Jonathan Tremblay: From Black September to September 11 - The Legal Murder of Murderers
(Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and Breaking News Editor for the Breaking News Network)
As you may have heard…, a United States Navy Seals taskforce found and shot dead Osama bin Laden in a compound on the outskirts of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. Public Enemy No.1 has eluded international authorities since the late nineties when he was accused of masterminding the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 223 people.
Bin Laden was shot by American forces on the orders of US President Barack Obama. Bin Laden is confirmed to have been unarmed but “near several firearms” and having “made no attempt to surrender” when he was shot. The Seals indeed followed the order of their Commander-in-Chief and brought back the lifeless body of an assassinated terrorist. The killing of Osama bin Laden was perfectly legal. President Obama (as had done presidents Bush and Clinton before him) signed an order to capture the man “Dead or Alive” as is the traditional and executive privilege of the president. Furthermore internationally, the “Dead or Alive” order was accepted by most major organizations including Interpol and NATO. In the end, one or many US Navy Seals legally shot an unarmed terrorist wanted for a series of atrocities committed internationally and this crime was, in the words of US attorney general Eric Holder “an act of national self-defence”.
The list of accusations brought against the now deceased bin Laden included: two counts of murder in Libya 1995, seven counts of murder in Saudi Arabia later in 1995, conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States in 1998, attacks on a federal facility resulting in death and 12 counts of murder of US nationals outside the US in 1998 and generally for terrorist acts following 2001. No charges are filed after. We may hypothesize that a trial was never really in the stars for Mr. bin Laden after 9/11.
All of this being said, I shed no tears for the man but how do we feel about the way in which he was dealt? We have established that the killing was legal as defined by US and international law but was it moral? Ethical? The right thing to do?
One of bin Laden’s sons has gone on record to call the assassination “arbitrary” and that his father was not given the right to a trial while court proceedings were granted to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Certainly an apt comparison yet one that forgets the international scope of bin Laden’s crimes compared with the other two. It also unfortunately forgets that bin Laden is not a politician and that the other two had to be handled delicately as representatives of nations.
I see the lawful assassination of Osama bin Laden as lawful as well but I question the president’s prerogative as judge, jury and executioner in dealing with the wanted criminal. I understand that this is an extraordinary circumstance and that he is not your run-of-the-mill criminal but it is exactly in this kind of extreme case that the United States was to show its core values. For centuries the Western World has made grandiose claims of justice above all and of lawful trials before sentencing but Osama bin Laden has brought out the base barbarism and dare I say hypocrisy, specifically in the United States moral code. When it came down to such a sensitive issue as bin Laden and the thousands of deaths he is responsible for on US soil, Guantanamo Bay, detention without trial, torture, quasi-torture and finally an executively-mandated execution replaced great ideals of justice and morality. I think that the worst thing in all of this is that I can’t bring myself to blame Clinton, Bush and Obama for ordering the man captured dead or alive and can myself see why we can collectively hold our breath to deal with bin Laden before resuming our pursuit for normal justice for all. It’s like being against the death penalty and then seeing that a pedophile has been sentenced to death for raping and murdering 33 children. You don’t become pro-death penalty all of a sudden but you do understand. You feel slightly ashamed but your morals sort of look the other way, just for an instant.
I don’t personally know anyone that lost someone to the many terrorist attacks orchestrated by the man so I won’t pretend to know if the death of bin Laden and the way in which it was carried out will bring closure to them, but I hope it can help, if in the paradoxical way I describe above. A monster is dead but what have we become by killing him?
This is of course neither the first nor the last state-sanctioned murder in history but it becomes one of the most well-known and publicly revealed, the most talked about since Israel’s 1972-1991 “Operation Wrath of God”.
Divine retribution or (wo)man-made justice?
The 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany are unfortunately best remembered for the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered by Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Only a handful of those directly responsible were actually caught and tried while many went into hiding and others remained free due to lack of evidence.
In an era where the young Israeli republic was in the violent throws of carving out a place in the Middle East, Prime Minister Golda Meir brought together a committee to decide what would be done following the assassination of innocent Israeli civilians in Munich. It was thus decided that Israel’s international secret service, the Mossad, would be sent to assassinate all those responsible and in a dramatic and public fashion to send a clear message.
“A reminder we do not forget or forgive” read the note sent to the families of the targeted Black September and Palestinian Liberation Organization members that were found and assassinated. The targets went up in spectacular mine and bomb attacks or were simply killed in a way that sent the intended message: from 11 gunshot wounds.
The state-sanctioned assassination campaign claimed the lives of dozens of suspects, for which there were varying degrees of evidence regarding their involvement in the Munich tragedy, varying degrees from: identification on the scene of the crime to reasons that are only known to Israeli officials to this day. Furthermore, many civilians were killed by the bombs placed by the Mossad and intended for a single showy assassination. Finally, the Mossad even killed a waiter in Denmark after mistakenly identifying him as a Black September operative. Revenge at all costs seems to have been the name of the game and indeed justice became a distant guiding principle as Israel ordered the “lawful” murder of many with little or no regard for collateral damage, due process and justice. In the end, I again don’t know if the twenty-year campaign to kill all of those responsible brought closure to Israel or whether the Israeli people, especially relatives of the 11 killed in Munich, are ashamed of what was done in their name and in the name of justice.
Israel certainly sent a message but it was also seen as a challenge. Militant and terrorist groups in the Middle East have since intensified the blood feud and the region is nowhere near the state of peaceful coexistence that Israel wanted to coax through fear with “Operation Wrath of God”. Similarly, I hope that the Middle East and even militant and terrorist organizations of the Middle East still sees the Western World as a stubborn bastion of liberty, peace and democracy and that they don’t take the state-sanctioned assassination of Osama bin Laden as the showing of our true colours and thus an invitation to escalate our war of differences.
End.