Ted, it's not that we're not a nation of laws. Laws exist but what we're unable to put up with are the double standards of how the laws are applied. Again, I must bring up George Orwell's quote from the novel "Animal Farm":

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

Take this quote and go back and apply this to what you wrote and you'll start to see the picture better. The country isn't lawless. The issue is applying the laws equally to everyone and seeing to it that no one regardless of privilege is above the law.

Osama bin Laden proclaimed his responsibility for 9/11 as well as other deaths caused by similar bombings.
He had "declared war" on the USA.
He was a fugitive in hiding.
His criminal organization's SOP is suicide bombing. The people who hunted him down were inside a building bin Laden and his people had occupied for years that may have been rigged with explosives.
SOP with possible suicide bombers is to shoot to kill.

This opperation found the guy after almost a decade so I will give them credit for knowing more about the real situation they were facing than I or the author. Further I don't want them to release details that may screw up catching or killing more of these dangerous people.

As to justice if bin Laden had wanted his day in court he could have turned himself in. I don't care if it is justice so long as the guy is out of circulation.

Nemesis always awaits. Without a believable bogeyman the US would lose whatever standing it still has in the world, the dollar would cease to be the standard currency, and the economy would collapse entirely. Not that that's a bad thing...

What if the US Were a Nation of Laws? They'd likely be laws of repression as in Neve Gordon's article on Israel above. Right now we have the Bill of Rights which leaders have to at least pretend to be paying heed to.

If the U.S. actually obeyed and enforced the laws it has signed, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, and most other members of all their administrations would be in prison for life, convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in violation of U.S. laws, the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunals.

This will never happen, of course. So any wishful thinking about the U.S. as a nation of laws is just that - wishful thinking, not reality.

Empires such as the U.S. have always been brutal and lawless, obeying only those laws which were convenient for them to maintain their power and hegemony. That is how empires operate, in contrast to true democracies built and sustained on the rule of law.

USans who refuse to accept that we live in an imperial authoritarian corporatocracy are living in denial of reality as well as ignorance of history.

During the S&L crisis, over 1,000 people were convicted.

Now laundering drug money only results in a fine:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-07/wachovia-s-drug-habit.html
Wachovia's Drug Habit - Bloomberg.com

"...The bank didn’t react quickly enough to the prosecutors’ requests and failed to hire enough investigators, the U.S. Treasury Department said in March. After a 22-month investigation, the Justice Department on March 12 charged Wachovia with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to run an effective anti-money-laundering program.

Five days later, Wells Fargo promised in a Miami federal courtroom to revamp its detection systems. Wachovia’s new owner paid $160 million in fines and penalties, less than 2 percent of its $12.3 billion profit in 2009.

[snip]

‘No Capacity to Regulate’

Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.

Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.

The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.

“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught...”

Bin Laden was snuffed because he knew too much that the US Govt did not want made public. Period.

Rall has quite a nice cartoon here:

http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2011/05/11/

"In the U.S., conservatives and "liberals" agree: Might makes right. America's military-intelligence apparatus is so fearsome that it can deploy its soldiers and agents without fear of retribution."

This is a key point.

The trick is that they are Liberal Imperialists and Conservative Imperialists, but they are constantly discussed as if they were Liberal Democrats and Conservative Democrats.

The Blue ("Democratic") Party leadership is -generally- Liberal Imperialist, and the Red ("Republican") Party leadership is -generally- Conservative Imperialist.

When I first voted 13 years ago, it felt like most of the rank-and-file and voters of the Blue Party were still Liberal and Social Democrats. From a greater distance, it felt as though much of the rank-and-file of the Red Party were already Imperialist, but most of the voters were still Conservative Democrats.

Now it seems as though most Blue party members and voters are Liberal Imperialists and the few that aren't are called "Progressives". And that nearly all of the Reds are Imperialists, and some are even Theocrats and worse. The few Democrats left in that party are scattered and kinda paranoid.

It gets worse. The Corporatists - followers of Neoliberal Economic Theory, amongst other things- have thoroughly infiltrated both Imperialist Parties and the Mass Culture in recent times, confusing things even further!

But even with the Corporatists, there are still really two Divides in the U.S. today.

First, the False Divide of "Liberal" and "Conservative".

Second, the True Divide of "Imperialist" and "Democrat".

