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The Targeted Assassination of Osama Bin Laden
When he announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by a Navy Seal team in Pakistan, President Barack Obama said, “Justice has been done.” Mr. Obama misused the word, "justice" when he made that statement. He should have said, "Retaliation has been accomplished." A former professor of constitutional law should know the difference between those two concepts. The word "justice" implies an act of applying or upholding the law.
Targeted assassinations violate well-established principles of international law. Also called political assassinations, they are extrajudicial executions. These are unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework.
Extrajudicial executions are unlawful, even in armed conflict. In a 1998 report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions noted that “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” The U.N. General Assembly and Human Rights Commission, as well as Amnesty International, have all condemned extrajudicial executions.
In spite of its illegality, the Obama administration frequently uses targeted assassinations to accomplish its goals. Five days after executing Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama tried to bring “justice” to U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who has not been charged with any crime in the United States. The unmanned drone attack in Yemen missed al-Awlaki and killed two people “believed to be al Qaeda militants,” according to a CBS/AP bulletin.
Two days before the Yemen attack, U.S. drones killed 15 people in Pakistan and wounded four. Since the March 17 drone attack that killed 44 people, also in Pakistan, there have been four drone strikes. In 2010, American drones carried out 111 strikes. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that 957 civilians were killed in 2010.
The United States disavowed the use of extrajudicial killings under President Gerald Ford. After the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed in 1975 that the CIA had been involved in several murders or attempted murders of foreign leaders, President Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. Every succeeding president until George W. Bush renewed that order. However, the Clinton administration targeted Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but narrowly missed him.
In July 2001, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel denounced Israel’s policy of targeted killings, or “preemptive operations.” He said “the United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations. They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”
Yet after September 11, 2001, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer invited the killing of Saddam Hussein: “The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less” than the cost of war. Shortly thereafter, Bush issued a secret directive, which authorized the CIA to target suspected terrorists for assassination when it would be impractical to capture them and when large-scale civilian casualties could be avoided.
In November 2002, Bush reportedly authorized the CIA to assassinate a suspected Al Qaeda leader in Yemen. He and five traveling companions were killed in the hit, which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz described as a “very successful tactical operation.”
After the Holocaust, Winston Churchill wanted to execute the Nazi leaders without trials. But the U.S. government opposed the extrajudicial executions of Nazi officials who had committed genocide against millions of people. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who served as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, told President Harry Truman: “We could execute or otherwise punish [the Nazi leaders] without a hearing. But undiscriminating executions or punishments without definite findings of guilt, fairly arrived at, would … not set easily on the American conscience or be remembered by children with pride.”
Osama bin Laden and the “suspected militants” targeted in drone attacks should have been arrested and tried in U.S. courts or an international tribunal. Obama cannot serve as judge, jury and executioner. These assassinations are not only illegal; they create a dangerous precedent, which could be used to justify the targeted killings of U.S. leaders.
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Show AllAt least the columnist and commenters here are not swooning over Obama's macho act, like so many are at Common Dreams and other sites. So that's a plus.
I even notice there is more critical perspective of this grotesque charade bubbling up through the intertubes than in the first few days of manufactured euphoria about the de facto assassination of the world's "No 1" terrist.
Concerning the debate over the "legality" of assassinations, it's an embarrassing spectacle that we even dignify this discussion. Flawed as it was, Nuremberg was a foundational achievement in international law. Now we have this posturing fool in the white house, coasting on the goodwill of voters who are paralyzed by fear of republican candidates, and the remnants of delusional "diversity" queens.
We are not the men our fathers were.
Looking from a distance, this seems just another building block in a decade-long campaign to desensitize the rubes, and the rest of us, to a totalitarian regime that paws through your children's underwear, your email, your financial, employment and medical records, and blows up faceless millions in the provinces on your dime, while stripping the citizenry of their last penny.
The god damn thing is in overdrive and we're not even in first gear. Get ready for $10 a gallon gas and milk, foreclosure/eviction treadmills and debtors prisons.
BE CAREFUL...
Be careful what you say...think. We are not permitted free expression.
We cannot criticize a foreign country (eg Israel). We cannot criticize
the US (in my case my "own" country).
email: peterloeb@yahoo.com
Marjorie Cohn is so far down the Bush-Cheney-Obama rabbit hole she can't see daylight. OBL died in mid December 2001--this whole "we killed Osama" hoax is just amateur kabuki theater to enable the next phase of the police-state, martial-law, false-flag-terror program. Get ready for a "terror attack" in a city near you.
Bartender: Gimme an OBL...'Two shots and a splash of water'.
"...they create a dangerous precedent, which could be used to justify the targeted killings of U.S. leaders."
And, for all the persiflage about the Nuremburg trials, that's what you're *really* worried about!
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History repeats itself,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,We are the declining American Empire.
If you want to change the dialog presented by the government, you have to change the frame within.
The writer has bought the assertion that OBL has been killed recently by the US government. All the responders have plead like this is fact.
But, this admits that the government is credible in its assertions.
No one except the asserters make any claim to have murdered OBL. But, there is no proof.
I would have liked to see the body, had independent news organizations confirm the claim, and have independent scientific evidence that OBL is dead as asserted.
To debate the government case without independent proof is foolish and self defeating.
The worst-case scenario would be that what we have been witnessing since the Industrial Revolution began (roughly since the American Revolution succeeded) is the progressive devolution of a uniquely cognitive species.
After humans developed language and empirical science following a mere 200,000 years of evolution they began to be undone because their brains' more primitive emotional centers had retained enough control of its more rational cognitive centers to allow those with a talent for social control (political & religious leaders) to determine HOW scientific achievements should be employed- and thus to force "culture" into a path controlled by greed, fear, and uncertainty.
Can anyone come up with a better explanation of our very talented species' current array of existential problems?
Thus does a rapidly warming planet continue to orbit its sun, even as the climate change humans are still much too distracted to acknowledge produces a series of dislocations that, in the aggregate, have the power to compromise the human economy beyond the species' capacity to tolerate.
There is still an (unlikely) possibility the species may be saved from itself: enough survivors would have to understand just HOW they screwed up and retain enough technology to correct the original errors and then be able to AGREE on just how to try again.
That seems like a long shot from here... we already know there are other, more adaptable life forms (bacteria and insects for example) able to take our place.
I, for one, will not second guess the Navy Seals and/or Special Operation personnel who were on the scene during the bin Laden affair. I was not there, not were the other commentators criticizing the way this operation ws conducted. Until we face what they faced, we should keep quiet.
The motive for the illegal May ! attack: P R for a floundering president.
The motive for dumping a body into the sea alleged to be Osama bin Laden: Defense of a LIE.