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My problem with the way bin Laden was handled is that I feel that I am being lied to for appearances sake, on the possibility of taking him alive. I would have preferred he be taken for questioning, brought before a war crimes tribunal, tried and sent to his home country of Saudi Arabia for sentencing.
I oppose extrajudicial killing of a fugitive. I would have wanted the same thing in the case of Hitler.
I oppose pre-Old Testament morality embodied in the "put the head of your enemy on a pike", "retribution is necessary to ensure the balance of nature" school of thought. I am indifferent to the Old Testament approach of "an eye for an eye" (I'm more of a new testament person) but I only respect people who take that approach if they're honest about it. You want his head on a pike? Let's see you do it! See, this is the ethical problem posed by combat video game addiction where people can take vicarious satisfaction in watching others do such acts on screen and egg them on when they would recoil to pull the trigger themselves, a sort of virtual mob experiment. I oppose the ANTI-morality of the modern state military training via video games, say, Israeli-commando style where any rules of engagement is OK, where might is admirable in and of itself (whether it "makes right" is irrelevant -- it is not because we are the "good guys" it's because we're the "biggest and the baddest")
so long as bad guys are sufficiently bad enough because we are under siege and it is an "existential threat". I believe in the concept of "do the right thing, come the end of the world." Especially under existential threat. That's the sort of adversity that is supposed to bring out the best in people, is it not?
It's usually the right thing that is also the best thing for our survival. Otherwise it wouldn't be the right thing.
Although I considered joining the crowd in front of the White House and would have been there if the trains were still running, I reacted very viscerally to the circus it seemed to turn into. I don't like Schadenfreude. I'm not happy that the man is dead per se, I'm happy that he and the world has been put out of his misery because his endorsement of the 9-11 attacks and his implicit endorsement of every other attack on Americans by remaining alive had caused so much pain.
9-11 was an act of cultural genocide, compounded when we (corporate America) decided not to rebuild the towers. It wasn't just the 3000 lives that were lost, it was the towers themselves which the corporations don't want to rebuild. That makes them complicit in the world bin Laden wanted to build, in my opinion. A world without the towers, without civil liberties, and a world of Manichaean opposition between Western and enemy morality, where war is waged without quarter.
Let us not forget that bin Laden's guards were under orders to execute him lest he be taken alive. Us getting him in a room alone with just his wife was a coup, quite frankly. We just gave him what he wanted. And then we disposed of the body. I wanted to know what bin Laden was hiding. What was he doing in Pakistan, in a house he probably bought from the Musharraf aide who funded the 9-11 hijackers? You remember, the guy was quietly evacuated from DC shortly after it happened? The guy who cut the check, according to the commission? Probably lived in the same suburb of Islamabad. All those military guys do. Abbottabad was a garrison town, founded after a British colonial general. One of the guys who established the Pakistani regiments and subjugated the Pathans. The guys who became the backbone of Pakistan as a separate state, since there was no other ethnic continuity between the Pakistani people besides them happening to be Muslim. Pakistan wouldn't even exist were it not for British fuck-ups, drawing a line in the desert that resulted in the death of a million refugees. Interesting, no? But we don't want to hear what bin Laden had to say in interrogation or a tribunal. Because we want to believe the polite fiction that he was solely responsible for directing 9-11 and that by burning him in effigy, so to speak, we could cleanse ourselves of the hole in our hearts left by the towers that our corporate captains of industry and state are unwilling to rebuild. He took sole credit for it, and more attacks, and that is enough reason to make him morally responsible, of course. But why take pains to give him the death he wanted?
Why are Americans celebrating secrecy and taking solace in the notion that the gov't will never tell them how it actually went down and that we don't want to know? It's almost as if a new mythology has been invented, the hagiography of the Special Forces, that oh this is so cool BECAUSE I will never know what my rulers know or what these special forces on the ground saw, so whatever it was must have been really cool! Whatever happened to flushing these people out and putting them in the cold light of truth? The daylight that the people in the Arab Spring are calling for is freedom from this sort of veil of secrecy and fear. Save the cloak and dagger stuff for FINDING bin Laden. They actually did a good job of it (without any need for the attendant spying on 300 million Americans daily communications that the Administration has fully endorsed before it came into office -- without the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan or keeping troops in those countries today -- NONE of that was necessary.)
Such a waste. (Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.)
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