Was the Hit on Bin Laden Illegal?

[Feuer Frei!]

Yes yes, i know, we are covering old ground here perhaps, rehashing ideas or whatnot but i thought i'd link this because i think it raises some good points which i haven't seen raised on the forum here:


The May 2 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound was a combination of virtuoso intelligence-gathering and analysis, impressive technological prowess and incredible bravery by the strike team; and their dog. But one thing it might not have been is legal.
Which is not to say it wasn't necessary, and even good. Clearly, bin Laden deserved to die; and the world is a safer place with him gone. But just because the man needed killing, doesn't mean the hit that took him out didn't bend or even break U.S. law.
The legality of the bin Laden hit is neither a pointless question nor a purely academic one. Our laws are meaningless if we don't respect them. In a complex and dangerous world, a solid foundation of law helps ensure the peaceful coexistence of nations with ample reason to fear each other. In short, if we broke our laws in order to kill bin Laden, we risk the kind of behavior typical of a rogue state. And we all know how the world feels about rogue states.
In considering the legal case, some observers have focused on whether bin Laden was armed and fought his Navy SEAL assailants. But that's confusing covert and military actions with cases of armed self-defense by cops and civilians here at home. The situations couldn't be more different.
No, the legal issue actually boils down to one central question: Was the attack on Osama bin Laden truly a CIA-dominated covert action, or was it a mostly military one? The distinction matters because different U.S. legal codes apply to each category. Covert operations fall under Title 50. Military ops, under Title 10. In either case, the killing of the Al Qaeda chief presents legal problems.

That's why the White House has carefully avoided both definitions, instead letting the raid fall into a fictional legal category that Jim Thomas, an expert in political-military relations from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, called Title 60. In other words, the sum of Titles 10 and 50.
The day after the raid, CIA Director Leon Panetta deftly described the attack both ways to PBS. After referring to the attack as a Title 50 operation commanded by him personally, Panetta quickly backtracked. I have to tell you that the real commander was [Special Forces] Adm. [William] McRaven because he was on site, and he was actually in charge of the military operation that went in and got bin Laden.
Moreover, the raid's manpower was mostly or even entirely military, as were the secretive stealthy helicopters that transported the attackers. Also, the strongest potential legal cover for the attack could come from Congress 2001 authorization of the use of force against Al Qaeda something that wouldn't necessarily apply to a covert action.
This muddling on Panetta's part is deliberate, according to Milt Bearden, a retired CIA station chief who headed agency operations in Pakistan in the 1980s. That's the ultimate duty of lawyering as you're looking at it and thinking about it, the box keeps turning itself inside out, Bearden said.
In the best case, the killing of bin Laden exists in legal limbo. If the raid was definitively Title 10, it violated a slew of restrictions on the use of military force in a country that is not a formal enemy of the United States, this despite the Congressional authorization for using force against Al Qaeda. If it was Title 50, it could possibly be characterized as a political assassination, which is illegal under a 1976 Executive Order.
As lawyers and academics mull the legal implications of the Abbottabad raid, one expert cautions against taking too legalistic an approach to the problem. You don't want to argue against getting bin Laden, said Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University.
Instead, Greenberg said, we need to understand what laws we broke so that we can fix the laws. What does it mean to have a targeted-killing policy and what are the rules? she asked rhetorically. With updated codes perhaps including a real Title 60, we could pull off future high-profile hits on terrorist leaders without breaking our own laws.
The ramifications of this, Greenberg said, need to be for the next bin Laden.


SOURCE

[Gerald]

Edit the text better,

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by Vendor

Edit the text better,

Done.

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

Done.

Good.And for the title in question, so I think that there has been no fault, on the sweep against OBL, or former OBL.

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by Vendor

Good.And for the title in question, so I think that there has been no fault, on the sweep against OBL, or former OBL.

Indeed, and the article linked states so.
The article raises some interesting questions though, not on wether OBL should have been targeted in such a fashion from a moral stand point but, from more of a legal stand point.
The article does indeed not attempt to dissuade readers of the notion that it was wrong necessarily to kill him, morally speaking ofc.
I personally find this interesting because it asks questions which aren't based purely on the monotonous articles so far in circulation which ONLY deal with the moral aspect of the assassination.

If Raul Castro had sent some super commanderos to America on donkey powered stealth rafts and carried out an exrta judicial killing of Carriles for his role in blowing up planes and bombing hotels would it be called legal?

