Let us also assume she was smart enough to have realised that the U.S. had, after considered thought, decided this was the most beneficial course of action. This wasn’t something they would have forgotten so simply bunged his body off the side of a ship. It should be obvious that they thought it safer not to create a shrine and a cause for future problems. Serious people concluded that this was the preferred option. I suspect it was more than Bin Laden would have hoped for.
The U.S. government have a duty to the safety and security of their own citizens. Alibhai-Brown tells us that ignoring that duty in favour of her sanctified process of dealing with the mass murderer’s corpse is not only right and moral but to do otherwise makes you barbaric. And more, as barbaric as the mass-murderer himself.
Does it not seem like this was a final, desperate, complaint she clawed from the bottom of the barrel? The remaining chunk of mud to fling at what she described on the program as the ‘ugly American’? And does this not speak to a deeper problem?
What she said is daft. More than daft, it is perverse. When no logical explanation can be provided for somebody’s argument then one is forced to search for the ad hominem. In this case, a fetish is all I have.
Only somebody utterly compelled by their fetish would appear on television to discuss matters of great import yet choose to shower us with the effluent of their proclivity.
This is your brain on sophistication-via-masochism. We should perhaps be grateful to Alibhai-Brown for providing us with such clear example.
If the masochism she publicly indulges wasn’t so widespread she would have been mocked and jeered by the television audience. Instead, alas, there were plenty there who heartily applauded.
Abandoning The Rule of Law
They didn’t and Part 1 explains why, so I’ll breeze past this. I will simply note that anybody suggesting that the United States government did abandon the rule of law, and who wishes to be taken seriously, needs to at least explain which law was abandoned and in what way.
law was abandoned and in what way.
If the law is so important to you and you think the raid broke it when it killed Bin Laden, why would you support his kidnapping for trial from a foreign country? What is it that makes the latter legal but the former an abandonment of the rule of law? Is the rule of law something that gets broken in degrees?
Word Games
Hitchens called the killing of Bin Laden a ‘summary execution’. Johnson called it an ‘assassination’. Part 1 of this explains why they are both wrong.
Both of them also described it as an ‘extrajudicial killing’, as have countless others.
The former government lawyer, Carl Gardner, wrote an excellent piece on the trouble with this term. In it he uses Orwell’s Politics and the English Language to demonstrate why the word is so shifty. As the title of his piece demands, ‘if you think it murder, say so’. He wrote:
The phrase extrajudicial killing is indeed spreading and corrupting thought. Judicial killing not being fine, “extrajudicial” adds nothing and means nothing. All that these critics are actually saying is that killing’s to be feared, or always wrong: something that’s either banal or plain inaccurate, since killing can be justified in self-defence or war, or even out of compassion. But what are they trying to say?
The convenience of extrajudicial killing is that it implies wickedness vaguely connected with the law, without accusing anyone of breaking it; and its repetition suggests to the mind unspecified wrong by sending thought to sleep.
If this is an ‘extrajudicial killing’, and we can probably assume from his use of it it is a bad thing, then what sort of killing isn’t?
Entering the Bataclan theatre and killing the terrorists inside?
Shooting a Nazi machine gunner at Normandy?
The killing of Yamamoto?