Mr. Rall -I gather from book reviews- advocates Violent Revolution to solve our problems. I'm for trying -not talking about, actually trying- Peaceful, Legal Revolution first.

Constitutional Convention Now.

please ;)

-matti.

It's too dreary and depressing a subject to research, but I often wonder about the legal profession in Germany during the ascension and domination of the Third Reich.

I vaguely know that Nazi Germany was by no means a "lawless" state, and that perforce government ministries, legislators, courts, and lawyers marshalled considerable rationality and intellectual resources to pass, enforce, and adjudicate carefully worked out laws, regulations, policies, and procedures.

As stated, I don't have the will or determination to pursue the question. But I'm tantalized by it because I'm sure that the reality of that time and place increasingly resembles the status quo in the present Amerikan Imperium.

It occurs to me that each nominally distinct and independent branch of the Amerikan federal government, from the Oval Office Throne to the para-corporate service delivery system called Congress and the Supreme Court bench, has become overwhelmingly populated by once and future corporate lawyers.

And that by and large, these political and judicial "corporate lawyers" personify the pejorative stereotype of the "corporate lawyer"-- the glorified shyster who carefully chooses words and finesses principle and ethics with fancy footwork and devious end-runs to accomplish their nefarious ends.

These are high-minded professionals, duty-bound to responsibly serve their clients, of course-- but in a government of the overclass, by the overclass, and for the overclass, "self-serving" and "client-serving" becomes a distinction without a difference.

It seems to me that it's no accident that maladministrations lousy with corporate lawyers craft reprehensibly blood-soaked policies and practices that ostensibly conform to the letter of the law, and with applications and consequences that are officially defended as "legitimate" and "clean"-- and whose rationalizations readily appease and satisfy their own kind.

This circumstance obviously transcends political ideology and party-- as we have seen, in crucial areas like "national security", a Holder or Koh readily builds upon the work of seemingly-discredited former Executive Branch consigliari like John Yoo and David Addington.

It's "a nation of laws", all right-- with the political authorities weaving a self-sealing, self-confirming, self-stoking helix: lawyers deferring to other lawyers.

Like the supposedly virtuous DA and staff in "Law and Order" scheming to connect the dots in any way that can plausibly convict the accused (with the common advantage of always "knowing" in advance who's guilty), the lawyers are tasked to create legal rationales to justify the ends.

And the executives in turn are immunized by claims that everything that is done is meticulously vetted and approved by the lawyers. It's all strictly legit! Good enough for government work!

It's like a tag-team marathon on a circular track-- and the Constitution is NOT the baton. The corporate media and professional commentariat are happy to go along for the ride, notwithstanding a marginal Jonathan Turley or Glenn Greenwald or two.

I find it perfectly possible that government spokespersons, from the Unitary Executive on down, are so boggled by a common, pervasive corporate-lawyer groupthink that they sincerely believe that they remain ethical, responsible, high-minded officials.

My intuitive guess is that this is exactly how it was in Germany and Nazi-dominated Europe in the heyday of the Third Reich. Only when it all comes crashing down does the legal profession awake, like Doctor Jekyll in the bright morning, and take horrorstruck notice of the blood mysteriously and inexplicably staining its hands, clothing, and bedsheets.

With luck, though, the new and improved Amerikan Imperium will be that thousand-year Reich that never comes crashing down. There's a first time for everything! And the experts and lawyers will go on and on, crafting exquisitely subtle and sophisticated shades of law and "due process" like a gleaming, sculptured sepulcher of whitest marble in which no end of putrescent offal and corruption is hermetically sealed.

Thus honor is saved.

"Imagine if the killing had gone down the same exact way, but under Bush." That's a good rule of thumb for all of us:

What if Bush Did It?

It also is the reason Obama is MORE dangerous than Bush: because so many who would have opposed Bush, or McCain, will make excuses for Obama, just because he's a Democrat, makes pretty speeches, and is the First Black President.

And ultimately, it's a perfect example of the trap the 2-party "system" lays for us.

www.gp.org

It is good to hear some truth spoken after the President has stated on 60 Minutes that such people who would question the killing of Bin Laden need to have their heads examined. Basically calling anyone skeptical of the World Trade Center bombing and the rest of revenge seeking policy that followed as Screwballs! This statement by the President was very revealing and insulting as it pretty much declares capitulation to US war policy or you will be classified as insane! We are in Orwell Land and Brave New World simultaniously. The Matrix is operating. And the Daily Joe has not a clue....

