Home Invasion

Do you think if you get General Aidid,
we will simply put down our weapons
and adopt American democracy?
--Black Hawk Down (2001)

Vengeance is mine, saith the lord
Romans 12:19

So you kids are, what?
Some kind of mod squad or something?
--Mod Squad (1968)
__________________

On the news program "60 Minutes" this past weekend, President Obama said of the Osama bin Laden assassination,

"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"

The words were flip and unpresidential, the sort one would expect from a Right-wing cheerleader or George Bush himself. The president is not a mental health professional and knows little or nothing about examining heads, nor does he have a grasp of what two shots to the head does to a person's head.

America was founded on the principals of free speech and thought. Last we checked, those rights are still intact, and we don't need a president shaming those of us who would dare to question his oh-so-brave decision.

Yes, Osama bin Laden was a bad actor, but he was never adjudicated guilty, nor can we prove that his fingerprints were on the attacks of 9-11-01. Sure, he claimed responsibility, but it is the nature of a terrorist organization to take credit wherever and whenever it can. However, the claims are not credible until proven in a court of law.

Self-aggrandizement is not evidence, nor should any man be judged guilty by the president without a judicial stamp of approval which = a court finding of guilt. If OBL was such a bad actor, why wasn't he tried in absentia and appropriately sentenced?

We are not comfortable with the adulation bestowed upon professional killers like Seal Team 6. Having professional hit men wearing our national uniform is more discomfiting than having OBL hiding out in some shit hole, backwater town somewhere west of bum fuck China. Our soldiers must kill on the battlefield, but this does not make them murderers; it makes them soldiers.

When soldiers must shoot people in their bedrooms this makes them as bad as home invasion criminals. Ranger will be called soft in the head, but he thinks anyone favoring murder and mafia-style hit squads is more in need of a psychiatrist than he.

One must be vigilant to rise above the seduction of mass hysteria and maintain the basic values of a humanistic society. The simplistic mantra that OBL was a "bad man" does not make his murder any more palatable.

On this same 60 minutes episode, Andy Rooney equated the death of OBL with that of Adolf Hitler -- a strained analogy if ever there was one. Hitler's wars, with our contributions, killed at least 50 million people; the atrocities of 9-11-01 are not comparable. Thousands were murdered daily in German death camps -- OBL's claimed acts, despicable as they were, pale to insignificance in the analogy.

The average U.S. citizen lacks for perspective. There was a time when advocating for the protection of Jewish lives was considered anathema in Nazi Germany. The approximately 3,000 killed in the 9-11 attacks are small potatoes compared with the number of people who starve to death each day worldwide. Are American lives more sacred than those of others?

In its most basic sense, justice is defined as the administration and procedure of law. If we are dispensing Old Testament "eye-for-an-eye", law of the jungle justice, then yes, the president applied justice.

However, if we take our Constitution literally, Seal Team 6 was used as nothing but an instrument of vengeance.