Mostly I just want to point out Professor Noam Chomsky’s excellent use of the word “uncontroversially” below.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
To be sure, a glance at http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ is sobering, but I don’t think that word means what Dr. Chomsky wants it to mean. ;p
Anyway, I don’t have very much to say vis-à-vis the legality of bin Laden’s assassination except to say that while we all know that assassination isn’t any kind of policy tool and if I were in charge of the US budget I probably wouldn’t have spent as many millions of taxpayer dollars on his head as we have, I’m having profound difficulty conjuring much sympathy for bin Laden’s fate. I’m cheered that people are willing to ask the tough questions about due process and international law because I think they’re important principles, but — and this is my American speaking — in this instance, I really just don’t care. I certainly don’t think bin Laden’s assassination was unjust or, well, surprising, and the relatively muted outcry seems to suggest it wasn’t exactly incompatible with American foreign policy goals.
(Source: guernicamag.com)
