Usama bin Laden is dead

[yodajazz]

Osama Bin Laden DENIES All Involvement with 9/11 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulWWKK3MLJA)

Bin Laden had to be silenced.
Wikipedia article:

In an interview with Osama bin Laden, published in the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi on September 28, 2001, he stated: "I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act."[60]

The reason I believe this statement, is because this is really in sync with the teachings of their Prophet on the conduct of war. When Bin Laden did issue a Fatawah declaring war on the US in 1998, it was against US Military personnel only. This is in accordance, with the teachings of the Prophet, to my understanding. Bin Laden was never formally charged with being involved in 9/11. Wonder why? Cause if they did, then he could have turned himself in and demanded a public trial. His testimony, would have been truly explosive.

[trish]

Bin Laden was never formally charged with being involved in 9/11. Wonder why?The U.S. did level formal criminal charges against bin Laden for his involvement in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. These charges were only dropped after bin Laden's demise.

The very day of the attacks both the NSA and German intelligence intercepted communications indicating they likely originated with Osame bin Laden. The hijacker/terrorists left behind a considerable paper trail linking them to Al Qaeda. Furthermore, bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks and threatened further attacks on western security in a video tape addressed to the American people and broadcast in the Fall of 2004 by al Jazeera. (Here is the transcript. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=215913&page=1 )

I’m not a lawyer so I can’t answer the question of why further criminal charges weren’t levied against bin Laden. But it is clear, Muslim or not, that bin Laden was able to justify, to his own satisfaction, gross violence against civilians. It seems from the transcript that his argument goes along the lines of “an eye for an eye.”

[Stavros]

Wikipedia article:

In an interview with Osama bin Laden, published in the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi on September 28, 2001, he stated: "I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act."[60]

The reason I believe this statement, is because this is really in sync with the teachings of their Prophet on the conduct of war. When Bin Laden did issue a Fatawah declaring war on the US in 1998, it was against US Military personnel only. This is in accordance, with the teachings of the Prophet, to my understanding. Bin Laden was never formally charged with being involved in 9/11. Wonder why? Cause if they did, then he could have turned himself in and demanded a public trial. His testimony, would have been truly explosive.

Yoda I am sure we have discussed this before. The ideological justification for attacks on 'innocent women, children and others humans' was made by Ayman al-Zawahri in 1996 and is justified because:

Civilians in the West elect and pay for their governments. They are therefore responsible for the actions of these governments – in essence, they are the decision-makers– and thus they negate their status under Islamic law as innocent non-combatants and become legitimate targets.

For some this was such a departure from Islamic norms that they refused to join with al-Qaeda or approve of its actions, while some who were part of the organisation left it after 9/11 precisely because they could see it was the wrong strategy politically as well as undermining their Islamic credentials. I think it is an inevitable consequence of politics taking over from religion, relegating the latter to a cloak of 'respectability' while actually demeaning it. Not unlike the concept in Christianity of a 'Just war' which to me is a basic violation of the gospel of Jesus.

http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/International%20Security/azzaml.pdf

[broncofan]

I am not sure exactly why Bin Laden was not charged with a crime as many applicable criminal statutes could have been used to charge him, whether the statutes had extra-territorial jurisdiction or not as the crimes took place on U.S soil.

One reason may have been because of how the war was going to be prosecuted. The Bush administration believed Al Qaeda members should be treated as enemy combatants rather than criminals. The idea was that even if this is a different type of war, it is still war, only the theater of conflict is much broader.

I think this makes some sense. If an organization spanning an entire continent has declared war on your country and your people, looking for individual crimes to charge their members with is beside the point. Enemy combatants are detained, they are tried in military tribunals for violating the laws of war, and they are killed. Nothing more is required than that they are enemies conducting a war against your nation.

It does make things more complicated when you are dealing with sub-national enemies. But while some proof should be required that they are conducting operations designed to kill and maim your citizens before engaging in armed conflict, the burden of proof necessary to convict them of specific crimes is unrealistic. Think about the evidence that would have been required to demonstrate not just that Al Qaeda committed crimes but that Bin Laden himself possessed the requisite mental state and actively participated in hatching the various plots. Add this to the fact that such operational details would never see the light of day. It's not as though Al Qaeda is going to respond to a subpoena for its files or something.

[broncofan]

I am not saying there should not be some threshold determination that an organization is conducting a war against us. I just mean that what provides us the right to use our military is not so much the perpetration of discrete acts as the ongoing effort to harm our interests at home and abroad. Once it is clear that an organization's aim is to accomplish that end, the new threshold determination is that someone is a member of that organization.

[Dino Velvet]

It's not as though Al Qaeda is going to respond to a subpoena for its files or something.

Couldn't we of sent Dog The Bounty Hunter after him? His wife would badger Osama to the point he'd stick that Kalashnikov in his mouth.

