That and he was actually guilty of doing something wrong.
Very true. But we aren't talking about shooting a black guy, Osama had much too light of a skin tone for the NYPD to shoot him.
bin Laden not armed - was it right to shoot him anyways?
- Thread starter DarthTom
- Start date
This needs to be said again. Others have said it, I have said it.
This is not the same thing as an asshole cop shooting some innocent kid in an arrest situation where the kid was unarmed. This was a terrorist a man who waged war against America. It was a military situation so the rules and laws of war are applied. Shoot the bastard.
This is not the same thing as an asshole cop shooting some innocent kid in an arrest situation where the kid was unarmed. This was a terrorist a man who waged war against America. It was a military situation so the rules and laws of war are applied. Shoot the bastard.
When bin Laden confessed to arranging the deaths of thousands of people in acts of terrorism against our country, he gave all of us permission to kill him.
So say we all!
Nobody has said it was the same thing.
People are likening it, saying that it was somehow "wrong" to kill Osama due to him not being armed. Which suggests likening to it being a police action or some action where any sense of "fair play" was presumed to be the case. It isn't.
It was war. Osama killed 3,000 innocent people tied to nothing directly affecting him nine years ago and is responsible for many more deaths of innocent people across the globe. No sense of "fair play" or any acts of "Oh, you don't have a gun? We won't shoot you."
Name schools after the guy who killed Osama and make a 100-foot statue of him on the GZ Site. It wasn't wrong to shoot Osama bin Laden even if he was unarmed, he could've been sleeping in his bed cuddling a puppy while wearing pink pajamas for all he cared. Kill the bastard.
It was war. Osama killed 3,000 innocent people tied to nothing directly affecting him nine years ago and is responsible for many more deaths of innocent people across the globe. No sense of "fair play" or any acts of "Oh, you don't have a gun? We won't shoot you."
Name schools after the guy who killed Osama and make a 100-foot statue of him on the GZ Site. It wasn't wrong to shoot Osama bin Laden even if he was unarmed, he could've been sleeping in his bed cuddling a puppy while wearing pink pajamas for all he cared. Kill the bastard.
Don't the Rules of Engagement say that a soldier not wearing a uniform and not carrying a weapon is not a soldier (I believe it's the other way round: a civilian carrying a weapon is not a civilian, but still)?
Anyone know why the FBI didn't want him for 9/11?
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden
But in any case... George Lucas and ILM need to be hired to restore the lost minutes of the transmission. Maybe Usama will shoot first then.
Anyone know why the FBI didn't want him for 9/11?
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/usama-bin-laden
But in any case... George Lucas and ILM need to be hired to restore the lost minutes of the transmission. Maybe Usama will shoot first then.
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Actually, a soldier not wearing a uniform and not carrying a weapon is liable to be shot as a spy.
A spy in a foreign country? Who's he spying for?
I think you're confused.
Uniform-wearing determines eligibility to be considered a lawful combatant for purposes of being protected under the Prisoner-of-War provisions of the Geneva Convention, that's all.
Combatants without uniform do not automatically receive those protections, but can still regarded as enemy combatants. Defining them as such doesn't require them to be armed (although of course, that is one of the ways in which to prove it).
Bin Laden may not wear a state's uniform, and he may not have been armed at the time he was shot but he was clearly a (self-declared) military enemy of the US state. If he's fighting a (again, self-declared) war against the USA, he can be killed legally by the USA, especially as he's no longer entitled to another state's protection (his native Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian state that doesn't exactly mollycoddle anyone it deems enemies of the state). Uniform or carrying arms doesn't come into it, really. If he surrendered, and was in a state's uniform, he'd have rights under the Geneva Convention, but that clearly doesn't apply here.
It's fun to play Devil's Advocate sometimes, believe me I know, but it's not fun when you don't really have a strong argument to deploy on your client's behalf.
Yup. 3000 folks were innocent and not armed on 9/11 and he sure didn't care about killing them.
So anyone who surely didn't care about his crime can just be shot without a trial?
The thing is: Do we have principles or do we not? Principles that can be conviniently pushed aside every time it's "necessary" aren't really principles.
What seperates you from a terrorist if you simply do the very same thing?
For example, many people say the US committed a big fucking war crime with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, for instance. 100,000 civilians dead. Would a Japanese assault team have had the right to brake into the White House to shoot the President, unarmed? Who is right? Are the people wrong that say Nagasaki/Hiroshima is a war crime? Or is it "different" when the US does it?
Why do I bring that up? Because I am both disgusted by 9/11 and Hiroshima. Gee, how can that be?
I'm kinda allergic to "He killed 3000 people, so he deserved it", because that's too black and white for me. I am happy he's dead, too, but I'm also not afraid of saying that it was wrong to simply shoot him unarmed. Heck, I just watched an episode of Boston Legal where Denny Crane is forced to defend someone who raped and killed a thirteen year old and then shoots both his kneecaps out, and I cheered, because "he deserved it". But the thing is, the guy would still get a trial, and THEN get executed, or imprisoned, depending on the law.
I am kinda playing the devil's advocate here, and then again I'm not. All in "good fun", though, because it doesn't matter anyway what we say here.
At some point, in the future, the entire world, needs to get to a point where there is an international law, that is accepted, and respected, and followed by everyone. Otherwise it will never, ever, work out. If any country that's powerful enough just chooses to ignore it every time it's convenient, then it's pointless, it really is. Then we can just throw those damn law books away and burn them.
