General Ratko Mladic is now on trial in the Hague charged with war crimes, following the horrors nearly 20years ago in Srebrenica with the massacre of 8,000 boys and men.
This is in marked contrast to the discovery and subsequent shooting of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. There may have been very good reasons why he, too, could not have been arrested and put on trial for his crimes, but we are not told them in any clear or persuasive way.
A couple of points.
1. The 9/11 attack wasn’t a crime. It was an act of war. You don’t address acts of war with search warrants, and Miranda rights, and rules of evidence. You address acts of war by killing the enemy. You put your metaphorical foot on his metaphorical throat, and you beat him with an iron rod until he submits. This is not a hard concept to understand. OBL was an enemy commander, and just as legitimate a target as Admiral Yamamoto. This wasn’t an arrest. There was no moral duty to take him alive. There was only the moral duty not to kill him if he managed to surrender. Evidently, he wasn’t given that opportunity.
2. There was no effective way to address OBL as a criminal in any case. He was acting with the covert support of several states. Imagine going to the Pakistani Gov’t and saying “We have located OBL, and would like your people to arrest him.” The Pakistanis would have said “Will do!” and then promptly warned OBL to leave. “Very sorry, Mr American President. OBL wasn’t there. Your information must have been wrong.”
3, The impact of 9/11 was too severe to treat it as a crime. One man being arrested, tried and convicted is not a sufficient deterrent to prevent future attacks. Nor does it balance the profound impact on the US in blood and treasure and security. The enemy would see the trial as a ridiculously light (and therefore entirely acceptable) cost for such a major impact on US power and prestige and wealth – not to mention 3000 dead. It might in fact see a trial as a propaganda stage to further its cause. There is no doubt that an OBL trial would have been used for just such a purpose. That is one of the reasons he was not taken alive.
4. Does the good bishop not remember how the war in the former Yugoslavia ended? The western nations that are now strutting about proclaiming their commitment to justice by trying Mladic were the exact nations that discretely looked the other way during the Croat invasion of Serbian Krajina. The Croats ended the war by effecting a forcible separation of the populations. They ‘ethnically cleansed’ the Krajina of Serbs. Isn’t that what Mladic is being tried for? Wasn’t that why the West got involved in Bosnia in the first place?
carl
Any retreating suspected murderer in a room with weapons and with confederates who had already opened fire on the arresting officers probably would have been shot dead. That’s one good reason he couldn’t have been tried at the Hague (or anywhere else). Seems pretty “clear and persuasive” as far as I can figure.
I would imagine the political reasons for not taking OBL alive were also given consideration, long before he was ever caught. Catching OBL alive and trying him, would have made him an international hero in the eyes of millions of Muslims. We would have been forced to face the idea that Islam is, by its nature, a “radical” religion, with radical ideas for world conversion. Much of this would have been made evident at the trial. Hence, no trial was forthcoming.
Hope someone who is not as tired as I am at the moment will address “for Justice not Revenge.” A quick survey of dictionaries and Wikipedia suggests the two terms are not all that easily separated.