Barack Obama called the killing of Osama Bin Laden “justice”, but it didn’t match the classic legal definition of justice that’s supposed to be practiced by the U.S. government. In that definition of justice, guilt is determined through trial and punishment is delivered after conviction. Obama lectured that anyone who questioned the process by which Osama Bin Laden was killed “needs to have their head examined”.
Apparently, Obama now thinks that the rule of law is a wacky, extremist idea, and that people who question their own government are insane. I don’t share that idea.
I strongly suspect that Osama Bin Laden was significantly responsible for the death and destruction of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011. Call me old fashioned, but I wanted to see Osama Bin Laden put on trial. Killing him when he was unarmed delivered the American people a feeling of revenge, but it didn’t really give us justice.
Maybe, though, President Obama was using the term “justice” in another sense – in the lawless, violent sense of retribution – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If we accept that as justice, though we also have to accept the killing of U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jim McLaughlin as justice. After all, McLaughlin was shot and killed by a Muslim in Afghanistan shortly after Osama Bin Laden was killed. McLaughlin’s death could be looked at as retribution, and if we accept that retribution = justice, then McLaughlin’s death would be justice.
I don’t accept that definition of justice. Neither does U.S. Representative Lynn Woolsey, who said of McLaughlin, “Just last week, a retired Army lieutenant colonel from my district just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, James McLaughlin, Jr., of Santa Rosa, California, was killed while working as a contractor training military pilots in Afghanistan. He died along with eight others when an Afghan pilot turned on his allies and went on a shooting spree during a meeting at the Kabul airport. Bin Laden’s death won’t bring Jim McLaughlin back, nor will it bring back the 1,500-plus Americans who have lost their lives in Afghanistan. The horror of this war continues unabated.”
If our government was truly pursuing justice, then we might have a chance of ending the long years of American wars in Muslim nations, and bringing our nation’s soldiers back home to the United States in peace. As long as our nation keeps pursuing revenge, we will not obtain peace, and we will remove ourselves progressively further from the noble system of laws and true justice that we once sought to maintain.
How old are you Peregrim 6, 7, 8, 14 at the most, are you typing this on you parents computer? You have an infantile understanding of the world and war in particular. When a man who uses suicide terrorist to murder 3,000 plus civilians and brags about it on TV is shot that is justice. The killing of Mc Laughlin was an act of war at least and more accurately murder, where someone built up a sense of trust only to commit murder.
To equate the two is on the same scale of empty headed thinking that would equate a druggist as being on the same plane as a drug dealer; after all they both dispense drugs.
We are at war; we don’t put people on trial before ensuring the public safety, unless you’re a starry eyed liberal who wants to make sure that more Americans die in terrorist acts. Would you have demanded that Herr Hitler be put on trial, or shot in the head?
The thing about being an American, the thing that makes it special, is that as an American citizen you are guaranteed certain rights, are you saying that everyone in the world is guaranteed those same rights even in time of war? Should people on the battlefield be Mirandize instead of being shot? The rule of law applies to civil and criminal law. War is outside of those areas, and as such is a terrible and deadly place to be. That’s why we should avoid it, but once being in, we should win.
The killing of OBL didn’t give us Justice!? No it gave OBL the justice he deserved. Revenge, is an entirely different thing. If we bombed random Muslims, that would be revenge. But a 6, 7, 8, year old wouldn’t understand the difference. You live in a world of cartoon perfection, and the kind and benevolent treatment from mommy and daddies pampered love.
While I really have issues with BO on most things political, his allowing the Special Forces to kill OBL isn’t a problem for me.
Jon, to start a response with a personal insult reflects what I would regard as an immature understanding of the world.
There’s a difference between justice and what we as individuals believe someone deserves. In our American system, the guilt of an individual isn’t determined by mere government assertion, or by repetition on television. It’s determined in a court of law.
There has long been an assertion that the hijacking of airplanes to conduct mass murder was an act of war. However, Osama Bin Laden isn’t the representative of a foreign government. He’s an international criminal. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were massive criminal acts. I’d like to see them responded to with genuine criminal trials – not military tribunals, and not pre-trial executions of the sort that was delivered to Osama Bin Laden.
You’re focused on what Osama Bin Laden deserved. What about what we, the American people, deserve? Justice is for the entire society, not just for the accused and for the victims. Our society deserves to see the evidence, and to learn, through open trials, what really happened on September 11, 2001. We deserve to see Osama Bin Laden and his criminal assistants questioned. We deserve to see the government present evidence in a courtroom, not just through selective press releases.
That’s justice. Having Osama Bin Laden killed without questioning, and his body dumped at sea, is not justice.
Our nation has tried many terrorists before, and these trials have not been interrupted by terrorist attacks. Your suggestion that fair and open trials are unsafe is pure fantasy.