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

Indeed, and the article linked states so.
The article raises some interesting questions though, not on wether OBL should have been targeted in such a fashion from a moral stand point but, from more of a legal stand point.
The article does indeed not attempt to dissuade readers of the notion that it was wrong necessarily to kill him, morally speaking ofc.
I personally find this interesting because it asks questions which aren't based purely on the monotonous articles so far in circulation which ONLY deal with the moral aspect of the assassination.

I enjoyed it for those reasons too. It does seem to fall through a legal crack here. Or maybe it'll be pushed down that legal crack by those in charge. Regardless, I doubt anything will come of it. Nobody is going to go to jail for killing the world's most wanted man.

My favorite part:

Our laws are meaningless if we don't respect them. In a complex and dangerous world, a solid foundation of law helps ensure the peaceful coexistence of nations with ample reason to fear each other.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

If Raul Castro had sent some super commanderos to America on donkey powered stealth rafts and carried out an exrta judicial killing of Carriles for his role in blowing up planes and bombing hotels would it be called legal?

Of course not, because they are Cuba. For the US, anything we want is legal. You can't stop us.

You can't stop us.

But we can ridicule you if you try to claim it was legal.

[STEED]

To be honest I don't give a s*** that turd is dead, legal or not.

Now let us go forward and get the rest of these pig dogs.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

But we can ridicule you if you try to claim it was legal.

But who is really listening?

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

But we can ridicule you if you try to claim it was legal.

And no one will laugh louder than me

I think that this question is on the same level as asking how many angels can swim in the head of a beer and so is unanswerable in terms of the political realities surrounding international terrorists.

That said I do not believe there is a military solution to terrorism under most conditions but the military does have parts to play. Rather, terrorists should be treated as criminals and police methods coupled with effective intelligence gathering and sharing should be sufficient to thwart that vast majority of terrorist outrages on home soil. Realistically you will probably never stop them all regardless of the methods or amounts of firepower used.

Terrorists and their organizations are not nation states and so I would submit that the legal ban on political assassination cannot apply to them since they are effectively criminal entities. Their nature also renders them extra-territorial, they move freely across international boundries and may receive covert or overt support from certain nation states that might have similar agendas. Historically projecting military power across international borders constitued an irrevocable act of war. The most extreme example of this was World War One where Austria-Hungary had solid evidence that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was engineered by Serbian military intelligence. The only legal option after the failure of (half-hearted) diplomacy was a formal declaration of war and we all know how well that worked out. What would the world today look like had they sent a covert hit squad to Belgrade and executed the shadowy Colonel "Apis", the man behind the murder plot, in his bed? No doubt there would have been formal protests but probably no world war would have resulted.

Essentially America has put terrorist leaders around the world on notice: you cannot hid and your friends in high places cannot save you. Period. A 5.56mm double-tap awaits those who see themselves as leaders of their movements and terror applied to innocents will now be returned to sender. This is the role that the military is best suited to play in the fight against global terrorism. the controlled application of precision violence delivered up close and personal. This is how you deal with terrorists, not with airstrikes or drones (although they may have applications in some situations).

International relations have changed since 2001 and surgical strikes may be expected to cross borders under certain circumstances. Since it is inconcievable that members of the Pakistani government and or military had no knowledge of OBL's whereabouts regardless of what their PM says, those nations that nurture or ignore the terrorists in their midst can expect the sort of action seen on 1 May 2011.

Sometimes it will go wrong and the cost of failure will always need to be measured against the potential gain. However, if the fear of a bullet in the head while watching Iranian Idle causes future terrorist leaders to scatter and isolate themselves from their followers as their only defence, the US Special Forces will have won an important round for all of us.

Bravo Zulu gentlemen. We owe you.

Apologies for the wall of text.

[DarkFish]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

If Raul Castro had sent some super commanderos to America on donkey powered stealth rafts and carried out an exrta judicial killing of Carriles for his role in blowing up planes and bombing hotels would it be called legal?

This.

Just killing people without sentencing them first is always wrong IMO. This was just an assassination. They should have brought him to court, and then sentence him to death. But killing people without bringing them to justice? No. If we allow that to happen, where will it end? The next time, it's the US assassinating Raul Castro. The time after that its a US maffia boss. The time after that it's an opposition leader. Next the government assassinates anyone they don't like and you end up with a police state.

A state that doesn't obey its own laws is a state without laws.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Randomizer

Apologies for the wall of text.

No apology needed. Great points, great post.