I am glad bin Laden is dead.

My problem with the way bin Laden was handled is that I feel that I am being lied to for appearances sake, on the possibility of taking him alive. I would have preferred he be taken for questioning, brought before a war crimes tribunal, tried and sent to his home country of Saudi Arabia for sentencing.

I oppose extrajudicial killing of a fugitive. I would have wanted the same thing in the case of Hitler.

I oppose pre-Old Testament morality embodied in the "put the head of your enemy on a pike", "retribution is necessary to ensure the balance of nature" school of thought. I am indifferent to the Old Testament approach of "an eye for an eye" (I'm more of a new testament person) but I only respect people who take that approach if they're honest about it. You want his head on a pike? Let's see you do it! See, this is the ethical problem posed by combat video game addiction where people can take vicarious satisfaction in watching others do such acts on screen and egg them on when they would recoil to pull the trigger themselves, a sort of virtual mob experiment. I oppose the ANTI-morality of the modern state military training via video games, say, Israeli-commando style where any rules of engagement is OK, where might is admirable in and of itself (whether it "makes right" is irrelevant -- it is not because we are the "good guys" it's because we're the "biggest and the baddest")

so long as bad guys are sufficiently bad enough because we are under siege and it is an "existential threat". I believe in the concept of "do the right thing, come the end of the world." Especially under existential threat. That's the sort of adversity that is supposed to bring out the best in people, is it not?

It's usually the right thing that is also the best thing for our survival. Otherwise it wouldn't be the right thing.

Although I considered joining the crowd in front of the White House and would have been there if the trains were still running, I reacted very viscerally to the circus it seemed to turn into. I don't like Schadenfreude. I'm not happy that the man is dead per se, I'm happy that he and the world has been put out of his misery because his endorsement of the 9-11 attacks and his implicit endorsement of every other attack on Americans by remaining alive had caused so much pain.

9-11 was an act of cultural genocide, compounded when we (corporate America) decided not to rebuild the towers. It wasn't just the 3000 lives that were lost, it was the towers themselves which the corporations don't want to rebuild. That makes them complicit in the world bin Laden wanted to build, in my opinion. A world without the towers, without civil liberties, and a world of Manichaean opposition between Western and enemy morality, where war is waged without quarter.

Let us not forget that bin Laden's guards were under orders to execute him lest he be taken alive. Us getting him in a room alone with just his wife was a coup, quite frankly. We just gave him what he wanted. And then we disposed of the body. I wanted to know what bin Laden was hiding. What was he doing in Pakistan, in a house he probably bought from the Musharraf aide who funded the 9-11 hijackers? You remember, the guy was quietly evacuated from DC shortly after it happened? The guy who cut the check, according to the commission? Probably lived in the same suburb of Islamabad. All those military guys do. Abbottabad was a garrison town, founded after a British colonial general. One of the guys who established the Pakistani regiments and subjugated the Pathans. The guys who became the backbone of Pakistan as a separate state, since there was no other ethnic continuity between the Pakistani people besides them happening to be Muslim. Pakistan wouldn't even exist were it not for British fuck-ups, drawing a line in the desert that resulted in the death of a million refugees. Interesting, no? But we don't want to hear what bin Laden had to say in interrogation or a tribunal. Because we want to believe the polite fiction that he was solely responsible for directing 9-11 and that by burning him in effigy, so to speak, we could cleanse ourselves of the hole in our hearts left by the towers that our corporate captains of industry and state are unwilling to rebuild. He took sole credit for it, and more attacks, and that is enough reason to make him morally responsible, of course. But why take pains to give him the death he wanted?

Why are Americans celebrating secrecy and taking solace in the notion that the gov't will never tell them how it actually went down and that we don't want to know? It's almost as if a new mythology has been invented, the hagiography of the Special Forces, that oh this is so cool BECAUSE I will never know what my rulers know or what these special forces on the ground saw, so whatever it was must have been really cool! Whatever happened to flushing these people out and putting them in the cold light of truth? The daylight that the people in the Arab Spring are calling for is freedom from this sort of veil of secrecy and fear. Save the cloak and dagger stuff for FINDING bin Laden. They actually did a good job of it (without any need for the attendant spying on 300 million Americans daily communications that the Administration has fully endorsed before it came into office -- without the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan or keeping troops in those countries today -- NONE of that was necessary.)

Such a waste. (Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.)

Of course, it's not really all that sensationalist. I don't like killing. I detest it. Sometimes it's necessary (that doesn't make it moral). But it appears some Americans absolutely love killing. They love to have the opportunity to have SOMEONE to hate. The younger folks who seemed to dominate the celebrations Sunday night (celebrations I initially desired to attend, but to bear witness as someone who remembered 9-11 as an adult, not to scream and cheer) seemed to have no hole in their hearts from 9-11. They weren't upset at the loss of the towers and the individuals inside them, only that the "#1 enemy of America" who they were taught about in elementary school was captured and killed. They were celebrating the death of a supervillain for its own sake, and even anticipating that he would be replaced by an even bigger and badder enemy in the next issue / er, news cycle.

Maybe I'm wrong. What I hate is what bin Laden stood for, and the fact that he stood for 9-11 (and more) meant that he could not go on living on this earth. Sometimes its better to pull the trigger, after all, these guys had killed a million foot soldiers without remorse. American soldiers are used to such things because it is almost seen as a criminal act if an enemy soldier is able to get a round off, our superiority is so great that our own military hagiography no longer celebrates sacrifice, only how many mooks are we able to kill. With so many other deaths committed by his own people and by the military in charge of executing the order, bin Laden's death is hardly something to fret about. But that does not mean extrajudicial killings is the way to go about such things. Within a century we will be in the same place the Roman Republic was. As a (fairly religious) liberal, though, I can't sit back and watch "religious" "centrist" Americans go around with this sense of the state as their own personal hit squad, there to entertain them, where there is a caste of excluded people that violence may be committed against without rules or remorse. That is no different than the world bin Laden believed in. I agree with David Sirota on that.

in today's America that can face the truths that might be revealed if Bin Laden were ever to receive a fair trial.

Like you, I would have liked to see him tried in an International Court. He didn't just kill or order the killing of Americans. There are questions now that will never be answered, but then that was the goal.

We are treated like children, by some of the most incompetent members of our society who act like parents to annoying toddlers.

In the end, they all got what they wanted, except us of course. Bin Laden got to see the US losing its power and influence around the world. The MIC though, thanks him for helping them get America in two, three or more very profitable wars.

I don't think even history will ever record the facts about this dark period. Nor will the other criminals ever be tried, the Bush gang who lied us into these devasting wars, weakening this country by using its wealth, both human an monetary for their own personal agendas.

Nice OP, thank you for posting. Just know that many Americans agree with you. We just don't have the leadership to end these policies and truly represent us and I'm not sure we ever will, at least in our lifetime.

I'm sure this stuff has been said many times before given the huge volume of threads on the issue.

At least Obama showed 'em how it's done, unlike Bush. Bush only wanted to prop him up as a poster
enemy to serve as an excuse for invading unrelated countries, not go after Bin Laden. But why were
we so desperate to make sure he was killed on the spot? I suppose if it was Satan, we'd have a
reason to fear him even in US custody, but short of that... If it was simple "blood for blood",
then just SAY that and be honest about it.

I suspect most Americans would agree with blood for blood in the case of bin Laden. Except if we
recall that he was not the sole criminal mastermind (even within Al Qaeda), as noted by where we
found him hiding, and want to know what he knew. I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories but
Bin Laden was not working in isolation, the radical Islamists had funding sources and organizations
that looked the other way at his plans to attack the heart of our country.

So this notion that we don't want to know what he thinks or who he was working with because he
was at the top of the food chain, the final target rings hollow for me. It's like the whole
Afghan War was a game of Wolfenstein 3-D, with the big boss battle at the end of it.

was the excuse to get us there and keep us there. I guess he served his purpose.

I just find the whole thing to be so sad. We let a bunch of insane neocons take this country down a very dark road.

I can't believe that we are now, on the left, 'debating torture' as Leon Panetta just say.

As someone said about Germany long ago, and btw, I don't care about Godwin's law so don't bother anyone, things didn't happen all at once. Things made you 'feel uncomfortable' at first, but things 'happened incrementally' and before you knew how it happened, those 'uncomfortable feelings' became muted after a while.

Let's how hard the left will fight against torture as a policy. That will determine for me, whether this party is the one I want to belong to.

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On what Osama was up to of late. Wait, what? Waait a minute! Huh?