Examining My Head

From the 60 Minutes interview on CBS on Sunday night, 8 May (last page), with President Obama.

OBAMA: As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn't lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.

I'm trying to unpack this quote and keep getting hung up on the word "deserve." I'm not a proponent of capital punishment, but I would have to concur with the President that in an eye-for-an-eye world that if ever there was a crime deserving of death, bin Laden deserved to die. What an awful creature he was.

However (and there's always a big however)...our legal system has gone beyond mere eye-for-an-eye retribution. Every accused person, from a street punk to a mass murdering terrorist, deserves a fair trial via the legal system, and not vigilante justice. My opinion is that nobody--even bin Laden--deserves summary execution. Especially when it appears that we could have captured him.

Otherwise we have a two-tiered system of justice: one tier for the really bad guys, in which we can conveniently serve as judge, jury and executioner when it's expedient to do so. And the other tier for your regular accused folks. And who would be the gatekeeper for opting for one over the other?

We're the United States of America. We're the good guys. We stand for the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, and fair trials.

I am not fond of slippery slopes. And two sets of justice certainly qualifies.  So I guess I need my head examined.


(NOTE: I don't know what happened in the compound in the small-unit action when bin Laden was confronted by the Navy Seals. The Seals may have had no choice but to shoot him. But it sure sounds like the default approach going in was to assassinate him rather than take him alive, presumably because the latter approach would be more inconvenient.)

 

What We Have Lost

Just An Earth-Bound Misfit had a great post on Tuesday, pondering the milestone event that is represented by the death of bin Laden.  We indeed have lost a great deal:

What I want to ruminate on, now, is what we have lost. We, as a nation, have spent trillions of dollars on both the Iraq and Afghan wars. Without 9-11, Afghanistan would not be a concern of any nation other than its neighbors. Without 9-11, George Bush and his cabal would not have been able to gin up a phony casus belli. Without 9-11, we would not have had to send over five thousand men and women to die in Asian land wars, not to mention the tens of thousands who have come back with devastating injuries to their bodies, brains and psyches.

We have lost or given up a lot of our civil rights. It is now acceptable that the government can monitor the telephones and e-mails of anyone it chooses. It is now acceptable that, without a warrant, the Feds can snoop through our bank accounts and library records. There are cameras in many places which automatically record into a database every vehicle which has passed by. The Feds now conduct warrantless "sneak and peek" searches, no matter what it happens to say in that pesky Fourth Amendment. The Federal government has claimed the right to hold anyone it wants, wherever it wants to, for as long as it pleases them, without granting them access to family or attorneys and without any form of judicial process.  The Federal government (as well as state and local governments) now treat public protests, a right enshrined in the First Amendment[6], as though they were terrorist events and treats protesters as national security threats to be tracked as though they were cooking up PETN in their kitchens.

///SNIP///

In the meantime, and in no small measure due to the fecklessness of the Bush Administration, we are locked into a land war in one of the most inhospitable and inaccessible places on the planet. In Year Ten of the war, the best that the commanders can say at the Five O'Clock Follies is that "tangible progress" has been made. Many more American fighting men and women will be killed and maimed. At least another trillion dollars will be spent. There is no end in sight for this war.

So one may make the argument that, even as his corpse is being chewed by crustaceans at the bottom of the sea, that bin Ladin won his war.