The latest Newsweek, a special edition devoted to Osama bin Laden’s death, labels the killing the “finest moment” in President Obama’s administration.
But as Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter notes, the operation that led to the terrorist’s demise raises some questions about administration policy.
[A]mid the national joy, ethical questions abound. Consider the most obvious one. It appears that the mission all along, despite White House assertions to the contrary, was to kill bin Laden, not capture him—that is, to assassinate him. The Obama administration, like its predecessor, continues to insist that setting out to kill the other side’s leaders pursuant to a very general congressional grant of authority is not the same as assassinating them; but this semantic argument cannot cloak what we have been doing, both with our drones and with our Special Forces. I am not arguing against a policy of assassination, but I do think we should call what we are doing by its proper name.
And there is a deeper ethical dilemma. In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called “enhanced” interrogation. …
… So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest moment of Barack Obama’s presidency to this point came about precisely because of the detention system against which he railed during his campaign. Indeed, the only slip in what was otherwise an exemplary performance on May 1 was the president’s failure to credit his predecessor, who established the controversial mechanism that likely led us to bin Laden’s door. If we are cheering bin Laden’s death, then we are also cheering, whether we like it or not, the methods that brought it about.
