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The Assassination of Osama bin Laden. The Good, The
Bad and The Ugly
By mickielynn on 2011-05-03 21:17:58
Late Sunday night we were told that Navy Seals Team Six, an elite group of 25 Special Forces, under the aegis of the Joint
Special Operations Command had infiltrated a large, luxurious and heavily fortified compound located very near Pakistan’s
major military academy in the city of Abbottabad. Forty minutes later they had executed the Saudi born founder and spiritual
leader of al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden.
On many levels that’s good news: Osama bin Laden’s death gives closure to the historical chapter following the attacks of
September 11, 2001. Almost ten years of hunting for Osama bin Laden is over. We now have a unique chance to pause and
re-evaluate the reasons why we’re spending lives and resources in Afghanistan to fight our "war on terror." At the current
time there are fewer than 100 members of al Qaeda in that country and the Taliban (a home grown group that has never
committed acts of international terrorism) is not in power in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was found in Pakistan where he
had been living for over 5 years.
This would be a very good time to begin a truly significant drawdown of our 100,000 troops when the first withdrawal is
scheduled for July of 2011. It gives the President and Congress a chance to do more than the token withdrawal that some in
the military were urging. The more troops and contractors that we bring home the more lives and money we save. If we
brought home 50,000 or more then we’d be well on our way to clearing the political and military space for a negotiated
settlement.
More good news: Our intelligence operations can work well with time and patience. Again, if we believe what we’ve been
told this was a long slow tracking of the couriers who connected Osama bin Laden with the rest of the world. It took five
years of detective work to be sure of his location and of the way to approach it. The results were accomplished without
massive bombing or civilian casualties. Good intelligence work and cooperation with others can keep us safe.
The bad news: We couldn’t trust our ally, the Pakistani ISI and invaded the sovereign territory of another country without
giving them any notice (again if we believe the current description of how things went down). According to the original
reports the Special Forces had orders to kill rather than to capture Osama, which amounts not to justice but to vengeance and
extra-judicial execution.
More bad news: As the story comes out some details are changing. There’s more ambiguity about whether there was ever
any chance that we would try to capture bin Laden and give him a trial that would reveal just what his role was and provide
a model of real justice and adherence to international and US law and justice. The use of another extra-judicial assassination
indicates that the Obama administration is continuing the policies of the Bush administration. Targeting and killing those
that we view as our enemies makes it easier to keep doing that. As in the case of the targeting of Muammar Gaddafi’s
residential compound in Libya.
The worst news of all is that we really can’t trust our government to tell us the truth. We don’t know if Pakistani intelligence
cooperated with us during this operation but wishes to maintain plausible deniability or whether they thwarted us while
knowing that Osama was living 35 miles from Islamabad. We don’t know if he really was buried at sea with Muslim rites
and respect because that would prevent his grave being used as a shrine or if there was some other disposition of his body
and some other reason. We don’t know if his death photos are not being shared because they might be "inflammatory" or if
there’s some other reason, perhaps more than one. The pattern that has been established during the past 10 years indicates
that we may be told one thing and then may need to wait some time before true information is leaked and we find out just
what our government has been up to.
So Osama bin Laden’s death could lead to the end of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sooner and in a less politicized way
but we still have some ugly factors to contend with. From my point of view these include the fact that 800 military bases
around the world don’t make us safer or stronger. Our continued arrogance in pursuing targeted assassinations under the
command of JSOC instead of capture and lawful trials puts US citizens in great danger both abroad and at home. It erodes
civil rights and threatens our very democracy and rule of law.
I think that Jeremy Scahill said it best in a recent interview:
"... Let's remember here, hundreds of thousands of people have died. Iraq was invaded, a country that had nothing to do
with al-Qaeda, nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. The United States created an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq by invading it,
made Iran a far more influential force in Iraq than it ever would have been. We have given a grand motivation to people
around the world that want to do harm to Americans in our killing of civilians, our waging of war against countries that
have no connection to al-Qaeda, and by staying in these countries long after the mission was accomplished. Al-Qaeda was
destroyed in Afghanistan, forced on the run. The Taliban have no chance of retaking power in Afghanistan. And so, I think
that this is a somber day where we should be remembering all of the victims, the 3,000 people that died in the United States
and then the hundreds of thousands that died afterwards as a result of a U.S. response to this that should have been a law
enforcement response and instead was to declare war on the world..."