Dog The Bounty Hunter - Beth goes off on an "ice-head" - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIWf9nJfM-o)

[yodajazz]

The U.S. did level formal criminal charges against bin Laden for his involvement in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. These charges were only dropped after bin Laden's demise.

The very day of the attacks both the NSA and German intelligence intercepted communications indicating they likely originated with Osame bin Laden. The hijacker/terrorists left behind a considerable paper trail linking them to Al Qaeda. Furthermore, bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks and threatened further attacks on western security in a video tape addressed to the American people and broadcast in the Fall of 2004 by al Jazeera. (Here is the transcript. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=215913&page=1 )

I’m not a lawyer so I can’t answer the question of why further criminal charges weren’t levied against bin Laden. But it is clear, Muslim or not, that bin Laden was able to justify, to his own satisfaction, gross violence against civilians. It seems from the transcript that his argument goes along the lines of “an eye for an eye.”

Here is a video that questions the credibility of a Bin Laden video, both in visual, and actual translated meaning. Attached is a screen clip from the video.

[Stavros]

I am not sure exactly why Bin Laden was not charged with a crime as many applicable criminal statutes could have been used to charge him, whether the statutes had extra-territorial jurisdiction or not as the crimes took place on U.S soil.

One reason may have been because of how the war was going to be prosecuted. The Bush administration believed Al Qaeda members should be treated as enemy combatants rather than criminals. The idea was that even if this is a different type of war, it is still war, only the theater of conflict is much broader.

I think this makes some sense. If an organization spanning an entire continent has declared war on your country and your people, looking for individual crimes to charge their members with is beside the point. Enemy combatants are detained, they are tried in military tribunals for violating the laws of war, and they are killed. Nothing more is required than that they are enemies conducting a war against your nation.

It does make things more complicated when you are dealing with sub-national enemies. But while some proof should be required that they are conducting operations designed to kill and maim your citizens before engaging in armed conflict, the burden of proof necessary to convict them of specific crimes is unrealistic. Think about the evidence that would have been required to demonstrate not just that Al Qaeda committed crimes but that Bin Laden himself possessed the requisite mental state and actively participated in hatching the various plots. Add this to the fact that such operational details would never see the light of day. It's not as though Al Qaeda is going to respond to a subpoena for its files or something.

I can't agree with this. The Bush Administration thought that by declaring individuals fighting with or for al-Qaeda to be enemy combatants they could treat them differently from civilians, whereas the Geneva Conventions protect the rights of combatants and non-combatants. The question at the heart of this issue relates to the prosecution of Germans at Nuremburg after the war. This was a military tribunal and its aim was to subject surviving members of the Nazi Party and the German High Command to the rule of law. There is, I believe a large literature in law on the consequences of Nuremburg and whether it set the standard for the prosecution of war crimes, or was a one-off. The varied history of prosecutions at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the calls for George Bush and Tony Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes also suggest this is still a fiercely contested issue in law and politics.

There has been a suggestions that an enemy combatant can be killed precisely because of that status, and if killed 'on the field of battle' this is assumed to be part of the conduct of war. One of the problems raised by asymmetrical warfare, or 'low intensity warfare' or 'guerilla war' is that the 'field of battle' could be anywhere. I believe Israel has justified its targeted assassinations of members of HAMAS on the basis that they are enemy combatants in this sense.

In the case of al-Qaeda, the US agreed with bin Laden that they were at war, whereas the British Government refused to recognise the Provisional IRA as an army at war and prosecuted its 'volunteers' on the basis of criminal law. That the Good Friday agreement released many of the men convicted of murder for political reasons is still controversial here precisely because it appeared to be an acknowledgement that the PIRA had confirmed the status the British Government had denied to it.

I don't know if the USA had enough evidence to convict bin Laden in either a court of law or a military tribunal, the raid on his home in Abbotabad claims to have seized a large haul of documentary evidence that shows that not only was bin Laden involved in the 9/11 attacks, he and al-Zawahri were planning more.

There is a view, expressed by Geoffrey Robinson, that it has been a mistake for the US to use a military tribunal to prosecute the arrested members of al-Qaeda -Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for example- because of the contested issue of al-Qaeda's status as an 'armed force' and because he feels those members of the group still alive should be prosecuted in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Whether you call al-Qaeda an army at war with the USA or not, the Geneva Conventions apply, which is why we should either be outraged when they are violated, or shrug our shoulders and say 'he got what he deserved', in which latter case we should abolish the Conventions altogether and abandon the concepts of and administration of justice, replacing it with crude revenge.

[broncofan]

Good post Stavros. I don't know a lot about the international humanitarian law issues. I used to have a book that I could have consulted as a reference, but it got lost in a move. I agree at least that even if someone has "combatant status", they should have the right to surrender and not be harmed. I also think that someone who is captured should either be released or tried on some law of war crime.

Where I clearly departed from ihrl and am likely wrong below:
I am sure there is no international tribunal that has sanctioned the use of targeted killing. And while it is therefore not considered an acceptable means of conducting a war, I just wonder how this kind of asymmetrical war can be conducted without it turning into a large-scale police investigation against men who will not be taken alive.

