One week ago, President Obama announced that U.S. Special Forces had raided the fortified compound of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, killing the 9/11 mastermind along with four other people, including one woman. Bin Laden had been living within walking distance of a major Pakistani military headquarters and only a short drive from the country’s capitol of Islamabad.
The official U.S. account of the raid has all but unraveled. Initially, the Obama administration claimed Bin Laden was on the third floor of the compound and, after shooting their way through resistance on the first two floors, commandos were forced to kill an armed Bin Laden using his wife as a human shield – actions befitting the American mythology of this arch villain.
However, according to Al Arabiya, senior Pakistani security officials reported Osama Bin Laden’s 12-year-old daughter who survived the raid confirmed “U.S. forces captured her father alive but shot him dead in front of family members.”
The news agency also reported Bin Laden was staying with his family on the ground floor and was “neither armed nor did inmates at the compound fire at the U.S. choppers or commandos.” Moreover, Pakistani officials confirmed they “did not recover any arms [or] explosives during their detailed search of the compound on Monday and Tuesday.”
The picture that has emerged is one of an extra-judicial execution in a raid violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. Needless to say, such assassinations are outlawed under both U.S. and international law.
The U.S. government has conducted such assassinations for decades, most recently executing without any judicial review or oversight more than 2,000 Pakistanis, mostly innocent civilians, with predator drones over the past decade alone.
However, the summary execution of Bin Laden stands out for its open and brazen character. One does not have to sympathize with Bin Laden or his reactionary cause to be disgusted by this assassination, repulsed by the official celebration being promoted in the media, and nauseous of the orchestrated national chauvinism which has attended it.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden had nothing to do with administering “justice.”
Instead, definite political calculations were taken into account when deciding not to take Bin Laden alive. For one, it precludes placing him on trial which would inevitably involve an analysis of the intimate relationship he shared with the CIA when the U.S. extended him support to carry out insurgency operations against U.S. rivals, particularly the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
A trial of Osama Bin Laden would also place scrutiny on the September 11 attacks – an event the U.S. government has never seriously investigated or accounted for – and their role as a pretext for a decade of brutal militarism abroad and political reaction at home.
More importantly, however, are the political consequences flowing from accepting such state-sanctioned, extra-judicial assassinations. While there has been mild criticism from the international community on Washington’s flouting of international law, not a single section of the American political or media establishment has voiced concern over the brutal and patently illegal methods employed in Bin Laden’s murder. This only underscores once again the extent to which the American ruling class has degenerated politically.
Washington’s illegal and brutal foreign policy flows inexorably from the criminal character of the so-called War on Terror itself. It finds further expression in the targeted assassination attempt on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi only the day before the killing of Bin Laden, as well as a similar assassination attempt made last Thursday in Yemen by predator drones on Anwar al-Awlaki – a U.S. citizen who was born in New Mexico. President Obama ordered the killing of Al-Awlaki last year without trial, presentation of evidence, or even criminal charges.
These are extremely disturbing developments. Washington is only one step removed from employing these repressive measures, honed abroad, against its critics at home. There is nothing to suggest it will hesitate to do so when its austerity measures incite mass social opposition in the coming period.
