Mark Philip Bradley: The Death of bin Laden and a Global Order of Rights

Mark Philip Bradley teaches history at the University of Chicago.

“If Hitler falls into our hands,” Winston Churchill told his war cabinet in 1942, “we shall certainly kill him.” Hitler himself eventually took that problem off his hands. Yet Churchill continued to insist as the Second World War drew to a close that the best way to deal with the Nazi leadership was to “execute the principal criminals as outlaws.” Cooler heads, Americans among them, eventually prevailed. The subsequent Nuremberg Trials were not without the taint of victor’s justice. But they established a revolutionary set of global principles that sought to guarantee the right to trial for individuals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Whether Osama bin Laden, the Hitler of the war on terror, would have, if captured alive, found his way to the International Criminal Court in the Hague or some other state or transnational juridical body, we will never know. But if his killing by American forces is to be considered just, at home and abroad, we must know more than we do today. If it was a “kill-or-capture” mission, why was bin Laden killed? One day the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan says bin Laden “was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in.” The next day White House Press Secretary Jay Carney acknowledges that bin Laden “was not armed.”

The circumstances matter, as do American intentions. Even in the wake of the terrible loss of American lives on 9/11, and perhaps especially because of them, vengeance is not justice. After almost a decade of officially sanctioned torture and extrajudicial killings, knowing what was meant to happen in the Abbottabad compound on Sunday, and what actually happened, is critical. It may determine if the United States can ever recover its credibility as a guarantor of the global human rights order it first sought to construct in the waning days of the Second World War.