[avacado]

So are the left-wingers going to be calling Obama a war criminal and to be put on trial by the International Criminal Court?

[OldDeckHand]

"So are the left-wingers going to be calling Obama a war criminal and to be put on trial by the International Criminal Court?"

Puhleeze.

But, I do worry quite a bit about the names of those operators getting into the public domain - not so much because of retaliation by terrorists (although that's not unimportant) but because of legal targeting by leftist governments.

I'm thinking of those CIA operators who bagged several people in Italy for rendition. Their names leaked out, and they are now persona non grata pretty much everywhere except Canada - and even a trip to Canada probably isn't without risks.

You can bet the same would happen to these SEALs if their names were leaked.

[Verginius Rufus]

Killing Bin Laden deprived dozens, maybe hundreds, of ACLU lawyers their taxpayer-paid fees for defending OBL in an American criminal proceeding. Osama would probably have died of old age before the case actually came to trial.

If Nicholson Baker and the other lefties had gotten their wish and GWB had been assassinated, characters like this German legal expert probably would have found arguments to defend it as justified.