Although I thought GWB to be a "dim bulb" when it came to understanding complex principles, Obama's bulb done burned out. Justice????? The targeted political assasination of whoever was killed (we'll never know that either) was the antithesis of justice. You'd think a smart man like Obama would know that.
You'd also think he'd know that (God forbid) what goes around comes around.

"Liberals would be appalled if this had happened four years ago. They would have protested Bush's violations of international law and basic human rights."

Come on Ted. Why not pick on the conservative perps instead? Are you trying to appear bipartisan?

Alice Miller, the controversial (but right-on psychologist) who passed away in 2010, in the book "The Body Never Lies" explains how our propensity towards violence remains as our main solution to violence done to us. And, oddly enough, it has to do with the universal (even Islamic) belief that we should "honor thy father and mother" even though they neglected you or horribly sexually abused you:
"Religious education teaches us to forgive our tormentors. Should we really forgive them? Is it in fact possible to do so?
"It is understandable that we want to forgive and forget and not to feel the pain, but this outcome doesn't work. It turns out sooner or later that this is not an outcome at all. Take the many sexual abusers among the people of the Church. They have forgiven their parents for sexual abuse or other abuses of their power. But what are many of them doing? They are repeating the "sins" of their parents BECAUSE they have forgiven them. If they could consciously condemn the deeds of their parents they wouldn't be urged to do the same, to molest and to confuse children by forcing them to stay silent - as if this was the most normal thing to do and not a crime. They just deceive themselves. Religions can have an enormous power over our minds and force us to many kinds of self-deception. But they have not the slightest influence on our body, which knows perfectly well our true emotions and insists on respecting them.
"Is compassion for Milosevic or Saddam Hussein acceptable?
"I have always had compassion for children but never for an adult tyrant. Here, I have sometimes been misunderstood, especially when I described the childhood of Adolf Hitler. Some readers didn't understand that I could feel compassion for the infant but never for the adult Hitler, who became a monster exactly because he denied how he suffered from being severely humiliated by his father (who by the way was an illegal child of a Jew). (See "For Your Own Good"). As a child Adolf Hitler was of course unable to defend his dignity but he also remained submissive in adulthood. He feared and honored his father his whole life, suffered from attacks of panic at night, and his immense hatred was directed at all Jews and half-Jews.
"The fiercest adorers of their parents are those who were the most emotionally deprived by them. There is a very cruel mechanism at work here and it produces a very pessimistic vision of life. Is there hope for the badly wounded?
"I don't think that my view is pessimistic. On the contrary, I think that if we can understand how the cycle of violence functions we can share our knowledge with others and cooperate in putting a stop to it. But if we believe that people are born with genes that make them violent, we can't change anything. Although this opinion is highly pessimistic and feeble-minded, many so-called intelligent individuals share it. I have never got an answer to my question why so many "genetically" defective persons should have been born under the rule of Hitler in Germany or of Milosevic in Serbia. The reasons for these misleading ideas are always the same: people prefer to believe in genes than to see how their parents treated them and to feel the pain. But by feeling the pain they could liberate themselves from the compulsion to repeat and thus become responsible adults. This statement is by no means pessimistic."

I continue to ask: is OBL dead?

No body, only an assertion by the government that OBL has been killed.

Of course, the narrative of OBL's death makes money for all those who accept the story.

I guess people aren't tired enough of the never ending disinformation, lies, and prevarication, yet.

What if bin Laden was in cahoots with the Bush cartel?
What if Saddam Hussein used to do business with the u.s. military?
What if Noriega used to buy and sell cocaine with the cia?

"At some point a sovereign state [such as Pakistan] that's harboring an international fugitive loses the right to assert sovereignty," added Robert Van Lierop."

Does this mean Bush is fair game?

" I'm angry that, without a trial or a real investigation, we will never know whether he was guilty of 9/11—or, if he was, who else was involved."

We can always waterboard Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld et al?

"What if the US Were a Nation of Laws?"

It is, but these laws only apply to people, not the government. To question that is unpatriotic, don't you know.

the US - a nation of flaws.

Bin laden got the Mussolini treatment. How sad.