Earlier, I said that the Navy SEALs who killed Bin Laden were most likely ordered to not take him alive. That has a lot of Obama’s base upset, who have long denounced things like targeted killings and assassinations and summary executions and extralegal deaths and the like — at least, they do when ordered by someone other than President Obama, it seems.
But if we did take Bin Laden alive, that raises a whole host of questions — questions the Obama administration doesn’t want to answer.
Wait, that’s not fair. The Obama administration doesn’t like answering any kind of questions. But these would be especially thorny.
So, we take him alive. He’s hauled out of Abbottabad, flown back to a base in Afghanistan, then tossed on another aircraft (I’d suspect a C-2 Greyhound) and flown out to the Carl Vinson — the nearest hunk of “sovereign US territory” available. From there, I suspect he’d be ferried by ship and aircraft, never entering any other nation’s territory or waters or airspace, until he was delivered to…
Well, the most logical place would be Guantanamo. You know, that place that Obama vowed to shut down on his first day in office, the most evil place in the world according to much of Obama’s base.
And the only place, realistically, that we could take him.
So we put him in Guantanamo. Do we arrest him, read him his rights, give him a lawyer, and start arranging his trial? Or do we interrogate him, using every legal means at our disposal, to wring him dry of every bit of intelligence we can from him?
OK, on that one, I’ll give them a bye. I doubt that Bin Laden really had a lot of useful intelligence. He’s likely been out of the operational loop of the Islamist war on the West for some time, so he probably didn’t know much useful stuff. Further, one of he key pieces of information we’ve wanted for some time is “where is Bin Laden,” and that’s kind of a moot question to ask Bin Laden himself. So there are limits to what valuable intelligence he could give us.
So we catch him, and put him on trial. Former Wizbang Blue editor Steve Crickmore voiced his support for that option:
My preferred option would have been that we capture him and then send him to Baghdad to be tried, in a trial similar to Saddam Hussein’s with the same assured fate. That would have been a real coup.
First up, we’d have dibs on Bin Laden. He hit us long before he started hitting Iraq. So that’s out.
But apart from that, Steve is showing he’s perfectly in line with the Obama administration. Remember when they were pushing for civilian trials for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other top Al Qaeda leaders? They assured us that they would receive perfectly fair, honest, and impartial trials — and then found guilty. And even if not convicted, we needn’t worry — they’d never be released anyway.
Which sounds like the textbook definition of a “show trial” — “we’ll give them a fair trial before we hang them.” And this came primarily from Attorney General Eric Holder, this nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer.
Way to reinforce faith in the fairness and impartiality of our judicial system, Mr. Attorney General.
So, we give him his fair trial and get the guaranteed conviction. Then what? We executed Timothy McVeigh, but we gave life sentences to the 1993 World Trade Center plotters. And the mastermind of that one, Sheikh Abdul Rahman, still figured out a way to keep up his terrorist plotting, thanks to — hold on to your socks for THIS surprise — a far-left liberal activist lawyer.
As far as I’m concerned, the way that the Obama administration handled Bin Laden was nearly ideal. The only criticisms I have are that I think that they disposed of the body too quickly and they tried to spin the circumstances to conceal the less civil aspects of the exercise into some kind of Hollywood PC fable, but apart from that, well done.
But they really ought to own what they did. I have no problems with it, and I believe the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t, either.
The only segment that would have problems would be a large portion of Obama’s base, the loony left — and, unfortunately, the Obama administration pays far too much time catering to their whims.
Bin Laden’s dead. He’s now part of the circle of life, being processed into fish shit. And that’s more than fine with me.The last thing we need is him living the rest of his life on the US dole.
