"I can report to the American people and to the world" announces the president of the United States, Barack Obama... What? That they have cured cancer? Landed on Mars? Achieved room-temperature superconductivity? Solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? At least lifted the embargo on Cuba?
In a painfully read tirade of pathetic poetry and cheesy patriotism, struggling here and there to read the script—not so much at ease than in his one man show of a few days ago [1]—the Nobel prize for peace delivers the news, trumpets the feast. They have shot bin Laden.
At best this would be a failure, the operation that goes wrong, the accident, confusion among the commando and a lost bullet, maybe a suicide. A criminal of this calibre had to be captured alive. The charges weighting against him were so monumental, nothing but his trial could have turned this page in the sight of history.
To execute him in the wake of a legal trial by the cold, resolute will of the Law? This is another debate. That has been missed, or more properly, stolen.
For not only this summary execution is met with exhilarating celebrations and profuse congratulations from everywhere and everybody, even the Vatican, but also it turns out this was the goal: to kill [2], [3], [4].
Shot in the head and quickly thrown away in the ocean.
This revengeful action, that violated, in an insignificant aspect of this punitive expedition, the frontiers of a sovereign country, did not make justice but forcefully imposed its wrath. It thus puts itself down at the level of the offenders. This will not excuse the response that this could elicit, for we face—if we still give credit to those to whom we entrust law an order—terrorists, who obey to no rule. But states and nations, people, citizens, we, should know and demand better.
It is a sad world where killing is celebrated. Even of a man who, suspiciously, can support by himself all the guilt in the world. Some scenario between Se7en and an Orwellian novel.