
At this stage, it seems obvious that, ten years on, the US can no longer afford to sustain several major military conflicts simultaneously and for a long duration.
That phenomenon was precipitated by the al-Qaeda strategy, and Washington‘s reckless reaction to it…
US troops have not been driven form Muslim lands however, and al-Qaeda no longer has its charismatic leader to pursue its delirious agenda…
To return to our question posed earlier, could the Navy Seals have captured bin Laden?
It is difficult to say.
But this is a guy who’s extremely dangerous. If he’s nodding at someone in the hall, or rushing to the bookcase or you think he’s wearing a suicide vest, you’re on solid ground to kill him, suggested John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the State Department during the Bush Administration.
According to new details on the raid issued on Wednesday, bin Laden did have an AK47 and a Makarov pistol in the vicinity when the Seals entered the room
Yet, would the Obama Administration really have relished the prospect of trying bin Laden?
Probably not, if the administration’s handling of the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial is any indication…
As such, it seems evident that the founder of al-Qaeda would not have been tried in a civil court, but before a military commission in Guantanamo where he no doubt would have been held…
Criticism from within some circles in the US and from abroad would have been withering and thus unpleasant.
Yet, a fair and public trial given to bin Laden would have offered a powerful display of democracy and justice at work.
It would have demonstrated to the world what the rule of law signifies, and that even the most evil of men is treated in a civilized way, his fundamental rights as a human being (albeit, that he may not deserve) protected.
That our values are universal, that they apply to all and not only to some (the chosen few to which we belong) and that even our enemies are treated in accordance with them, a civil trial of bin Laden would have made obvious to all, including America’s enemies…
This will never happen, but, alas, the US is no longer equipped to hold such a trial, its judicial system having been grievously undermined by the Bush/Cheney and now Obama national security agenda.
If the war on terror had not so completely eroded the US judicial authority it is wholly plausible to conceive that bin Laden could have been tried exactly the same way as Sheikh Omar, mused Robert Lambert in The Guardian.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, was arrested in 1993 and convicted of seditious conspiracy in Federal District Court in Manhattan, after issuing a fatwa encouraging militants to bomb targets in New York City.
Is the war on terror over now that bin Laden is dead?
It must be.
The militaristic strategy recklessly followed these last ten years has engendered much too much death and destruction.
Why stay in Afghanistan now that the central objective there has been achieved, the eradication of al-Qaeda and the death of its founder and leader?
What, precisely, is the US currently accomplishing in Iraq?
War has never been the most efficient method to promote peace, progress and prosperity.
What are we waiting for to propose such an agenda?
Through arms sales and giveaways, its military presence and its propensity for intervention, the US has for decades underwritten and encouraged violence as the main stay of Middle East politics. Washington has talked peace while promoting war, Andrew Bacevich wrote in The LAT.
It is high time to pursue different policies and the Arab Spring offers us an opportunity to do so.
The revolt of the people across the Middle East clearly shows that they yearn for peace, progress, prosperity, and the opportunity to choose their own leaders…
Let us help them do just that, but not by resorting to Apache helicopters and the 82nd Airborne.
It is time to talk peace, but promote it as well…
(the photograph above is by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire