Posted on 05/03/2011 9:03:22 AM PDT by presidio9
US President Barack Obama gets precious few opportunities to announce a victory. So it's no wonder he chose grand words on Sunday night as the TV crews' spotlights shone upon him and he informed the nation about the deadly strike against Osama bin Laden. "Justice has been done," he said.
It may be that this sentence comes back to haunt him in the years to come. What is just about killing a feared terrorist in his home in the middle of Pakistan? For the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and for patriotic Americans who saw their grand nation challenged by a band of criminals, the answer might be simple. But international law experts, who have been grappling with the question of the legal status of the US-led war on terror for years, find Obama's pithy words on Sunday night more problematic.
Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is "not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial." Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
LOL!
Except nowhere is the authority given to government to declare war on an ideology.
[no matter how repulsive a civilized people consider that ideology to be]
Only an idiot would LOL about something like that.
I bet you giggle a lot too, don't you?
I agree with your analysis. The real prize here is not Bin Laden’s head, but the intelligence found in the compound. The CIA would not have recommended a strike which would have destroyed this type of intelligence.
One problem is the justice system is screwed up enough that a trial would take a decade and cost about $1B.
A fair, efficient trial would amount to:
“Is the defendant Osama bin Laden? Is he responsible for the infamous terrorist attack on 9/11/01? Is there any proof the answer to any preceding questions ‘no’ or reasonable doubt? Is there any misconduct in the preceding court actions? Bailiff: your sidearm, please...”
That being impossible, as arrest would become a billion-dollar decade-long circus, the SEALs worked perfectly.
I have to wonder why the “illegal!”-shouting crowd feels compelled to do so. Why does the sequence of events as occurred bother them so much? or are they too among the chronically offended?
Is he/she/it an idiot, maybe possible???
It's a simple question. Why are there no answers?...,LOL
I see an act of war being dealt with as an act of war.
Go ahead and giggle now, Sally.
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