Ever since the killing of bin Laden, I have been trying to make sense of a whole series of thoughts and concerns, trying to put them into some kind of clear, cogent point, which would adequately express my nagging concern about the whole affair. There is no longer much need to continue that process, as Glenn Greenwald pretty much sums up my own thoughts and sentiments regarding the issue around the killing of bin Laden, and the state of American foreign and legal policy today. Thank you, Glenn, for giving those thoughts voice here, while saving me the effort to try to draft them out myself.

One bothersome aspect about the reaction to this event is the notion that bin Laden is some sort of singular evil, someone so beyond the pale of what is acceptable that no decent person would question what happened here: he killed civilians on American soil and the normal debates just don’t apply to him. Thus, anyone who even questions whether this was the right thing to do, as President Obama put it, “needs to have their head examined” (presumably that includes Benjamin Ferencz). In other words, so uniquely evil is bin Laden that unquestioningly affirming the rightness of this action is not just a matter of politics and morality but mental health. Thus, despite the lingering questions about what happened, it’s time, announced John Kerry, to “shut up and move on.” I know Kerry is speaking for a lot of people: let’s all agree this was Good and stop examining it. Tempting as that might be — and it is absolutely far easier to adhere to that demand than defy it — there is real harm from leaving some of these questions unexamined.

No decent human being contests that the 9/11 attack was a grave crime. But there are many grave crimes, including ones sanctioned by (or acquiesced to) those leading the chorus of cheers for bin Laden’s killing.

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Yet the very same country — and often the very same people — collectively insisting upon the imperative of punishing civilian deaths (in the bin Laden case) has banded together to shield George Bush from any accountability of any kind. Both political parties — and the current President — have invented entirely new Orwellian slogans of pure lawlessness to justify this protection (Look Forward, Not Backward): one that selectively operates to protect only high-level U.S. war criminals but not those who expose their crimes. Worse, many of Bush’s most egregious crimes — including the false pretenses that led to this unfathomably lethal aggressive war and the widespread abuse of prisoners that accompanied it — were well known to the country when it re-elected him in 2004.

Those who advocated for those massive crimes — and even those who are directly responsible for them — continue to enjoy perfectly good standing in mainstream American political circles. The aptly named “Shock and Awe” was designed to terrify an entire civilian population into submission through the use of massive and indiscriminate displays of air bombings. John Podhoretz criticized the brutal assault on Fallujah for failing to exterminate all “Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35.” The country’s still-most celebrated “foreign affairs expert” at The New York Times justified that attack based on the psycopathic desire to make Iraqis “Suck. On. This.” The Washington Post hires overt torture advocates as Op-Ed writers and regularly features Op-Ed contributions from the architects of the Iraq crime, as they did just today (Donald Rumsfeld claiming “vindication”). And, of course, we continue to produce widespread civilian deaths in multiple countries around the world with virtually no domestic objection.

There’s no question that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack committed grave crimes and deserved punishment. But the same is true for the perpetrators of other grave crimes that result in massive civilian death, including when those perpetrators are American political officials. As Ferencz put it when describing one of the core lessons of Nuremberg: “every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.” More than anything, that precept — the universality of these punishments — was the central lesson of Nuremberg, as Jackson explained in his Opening Statement:

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. . . . . And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.

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There is, of course, a difference between deliberately targeting civilians and recklessly causing their deaths. But, as American law recognizes in multiple contexts, acts that are undertaken recklessly — without regard to the harm they cause — are deemed intentional. And when it comes to an aggressive and illegal war that counts the deaths of extinguished civilian lives in the hundreds of thousands — such as the destruction of Iraq — those distinctions fade into insignificance.

Read The Complete Post

And this is a must-hear piece, from a Canadian radio interview with Benjamin Ferencz about the bin Laden killing, the Nuremberg principles, and the U.S. role in the world. Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people.

He lays it out straight up. I hope we take the time to listen, America, and know thyself a bit better.

Listen to the Interview