I am fully on board with taking caution in protecting the rights of civilians, which is one reason I am against the use of drones. I also don't think a country should be able to enter into the airspace or territory of a sovereign simply because an "enemy" has entered there or happens to be located there. Perhaps there is no place for just killing someone and considering it a battlefield killing...in conventional warfare you would never have to prove your enemy is fighting you. I have never been comfortable with the Israeli method of poisoning people in far-off countries, but I suppose one of the reasons is that the Israeli operations tend to have no regard for who gets hurt or how they enter a country. These are just thoughts: what I mean is I'm sure you're right.

I think one problem with the criminal prosecution of Al Qaeda members is the same issue prosecutors had in trying to prosecute the mafia. When you have large organizations, to avoid punishing guilt by association and actually punishing actions you have to create laws that punish inchoate portions of the crime. So, you charge people with conspiracy to commit such and such crime, and then have to link all of the chains together.

What happens is that the individual links find ways of denying they knew anything or new ways of fire-walling themselves off from each other. And what you end up knowing is that they were all party to some of the acts, and the same general mission, but not knowing specifically what they did and knew. Again, I shouldn't be arguing that because it's hard to prosecute someone, the burden of proof should yield. But I do think there is a martial character to a lot of the acts in question...I don't how that would change the analysis in the courtroom.

[Stavros]

Good post Stavros. I don't know a lot about the international humanitarian law issues. I used to have a book that I could have consulted as a reference, but it got lost in a move. I agree at least that even if someone has "combatant status", they should have the right to surrender and not be harmed. I also think that someone who is captured should either be released or tried on some law of war crime.

Where I clearly departed from ihrl and am likely wrong below:
I am sure there is no international tribunal that has sanctioned the use of targeted killing. And while it is therefore not considered an acceptable means of conducting a war, I just wonder how this kind of asymmetrical war can be conducted without it turning into a large-scale police investigation against men who will not be taken alive.

I am fully on board with taking caution in protecting the rights of civilians, which is one reason I am against the use of drones. I also don't think a country should be able to enter into the airspace or territory of a sovereign simply because an "enemy" has entered there or happens to be located there. Perhaps there is no place for just killing someone and considering it a battlefield killing...in conventional warfare you would never have to prove your enemy is fighting you. I have never been comfortable with the Israeli method of poisoning people in far-off countries, but I suppose one of the reasons is that the Israeli operations tend to have no regard for who gets hurt or how they enter a country. These are just thoughts: what I mean is I'm sure you're right.

I think one problem with the criminal prosecution of Al Qaeda members is the same issue prosecutors had in trying to prosecute the mafia. When you have large organizations, to avoid punishing guilt by association and actually punishing actions you have to create laws that punish inchoate portions of the crime. So, you charge people with conspiracy to commit such and such crime, and then have to link all of the chains together.

What happens is that the individual links find ways of denying they knew anything or new ways of fire-walling themselves off from each other. And what you end up knowing is that they were all party to some of the acts, and the same general mission, but not knowing specifically what they did and knew. Again, I shouldn't be arguing that because it's hard to prosecute someone, the burden of proof should yield. But I do think there is a martial character to a lot of the acts in question...I don't how that would change the analysis in the courtroom.

There is a discussion of the international law of humanitarian intervention in the book review in the link below.
http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/24/1/2393.pdf

The fundamental problem as I see it is that governments have always tried to find ways round the observance of international law to strike their enemy. It plays into national outrage when something happens and the public want something done about it right now, and don't want the niceties of international law to be observed. But it does run the risk of turning international relations into a game of chicken, or the use of lynch mobs or posses when diplomacy might be better.

The most pernicious aspect of 9/11 was the belief, expressed by Tony Blair in his speech to Congress in 2003 that history cannot explain what happened, and that the idea that one state should dominate the international system, an idea fought against since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which Blair believed is now redundant (although he goes on to plead for a Euro-American alliance)

There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood, or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day.
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/07/17/blair.transcript/

I think the issue in law is whether or not an act has been committed by an 'organisation' or by a deranged individual. Gavrilo Princip was part of an organised group, the Black Hand, and the fact that this group was supported by the Serbian government was a key factor in the ultimatum that Austria-Hungary issued to Serbia in 1914. As you point out it was historically difficult to prove that a group of Italians constituted 'cosa nostra' just as the creation of cells of 'guerillas' meant that members of the same Provisional IRA did not know the identities of most of the others although in time it was shown that most of the worst atrocities in the UK were committed by one cell, known popularly as the 'Balcombe Street gang'. Ultimately the argument must be that international law is there to give structure and coherence to inter-state relations, and that the moral argument for pursuing violations of crimes against humanity through the courts has a superior value to vengeance.

[Prospero]

I think "the most pernicious" aspect was surely the deaths of more than 3,000 innocent people...

[Stavros]

As if you needed prompting- 'the consequences of...'