We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems and crime’s adjudication as Justice must be seen to be done.

When I read that in Statement From the Family of Osama bin Laden, my irony meter broke. They owe me a new one.

I was out of town on May 1 (and all of last week), and have had only intermittent chances to catch up on all of the happenings, but do have some thoughts. There are only a few things that bother me at all, I think. The kind of celebration I saw Monday night/Tuesday morning made me a tad uncomfortable; I understand it, but the first thing I thought of was the media coverage of the reaction in some (not all) places in the middle east after 9/11. It wasn’t obvious that they were celebrating justice or reveling in revenge. That gives me pause. Labeling it as justice also has some issues. I don’t know what a better description would be, but the word implies that this was somehow tied in with the criminal justice system, with due process and rights. It wasn’t. This was a military action, and it was justified.

Terrorism is a strange mix of criminal activity and war. But one must not forget that it is still war in many of its actions. Bin Laden declared war on the US in 1998 and carried out overt acts, killing thousands, and not just in the US. The attribution of these deeds solely as criminal acts is, I think, naive and simplistic. This did not take place on US soil. The notion that the appropriate response to locating him, in foreign territory, would to be to serve an arrest warrant is ludicrous. Good men put their lives at risk in this operation, and would have been at greater risk if they had been under a restriction to capture but not kill, or with similar rules of engagement. Keep in mind that we had other options, like sending a missile or a GPS/laser-guided bomb. An enemy general in a war does not need to have a pistol in his hand at the time of action in order to justify bombing his headquarters. This, I think, is no different. This was a war of bin Laden’s choosing, and it is likely that the only way the ending could have been different would be if he had surrendered of his own accord. Which he had the option to do at pretty much any point.

Fred Clark at slacktivist has some excellent posts (its predecessor is linked within) on the reasoning behind the justification. There is a mention of the Nuremburg trials after WWII in a post by Glenn Greenwald, which I have not read. Those trials took place after the war was over, with prisoners who had been captured, many of whom were captured after hostilities had ceased. That’s an important distinction, I think. Prisoners are taken when they have made an overt act of surrender. Absent that, they are considered combatants, and don’t have to explicitly “go” for a weapon to be considered dangerous. I would not consider the risk trading even one more life for Osama bin Laden’s capture to have been acceptable. His killing was not arbitrary, nor was it the execution of a criminal sentence. It was part of the war that he declared, and unlike the slaughter of civilians he orchestrated, was justified.