If You Don’t Love America, You’ll Probably Hate the bin Laden Killing
May 4, 2011
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/04/obamas-big-bet-ground-zero-speech/

This was a complex operation and it would be helpful if we knew the precise facts surrounding his killing. The United Nations has consistently emphasized that all counter-terrorism acts must respect international law.
-- Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a statement calling for more details from the raid that killed Usama bin Laden.
There is something kind of quaint about the debate over whether or not Usama bin Laden had the chance to surrender or not before he was shot. What other great power in the history of the world would have a discussion about what rights -- or even battlefield gallantries -- were offered to such an enemy.
Power Play assumed that SEAL Team Six went to bin Laden’s compound to kill him, especially since there was nothing else to do with him. Where would one have put him if he had been taken alive?
President George W. Bush had allowed the creation of an alternate system of detainment and justice likely with the hope that bin Laden one day would be its most notorious subject. The teams at Guantanamo Bay, CIA facilities around the world and the military tribunal system had all probably anticipated that one day bin Laden would be brought, hooded and bound, into their world for interrogation, swift trial and execution.
But President Obama made the dismantling of that system a central campaign promise. He has ended up, though, caught between the old Bush system and the new system of civilian justice he and Attorney General Eric Holder had imagined. If Obama’s fellow Democrats would not tolerate having Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in Manhattan federal court, bin Laden would have been out of the question. Imagine the spectacle and risks of U.S. vs. bin Laden and imagine the platform a civilian trial would have given the master propagandist.
The Obama administration is working to clear the backlog of cases at Guantanamo Bay, using modified military tribunals to push through the cases, like Mohammed’s, that are too sensitive, or involve interrogations not permissible in civilian justice. The goal isn’t to keep the place running, but instead close it down. The system designed with bin Laden in mind is spinning down, not ramping up.
If Obama had put bin Laden in Gitmo he would have been highlighting in the brightest way possible what he and his team say is the “No. 1 terrorist recruiting tool” in the world. Neither could Obama have just snatched up bin Laden and held him in whatever undisclosed locations the CIA has left for such baddies. Holding people without charges in secret locations is even more antithetical to Obama’s stated polices (and contradictory of his attacks on George W. Bush) than sticking them in a military prison and using a military court. No Gitmo, no civilian courts, no black sites: no place for bin Laden but the bottom of the sea.
Except for among a few very dainty souls, there will be little concern in America about whether the raid on bin Laden’s compound was a “capture or kill” mission or just a “kill” mission.
But there will be considerable domestic debate about what to do with the enemy combatants captured presently and in the future. The necessity of killing bin Laden will be uncontroversial, but expect to hear more about the gaps in our system for handling and interrogating high-value terrorists.
If, for instance, the cache of information boosted from bin Laden’s house lets us net yet more baddies, where will the president keep and question them?
The confusion over the circumstances of bin Laden’s death – administration officials first said he was armed but may not have been able to fire a shot, then said he was unarmed but presented a danger – will, however, be fodder for the UN, the press in the Muslim world and human rights groups who are casting aspersions on the raid.
Already, Arab news outlets are reporting leaked details of the raid supposedly from bin Laden’s family captured at the scene and now in Pakistani custody. They are describing an assassination, which will not only inflame the already riled up Pakistani populace but also prompt international do-gooder groups to ramp up the pressure on Obama.