Article first published on Blogcritics.
***
Before I begin, let me say that I have some mixed feelings on how the Osama bin Laden case was handled. In one sense, as I will state again later, I’m glad we finally got him. On the other hand, I think his execution elevates him in the eyes of some and skirts a judicial system that is all ready in place to try individuals accused of crimes against humanity. I explain further here.
I wasn’t planning on chiming in on the bin Laden case in the first place, since it’s been covered ad nauseam in the media following his demise, but that was before I read that Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendelhall had opined on the matter. While many NFL players were quite positive about the military finally getting bin Laden and laudatory of our men and women in uniform, Mendelhall had some rather brash things to say about Sept. 11 and bin Laden’s death.
Speaking from his Twitter account, here are a couple of his posts:
What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…
and
@dkeller23 We’ll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.
In these comments, Mendenhall appears to be referencing certain conspiracy theories that claim the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were enacted by our own government, that the World Trade Center buildings were imploded artificially and that the whole thing was a farce. I will not speak on the absurd notion that the Sept. 11 attacks might have been executed by our own government as an excuse to invade Iraq. I will concede that George W. Bush was exceedingly incompetent as a leader and probably led us into a war with Iraq on false pretenses, but even I can’t indict Bush for orchestrating a massive plot to raze the World Trade Center, sacrificing 3,000 Americans as an excuse to invade Baghdad.
I agree with Mendenhall that celebrating death, any death, is cause for pause, but I don’t share his religious misgivings about judging bin Laden or his crackpot suggestion that bin Laden might not have been behind 9/11. We know that he and his organization were behind the Sept. 11 attacks. This isn’t in dispute because he admitted it in 2004, lest Mendenhall or anyone else forgets. As bin Laden said at the time:
We decided to destroy towers in America. God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind.
But celebrating bin Laden’s death is misguided for a different reason: as hinted at earlier, I’m not convinced that we should have killed the man in the first place or at least not without a trial. First, his death may incite future attacks, possibly more so than would have his capture and trial, and second, because we actually did him a favor by cutting his life short or at least based on his religious worldview and the worldview of his followers. By killing him, we essentially raised bin Laden to martyr status in the eyes of fringe Muslims and members of al-Queda.
According to this report from The Atlantic, the official story about what happened in the minutes leading up to bin Laden’s death was either misleading or an outright untruth. The original story was that bin Laden was killed amid a firefight, which implies that he was armed and putting members of a U.S. operatives group in harm’s way, thus leading American forces to fire on him. We now know, however, that bin Laden was unarmed when SEALs personnel shot him in the head and chest. As The Atlantic story says:
A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.
The public stance from the White House, however, is that the ops group would have taken him alive if they had the opportunity. It seems to me if he was unarmed, the SEALs would have had that opportunity, whether bin Laden was belligerent with them or not. The Atlantic article also implies that if the U.S. had captured bin Laden alive, an ensuing trial would have been a bureacratic and diplomatic boondoggle:
Capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges. …
A bin Laden trial, even before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, would have attracted enormous media attention, potentially giving the terror mastermind a high-profile platform for spreading his extremist views, and also could have inspired more terrorist attacks.
Boondoggle or not, the Obama administration is beginning to look more and more like the cavalier, let’s-go-get-’em outfit that presided over the last administration or, perhaps, even more so, since the Bush administration at least captured some suspected terrorists and informants, rather than cutting a fiery path of “justice” across the Middle East. The American ethos, of course, favors the approach that we took, which is to go after bin Laden with the intention of killing him. I won’t go so far as to say Obama purposefully took that course of action to help his election chances in 2012 (because he knows most Americans wanted bin Laden dead), but no other president can claim to have killed the mastermind behind the deadliest act of terror ever exacted against the United States. So, I think it will certainly play a significant role in his reelection chances.
Whether or not killing him was legal not (related article), refusing to try him like any other criminal presents other ethical problems. Michael Moore made a cogent point this week on Piers Morgan Tonight. He said that even high-ranking Nazi officials, who were at least partially, indirectly or directly, responsible for the murder of millions of Jews, received a trial and were not just executed firing-line style.
Or, in Moore’s words:
I just feel … we’ve lost something of our soul here in this country. And maybe I’m just an old-school American who believes in our American judicial system, something that separates us from other parts, other countries, where we say everybody has their day in court no matter how bad of a person, no matter what piece of scum they are. They have a right to a trial.
The question then becomes: should modern terrorists be treated more harshly than other war criminals like the Nazis? I think most anyone would have trouble making the case. Hitler and the surviving SS members had millions of people’s blood on their hands. Bin Laden had 3,000 Americans. Does just one American equal thousands of European Jews, thus justifying killing terrorists who harm Americans rather than putting them on trial like we did the Nazis?
Let’s work it out mathematically. By this wayward logic, if we take the 6 million Jews killed in Europe and the 3,000 people killed in New York and equated them, what would we find? We would find by simple division that the death of just one American would equal 2,000 Jews in Europe (6,000,000/3,000). Or, to put it another way, to kill one American means that 2,000 Jews in Europe would have to die to justify the same amount of justice. If all human beings are counted as equals, as they should be, and using the Obama administration’s line of thinking, we should have just shot all captured SS officials without batting an eye and been happy about it all the while.
But we didn’t. We allowed a group of deluded, racist and depraved individuals to have their day in court in the wake of Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the mass graves that littered the fields and towns of Europe. But when a fanatical Muslim terrorist kills 3,000 of our own, our justice system is too good for the man. Only the barrel of a gun will do. Thus, a martyr was born.
Since a trial would have surely damned bin Laden to the death penalty anyway, something about how events played out should, at least on some level, chaffe us all. Like Moore, I’m glad we finally found him, but even people who admit guilt are given a trial. Should bin Laden have been any different? It seems to me that we essentially immortalized the man by treating him as if he was somehow different than any other person charged with crimes against humanity. A trial would have said, and quite forcefully, to the rest of the world, especially to the radical Muslim world, “No! Bin Laden is no different than any other man. He will face a trial, and he will bow to the justice system like everyone else.”
We missed an important opportunity here. When celebrations break out in the streets after we gun down one of our national enemies execution-style without the use of the machinations that judge the guilt of every other mortal in the modern world, our collective soul may have, indeed, suffered an irreparable blow.
[Photo credit: Getty Images – Hundreds of Pakistani Jamaat-ud-Dawa activists prayed in Karachi for Osama bin Laden, whom they regard as a martyr.]