“Absolutely thrilling” is what Condoleeza Rice thinks what Barack Obama’s achievement of having had Osama bin Laden murdered is. Now, don’t get me wrong: Osama bin Laden was a criminal. He deserved to be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. He deserved to rot in prison for the rest of his life for the thousands killed by his soldiers.
But Osama wasn’t arrested. Instead he was assassinated by the CIA and JSOC, operating in a country where they have no authority. You may think “hey, he was a bad guy, we should do anything to kill him!” But is that so? Either we believe in democratic values or we don’t. It doesn’t matter who the subject is; the rule of law must apply. That’s why the Nazis – surely a much bigger threat – were arrested and tried at Nuremberg, where the nature of their crimes was analysed and made clear.
If they really knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding in this mansion, why not go in with the support of the Pakistani army, surround the place, and tell him to come out? Surely they could track him if he tried to escape? Can all the great might of the American military apparatus not manage to take a bunch of people alive? Can it not even try?
But even that line of thought is based on entirely false assumptions. Osama bin Laden was a criminal, but who trained that criminal? Osama bin Laden was a criminal, but how powerful was he really? Will his death change anything about terrorist activities worldwide, except giving them another martyr? Furthermore, was Osama bin Laden a bigger criminal than George Bush or Barack Obama? Osama bin Laden murdered several thousand people – a terrible crime. Bush and Obama have murdered over a million, wreaked havoc in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lybia, and probably several other countries. They’ve instituted and kept up secret prisons in which innocent people, even children, are regularly tortured to death. They’ve used death squads to murder people the world over, even citizens of their own country. And now we’re supposed to be happy that these supreme criminals have murdered another criminal, continuing their use of illegal, anti-democratic methods?
Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, and now Osama bin Laden. All of them nasty, criminal individuals – but no less nasty than the people who murdered them. Yet every time someone is killed – be it a leader or just the leader’s youngest son – the media celebrate the murder. Just look at them, frothing at the mouth like insane cannibals. Condoleeza Rice is about to have an orgasm. Death! Death! Death! It’s sick and it’s sickening.
We have not “woken up in a more secure world.” We’ve woken up the same shitty world where what should be a great democracy prefers to assassinate its enemies rather than put them on trial, where war criminals fight other war criminals while the people starve, and where the same old wars will continue.
Thousands more will die. Why are their deaths so much less significant?
