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 ...
[facepalm] I don't know. If some attorney wants to be appointed to represent him at this point, let him come forward and we'll shoot him too. Would that make it adequately legal?
So are the left-wingers going to be calling Obama a war criminal and to be put on trial by the International Criminal Court?
A cheesey movie quote will do as a reply:
In certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law. To pursue... natural justice. This is not vengeance. Revenge is not a valid motive, it’s an emotional response. No, not vengeance. Punishment.
Oh, no, did we hurt a terrorist? Who wasn’t doing any harm/ just hanging out with his wife in retirement?
BOOOOOOO HOOOOOOO.
Meh, he’s just speaking German.
I don’t actually care if it was or was not.
Fking german wusses. Its legal to us he was the reason 9/11 happened. You wimpy ass nanny state moral equalizers make me want to vomit.
Whether it was or wasn’t......I don’t think this country needs to answer Germany in matters of morality and law.
The mission was to execute an order likely on the shelf for some time to be called up in a minute’s notice. The order was in effect a death warrant signed sealed and requiring only a counter signature
The operation was therefore legal
Was it legal?
WHO THE F%$# CARES??? WE GOT THE SONOFABITCH!!!!
I mean jeez....we, the United States of America, take out a mastermind of evil, and someone asks if it was LEGAL??? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!!!
amen...Der Spiegel, you guys have historical amnesia in the morality department.
You people are funny.
There is no such thing as international law. Nations have laws, and sometimes they have treaties. Everything else is blather at international conferences, paid for by taxpayers who are not protected in the least by the conferees' silly, socialistic words. If you attack Americans, we paint a target on your back. Our guys are so good, even a metrosexual waving his hands can't screw up the operation.
I wonder what they actually told him beforehand about the operation or what it would involve. He doesn't know which end the bullet comes out of. How would he ever know if they were BS-ing him?
EVERYTHING is just about it. This is not a "feared terrorist". He is a known terrorist, and by his own admission.
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