MORAL DEBATES prompted by the killing of Osama bin Laden continued to roil US politics yesterday when the attorney general Eric Holder said bin Laden’s killing was legal and “not an assassination”. Senator John McCain deflated claims from the right that torture led the US to bin Laden.
The commando raid that killed bin Laden was a “kill or capture mission”, Mr Holder told the BBC. “It was not an assassination. If we could have captured him, if we could have taken him alive . . . we would have done.”
Mr Holder added: “The opportunity to capture [bin Laden] never presented itself” and the navy seals who killed him “did what they thought was necessary and consistent with the law, consistent with our values.” If bin Laden “had indicated very clearly that he wanted to surrender, they were prepared to take him in that way.”
But the US “had intelligence that perhaps he would have some kind of explosive device wrapped around him” and did not know what weapons were “potentially in the facility”.
Asked whether the operation was legal, the attorney general repeated that it was “an act of national self defence”. Not only had bin Laden killed thousands of Americans on September 11th and “hundreds” of Britons in the London bombings, but the US was now learning from material taken from his compound “that in fact he was still intimately involved in the planning of other atrocities. And so the determination to conduct this operation was consistent with the law”.
In Europe, prominent figures including former president Mary Robinson and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams have expressed regret that bin Laden was not captured and tried. In the US, Prof Noam Chomsky, film-maker Michael Moore and actress and radio talkshow host Rosie O’Donnell have been pilloried for expressing similar views.
US authorities harbour no qualms about the manner of bin Laden’s death. “The one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out,” president Barack Obama told CBS News in an interview on May 8th.
“Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”
While there is virtually no public debate about summary execution, US opinion is divided on the question of “enhanced interrogation techniques” or torture. Since bin Laden’s death, former members of the Bush administration have repeatedly claimed that waterboarding and other methods practised by the CIA enabled the US to locate and kill him.
That version of events was rejected yesterday by the Republican Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war for 5½ years in North Vietnam. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Mr McCain said that “waterboarding, which is a mock execution” was “an exquisite form of torture”.
In his article, and again yesterday on the Senate floor, Mr McCain accused Bush’s attorney general Michael Mukasey of lying when he claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding.”
Mr McCain said he “asked CIA director Leon Panetta for the facts” and was told that both the initial clue and subsequent information that led to bin Laden’s death were “obtained through standard, non-coercive means”. The torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed elicited “false and misleading information”.
US lawmakers have been given the opportunity to view photographs of the dead bin Laden at CIA headquarters in Virginia.
Mr McCain declined, saying: “I’ve seen enough dead people in my life.”-