I am not morally equating Jim McLaughlin and Osama Bin Laden. I am saying that the eye-for-an-eye, extra legal definition you use for justice will also be used by Osama Bin Laden’s allies as justification for killing Americans. When we kill without trial, we encourage that lawless version of justice. We encourage violence with this attitude.
Don’t forget that Osama Bin Laden himself was motivated by your brand of justice, seeing himself as a high moral agent, working to avenge the profound sin of having American soldiers on the soil of Saudi Arabia.
Osama Bin Laden would have been right to pursue his grievances through Saudi and international courts. He was not in the right to enact his vision of justice with murder.
I can’t help but insult you; your writing is an insult to thinking people everywhere. OBL isn’t a criminal he was the leader of an Islamic Imperialist movement that seeks to dominate the world. Just like Hitler or any other hostile foreign power that has launched an attack on America. Think the Japanese, without uniforms or a specific homeland. The only difference is that this enemy blends into society to create terrorist cells that await opportunity.
What other terrorist has this country tried, before BO, and the band of knuckle headed college educated morons he has placed into his administration took over. I am thinking Eric Holder…
“Don’t forget that Osama Bin Laden himself was motivated by your brand of justice, seeing himself as a high moral agent, working to avenge the profound sin of having American soldiers on the soil of Saudi Arabia.”
Are you without the slightest shred of comprehension? There isn’t a shred of moral or intellectual equivalency in the two situations. Killing 3000 plus innocent civilians is totally different from taking out the head of a terrorist organization. I thought you liberals prided yourself on having a keen and precise understanding of reality. Like the distinction you have randomly drawn over when human life really begins.
What do you mean when you say “find out what really happened”? What do you think really happened? I am sure to love this.
Why don’t you offer to have your hometown host any trials for future Terrorist leaders that are captured? This is war, not a criminal law enforcement exercise. I am sorry to blind side you with this but OBL had no right to plead the fifth, or a speedy trial. That right is reserved for those lucky enough to be US citizens who are not in open war with the US.
How is that new Nintendo 3DS? You have more than your fair share of paranoid individuals on this site!
“OBL isn’t a criminal he was the leader of an Islamic Imperialist movement that seeks to dominate the world.”
How dare you insult Peregrin Wood’s intelligence and then spout ignorant bullshit like this? Al-Qaeda’s goal is world domination? Are you stupid? What nutjob do you get that shit from? Al-Qaeda’s goal has always been to remove all Western influences from the Muslim world and to return to a very fundamentalist version of Islam. Never has it been to dominate the world. Do you see Al-Qaeda as some cartoonish supervillian? Are you that childish?
Jon, you can keep up the personal insults, but it doesn’t add logic to your arguments.
What I as an individual citizen THINK happened and what is determined to have happened through the legal system of Justice are two separate things.
If we were to follow your system of justice, then we would excuse vigilantes killing who have convinced themselves that they know who is guilty.
History is full of instances in which people were widely assumed to be guilty of crimes, and then found to be not guilty when evidence was examined in a court of law.
I would not sacrifice the American system of Justice for the sake of a temporary thrill of revenge. I’m sorry that you feel differently.
I’d like to know, Jon, how there can be an Imperial movement that doesn’t include direct control of the government of even one nation? How is that an empire?
Are you just pasting together scary words you know in a kind of Homeland Insecurity Mad Libs?
LMAO!!! Bin Laden has been dead since 2001!!! But many of you will just believe ANYTHING they throw at you! Hey, to all you establishment butt kissers…I have a bridge to the moon I’d like to sell!
i don’t believe it either. To me it’s another psy op designed to elicit support for the unaffordable wars by producing a high profile result (except this time there’s only secondary evidence to go on – which really look fake upon inspection) – giving the president a bump in his popularity and distracts us from the miserable state of our bankrupt economy. Well, just like the 9-11 show, it’s a put-on that i don’t buy for a minute – too many unanswered questions, not enough first hand evidence (like the guy’s actual body would have been nice).
Saying that, the “justice” Peregrin describes is the original, traditional variety that has been put out to pasture. Nowadays, in our new prison nation, we let the president “declare” who our enemies are and they get “disappeared” – no messy rule of law or court system to bother with and the results are permanent! Oh yeah – we’re all prospective terrorists now and the TSA, Homeland Security, police, FBI, NSA, et al will spy on us, grab us from our vehicles and homes with impunity – and we’re only too happy with this (where’s the outrage)!
(Piggy-backing on the article above this one) There’s your American Dream, right there! It’s now a nightmare.
Fishy, as in:
http://ofgoatsandmen.blogspot.com/2011/05/hizbul-mujahedeen-owned-abbottabad.html
Jon, I have to say I’m closer to Peregrin than you on this issue, and I’m over 70 Y/O and have spent my life thinking about just these kinds of issues.Your insistence on personal insult completely invalidates whatever you have to say and I assign it no weight, none at all.Islamic Imperialist movement? Really?