On May 4, 2011, CNN World News asked whether killing Osama bin Laden was legal under international law. Other news commentaries have questioned whether it would have been both possible and advantageous to bring Osama bin Laden to trial rather than kill him. World attention has been focused, however briefly, on questions of legality regarding …
Continue reading “The Predators: Where Is Your Democracy?”
“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, lest the Lord see [it], and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.” This is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible (Proverbs 24:17-18) and, indeed, in the Hebrew language. It is beautiful …
Continue reading “Bin Laden Is Dead, but What About His Ideas?”
With the assassination of Osama bin Laden, US foreign policy – or, rather, the rationale for it – has a giant hole in its very center: the task of the War Party is to fill it, and quickly. Without a human face to put on the Terrorist Threat, without an ever-elusive target to lure us …
Continue reading “It’s All About Pakistan”
In Hollywood Westerns, the sheriff engages in a shootout with bad guys and wins. Such was the story of Wyatt Earp, who killed rustlers in the "Gunfight at OK Corral." Then there is the American cowboy, represented by John Wayne — tall, handsome, Anglo-Saxon — who rides into town whistling before he dispatches the "bad …
Continue reading “Gunfight at Abbottabad: Dismantling the Myth of an American Hero”
Osama’s dead, but he won, says Kevin Carson
Tom Engelhardt: Stop celebrating and go back to Kansas
As America’s morbid celebrations over the killing of Osama bin Laden begin to fade, we are left with a new landscape of risks – and opportunities – created by his slaying at the hands of a U.S. Special Forces team at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The range of those future prospects could be found …
Continue reading “What Has Bin Laden’s Killing Wrought?”
Although the Obama administration has said that the killing of Osama bin Laden is not a VE or VJ day—which brought a return to normal times after World War II ended—perhaps it should be. President Obama should declare that the Bush-era “war on terror” has finally been won. The main trunk of al Qaeda has …
Continue reading “Let’s Call It ‘VO Day’ and Get Out”
Far from concluding the war on terror, both Western and Muslim-majority countries—many emerging or still embroiled in months of popular protests—will continue to face a threat from extremist ideology after the United States’ decade-long campaign to capture or kill Osama bin Laden has come to an end, most analysts say. The U.S. will now position …
Continue reading “Osama the Symbol Not So Easy to Vanquish”
When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid-October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden’s terrorist career for the next nine years.The al-Qaeda leader was able to escape into Pakistan a …
Continue reading “US Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave bin Laden a Free Pass” 