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I'm a frontier justice kind of guy so I wouldn't miss those books.
There's a vast difference between an indifferent first-degree murderer and a war criminal who crashed planes into skyscrapers!
There's a diifference between a murderer being hunted down to another state and captured and a man hunted down for 10 years in an area filled with people intent to kill as many Americans as possible and threw down an act of war onto a nation finally being captured, and killed, by a military.
There's a big difference between bin Laden and your friendly neighborhood murderer.
On the WWII Japan bombing front, that also was war. Not to mention a war between two nations, in the aftermath if Japan wasn't devestated they would've been "in the right" in the laws of war to retaliate but they didn't and couldn't because we won. The Japan bombings were terrible, for sure, but also necessary to ensure the security of our nation.
You're comparing apples and oranges here, buddy.
What I've been trying to show, through my posts, is that there is no inconsistency. The problem is, you're applying the wrong set of principles to this case.
There are laws of peace, and laws of war. Criminals have rights that enemy soldiers do not. Enemy soldiers have rights that criminals do not.
Osama bin Laden had arrogated to himself the sovereign power to wage war, and was waging it against the United States. If you had talked to him, he would have firmly rejected the suggestion that he was a mere criminal, and liable to punishment for any of his acts. In his own mind, he was a freedom fighter, and a holy warrior. Your "justice," he would have argued, was no justice at all.
There is considerable disagreement about how we should deal with such people. We can reject their claims to combatant status, and treat them as criminals. Or we can accept their claims, and treat them as enemy soldiers.
I would argue that, while the distinction between a criminal gang and a guerrilla band is not always clear, it is nonetheless real. And that, while it may be both possible and desirable to treat small terrorist groupuscules as criminal gangs, it is counterproductive in the case of someone like Osama bin Laden and an organization like al-Qaeda. In such a case, the law should face the facts: that they are waging war. To treat them as mere criminals would be to deny reality.
Once you accept that, everything else I've been saying follows.
Very well stated, PKTrekGirl.
To the poster who mentioned shooting OBL twice: SEALs, and others, are trained to "double-tap" which is two rapid, successive shots. It enables one to be certain the target is dead so they can move quickly to the next target. It is necessary and effective in a close quarters firefight.
As I explained earlier, bin Laden had already voluntarily surrendered his rights by committing acts of war; as did Japan in 1941.
International law really is more of a polite fantasy than anything else. Law ultimately depends on the authority of a sovereign state that has absolute ability to carry out said law in its jurisdiction. International arenas, by their very nature, are outside the jurisdiction of a single state, and may be outside the realm of any state. Given that, international law relies upon the force of agreeing states to support its legitimacy. Having the moral high ground simply isn't enough and never will be.
As such, there will always be countries strong enough to tell the ICC, or whatever eventually replaces it, to go to hell. Conversely, there will be many countries that will have no choice but to answer to a group of judges they had no choice in appointing on laws they had no power to write. We are somewhat fortunate, as a world, that the sole country capable of enforcing its will upon any point in the whole world, at least in principle, supports the concept of international rule of law. However, that law is not absolute and relies upon foundation of American power for its enforcement and indeed continued existence.
Without such power, a tin pot dictator in a far away corner of the world could (for example) start seizing oil tankers in international waters and using the money to fund a genocide. Fear of American bombers keeps such people from going to far beyond their borders and fear of the US and Europe (which I don't want to belittle here, Europe is powerful and also largely gets immunity from international courts. It's actually more of a partnership of the two regions, but I'll stick to using the US to keep things simple) backed courts keeps them from being too blatant with what they do within their own borders.
The thing is. Just shooting criminals or terrorists out of revenge, that's sending the wrong message. Of course it's sending "Don't fuck with me", but it also reinforces the very image terrorists have from you. You will never make them understand that they are wrong if you continue to do that. So you just have to kill them all. Which will not work, because the more you kill, the more will emerge.
Good that everyone is ignoring my question if Japan would have had the right to assault the White House to kill the President to take revenge for Hiroshima. And would the President, being the CIC, be considered a soldier or a civilian?
And what if Bin Laden had been in Kansas? How would they have captured him? Navy Seals, National Guard, a SWAT team?
And then again, I personally don't give much about that distinction. It's like an individual life is suddenly less worth just because it's the life of a soldier. And mass murder is suddenly not a problem because it was "an act of war". Didn't I make a post about morals recently? Where I said that this kind of thing is just whitewashing to make people feel better about themselves. "It's okay because it's war." It's not okay. It never is.
Good that everyone is ignoring my question if Japan would have had the right to assault the White House to kill the President to take revenge for Hiroshima. And would the President, being the CIC, be considered a soldier or a civilian?
And what if Bin Laden had been in Kansas? How would they have captured him? Navy Seals, National Guard, a SWAT team?
Goliath said:
These are distinctions made in a time when warfare was still "traditional". Enemy troops attacking each other on the field.
And then again, I personally don't give much about that distinction. It's like an individual life is suddenly less worth just because it's the life of a soldier. And mass murder is suddenly not a problem because it was "an act of war". Didn't I make a post about morals recently? Where I said that this kind of thing is just whitewashing to make people feel better about themselves. "It's okay because it's war." It's not okay. It never is.
Which then of course would have made him an unarmed Prisoner of War.
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