Before you read on, consider the following quotes from a recent BBC news article:
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says the US killing of unarmed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has left "a very uncomfortable feeling".
Lord Dannatt told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: "The special forces troops going in had been briefed, perfectly reasonably, that if Bin Laden was anything other than naked, he could be assumed to be wearing a suicide vest.
"Unless he put his hands straight up and surrendered straightaway they had to assume that he had evil intent."
The end of the influence of Osama Bin Laden over extremist networks is something the world is completely justified in celebrating and I do not for a moment think that we would be wrong to be glad that "justice" has been done to this particularly nasty individual.
I do however think that there is room for legitimate concern in this story. The accounts of the raid on the complex in Pakistan have changed dramatically over the past few days. The US has changed it's story regarding resistance faced; first Osama was armed, then he wasn't. A news commentator has recently said that the US is particularly good at informing the public about it's overseas activities quickly and that this leads to confusion such as this, so maybe this post (and the news stories it draws on) are over-reactions but the level of disparity between acounts is enough to make me stop and think.
Maybe you would think these are trifling details. An evil man has met his end in a fitting way. Make no mistake about it, Osama was a horrible and misguided person as are all of his followers and sympathisers and I think we can all agree on that.
As much as I generally disagree with Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, I have to say I share his sense of unease at the thought of an unarmed man being shot by special forces. I also share unease at the way the team entered a country without knowledge or permission. I might ask whether a foreign strike team entering the US or indeed the UK would be treated in the same way. (The image of fighter jets being scrambled comes to mind).
Now before you think of me as someone who is not happy to see this man gone, let me say that I am as glad as the next person to see him out of the public eye. But I'm not sure I can say that I am GLAD he is dead, after all death is the very thing he perpetrated and is his evil work. To celebrate death is to celebrate an abandonment of the most basic of human rights, and to give up all that our soldiers fight for. As corny as it might sound, shouldn't we be celebrating life, not death?
Maybe you think as many do that he didn't deserve human rights, maybe you think there is a specific and tangible point where someone becomes less than human or undeserving. I would say that the moment we make an exception is the moment that any principle we have goes out of the window.
But of course the US doesn't have the same laws we do, and I have no doubt that if Osama did surrender and was taken back to the US he would have faced the death penalty. Leaving aside difficult questions as to where he is tried aside you might be tempted to argue it makes no difference, and maybe it doesn't with someone as hated as Osama.
A final point which relates to the second extract from the BBC article. Maybe it is fair to say that with such a person as the leader of Al Qaeda, assuming he meant mortal harm to his enemies was a given. Maybe assuming he could be wearing an explosive vest was fair. Given that I would only argue that we should somewhere pause and regret that "justice" not could have been done in a better fashion than shooting him then and there.
